Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  Ned Bourne, Edward Bourne, E. C. Bourne, Neddie. What should he call himself but what he is, a bare, dry name, Ned. On the way to their bedroom, he drags his wet finger along the wall. Where the mark he makes gives out means he will be no good for tomorrow. He hasn’t enough spit. He wants to sleep. His eyes are shutting on the high season, no planted interest, no red anywhere for him but it is blunted and fecal.

  *

  In the morning, Ned wanted to talk.

  “Let’s not talk about this now,” Isabel said. “Aren’t you tired of it? We have two more weeks with nothing asked of us. We should be nice to each other and work.” She walked away from where he sat at the edge of the bed. Downstairs in the kitchen the sensible sound of public radio put her in her place — and sure enough: another tornado in the poor flat states where so much weather seemed to happen.

  The Barn, Maine, 2004

  “Who was bleeding?” Dinah asked Clive. “You or me?” She had found a bloodstain, surely oral, on the sheets, but whose? Their wanton, close sleep! Most likely his, his mouth, the older, though he didn’t feel any pain.

  “You’re welcome to look,” he said, opening his mouth.

  So the day came on, another day with a sky blue enough to put the sun in its place, a sky as hard to look at as the sun, although she looked up after the incongruously sweet sound of the ospreys. Straight through the afternoon she squinted and still she didn’t see them until they were a dash, then out of sight. She wrote about the frog she had stared at the other day, the cold hysteria in his eyes, but frogs seemed too enervated for hysteria; they seemed lazy. The sound they made was a plucked string, the start of down-home Delta, slow. The afternoon went on and on and she worked on her geraniums — all firecracker reds in clay pots of different sizes, some atop an old blue box, all packed close. Maine classic. Clive was with Isabel on the bench outside the barn; the bench, once soldier blue, had faded to something like oyster, a color she liked. It did not need repainting, not yet. When the wood looked dried out and splintery then she would paint.

  But here was a change she wanted to make next year no doubt — next year, would Isabel be in the picture? — next year she wanted to paint the bench on the screen porch black, eschew geraniums for a good leaf, no blossoms necessary. A part of her was sick of the drawn-out dying about the geraniums. From so little a rain as a shower they seemed to emerge sopped and spotted black and brown; they only looked durable; their lives were short. What bewildered her was how much she had loved them and for so long. Her high-school sweetheart, her first love, her young husband, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card, a rhyme — did he know she still loved him from time to time? Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. Endure was a word in another song. She didn’t always have to be in Isabel Bourne’s company; it was easier to lunch alone. What did Ned Bourne do for lunch? She had seen him the other day at Trade Winds shucking ears of corn to check the kernels, shucking fast and looking guilty about it. She had avoided him then, “glad to escape beguilement and the storm. .” Did Robert Lowell know how much she loved him? A bit of a bully, like Clive, only madder. No, it wasn’t madness in Clive, Clive wasn’t mad — he was selfish, which was a fault, but a fault a person could live with. The word endure again. Ned Bourne squeezing avocados at Trade Winds, poking the vegetables, no, poking the meat, “and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Patchwork poems while she waited for Clive, who had said the tide was high at four. She was ready to swim when he was and he was at four thirty, which really wasn’t late. Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. That didn’t mean she had to be in the model’s company. Clive knew this much and they went to the cove alone without Isabel.

  Ah! The water was a gasp and Clive swam loudly in it — a splashy stroke — while Dinah, in sunglasses, treaded in a hot spot, hung, froggylike, which was not attractive, but her aim was to stay warm with her head up and out of the water and her face dry. She was from the middle of the country; she was used to lakes and had never grown used to saltwater in her eyes. Not to say she didn’t enjoy paddling in the ocean — she did — she almost didn’t want to leave, so soothing was it and the air today, so cold. He promptly put a towel over her shoulders as she emerged. “Here,” he said, and he put into her hand a stone he had found on the rubbly beach. The stone was bone worn and warm, not heavy, but rather light, and she turned it over in her hands, and thought of Sally, who liked to look for stones on the beach. Dinah kept them, the nicest of them, Sally’s presents, on the sills of the tool shed. Now Clive was offering her a stone because, she guessed, he knew how she missed Sally. He knew she wanted company. He knew she wanted to see his daughter, but he was not up for it.

