Prosperous Friends

The Bridge House, Maine, 2004

The unmanning memory of the Clam Box. The Clam Box on the dock, that lidded, sunken, mossy place, hurried, humid, steaming tubs of shellfish, small orange light; it was here they all sat — two, three nights ago.

“Don’t,” Isabel had advised Ned behind their menus.

“Don’t what?”

“Oh, to hell with it. Do what you want.”

He had shown off. Good schoolboy, having done his homework and up to date on Clive’s opinions, full of praise for de Kooning: “firsthand, deep and clear.” He, Ned, wanted to be intense like de Kooning’s colors and intense, intensely himself. Homer, Marin? The muddy sea? And why not? No doubt, he was a bore. “I really can’t remember a fucking thing,” he said.

Oh, God! Turning from these considerations, he makes his way across a room of shirtfronts and bare arms. He is looking for Isabel, who has disappeared. Light fizzes. Someone taps his shoulder and he turns and sees the only crone in the room with skin as luminous as coal, dry patches, and above her upper lip, small hairs.

This old woman with the mustache keeps turning up.

“I’m spooked,” he says, relieved to see the woman at the window is Isabel, shoulder blades sawing, skeletally illustrative of the puppet body. There are many reasons Isabel does not eat; she has told him a few. At the Clam Box, for instance, there had been no green on the table that Isabel could see. First the gray steamers, then the lobsters, looking maniacal next to the alarming corn.

Ned had been all right until he saw him. Ned had muddled the face of the handsome old man, Clive Harris, high color and white hair, hair curled over his collar, puffed out, sort of wild. The hair and the faded clothes Harris wore and the way he stood made him out to be unusually hardy at seventy-some years old. How had Ned forgotten this man, Ben Harris’s uncle, but Ned had been looking at Phoebe. Didn’t everyone look at the bride? Now, it seemed, everyone looked at Clive Harris, the best known of well-known painters on the peninsula — sure, showy, famous. Famous? No. Isabel was wrong about that. The tourists didn’t really turn around to see Clive Harris. Clive Harris and his wife, just behind, in frantic colors, passing.

“I hope we had fun” is the best Ned can do, standing behind her. He unties her bows. After he has unbraided her hair, he tries to braid it and then unbraids it again.

Isabel says, “You could do more than hairdressing.”

But it is hard to sustain his interest here in the bare room they have found for themselves. He says, “We should do it, we should make a baby.”

Poor Ned. His favorite word these days is fuck, though he can’t do it. Fuck.

“What’s the matter now?” Isabel asks. Common as a kitchen cut, her question starts a fight.

“Did I blow it?” Ned asks.

“What do you care? You were in no hurry to be liked.”

“Please,” Ned says. “I wasn’t entirely uncharming was I?”

“No. You were very flattering about Clive’s hair.”

“Please.”

“No,” Isabel says. “I mean it.”

He decides to believe her.

“What else?”

Isabel says, “You were fine.”

“Turn around and tell me you mean what you just said.”

Perversely, she doesn’t. “Fuck off,” Isabel says. “Why do you even bother getting out of bed?”

Just before she leaves the house for a walk, Isabel’s manner changes with his, both of them chastened — by what? “You should come with me, Ned,” she says. “Take a walk with me. It’s a pretty cemetery.”

No, he wants to think of pleasanter times. So does she but uglier thoughts intrude. The chocolaty laxatives she chewed after every meal — crapping over a hole in some Italian hill town while Fife and Ned drank under an awning sagged with rain. Why did her thoughts wend this way? She is here, now — look up! The oaks in the Seaside Cemetery rattle; the sky is near.

Here, with these sleepers, how easy it is to fall onto a path that should be familiar but is not. The Seaside Cemetery will never be known entirely. Today’s new names are Zilpah Means and Isophene; Helen, at Rest; and Minnie. The last two are small stones. Minnie’s has a rose; Helen’s, nothing. Zilpah Means is buried with her husband under a twelve-foot obelisk. Isophene is all by herself, a name on a stone separated from family, a child, but whose?

Isabel’s maiden name — and her professional name — is Stark. Bourne is sometimes socially expedient; thus, Dinah must think of her now as Isabel Bourne, and what is that but a foolish heart?

Speared on a pike of the wrought-iron fence are gouts of melons — watermelons — squashed troughs for flies she nears to see. Kid mischief, must be; mostly no one’s here to hear the steady lobstermen at sea coughing through the fog and brushfire blue before first light every morning. Lobstermen because this is still a fishing village; but there are also — count them — three art galleries, a few bric-a-brac shops, the Trade Winds, and an older grocery that sells liquor. Across the street from the older grocery is the town hall and, up the street, the high school. Most of the town is white; the darker, waterlogged-looking places, watering holes like the Clam Box, are on the dock. A small post office — very friendly — a library, two banks, the famous Wish Nursery, two competing hardware stores, The Bay Bookstore, and the other one, for tourists, that sells puzzles and calendars and toys. A town the way a town should be, straightforward and simple as Grover’s Corners with a historical society and historical sites, homesteads, deeds, seals, the picture of Amos Weed’s funeral. June 1895. A windowed box of smoke on wheels, a horse-drawn summer hearse posed before the open gates of the Seaside Cemetery. The horse looks nearly dead himself though the coachman sits upright. Someone there is always brave.

