Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

Clive liked his role in the gathering; nothing was expected of him beyond sitting, which he did largely, an open-armed posture, his drink held near the floor. Summer’s ease, in a soft, clean shirt, rolled sleeves, he saw the dark ropes of his arms were a lustful seducement to any Polly to be shoved against the barn. Somewhere in the house is a hat Dinah gave him, a straw hat with a straw band and a papery flower stuck in the band. August and he is playing Pan; in Maine, in summer, he grows younger. Where was the hat from? Where was the hat? He signaled Sally to interrupt and ask Dinah if she remembered where that hat was. “Do you remember that hat from Mexico?” he asked, and he described it, the hat she had bought him from — where in Mexico?

“Which hat?” She startled.

“The straw hat with the cornflower,” he said. “You bought it for me.”

She sat up and made herself a cracker, considering hats. “The one from Mexico,” she said, “from Zihuatanejo,” and her distant face told him she was upstairs in the closet looking for the straw hat from the market in Zihuatanejo. “I haven’t seen it,” Dinah said.

“So?” Sally was looking at him, bewildered.

“What?”

“What should I have done?” she asked.

“Sorry?” he asked. Sally, holding an overloaded cracker near her mouth, what was she talking about? “I don’t know,” he said, which seemed to be the answer, because she began to eat. She ate the cracker — it looked like a hoagie — and made another, added an olive. Ate it, ate it so fast, he picked off the pansy before it disappeared, but the perky cap of the goat cheese had collapsed; it looked hot and the Brot had curled. His drink was some kind of foam. He left to find his hat; he wanted to find and wear it. He wanted to wear it enough that he would open the attic on the chance it had turned into a souvenir. Upstairs in his closet he looked to the back of the top shelf. He had so many hats! He put on the Borsalino and felt raffish: la sua era una vita fortunata.

On the curb of a street in Trastevere, a melon-shaped woman in a housedress, short gray hair and stick legs, flats — the legs and the flats he remembered because she was rocking on the curb a little; she was walking a black dachshund, a smoothy, without shape, like her. Clive had seen that woman more than once in Rome and once he had followed her, so mesmerized was he by the backs of her elbows — the joint a dark line as made with a knife in the middle of capable dough.

“How handsome you look!” Dinah surprised him.

He said, “I had forgotten about this hat.”

“Better than the straw hat.”

Dinah said all the things he had come to expect her to say; she, his greatest champion, devoted, careful, kind. How could he assuage the pinch of remorse over Isabel except to admit that what he saw of himself in Isabel’s face had been flattering, yet he had abused her. He was vain, which was a failing, except that it had kept him in motion.

In an expensive store that looked like a bomb shelter, he had purchased a sweater for Isabel; nothing in the store suited Dinah although he had looked.

Oh, no custos morum, he, but a serial adulterer — he put the worst words to it — selfish, insensitive, yet he was not ignorant of Dinah’s forbearance but grateful. “Thank you,” he said to all of her compliments. “Thank you,” he said, and he held her, repeating, “I mean it, thank you.”

The advantages of an old wife, Clive thinks, are too often overlooked in the market economy. A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes. He is careless of last names, often can’t pronounce them; nevertheless, the young woman thinks she is known — why? She is, as they all are, a fungible creature with the same small disasters — sometimes a story. Isabel, in New York, months ago, dinner at King Arthur’s Court, said, “I know a lot of what I do isn’t interesting but every day has its scene or two.” How he had liked her for that and her flattering appreciation of his work, of course, her appreciation of him and for such slight returns — Christ. All young women should ask for more. If he had a granddaughter that is what he would tell her. He does have a granddaughter! He forgets about Wisia all the time.

He followed Dinah into the kitchen.

“You’re not going to wear your hat?” she asked.

Not now. Now he saw the clock was pointing at the grill and whatever was planned he offered to burn it.

The menu was salad and salad, thanks to Sally, who was trying not to eat meat.

“Really?” he said, pointedly skeptical.

“Steak tomorrow,” Dinah said.

Her answer cheered him. Here was an old wife who did not change an old man’s diet even if the change was healthful. On the porch Sally was still on her haunches and eating Brot and goat cheese while Isabel was saying, “Yaddo to rhyme with shadow . I’ve never been but I know how to say it.” Isabel had met Ned at Columbia. “One night after some reading,” she said, “we all went to a bar. There was talk about the Rapture, and I heard Ned say he wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that excluded his pets from heaven.” Isabel said, “I fell in love on the spot. He was seeing someone else then. Early in the summer, when the term was over, Ned called and asked if I would meet him in California. He needed to close his mother’s estate and his plan was to drive her car across the country to New York. ‘Was I up for a cross-country trip?’ I told him my suitcase was already out.”

By the time Isabel got to La Jolla, where Ned’s mother had lived, the house was down to a crestfallen assortment of Pet’s lesser antiques and what’s known in the business as smalls, in Pet’s case, stuff that looked inherited but wasn’t — lineage in the shape of silver dresser sets and napkin rings, a horrible accumulation of tarnished utensils, pickle forks and berry spoons, sugar shakers, candlesticks, salt cellars with cobalt-blue glass liners — possessions! Ned was crazed with it all, and he called Bertita, Pet’s longtime housekeeper — Bertita, por favor! — who rolled the house into a U-Haul and drove it away.

Isabel’s work was a dashed insertion in her story. She thought of herself as. . well, she didn’t.

Clive said, “You should take yourself more seriously.”

At the table, shaking open a napkin, he saw Dinah had put cold cuts and strips of cheese near his end of the table that he might make a Cobb salad if he were so inclined. He ran four miles every day. He needed the nourishment. He never got fat. There was a blue cheese dressing on the table as well as vinegar and oil, and the blue cheese was for him.

“The strips of Swiss are Dad’s, I assume.”

“Correct,” he said, at the same time Dinah offered to cut more. “No one wants more,” he said, and he told Dinah to sit down even as she seemed to be checking off items — something missing. Dinah went off to the kitchen and Sally followed. “What’s the matter?” he called after her, and then after Sally, “Where are you going?” but Sally didn’t answer, and now he was alone with Isabel. This was Dinah’s plan probably and she had let Sally in on it so that for a while at least, Isabel would have some time alone with him and he, with her, before she left for New York, but to say what?

“Tell me about the car,” he said, “your accident.”

“I didn’t drive off the side of the road, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Then how did it happen?”

“Do we have to talk about it?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t,” and he forked salad and chewed slowly.

“I should thank you,” she said.