Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  *

  “Let’s just try this.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Let’s.”

  “No. Why don’t you just give in to what I can do for you? Most guys would.”

  *

  His idea had to do with women. Why did it surprise her? He had said as much before. Pick anyone in the theater was Ned’s suggestion between acts, The Maids—very chilly. When she didn’t pick, he did, and his choice alarmed her, but later she shut her eyes and imagined, even as Ned inventively opened her with his fingers and his tongue, imagined he was working on the young woman in the orchestra seat two rows ahead of them, a dark head of crimped hair that caught the light and looked wet. Isabel needed to touch it to know what it was about the wet hair on the small hard head between her legs; it was the girl’s fingers Isabel held, not his.

  “You were close, I thought.”

  “I thought, too.”

  *

  But she thought a lot of things. She thought a girl who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts would be discreet! Who was she kidding? G had an earring in her eyebrow. Her hair was the color of mud and dense; her breasts were no more than red cones. Her body was tough but her reactions to dogs, milk soap, cocoa were as goggly as her eyes. G was young; she missed camp. “S’mores,” Isabel had said, “I know all about them.”

  “How did you meet this G?” he asked.

  “How did we meet? We met here at the National Portrait Gallery. I was browsing in the gift shop. I was waiting for you then, too. She just started talking to me.”

  “About?”

  “Her favorite portraits? I don’t remember now, besides you’re late, Ned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  He gave her the postcard G had sent of a naked old woman with a slab of paint for a pubis. The gray stroke could have been a headstone. On the back of the card in a hand hard to read was the message: “‘Flesh is the reason why oil painting was developed.’ De Kooning. When are you going to let me do you?”

  Isabel stood in front of Mary Wolstonecraft. The woman’s forehead was serenely unlined although hadn’t Godwin sullied her reputation?

  “Fuck Godwin. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now. We met. It was nothing.”

  “Liar,” he said, but his pretty mouth had a greasy shine as if he’d sucked on buttered toast.

  But it was nothing was true. No more than a chance to sit in a bedsit, and there to kiss a young woman and watch her work at herself—I like to be debased. Was that it? Isabel had thought at the time. Far more instructive than G on that rainy afternoon had been seeing Ned in the evening. He didn’t know her secret then, a secret ugly as a cyst was ugly or G was ugly, and that, Isabel had thought at the time, her secret, the elixir of betrayal, was exciting. But the days she accounted near perfect — and there were many of them — were book dry and predictable. They involved his reading in the morning and her writing awake at their shared desk, a walk after lunch, then her reading, his writing, and tea, and afterward more reading, sometimes to each other before the making of dinner. There were the cloudy afternoons, too, when she went to the British Museum and found perspective—here I am; there they were. She liked the centaur carved in high relief who was making away with a headless woman, but she ducked as through a tunnel past the brown disappointment of jewels like rusted nails, worn stone lions — abashed or indifferent or dumb — funerary kraters and Attic symbols, a cup, gold ingot, crushed. What was to be said about the gold cup but that someone very important lived in Kent thousands of years ago?

  *

  The girl Ned and Isabel had watched in the checkout line at Boots looked fourteen or fifteen, young. Her fingers were raw, the nails chewed and misshaped. Her hands were very small and, except for the fingertips, quite pale, and her arms were pale and led to the pale and hairless rest of her, there and there, or so Isabel thought.

  Ned thought so, too. “Stand up,” he said. “Turn around and let me shave you.”

  Isabel stood. She did as she was asked. These were the days when she was up to the humiliation of being handled all for nothing.

  “Nothing?”

  “What am I supposed to feel?”

  “Oh, fuck it. As long as you’re satisfied.”

  “And you’re not?”

  He was pinching her nipple.

  This was an education, wasn’t it.

  *

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “My mother.”

  “If I didn’t believe in what I was doing,” Ned said, and Isabel could hear that he was smiling next to her, behind her, very close in bed. Her mother’s visit had been overlong, and their routine had been necessarily shelved to accommodate a chary woman, crammed with opinions but few questions. How could her mother resist Ned, but she did, had. Poor Mom.

  Her mother, in a dust-colored dress, wore a face as inviting as a rake, yet why should the woman be enthusiastic about their marriage? Her mother’s drama, the generic one: replaced by a younger version of herself rosy enough to wear red without in any way seeming menopausal. “Red is menopausal after forty,” her mother said. She was probably right.

  “My mother is scary.”

  “You’re nothing like her.”

  “Really?”

  Ned was holding Isabel in the narrow bed of her girlhood, or so she imagined, and she was a girl again and barefoot on the landing, her mother down the hall in an ataractic dark and all very quiet, the house, Isabel’s. The chairs whined “pet me” and she ran her hand along the railings as she passed through the house, through the house and out the back door. She was moving quickly over the lawn, and when she looked back she saw her footprints in heavy trespass. Isabel lay on the stone bench in its ruff of thorns. The roses have a long reach!

  “Careful.”

  “I’m being careful,” he said.

  Sharper inhalations in her girlhood’s bed.

  The sheets are heavy; the hour is wrong. “I’m all fucked up,” she says.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  She is already used to it.

