Prosperous Friends

Postdoc, London, 2002

The stone faces she saw on either side of the prior’s door looked surprised.

She always expected grotesque but not so Ned, no. Ned Bourne was walking into the world with his arms open, whereas she, she suspected, everything she knew about people came from looking at them through a window. Now there was Ned to take her to sacred places, to the Ship of the Fens, a cathedral in the marshes. They stood on the threshold of the prior’s door and felt how much cooler it was; the stones, cool and wet.

“Feel,” Ned said, and Isabel held out her hand and touched the wall, clammy as a toad’s but then think of all that had happened in this church!

“Come here,” Ned said. He was braced in a corner in shadow. “Here,” he said when she was closer. “Come here.”

“Someone will see,” she said even as she leaned against him and he rustled up her skirt. “Oh my, Ned!” Ned, skilled in astonishment as from the start. “Really,” she said, almost giving in to feeling but not quite — almost, nearly, a familiar breach in the intimate scene. She could only act excited, which he surely knew, and on the drive back to London, slashing past what they had passed before, the slurry view was all she saw: nothing still or edged but it was gone. Car turned in and paid for, day trip done.

“Let’s go home,” he said, and she looked up and saw he was far ahead. Why so fast, but Isabel Bourne caught up at the crosswalk and took hold of his hand and ran through the throbbing warning. A cold front or a damp front, in any case, a new front was coming in: The change for the worse in the weather chilled them. At home they drank soup and he sang aloud to her, “‘The grave’s a fine and private place.’”

Night’s disarray and rain and his disappointed face.

“What is it I can do for you, Isabel? What is it you need?” Ned asked.

If only she knew, but she never. .

“Never?”

“Don’t act as if this is news, Ned, please.”

He took her hand and led her to bed and the cold ordeal of readying for bed, which was readying for something else, and she was not ready. “Relax,” he said, and he worked to help her relax, stroked, kissed, used his hands inventively until after a while he rubbed himself against her mouth, her wet mouth moving, and the electric feather that was her tongue. He could, he could. “That’s good what you’re doing. Don’t stop.” And she didn’t and he was satisfied. “But what can I do for you?”

If only there were something she could think of.

Las Vegas, a summer ago, 2001, she was up for anything — no matter the small results: early-bird special, Tex-Mex, fried. Las Vegas looked like Candyland but the colorless sky was a desert, and it was hot, hot. She had never been to Nevada — never to Utah or Wyoming, a lot of states, really, so they had meandered, Isabel Stark then and the persuasively all-to-everyone Ned Bourne.

How was it she was here with him now in London, but she was, she was Isabel Bourne, changed and unchanged. Already she had seen so much with him: the orange canyons of Zion and Bryce, where they had looked up silenced by slabs of righteous nature. In the weathering weather of Wyoming a girl needed steams and cold cream every night. The mountains, yes, the Tetons, yes, spectacular, goes without saying, but flat stretches of fenced-off pale land made for bleak memories, not a tree or animal in sight, only carcasses twisted in barbed wire.

“Nothing?” Ned asked, swinging away from her in the bed, seated at its edge, waiting for an answer that was no more than a smile at the sight of his muscled legs. She reached out and petted him.

“Whatever you’re getting for yourself, get me some.”

On that road trip across the country, they had sussed out state specialties but what were the English specialties? Toad in the hole, Cornish pasty, shepherd’s pie, Ned had every intention of trying it all, bangers and mash, Stilton and port. In Minnesota they had discovered the pies were custardy, merangued, but what had been served up in South Dakota? Had they driven through at night? She remembered seeing buffalo. Buffalo in dirty coats slugging in the high grass — graceful, calm, as if eating were a kind of meditation.

Ned came back to bed with crisps, a noisy snack and a salty, smiley pleasure, a pleasure to be in his company although she was often out of his company that he might work without distraction. He had a fellowship and a book he hoped to finish, and Isabel? Since the ashy collapse of the year before, she could not find a subject large enough — arguments in kitchens and her parents’ divorce? The time he almost left her but she cried and cried? Ned and Isabel often talked of the event and other dilemmas of purpose and direction—I’m not young! Isabel said, not a little surprised.

*

All too often a finger heavy on a key woke her, so that she put the laptop on the floor and sat before a pond of yyyyyyyys. Discomfort might keep her awake if not her subject. “I need a regular job when we get back,” she said to herself and then later to Ned, “I need a regular job when we get back to the States. I need something to do.”

