Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  “What am I punishing myself for? I could have stayed at a motel.”

  “Sally.”

  “Some of the money from the painting Dad gave me went to this camp, you know.”

  “Sally. .”

  “I loved horses at her age. They always took advantage of me but I loved them.” Sally returned to the airport experience and her good fortune in having a book to read.

  But Wisia on a horse was on Dinah’s mind.

  Sally said, “I actually finished this book. It got me through the long night. I’ve underlined pages — here.” Sally put on her reading voice, the one she wore with glasses: “‘Encaustic images of women in funerary portraits were discovered in the nineteenth century at Fayum in Egypt.’ That’s nice to know, isn’t it?”

  “I thought you said the book was about jigsaw puzzles. What does that have to do with jigsaw puzzles?”

  “A lot,” Sally said. “Margaret Drabble makes it fit. She is so smart and frugal. She doesn’t like taking taxis. Art, family, old age. Dad would like it.”

  “Oh, Sally.”

  “I’m coming to you, Dinah,” she said. “I don’t care what Dad says.”

  “Did you have any dinner at all last night?”

  “I kicked an old Baby Ruth out of the vending machine. The peanuts were white. Bad sign. But I had no choice; Sabarro’s was shut up. The drinks in the vending machine looked like cleaning fluid.” Sally said, “The meal they’ll be serving in the next life.”

  “I don’t know why you didn’t go to a motel.”

  “I did expect the lights to dim.”

  Instead there was music and CNN. All night the breaking news scrolled across the TV along with footage of the killer whale who had killed his trainer: the killer whale corkscrewing into the air, breaking the water with his tail or else sliding up a ramp, his expression disingenuously smiley. “He had a history of violence,” Sally said.

  “No,” Dinah said softly into the phone, no, she had not seen the killer whale.

  “I had to pee something terrible,” Sally said. “Fortunately people started to return to the airport a little while ago. I’m a go.”

  Clive cued Dinah to whisper, so she whispered in a rush for Sally not to drive if she was tired.

  “I’m in the airport, Dinah. I’m flying.”

  *

  The morning! It began again, real delight at Clive close in bed. “Don’t get up just yet,” he said. She let him knead her back and her neck and her arms, and she thanked her good fortune until the phone. “Damn it,” Clive said, though it was Dinah who sat up and answered.

  The voice was Isabel’s, not Sally’s.

  “What time is it now?” Dinah asked. Long past morning, past expectation and nearer dread. Dinah was sorry to say she had not seen Ned; she was especially sorry when she learned that he was not supposed to drive, that he had lost his license a few months ago; moreover, that he was under medication. I understand, Dinah said, although she didn’t quite understand the meandering account of Ned and the medicine he took; Dinah didn’t quite understand the sequence of events either — how the young couple went from the afternoon through the evening. “Gone since when?” Dinah hoped to hear something more specific than “sometime in the night.” Isabel couldn’t be sure. She simply woke to discover Ned missing and the car gone.

  “How sad,” Dinah said, first to Isabel and then, hanging up the phone, to Clive. “Oh, pity the wives, ‘their brief goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.’”

  “That’s good,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  Dinah told him what she knew. “I hope he didn’t drive in the storm.”

  “He slept in the car, I’ll bet,” Clive said. “Are you up for good now?”

  And in truth, Dinah didn’t know, but she slapped the hairbrush around her head. No matter there wasn’t much of it, hair came first in the construction of her face.

  “So I take it that’s the end of our morning?”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “This doesn’t happen every day.” She saw the blazoned grizzle on his chest and his loose old arms, still muscled, still powerful, and she was moved, and put her hairbrush aside and went back to bed. His hair — there was so much of it, a silvery white, no yellow in it, and his eyebrows, darker. They moved when he talked, which was rarely, but Ned Bourne. . Ned, why did he have to come into her story all of a sudden?