*

The malign eye and the nasty snout repelled her and she couldn’t set the trap. That’s when Floyd and Floyd’s PestGo came over — well, really, only the younger Floyd, called Pete, came over and advised against catch and release. “The darn things come back like as not”: this from Pete who bent to a hole in the house. “Here’s one way them squirrels get in.”

Sure enough, Isabel saw this and other fissures as she followed Pete on the investigation of the Bridge House. And after Pete from Floyd and Floyd’s PestGo left, she walked around the house, picking off conspicuous splinters of paint; she liked the faded yellow side of the house; the dank side, north and cold, was far less welcoming although the paint was vibrantly yellow. If the Bridge House were hers, she would paint it white: a white house made rodentless with the help of PestGo. No more acorn shards in the kitchen drawers; no more fear of finding squirrel turds in corners. When she thought of their tiny paws, she saw a bird claw, something basic that looked like a symbol of dissolution. “Am I making too much of the squirrels?”

“Yes” was Ned’s answer. “You are making too much of the fucking squirrels. And you,” he said, “whoever would have thought you with an exterminator?”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a contradiction. What can I say? Some things just don’t mean as much to me. Animals with snouts, pointy faces — ferrets, minks. .”

“And your mouse?”

“It wasn’t a mouse to me.”

*

For the first week, every day, Isabel drove to the long white house where Clive and Dinah lived and there modeled for Clive in his studio. Ned had seen the studio from the outside; he had not been invited in the house or entertained. Isabel had lunch with Dinah and Clive once; always she was home by early afternoon to work at the kitchen table on something of her own. “Don’t ask,” she said, and Ned didn’t. Was it rain that kept her at the Bridge House the second week? The dining table didn’t work then and she moved upstairs to the tiny bedroom with its single tiny window painted shut — stuck — she used an oscillating fan and paced the hall. Isabel did not return to Clive’s studio but three or four times after the rain; after the rain — what happened? A migraine — poor woman. However, she slept; she slept somewhere else, lived on warm Coke and horse pills for headaches like hers; the smell of cooking made her sick, so Ned ate out at the Clam Box and made friends with the waitress. Well again, Isabel walked very carefully and quietly so that her head would not clatter — her word, clatter.

Shuuuuuush was all she said when she came back to their bed. She put her hand on his shoulder, touched his back, though they both knew by now he couldn’t or wouldn’t — and she?

*

She read about the greater sorrows of others caught in civil wars or genocides, their ghoulish solutions to starvation — in this book, catching small birds and biting off their heads, eating feathers, twiggy claws. The warm dead made use of. Would she, so fortunate, do anything to save herself? Shoes, blankets, warmed eggnog with brandy. The granite stoop she sat on was no longer in the sun and the air was cold off the ocean. How could she move past Rwanda to mulled wine and apples, but she was doing just that when Ned emerged from yet another afternoon spent looking too closely at the wall. She knew his disappointed face.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s getting cold out. I was about to go inside.”

“I’ve been inside all day,” he said, and he promised he would take only a short walk so they could decide on dinner.

*

The sky, Ned saw, was an ordinary blue, and the sunset was minor, and where they lived and how they lived was small. That was dinner. And after dinner more of what he was doing — small again, an essay on his mother and California and grief, for which he would be paid a modest figure. The work didn’t seem worth the trouble, but he might have a memoir. He wrote after dinner, or at the least he sat in the room where he said he wrote until well past whenever Isabel had gone to bed.

She found him later on the granite stoop, looking out at the dark under a close sky — no moon, no shadows, cool, wet air. She went back into the house and found a blanket and brought it outside.

“Sit close,” he said, and she moved closer.

Evil stories begin in basements with experiments and rats, but his own story begins under an umbrella, poolside with his mother in La Jolla. Pet, his mother, furiously ageless, looked spotty but smelled new. Empty travel, small depressions. The bent-over, boneless, sunk way she sat at the end: I have a slight case of cancer. His mother, poolside in La Jolla, was speaking of what would shortly kill her. Was there a dog at her feet?

Old pugs are ugly without exception — fat, gray, rumpled — and Crackle, the last of three (Snap and Pop were dead), had cataracts and farted.

They are all dead now, the dogs and Pet.

Was his mother a beauty? She must have been. Her hands at the end were translucent and barbed. He wanted to take hold of her hands and break them in his own, but he feared being cut. The sight of his own blood made him queasy, though bleeding and being bled were Pet’s terms when talking about the upkeep of the La Jolla house and taxes. I was hoping for a little comfort?

