Prosperous Friends (6 page)

“Peanut butter,” Ned said, and he proffered the dog a dollop of Jif stuck with pills and in this way learned how easy it was to give BK his medicine.

“What next?” he asked.

“I think the dog is deaf.”

“Why?”

“Maybe dim then.”

“Maybe.”

“No, deaf.” And she lifted him, a soft sack of something living—(Ned saw the dog’s face only once; full side, eye open, the opalescent, not the red.) Isabel set the dog to stand on the floor and turned him to face the wall, which he did in a sweet dumb trance that wasn’t broken by the sound of the vacuum or tin bowls banged together. BK didn’t hear; the dog didn’t turn around.

The dog died, he crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but before that, Ned took him every day for a week to the vet’s in a precautionary manner; hopeful—well, and desirous of the veterinarians’ company, especially the boy in the green operating duds although the boy really wasn’t a boy, only his sweet exuberance marked him as a boy.

“It looks to me as if you’d owned that dog for years,” the boy had said that first visit.

Ned liked the boy but the vet’s office was dirty and preposterously small. The two examining rooms were the size of a closet. In one, another young assistant—in green, blue, white duds?—was eating lunch off the step-on scale. She had made a plate out of the hamburger’s wrapping—but to eat in the same room where dogs sneezed and cat parings black as a mechanic’s flicked into space and landed on the step-on scale, where even now the assistant was craning to catch the mayonnaise leaking from one side of a hamburger so big it had to be a Whopper. The vet they had found was unsanitary. At the checkout station, desultory biscuits decomposed in a jar—shit. What was he doing here with the dog in his arms, handing the dog over, when he really wanted to be talked out of it or into it, but the fucking vet, the one who belonged in Montana braining trout with rocks, was in a rush and he jabbed the sedative needle in and the dog yelped and then yielded up himself.

Why didn’t Ned turn away from, take the dog away from, but he walked out and for a moment, yes, a moment, he was free!

Now, days later, what he couldn’t quell was the horror of his turning away from a messenger, surely a god in disguise—the old lady who had stopped him on the street just as he had turned away from the dog groomer’s and decided on the vet, the old lady approached and in a voice full of tears asked, “May I pet your dog, please?” She said to the blind dog, “Oh, I had one like you.” She said, “Oh, so wonderful. Aren’t they wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful?”

“He’s blind,” Ned said.

“Oh,” she said with a shrug, “that happens.”

“He’s also deaf.”

The old lady said, “But he can feel, can’t he?”

*

“Who?” he asked.

Phoebe held up a finger and spoke into the phone in her soberest voice about looking at the Schumacher. Ned didn’t know what would be looked at, but he wasn’t interested enough to ask was it a faucet or a couch?

“It never ceases to amaze me that people live like this,” he said when he had Phoebe’s full attention.

She wondered that he had never been to the apartment before. “Are you sure?” She swiveled in her chair and inventoried her in-home office. “Doesn’t any of this look familiar?”

He started to say, “Aside from the mess, but no. No,” he said, and then he saw the familiar photograph of the cottage on the bluff overlooking the Menemsha Harbor. “Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. Sea glass in the soap dish and Phoebe’s dormered bedroom, close, churchy, hot. “I remember.”

“I should hope so,” Phoebe said. “I’m going in July—we are.” She said, “Now, what can I do for you, sir?”

“For starters?”

“For starters,” Phoebe said, “I’m very much my own woman today.”

“No clients?”

“Not today. Not unless I decide to see the Schumacher—patterns,” she said, “material.”

“See me,” he said. “I put the dog down today.”

They had the afternoon to themselves and could, given overcast weather, guiltlessly cavort through most of it. How better to spend the time? For years, he had been impersonating a disciplined writer, putting off pleasure until the cocktail hour—so why not now run his hand along her check, touch her collar bone, her breast . . . ?

“Why’d you stop?” Phoebe asked.

“I go about my business so glumly.”

