Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  *

  “Oh, Sally.” Dinah smiled to see the happy pills were working and the shaggy girl she loved was back and making her laugh until her arm weakened, and the pitcher she carried so heavy, water wagged near the spout. “Oh, Sally,” she said.

  “What? I’m the mother. I can say anything.”

  But what had Clive and Isabel said? What did he say to these iridescent girls in their quick sideways flights? Dinah did not care so long as he cared for her chiefly, as she did him in their daily passing, bumbly as wasps, hiving it out, makers, albeit slower. Slower? No, like the good doctor-poet of Paterson, Clive knew he was “more attractive to girls than when he was seventeen.” He took them up and put them down like a fork, as needed. The figurative paintings in June, then the fox and now, what now? “Will you show us?” Dinah asked. At the sweet end of the meal, Dinah asked again, “Will you?”

  His work had not always been applauded; he had suffered and doubted. “My style lacks a champion!” Adoring young women helped as did someone else to do housework and mail, drive, and keep a calendar. Dinah had come into his life just as it was turning. Oh, there had always been yes, the yeses from a few significant others, although the lash of uninterest was the greater sensation; exclusion, the continuous drizzling misery of it, had been the weather in Clive’s thirties and forties, but then, nearing fifty, it had happened. “Trees in Bud,” “Morning from the Porch.” Could the titles have been more significant? “Rainy Afternoon.”

  Now, no rain, but an awning of light under which Clive stood in the barn, not entirely certain, unveiling the lily pond. The lily pond was far from completion — purple wounds on a largely white surface — and in his expressions Dinah saw he was not entirely certain of this work. He didn’t look at it when he was showing others. “The lily pond is promising.” That’s what Dinah said.“I look forward to when it is finished,” and so saying, she saw he was relieved. He showed off the summer’s earlier triumphs. Paintings he was pleased with — he said so. She was glad to hear it.

  “I look like a shrimp in that painting,” Isabel said.

  “A shrimp,” Dinah said, “wedding hors d’oeuvre of choice.” She said, “I like all the angles, the different points of view,” and then no more, but she walked deeper into the soft interior of the barn expecting straw on the floor and chaff in the air, barn smells and the sudden swallow. Where was the kitten with the gummy eye, the one she had tried to catch in another such barn in another time, as a child? Isabel followed Dinah as if expectant of a story or some remarks on what they had just seen, a naked Isabel with no pubis to speak of, and all the action outside of the studio with Dinah and the garden. “I grew up in a house next to a farm,” Dinah said. “I found all kinds of animal life there — some of it alarming — once I found a dead rat the size of a dog.” By then, she remembered, the barn had already caved in and the wood had turned silvery in places, in places dark, a beautiful carcass in its long conclusion. Dinner was over; the viewing was over. “Someone should take you home,” she said to Isabel, and Sally offered.

  *

  Dying barns and houses, that’s what Isabel was thinking about when Sally put the farmers’-market fare, along with the box of tarts, in the backseat of the car. Watching her move, Isabel had decided that at age forty, Sally walked in a way that might seem aggressive to some — it had to Isabel — but which had more to do with Sally’s height, and was meant as a smaller approach. Nevertheless, her posture seemed abject, and once they were on the road Isabel asked Sally, “Do you consider yourself a guest at your father’s?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “He is. .” Isabel made a wavy gesture.

  “Moody? It’s no use talking about him,” she said as if they had been talking about Clive for a long time.

  Isabel was not so keen on the subject that she pressed for more but went back to the conversation about abandoned houses, the Bridge House, the barns. On the Reach Road Isabel was attached to an empty house the bittersweet had overmastered; vines seemed to grow out of rather than into the open windows, and soon it would appear like topiary in a rough approximation of a house. “I have no business staying here in Maine,” Isabel said. “I’ve got so much to do.”

  “Settle back,” Sally said and she petted Isabel’s shoulder.

