Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  “‘Pain has an element of. .’? What? No, I didn’t forget.” Dinah knew Miss Dickinson’s terms for absence, emptiness, nothing; she knew the poet was well versed on the subject of pain and that the poet was right; the sudden erasure of the world so completely was a white astonishment. The horses were a response to that moment when pain felled him and the world was white. Sally had said of the horses, “There’s a lot of air in the paintings.”

  He healed.

  In this way Dinah and Clive drove back home talking about the fox, the horses, pain. Talking about Sally. Talking about Sally at the farmer’s market with Isabel Bourne.

  “Should I say Stark?” Dinah asked. “Isabel Stark?”

  He shrugged, taken up by the effortlessness of his summer life in Maine. He had his health; his body worked.

  “Sally says that despite appearances Isabel likes food”—good news, good news for the starving young woman disappearing before their very eyes.

  A few weeks ago, Clive had painted Isabel, and when he thought of her frame in the window frame, the light so blue, he saw the window was the angular element while she was some pale blue strokes. The sky was alive; it thrummed against the eyes — God’s fist.

  How could Isabel have gone off the road where she did?

  Shape, color, light, the fine details of a face were of no interest to him except to know now that the shape in the window had come to the Bridge House hopeful of repair and had been broken.

  Longfield’s Beauty, Maine, 2004

  “Age,” Dinah said. “I don’t know how else to talk about it. I am not modern.” A remark purely true just to see her as she was, Dinah, dated as a finned car in pants she called pedal pushers. Dinah said, “I still go to bed in mascara on the chance I’ll be seen by a lover.”

  The possibility that Dinah might be as unfaithful as Clive had not occurred to either woman, or so Dinah inferred from the dead air. “Does that surprise you?” she asked.“A lover?”

  Isabel didn’t answer. After a while, Sally said, “Does me.”

  “Oh, Sally,” Dinah said.

  “Does Dad know this?” Sally asked. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “We were talking about age,” Dinah said, explaining the mascara business had to do with her horrible discovery that she had caught up to Clive in years. He had grayed, sure, but not collapsed. “Can you believe I was once Clive’s student?”

  The same downturned eyes whenever Clive smiled, but he didn’t smile enough while she was a smiling idiot, a stained bone with unnaturally blonde hair. “Have you ever seen this color?” she asked.

  “Your hair is white though, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

  “Careful,” she said, taking a big, round ring, like a thistle, spiked, off her finger so that Isabel might inspect it.

  Dinah had Isabel’s attention. “Imagine me forty years younger,” she said, and she made a doused sound of something hot hissed out.

  *

  Was it too early to drink? There was only the sun to go by, and the sun said, Fine! Go ahead! You must be thirsty! The summer porch was Dinah’s favorite place at any time of day in the high season. Just the high season?

  “The high season depends on location, don’t you think?”

  The first and only other time Isabel had eaten with Dinah had been at the Clam Box at a corner table, a room the color of wet stones, rigging, nets, markers, traps, and on the table a pot of steamers and a smaller bowl of sudsy broth and a bowl of melted butter. Steamers at the Clam Box. The stomachs, dipped in butter, insinuated themselves on the way to her mouth, ugly and lustful at the same time. Steamers for starters with Ned and Isabel Bourne.

  “We were a little drunk then,” Isabel said, recalling her confession in the bathroom: I’m not the person I wanted to be. That was easy enough to say when tinkling between stalls, wasn’t it? Isabel had said it, I’m not the person I wanted to be, and Dinah had responded, Who is ever? Dinah had wanted to tell the girl then, I know and you should know. . she wanted to say, If you’re looking for someone to listen to you. . Clive liked to think he was a listener. . Dinah had wanted to say, You will be hurt — but the poor girl was already.

  Now she said to Isabel that her memory of the Clam Box was of a girlish woman in a rucked peasant blouse and Chinese slippers, especially the slippers.

  “I’ve always been partial to them.”

  “What about espadrilles?” Sally asked. “What about me?”

  “What about you?” Dinah asked and was out of the room before a rejoinder. She was going to make drinks, throw together an appetizer plate, a bowl of olives — whatever people nibbled on at this hour — maybe cookies? Maybe everything the girls had bought at the farmer’s market? By the time she came back to the conversation, Sally had moved next to Isabel so to see the bay and the blue sirens on the other side, Acadia and island sisters. From the quiet on the porch, close, sororal, Dinah inferred confessions had been made. Isabel, perhaps, had cried; her cheeks looked chapped. Onto this stage Dinah carried a tray with a pitcher of New England iced tea and tall glasses filled with ice and stems of mint. Sally fished out the mint, smelled it, bit a leaf, said it tasted dusty.