Ned said, “Think of our time here as graduate school”—no matter they had both just finished.

But graduate school had been so jokey. She had honed skills in the thrift shops on Broadway, buying furred sweaters and looking like Twiggy. And her thesis? Isabel’s stories? The criticisms from her classmates had been spiteful or silly; the meanest of them closed on upbeat notes: Hope to read more! Really? Ned’s critiques were smart. He hit on the weak spots in ways that didn’t shame her. Whatever brought on the sick-making headaches was not much to do with Ned but sloth, envy, anger, uncertainty. Why couldn’t she live on a pot of tea all morning and a mirthful meanness writing?

“So go out,” he said. “Be courageous. See the city.”

She went to the theater first. Isabel had dividends enough to see the same production of The Seagull as often as she liked, and she was enamored of its desperate Nina. . “How sweet it used to be, Kostya! Remember? How bright, and warm, how joyous and pure our lives were!” Isabel had played Nina in a college production: “. . a man comes along, by chance, and, because he has nothing better to do, destroys her. .”

On the day Isabel came back from The Seagull a second time, Isabel wrote her father to thank him for his generosity. In a postscript she wrote, Hello to Anabel. “I’ve never written my stepmother’s name before,” Isabel said. “For that matter, I’ve never written to thank my father. This is progress, wouldn’t you say?” She fanned herself with the letter.

“You’re a kinder person, are you?” Ned said with an English inflection, so that it sounded like a question.

*

The next day, in studentlike spirit, to be smart, at times smart — Vassar was her own doing, had nothing to do with her father’s money — Isabel went on a day trip to Cambridge with the Blue Guide and its rundown of the colleges and their famous members. Literary royalty — Milton had walked here. She unsettled herself with thoughts of sloughed-off skin on whatever had been touched. Maybe she would sit in some of Milton if she sat beneath the right tree in the right place. England’s trees, and whoever met or dreamed, picnicked or loved beneath them, were a wonder: the enormous reach of copper beeches, explosive heads. Yews, chestnuts, limes, gingkos. The dead oaks in Windsor Great Park were no less than gods sycoraxed in a moment of anguish.

Might they not be released and made green again at some greater god’s touch?

Anointment was what she sought, had sought. More than one visiting writer had said what matters most is staying in the room. She fell asleep in the room. Ned said, “Fine to stay in the room, but not all the time. You have to live.” That’s why she was drinking ale in the oldest pub in Cambridge, once known as The Eagle and Child, now just The Eagle with its RAF bar and plaques commemorating Watson and Crick, who drank here, talked, and thought. DNA — no small discovery. Isabel’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, Harley Chalmers Stark, came by a fortune through the garment trade and Wall Street; he was good with numbers, but Isabel was just so-so. The DNA got diluted, mixed up. From Isabel’s mother’s side came Eleanor, Isabel’s grandmother. She wrote children’s books. Her first and most popular book was published by a small press in Ohio. Soap Bubbles for Christmas. While Santa napped after his long night, the restless elves opened an undelivered gift in the sleigh: soap bubbles. They romped in the snowy landscape, blowing bubbles that froze on the boughs of a pine tree. Jack Frost painted the bubbles bright colors. Remembering this book and its maker did not inspire confidence so much as admiration for the maker’s use of her time. Isabel’s father went to Harvard, but her mother studied French in a women’s college that went out of business in 1982. Discomfited by the school’s reputation, her mother’s first disclaimer was Don’t ask me to speak French but I got an A. Her mother did not inspire confidence. Why couldn’t her mother have been an authority on something? A guy in the poetry division, August Mueller, had criticized Isabel for romanticizing the lives of artists. Artists were largely ignored, he scoffed; even if well funded, a group largely relevant only to themselves. Isabel had wanted to be an actress — was pretty enough but had not enough courage. Writing was hard. Ned had been the best of the writers in their year. Writing couples, how did they do it?

Isabel put the skinny triangles of bread on the side of her plate and ate the cheese and tomato.

One unexpectedly hot afternoon, she persuaded Ned to walk through Highgate Cemetery thinking it would make for the coolest exercise — reinvigorating, but it brought no extended relief. Ned complained. Better to be hot at home; at least there he could work. She was looking at the faithful mastiff at the foot of the pugilist’s grave when the midget father appeared. Out of nowhere, an old-apple face on a little body, followed by a midget boy with hair like a cap pulled low. After that, Ned preferred walking in the wide spaces of heaths, views, Parliament Hill.

