Prosperous Friends (9 page)

“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.”

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.