“The blight of being conditioned for luxury without the means.” Ned was quoting somebody here, but it applied to her, Ned’s mother, Pet, shortened from Petronella, an old family name fished from the deep pond of a murky family, capricious and improvident. The old wheezing industrialist, his stepfather, had helped; he died before their second anniversary. Pet was left with a lot of real estate and trusts. She sold the houses — both — turned a profit, and moved to the jewel on the West Coast: lovely La Jolla. As to the trusts, she found lawyers to loosen the strings.

Infirm of purpose and very much alive, Pet had spent her last years in bed on the phone, catalog shopping, often for the dogs, ordering boxes of piddle pads for the pugs from the good doctors Foster and Smith, elastic ruffs with bells for the holidays, and treats: pig snooters for the overweight pugs. Pugs: the joke dog of the toy class, or was it nonsporting? I love them, his mother said. So did the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “What can I say?”

When Isabel made no response he looked and saw she was asleep, which really didn’t surprise him; at some point in the story, he was alone. The way Pet must have been alone. All night on the phone buying adorable containers and laundry baskets, shower curtains, towels, and gadgets for the grill and the garden, bud vases, doorstops, pillows to dress up the sofa, his mother readied for guests who never came. She hadn’t grilled a weenie in years; everything she ate was cold and pink.

Ned had hoped for guests in Maine, for distractions, competitions, quests, ways out of the suffocating maze of memoir.

“Oh, ” Isabel said, “I fell asleep.” She creaked forward to stand, and the blanket fell away, and he saw the bony hanger of her shoulders and the loose way her T-shirt flapped — he can no longer remember what it was about a waif he once found attractive. Poor girl. He should hold her; he has not made such a gesture in a long time.

“Coming in?” she asked.

“Soon.”

She said, “You asked me about Clive. . before.” She said, “There’s nothing much between us.” Whatever was it anyway but surprise and her delight at delighting an attractive man. Briefly mutual, briefly pleasurable. For her, a dinner at a restaurant with courtly pretensions and food served on fire — very festive, birthdaylike, and bewildering, but enough — better than as she is or was with Clive: on her knees between his knees whenever he pushed her into an anguished posture.

Isabel had posed for a portrait of the artist at work. Clive had put Dinah outside the studio window pulling at her garden while he worked with his back to her. “He is looking at his canvas. I’m in the foreground,” Isabel said. “I’m the color of uncooked shrimp. I’m seated, curled up; my spine is exaggerated and looks like a fin. I’m a shrimp shape, no particulars at all.” She said, “Everyone’s face in the painting is just a suggestion.”

She stood at the front door and said, “I’m not going to wait up for you.”

“Don’t.” When she had gone, he pulled the blanket around his shoulders and hunkered down for the night. As a boy, aged eight or nine, his mother said he could sleep outside. He could sleep under the stars and as far from his house as the walled enclosure. Once he disobeyed her and slept on the neighbors’ putting green, a close-cut and cool, spongy mattress that still left its gross imprint on him. In the morning, one side of his face was stippled, red and warm against his hand.

Most golfers are like most managers: They’re not very good at what they do. This, in an e-mail from Phoebe, caravanning in Scotland — where was she now? Then it was the Old Course at St. Andrew’s, high-season greens fees. But where now?

Starless night, the upstairs windows were open, the hall light needlessly on. Was Isabel awake? He had put her to sleep with his story. Isabel had never met his mother; what would she have thought? Ned could hear Pet’s assessment of his wife: “It doesn’t look as if she can cook — that’s good.”

“Ned reminds me of a movie star with a few bad habits, none of them mine”—Pet talking about him in front of him. Oh, but she deplored his suspicious suits — dead men’s clothes from consignment shops. She’d met Phoebe and hadn’t liked her. Pet didn’t have to say it — he knew, he knew, he knew, but she said it anyway: “The charm of genteel poverty wears off mighty quick.” Mighty quick: Pet’s tough talk. The beauty of it was Phoebe broke it off for the same reason: He did not have enough money. For his part, still true.

Ned Bourne, Edward Bourne, E. C. Bourne, Neddie. What should he call himself but what he is, a bare, dry name, Ned. On the way to their bedroom, he drags his wet finger along the wall. Where the mark he makes gives out means he will be no good for tomorrow. He hasn’t enough spit. He wants to sleep. His eyes are shutting on the high season, no planted interest, no red anywhere for him but it is blunted and fecal.

*

In the morning, Ned wanted to talk.

“Let’s not talk about this now,” Isabel said. “Aren’t you tired of it? We have two more weeks with nothing asked of us. We should be nice to each other and work.” She walked away from where he sat at the edge of the bed. Downstairs in the kitchen the sensible sound of public radio put her in her place — and sure enough: another tornado in the poor flat states where so much weather seemed to happen.