Prosperous Friends (13 page)

“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.

Honestly!

Her voice in his ear’s a hoarseness he loves to hear. That and her money was why she got away with everything.

*

“Do you remember that first summer when Sally locked herself in her room every night, and the door stuck? It wouldn’t shut for her to lock it. I had to push from the other side.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to remember,” Clive said, “and you’re smiling.”

But she had liked that noisy, nighttime business.

On Sunday afternoons, Dinah’s grandfather let the Newfies lie near the fire in the den and watch old Westerns with him. Dinah said, “Whenever one of the dogs farted, and it was almost always Tom, my grandfather lit a match.”

Dinah said, “Sally had nothing to be afraid of then.”

“Her mother was living with that man.”

“Sally should get a dog.”

Clive said, “She has Wisia.”

But only in the summers and six weeks of this one at camp—and that was money well spent. Dinah had seen the girl kick Sally in a most hurtful place, stood witness, helpless to part them—afraid really. Wisia was more respectful of her other mother and why was that?

Dinah said, “Sally’s driving up from Portland.”

“You amaze me,” Clive said.

“I’m glad,” she said. For Sally’s sake, she hoped the Bournes would both vacate although she felt maternally toward them, felt other stirrings, too, and sadness.

The Bridge House
Maine, 2004

The knock on the door was the loose door itself in the wind, and Isabel kept her eyes shut and her face in the sun. The door in the wind, in the wind and the pitched light of late afternoon in the backyard, she saw where she was and, too, for an instant, a not so tall man stretched out on the bulkhead: Ned of the slender ankles, shapely leg. Too handsome.

His story always started with
I was invited to this
. . .

Isabel shut her eyes and listened for a voice, a word more, which, when it came, came from a woman. Woman? Women?

On the kitchen table near the open windows was a tiny bottle of fluttery sweet peas feigning faint of heart. A note, too, but Isabel didn’t move to get it. The Bridge House was not reliable.

Stupid.

The Bridge House, 1858, yellow clapboard, the yellow almost all worn away. Old trees. Old windows, wiggly glass. No bridge figured into it; the first owner’s name was Gray, and after him, a spinster daughter, Margaret. Occupied for more than a hundred years by the same family, a New England farmhouse not so far from the road, a winter house, austere and brave, high elevation, hard on a hill overlooking the bay! The bay and, but for Mr. Weed and his establishment, open meadow, pines, outcroppings. But Mr. Weed, the menacing Mr. Weed, lived at the bend in the road in a warren of outbuildings, where he serviced lawn mowers, sold parts. She had introduced herself—she had seen the photo of his ancestor and seen his ancestors’ graves at the Seaside Cemetery. Mr. Weed was on his knees and too old to get up quickly.

“Please don’t!” she had said even as he stood.

On clear days Isabel could see Acadia in the distance.

*

Sally said to her father, “You think I’m staying forever. I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do, do you?” Clive asked.

Dinah was out of the door with her arms open, bumping past him and into the cushion of Sally in slacks. Dinah, no bigger than a darning needle, put her arms around Sally’s waist and hugged, exuberant. As long as they keep it to themselves, why shouldn’t he suffer his daughter’s visit? Dinah wanted company, whereas he was no sooner in company than he wanted to be out of it and back in the barn. Not that he was always productive, Christ, no. A lot of looking went into what he was doing. For a time he had liked to look at Isabel, bony as she was, but he was looking elsewhere now. A fox, a fox and her kits, had come upon him from time to time when he had set up in the field to paint early in the morning, and he was smitten. Mama fox, lighthearted in the high grass, when her focus turned on him, she held still; she stood self-possessed and cool and looked right through him. Mama fox. The kits were merely foolish.

“I’m happy to see you, too, Dad,” Sally said and she made an affectionate move toward him as she dragged what looked like camping gear behind her.

“Smells syrupy in here. Did you make waffles this morning, Dinah?”

Had she? He didn’t remember. “No one tells me anything,” Clive said, more to himself than to anyone listening, moving out of the kitchen to the back porch. Dinah already at the disaster site, saying, “Shared custody is often not shared.” He wished there were some other story. People were moving about him even as he moved away. Dinah, last glimpsed with branches of weigela in a Ball jar. He remembered that part of breakfast at least.

*

The last corner before the last so sharply inclined to the shore that Ned’s car, now Isabel’s car, fishtailed off the road—an accident! The tree broke the car’s fall, or who knows how far down the hill she might have gone. Isabel was unhurt, but when she dared to see how far down was down, she got sick. And this fuck-up after all she had accomplished in asking Mr. Weed to help her get her car—on Pearl near the Clam Box, where else? She must have forgotten she was driving or something equally stupid—a dumb accident might explain her accident. Embarrassed, wiping her mouth, not quite relieved. The back window of the car was a blown-out sheet of glass—green diamond edges beguiling as a gemstone. The back door was dented, half-open. Otherwise the car worked.

“My God!”

The policeman did not remind her of any person in authority.

“It was so easy,” she said, “in slow motion and so much damage, but I’m all right, thank you, really. That such a tiny accident should cause so much damage. The car’s worth nothing now, I guess. Not even trade-in. Scrap.”

Once home, she sat on the granite step looking out at the bay. It took a while before the sensation of falling ceased.

She talked to her mother for a time and was comforted by her terrorized reaction. “Why?” Her mother said, “You have to ask me why I’m so upset? After this whole shameful business . . .” The sentence was abandoned. “Please,” her mother said, “if it’s about Ned, I don’t want to know.”

*

“Ned was hoping for guests,” Isabel said when Dinah and Sally arrived. “We’ve got rum and vodka, gin, six or seven bottles of modest house red. I’m leaving it here with you, if that’s okay.”

“No,” Sally said. “Don’t you want it?”

“I’ll take it,” Dinah said, “but Isabel don’t drive back to New York right away, at least stay through the weekend.”

“I hadn’t planned staying longer,” Isabel said. She thanked them for the surprise of the sweet peas, and then she was crying. She was crying, and Dinah and Sally led her out of the kitchen into a front room with sun. They sat on either side of her on the sofa.

They didn’t know about the car. Clive had not told them, but they wanted to know, animated by talk about accidents with machines and people: the surprising force of slight collisions and accident lore. How once, Dinah remembered, a not-so-large tree limb overloaded with wet snow fell on the tool shed and crushed it.

The usual disaster commiserations brought the women together: They had all dinged some car, lost keys, forgotten gas; they had surprised themselves with their own fragility: falling on a street, banging into something with an edge. Tables!

“I don’t remember there being so little furniture,” Sally said, “but you put in new screens?”

“No,” Dinah said. “I sent Nan Black to clean before Isabel . . .”

Isabel was apologizing for the mess. She planned on cleaning as soon as she knew what she was doing; she was weepy about the car, the shock and expense of it, and then she was speaking about Ned: How often she had heard herself asking, “But you’re not a fuck, are you?” And his answering, “Yes, I am.”

Isabel said, “Dinah, I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” Dinah said, and she looked around the room and appeared delighted and surprised at her own foresight: “I sent Nan.”