  *

  He pushed what Dinah had set before him away. “Why would you expect me to be sunny? I’ve never much liked anybody in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dinah said, and she took up the plate of fruit she had just put before him. “How would you like your eggs?”

  Dinah jiggered vodka in her juice. Vodka, blue sky, birds. Clive was almost always nicer in the afternoon. (Sally, on the telephone: “Would everyone start behaving if I had cancer?”) But she had read somewhere statistics that prisoners were more likely granted parole if their hearing was in the afternoon. One explanation was people were generally happier in the afternoon.

  “Sally wants to visit.” This, over a late, late lunch that would serve as dinner, just the two of them, a picnic, a bully bread with a leather crust and other hard food, like salami, and iced coffee — bitter and no cream to cut it, no sugar.

  “Sally wants to visit.”

  His response to the whistling-out-of-nowhere speed of her announcement was no response.

  “She doesn’t mind about the house — though it was abrupt. She just wants to see us,” Dinah said. “Don’t be this way. Please. Whatever it is you’re fighting about. . ” Dinah hesitated because, in truth, she didn’t know quite why he would not talk to Sally. Undoubtedly, the cause was trivial.

  “I miss her,” Dinah said. “I miss Sally.”

  “You shouldn’t drink in the morning, Dinah. It makes you sentimental.”

  Sally, long ago, a large and unwashed girl on her way to camp, she needed a bra, but no one, it seemed, had told her. No one had told Sally about Dinah either; not until Clive and Dinah were married was Sally introduced to Dinah — whose idea was that? Sally’s arms were shapeless even then, and the pallid skin up close was pimpled — some kind of rash. Sally’s arms — most of what Dinah remembers from that time: that, and her impulse to hug the girl. Stepdaughter? The word was too harsh for such a big, gentle soul.

  “You talk about Sally as if she were a Saint Bernard.”

  “Oh, Clive, please!”

  Sally stretched out along the picnic cloth was long, nearly as tall as Clive — six feet — and her backside, monumental.

  “I know Sally can be needy, has been — is!” Dinah didn’t want to yell. Who was she to scold?

  When Dinah woke from her nap, she saw the meadow had been mown. The fieldstones were visible again. They looked like lumpish animals in the muddy embankment, and Clive, at the shed, appraising, seemed pleased — pleased with the appearance of everything, himself included, and why not? The smooth movable parts of him — nothing caved in or stiff or dry about Clive, nothing barreled but his chest was russet colored, ardent — all worked, and the whole of him turned to her now, welcoming. Up close, he smelled grassy. Was it any wonder what she did, what she had done, and would do again for the attentions of this man? Years ago Dinah had left the young husband — known long but married shortly — for this man, Clive Harris, older but not by so many years anymore. Left a husband, a hometown, and friends for a man who openly cheated on her even then. Oh, pride was overrated; she had learned how to put it aside. Drinking a little helped and the days when she fancied she had written a good line, which sometimes turned into a poem and a good one at that.

  “Does the meadow meet with your
approval?” Clive asked, and in asking she knew he was sorry, sorry about Sally. He was sorry but he did not want to talk about his daughter. No more about Sally, please. No more, and they turned back to the long white house with the wind dropped to nothing and the wind chimes quiet.

  *

  At some unrecognizable hour, Dinah woke to his juddering hand. He was turned away, but the movement he made, his seeming light, expert touch impressed her, and Dinah tugged at herself a little, but hard so it hurt, which was a way to feeling, and she went off to sleep thinking about her age — sixty — and Clive’s age and Sally’s. The Bournes, how old were they? Ned Bourne was in her dream, ineffective, silent, seated, yet comely compared to the woman she saw or what might have been a woman: Where there should have been breasts were cavities; where hair, a coarse whorl, a black twat.

  “Oh, what a terrible dream I had!” were her first words in the morning.

