Prosperous Friends (17 page)

*

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 invented 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.

The books were at the end, at least that’s how she remembers it.

But why think on the past on such a day—pink wind, timid sun—softness in all things? She is on her hands and knees on the granite terrace Clive laid out a long time ago. She is neatening up with self-abasing ceremony. Her face nearly touches the stones in sorting the weeds from the moss and fancy pussytoes.

Something else she was thinking—what was it?

At Scottie Rostow’s party, she and Jim didn’t talk to anyone but huddled, facing each other, knee to knee, arms around in a loose embrace, heads pressed together, a mourning posture, both of them glum. But a family’s history of service in the Marines is not an inheritance to squander, she learned.

Something else, this: Jim is sitting on the plank seat chair in his mother’s kitchen, senior year, track season. She practically lives at his house. She snaps the kitchen towel at his little sister and talks with his mother about him in front of him. He drinks a milkshake at ten thirty every morning. Nothing sticks to him but it turns to muscle. He is sitting on the plank seat chair and taking off his running shoes that in memory turn silvery, melted and runny. After his exertions, the muscles in his arms jump just doing little things, like taking off his shoes. He is sitting on the plank seat in a plank of light.

Clive walks carefully over the terrace, examines her work, says, “Good job.” But the ache! Her shoulders especially, she massages her shoulders until her hands cry out, please! Poor, misshapen hands, the fleshy chuff deflated, her thumbs have disappeared. When she holds out a hand, stop-sign fashion, only four fingers show.

“Look at that, will you,” Dinah says, and he does. He frowns and gives her his hand and helps her up off the pavement. The deep imprint of her knees in the foamy kneeler is a disconcerting sight—too mortal.

“It doesn’t stop you,” Clive says.

“Plainness is the beauty of aging:

cropping my hair, blotting excess,”

He breaks off from quoting her and says, “I love your face.”

“And my poems?” she asks.

“‘Transparent Window on a Complex View’” —he exhales the title as if he’s just eaten something airy. “Of course, I like the poems—I like them very much.

“. . . what was solid was miraculous:

planes of light, day-old eggs on a white dish . . .”

His recall for her work mostly pleases and when they come to the barn bench, he is still plucking lines, and she is listening to herself and how he hears her, and it wins her over that he knows, better than anyone else knows, the great divide between who she is and what she has done.

*

“Wait,” Isabel said, and she thumbed Sally’s cheek. “Just a little ink. Pen, I think. Okay. You’re okay. Did you sleep all right? You weren’t cold?”

“Fine,” she said. “How’s your finger?”

Isabel held up her finger, a swami heavy headed and hung over.

“Poor little fellow,” Sally said.

“Doesn’t hurt so much, just sore. Say,” Isabel said, “we’ve got those tarts left over from last night for breakfast.”

They took coffee and the leftover tarts outside, and it was then Isabel noticed the birds. She was sorry to have missed them in the first place. Sparrows by the hundreds cheeped in the shrubs enough to shake them. She walked down the hill with Sally, delighted by the gregarious birds and all that was moving and inviting from the house to the road and across the road for an uninterrupted view of Acadia, a blue symbol on the tranquil horizon. She told Sally how she often took this walk and how she liked to walk, too, in the Seaside Cemetery. If she didn’t get outside first thing in the morning, she would have trouble breathing. “True!” she said.

“I believe you,” Sally said.

*

“Should I be laughing so soon after?”

The question was how did Isabel feel about the pink sands of Bermuda and Phoebe Chester-Harris on a half shell?

“I can tell you what Ned has to wear in the tropics. I can tell you he’s unpacking some dead guy’s seersucker jacket yellowing at the collar. But will Phoebe let him wear it? That’s the question.”

Did Phoebe have a say in her husband’s clothes? The last time Isabel had seen Ben Harris was at their country house and then he was wearing Barbour or something. Ben Harris was not a thrift-store shopper. No dead man’s shoes for him. Ben Harris in Bermuda in sorbet colors, easy anywhere and with skin that didn’t burn, whereas Ned . . . ah, he was such a tender baby.

The Bridge House, on a scenic road treacherously full of blind spots, was locally famous and Clive Harris, she liked to imagine, was more than locally famous, so that pillowy elements attached to Sally and, to a lesser degree, Isabel, and the women lounged with ease in an indefinitely extended summer. The queen of the meadow was nearly gone. (Weren’t the common names for flowers lovely?) The roses had rallied and there were days yet in ‘Longfield’s Beauty.’

Sally drove Isabel to the outdoor concert: African and African American choral music in the field overlooking the reach. The wind was arctic out of Canada and worsened. Isabel was wearing a ski cap; it was that cold. An old man in an overturned poncho staggered, blind and blown. The sight of him! And then the not-so-old woman in a parka wheeling her own wheelchair out of the field after shelter. The hood to her parka was tied tightly against the wind and crumpled her face, and she looked angry, though the music was full of odd notes resolving. There were upright bodies of every size everywhere, dancing. Isabel watched a toddler on legs stiff as stilts scare his mother while older children skidded around picnics or collided on purpose, fell. A boy with blond dreadlocks played on invisible bongos. He played with such passion, the music might be his, yet Isabel and Sally walked past him and nearer the larger sound of the chorus. They walked around the huddled and dancing. Someone called out, “Holly!” and Sally said, “Someone’s kid, I bet.”

“Everyone’s here,” Isabel said, though she knew no one, a few faces, but there, behind the fat woman in fleece, was Mr. Weed. Even Mr. Weed was at the concert, and Sally, seeing the skinny man on a picnic blanket, said yes, sure enough. “Mr. Weed is such a nice guy.”

Really?

“Holly!” they heard again. They saw Stephanie who worked at the post office and the lithe woman with long white hair who sold them the goat cheese at the co-op. Sally said her name was Helen Friendlander; Helen was behind the co-op’s hippie baskets from Ghana.

But where were the black faces, the migrants who picked in the blueberry barrens?

Were they Haitian, Isabel wondered, or what?

Sally said, “The Haitians pick apples and the Mexicans pick blueberries.” She said, “The Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers. The lobsters,” she said, “are for white folks to get.”

Isabel blew into her hands to warm them although it was warmer near the prow of the chorus and Isabel was not so cold that she couldn’t stand and watch, without shivering, as an older man danced with a younger woman. They were not married; at least Isabel thought they were not married. “But why do I think that?” she asked Sally.

Sally said, “They might be anything to each other.”

They danced, this ordinary man and younger, ordinary woman. They hopped and clapped, hooked arms, and went in circles.

Epilogue

Aura Kyle puts her father’s best shoes in her lap. He wore these shoes when he acted as a driver for Mrs. Pfizer, which he did with greater regularity in the last years of his life. A dark walnut color, the shoes are glossy with his care—they could be mistaken for new. Someone else would gladly wear them, but Aura knows she will not give her father’s shoes to anyone. Heart hobbled at the end, her quiet father yielded of necessity and put aside his job and his uniform—the green shirt with the EBS stitching, the pin with his name, Dan Carter. Dan Carter, one of the many Carters in Hancock County, now wore clothes better suited for a salesman, though he was largely unemployed. At home and short of breath, he sat at the card table, sat for hours every afternoon making toothpick ashtrays and pencil holders. In a better world her father would have died at the card table in rolled sleeves and good shoes; instead, he died seated on a crate in the middle of the frozen lake. Ice fishing! Gone alone, he must have known what he was risking, but why had his wife let him go? Aura’s mother called the boys for a search party before she remembered he had told her his intentions, yet she had let him go knowing, as she must have known, the icy air would kill him.