Prosperous Friends

by Christine Schutt

  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 k
new 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 Sall
y 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.