  *

  The cheap princess phone looked like a giant aspirin, the oblong kind. “Fuck me. Fuck me to shit fuck shit!” The phone scratched in her ear and the ring lacked conviction. “Answer this time, you fuck. Answer.” But the first time she called, Dinah said hello. Oh, fuck. Isabel, stumbling through her story, considered the frenzied appearance of the house behind her: rag rugs skidded in her pratfall search for him — Ned? Closet door opened. Ned? By the time she made the second call, Isabel had straightened the house — nothing tippy or off — and she was lucky this time: Clive answered.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes I can,” she said, and she threw herself into her sorrows: “Ned was just so nice to me for the first time in a long time. We talked.”

  “Why do you think he left?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t cry.”

  “Why ever did you think I’d be happier here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you’d come alone.”

  “Even so,” she said. “This is your daughter’s house.”

  “My house,” he said.

  Isabel said, “It needs work.” All she had to do was lift the tatty skirt to the apron-front sink to be assaulted by the basement gloom of old pipes and a floor that looked tarred. “You should visit,” she said, and when he didn’t answer, Isabel told him about the Electrolux in the closet. “Vintage fifties,” she said, “easy.”

  “Why did you?” she said, accusing, not asking.

  “Sorry?”

  “What was I thinking coming here?”

  “Isabel.”

  “Why don’t you love me?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer, she said, “It doesn’t matter,” and she pulled out the cord for the whiplashed finish, the big bang of nothing before she shoved the princess phone in yet another empty drawer. It rarely rang. Old house, the Bridge House, and the path to the other house, Clive’s house, was not quite as he had described it — no mown swath of lawn from one stoop to the other but houses out of sight of each other parted by land as hard as heath, a plaid field — fall-like — blocks of piney woods, another field with a mown path to Clive’s house, nameless, long and white. To walk from one house to the other was not to be undertaken lightly. In the plaid field, thorns scored the body and stung; nothing drooped but stood up in the heat — and today, huzzah! The out-of-doors roughly washed, not yet dry but cooler, cleaner, like walking through sheets on a clothesline. Down the hill across the road she went to where the incline toward the coast began steeply. Wild roses, pink scraps of color, sweet-smelling but hairy stemmed, full of prickers, hedged a narrow path to the rusty-colored stratum, the coast’s outcroppings that in the light looked holy but inspired thoughts of soft things bashed against them. (She had a plate in her hand.)

  *

  He must have walked — Dinah’s first conjecture when she saw him. There was an uncertain path, but a path, from the forest through the field to where the apple trees started and the lawn was nubbled, scant, mown, the chicken coop now a studio for Dinah to work in, and nearby the tool and potting shed for Dinah’s garden. The garden itself was delicately fenced, an illusion of nets in trellises and curly vines, broken vines — a boggy odor — tomato and squash; beyond that, nibbles of lettuce, mostly dirt and not so soaked, but its hard crust was white in the sun. Already! The young man must have walked from the village. What was it about this boy, the newly arrived Ned Bourne, that held her attention? For one, he was Isabel Bourne’s husband, and she wondered how a man handsomer than Rossetti
could have failed his wife? Or she failed him? She imagined his days, dragging in to dinner, sickened by the ort of breakfast floating in the sink and nothing made. There may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them. Dinah had a garden and makeup and a tipsy habit — she had friends on the side. Poems? They grew.

  Oh, why were the young so slow to turn to life when they had it? The handsome Ned Bourne from her window, Ned Bourne, seated on the bench, leaned back against the barn and looked up unwashed and overheated, open mouthed, yet handsome, drinking the cure of Clive’s attentions. He must have taken the highway, then cut through the woods the last two miles and across the field to the barn by foot. Barefoot, quietly arrived, scratched up, grubby, bloody, Ned Bourne, it seemed, had walked from the village.

