Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  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?”

  The White Street Loft, New York, 2003

  “Right on time,” a beige woman said, and, “I’m glad because it turns out I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Neither do I,” Ned said, which wasn’t true; the rest of his day, his week — his life! — was a blank, so he bucked up to make the most of it now with Carol, the woman in beige, who already knew the menu, though he asked for chili and a salad instead.

  “Big mistake,” she said. “Call the waiter back. “

  “Too late — I’ll live.”

  The commonplace salad came in the middle of an anecdote about antidepressants—“Had she lived,” Ned was saying, “I don’t know what my mother would have done with her time. I emptied the house when she died. I remember finding tooth whitener in her medicine cabinet; it was packaged like narcotics. The vials didn’t have an expiration date. They were poisonous, I’m sure.”

  The woman in beige slapped away his hand. “Do you want some of my frites?” she asked.

  “I do want some of your freet,” Ned said, and she swept some onto his plate, saying, “All you have to do is ask.”

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  Carol got down to business then, talking and eating at the same time while he, uninterested in his insipid salad, ate her salty fries and watched the bracelet she wore slip up and down her arm as she cut into her skinny steak.

  “Is that made out of coconut?” Ned pointed to the bracelet.

  “Elk horn, thank you. Look—” She halted, ascertained. “Do you want to feel?” she asked as she slid the bracelet off her wrist.

  He rubbed it with his thumb. “Neat.”

  “Look,” she began again, “the stories are good, but a first collection of stories is a hard sell, think memoir.” The beige woman used her knife efficiently. “That story you just told about your mother wasn’t bad.”

  “What the hell,” he said. The bangle didn’t fit, and he gave it back to her, to Carol Bane — big-deal deal maker, Carol Bane. She was Stahl’s agent, but the fat man was not off the mark when he described Carol Bane as deeply uninterested in books except to sell them, and this was true; she was a book-hating, hateful. .

  “Hey!” she slapped his hand again.

  “The least you can do is share your fries,” he said.

  *

  The phlegmy latch of complaint Ned coughed up all too frequently rose in his throat at the sight of his doctor.

  Shouldn’t he be finished talking about the family romance?

  Of course not! Like a stern housekeeper, knock, knock, knocking an iron against a shirt, banged against and scorching the shirt, never once looking up at Ned, Dr. K said, “Of course not!”

  Ned stared at a filing cabinet, as attractive as an air conditioner — a box with handles — hardly soothing. He coughed. He did the hitching trick with his throat to clear it more vehemently. “I never really looked at your furniture before. Like the bookcase in the waiting room,” Ned said. “Where did that come from?”

  “Where do you think it came from?”

  “A lake house, that’s where the bookcase came from. A wet place that never dried out, a snotty-slime slime-colored cube entered unwillingly though the lake itself was velvet. I know I’m talking about cunt,” Ned said, and he reviled the attic-eclectic interior of Dr. K’s waiting room. The glass-fronted bookcase, in its black, cracked veneer, a wood leached of light as if the bookcase had been drowned, recovered, used in the lake house for cook books and jelly jars — one full of pennies — the glass-fronted bookcase housed a set of cloth books, watermarked and faded. To the doctor’s credit there were no Hieronymus Bosch prints, no ghastly garden of earthly delights.

  “You make me more hateful than I am,” Ned said, by way of good-bye, then shut the door. Hardly polite, hardly charming.

  Hardly the way you were at the craft talk is what a student had said last night — hip bones like hooks when she shimmied past him at the bar. The student had left with a craftier talker. Ned didn’t see, hadn’t looked out for, after — hadn’t what? Time was he would have taken advantage of a student.

  Poor snake.

  Ned walked down York, turned west onto a scabby street that should have been beautiful, not this mottled, unbuckled pavement, a narrow way all the way to a greater contraction, an underground entrance dank as the boathouse; subway stink and the usual terrors near the tracks before the train, and then he was on it — in it, a box that shunted downtown and made him faintly sick.

  He once knew a girl with a crooked face — who was she? What did her eyebrows do?

  “Isabel?”

  The experience of calling after someone was an experience he no longer wanted to have. He was thirty-six. The fellowship that had funded him through Fife and London and Rome and Lime House was long since spent, so, too, his talents for attaching to comfortable people. With Stahl’s help he turned onto the track of associate-something. .

  “Give me a break,” Isabel said. “Your thoughts are so depressingly obvious.”

  “You’ll have to tell me because I don’t know what it is I’m thinking.”

  “Working so hard, are you?”

  Sometimes he came back to the White Street loft feeling good, but not today, which was a pity, for now there was the weekend to be got through in a rural part of New Jersey people did not mock. They were going to the country to see prosperous friends.

  “Some fun,” Isabel said.

  “What is it with you?” Ned took up their bags — hers, unusually light. “Did you remember to pack warm clothes?”

  “I remembered the first-aid kit.”

  The house they finally came to belonged to Ben Harris, Ben and Phoebe Harris now. The house, inherited, had three chimneys and outbuildings — a tool shed, a garage, a barn — all, like the house, painted white. The trees in the orchard were hoary with lichen, but the meadow, just mown, looked young. A picnic was shortly under way there, champagne and thawed hors d’oeuvres.
Cheers to their prosperous friends! Ned chinged each glass, Phoebe’s last. “How does it feel to be adored?” he asked.

  “I’m used to it,” Phoebe said. Then the torchy laugh — impossible not to smile although Isabel didn’t; Isabel, eating a carrot, made bone-breaking sounds with her teeth.

  “I like a girl who eats loudly,” Ben said.

  “Who do you remind me of?” Isabel asked. “Ned, who does Ben remind you of?”

  He was wearily suspicious of the answer Isabel wanted and he would not — no, he shrugged. Ned wasn’t going to revisit the site, remorselessly circle that spot where their life was stained. . something to do with guilt and Hester Prynne feeling compelled to “haunt. . the spot where some marked event had given color to her lifetime,” and more lines from Hawthorne’s novel he once knew by heart and which applied to Isabel now lugging that carcass onto the picnic blanket: Lime House and Fife and weeks of rain and the sulfurous sky of London at night — pink, unreal. He could not remember a single night of stars when they lived in Lime House, but they had made love in that house, he had tried — God knows. He’d have to look up that Hawthorne line once he got home.

  “You don’t have a copy of The Scarlet Letter here, do you?” he asked.

  Not unless someone left a copy. Most of the books in the house were by writers out of fashion; a lot of books came from Ben’s great-grandfather’s library — but Hawthorne? “Wait,” Ben said, and, good host, he loped, long-legged back to the house to look.

  Again Phoebe’s laugh, and it charmed Ned. “You,” he said.

  “We’re getting old, Neddie.”

  “We’re not.”

  “Then where’s the urgent conversation?”

  “Look what I found!” Ben was waving a book, no larger than a passport. Tanglewood Tales, Riverside Series, Houghton Mifflin. “Let’s see. A gift to John Wren, 1913.”

  “Library smell,” Ned said, with his nose inside the book. He gave it to Phoebe, and she smelled, too.

  “The stacks,” she said, “Mem Library.”

  Isabel said it smelled like kindergarten to her, like construction paper and paste.