Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

Ned was right; the new someone knew someone who knew someone; it was one of those parties, but she hadn’t expected to see Phoebe there, Phoebe and Ben, Ben skating at such an angle it looked as if his cheek would touch the ice. I went to tennis camp with his brother she overheard. Were there other conversations she might intrude on?

A nameless Dartmouth man spurted ice shavings in his showy stop at her feet. He was a hotshot ice-skater, face as common as a pit bull’s but large and friendly, a panting invitation: “Do you want to impress your husband and try some tricks with me?”

Did she ever!

The Dartmouth man said, “Just hold on.”

Here were the words she had lived by uttered by a Dartmouth man moving her around the rink at a speed never before reached in all her years of skating — if that was what she had been doing, skating. Had she ever been spun quite like this or lifted?

“Look at what your wife can do!” the Dartmouth man hollered as he skated off and around the ring fast.

“Nothing I didn’t know already,” Ned said, and his tone was encouraging when she had hoped for sour. It seemed he was not worried about her daring turns but skated freely, unpartnered until Phoebe, out of nowhere, found him. Now he stood on the other side of the ice, listening to Phoebe talk. His mouth wasn’t moving and Phoebe was making small circles, head held down, yet Isabel was trying to read Phoebe’s movements to know what she was saying when the Dartmouth man showed up again for more tricks!

*

Ned and Isabel, days after skating, midweek, after another night at the theater: “‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’” Said again, said faster, fast but differently, sensibly stressed:

“‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

“‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

Ned was first to phumpher.

“F-U-M-F-U-R?”

“Spell it any way you like. It’s a made-up word,” Isabel said. “I can only find fumble in it, so I’m not sure it qualifies as a portmanteau. Maybe like buzz, maybe onomatopoeia? Our drama teacher used it whenever we botched a speech.”

Ned carried on with the speech in more of a whisper, said, “And so am I for Phoebe. .” And on the instant in his expression was real dolor and not just because of the unseasonable cold or the letdown at the end of great theater, but because of the utterance. Phoebe .

“‘Maids are May when they are maids but the sky changes when they are wives.’ I like melancholy,” Isabel said.

“That’s one of the problems,” Ned said. “I want to be happy more of the time.”

“You don’t say,” Isabel said.

The spell of Rosalind in the round dispelled, Isabel and Ned rocked on their heels in the subway station, waiting for the train to Manhattan and the White Street loft, home.

*

Oh, to feel buoyant as a cork in choppy water! Phoebe, of course he thought of Phoebe when he said her name. Her name was the first thing about her Ned loved. She had been obscured by a man as big as a rowboat — no one could have seen past him — Phoebe was obscured despite the high-heeled boots she was wearing then. (Phoebe always in standout clothes.) Phoebe liked high heels. “I like tottering,” she told him long after he had heard her name. “Phoebe!” The first he knew of her at Porter Blaire’s twenty-first birthday party, hundreds of Porter’s friends, Phoebe among them and the rowboat. Ned pressed in to see when he heard her smoker’s voice. So her voice was the second thing he loved; third was the girl herself, entire: Phoebe in high-heeled boots that came over her knees and fit tightly and tight jeans and an Aran Isle sweater so old the sleeves were stiff. Except for the boots, she could have come in from cutting turf or mucking stalls. Maybe she had; she smelled cold, and her hair, always harsh, was it tangled up with straw? It looked scratchy — was scratchy, he was certain, and they hadn’t even met.

“This is our stop,” Isabel said.

“Already?” He was surprised and surprised again when she told him about the Bridge House and Clive. The Bridge House on offer was free. A free house with a view of the ocean! Usually it was Ned who gilded their lives. Now the Bridge House, not far from but out of sight of Clive’s, was situated on the coastline by itself with only one other house in view and that one, sadly, an eyesore, Weed’s Mechanics, car parts and sheds on the waterside, too, but to the north of them, so the ocean was unobstructed. The mutable Atlantic matched the sky.

“I’m his muse at the moment. Does that surprise you?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“You should see your face,” Isabel said, but he was intrigued and looking for his reflection in the half-moon window, finding it, seeming to approve before he looked at her.

She did not want to spend the summer in New York. “Remember last summer?” For Isabel last summer’s discomfort peaked on a humid weekend in Tuxedo Park, mixed doubles. She played with Porter; Ned, with Porter’s date. Porter carried Isabel through to the finals, but she had muffed a drop shot. Runner-up was not what Porter had in mind.

“Do you think Porter Blaire will ever get married?”

“Where did that come from?” Ned asked.

No answer but she shrugged, free-falling into disparate, general thoughts. The Bridge House was free, a little tottery, perhaps, and peaked — no, no? The Bridge House, gray as a garden bench—“It’s really yellow,” Clive had said — but to her it was gray and in places mixed with pink. Behind the clouds was light while here on earth the ocean riffled over the granite stoop.

Married, what was it to be happily married? The poor couple in the Greek myth, granted any wish, asked that they might die together and so they did. The gods turned the old couple into a miracle — one trunk, two trees, a linden and an oak.

“Clive is happily married,” she said, and a part of her believed it true and that she, Isabel, was no more than a passing thought. But might not Ned see her worth in Clive’s eyes? “You should come with me,” she said.

*

“I was early,” Ned said, considering Carol Bane, his agent, forever in beige. What color skin was best for beige? Not hers. A bloodless, bleached woman whose body had surely never known a vivid day — a goblet grace maybe, once, for her wedding — today she wore sand-colored clothes as shapeless as dunes and large bangles; the impression she made was disingenuously indecisive. The waiter had told them the specials, then left them with menus. She pushed his newest story in its sleeve across the table.

“Once again,” Carol Bane said, “a second book of stories is not a good idea. Make it a memoir.”

They looked at their menus, shut their menus.

“Do you know what you want?” Ned asked her.

The waiter recited the day’s specials a second time, to which Carol Bane responded, “Nothing much to shout about is there?”

Carol Bane hesitated, and he wondered if she was not well. After a certain age — what the fuck did that mean, a certain age? He couldn’t keep up her pace in the prickly heat, though he tried. He walked from Broadway and 45th to 125th. There in a studio he worked on the manuscript Carol Bane had returned. A Whiting is all very fine but fiction is a hard sell and hard fiction, short fiction, well. . He could fix this; he could be less elliptical; he could be faithful to Isabel and disciplined. The Bridge House, as he understood it, was a loosely amorous residence open to artists, and he was an artist, wasn’t he? And Isabel was his wife, wasn’t she? He thought about his classmate Jonathan Loring and his big-deal memoir, No One to Say It— hah! Loring’s quick and unequivocal you’re fucked to Ned’s marriage. Some guys like projects . But there was more to Isabel than project. Her expressive face with its many lovely registers — an actress’s face, had she the courage — was a face responsive to him. Lime House was as much her book. . no. She had been there with him when he wrote it. Now he would write a memoir. Once, he had thought about being a poet, but he couldn’t scan, a fact that seemed fatal at twenty. Dinah Harris was a poet; he had seen her name in New Yorker font. Was it a poem taped to a season, was that it, something to do with jack-o’-lanterns and death? He could write anywhere, or so he told Isabel when he came home from lunch with Carol Bane. He told Isabel he would write a memoir at the Bridge House. “You said I could come.”