*

“I’ve got an idea,” Ned said.

Lime House, when just a look could inspire anything.

Anything?

“How do you like this?”

“Yes, well. No, not exactly.”

“How about this?”

“Yes.”

“This?”

“A little.”

“This?”

“No. No, that hurts. That really hurts, Ned!”

Afterward, the only thing he could say was he wanted to give her pleasure.

“Not that way, you don’t.”

She showered in a plugged-up tub, then sat growing colder in the scum that was water.

*

“Why is it so important to you?” Isabel asked.

“I think if you knew the sensation you’d want to have it more often.”

*

A certain kind of woman — coarsely attractive, sensual, damp, bad skin — invariably told Isabel that Ned looked like an old boyfriend. Now, for instance, Sue Rassmussen was telling her how Ned looked just like this guy she knew back home in the States. Sue Rassmussen was talking about this guy, and as there was nothing expected of her in this conversation, Isabel turned away.

Of course, Isabel forgave Sue Rassmussen. Sue Rassmussen was only experiencing what others, what she, too, knew seeing Ned. He could quite literally stop conversation. Then again, Sue Rassmussen was a willful, aggressive, ugly woman. “‘Ned looks like this guy I know.’” Who would believe it? Who cared?

“You don’t have to come to these parties, Isabel”: Ned at her ear.

Once at just such a party — people interested in Ned, friends with Ned, friends with friends of Ned — Isabel overheard Ned saying how lucky he was to look across at her every morning.

Did she really want to miss out on Ned making deep impressions?

Sue Rassmussen was at the party for Jonathan Loring, from Ned’s class, whose memoir, No One to Say It, had just come out in Italian, and Jonathan, never modest, handed Isabel a copy to appreciate the gravity of its cover — not just the image — but the weight of the cover’s paper itself. Nessuno Lo Dice. Jonathan said, “For Italians a book is a work of art.”

“It’s a nice-looking book,” someone said, “but Italians don’t read.”

Sue Rassmussen was at the party where a woman leaned over the balcony, sick. The host, some new friend of Jonathan’s — Carl? — ran down the stairs with a bucket of water he tossed at the bushes. He ran up and down the stairs with a bucket two or three times, puckishly apologizing, saying he was anal.

The party where Sue Rassmussen’s conceit grew into a rash that Isabel scratched bloody was like so many of the parties Ned and Isabel went to, entered into together, moving around the room to talk to him and her and her. Once, a woman in an ash-colored alpaca sweater was the attraction for Isabel, but at the occasion where Isabel encountered Sue Rassmussen, there was no such woman in moon, ash, or evening colors.

*

“Let’s just try this.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Let’s.”

“No. Why don’t you just give in to what I can do for you? Most guys would.”

*

His idea had to do with women. Why did it surprise her? He had said as much before. Pick anyone in the theater was Ned’s suggestion between acts, The Maids—very chilly. When she didn’t pick, he did, and his choice alarmed her, but later she shut her eyes and imagined, even as Ned inventively opened her with his fingers and his tongue, imagined he was working on the young woman in the orchestra seat two rows ahead of them, a dark head of crimped hair that caught the light and looked wet. Isabel needed to touch it to know what it was about the wet hair on the small hard head between her legs; it was the girl’s fingers Isabel held, not his.

“You were close, I thought.”

“I thought, too.”

*

But she thought a lot of things. She thought a girl who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts would be discreet! Who was she kidding? G had an earring in her eyebrow. Her hair was the color of mud and dense; her breasts were no more than red cones. Her body was tough but her reactions to dogs, milk soap, cocoa were as goggly as her eyes. G was young; she missed camp. “S’mores,” Isabel had said, “I know all about them.”

“How did you meet this G?” he asked.

“How did we meet? We met here at the National Portrait Gallery. I was browsing in the gift shop. I was waiting for you then, too. She just started talking to me.”

“About?”

“Her favorite portraits? I don’t remember now, besides you’re late, Ned.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

He gave her the postcard G had sent of a naked old woman with a slab of paint for a pubis. The gray stroke could have been a headstone. On the back of the card in a hand hard to read was the message: “‘Flesh is the reason why oil painting was developed.’ De Kooning. When are you going to let me do you?”

Isabel stood in front of Mary Wolstonecraft. The woman’s forehead was serenely unlined although hadn’t Godwin sullied her reputation?

“Fuck Godwin. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now. We met. It was nothing.”

“Liar,” he said, but his pretty mouth had a greasy shine as if he’d sucked on buttered toast.