“This isn’t getting you down,” she said and her merry expression when she tugged at him made him smile.

When had Isabel stopped smiling?

*

Back at the White Street loft he saw Isabel sitting on the floor next to the shih tzu’s empty crate.

The empty crate brought back the anguish of that morning, the empty crate and the fleecy bedding, the tin bowl of water, the water slopped onto the floor as if someone had just been drinking from the bowl, as if the dog were still with them and not, as Ned remembered, remembered all too easily and readily, not a helpless animal on his side, wide-eyed—that blue marble Ned had seen for the one and only time—not an animal relieved. Relieved? Who would wish to be relieved of his aches, small and large, if it meant death? Relieved of being purely a heart without the distraction of sight and hearing, just a beating heart. Ned’s own was beating in his ears.

“I’m sorry,” Isabel said.

”I need to be happy more of the time,” he said, making as if to rub his nose, smelling Phoebe on his fingers.

“We both.”

But having been happy for most of the afternoon, it was easier for him now to go over to the crate and collapse it. He put the fleece into a plastic bag to be washed separately, and he took up the water bowl and the food bowl and washed them at the sink. He gave Isabel the tube of lavender incense sticks and told her to light one or two—“Clear the air,” he said—but he was muddled by discovery of a stuffed toy, just a shape really, like a scepter with ears, Isabel’s purchase in her willfully blind expectation that the blind dog would play fetch. Where to put the fucking toy? Didn’t they know a deserving dog or two?—theirs, a childless, dogless marriage. Maybe someone had cats?

“Why not a cat next time?” he said.

“I don’t want a next time,” Isabel said. “I’m poison.”

The White Street Loft
New York, 2004

If a street had seasons, White Street was early spring, too colorless, hardly sentimental, no budded touches, nothing risen but March, secular and cruel. To think she had lived on this street for almost two years when the plan had been to rent the loft for six months, meanwhile look around to buy, get permanent. Oh, what was she doing? Shaking her bag for the sound of her keys to get into the loft quickly. The space was dark, though known, and she ran through it to where the oven hood shone holy. Weirdly overheated, she ran cold water over her wrists. “Too much excitement,” she said aloud to herself, and felt the water’s sting and wondered if, when Ned came home tonight, she would tell him about Clive Harris calling.

But why do that? G, remember G? But this was different. G was no more than a punk girl in a bedsit; whereas Clive Harris, well, Clive Harris was older, established, a painter with a following. He came from money and had kept it. Think of James Merrill, James Merrill, a patrician poet of the last century—“a relic,” a classmate had said although Isabel found him attractive. Those artists with their attendant wives, partners, mistresses, muses, observing summer’s gyre in inherited homes on islands and coasts—that was the sweet life, wasn’t it? James Merrill in a documentary wore a white bathrobe, or was it a kimono? The taut cords in his thin neck pulsed when he spoke in his aristocratic voice. To admit to being transported by the sound of his voice—was she elitist and out of date? Maybe, probably. But why tell Ned of Clive except to stir in him some feeling for her as at the beginning, when anything was possible. Then if he so much as caught her staring at him—the book she was reading no more than a fan—he often put down his own book and went to where she was sitting and put his head in her lap.

Relief not to be hungry at all but rather pleasantly distracted by the body’s other parts. Nipples, for example, hers prickled, and she touched herself and leaned into the corner of her desk, and she played—the way she remembered as a kid, skipping little words over the placid future:
ram, cat, slut, cunt
—rubbed against the corner of her desk. If Clive were only a woman was a thought that was pleasurable.

Clive Harris, at his nephew’s marriage to Phoebe Chester—over a year ago, February? She had not forgotten. Clive Harris had pulled her up against the old club’s coffered wall to save her from the press of the tuxedo crowd. “To see the club’s library, a woman must be escorted by a member,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Would I?”

Real excitement at a wedding at last!