  Settle back, Izzie was her mother’s expression, and so she did; she sat back in the dark car and wondered at the sequined glamour of the controls, the warm smell of a high-end rental rolling smoothly over a ruined road of frost heaves and no one else encountered on the road.

  “You’re a careful driver.”

  “No one’s ever told me that,” Sally said, “but I am glad you think so.”

  Easier to lie when not looking at a person; at least, this was Isabel’s experience; it was also easier to speak intimately, to say, “I am more alone than I am used to.” She asked Sally if she would stay, if she would spend the night. By then Sally had turned onto the drive but not without responding, saying, “Well.”

  Isabel said, “I’ve got extra nightgowns.”

  “Really?” Sally said, sounding skeptical about the nightgowns — their sufficiency? — while at the same time following Isabel into the house and the kitchen. There Isabel set down the polished onions, the carrots, the dusky kale. The leftover tarts slid in their box.

  “Would you like one?”

  “Later.”

  Later was a way of saying yes, and Isabel said she was glad, she was grateful. “You have no idea. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, and they took themselves out to the rough backyard to look at the moon. Sally made herself at home on the bulkhead, and Isabel sat at the back door under the light on a steep granite step. “Somebody must have had a purpose. Doesn’t it look that way?”

  “Do you mean the moon,” Sally asked, “or the yard? The field grasses were encouraged, I think.”

  “I think so, too,” Isabel said.

  “I used to be a not-so-amateur gardener, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I’ve not worked in years,” Sally said. “I have a law degree,” she said. “Can you believe it? Surprises me, too. Law and landscaping, there’s a practical combination. It’s been an awards show of disappointments, but you must know that.”

  “Honestly,” Isabel said, “your father didn’t say.” Isabel would not repeat his brusque summation of Sally: my daughter with my first wife, a heartache. He had failed to mention his daughter was attractive, forgetting Sally’s face to speak of her mother’s wrecked beauty. Sally in shadow, flat on her back on the bulkhead, was a still, consolatory shape far from the violent theater beside the door: frenzied insects bashing into the filthy light. Even the cobwebs were black. She lived here, didn’t she, hadn’t she, for more than a few weeks?

  Nothing a broom couldn’t fix and she was half inclined.

  “Relax,” Sally said. “Come sit next to me.”

  A familiar invitation — and welcome although Isabel wondered just how much Sally knew about her, and as she neared, she said, “You know about your father and me, don’t you?” She sat at the bottom of the bulkhead with her back to Sally. She said, “I sat for him when I first got here.”

  “Yes,” Sally said.

  “And it doesn’t bother you? I mean it was brief — and rather one-sided, but still. . you don’t hate me?”

  “You sound like my daughter,” Sally said and she rolled toward Isabel, lifted her rump and brushed off tree slough. Sat, but made herself small — if such were possible — knees pulled up, arms around her legs, hands clasped, Isabel’s posture. Sally said, “I once met someone at an AA meeting in Long Beach, California. We spent a week together and on our last night — I was visiting my dad and Dinah — she told me she knew my dad. She didn’t have to say any more than that.”

  Isabel said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You know, you could have a rock garden.”

  “No,” Isabel said, “I could never.” Not after the snake plant, an imp
ulse purchase she had treated poorly — even contemptuously. In the White Street loft, the snake plant stood in indifferent foyer light. Over time, the poor plant could not be soaked but the water ran through it: Isabel could lift all three, four feet of it — pick up a hempen spike and all of the plant came out of its pot in pot-shaped dirt, dry and compacted.

  Isabel asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” Sally said. “If you don’t know what to look for. . you need to know what to look for in a thing that’s dying to know when it’s dead.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Isabel said.

  “What else have you killed?”

  The shih tzu came to mind — and Isabel flinched to remember him and what she had done. The baby that never was. And G, and — but Clive? Do you want to show your husband what you can do? More than one man had asked. Now Ned had shown her what he could do — no fooling: In the few weeks at the Bridge House he was onto something his agent liked.

  “I had begun to think Carol Bane didn’t exist,” Isabel said. “Why is it so hard to picture the people closest to us as succeeding?”

