Free Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt

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