Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

“It’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t want to speak to him.” But she wasn’t sure if what she said was true. She was also thinking of Phoebe.

“Now that we’re in Maine,” Ned began, “it might be fun. .,” but he had no need of finishing when he saw Isabel’s expression — God knows he wanted to be hopeful himself. “We should read The Odyssey together. The epic belongs to beautiful women — Odysseus visits the underworld and is witness to a parade of them, a great loveliness of ghosts with stories of ravishment, fleet sons, and sorrow.”

*

The barn is preternaturally white before the storm; her warm sides heave, bovine and alive, patient. Clive gestures toward the house and Dinah moves. She feels afraid of the storm but also dreamy. The grass is very green and squeaks underfoot, and all the while Clive is nudging her forward to the house and up the stairs. Love! She is also afraid. How she must look: the dull hair, her hair, all this way and that, flat patches, a child’s morning hairdo, the nut-size skull, and the scalp that shows through. Terrible thoughts when he means only to please her. And she is pleased and feels purely lucky to be touched.

“Why are you crying?” Clive asks.

“Any number of reasons.”

“I’ll squeeze it out of you, whatever it is,” Clive says.

All night sentimental voices in a continuous loop of sound played in the airport. “I should know,” Sally shouted at the little phone in her hand. Cell phones, she hated them. “Can you hear me, Dinah? Yes?” She pressed a button along the side of the phone. “This any better?” Sally asked. “I can hear you better.” Shut down by a storm and being cheap, Sally had spent the night in the Boise airport. Now she watched a half-assed sunrise turn the sky white and perceived no change in the lounge. She was alone; she was alone in the airport but for a man in a red shirt on the other side of the security gate near the end of a spooky job; the concessions stands — two to be exact — were gated. No CAUTION signs, no woman swabbing the tunneling entrance to the women’s restroom, so Sally held it in, wouldn’t go, endured the knotted sensations because who was to say? Murderers — the man in the red shirt, someone she had missed in the long night in the empty airport where the escalator still kept running — ghostly. The escalator and the music! The music was a threaded needle working its way through her brain.

“Oh, Sally.” Dinah spoke softly into the phone, fearful lest she wake Clive sleeping next to her in bed.

“What am I punishing myself for? I could have stayed at a motel.”

“Sally.”

“Some of the money from the painting Dad gave me went to this camp, you know.”

“Sally. .”

“I loved horses at her age. They always took advantage of me but I loved them.” Sally returned to the airport experience and her good fortune in having a book to read.

But Wisia on a horse was on Dinah’s mind.

Sally said, “I actually finished this book. It got me through the long night. I’ve underlined pages — here.” Sally put on her reading voice, the one she wore with glasses: “‘Encaustic images of women in funerary portraits were discovered in the nineteenth century at Fayum in Egypt.’ That’s nice to know, isn’t it?”

“I thought you said the book was about jigsaw puzzles. What does that have to do with jigsaw puzzles?”

“A lot,” Sally said. “Margaret Drabble makes it fit. She is so smart and frugal. She doesn’t like taking taxis. Art, family, old age. Dad would like it.”

“Oh, Sally.”

“I’m coming to you, Dinah,” she said. “I don’t care what Dad says.”

“Did you have any dinner at all last night?”

“I kicked an old Baby Ruth out of the vending machine. The peanuts were white. Bad sign. But I had no choice; Sabarro’s was shut up. The drinks in the vending machine looked like cleaning fluid.” Sally said, “The meal they’ll be serving in the next life.”

“I don’t know why you didn’t go to a motel.”

“I did expect the lights to dim.”

Instead there was music and CNN. All night the breaking news scrolled across the TV along with footage of the killer whale who had killed his trainer: the killer whale corkscrewing into the air, breaking the water with his tail or else sliding up a ramp, his expression disingenuously smiley. “He had a history of violence,” Sally said.

“No,” Dinah said softly into the phone, no, she had not seen the killer whale.

“I had to pee something terrible,” Sally said. “Fortunately people started to return to the airport a little while ago. I’m a go.”

Clive cued Dinah to whisper, so she whispered in a rush for Sally not to drive if she was tired.

“I’m in the airport, Dinah. I’m flying.”

*

The morning! It began again, real delight at Clive close in bed. “Don’t get up just yet,” he said. She let him knead her back and her neck and her arms, and she thanked her good fortune until the phone. “Damn it,” Clive said, though it was Dinah who sat up and answered.

The voice was Isabel’s, not Sally’s.

“What time is it now?” Dinah asked. Long past morning, past expectation and nearer dread. Dinah was sorry to say she had not seen Ned; she was especially sorry when she learned that he was not supposed to drive, that he had lost his license a few months ago; moreover, that he was under medication. I understand, Dinah said, although she didn’t quite understand the meandering account of Ned and the medicine he took; Dinah didn’t quite understand the sequence of events either — how the young couple went from the afternoon through the evening. “Gone since when?” Dinah hoped to hear something more specific than “sometime in the night.” Isabel couldn’t be sure. She simply woke to discover Ned missing and the car gone.

“How sad,” Dinah said, first to Isabel and then, hanging up the phone, to Clive. “Oh, pity the wives, ‘their brief goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.’”

“That’s good,” he said. “What’s happened?”

Dinah told him what she knew. “I hope he didn’t drive in the storm.”

“He slept in the car, I’ll bet,” Clive said. “Are you up for good now?”

And in truth, Dinah didn’t know, but she slapped the hairbrush around her head. No matter there wasn’t much of it, hair came first in the construction of her face.

“So I take it that’s the end of our morning?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “This doesn’t happen every day.” She saw the blazoned grizzle on his chest and his loose old arms, still muscled, still powerful, and she was moved, and put her hairbrush aside and went back to bed. His hair — there was so much of it, a silvery white, no yellow in it, and his eyebrows, darker. They moved when he talked, which was rarely, but Ned Bourne. . Ned, why did he have to come into her story all of a sudden?

*

The cheap princess phone looked like a giant aspirin, the oblong kind. “Fuck me. Fuck me to shit fuck shit!” The phone scratched in her ear and the ring lacked conviction. “Answer this time, you fuck. Answer.” But the first time she called, Dinah said hello. Oh, fuck. Isabel, stumbling through her story, considered the frenzied appearance of the house behind her: rag rugs skidded in her pratfall search for him — Ned? Closet door opened. Ned? By the time she made the second call, Isabel had straightened the house — nothing tippy or off — and she was lucky this time: Clive answered.

“Can you hear me?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes, yes I can,” she said, and she threw herself into her sorrows: “Ned was just so nice to me for the first time in a long time. We talked.”