Prosperous Friends

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 To admit to being transported by the sound of his voice — was she elitist and out of date?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.

“I’ve never known a Dinah before,” she said.

“Now you do,” he said. “It’s a name people like to say.”

He made a large, showy whistle and a cab swerved in with accompanying verve, and Clive offered her up and sent her home. The cabdriver was on the phone speaking in a furious language, and Isabel was glad to get out of the cab, away from the close, coarse — too mortal — smells, his and her own. The cloudy partition, his impossible name. Only the turban helped. A Sikh.

Poughkeepsie first, then London, now the city Nick Carraway liked, and she still saw the world as through a window. Why couldn’t she be like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or maybe she was like Fitzgerald, and “both enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

On her way to the tutoring center the next afternoon, hot spots in the making bristled high inside her legs and it took all the willpower she could muster to keep from wheedling her hand down her tights to press her cooler fingers against the heat of what was happening: hives, scrofulous signs she saw when she chugged down her tights in the ladies’, hot, dime-size, repellent pustules — pink, itchy — high on the inside of her legs. Hives. “Fuck me!” And she scratched at the hives until they popped, like blisters, with warm blistery water inside. So much for sitting comfortably with the dull boy Adam. Did he like The Great Gatsby? The two-hour session heaved along and she really couldn’t tell. Adam read so flatly she took over, so what did they learn together, she doing most of the talking, both of them wriggling in their seats?

Once home, she drank soup and took hot baths but still felt dirty. Worse, Clive Harris did not call, not the next day or the next, so was it any wonder she got sick? Here again were the near-dead, weird days when she lived as in a closet in her migraine hell: her bed, a box of rags; her heart, a corner, spooky. Sometime in the night — the next night, the next day? — Ned crossed the room; then the room emptied of people, and Isabel shut her eyes but they wouldn’t stop working: The pink underside of her eyelids, a million pixels, blinked; the sight made her sick, but when she opened her eyes, she turned sicker — always the way with her.

*

“Clive?” The curtains in the bedroom were drawn, and she was speaking softly from her bed.

“Isabel?”

“My God, this phone is heavy.”

“Isabel,” he began, but she had to hang up, and when the phone began to ring again, she pulled out the cord. Had she called him or he her?

*

There was weather outside and she asked Ned to describe it.

“Milky sunshine,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s what I heard on the radio this morning.”

“My skull,” Isabel said, “it feels vacuumed.”

She thought Ned would say yes if she asked him to stay but she didn’t ask; she waited until she was sure he was gone. “Ned?” The answering silence was sweet then and she slept.

This time — but what time was that? — she answered the phone and heard Clive’s voice.

Oh, come over, come over and look me over the way you did! If only she knew what to say. The phone was in her hand. Was that all? Would that be all? I’m feeling better? Now, when her body was ringing, why weren’t they making plans for the future?

But she was feeling better.

*

And Ned wasn’t surprised at her recovery. Isabel was not one to miss a play, especially if she liked the actors. And the actors! But after the play so often came the theater fug. On this night, Ned and Isabel walked and talked about the famous actress and how she had used her hands to convey Mary Tyrone’s suffering. Isabel was moved by it, but her heart really went out to Jamie. “He is the sufferer; Edmund can write and has this thing with his mother.” Ned gave Isabel his handkerchief, and she used it and said, “Oh, that was sad, that was stunning, that was terrible. Families. Oh, God!”

“You okay?”

“Hardly.” The way the actress had used her hands — those palsied gestures — how pitiably empty they were, the hands and the gestures. To see a great performance is a gift from the gods and she remembered the heartwrecked peacock king with the golden round in his hand — Richard, the poet, in tears, defeated, talking of the death of kings. This was at the Globe; Isabel had stalked him, the actor, stalked in her fashion, prowling the frowsy stalls of tourist traps for pictures of him and greats aged or dead, old programs and photographs, anything to do with the small-seeming actor who played the king or any of the other odd crushes then in England on the Lime House adventure. Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter. The lascivious peeper in No Man’s Land says “what is obligatory to keep in your vision is space, space in moonlight particularly, and lots of it.” No moles, no nose hairs, no moon-pit pores. Isabel had considered this idea on more than one occasion and was relieved to feel still young enough that it did not quite apply to her. The fishtail lines at her eyes were faint; they didn’t last beyond her smile, and she didn’t smile much, not in Ned’s company, anyway, not much anymore — why?