  If someone were to ask her was she still in love with Clive, Dinah would say, “Yes, very much so, decidedly.” It would not surprise her if Ned Bourne should come to love him — Dinah had seen Clive’s students brighten in his company, and she had watched the willing girls, too, one most unsteady from UT where Clive was a visiting professor. (Isabel Bourne didn’t seem so unsteady as sad. “I am not turning into the person I wanted to be” was what Isabel had said, a little drunkenly, sweetly, the night they parted company at the Clam Box.) The girl from UT wore jeans and English riding boots and tops that seemed as slight as scarves or made of scarves, a summery way about them, as sheer as curtains, lifting in a small breeze. The girl had no breasts to speak of. What was her name? Emma, Lynne, Lou? She asked intelligent questions although Dinah had heard such questions and their answers before, so that she dared to leave them, this Emma girl and Clive, to bob, in her fashion, in the pool. The pool was a part of the faculty complex — a hushed place, washed and planted and tended to by Mexicans. The sprinkler system spurted on at night. Not without surprise and certainly delight, Dinah remembers how she left them, walking bravely into unmitigated light — the blue square of water against pink verticals — she left them alone in a cool room, Clive and this girl, the sloppy human element, and Dinah did not look back. So now, why not guests? Why not Sally — on her way? And Ned? Ned, come from the village and the Clam Box, no doubt, but come in the spirit of one invited. Guests, of course, yes, even in sleep Dinah had heard Clive thrusting the lawnmower this way and that; a mown path, what was it but an invitation?

  *

  Clive watched Ned Bourne’s hair dry as they sat together on the bench outside the barn. The strands dried singly — red, brown, black, yellow — softened, blended, waved. From where had he come and why at this hour? At some point Clive told Ned that he should do whatever he had to do. (Clive later regretted this advice when he learned Ned was speaking of Phoebe. Phoebe of Phoebe and Ben — Ben was his nephew, for Christ’s sake!)

  Ned told Clive that he had walked to the barn from the village because he did not dare drive home. “I lost my license,” Ned said, “but I drove to the Clam Box last night.” So the story came out, he went to see the girl — two girls, it turned out; a duller friend tagged along — the waitress he had noticed on the night he first met Clive.

  “Do you know the waitress I’m talking about? She has a lot of hair?”

  Clive suspected it was Ellie but he would not say.

  Ned shrugged.

  Clive was sure it was Ellie, Ellie Phlor, whose thoughts came out the size of beads strung together with like, like, like, like never, like what the? Ellie Phlor was rumored articulate in other ways.

  “No,” Clive said, “no idea.”

  The bench on this side of the barn was in the shade, and the grass there still wet enough for Ned to wash his feet in it. “What’s the time, anyway?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” Clive said, “near noon?”

  Ned lifted himself off the bench and followed Clive to the back porch, where he sighed to sit again.

  “I didn’t think your house was so far from town.”

  “No one offered you a ride?”

  “There were not so many cars on the road. It was late,” he said.

  “You look as if you might fall asleep.”

  “I might.”

  Sunday, midmorning, very quiet but for that shrill insect sound of old, the whistle of childhood’s high summer, that sound heard once, twice, then Dinah arrived with drab yellow drinks that worked miracles.

  Dinah said, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” She touched Clive’s shoulder, saying not to worry, mostly lemonade.

  “Whatever you’ve mixed, I feel better already,” Ned said.

  *

  Overbleached, Dinah’s hair shocked around her head inspiring tenderness in Clive as he attended the sad case of the handsome Ned Bourne, whose eyes were closed — poor bastard. The spectacle of the Bournes. He phoned Isabel to tell her that Ned was with them on the porch, but when he heard a busy signal, Clive grew angry. All of a morning ruined — or nearly. Back on the porch, he saw Dinah ministering to Bourne; she had his feet in a pan of warm water and Epsom salts.

  “He’s resting his eyes,” Dinah said, “which is good.”

  For a moment, he thought he might work, but then Dinah told him about Sally and the airport and the storm, bigger than last night’s rain, that was still on its way to them. And Sally was on her way, too.

  “I knew it,” he said.

  “I like her company, Clive, very much. I like women.”

  *

  Ned, dreamy, was making his way across a room of shirtfronts and bare arms. He was looking for Isabel, who had disappeared. Somewhere in the crowded room of dressy people, most of them his age, was his wife. I am looking for my wife. I am looking for Isabel; but there was the crone again, the old witch with the mustache. Damn it. He startled awake in a wicker chair on an empty porch. His feet felt powdered, and when he looked down, it seemed to him they glowed opalescent. Epsom salts, the sound of the words was soothing until he remembered where he was and the way he had walked the seven miles from town to Clive’s barn. He must have started the car, then smartly thought better of it: Safer to walk, but how did he lose his shoes? He banged his pockets for keys or a wallet — nothing.