  “Stay with me now,” Ned says. (Every part of her corked.) “Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at what we’re doing.”

  He is quiet above her then, and maybe it’s the way he is moving. .

  “Concentrate!”

  But she’s a girl after all; she wanders; she makes things dewy. She gets overexcited! The noise, the bed — my mother!

  *

  It was that time of year, everything dying, when Isabel turned a corner and a blast of underground air at the newsstand made her sick.

  “Isabel!”

  She got as far as the chemist’s when she rushed to the curb and bent over and spit. Something was happening to her.

  The doctor’s assessment was that she was two months gone.

  That explained her breasts, their feverish bloat.

  Ned and Isabel after the doctor, on the street, he had her arm.

  She knew the night it happened. Whatever bird it was outside had sounded profound.

  “I knew it,” Isabel said to Ned.

  “Hold on.”

  She was startled by the street but he knew where they were and promised to lead her toward refreshment.

  “I don’t want to make this into something it isn’t,” she said, but already she was remembering the granite bench in the garden, a bed and thorned and very exciting.

  “Why not make it into something?”

  “Well, then, it’s a girl.” Isabel was as sure of this as she was of the night it happened in the green conspiracy of midsummer’s eve. There was an owl. The dark outside the window was not dark. There was a moon. The air was visible for all the noise in it, and they were in agreement, she and Ned, and nothing was needed beyond what they knew together, and all those fitful experiments, G and the rest, the urgency that drove them to know, to know, and for her sake, he said, espe
cially, to experience. All they had thought necessary was not required! They’d made a girl that night. She knew.

  The tea in the tea shop was mauve and hard to sweeten, but the shortbread popped in her mouth like a bag of powdered sugar, and Isabel was happy for a while to look across the table at her husband, for that was what he was, Ned Bourne, her husband.

  “I can’t do this now,” she said.

  He leaned forward to take her hand, but she pulled it away.

  “Isabel,” he said. He said it was all right. He said whatever she wanted to do, he understood.

  She hated him for accommodating her.

  The waitress came by but there was nothing they needed.

  “No, wait. Do you have any honey?” Ned asked.

  “I don’t want to be sentimental,” Isabel said.

  “Be as sentimental as you like.”

  The honey spiraled into his tea.

  “I can’t do this,” Isabel said.

  Whatever she meant, he was behind her.

  “Easy for you.”

  *

  Isabel wanted to see the hyacinth macaws, the largest species of parrot, and one of the stars at the London Zoo, but size aside, the color of the bird was what she wanted to see. That they mated for life made them admirable, but were they really as blue as in the photographs? Yes, yes, yes. Self-possessed and regal. She had to turn away from the birds and walk ahead.

  “Why are you so angry all of a sudden?” he asked.

  “Why am I so angry? I don’t know,” she said. “I’m surprised, I’m surprised at how angry I am, but I am.”

  The bench they sat on was wet.

  “Damn it.” Isabel was thinking of her name, her maiden name, the name she hoped to call her professional name: Isabel Stark. Would their daughter be Stark-Bourne? Born stark naked was on her mind when she noticed the man walking toward them. He was unsteady on his feet, more a fluid than a man with bones. He was looking at Isabel and she was looking at him when he opened his coat and his zipper was down, and Isabel saw his malicious little cock.

  Whatever happened, whatever she saw, whatever signage she read, the message applied, and to prove her point, Isabel stopped walking, turned, and read aloud the black hornbill’s story: How the female is sealed in a tree on her nest for three months; only her bill pokes through so she can be fed. “I can’t,” she said. “I haven’t become anything yet. I’d be a black hornbill sealed in a tree.”

  She said, “The hornbill sighting is telling me, don’t do it.”

  “Don’t what?” he said. “Come on.”

  Isabel was thirty-three years old. Her mother was twenty-two when she had had Isabel. Holly Mixon, her first-year roommate at Vassar, had two children already, and someone else from Isabel’s class. . who was it? She couldn’t remember. Laura, her best friend, and roommate for sophomore, junior, and senior years, was in Paris, childless. They had made promises to each other, promises to be purposeful, employed, well traveled. The well-traveled part was under way, but purposeful or employed?

  “Are you so entirely happy,” Isabel asked, and Ned said, “I am. I’m up for anything!”

  *

  Of all the nightgowns to bring, this, the one ready to be torn into rags. The nightgown bundled in her lap, she saw, was her granny nightgown, yellowed under the sleeves, and she couldn’t quite understand her decision.

  “Are you sure?” the doctor asked.

  She did all the unsightly crying things, and both men watched. She used the sleeve of her yellowed nightgown on her face.

  “You’re in agreement?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” and they said yes at the same time, so Ned and Isabel must have been in agreement.

  *

  So he didn’t get what her problem was.

  “You don’t? Really? How many weeks has it been?”

  In truth, he couldn’t remember what the doctor looked like — only Isabel with a nightgown bundled against her belly like a baby. Isabel, he remembered, and the Oriental carpet in the doctor’s office, so old it looked black.

  Ned said, “Look, Stahl’s done a lot for me, and he’s not here for very long, and I don’t want you to come if you’re going to shift into remote without warning.”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean, Isabel.”