Ned, not for the first time, sat on the edge of their bed and said, “You’re going to have to be the initiator.”

O, so bring out the three-prong speculum, the ratchet-mouth gag, the diddle kit, and forceps.

“You’re easy to please,” he said.

So she had always believed.

*

Clive Harris blew at his coffee and looked at the mess on his daughter’s plate. First time together in New York since Ben’s wedding last year, and already Sally was glum. He said, “There are people in the world who love you, Sally, and want you well and happy.”

Sally said she was fine; really, she was fine and she smiled and sipped water and turned the crust of her potpie into crumbs as she described her day thus far. A grotesquely crippled French woman from Algeria had shared at the meeting the astonishing fact that she could not drink water straight. Water by itself made her sick. She couldn’t stand the taste. The French accent made her story more convincing. Also the French woman had a beautiful face — there was Arab in it — but no legs to speak of, little stumps in corrective boots. However could she have had babies? Sally asked. “I mean, I wonder,” and she looked at Clive.

“Terrible!” she said.

Sally was changing doctors and medication again.

“It takes about six weeks to get happy,” Sally said, and she pulled her sweater tighter and shivered although the diner was warm and served jolly food — comfort food most called it: potpies, meatloafs, creamed spinach. Alas, no good desserts, and Sally? Sally cried.

Clive handed her a handkerchief.

“You know what it is?”

“What?” he asked.

“I need to sit under a sunlamp for a couple of hours every day.”

Sally, Sally, Sally, shaped like an egg, warm brown and large, he wondered at her: AA meetings and cripples. Why should it be but that she was ungainly, shy, unsure, a girl, a woman really, a woman with some talent — his daughter — and quite alone but for sharing her problems with strangers? Something about Sally — there was the will to fail or did he mean flail? Headaches — he didn’t want to know about headaches or pills and sunlamps and whatever the hell it took to get happy.

The girls Clive had known — so many girls, where were they? Where were the girls who had found their way into his room when he was a boy, sixteen, great age — everything worked.

Clive almost wished Sally drank. Now she was speedy and loud, a little overeager to share her miseries, turning to the biggest, her mother, Clive’s first wife, Margaret, called Meg. Meg had been a drinker, which explained why, a few years earlier, on a simple midday errand, the poor woman had been stalled, arrested as by air, confused — which way headed? Westport, Connecticut, August 1999. First stroke. Just before the millennium and the destruction of the towers.

Sally exhaled — to heck with the diet — and she took up her fork and so came the story of the mean and practiced child moving fast as a rat along a wall doing damage. “Yesterday Wisia told me she wanted to staple my mouth shut. Do I sound desperate? ‘Go live with your other mother,’ I tell her. ‘You can rip up things together.’”

Clive put out his hand, saying, “Sally.”

“That scares the kid. That shuts her up!” Sally said, “I haven’t seen you in so long.”

“That’s not true,” Clive said.

“It’s always true. So much happens and you’re out of touch. We kept Mom for a while, you know. I thought I didn’t want her in a nursing home, but in the house she was a banshee.” Naked — enough to sear the eyes! — Mom had wandered naked into the kitchen and slipped and fell. “Wisia was in the kitchen with me at the time and she threw herself onto her grandmother as if the woman were a sandpile, which was how she looked, like a sandpile of flesh.”

“Please,” Clive said, “don’t tell me these things.”

“Does this mean you won’t visit her?”

“Calm down,” Clive said.

“Am I right, you won’t?”

He said. “You’re right.”

“I’m right about it being a long time since we talked, too.” And when he didn’t answer, she asked, “You’re staying on, aren’t you? You’re not going back right away?”

“Calm down, Sally,” he said. “I leave Thursday. We could take a walk tomorrow in the park if you like.”

“Meet at Bethesda Terrace?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. “Now isn’t that worth a smile?” But Sally didn’t smile right away, thinking of her mother, no doubt, of Meg. “I’ve been thinking,” but Clive didn’t tell her of what. “Poor Sally,” he said. “What would you like to do for the next hour?”