But it was nothing was true. No more than a chance to sit in a bedsit, and there to kiss a young woman and watch her work at herself—I like to be debased. Was that it? Isabel had thought at the time. Far more instructive than G on that rainy afternoon had been seeing Ned in the evening. He didn’t know her secret then, a secret ugly as a cyst was ugly or G was ugly, and that, Isabel had thought at the time, her secret, the elixir of betrayal, was exciting. But the days she accounted near perfect — and there were many of them — were book dry and predictable. They involved his reading in the morning and her writing awake at their shared desk, a walk after lunch, then her reading, his writing, and tea, and afterward more reading, sometimes to each other before the making of dinner. There were the cloudy afternoons, too, when she went to the British Museum and found perspective—here I am; there they were. She liked the centaur carved in high relief who was making away with a headless woman, but she ducked as through a tunnel past the brown disappointment of jewels like rusted nails, worn stone lions — abashed or indifferent or dumb — funerary kraters and Attic symbols, a cup, gold ingot, crushed. What was to be said about the gold cup but that someone very important lived in Kent thousands of years ago?

*

The girl Ned and Isabel had watched in the checkout line at Boots looked fourteen or fifteen, young. Her fingers were raw, the nails chewed and misshaped. Her hands were very small and, except for the fingertips, quite pale, and her arms were pale and led to the pale and hairless rest of her, there and there, or so Isabel thought.

Ned thought so, too. “Stand up,” he said. “Turn around and let me shave you.”

Isabel stood. She did as she was asked. These were the days when she was up to the humiliation of being handled all for nothing.

“Nothing?”

“What am I supposed to feel?”

“Oh, fuck it. As long as you’re satisfied.”

“And you’re not?”

He was pinching her nipple.

This was an education, wasn’t it.

*

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“My mother.”

“If I didn’t believe in what I was doing,” Ned said, and Isabel could hear that he was smiling next to her, behind her, very close in bed. Her mother’s visit had been overlong, and their routine had been necessarily shelved to accommodate a chary woman, crammed with opinions but few questions. How could her mother resist Ned, but she did, had. Poor Mom.

Her mother, in a dust-colored dress, wore a face as inviting as a rake, yet why should the woman be enthusiastic about their marriage? Her mother’s drama, the generic one: replaced by a younger version of herself rosy enough to wear red without in any way seeming menopausal. “Red is menopausal after forty,” her mother said. She was probably right.

“My mother is scary.”

“You’re nothing like her.”

“Really?”

Ned was holding Isabel in the narrow bed of her girlhood, or so she imagined, and she was a girl again and barefoot on the landing, her mother down the hall in an ataractic dark and all very quiet, the house, Isabel’s. The chairs whined “pet me” and she ran her hand along the railings as she passed through the house, through the house and out the back door. She was moving quickly over the lawn, and when she looked back she saw her footprints in heavy trespass. Isabel lay on the stone bench in its ruff of thorns. The roses have a long reach!

“Careful.”

“I’m being careful,” he said.

Sharper inhalations in her girlhood’s bed.

The sheets are heavy; the hour is wrong. “I’m all fucked up,” she says.

“You’ll get used to it.”

She is already used to it.

“Stay with me now,” Ned says. (Every part of her corked.) “Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at what we’re doing.”

He is quiet above her then, and maybe it’s the way he is moving. .

“Concentrate!”

But she’s a girl after all; she wanders; she makes things dewy. She gets overexcited! The noise, the bed — my mother!

*

It was that time of year, everything dying, when Isabel turned a corner and a blast of underground air at the newsstand made her sick.

“Isabel!”

She got as far as the chemist’s when she rushed to the curb and bent over and spit. Something was happening to her.

The doctor’s assessment was that she was two months gone.

That explained her breasts, their feverish bloat.

Ned and Isabel after the doctor, on the street, he had her arm.

She knew the night it happened. Whatever bird it was outside had sounded profound.

“I knew it,” Isabel said to Ned.

“Hold on.”

She was startled by the street but he knew where they were and promised to lead her toward refreshment.

“I don’t want to make this into something it isn’t,” she said, but already she was remembering the granite bench in the garden, a bed and thorned and very exciting.

“Why not make it into something?”