  “We were talking about relationships,” Isabel said.

  “Sounds deadly.”

  “How much can you ask for?” Sally said. “That is the question.”

  “Ask for as much as you dare,” Dinah said. “I’ve seen the future.” More than once she had taken flowers to Wax Hill. Wax Hill, where the old folk bumped against whatever was held out to smell. “Their heads are no bigger than hydrangeas,” Dinah said. “That’s right. Look afraid.”

  *

  Goat cheese amid the three graces. Clive wanted to paint them as they were on the porch — his wife, his daughter, his sometime little-mistress with a governess’s self-abasement. Christ, Isabel, buck up, he was thinking. He walked over to the Adirondack chair and stuck a pillow behind her back, propped her up so she could speak.

  “That chair is too big for you,” Sally said, and they switched seats.

  The sofa was a better fit for Isabel. Everyone agreed. He was thinking of the composition now that Isabel was visible and his wife Dinah was at her drink, and Sally, his daughter, was talking — about? He could look at them or the cheese. So very pretty! Green sprigs and purple pansies, a fanned deck of crackers, a wooden spreader. Sally and Isabel had bought cherry tomatoes and a bread called Brot, thin shingles speckled with caraway and sea salt, also smoked oysters and smoked bluefish, olives, something tan, enough food to make a dinner but this was just to start. “What can I do to help?” he asked Dinah — pro forma, he knew, but intention, not action, was what counted, wasn’t it?

  “Sit,” Dinah said, and he made to when he pulled himself out of the chair.

  “What’s this?” He backed away to where Dinah was sitting.

  “I’m sorry!” Sally took the yarn and needles off the chair and found the basket she had come with. “Hope nothing stuck you!”

  “What are you making?” he asked.

  “A modest scarf?”

  “In brooding colors,” Dinah said and she touched his arm, and he put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. “Dinah,” he said because he liked to say her name.

  Clive might have said something to Isabel, but he had interrupted Sally.

  “Sally has a story,” Dinah said to Clive. Then, “How do you know this, Sally?”

  “I saw them kissing.” Sally pulled herself forward in the chair. “Her poor husband looks a little like Henry the Eighth; he has a beard. At least I think he has a beard. If he doesn’t have a beard, he has a pointy chin.”

  Clive liked his role in the gathering; nothing was expected of him beyond sitting, which he did largely, an open-armed posture, his drink held near the floor. Summer’s ease, in a soft, clean shirt, rolled sleeves, he saw the dark ropes of his arms were a lustful seducement to any Polly to be shoved against the barn. Somewhere in the house is a hat Dinah gave him, a straw hat wit
h a straw band and a papery flower stuck in the band. August and he is playing Pan; in Maine, in summer, he grows younger. Where was the hat from? Where was the hat? He signaled Sally to interrupt and ask Dinah if she remembered where that hat was. “Do you remember that hat from Mexico?” he asked, and he described it, the hat she had bought him from — where in Mexico?

  “Which hat?” She startled.

  “The straw hat with the cornflower,” he said. “You bought it for me.”

  She sat up and made herself a cracker, considering hats. “The one from Mexico,” she said, “from Zihuatanejo,” and her distant face told him she was upstairs in the closet looking for the straw hat from the market in Zihuatanejo. “I haven’t seen it,” Dinah said.

  “So?” Sally was looking at him, bewildered.

  “What?”

  “What should I have done?” she asked.

  “Sorry?” he asked. Sally, holding an overloaded cracker near her mouth, what was she talking about? “I don’t know,” he said, which seemed to be the answer, because she began to eat. She ate the cracker — it looked like a hoagie — and made another, added an olive. Ate it, ate it so fast, he picked off the pansy before it disappeared, but the perky cap of the goat cheese had collapsed; it looked hot and the Brot had curled. His drink was some kind of foam. He left to find his hat; he wanted to find and wear it. He wanted to wear it enough that he would open the attic on the chance it had turned into a souvenir. Upstairs in his closet he looked to the back of the top shelf. He had so many hats! He put on the Borsalino and felt raffish: la sua era una vita fortunata.

  On the curb of a street in Trastevere, a melon-shaped woman in a housedress, short gray hair and stick legs, flats — the legs and the flats he remembered because she was rocking on the curb a little; she was walking a black dachshund, a smoothy, without shape, like her. Clive had seen that woman more than once in Rome and once he had followed her, so mesmerized was he by the backs of her elbows — the joint a dark line as made with a knife in the middle of capable dough.