“Skip town. Buy a ticket to some warm island. Otherwise, shopping.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Buy Dinah a post card,” he said.

“Find something for Wisia, too,” he said.

Something soft, Sally thought, and childish. And Dinah? A card she had seen once would be perfect: King Kong with Fay Wray in his grip.

*

Clive, at the top of the stairs to the terrace, saw Sally walking toward the angel in a large coat that looked like something her mother might have worn. (He should give Sally the money he knew she needed.) Sally’s mother, a long unbuttoned girl swinging bell-like and wide, had once walked willingly, smilingly toward him — for an entire roll of film, she moved agreeably among the pigeons. Ah, acqua alta in the Piazza San Marco, all awash yet staunchly swept, and the coffeehouse, famous. He saw in his daughter his once-cheerful wife, Meg, in the piazza, winter, a happy winter for them both despite a year of crepe and tears. That first Christmas after Clive’s father’s death when his mother had asked him please, couldn’t we all do something other than New York, far away but family?

Italy then.

On a colder afternoon, Clive and Meg shut their shared umbrella and shook themselves out at the araby that was the entrance to the Caffè Florian. Here we are! Sorry! Hardly sorry, but bed-warm beneath their coats. “We were happy,” Clive said to Sally now. “Your mother and I, and we made my mother happy, too, at a time when, I think, she didn’t expect to feel much of anything.” Across a room, distantly tinseled — bar pin, bracelet, ring — his mother once at the Hotel Gritti on the Grand Canal, New Year’s Eve, a widow in a loose sheath, black — black beaded; she sat uncertainly holding a flute of something pingy. At his father’s memorial service, his mother had told Clive not to expect such a turnout for her — and there wasn’t.

In a companionable moment, he put his arm around the soft shape of his daughter. The bowed softness of his daughter, the cushioned arms, not his mother’s arms or his, but hers, Sally’s. Children are always entirely themselves — so Dinah said. Dinah, his second, sturdy wife, he missed her.

As if his daughter knew his thoughts, she asked after Dinah.

“Dinah is fine,” he said, with some relief to be walking in the sun, walking north, northeast from Bethesda Terrace to the Conservatory Garden, some considerable distance, though he was fit, Clive; he still ran. He was ready for spring. Dinah was crazed for it but otherwise fine.

“There’s already spring interest here. Look at that!” he said.

The early dogwood’s yellow had arrived, no more than dots on twigs, yet they brightened the bark-chip mulch and blackened leaves that had toughed out winter. He liked the yellows better than the pinks to come or the Conservatory Garden’s rigid plantings of tulips, now just spikes, but the penitent Lenten rose was up in borders, and he liked that perennial very much.

“Look inside,” he said, and Sally bent down next to Clive and looked inside the surprise of the muted hellebore.

They had seen more spring than he had expected. “That was pleasant,” he said and meant it, glad not to have talked about money or that woman Sally lived with — anything to do with Sally’s messy grown-up life.

“I thought we could pick up Wisia at school together” was Sally’s hopeful invitation at the gates to the Conservatory Garden.

But no, he couldn’t come to school. A friend had called, not someone she knew.

“Man or woman?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Why won’t you see Mom?”

The answer he had was too harsh, and he didn’t know why he went ahead and said, “For the same reason I don’t see you that often. You both make me sad.”

“If you think we’re disappointing, Dad. Really, to be stingy at your age.”

He made as if to take off her head and didn’t stop short but hit her in the neck with his hand. He hit her but not that hard.

“That hurt.”

“Wasn’t very hard.”

“Says who?” Sally backed into the street and waved down a cab, all the while holding a hand against her neck. “Enjoy the rest of your visit,” Sally said, before she shut the door.

He would. Goddamn her. He had perversely persevered, had lunched, dined, breakfasted with Sally, walked with Sally, listened to her litany of insufficiencies — starting with funds! He could have been seeing Isabel Bourne. His surprise was considerable then when Sally appeared the next day at Torvold’s gallery. She startled them both, Clive and the convincing young adult (spotty beard but deep voice) there to interview Clive. “This is a surprise.” Clive stood up. “My daughter,” Clive said, by way of introduction to the young man named. . he’d already forgotten.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the young man and then again to both of them. “Really, I am.” Sally looked closely at her watch, pressed her ear to the face of it. “Go ahead,” she said, then, “Oh, no, is that recording?”