“Well, then, it’s a girl.” Isabel was as sure of this as she was of the night it happened in the green conspiracy of midsummer’s eve. There was an owl. The dark outside the window was not dark. There was a moon. The air was visible for all the noise in it, and they were in agreement, she and Ned, and nothing was needed beyond what they knew together, and all those fitful experiments, G and the rest, the urgency that drove them to know, to know, and for her sake, he said, especially, to experience. All they had thought necessary was not required! They’d made a girl that night. She knew.

The tea in the tea shop was mauve and hard to sweeten, but the shortbread popped in her mouth like a bag of powdered sugar, and Isabel was happy for a while to look across the table at her husband, for that was what he was, Ned Bourne, her husband.

“I can’t do this now,” she said.

He leaned forward to take her hand, but she pulled it away.

“Isabel,” he said. He said it was all right. He said whatever she wanted to do, he understood.

She hated him for accommodating her.

The waitress came by but there was nothing they needed.

“No, wait. Do you have any honey?” Ned asked.

“I don’t want to be sentimental,” Isabel said.

“Be as sentimental as you like.”

The honey spiraled into his tea.

“I can’t do this,” Isabel said.

Whatever she meant, he was behind her.

“Easy for you.”

*

Isabel wanted to see the hyacinth macaws, the largest species of parrot, and one of the stars at the London Zoo, but size aside, the color of the bird was what she wanted to see. That they mated for life made them admirable, but were they really as blue as in the photographs? Yes, yes, yes. Self-possessed and regal. She had to turn away from the birds and walk ahead.

“Why are you so angry all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Why am I so angry? I don’t know,” she said. “I’m surprised, I’m surprised at how angry I am, but I am.”

The bench they sat on was wet.

“Damn it.” Isabel was thinking of her name, her maiden name, the name she hoped to call her professional name: Isabel Stark. Would their daughter be Stark-Bourne? Born stark naked was on her mind when she noticed the man walking toward them. He was unsteady on his feet, more a fluid than a man with bones. He was looking at Isabel and she was looking at him when he opened his coat and his zipper was down, and Isabel saw his malicious little cock.

Whatever happened, whatever she saw, whatever signage she read, the message applied, and to prove her point, Isabel stopped walking, turned, and read aloud the black hornbill’s story: How the female is sealed in a tree on her nest for three months; only her bill pokes through so she can be fed. “I can’t,” she said. “I haven’t become anything yet. I’d be a black hornbill sealed in a tree.”

She said, “The hornbill sighting is telling me, don’t do it.”

“Don’t what?” he said. “Come on.”

Isabel was thirty-three years old. Her mother was twenty-two when she had had Isabel. Holly Mixon, her first-year roommate at Vassar, had two children already, and someone else from Isabel’s class. . who was it? She couldn’t remember. Laura, her best friend, and roommate for sophomore, junior, and senior years, was in Paris, childless. They had made promises to each other, promises to be purposeful, employed, well traveled. The well-traveled part was under way, but purposeful or employed?

“Are you so entirely happy,” Isabel asked, and Ned said, “I am. I’m up for anything!”

*

Of all the nightgowns to bring, this, the one ready to be torn into rags. The nightgown bundled in her lap, she saw, was her granny nightgown, yellowed under the sleeves, and she couldn’t quite understand her decision.

“Are you sure?” the doctor asked.

She did all the unsightly crying things, and both men watched. She used the sleeve of her yellowed nightgown on her face.

“You’re in agreement?” the doctor asked.

“Yes,” and they said yes at the same time, so Ned and Isabel must have been in agreement.

*

So he didn’t get what her problem was.

“You don’t? Really? How many weeks has it been?”

In truth, he couldn’t remember what the doctor looked like — only Isabel with a nightgown bundled against her belly like a baby. Isabel, he remembered, and the Oriental carpet in the doctor’s office, so old it looked black.

Ned said, “Look, Stahl’s done a lot for me, and he’s not here for very long, and I don’t want you to come if you’re going to shift into remote without warning.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean, Isabel.”

“You go,” she said, for what had Stahl ever said to her but You’ve a good name for a writer.

*

Ned came home late but was not so tired as to refuse Isabel’s request. “Make love to me, please,” she said. He was obliging, so the night was shorter, though she slept and he didn’t. His eyes smarted — pinpricked — as if he’d done all the crying. It hurt to close them, and he looked at the ceiling, at the wall, at the end of the bed, at the window beyond the end of the bed, and touring the room this way, he saw his jeans on the floor, stepped out of, small. He was weak — he had called Phoebe to congratulate her on her engagement — he was weak, and for all that his eyes hurt he mustered something watery that ran into his ears.

In the morning over coffee Isabel apologized for not being up to Stahl.