  He didn’t ask her to recount it, but she would not have told him; no more than she would tell him that she, too, often cried in the morning — what remedy? She had her jiggered-up juice from time to time and reveries of children. She was sorry she had not prevailed on the subject of children. Childlessness was a hole in her life, and how a child might map this house was a game she had played for years — still did. By what surfaces, what smells, colors, places, dogs would a child know this house?

  Something Sally did one summer when she stayed with them in Maine. She was old enough to drive by then, but didn’t; rather, every morning, she and Clive set themselves up — he seated in a wheelbarrow en plein air. Sally had a foldout chair but stood, even then, restless or jumpy, a girl who trembled to be spoken to though her hand was steady. The watercolors Sally made were as precise as oils. Dinah had one, a painting of stalks and tassels, high summer greens; she hung it in the sunny nest where she wrote in the winter — a green memory of summer.

  Which of the daylilies would a granddaughter favor? The cream-colored, ruffled ‘Longfield’s Beauty’ or the velvety red ‘Woman’s Work’? The yellows will not move her — and ‘Going Bananas’ is just another yellow, but the name might win her over. Dinah didn’t like the common orange when she was a kid, so why should a granddaughter, fancifully made, embrace them? (Poor Wisia is not fancifully made. She hasn’t the attention span for flowers. She likes camp and archery — and may come to love horses.) Go on with the game, and Dinah does, thinking a granddaughter has come to visit. The stone floor in the kitchen is cold underfoot in the morning and Grandfather is a grump, but Grandmother wears an apron — hug her! — she is bacony and sweet.

  Dinah would like to tell Clive that she wants grandchildren, that the unaccountably odd Wisia is preferable to silence, and Sally is his daughter.

  *

  “Let’s start the morning over again,” she said. “How do you want your eggs?”

  *

  After the smear of lunch, blue skies and a chance to play with watercolors, sleep, no swimming today but she was caught up in the cocktail hour and playing around with the festive mesclun, washed red bits sticking to her hands—“My day?” Dinah considered. “It was,” and she tossed the salad not unhappily though she heard his knuckle-crackling sounds and sighs.

  “Break the seal on the whiskey,” he said, and she turned away from the sink to do it. Five Motrim at a swack usually did the trick for him, but tonight the ache went on. He was looking at his feet.

  “Your drink,” she said, and now she looked at his feet and was awed by the crisscrossed, ropy varicosities knotted at his ankles. Was it any wonder he ached?

  *

  “Good morning, sweetheart!” Clive was not always glum. So why did she ruin the day with mention of Sally?

  “I’m not talking about the Bournes,” she said. “Why can’t Sally stay with us?”

  “I saw a lot of Sally in New York this spring. Too much of Sally,” he said. “I don’t want to go on outings to Isle au Haut.” Clive said, “I want to work,” and his purpose was as final as a nail.

  Once your parents die, there is nothing between you and it. Not a new idea, but the reality has pressed against his heart. Clive has had his mother on his mind. And not because Ned Bourne has made it his subject — no, hardly that; rather, remorse over his own behavior toward the women in his life has Clive facing backward to where his mother left off. Would she approve? Doubtful. Your father would never was how she reprimanded Clive when he was growing up. He sees his mother from a distance and then spends the night by her side. His mother in imposing diamonds at the Hotel Gritti, New Year’s Eve, the passing of the year in which his father had died, Clive sat with his mother while she delivered her pronouncements on Daddy’s genius, his kindness, his elegance — such assertions had hissed past his ears before, chiding; but on this one night she spoke of his father’s gift for life and for loving others. “Your father was a man who let things go alive.”

  Then with the alacrity of another new year, she tucked the dead man into her clutch, quoting him only from time to time when it served instructive. Scolding Sally’s table manners, “Your grandfather used to say only boiled and roasted joints allowed on the table!” Clive thinks his mother liked to poke Sally in the elbow with a fork. In this way Clive thinks he is more like his mother: He’s a killer.

  The other day he had told Isabel he would not be needing her services for a while. Poor choice of words, probably, but he was not given to lying. He had told her from the start, just as he had once told Dinah, he must have full sway.

