Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

“‘Pain has an element of. .’? What? No, I didn’t forget.” Dinah knew Miss Dickinson’s terms for absence, emptiness, nothing; she knew the poet was well versed on the subject of pain and that the poet was right; the sudden erasure of the world so completely was a white astonishment. The horses were a response to that moment when pain felled him and the world was white. Sally had said of the horses, “There’s a lot of air in the paintings.”

He healed.

In this way Dinah and Clive drove back home talking about the fox, the horses, pain. Talking about Sally. Talking about Sally at the farmer’s market with Isabel Bourne.

“Should I say Stark?” Dinah asked. “Isabel Stark?”

He shrugged, taken up by the effortlessness of his summer life in Maine. He had his health; his body worked.

“Sally says that despite appearances Isabel likes food”—good news, good news for the starving young woman disappearing before their very eyes.

A few weeks ago, Clive had painted Isabel, and when he thought of her frame in the window frame, the light so blue, he saw the window was the angular element while she was some pale blue strokes. The sky was alive; it thrummed against the eyes — God’s fist.

How could Isabel have gone off the road where she did?

Shape, color, light, the fine details of a face were of no interest to him except to know now that the shape in the window had come to the Bridge House hopeful of repair and had been broken.

“Age,” Dinah said. “I don’t know how else to talk about it. I am not modern.” A remark purely true just to see her as she was, Dinah, dated as a finned car in pants she called pedal pushers. Dinah said, “I still go to bed in mascara on the chance I’ll be seen by a lover.”

The possibility that Dinah might be as unfaithful as Clive had not occurred to either woman, or so Dinah inferred from the dead air. “Does that surprise you?” she asked.“A lover?”

Isabel didn’t answer. After a while, Sally said, “Does me.”

“Oh, Sally,” Dinah said.

“Does Dad know this?” Sally asked. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“We were talking about age,” Dinah said, explaining the mascara business had to do with her horrible discovery that she had caught up to Clive in years. He had grayed, sure, but not collapsed. “Can you believe I was once Clive’s student?”

The same downturned eyes whenever Clive smiled, but he didn’t smile enough while she was a smiling idiot, a stained bone with unnaturally blonde hair. “Have you ever seen this color?” she asked.

“Your hair is white though, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

“Careful,” she said, taking a big, round ring, like a thistle, spiked, off her finger so that Isabel might inspect it.

Dinah had Isabel’s attention. “Imagine me forty years younger,” she said, and she made a doused sound of something hot hissed out.

*

Was it too early to drink? There was only the sun to go by, and the sun said, Fine! Go ahead! You must be thirsty! The summer porch was Dinah’s favorite place at any time of day in the high season. Just the high season?

“The high season depends on location, don’t you think?”

The first and only other time Isabel had eaten with Dinah had been at the Clam Box at a corner table, a room the color of wet stones, rigging, nets, markers, traps, and on the table a pot of steamers and a smaller bowl of sudsy broth and a bowl of melted butter. Steamers at the Clam Box. The stomachs, dipped in butter, insinuated themselves on the way to her mouth, ugly and lustful at the same time. Steamers for starters with Ned and Isabel Bourne.

“We were a little drunk then,” Isabel said, recalling her confession in the bathroom : I’m not the person I wanted to be . That was easy enough to say when tinkling between stalls, wasn’t it? Isabel had said it, I’m not the person I wanted to be, and Dinah had responded, Who is ever? Dinah had wanted to tell the girl then, I know and you should know. . she wanted to say, If you’re looking for someone to listen to you. . Clive liked to think he was a listener. . Dinah had wanted to say, You will be hurt — but the poor girl was already.

Now she said to Isabel that her memory of the Clam Box was of a girlish woman in a rucked peasant blouse and Chinese slippers, especially the slippers.

“I’ve always been partial to them.”

“What about espadrilles?” Sally asked. “What about me?”

“What about you?” Dinah asked and was out of the room before a rejoinder. She was going to make drinks, throw together an appetizer plate, a bowl of olives — whatever people nibbled on at this hour — maybe cookies? Maybe everything the girls had bought at the farmer’s market? By the time she came back to the conversation, Sally had moved next to Isabel so to see the bay and the blue sirens on the other side, Acadia and island sisters. From the quiet on the porch, close, sororal, Dinah inferred confessions had been made. Isabel, perhaps, had cried; her cheeks looked chapped. Onto this stage Dinah carried a tray with a pitcher of New England iced tea and tall glasses filled with ice and stems of mint. Sally fished out the mint, smelled it, bit a leaf, said it tasted dusty.

“We were talking about relationships,” Isabel said.

“Sounds deadly.”

“How much can you ask for?” Sally said. “That is the question.”

“Ask for as much as you dare,” Dinah said. “I’ve seen the future.” More than once she had taken flowers to Wax Hill. Wax Hill, where the old folk bumped against whatever was held out to smell. “Their heads are no bigger than hydrangeas,” Dinah said. “That’s right. Look afraid.”

*

Goat cheese amid the three graces. Clive wanted to paint them as they were on the porch — his wife, his daughter, his sometime little-mistress with a governess’s self-abasement. Christ, Isabel, buck up, he was thinking. He walked over to the Adirondack chair and stuck a pillow behind her back, propped her up so she could speak.

“That chair is too big for you,” Sally said, and they switched seats.

The sofa was a better fit for Isabel. Everyone agreed. He was thinking of the composition now that Isabel was visible and his wife Dinah was at her drink, and Sally, his daughter, was talking — about? He could look at them or the cheese. So very pretty! Green sprigs and purple pansies, a fanned deck of crackers, a wooden spreader. Sally and Isabel had bought cherry tomatoes and a bread called Brot, thin shingles speckled with caraway and sea salt, also smoked oysters and smoked bluefish, olives, something tan, enough food to make a dinner but this was just to start. “What can I do to help?” he asked Dinah — pro forma, he knew, but intention, not action, was what counted, wasn’t it?

“Sit,” Dinah said, and he made to when he pulled himself out of the chair.

“What’s this?” He backed away to where Dinah was sitting.

“I’m sorry!” Sally took the yarn and needles off the chair and found the basket she had come with. “Hope nothing stuck you!”

“What are you making?” he asked.

“A modest scarf?”

“In brooding colors,” Dinah said and she touched his arm, and he put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. “Dinah,” he said because he liked to say her name.

Clive might have said something to Isabel, but he had interrupted Sally.

“Sally has a story,” Dinah said to Clive. Then, “How do you know this, Sally?”

“I saw them kissing.” Sally pulled herself forward in the chair. “Her poor husband looks a little like Henry the Eighth; he has a beard. At least I think he has a beard. If he doesn’t have a beard, he has a pointy chin.”