Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

“For what?”

“I was looking for a way to be happy.”

“You’re not saying you’re happier now, are you?” he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he repeated, “Are you?” Isabel, seated in the middle of the table, stared at the table and did not look at him when she spoke, which made him angry, unreasonably so, especially if she was happy. He could see himself, a puffed-up poisonous frog. He wasn’t happy. Fuck that.

“Look,” he said, “will you look at me?” And he leaned forward and took hold of her arm, less than gently, and she did look up, scornful mouth faintly pleased and familiar with violence, the hurting heat and the marks left behind. Her expression only made him angrier but he’d be damned. Better to back off, which he did; he took up his fork; he resumed his eating. Then almost in a way of passing, he said, “I’m sorry.” He said, “I think you are a capable young woman and deserving of a happy life.”

“Thanks,” she said, “you’ve been a good example.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I mean it,” she said. “You’ve been straightforward with everyone.”

“You have to stand up for yourself,” he said and would have gone on, but she was crying and apologizing for crying, saying she was a mess. Always looking for someone else to shape her life.

“I’m going to go back to New York as soon as I sell the car,” she said. She told him she was definitely going to sell the car. She wouldn’t get very much; she knew that; they had told her — shocking devaluation, but the car was old to begin with. It was Pet’s car, the one Isabel drove cross-country with Ned. She said, “I don’t dare drive now. I don’t trust myself.”

Now he was interested. “You drove off the road on purpose then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember feeling involved.”

He should have stood to embrace her, this young woman some thirty years younger — they had stopped touching each other and grown used to it when he was still painting her. An abrupt if quiet parting: He was preoccupied, she was confused, there was Ned. They hadn’t seen each other — a week or more, ten days? Once met at the post office, another time Trade Winds grocery — but not until the business with Ned had they spoken at length with any warmth, not until Ned’s leaving was there reason to meet. Now Dinah, it seems, had adopted her, Isabel Bourne — no, Stark. Isabel Stark. She did not look like a woman nearing forty; she did not look like his daughter, not the way she was dressed: Isabel in loose braids and a T-shirt, a suggestion of tits — right word for what she had, next to nothing, snotty girls on this most girlish woman. He lightly tugged a braid. “You are very sweet,” he said, “and I have been selfish. I want to make up — I should make up — with all the women in my life. So, friends?” he asked, “Are we friends?” and he put his hand over hers, lightly.

*

“Oh, Sally.” Dinah smiled to see the happy pills were working and the shaggy girl she loved was back and making her laugh until her arm weakened, and the pitcher she carried so heavy, water wagged near the spout. “Oh, Sally,” she said.

“What? I’m the mother. I can say anything.”

But what had Clive and Isabel said? What did he say to these iridescent girls in their quick sideways flights? Dinah did not care so long as he cared for her chiefly, as she did him in their daily passing, bumbly as wasps, hiving it out, makers, albeit slower. Slower? No, like the good doctor-poet of Paterson, Clive knew he was “more attractive to girls than when he was seventeen.” He took them up and put them down like a fork, as needed. The figurative paintings in June, then the fox and now, what now? “Will you show us?” Dinah asked. At the sweet end of the meal, Dinah asked again, “Will you?”

His work had not always been applauded; he had suffered and doubted. “My style lacks a champion!” Adoring young women helped as did someone else to do housework and mail, drive, and keep a calendar. Dinah had come into his life just as it was turning. Oh, there had always been yes, the yeses from a few significant others, although the lash of uninterest was the greater sensation; exclusion, the continuous drizzling misery of it, had been the weather in Clive’s thirties and forties, but then, nearing fifty, it had happened. “Trees in Bud,” “Morning from the Porch.” Could the titles have been more significant? “Rainy Afternoon.”

Now, no rain, but an awning of light under which Clive stood in the barn, not entirely certain, unveiling the lily pond. The lily pond was far from completion — purple wounds on a largely white surface — and in his expressions Dinah saw he was not entirely certain of this work. He didn’t look at it when he was showing others. “The lily pond is promising.” That’s what Dinah said.“I look forward to when it is finished,” and so saying, she saw he was relieved. He showed off the summer’s earlier triumphs. Paintings he was pleased with — he said so. She was glad to hear it.

“I look like a shrimp in that painting,” Isabel said.

“A shrimp,” Dinah said, “wedding hors d’oeuvre of choice.” She said, “I like all the angles, the different points of view,” and then no more, but she walked deeper into the soft interior of the barn expecting straw on the floor and chaff in the air, barn smells and the sudden swallow. Where was the kitten with the gummy eye, the one she had tried to catch in another such barn in another time, as a child? Isabel followed Dinah as if expectant of a story or some remarks on what they had just seen, a naked Isabel with no pubis to speak of, and all the action outside of the studio with Dinah and the garden. “I grew up in a house next to a farm,” Dinah said. “I found all kinds of animal life there — some of it alarming — once I found a dead rat the size of a dog.” By then, she remembered, the barn had already caved in and the wood had turned silvery in places, in places dark, a beautiful carcass in its long conclusion. Dinner was over; the viewing was over. “Someone should take you home,” she said to Isabel, and Sally offered.

*

Dying barns and houses, that’s what Isabel was thinking about when Sally put the farmers’-market fare, along with the box of tarts, in the backseat of the car. Watching her move, Isabel had decided that at age forty, Sally walked in a way that might seem aggressive to some — it had to Isabel — but which had more to do with Sally’s height, and was meant as a smaller approach. Nevertheless, her posture seemed abject, and once they were on the road Isabel asked Sally, “Do you consider yourself a guest at your father’s?”

“You have to ask?”

“He is. .” Isabel made a wavy gesture.

“Moody? It’s no use talking about him,” she said as if they had been talking about Clive for a long time.

Isabel was not so keen on the subject that she pressed for more but went back to the conversation about abandoned houses, the Bridge House, the barns. On the Reach Road Isabel was attached to an empty house the bittersweet had overmastered; vines seemed to grow out of rather than into the open windows, and soon it would appear like topiary in a rough approximation of a house. “I have no business staying here in Maine,” Isabel said. “I’ve got so much to do.”

“Settle back,” Sally said and she petted Isabel’s shoulder.

Settle back, Izzie was her mother’s expression, and so she did; she sat back in the dark car and wondered at the sequined glamour of the controls, the warm smell of a high-end rental rolling smoothly over a ruined road of frost heaves and no one else encountered on the road.

“You’re a careful driver.”

“No one’s ever told me that,” Sally said, “but I am glad you think so.”