Prosperous Friends (14 page)

“New screens?” Sally asked.

“Just Nan, Nan Black.”

“It’s so bright,” Sally said. “I don’t remember its being so bright.”

Isabel pushed herself out from the couch, saying, “I’ve been throwing away a lot of Ned’s crap.” Why did she always pick mean words? “Some clothes are nice and a few books.”

“Don’t give away his books,” Dinah said. “He should have them.”

The three women on the stairs—Sally held the banister as if it were the handle to a suitcase—ostensibly to look over whatever Isabel had labeled nice. At the landing, Isabel watched as what seemed dank and threatening, oppressively wallpapered on the sunless side of the house dried, darkened, and turned softly old in Dinah’s company. The wide-board floors painted gray were smooth enough to walk on barefoot, but Isabel was in the habit of slipping off her slippers at the edge of the bed and otherwise wearing them. Now she saw what Clive meant but Sally wasn’t too tall for the Bridge House. She walked through the house comfortably, seeming happy in the fact that the house worked: Lights, door handles, locks; room to room she walked until she reached the room Ned had seized to work in—and why not? No one ever said he wasn’t selfish. Isabel stood with Sally and Dinah at the opened windows. The clamorous brilliancy of the bay was not tamed even at this distance from this height. The height made Isabel dizzy and she stepped back just as Sally sat on the table, the same Ned used for work. “Ah, hah!” Sally said. “Where the magic happens?” and she used her arm as a dust rag over the powdered surface. “Was he working here?” Sally asked.

The house faltered. “I thought,” Isabel said, and she steadied herself on the desk edge and wondered that the time Ned had spent in this wide room with all its light should yield up the parts he had read her, indulgences, lugubrious and trite—except that Carol Bane had approved. In consideration of events in the world the only noble calling was to report on them. Where were the orphans in Ned’s work but he was sitting under an umbrella table with a silly woman feeding table scraps to dogs? What did a person say to such audacity as Ned’s? To write a memoir didn’t a person have to suffer a little?

Sweet Neddie, he seemed so, seemed so _________. Fill in the blank. Blank? Ned was on his way to Bermuda —he had told her as much.

Sally was talking about the view while Dinah was opening closets, saying, “I’m told there’s an old Electrolux somewhere?”

“I’m going to let you look around,” Isabel said to the women, for which they both apologized, looking around.

“I haven’t seen the house since Dad bought it,” Sally said.

Dad,
Isabel heard, and she thought,
Clive,
and she saw that the woman uttering the word
Dad
was her age, and she was ill at ease again. “I’ll be in the back outside,” Isabel said. “Take your time,” she said, but whose house was this? What house? The Bridge House was unstable and teetering.

When had this started?

Weeks ago: She had seen the front door of the Bridge House open onto the ocean, and in the distance a small boat, tinier and plainer than Brueghel’s, was moving away equally indifferent to Isabel’s dilemma: how to get out of the Bridge House? Even out of the house, she felt endangered, which was stupid. She was safe indoors and out. The sea was nowhere near. Nothing was tilted but her vision of Ned, lying on the backyard bulkhead to the cellar, head tipped back, eyes shut, sculpted throat sacrificially thrust forward. The backyard was wildly untended, full of high danger. Here in the backyard was where he told her he was sorry, he felt it was best, he knew now, he was leaving. Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!
As You Like It
was a violent comedy, though the last time she saw it, she had cried when old Adam died onstage, reverenced at the fire by the banished duke’s men.

The reward of long service is no more service.

But on to other considerations. Will Ben Harris catch up to his quick-witted wife? Of everyone involved she felt sorriest for Ben—no, she felt sorriest for herself.

*

After Sally and Dinah had gone, putting dibs on nothing, all of it crap, Isabel stood near a closet holding on to the sleeve of Ned’s shirt. A terrible stillness in her ears, some empty sound.

Only weeks ago, she had driven to a deserted house off the Reach Road and there had broken what windows in the house were left to break.

Ned had said he didn’t know what it was about her but he did not find her sexy. Maybe it was her clothes. She was so often in doubt.

“What clothes?”

“My point,” he said. “Exactly.”

How nasty it seemed now that he should have criticized her wardrobe. Isabel in the Bridge House packed up Ned’s clothes; a slouchy, dirt-colored sweater she kept. He hadn’t left much behind. The long socks knotted in his sock drawer she threw away. Anything with a netted interior, of course, was also out. Haha.

In the last week she had told him that his penis was small.