“He’s important, you know.”

“Impotent?”

Ned said, “If you could only look as if you were having fun, we might make some friends.”

“I said I was sorry.” Then, “Do you want more milk in that? Your coffee,” she said, “it looks dark.”

Turned away from him, she was an old woman, a bone, a crone, a downwardly sloped shape in a thin bathrobe, purposeless and derisible. Why this woman when there were so many others he might have amazed? So many he had amazed — even Phoebe, once Phoebe, especially Phoebe.

*

They went to a holiday party in Hammersmith in cowboy costumes.

“I couldn’t resist a buckskin skirt,” Isabel said, and she swirled to show off her fringe and knocked around in cowboy boots — a slutty shuffle, a hint that she was easy when they both knew she was not. No matter. She could not get the man’s attention. The man’s name was Fife and his face was all mouth.

“I know you from somewhere,” he said to Ned. “I’m sure.”

“Really?”

“Really,” the man said, suggesting connections with names with connectives — the something von somethings, the something de Villes — on estates with escarpments, mottos, and wolf hounds. A royal charity, perhaps?

Who was this stuffed-up-sounding mouth breather, Fife, Fifidy-fife something, Simingdon Fife Fiefdom the second or the third. Whatever he was wearing for a costume approximated something formal.

“What are you?” Ned asked. “A conductor, a waiter?”

“An earl,” he said, “an earl in real life. No, just kidding. I work at a bank.”

Fife acted like a semiroyal. At the coat check he turned out his pockets and left a pile for a tip because the coins were too heavy and his suit was bespoke. The money was dirty, besides.

“I’ll take you home,” he said to Ned, and then to Isabel, “I sense your hesitation. I’ve a good driver. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

But Ned could see she was, and who was this man really? He looked like Oscar Wilde, ungainly and full of appetite, but rich, there was that. Ned could see the money nudged against the curb and the driver on alert.

“After you,” Fife said, and in Ned went and was instantly made imperishable in the vault of Fife’s car.

“Is it German?”

“Why not?” Fife said.

And why not roughly, an all-night magic act willing girls? After a while, the girls got tired; nothing much was happening to them, and Isabel had no ideas. She seemed incapable of enjoying herself anywhere. She said, “I can’t talk,” but Ned waved her off.

She said, “Ned, please, Ned. Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned.”

“You’re such a drag,” he said.

“Ned, Ned, Ned.” Her voice was tiny and squeaky. She said, “I can’t see!”

“Open your eyes!”

“I can’t.”

He led her out of the party and propped her against the building’s gate. Told her to wait, he’d get a taxi.

The next thing he knew, there was Fife loudly returned to the street and undressing — at least he heard undressing sounds. Fife was shouting at Isabel to open her eyes and Isabel was making panicky squeaks, chittering like a squirrel. Fife had hold of her.

“Open your eyes, you dumb cunt!”

And she did and she puked on his shoes.

*

They came up with the idea of Rome together, Fife and Ned, and they all three took off for a week in December, but it rained most of the time and the discolored statuary looked like so much salvage in the dingy gush of water. So much for the city of fountains. At night the Piazza Navona twitched in gaseous light — they might have been in Las Vegas but for the sodden stalls of nativity scenes, carnival hawked: cheap. Even the church was dank despite the pulsing coils of heaters.

“Here, stand here,” Ned said, and Isabel stood as near as she dared but was not warmed and said so.

“I’m cold, Ned, really.”

Ned, however, Ned was irrepressibly hopped up, red, manic, an all-out tourist: Borromini, Rainaldi, Bernini.

Ah! Another bloody Christ, another bloody saint, another sepulchre of little bones brittle as brushwood: the tedium of martyrdoms. “I’m cold,” Isabel said, “I’m going home,” by which she meant the hotel on the hill overlooking the Spanish Steps, the Hassler, a brocade corruption enjoyed at someone else’s expense, in this case, Fife’s.

*

“Answer me, Ned. What are we doing with this man?”

“Getting out of the house,” he said. “Isabel?” When she didn’t answer, he reminded her of what he, Ned, had been good for: experience. And he wanted to see more and he was fascinated by this jaded, shallow man’s bullying way of making money. And he didn’t want to think about what might have been anymore. They had to believe they had made the right decision. “Isabel?”

She sat on the ledge of the sink and stuck out her face at the mirror, used a tweezers lightly.

Ned peed.

“Please,” she said, distasteful twang in her voice. “I’ll be finished in a minute.”