“No,” the young man said. “No, I turned it off.”

“Lucky,” she said although it seemed to Clive she was the unluckiest person. She was too timorous to make a wider way through the world, yet it gladdened him to know he was predominant still and could shut her up with just a look. Clive sternly watched her walk to the other end of the gallery with its glassy island of a table and low seating that conformed to it. Onto this shoreline Sally dropped as if she had been pushed.

“I’ll just wait,” she said, and she took off her watch and peered closely at it, longer than was necessary, and she did not look back at Clive; rather, she seemed to be talking to her watch. Had she been drinking? He wasn’t going to give her any more money no matter what it was for.

The interviewer, ever hopeful, said, “Italy?”

Yes. His mother had taken him. He was eight years old and he liked looking at paintings, especially the noisy terrors recorded in Renaissance paintings, paintings of those suspect and traitorous early Christians so inventively tortured, drawn and quartered, boiled, burned, defenestrated. Some figures had no more dimension than drapery, flayed as they were or flung from the Tarpeian Rock. The dogs, unleashed, were outraged, bullet-headed hounds in the likeness of Cerberus — savage mouths.

“I couldn’t stop looking,” Clive said, although his own horrible imaginings dismayed him. Now, for instance, he thought of Sally and the ways she might be hurt, had been hurt — on her own, by him, by others. The bruise on her neck had a black center she should have concealed — it was not becoming. Why didn’t she know? She was forty and he was. . didn’t matter; work was life’s imperative. Wisia was eight — his age when first he saw Pauline Borghese. Such a slender invitation, breasts no more than suggestions, Canova’s Pauline reclined on her marble chaise under a vague wrap.

Clive talked about the massacre of the innocents, another image first encountered with his mother in Italy. He had always suspected adults of violence, but up until then he had not seen that much of it. His own parents were model and kind. (In truth, his mother was neither, but Clive felt no obligation to be truthful.)

A gunshot. That’s what it sounded like when Sally dropped the heavy coffee-table book on the floor.

“If there’s a better time,” the young man said.

“No, no, no, no, no. Now is fine,” he said, but he could hear at the other end of the gallery, Sally was making those sounds he knew for the mewling preamble to I’m sad. I’m tired. I’m sorry, though she didn’t mean it. Clive moved his chair closer to the young man, saying, “I’m not going to look back at her.” But he was looking back. Yesterday in a flirtatious coat, she had swayed for attention. Look at me, listen to me, help me: the tedious refrain to Sally’s song of herself. Her neediness unsettled him or was it unseated him?

But he talked on. He had given so many interviews in his lifetime: Clive had grown up in Boston, which was as far as he went besides acknowledging he had had parents. He liked to hint at having known harder times as if his impeccable academic background had come by way of scholarships. “I’ve a brother and a sister, both older, not artists.” He had loved to draw from the beginning, but from whom had he inherited his gift? His mother, yes, she had had such ambitions.

“I should add my father was an architect of some distinction.” Why did he say this now — a fact known but not uttered by him in past interviews — why except that Sally was present and he hoped she was listening, oh, how many times had he told his daughter yearning was all very fine but only the doing counted?

Sally banged the book shut.

Clive said, “My feeling about form is that it’s discovered. My friend P. A. Ricks says the same is true of fiction — not an original idea.” Yes, Clive knew a lot of writers; his wife, Dinah, was a poet.

If Dinah could see now how Sally lumbered around the glass island to look at the gallery’s paintings, Dinah wouldn’t wonder at his reluctance to see more of his daughter. Clive called out, “I don’t think Torvold wants us in his offices, Sally.”

Why did he have to speak to her as if she were twelve years old?

To have an awkward daughter came as a surprise. How often Sally stood too close to a person, bumped into railings, stumbled. He was afraid for her — and for the glass table and the cylindrical vase of calla lilies. She should not be near anything that wasn’t planted in the ground.

What was on his mind, the young man asked, when he painted the white horse series?

“Not much,” he said. “The palette changes.” That was vague; he turned quotable. The horses were the visual equivalent of his state of mind at the time he painted them. The source of his pain was too petty to relate. “When I was in California, I did a lot of sketches of horses. Horses are very beautiful to me, even the most ragged has a soulful expression.”