*

After breakfast—skipped—Isabel stood at the long closet mirror. She looked just as she had hoped to look when being nasty to Ned, lovely, at ease. Waste of time to be mean, but when had she ever been wise? She had kissed another man, not her husband, at a wedding, which was not a big deal, except that today she hoped to kiss this man again with clearer intentions. She had really almost forgotten him. Clive Harris, he said in a voice unused to being forgotten. The Union Club. Ben and Phoebe’s wedding, remember? She remembered. Also the visit to Ben and Phoebe’s, the mouse, and a moment when she stood at the guest-room window looking out at Ben Harris, some distance from the house in the vegetable garden, practicing good husbandry with a rake and seeds. His long reach and the steady way he worked. Ben Harris was a good man, and his uncle, Clive Harris, the painter, was he so very good? Her own reflection in any surface was most often pleasurable—except that she was too fat! Too fat! But Fife had said, “You’re skinny enough, just dull.”

Now there was tonight with Clive Harris at a restaurant in Midtown, but she had plans she had to change first. She explained to Ned that she had been invited to dinner by Ben Harris’s uncle, Clive Harris, and that, in the flush of the invitation, she had forgotten about the reading. “I’m sorry to miss him,” Isabel said, then, “but this way you and Stahl can really talk. And who knows?“
Who knows
was an inducement to go anywhere, meet anyone, try anything, but his easy acquiescence to her absence made her wonder: What event was it first diluted the marriage, or was it an absence of event, Isabel’s failure to make something worth regarding? Where was her book, her business, her flaring discovery? She spoke no other languages, had no hobbies—unless reading was a hobby. She was paid like a hobbiest in the freelancing world. Also she tutored. She had work.

*

“You put me in mind of my daughter,” Clive said. “You’re about the same age.”

“I’m thirty-four,” Isabel Bourne said.

“Right,” he said. “Sally’s forty. I’m glad you look surprised.” Clive leaned across the table nearer to Isabel. He knuckled her cheek: How warm she was, blushing. Their waiter was smitten, too, and directed his attention solely to Isabel and talked at length of what could be had from the dessert case. According to the waiter, there was, yes, indeed, an eight-layer cake if she cared to look.

But no, she didn’t.

“I trust you,” Clive said, and the waiter seemed surprised to see Clive and noted the order as if calculating all—eight layers, fifteen dollars, plus wine, sea bass, a decorative appetizer, how old—how much was that? Clive might have been Isabel’s father.

“Clive?” she asked.

“Isabel? I bet they have sorbet.”

“Orange, raspberry, lemon, coconut.”

“Raspberry,” she said to their careful waiter, who bowed and backed away.

A halfhearted restaurant with swagged Arthurian touches—torchlights and crests, blood-brown carpeting—only the tapestries of courtly love and valor were missing. He thought of dungeons, plagues, Boccaccio and his pigs: Stink was linked to putrefaction; putrefaction to pestilence; a pleasant smell meant purified. Isabel’s hand was all lily of the valley and clean; her nails were shell. “You are inspiring,” he said, “but this restaurant we’ve found . . .”

“Is silly,” she said.

Clive smelled her hand once again, and the restaurant turned buoyant, and the service, the service was, well, here came their waiter with dessert already: the eight-layer cake, white with red filling, weddinglike and flouncy on a tablecloth scraped so clean that the dinner seemed to be starting again, and Isabel was saying she would like it to start again. “And I’m not fond of Wednesdays.”

“Ah, hah.”

“Would there be anything else?”

“No thank you.”

“I’m baffled,” she said once the waiter had left. “You baffle me.”

Not a remark to answer, but Clive smiled at the small hook Isabel used to catch him. He, a ravaged carp, practiced in taking advantage of the stunned or wounded, although his appetite, of late, had dulled. And why cloak his intentions so darkly? He wanted to be kind if only Isabel would hold still and let him look at her: bark-brown hair and eyes; eyes wide apart, pale face.

“What about your wife?” she asked.

“What about my wife?”

They stood on the sidewalk, empty taxis passing. “What’s her name?” Isabel asked.

“Dinah,” he said.