That his penis was small, he knew; but her cunt, he said, was enormous.

In whatever game it was they played, Ned and Isabel had made a point of staying even.

“You want me to pay attention,” Ned said, “I know. I’m trying.”

She curled his belt in a shoe box for charity, but his hairbrush she kept for his smell.

Why do that?

How could she explain herself to herself or to anyone? Both of them from elsewhere, they had lived in different cities. New York, the longest. Columbia first, West Ninety-eighth, later the White Street loft. Left unused, the White Street loft was an overturned fishbowl: unwashed windows in punishing southern light. Caught air—terrible—but now, night after night, to put herself to sleep, she passed through the White Street loft swiping her hand over onyx edges and surfaces that started liquidy and cool, then turned solid. The hard immovables: column, sill, headboard. Hard headboard, yes, built-in and recessed. Was that possible and was it possible in just a summer to forget? Isabel walked down the long hall past the La Jolla scenes, large black-and-white photographs of Ned and his mother, Pet, and so to sleep, but the Bridge House roused her, a sound.

“Who’s here?”

Why here? Why was she here and not in the White Street loft, but when she thought of the White Street loft, really thought of it, Ned was in the loft, and he was shoving her against the sharp cube that passed for a sofa.

She did not want to hear Ned, but she heard him, saying, “My problem is I’m so quickly bored.”

For a time, fucking, being fucked, being hurt, then not being fucked. The astonished splatter in unlikely places, red on a far white wall—oh, Isabel could be bloody and dramatic, but in the end, Ned had outdone her with his exit.
I don’t want any of the stuff I’ve left. The car’s yours.
Then he called a taxi to the airport. Now what?

As soon as she sold the car, she would go back to the White Street loft.

Last night she had dreamed Fife had drowned off a beach in Corfu but come back to life. Fife twisted in a dance and told her she was common, she was dull—cement had more color. How could someone as mean as Fife die? She had never believed it, his drowning, so his resurrection seemed right. Then the dream scene changed and Fife stood naked in a tub in a middle-brow bathroom, everything ordinary—a house somehow hers and he knew it. Oh, the self-consciousness she experienced in dreams! Fife stood looking out at her, making dismissive appraisals—professional name? “What profession? Unless you’re doing business with your crease.” She pulled the curtain across his face all the while seeing his face grow long and desperate, putty mobility with a hole for howling and then the tub broke apart and all turned black with the blunt conclusiveness she knew for hell. He fell before he had a chance to change expressions. Gone that fast, forever and ever. Amen. When she woke she was relieved, for how could she be afraid of someone who was dead to her?

*

At the Clam Box so many weeks ago Dinah had met Isabel for the first time. She had met Ned, too, a girl more than a boy with small, decisive features, sleepy eyes, side part. Caramel as a color of hair on him looked new; he was a sleek boy in an ad for cologne, ambivalent or shy. Dinah remembered how she had looked at Ned more emboldened than she was wont to be and afraid. Over steamers Dinah told him she wouldn’t want to be any part of any kind of interview with Clive, especially one that might turn into more, into a long story, a novel, some sort of book. He had asked would she talk to him on other subjects then, and she had said, yes—boldly. He never visited but once, and that, for the last time.

Dinah and Clive beyond the checkout at the Trade Winds grocery resumed their conversation about the Bournes. “How did you know Ned was talented?” Dinah asked.

“He told me. He told me his agent was Carol Bane.”

“Who’s Carol Bane?”

“I don’t know. He said her name in a way that made me think I should know.”

Clive, in loose clothing, scootered the grocery cart and hiked on, a kind of skateboard, stuttering down the incline to the car. Here in the parking lot, in the yellowing middle of things, some reds out there, thrashed colors, his shirt was flying open; his pants were full of air. He offered his high spirits for the ride home. The anodyne of cheer; he said he was healed and whole; he lacked for nothing. And she? Dinah? Isabel, Sally? Who needed pills?

Sally needed pills. Dinah had seen her shake some out, not count, and take them.

“They seem to be working,” he said. “She holds still longer.”

“You are so critical.”

He was not! He was lost in good feeling! He had his fox—he didn’t deserve her. What a sight in the high grass. Years earlier a suggestion of horses in motion stampeding toward the viewer, a palette of blues, whites, yellows, greens. Not much green, not like now; then his misery had been in the making of the paintings: to be bound indoors, tender treatment, on his butt all day because of a heel spur that had brought him to the ground when first he stepped on it—pain! A bone was broken.

“‘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?”