Sally loved the horses; she had one of the paintings.

“One winter when my wife and I were housebound, I painted the horses. All the different shades of white outside and inside were a comfort and a drag.”

“So the landscape informed your ‘white’ period?”

“Death,” Clive said, “informs everything I see.”

Were artists relevant, could they instruct?

That was not the point. When he was painting, Clive said, he wasn’t thinking about meaning; he was looking to feel something.

Clive had said all there was to say, and if the young man had to end on a light note, well, he could finish the interview with a description of the scene, old man in the foreground and, behind, the suggestion of a woman on a Barcelona couch; both just strokes of paint, faces vacant.

“You’ve been more than generous with your time,” the young man said, and he stood and looked to the other end of the bleached wood and white gallery and waved good-bye to Sally, who came forward after the young man had left.

“I called Dinah,” she said. “She said you’re going to invite a complete stranger to live in the Bridge House for the summer.”

“Isabel Bourne is not a stranger.”

“I bet,” Sally said.

*

Ned was in Boston, or so he had told Isabel when Clive came to the White Street loft. He came with chicken soup and wonky cheeses packed in grass, the Easter-basket kind.

“Wasted on you,” he said. “I know your type.”

“What was it reminded you of me?” she asked him.

He had been thinking of her. He wanted to paint her. She would have time alone, too, to write. She could stay in the Bridge House.

“But your daughter. .”

“The Bridge House is mine,” he said. He described an old house, barely furnished; the kitchen counter tin and patched in places. The house was empty for a couple of years while the original owner was in the nursing home. She was the last of her line. “For a while it looked as if the house might be left to fall but a goddaughter was willed it. She sold it from afar, cheaply. There is no bridge. Dinah made up the name: the Bridge House for a house without a bridge. Our own house doesn’t have a name. We’ve a stone wall, a barn for me to paint in, and Dinah’s garden. Why are you smiling?”

“What about your wife? What about Ned? Why do you think I would do this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Clive said. “Most people I invite say yes.”

Noisy moths battered the barn light in her brain as he talked about firefly season. Not to be missed, and the light, especially in the afternoon, in the late afternoon, he described the way it turned their bedroom pink.

“Why are you telling me this?”

The phone rang and rang and rang until the answering machine clicked, and they heard Ned saying, “This should make you happy. .” before Isabel muted the machine. “I’ll find out later,” she said, “and it won’t make me happy, I’m sure.”

“But be happy now,” Clive said. “Come sit next to me. I’ll be quiet.”

In Clive Harris she had found a new album in which to put any pictures she wanted: a white pitcher of cream on a round table, covered in a checkered cloth, two skinny French park chairs unevenly settled on the pebbled path. Where was this? France, Spain, Italy? France. Nice — Neese. To say nice seemed cornball, but that was Clive to her.

“I am not nice,” he said. He was thinking of Sally, poor Sally and the drab adjectives he used whenever he spoke of what she was but might have been.

An only, lonely daughter. “I am one of those, and Ned is an only, too. Maybe that’s why,” but she didn’t finish.

Clive’s brother was unwell but his sister was in remarkable health. “We speak on the holidays,” he said. “Dinah sends her something she’s dried or canned or sewn along with an explanation about whether you wear it or eat it or hook it on a nail. Last year she cured Nepeta—catnip — and sent it to Gwen, who has a Maine coon the size of a bear. Bangor’s his name and he’s old and sleeps all the time, at least he did. Gwen sprinkled Dinah’s cat elixir on his paws, and instantly Bangor was a new man, gurgling and bumping around the house, positively happy, humming.”

She was humming, too, with her arm held out and Clive petting it as he talked his way closer. He held her breasts, assessed what parts of her there were to be assessed, unbuttoning, pulling her shirt off her shoulder. “Let me admire,” he said, and he looked for what seemed a long time, and she looked down, too, at a small lacy triangle of a brassiere, a cocoa-colored whiff of lingerie. Clive’s hand against her collarbone, she took it up and put it against her face and smelled him in a brandy fume of sensations before his hands against her head guided her downward to disappointment: Why did it always end like this with that musty part in her mouth?