“Fife’s waiting.”

“Let him wait.”

Ned washed one hand and held the other indifferently over the patch between her legs.

“Make yourself at home,” she said, worrying an eyebrow.

On his way out, he turned off the light.

“Hey!” she called after him. “I’m here, remember?”

*

Another night, another scrim walked through to darker places. Fife was dancing with Isabel — that much Ned knew — but where did the music come from? They didn’t come back for dances. “Ages,” he said, and Fife tapped Ned’s forehead as if in blessing.

“You’re ahead of us, Ned. What do you want, Isabel?”

“Water,” she said. Then, “Don’t whine, Ned. I only want water.”

Fife moved down the bar, touching all he passed. Ned watched him, wonder-struck: Why had Isabel decided to dance with Fife? “Why did you?” he asked.

“He asked me,” she said. Isabel’s face was near his when she asked, “Some things that have happened between us should stay between us, don’t you think?” She said, “It’s okay to tell him I’m depressed — tell anyone, I don’t care — but the reason? You don’t know the reason, not really. There are a lot of reasons but only some of them have to do with you.”

“With me, I hope,” Fife said, taking a sip of his golden drink at the same time he handed Isabel a like drink.

“I asked for water,” she said.

“Did you?”

Fife hitched Ned off the barstool and walked him — talked him — to the back of the bar and into a warm, wine-red leather space; Ned was in a womb or a wound and Isabel was patting him. The next thing he knew he was in bed at the hotel, alone in bed at the hotel — same shirt and shorts but the rest of his costume on the back of a chair.

“Isabel?”

No response but when he woke again, light bordered the shuttered balcony and the bedroom was fully returned, palpably quiet. He could see nothing had been moved; his pants’ legs still buckled off the back of the chair, and outside he saw yet more rain. Was Rome always this wet in December? Ned stood at the window, thankful the room was generously heated and the accusatory mirror that was his wife was turned away, a lot of hair on a pillow. When had Isabel come back? It might be his turn to play wronged, but had she been away at all? Perhaps they had gone to bed together, or had she put him to bed? He saw on the bedside table, his side, a carafe of water and aspirin: She had thought of him. He had done nothing for her but it was for himself, a self-loathing mission, playing to an older man’s desires — to simply sit on the edge of their bed and talk and talk, drinking bourbon — playing with Fife so as to see all he could see at Fife’s expense. On narrow streets mopeds, like insects, screeched past and scared Isabel, and he knew, Ned knew she was scared, yet he did not wait for her. Now she was asleep and on his bedside table a carafe of water, aspirin. She had thought of him. That was nice. She was nice. Fife wanted to extend their vacation, go to Florence, see Ghiberti’s doors. But Ned was thinking not today and maybe not on this trip.

“We’ve got the morning to ourselves,” Ned said when he next woke. “Look, I’m all yours.”

Afterward, they lay together and agreed that Fife was only fishy when he was drunk; then he was a fishy-fleshy sputterer. And his name wasn’t Fife but Lewellan, which he hated, and so his friends called him Fife from Fifield, a middle name. Some friends called him Fife the third, and one of his oldest called him Life.

Ned sometimes called him Lew. He dialed his room and said, “Listen, Lew, Isabel’s got one of her headaches, so we’re staying in today. Depending on how she feels, maybe we’ll have dinner.”

Isabel silently cheered.

*

Ned had a lot of friends and they celebrated Boxing Day in Oxford on a walk with some of them from the night before. Isabel couldn’t look at anything too closely for too long or else she was queasy from all she had had to drink while Ned’s friends from Brown, Phoebe, and some guy named Straight, moved robustly — boastful of all they had consumed. A few others who had spent the night stayed behind. Phoebe was engaged to a lawyer, Ben Harris, whom she had left in New York to visit Oxford friends. She knew her way around and led Ned and Isabel and Straight blithely over the shivered lawn to Magdalen College and its deer park. The college was ancient but the frost was new, everything new and clean except that Isabel felt used and stale as if she had slept in her clothes. Then there was Ned with his flask. “Please, Ned. Must you?”

“Oh, a little taste of the night before never hurt, Izzie.”

Ned pulled Isabel to him and turned her to face the deer. “Here’s to a happy. .,” he said just as a predator streaked over the fence and began to chase the small herd. They moved as a pack, one way, then another, but an outside doe was slower and slid, and the enormous dog, ugly as a jackal, cut her off.