  “How handsome you look!” Dinah surprised him.

  He said, “I had forgotten about this hat.”

  “Better than the straw hat.”

  Dinah said all the things he had come to expect her to say; she, his greatest champion, devoted, careful, kind. How could he assuage the pinch of remorse over Isabel except to admit that what he saw of himself in Isabel’s face had been flattering, yet he had abused her. He was vain, which was a failing, except that it had kept him in motion.

  In an expensive store that looked like a bomb shelter, he had purchased a sweater for Isabel; nothing in the store suited Dinah although he had looked.

  Oh, no custos morum, he, but a serial adulterer — he put the worst words to it — selfish, insensitive, yet he was not ignorant of Dinah’s forbearance but grateful. “Thank you,” he said to all of her compliments. “Thank you,” he said, and he held her, repeating, “I mean it, thank you.”

  The advantages of an old wife, Clive thinks, are too often overlooked in the market economy. A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes. He is careless of last names, often can’t pronounce them; nevertheless, the young woman thinks she is known — why? She is, as they all are, a fungible creature with the same small disasters — sometimes a story. Isabel, in New York, months ago, dinner at King Arthur’s Court, said, “I know a lot of what I do isn’t interesting but every day has its scene or two.” How he had liked her for that and her flattering appreciation of his work, of course, her appreciation of him and for such slight returns — Christ. All young women should ask for more. If he had a granddaughter that is what he would tell her. He does have a granddaughter! He forgets about Wisia all the time.

  He followed Dinah into the kitchen.

  “You’re not going to wear your hat?” she asked.

  Not now. Now he saw the clock was pointing at the grill and whatever was planned he offered to burn it.

  The menu was salad and salad, thanks to Sally, who was trying not to eat meat.

  “Really?” he said, pointedly skeptical.

  “Steak tomorrow,” Dinah said.

  Her answer cheered him. Here was an old wife who did not change an old man’s diet even if the change was healthful. On the porch Sally was still on her haunches and eating Brot and goat cheese while Isabel was saying, “Yaddo to rhyme with shadow. I’ve never been but I know how to say it.” Isabel had met Ned at Columbia. “One night after some reading,” she said, “we all went to a bar. There was talk about the Rapture, and I heard Ned say he wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that excluded his pets from heaven.” Isabel said, “I fell in love on the spot. He was seeing someone else then. Early in the summer, when the term was over, Ned called and asked if I would meet him in California. He needed to close his mother’s estate and his plan was to drive her car across the country to New York. ‘Was I up for a cross-country trip?’ I told him my suitcase was already out.”

  By the time Isabel got to La Jolla, where Ned’s mother had lived, the house was down to a crestfallen assortment of Pet’s lesser antiques and what’s known in the business as smalls, in Pet’s case, stuff that looked inherited but wasn’t — lineage in the shape of silver dresser sets and napkin rings, a horrible accumulation of tarnished utensils, pickle forks and berry spoons, sugar shakers, candlesticks, salt cellars with cobalt-blue glass liners — possessions! Ned was crazed with it all, and he called Bertita, Pet’s longtime housekeeper — Bertita, por favor! — who rolled the house into a U-Haul and drove it away.

  Isabel’s work was a dashed insertion in her story. She thought of herself as. . well, she didn’t.

  Clive said, “You should take yourself more seriously.”

  At the table, shaking open a napkin, he saw Dinah had put cold cuts and strips of cheese near his end of the table that he might make a Cobb salad if he were so inclined. He ran four miles every day. He needed the nourishment. He never got fat. There was a blue cheese dressing on the table as well as vinegar and oil, and the blue cheese was for him.

  “The strips of Swiss are Dad’s, I assume.”

  “Correct,” he said, at the same time Dinah offered to cut more. “No one wants more,” he said, and he told Dinah to sit down even as she seemed to be checking off items — something missing. Dinah went off to the kitchen and Sally followed. “What’s the matter?” he called after her, and then after Sally, “Where are you going?” but Sally didn’t answer, and now he was alone with Isabel. This was Dinah’s plan probably and she had let Sally in on it so that for a while at least, Isabel would have some time alone with him and he, with her, before she left for New York, but to say what?

  “Tell me about the car,” he said, “your accident.”

  “I didn’t drive off the side of the road, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Then how did it happen?”

  “Do we have to talk about it?”

  “No,” he said. “We don’t,” and he forked salad and chewed slowly.

  “I should thank you,” she said.

  “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 y
ou 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.