“Ah,” he said, finished, “you wish it could be more.”

“I don’t know.”

“I know,” Clive said, using his shirt as a towel.

He left not long after. He left saying nothing more of Maine but that he wanted Isabel to know he was, as ever, an admirer. He would like to paint her.

“Maybe,” she said aloud after he had gone.

Water runneled down the windows or else lights jiggled in the wind — something streaked the view. Her eyes burned and she hated the sky, starless, cloaked, low, wet, cold, oh, what did she have to be sad about really. I wanted to be an actress but I was too shy. What a stupid, phony admission. In London she could have taken classes. I once sat next to Rufus Sewell at the Royal Court. There was a moment! “I tutor,” she had said. “I’m not a teacher.” At least she was honest about that. “I think about writing fiction, but then I look at how miserable it’s making Ned.” Clive must have kissed her on the forehead then.

*

Ned, back in New York, no more than a day, said, “We’ve been invited to this party.”

“Who invited us?” Isabel asked.

“Does it matter? It’s ice-skating, Izzie. A little break from sloth and contemplation.”

Ned was right; the new someone knew someone who knew someone; it was one of those parties, but she hadn’t expected to see Phoebe there, Phoebe and Ben, Ben skating at such an angle it looked as if his cheek would touch the ice. I went to tennis camp with his brother she overheard. Were there other conversations she might intrude on?

A nameless Dartmouth man spurted ice shavings in his showy stop at her feet. He was a hotshot ice-skater, face as common as a pit bull’s but large and friendly, a panting invitation: “Do you want to impress your husband and try some tricks with me?”

Did she ever!

The Dartmouth man said, “Just hold on.”

Here were the words she had lived by uttered by a Dartmouth man moving her around the rink at a speed never before reached in all her years of skating — if that was what she had been doing, skating. Had she ever been spun quite like this or lifted?

“Look at what your wife can do!” the Dartmouth man hollered as he skated off and around the ring fast.

“Nothing I didn’t know already,” Ned said, and his tone was encouraging when she had hoped for sour. It seemed he was not worried about her daring turns but skated freely, unpartnered until Phoebe, out of nowhere, found him. Now he stood on the other side of the ice, listening to Phoebe talk. His mouth wasn’t moving and Phoebe was making small circles, head held down, yet Isabel was trying to read Phoebe’s movements to know what she was saying when the Dartmouth man showed up again for more tricks!

*

Ned and Isabel, days after skating, midweek, after another night at the theater: “‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’” Said again, said faster, fast but differently, sensibly stressed:

“‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

“‘If this be so, why blame you me to love you?’”

Ned was first to phumpher.

“F-U-M-F-U-R?”

“Spell it any way you like. It’s a made-up word,” Isabel said. “I can only find fumble in it, so I’m not sure it qualifies as a portmanteau. Maybe like buzz, maybe onomatopoeia? Our drama teacher used it whenever we botched a speech.”

Ned carried on with the speech in more of a whisper, said, “And so am I for Phoebe. .” And on the instant in his expression was real dolor and not just because of the unseasonable cold or the letdown at the end of great theater, but because of the utterance. Phoebe.

“‘Maids are May when they are maids but the sky changes when they are wives.’ I like melancholy,” Isabel said.

“That’s one of the problems,” Ned said. “I want to be happy more of the time.”

“You don’t say,” Isabel said.

The spell of Rosalind in the round dispelled, Isabel and Ned rocked on their heels in the subway station, waiting for the train to Manhattan and the White Street loft, home.

*

Oh, to feel buoyant as a cork in choppy water! Phoebe, of course he thought of Phoebe when he said her name. Her name was the first thing about her Ned loved. She had been obscured by a man as big as a rowboat — no one could have seen past him — Phoebe was obscured despite the high-heeled boots she was wearing then. (Phoebe always in standout clothes.) Phoebe liked high heels. “I like tottering,” she told him long after he had heard her name. “Phoebe!” The first he knew of her at Porter Blaire’s twenty-first birthday party, hundreds of Porter’s friends, Phoebe among them and the rowboat. Ned pressed in to see when he heard her smoker’s voice. So her voice was the second thing he loved; third was the girl herself, entire: Phoebe in high-heeled boots that came over her knees and fit tightly and tight jeans and an Aran Isle sweater so old the sleeves were stiff. Except for the boots, she could have come in from cutting turf or mucking stalls. Maybe she had; she smelled cold, and her hair, always harsh, was it tangled up with straw? It looked scratchy — was scratchy, he was certain, and they hadn’t even met.

