Free Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Page A

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