  “You go,” she said, for what had Stahl ever said to her but You’ve a good name for a writer.

  *

  Ned came home late but was not so tired as to refuse Isabel’s request. “Make love to me, please,” she said. He was obliging, so the night was shorter, though she slept and he didn’t. His eyes smarted — pinpricked — as if he’d done all the crying. It hurt to close them, and he looked at the ceiling, at the wall, at the end of the bed, at the window beyond the end of the bed, and touring the room this way, he saw his jeans on the floor, stepped out of, small. He was weak — he had called Phoebe to congratulate her on her engagement — he was weak, and for all that his eyes hurt he mustered something watery that ran into his ears.

  In the morning over coffee Isabel apologized for not being up to Stahl.

  “He’s important, you know.”

  “Impotent?”

  Ned said, “If you could only look as if you were having fun, we might make some friends.”

  “I said I was sorry.” Then, “Do you want more milk in that? Your coffee,” she said, “it looks dark.”

  Turned away from him, she was an old woman, a bone, a crone, a downwardly sloped shape in a thin bathrobe, purposeless and derisible. Why this woman when there were so many others he might have amazed? So many he had amazed — even Phoebe, once Phoebe, especially Phoebe.

  *

  They went to a holiday party in Hammersmith in cowboy costumes.

  “I couldn’t resist a buckskin skirt,” Isabel said, and she swirled to show off her fringe and knocked around in cowboy boots — a slutty shuffle, a hint that she was easy when they both knew she was not. No matter. She could not get the man’s attention. The man’s name was Fife and his face was all mouth.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he said to Ned. “I’m sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” the man said, suggesting connections with names with connectives — the something von somethings, the something de Villes — on estates with escarpments, mottos, and wolf hounds. A royal charity, perhaps?

  Who was this stuffed-up-sounding mouth breather, Fife, Fifidy-fife something, Simingdon Fife Fiefdom the second or the third. Whatever he was wearing for a costume approximated something formal.

  “What are you?” Ned asked. “A conductor, a waiter?”

  “An earl,” he said, “an earl in real life. No, just kidding. I work at a bank.”

  Fife acted like a semiroyal. At the coat check he turned out his pockets and left a pile for a tip because the coins were too heavy and his suit was bespoke. The money was dirty, besides.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said to Ned, and then to Isabel, “I sense your hesitation. I’ve a good driver. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  But Ned could see she was, and who was this man really? He looked like Oscar Wilde, ungainly and full of appetite, but rich, there was that. Ned could see the money nudged against the curb and the driver on alert.

  “After you,” Fife said, and in Ned went and was instantly made imperishable in the vault of Fife’s car.

  “Is it German?”

  “Why not?” Fife said.

  And why not roughly, an all-night magic act willing girls? After a while, the girls got tired; nothing much was happening to them, and Isabel had no ideas. She seemed incapable of enjoying herself anywhere. She said, “I can’t talk,” but Ned waved her off.

  She said, “Ned, please, Ned. Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned.”

  “You’re such a drag,” he said.

  “Ned, Ned, Ned.” Her voice was tiny and squeaky. She said, “I can’t see!”

  “Open your eyes!”

  “I
can’t.”

  He led her out of the party and propped her against the building’s gate. Told her to wait, he’d get a taxi.

  The next thing he knew, there was Fife loudly returned to the street and undressing — at least he heard undressing sounds. Fife was shouting at Isabel to open her eyes and Isabel was making panicky squeaks, chittering like a squirrel. Fife had hold of her.

  “Open your eyes, you dumb cunt!”

  And she did and she puked on his shoes.

  *

  They came up with the idea of Rome together, Fife and Ned, and they all three took off for a week in December, but it rained most of the time and the discolored statuary looked like so much salvage in the dingy gush of water. So much for the city of fountains. At night the Piazza Navona twitched in gaseous light — they might have been in Las Vegas but for the sodden stalls of nativity scenes, carnival hawked: cheap. Even the church was dank despite the pulsing coils of heaters.

  “Here, stand here,” Ned said, and Isabel stood as near as she dared but was not warmed and said so.

  “I’m cold, Ned, really.”

  Ned, however, Ned was irrepressibly hopped up, red, manic, an all-out tourist: Borromini, Rainaldi, Bernini.

  Ah! Another bloody Christ, another bloody saint, another sepulchre of little bones brittle as brushwood: the tedium of martyrdoms. “I’m cold,” Isabel said, “I’m going home,” by which she meant the hotel on the hill overlooking the Spanish Steps, the Hassler, a brocade corruption enjoyed at someone else’s expense, in this case, Fife’s.

  *

  “Answer me, Ned. What are we doing with this man?”

  “Getting out of the house,” he said. “Isabel?” When she didn’t answer, he reminded her of what he, Ned, had been good for: experience. And he wanted to see more and he was fascinated by this jaded, shallow man’s bullying way of making money. And he didn’t want to think about what might have been anymore. They had to believe they had made the right decision. “Isabel?”

  She sat on the ledge of the sink and stuck out her face at the mirror, used a tweezers lightly.