Free Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Page B

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