  They had left him sleeping on the porch. The house was still and he was alone, but feeling healed, able to walk home. He made a soft exit and walked on the grassy verge of the road. Had he put his hand on the halo of Dinah’s head? Had he kissed Clive? They seem to have disappeared if ever they were there. The soundless bay was a gray line beyond a grayer shoreline; the sky was growing wider. Here in the company of large elements Ned felt how it must be for Isabel with him. Pitchforked treachery on a bonfired night, and she, in the midst of it, insubstantially dressed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he saw her.

  *

  Standing in the yard at the back of the house, not so much a yard at all but long grasses, field asters — what some call weeds — Isabel pulled her hand up the long stems to things and took off the leaves until her hand, stained, hurt and smelled smoky.

  “I understand,” she said, “if we’d spent the summer apart maybe.”

  “Who knows?”

  “That was the plan,” she said.

  “For you, maybe.”

  “With you, I don’t know, I don’t know if I can, I have ambitions, you know, I. .,” she faltered, ashamed, unable to say what she wanted to be and silenced by a familiar expression of his — a broil of hurt and suspicion. Who was to say what anyone might make of a life, but Isabel was stung by the little startles of those who knew her at what she had become. From the girl most promising — no book, no significant publications either, and online didn’t count. She kept a journal; but she had not been a success, except perhaps outwardly in marriage. And now the marriage was over.

  *

  “I’m sorry,” Ned said again when he came downstairs with a packed bag and his computer. He had thought as she had thought, but why comb through expectations? Theirs, a short romance, three years if Columbia counted, no more than a sniffle, an accumulation of scenes
in thrift shops and workshops, a whimsical wedding in a rhinestone casino. I will if you will yes. Las Vegas, 2002. Road trip in his late mother’s car — the Solaris convertible, cherry red. (Do the really rich own cars in bright colors? Her father’s Mercedes was silver and sedate.) Ned’s mother had wanted to keep her Mercedes. “I can’t keep up with the upkeep”: Pet’s joke. She was already sick, so why not trade in for an optimistic car and find someone to drive her? The housekeeper’s husband, of course!

  The hungry eye followed by the numb, dumb discovery Ned made at the little there was to remember, and nothing that others hadn’t already known. Some images repeated: His mother, in shades of yellow, orchidaceous, was in love with the royals. (“That poor maligned duchess!” Pet said.) Their crests, their pugs, their cigarettes. Weak light with fog bank for background, Pet, in velvet slippers and round tortoiseshell sunglasses, sipped coffee at the umbrella table. The umbrella was furled, the blue pool, pale; nature for Ned was just bushes and flowers.

  “Don’t cry,” he said before he saw Isabel’s expression. Most of the big cries, as she called them, had happened on the road, at hotels, motels — weeks ago in the Wax Hill B & B on their way to Clive and the Bridge House. In the B & B they had suffered all night in a white box because, uninvited as he was, she wanted Ned at the Bridge House if it meant he was giving up Phoebe. Then she could concentrate, if she knew he had given up Phoebe. He had hoped to.

  And as to Clive, what was she to him but a different shape to paint?

  Ned said Isabel was more than to paint. He turned away and once in the drive looked back again at her wide-open face: It was made for wonder. Straight, finger-thick eyebrows, gray eyes, soft expression, Isabel.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  She seemed unmoved to see him go, said, “Thanks for leaving me the car.” And a dun-colored cab came slyly out of the fog and up the drive. Ned approached with a thuggish duffel bag. The trunk popped up, and the driver emerged, a shapeless man — two eyes, a nose, somewhere a mouth — distinctive as a carrot, gone hairy, limply aged. He fit the occasion, self-described as from the county, that northern bareness, seeming flat but for Katahdin on the map. Fog was nothing to a man from Aroostook used to much worse; whereas Ned, Ned was from a softer part of the country and bound for an even softer place: Bermuda of the pretty clichés — pink sands, turquoise waters. Phoebe had said hurricane season is best for lots of reasons.