Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

“He’s resting his eyes,” Dinah said, “which is good.”

For a moment, he thought he might work, but then Dinah told him about Sally and the airport and the storm, bigger than last night’s rain, that was still on its way to them. And Sally was on her way, too.

“I knew it,” he said.

“I like her company, Clive, very much. I like women.”

*

Ned, dreamy, was making his way across a room of shirtfronts and bare arms. He was looking for Isabel, who had disappeared. Somewhere in the crowded room of dressy people, most of them his age, was his wife. I am looking for my wife. I am looking for Isabel; but there was the crone again, the old witch with the mustache. Damn it. He startled awake in a wicker chair on an empty porch. His feet felt powdered, and when he looked down, it seemed to him they glowed opalescent. Epsom salts, the sound of the words was soothing until he remembered where he was and the way he had walked the seven miles from town to Clive’s barn. He must have started the car, then smartly thought better of it: Safer to walk, but how did he lose his shoes? He banged his pockets for keys or a wallet — nothing.

They had left him sleeping on the porch. The house was still and he was alone, but feeling healed, able to walk home. He made a soft exit and walked on the grassy verge of the road. Had he put his hand on the halo of Dinah’s head? Had he kissed Clive? They seem to have disappeared if ever they were there. The soundless bay was a gray line beyond a grayer shoreline; the sky was growing wider. Here in the company of large elements Ned felt how it must be for Isabel with him. Pitchforked treachery on a bonfired night, and she, in the midst of it, insubstantially dressed.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he saw her.

*

Standing in the yard at the back of the house, not so much a yard at all but long grasses, field asters — what some call weeds — Isabel pulled her hand up the long stems to things and took off the leaves until her hand, stained, hurt and smelled smoky.

“I understand,” she said, “if we’d spent the summer apart maybe.”

“Who knows?”

“That was the plan,” she said.

“For you, maybe.”

“With you, I don’t know, I don’t know if I can, I have ambitions, you know, I. .,” she faltered, ashamed, unable to say what she wanted to be and silenced by a familiar expression of his — a broil of hurt and suspicion. Who was to say what anyone might make of a life, but Isabel was stung by the little startles of those who knew her at what she had become. From the girl most promising — no book, no significant publications either, and online didn’t count. She kept a journal; but she had not been a success, except perhaps outwardly in marriage. And now the marriage was over.

*

“I’m sorry,” Ned said again when he came downstairs with a packed bag and his computer. He had thought as she had thought, but why comb through expectations? Theirs, a short romance, three years if Columbia counted, no more than a sniffle, an accumulation of scenes in thrift shops and workshops, a whimsical wedding in a rhinestone casino. I will if you will yes. Las Vegas, 2002. Road trip in his late mother’s car — the Solaris convertible, cherry red. (Do the really rich own cars in bright colors? Her father’s Mercedes was silver and sedate.) Ned’s mother had wanted to keep her Mercedes. “I can’t keep up with the upkeep”: Pet’s joke. She was already sick, so why not trade in for an optimistic car and find someone to drive her? The housekeeper’s husband, of course!

The hungry eye followed by the numb, dumb discovery Ned made at the little there was to remember, and nothing that others hadn’t already known. Some images repeated: His mother, in shades of yellow, orchidaceous, was in love with the royals. (“That poor maligned duchess!” Pet said.) Their crests, their pugs, their cigarettes. Weak light with fog bank for background, Pet, in velvet slippers and round tortoiseshell sunglasses, sipped coffee at the umbrella table. The umbrella was furled, the blue pool, pale; nature for Ned was just bushes and flowers.

“Don’t cry,” he said before he saw Isabel’s expression. Most of the big cries, as she called them, had happened on the road, at hotels, motels — weeks ago in the Wax Hill B & B on their way to Clive and the Bridge House. In the B & B they had suffered all night in a white box because, uninvited as he was, she wanted Ned at the Bridge House if it meant he was giving up Phoebe. Then she could concentrate, if she knew he had given up Phoebe. He had hoped to.

And as to Clive, what was she to him but a different shape to paint?

Ned said Isabel was more than to paint. He turned away and once in the drive looked back again at her wide-open face: It was made for wonder. Straight, finger-thick eyebrows, gray eyes, soft expression, Isabel.

“Good-bye,” he said.

She seemed unmoved to see him go, said, “Thanks for leaving me the car.” And a dun-colored cab came slyly out of the fog and up the drive. Ned approached with a thuggish duffel bag. The trunk popped up, and the driver emerged, a shapeless man — two eyes, a nose, somewhere a mouth — distinctive as a carrot, gone hairy, limply aged. He fit the occasion, self-described as from the county, that northern bareness, seeming flat but for Katahdin on the map. Fog was nothing to a man from Aroostook used to much worse; whereas Ned, Ned was from a softer part of the country and bound for an even softer place: Bermuda of the pretty clichés — pink sands, turquoise waters. Phoebe had said hurricane season is best for lots of reasons.

Honestly!

Her voice in his ear’s a hoarseness he loves to hear. That and her money was why she got away with everything.

*

“Do you remember that first summer when Sally locked herself in her room every night, and the door stuck? It wouldn’t shut for her to lock it. I had to push from the other side.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to remember,” Clive said, “and you’re smiling.”

But she had liked that noisy, nighttime business.

On Sunday afternoons, Dinah’s grandfather let the Newfies lie near the fire in the den and watch old Westerns with him. Dinah said, “Whenever one of the dogs farted, and it was almost always Tom, my grandfather lit a match.”

Dinah said, “Sally had nothing to be afraid of then.”

“Her mother was living with that man.”

“Sally should get a dog.”

Clive said, “She has Wisia.”

But only in the summers and six weeks of this one at camp — and that was money well spent. Dinah had seen the girl kick Sally in a most hurtful place, stood witness, helpless to part them — afraid really. Wisia was more respectful of her other mother and why was that?

Dinah said, “Sally’s driving up from Portland.”

“You amaze me,” Clive said.

“I’m glad,” she said. For Sally’s sake, she hoped the Bournes would both vacate although she felt maternally toward them, felt other stirrings, too, and sadness.

The knock on the door was the loose door itself in the wind, and Isabel kept her eyes shut and her face in the sun. The door in the wind, in the wind and the pitched light of late afternoon in the backyard, she saw where she was and, too, for an instant, a not so tall man stretched out on the bulkhead: Ned of the slender ankles, shapely leg. Too handsome.

His story always started with I was invited to this . .

Isabel shut her eyes and listened for a voice, a word more, which, when it came, came from a woman. Woman? Women?

On the kitchen table near the open windows was a tiny bottle of fluttery sweet peas feigning faint of heart. A note, too, but Isabel didn’t move to get it. The Bridge House was not reliable.