  *

  “I told you. Clive’s on to the lily pond,” Isabel said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ned said.

  “Whatever for?”

  Advancing across the sky, clouds promised a storm of Olympian proportion. The power might go out. Now something appropriately dramatic would happen.

  Ned wanted to know, “Should we get buckets?”

  “Does the roof leak?”

  (The weather that time with the dying mouse when Ben stood behind a grill big enough to roast a boar and Phoebe whisked the dressing, the weather then had been threatening but nothing came of it until the next morning when they drove back to New York in a downpour. Rain on a Sunday — all very appropriate.)

  She asked, “Should I feel sorry for you?”

  He made some helpless gesture — as if a sale had not gone through or he was broke or lost, unable to answer. “Yes, no, I don’t know.” He tried to explain to her — as much as to himself — that Phoebe was making her summer rounds, visiting her father and her stepmother, her stepfather and her mother, and Ben’s mother and father. Part of Phoebe’s vacation was being spent on different family compounds, another part was offbeat Europe with well-traveled friends. How did he feel about this, Isabel wanted to know. “Do you want to figure more prominently in her life?”

  Just when they were on to an important topic, the phone rang and she knew it was Clive. Before Ned even spoke, she knew from his expression of complicit exasperation that Clive had asked Ned if he might speak to her. “No,” Ned said, delightedly. Ned looked at Isabel and lied about her whereabouts, and all the time he was talking, Isabel didn’t signal for the phone, but watched Ned and wondered why he was so sure this was what she wanted him to do — when she didn’t know what she wanted Ned to do — or Clive to do, for that matter.

  “Thanks a lot,” she said.

  “I really didn’t think you’d want to speak to him. I’m sorry,” Ned said, and he sounded quite genuinely sorry; it made her sorry, sorrier, and sadder.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t want to speak to him.” But she wasn’t sure if what she said was true. She was also thinking of Phoebe.

  “Now that we’re in Maine,” Ned began, “it might be fun. .,” but he had no need of finishing when he saw Isabel’s expression — God knows he wanted to be hopeful himself. “We should read The Odyssey together. The epic belongs to beautiful women — Odysseus visits the underworld and is witness to a parade of them, a great loveliness of ghosts
with stories of ravishment, fleet sons, and sorrow.”

  *

  The barn is preternaturally white before the storm; her warm sides heave, bovine and alive, patient. Clive gestures toward the house and Dinah moves. She feels afraid of the storm but also dreamy. The grass is very green and squeaks underfoot, and all the while Clive is nudging her forward to the house and up the stairs. Love! She is also afraid. How she must look: the dull hair, her hair, all this way and that, flat patches, a child’s morning hairdo, the nut-size skull, and the scalp that shows through. Terrible thoughts when he means only to please her. And she is pleased and feels purely lucky to be touched.

  “Why are you crying?” Clive asks.

  “Any number of reasons.”

  “I’ll squeeze it out of you, whatever it is,” Clive says.

  In Transit, 2004

  All night sentimental voices in a continuous loop of sound played in the airport. “I should know,” Sally shouted at the little phone in her hand. Cell phones, she hated them. “Can you hear me, Dinah? Yes?” She pressed a button along the side of the phone. “This any better?” Sally asked. “I can hear you better.” Shut down by a storm and being cheap, Sally had spent the night in the Boise airport. Now she watched a half-assed sunrise turn the sky white and perceived no change in the lounge. She was alone; she was alone in the airport but for a man in a red shirt on the other side of the security gate near the end of a spooky job; the concessions stands — two to be exact — were gated. No CAUTION signs, no woman swabbing the tunneling entrance to the women’s restroom, so Sally held it in, wouldn’t go, endured the knotted sensations because who was to say? Murderers — the man in the red shirt, someone she had missed in the long night in the empty airport where the escalator still kept running — ghostly. The escalator and the music! The music was a threaded needle working its way through her brain.

  “Oh, Sally.” Dinah spoke softly into the phone, fearful lest she wake Clive sleeping next to her in bed.