Phoebe was calling out for a groundsman — was shouting to get a groundsman—somebody! And Ned was running toward the college, and Isabel? She watched, awash in the notion that this murder was somehow her fault. Ineffectual. All of them, ineffectual, even the groundsman, who ran toward them holding something like a weapon. By then the dog was at the doe’s throat. There was the doe’s rolling eye. The doe, still adorable, for all her terror.

This is hell — Isabel said. He could see how she fared and silently agreed: The savage dog had been an omen of worse to come. Ned knew she was thinking this then and later from the way she gripped her knife over brunch. What was it about this girl he had married?

“The cheese,” Phoebe said. “Try the gray cheese. Trust me, it’s delicious.” Isabel appeared wary but smeared some of the gray cheese on the rim of her plate. The minced pie looked gaunt, and she moved past it to the bowl of fruit and cut a stem of grapes, gone-by globes, the fattest of them split.

“That’s all you’re going to have for dessert?” Phoebe asked. “Aren’t you at least going to try Oliver’s flan?” she said. Phoebe turned away from the buffet and came up behind Oliver, who was seated at the head of the table, and she kissed the top of his head and then turned back to the buffet and said, “The gray cheese, Ned, you’ve got to try it.”

And Phoebe was right, the gray cheese — it looked like mold — was sweet, creamy. “Like brie but better,” Ned said.

Why, Ned wondered, had Isabel bothered to come to Oxford? An assassin’s face was sweeter than hers.

The yolk on the plates flaked off in the cleanup of the Boxing Day brunch, lunch — who cared when the food was so good? Not that Isabel had eaten much of it. Isabel was fading at the very moment everyone, and everyone at once, it seemed, had risen to help Oliver in the kitchen. Phoebe’s job was napkins.

“Just napkins?” Isabel asked.

“I break things,” Phoebe said and then to Straight, “and you’re not so careful either.”

When Ned next saw Isabel, she was kicking at the pebbled driveway and talking to Straight, a man she later described as in love with Phoebe.

“An old boyfriend,” Ned said.

“You’re an old boyfriend.”

“What is it you want to say, Isabel?”

“I want to go home.”

*

And then they were going home, the real one! Ned had his book, working title still a working title, Lime House Stories, and she had a guest book, a record of their guests at the real Lime House, the rental near Hampstead Heath. Its owners were in Israel. “Someday I want to go to Israel,” she said to Ned, then went back to the guest book.

I love you guys. Thanks for shelter. Jack Maas: Ned’s cousin, his father’s side.

“Aunt Charlotte,” Ned said.

“Yes,” she said. “The candlesticks.”

“Do you really remember what people have sent us?”

“Of course,” she said. “And if I’m not sure, I look it up.”

“You’ve got a list?”

There in the Lime House guest book she saw her mother’s adamant cursive: Mother/Beth. “Look at her signature, will you? Do you wonder I’ve got a list?”

She looked back at the signature. “From last October,” Isabel said, “disastrous month.”

“Let’s not revisit it,” Ned said.

Isabel read her roommate’s message about their college pact to live abroad. “Oh, Laura! She has this gift of seeming interested in a person’s life — she is interested! Laura is curious about people outside of herself. I don’t have this gift,” Isabel said. “I’m deeply incurious. Why are you smiling?”

Sam Solomon had signed her guest book. The weekend he spent with them he forgot he was running the tub — he was reading? — and he flooded their bathroom. And here was that friend of Ned’s from Brown with the have-it-all smile and the large trust fund. “How could I forget Porter,” she said, “but I did. Good artist, though,” and she showed Ned the sketch of a house they both loved on Church Street in Hampstead.

“That would make a good cover,” he said.

Isabel took back the guest book. Recipes exchanged. Phoebe’s Pâté. Cook in pan w/water. Don’t pour off oil. Can freeze. Easy, of course! Enjoy!! “Ick!” Isabel said. “I hated that liverwurst she made. You must have asked for this,” Isabel said. Then, “What is she doing with Straight when she’s marrying Ben Harris anyway?”

“Put the guest book away,” Ned said. “If you need room for anything,” he said, “I’ve got room in my bag.”

*

London had happened so fast. Good-bye to the heath and the horse guards, to the floridly decorated flat. They were in the bedroom in Golders Green, alone, alone and together in the intimate familiar that was marriage — wasn’t it? And she had nice clothes, too, didn’t she?

“Come here,” she said.

“Here?”

“Where else?”

“Isabel.”

“What?”

“Do we have time for this?”