  Sally said, “I don’t know.”

  Isabel refrained from explaining herself. One day perhaps there would be occasion to describe some jobs she once took — typing Ruth Draper’s letters in Miss Wilsey’s punitively small but respectable apartment on East Sixty-eighth — but not tonight. If there were other nights maybe — probably. She had been a substitute teacher at The Spence School. She still tutored. She had some stories to tell. Also secrets. Some secrets had to do with Ned, and the possibility that he might reappear and want to play again meant she wouldn’t tell: two together sitting smugly, the solidarity of two in the midst of company. Their fantasy life together, crossing on the QE2—that game — and the invented Lime House in Hampstead, NW3, all experience delivered in such detail that the fictions seemed fact, and the facts? The facts insisted on themselves. They flew economy to London and lived in Golder’s Green in an unnamed, floridly wallpapered, ground-floor flat.

  Some happiness to start there, some of it photographed, then perversely put away. In the nameless ground-floor flat in Golder’s Green, Ned and Isabel had pulled their chairs close to the plug-in coals and read and read.

  “I’m not one for travel actually, but with Ned, I could go anywhere. I would. I did.”

  *

  “Oh, God!” Isabel with a lemon under a knife, tea and tarts at midnight, had cut deeply into her finger.

  “Run it under cold water.”

  “Oh, God!” She saw the blood run off, and she contracted her vaginal muscles as if it might help contain the wound. “Oh. .” The sting of it! The cut! She didn’t like the cold water and she swaddled the finger with paper towels. Meanwhile, Sally was after the first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. She came back with the gauze in hand and took up Isabel’s finger and wrapped it rapidly, efficiently, like a nurse. “I feel dizzy,” Isabel said, and Sally put an arm around her, and led her from the sink to the kitchen chair, sat her down, and finished bandaging.

  “I’m taking you to the emergency room at the hospital. It’s not that late and there should be someone on duty. Where are your shoes?”

  The gauze had begun to pink already.

  “Keep your hand raised,” Sally said. “It’s a deep cut. You may need stitches. This is the kind of thing I would do,” she said.

  Isabel found her slippers — only slightly surprised at being barefoot — let herself be led to the car, door opened, legs swung in. “Okay?” Sally said, and Isabel nodded yes, though the gauze had begun to leak, so Sally gave her the kitchen towel she had brought along in case and told Isabel to wrap it around her finger and then her hand. In this way she muffled the bite and tried to subdue the sharp memory of cutting herself. She thought of graver agonies — wounds, burns — incalculable affliction of the sort she read about every day, but the hurt did not abate. The finger was hot and it beat, heartlike hot and sore.

  For the rest — the long drive, the parking lot, the waiting room, the frosty windows in ambulatory — Isabel let herself be led. She shut her eyes when the doctor took up the needle to numb the area and then a kind of nothing until she looked down and saw a turbaned finger puppet that grew sharper as it woke but safe. Sally knew her way around hospitals and did the paperwork — check-in, checkout — all the while smiling at Isabel, saying how much she liked being around someone more hapless than herself.

  *

  In the watercolor of the lily pads Dinah likes best, the lily pads are a congestion of greens with here and there a pink or yellow crown for flower. The sky is made of orange strokes; the white paper shows through. What time is it in the painting? Could be dawn or sunset. The pond is a party, present tense and happy, but he might very well have started painting it on one of his silent, unhappy mornings. The same was true for the nude paintings. What were his sensations when painting Dinah in the garden as seen from the studio with nakedness inside this summer in the shape of Isabel? Two summers ago, it was Caitlin with the red hair. Caitlin’s pubis is the same red, not quite a red, but an orange brown, burnt-brown triangle, very small, the hips broad invitations. Never on any of the nudes are their nipples largely, colorfully noted. A bright triangle, roughly brushed in, is the focal point of the nude model’s body. As far as Dinah’s concerned, that is. No, in truth, the dynamic element is really the color and the contrasts; the body, except for suggested sexual parts, is pink; the facial features are incidental; the young women — young women to her, to Dinah — the young women are shapes.

