Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  “I thought we could pick up Wisia at school together” was Sally’s hopeful invitation at the gates to the Conservatory Garden.

  But no, he couldn’t come to school. A friend had called, not someone she knew.

  “Man or woman?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Why won’t you see Mom?”

  The answer he had was too harsh, and he didn’t know why he went ahead and said, “For the same reason I don’t see you that often. You both make me sad.”

  “If you think we’re disappointing, Dad. Really, to be stingy at your age.”

  He made as if to take off her head and didn’t stop short but hit her in the neck with his hand. He hit her but not that hard.

  “That hurt.”

  “Wasn’t very hard.”

  “Says who?” Sally backed into the street and waved down a cab, all the while holding a hand against her neck. “Enjoy the rest of your visit,” Sally said, before she shut the door.

  He would. Goddamn her. He had perversely persevered, had lunched, dined, breakfasted with Sally, walked with Sally, listened to her litany of insufficiencies — starting with funds! He could have been seeing Isabel Bourne. His surprise was considerable then when Sally appeared the next day at Torvold’s gallery. She startled them both, Clive and the convincing young adult (spotty beard but deep voice) there to interview Clive. “This is a surprise.” Clive stood up. “My daughter,” Clive said, by way of introduction to the young man named. . he’d already forgotten.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the young man and then again to both of them. “Really, I am.” Sally looked closely at her watch, pressed her ear to the face of it. “Go ahead,” she said, then, “Oh, no, is that recording?”

  “No,” the young man said. “No, I turned it off.”

  “Lucky,” she said although it seemed to Clive she was the unluckiest person. She was too timorous to make a wider way through the world, yet it gladdened him to know he was predominant still and could shut her up with just a look. Clive sternly watched her walk to the other end of the gallery with its glassy island of a table and low seating that conformed to it. Onto this shoreline Sally dropped as if she had been pushed.

  “I’ll just wait,” she said, and she took off her watch and peered closely at it, longer than was necessary, and she did not look back at Clive; rather, she seemed to be talking to her watch. Had she been drinking? He wasn’t going to give her any more money no matter what it was for.

  The interviewer, ever hopeful, said, “Italy?”

  Yes. His mother had taken him. He was eight years old and he liked looking at paintings, especially the noisy terrors recorded in Renaissance paintings, paintings of those suspect and traitorous early Christians so inventively tortured, drawn and quartered, boiled, burned, defenestrated. Some figures had no more dimension than drapery, flayed as they were or flung from the Tarpeian Rock. The dogs, unleashed, were outraged, bullet-headed hounds in the likeness of Cerberus — savage mouths.

  “I couldn’t stop looking,” Clive said, although his own horrible imaginings dismayed him. Now, for instance, he thought of Sally and the ways she might be hurt, had been hurt — on her own, by him, by others. The bruise on her neck had a black center she should have concealed — it was not becoming. Why didn’t she know? She was forty and he was. . didn’t matter; work was life’s imperative. Wisia was eight — his age when first he saw Pauline Borghese. Such a slender invitation, breasts no more than suggestions, Canova’s Pauline reclined on her marble chaise under a vague wrap.

  Clive talked about the massacre of the innocents, another image first encountered with his mother in Italy. He had always suspected adults of violence, but up until then he had not seen that much of it. His own parents were model and kind. (In truth, his mother was neither, but Clive felt no obligation to be truthful.)

  A gunshot. That’s what it sounded like when Sally dropped the heavy coffee-table book on the floor.

  “If there’s a better time,” the young man said.

  “No, no, no, no, no. Now is fine,” he said, but he could hear at the other end of the gallery, Sally was making those sounds he knew for the mewling preamble to I’m sad. I’m tired. I’m sorry, though she didn’t mean it. Clive moved his chair closer to the young man, saying, “I’m not going to look back at her.” But he was looking back. Yesterday in a flirtatious coat, she had swayed for attention. Look at me, listen to me, help me: the tedious refrain to Sally’s song of herself. Her neediness unsettled him or was it unseated him?