“This is our stop,” Isabel said.

“Already?” He was surprised and surprised again when she told him about the Bridge House and Clive. The Bridge House on offer was free. A free house with a view of the ocean! Usually it was Ned who gilded their lives. Now the Bridge House, not far from but out of sight of Clive’s, was situated on the coastline by itself with only one other house in view and that one, sadly, an eyesore, Weed’s Mechanics, car parts and sheds on the waterside, too, but to the north of them, so the ocean was unobstructed. The mutable Atlantic matched the sky.

“I’m his muse at the moment. Does that surprise you?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“You should see your face,” Isabel said, but he was intrigued and looking for his reflection in the half-moon window, finding it, seeming to approve before he looked at her.

She did not want to spend the summer in New York. “Remember last summer?” For Isabel last summer’s discomfort peaked on a humid weekend in Tuxedo Park, mixed doubles. She played with Porter; Ned, with Porter’s date. Porter carried Isabel through to the finals, but she had muffed a drop shot. Runner-up was not what Porter had in mind.

“Do you think Porter Blaire will ever get married?”

“Where did that come from?” Ned asked.

No answer but she shrugged, free-falling into disparate, general thoughts. The Bridge House was free, a little tottery, perhaps, and peaked — no, no? The Bridge House, gray as a garden bench—“It’s really yellow,” Clive had said — but to her it was gray and in places mixed with pink. Behind the clouds was light while here on earth the ocean riffled over the granite stoop.

Married, what was it to be happily married? The poor couple in the Greek myth, granted any wish, asked that they might die together and so they did. The gods turned the old couple into a miracle — one trunk, two trees, a linden and an oak.

“Clive is happily married,” she said, and a part of her believed it true and that she, Isabel, was no more than a passing thought. But might not Ned see her worth in Clive’s eyes? “You should come with me,” she said.

*

“I was early,” Ned said, considering Carol Bane, his agent, forever in beige. What color skin was best for beige? Not hers. A bloodless, bleached woman whose body had surely never known a vivid day — a goblet grace maybe, once, for her wedding — today she wore sand-colored clothes as shapeless as dunes and large bangles; the impression she made was disingenuously indecisive. The waiter had told them the specials, then left them with menus. She pushed his newest story in its sleeve across the table.

“Once again,” Carol Bane said, “a second book of stories is not a good idea. Make it a memoir.”

They looked at their menus, shut their menus.

“Do you know what you want?” Ned asked her.

The waiter recited the day’s specials a second time, to which Carol Bane responded, “Nothing much to shout about is there?”

Carol Bane hesitated, and he wondered if she was not well. After a certain age — what the fuck did that mean, a certain age? He couldn’t keep up her pace in the prickly heat, though he tried. He walked from Broadway and 45th to 125th. There in a studio he worked on the manuscript Carol Bane had returned. A Whiting is all very fine but fiction is a hard sell and hard fiction, short fiction, well. . He could fix this; he could be less elliptical; he could be faithful to Isabel and disciplined. The Bridge House, as he understood it, was a loosely amorous residence open to artists, and he was an artist, wasn’t he? And Isabel was his wife, wasn’t she? He thought about his classmate Jonathan Loring and his big-deal memoir, No One to Say It—hah! Loring’s quick and unequivocal you’re fucked to Ned’s marriage. Some guys like projects. But there was more to Isabel than project. Her expressive face with its many lovely registers — an actress’s face, had she the courage — was a face responsive to him. Lime House was as much her book. . no. She had been there with him when he wrote it. Now he would write a memoir. Once, he had thought about being a poet, but he couldn’t scan, a fact that seemed fatal at twenty. Dinah Harris was a poet; he had seen her name in New Yorker font. Was it a poem taped to a season, was that it, something to do with jack-o’-lanterns and death? He could write anywhere, or so he told Isabel when he came home from lunch with Carol Bane. He told Isabel he would write a memoir at the Bridge House. “You said I could come.”