  Some of what has happened, some of what has been written about her husband and his interviews have made Dinah cynical. His work has been described as “showing us voluptuous ease,” but also conveying “a respect for labor. . no doubt a residue of his own early years of physical toil.”

  Toil? What toil to be the son of wealthy parents who have made it possible to be an artist, a figure destined to be reliant on a trust fund so that a trust fund has been provided?

  How old were the kids conducting these interviews anyway?

  Dinah was thirty when she first met Clive in an elective course on figurative painting. He seemed very young to be a visiting professor, but he told her that she seemed very old to be an undergraduate. “Just wise” was what she said. She had left college after her freshman year to marry her high school sweetheart and fuck and fuck and fuck with impunity before he deployed for Vietnam. The year was 1969. The baby, if indeed there ever was one, died; Dinah saw blood, and after that more blood, unbidden, clotted, black. The high school sweetheart came back, and they stayed married for two years. Why? She has knocked against this question before and had no answer except to remember why she married in the first place. His body! His body was the first place. Lolling in the school gym to see him and then to lean into his body. Talk was beside the point. The point was his long body, the combative hardness of his muscled body, and the smell of his body after running when his T-shirt was no more than a tissue she pressed her nose to. His inimitable smell! She has not tasted his like and never expected to even as she rubbed against him when they were no more than sweethearts; she knew this olfactory arousal would be forever particular to him, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card. And she was right.

  For a time her name was Dinah Card and she was married to Jim Card, who called her Dee.

  Now she is Dinah Harris and nothing of her hometown is known; she writes under this name even as she writes of her hometown. The baby who never was is an informing sadness, an ink that blooms on the white sheet.

  At age nine she broke her arm playing a stupid game with her best friend of the time, Cynthia. Cynthia tipped a hammock hooked up in a metal frame by sitting on the end and made Dinah climb to the top of what she called the mountain. “Climb the mountain!” Why not go to the park and play on the jungle gym? “Climb it!” Dinah slipped, her arm got caught somehow, and she fell — she was never able to explain the accident; even the game Cynthia had inve
nted was hard to describe, but she was committed to it. Cynthia didn’t believe Dinah had broken her arm, but Cynthia’s mother believed it. “Dinah’s hardly a sissy” was how Cynthia’s mother defended her. First sensations of mortality then, the start of the ugly years and trembling, Dinah, five feet barely-something inches, feared most people, men especially. Her art teacher took her aside for more than one reason; Clive took her aside, too, but by then, at thirty, she knew what men could and could not do to women, and she was not afraid of Clive.

  Weirdly fearless — adventuresome? — Dinah was the first in a high school class of fifty who dared to color her hair, and in Dinah’s case, blue streaks. She drew on herself as she did on other surfaces. She was on her way to mascara when she met Jim. Now her hands sometimes shake in applying eyeliner, and her eyes come out uneven and she thinks she looks tragic, like a French chanteuse — black pointy lips on a sad face informed by too much knowing.

  Another version of Dee and Jim Card: a rusty S.O.S pad disintegrating in her hand. The sink is dry, and the refrigerator, emptied, stinks; elsewhere locked windows, old air. Who left the apartment first? No sequence but objects, scenes, his glove without its mate.

  She doesn’t remember Jim’s voice though she sees him yelling at her on the stoop to their apartment. Henry Street, Madison, Wisconsin, around the corner from State Street, the center of power: at one end of State Street the university, at the other, the capitol. Politics, their politics were diverging when she thought, as lovers, she and Jim should be in accord.

  Another time she came back to their apartment to find a pyre of old books from courses she had taken — an entire term on Shelley, books on Freud and books by Freud and books with dialectic in their titles — all stacked as for a purifying rite in the middle of the bare room where she and Jimbo had once done everything but cook and sleep. He left a pack of matches nearby.