  But he talked on. He had given so many interviews in his lifetime: Clive had grown up in Boston, which was as far as he went besides acknowledging he had had parents. He liked to hint at having known harder times as if his impeccable academic background had come by way of scholarships. “I’ve a brother and a sister, both older, not artists.” He had loved to draw from the beginning, but from whom had he inherited his gift? His mother, yes, she had had such ambitions.

  “I should add my father was an architect of some distinction.” Why did he say this now — a fact known but not uttered by him in past interviews — why except that Sally was present and he hoped she was listening, oh, how many times had he told his daughter yearning was all very fine but only the doing counted?

  Sally banged the book shut.

  Clive said, “My feeling about form is that it’s discovered. My friend P. A. Ricks says the same is true of fiction — not an original idea.” Yes, Clive knew a lot of writers; his wife, Dinah, was a poet.

  If Dinah could see now how Sally lumbered around the glass island to look at the gallery’s paintings, Dinah wouldn’t wonder at his reluctance to see more of his daughter. Clive called out, “I don’t think Torvold wants us in his offices, Sally.”

  Why did he have to speak to her as if she were twelve years old?

  To have an awkward daughter came as a surprise. How often Sally stood too close to a person, bumped into railings, stumbled. He was afraid for her — and for the glass table and the cylindrical vase of calla lilies. She should not be near anything that wasn’t planted in the ground.

  What was on his mind, the young man asked, when he painted the white horse series?

  “Not much,” he said. “The palette changes.” That was vague; he turned quotable. The horses were the visual equivalent of his state of mind at the time he painted them. The source of his pain was too petty to relate. “When I was in California, I did a lot of sketches of horses. Horses are very beautiful to me, even the most ragged has a soulful expression.”

  Sally loved the horses; she had one of the paintings.

  “One winter when my wife and I were housebound, I painted the horses. All the different shades of white outside and inside were a comfort and a drag.”

  “So the landscape informed your ‘white’ period?”

  “Death,” Clive said, “informs everything I see.”

  Were artists relevant, could they instruct?

  That was not the point. When he was painting, Clive said, he wasn’t thinking about meaning; he was looking to feel something.

  Clive had said all there was to say, and if the young man had to end on a light note, well, he could finish the interview with a description of the scene, old man in the foreground and, behind, the suggestion of a woman on a Barcelona couch; both just strokes of paint, faces vacant.

  “You’ve been more than generous with your time,” the young man said, and he stood and looked to the other end of the bleached wood and white gallery and waved good-bye to Sally, who came forward after the young man had left.

  “I called Dinah,” she said. “She said you’re going to invite a complete stranger to live in the Bridge House for the summer.”

  “Isabel Bourne is not a stranger.”

  “I bet,” Sally said.

  *

  Ned was in Boston, or so he had told Isabel when Clive came to the White Street loft. He came with chicken soup and wonky cheeses packed in grass, the Easter-basket kin
d.

  “Wasted on you,” he said. “I know your type.”

  “What was it reminded you of me?” she asked him.

  He had been thinking of her. He wanted to paint her. She would have time alone, too, to write. She could stay in the Bridge House.

  “But your daughter. .”

  “The Bridge House is mine,” he said. He described an old house, barely furnished; the kitchen counter tin and patched in places. The house was empty for a couple of years while the original owner was in the nursing home. She was the last of her line. “For a while it looked as if the house might be left to fall but a goddaughter was willed it. She sold it from afar, cheaply. There is no bridge. Dinah made up the name: the Bridge House for a house without a bridge. Our own house doesn’t have a name. We’ve a stone wall, a barn for me to paint in, and Dinah’s garden. Why are you smiling?”

  “What about your wife? What about Ned? Why do you think I would do this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clive said. “Most people I invite say yes.”

  Noisy moths battered the barn light in her brain as he talked about firefly season. Not to be missed, and the light, especially in the afternoon, in the late afternoon, he described the way it turned their bedroom pink.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  The phone rang and rang and rang until the answering machine clicked, and they heard Ned saying, “This should make you happy. .” before Isabel muted the machine. “I’ll find out later,” she said, “and it won’t make me happy, I’m sure.”

  “But be happy now,” Clive said. “Come sit next to me. I’ll be quiet.”

  In Clive Harris she had found a new album in which to put any pictures she wanted: a white pitcher of cream on a round table, covered in a checkered cloth, two skinny French park chairs unevenly settled on the pebbled path. Where was this? France, Spain, Italy? France. Nice — Neese. To say nice seemed cornball, but that was Clive to her.

  “I am not nice,” he said. He was thinking of Sally, poor Sally and the drab adjectives he used whenever he spoke of what she was but might have been.

  An only, lonely daughter. “I am one of those, and Ned is an only, too. Maybe that’s why,” but she didn’t finish.

  Clive’s brother was unwell but his sister was in remarkable health. “We speak on the holidays,” he said. “Dinah sends her something she’s dried or canned or sewn along with an explanation about whether you wear it or eat it or hook it on a nail. Last year she cured Nepeta—catnip — and sent it to Gwen, who has a Maine coon the size of a bear. Bangor’s his name and he’s old and sleeps all the time, at least he did. Gwen sprinkled Dinah’s cat elixir on his paws, and instantly Bangor was a new man, gurgling and bumping around the house, positively happy, humming.”

  She was humming, too, with her arm held out and Clive petting it as he talked his way closer. He held her breasts, assessed what parts of her there were to be assessed, unbuttoning, pulling her shirt off her shoulder. “Let me admire,” he said, and he looked for what seemed a long time, and she looked down, too, at a small lacy triangle of a brassiere, a cocoa-colored whiff of lingerie. Clive’s hand against her collarbone, she took it up and put it against her face and smelled him in a brandy fume of sensations before his hands against her head guided her downward to disappointment: Why did it always end like this with that musty part in her mouth?

  “Ah,” he said, finished, “you wish it could be more.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know,” Clive said, using his shirt as a towel.

  He left not long after. He left saying nothing more of Maine but that he wanted Isabel to know he was, as ever, an admirer. He would like to paint her.

  “Maybe,” she said aloud after he had gone.

  Water runneled down the windows or else lights jiggled in the wind — something streaked the view. Her eyes burned and she hated the sky, starless, cloaked, low, wet, cold, oh, what did she have to be sad about really. I wanted to be an actress but I was too shy. What a stupid, phony admission. In London she could have taken classes. I once sat next to Rufus Sewell at the Royal Court. There was a moment! “I tutor,” she had said. “I’m not a teacher.” At least she was honest about that. “I think about writing fiction, but then I look at how miserable it’s making Ned.” Clive must have kissed her on the forehead then.

  *

  Ned, back in New York, no more than a day, said, “We’ve been invited to this party.”

  “Who invited us?” Isabel asked.

  “Does it matter? It’s ice-skating, Izzie. A little break from sloth and contemplation.”

  Ned was right; the new someone knew someone who knew someone; it was one of those parties, but she hadn’t expected to see Phoebe there, Phoebe and Ben, Ben skating at such an angle it looked as if his cheek would touch the ice. I went to tennis camp with his brother she overheard. Were there other conversations she might intrude on?

  A nameless Dartmouth man spurted ice shavings in his showy stop at her feet. He was a hotshot ice-skater, face as common as a pit bull’s but large and friendly, a panting invitation: “Do you want to impress your husband and try some tricks with me?”

  Did she ever!

  The Dartmouth man said, “Just hold on.”

  Here were the words she had lived by uttered by a Dartmouth man moving her around the rink at a speed never before reached in all her years of skating — if that was what she had been doing, skating. Had she ever been spun quite like this or lifted?

  “Look at what your wife can do!” the Dartmouth man hollered as he skated off and around the ring fast.

  “Nothing I didn’t know already,” Ned said, and his tone was encouraging when she had hoped for sour. It seemed he was not worried about her daring turns but skated freely, unpartnered until Phoebe, out of nowhere, found him. Now he stood on the other side of the ice, listening to Phoebe talk. His mouth wasn’t moving and Phoebe was making small circles, head held down, yet Isabel was trying to read Phoebe’s movements to know what she was saying when the Dartmouth man showed up again for more tricks!

  *

  Ned and Isabel, days after skating, midweek, after another night at the theater: “‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’” Said again, said faster, fast but differently, sensibly stressed:

  “‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

  “‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

  Ned was first to phumpher.

  “F-U-M-F-U-R?”

  “Spell it any way you like. It’s a made-up word,” Isabel said. “I can only find fumble in it, so I’m not sure it qualifies as a portmanteau. Maybe like buzz, maybe onomatopoeia? Our drama teacher used it whenever we botched a speech.”

  Ned carried on with the speech in more of a whisper, said, “And so am I for Phoebe. .” And on the instant in his expression was real dolor and not just because of the unseasonable cold or the letdown at the end of great theater, but because of the utterance. Phoebe.

  “‘Maids are May when they are maids but the sky changes when they are wives.’ I like melancholy,” Isabel said.

  “That’s one of the problems,” Ned said. “I want to be happy more of the time.”

  “You don’t say,” Isabel said.

  The spell of Rosalind in the round dispelled, Isabel and Ned rocked on their heels in the subway station, waiting for the train to Manhattan and the White Street loft, home.

  *

  Oh, to feel buoyant as a cork in choppy water! Phoebe, of course he thought of Phoebe when he said her name. Her name was the first thing about her Ned loved. She had been obscured by a man as big as a rowboat — no one could have seen past him — Phoebe was obscured despite the high-heeled boots she was wearing then. (Phoebe always in standout clothes.) Phoebe liked high heels. “I like tottering,” she told him long after he had heard her name. “Phoebe!” The first he knew of her at Porter Blaire’s twenty-first birthday party, hundreds of Porter’s friends, Phoebe among the
m and the rowboat. Ned pressed in to see when he heard her smoker’s voice. So her voice was the second thing he loved; third was the girl herself, entire: Phoebe in high-heeled boots that came over her knees and fit tightly and tight jeans and an Aran Isle sweater so old the sleeves were stiff. Except for the boots, she could have come in from cutting turf or mucking stalls. Maybe she had; she smelled cold, and her hair, always harsh, was it tangled up with straw? It looked scratchy — was scratchy, he was certain, and they hadn’t even met.

  “This is our stop,” Isabel said.

  “Already?” He was surprised and surprised again when she told him about the Bridge House and Clive. The Bridge House on offer was free. A free house with a view of the ocean! Usually it was Ned who gilded their lives. Now the Bridge House, not far from but out of sight of Clive’s, was situated on the coastline by itself with only one other house in view and that one, sadly, an eyesore, Weed’s Mechanics, car parts and sheds on the waterside, too, but to the north of them, so the ocean was unobstructed. The mutable Atlantic matched the sky.

  “I’m his muse at the moment. Does that surprise you?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “You should see your face,” Isabel said, but he was intrigued and looking for his reflection in the half-moon window, finding it, seeming to approve before he looked at her.

  She did not want to spend the summer in New York. “Remember last summer?” For Isabel last summer’s discomfort peaked on a humid weekend in Tuxedo Park, mixed doubles. She played with Porter; Ned, with Porter’s date. Porter carried Isabel through to the finals, but she had muffed a drop shot. Runner-up was not what Porter had in mind.

  “Do you think Porter Blaire will ever get married?”

  “Where did that come from?” Ned asked.

  No answer but she shrugged, free-falling into disparate, general thoughts. The Bridge House was free, a little tottery, perhaps, and peaked — no, no? The Bridge House, gray as a garden bench—“It’s really yellow,” Clive had said — but to her it was gray and in places mixed with pink. Behind the clouds was light while here on earth the ocean riffled over the granite stoop.