Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Read Free Book Online Page A

meant death? Relieved of being purely a heart without the distraction of sight and hearing, just a beating heart. Ned’s own was beating in his ears.
    “I’m sorry,” Isabel said.
    ”I need to be happy more of the time,” he said, making as if to rub his nose, smelling Phoebe on his fingers.
    “We both.”
    But having been happy for most of the afternoon, it was easier for him now to go over to the crate and collapse it. He put the fleece into a plastic bag to be washed separately, and he took up the water bowl and the food bowl and washed them at the sink. He gave Isabel the tube of lavender incense sticks and told her to light one or two—“Clear the air,” he said—but he was muddled by discovery of a stuffed toy, just a shape really, like a scepter with ears, Isabel’s purchase in her willfully blind expectation that the blind dog would play fetch. Where to put the fucking toy? Didn’t they know a deserving dog or two?—theirs, a childless, dogless marriage. Maybe someone had cats?
    “Why not a cat next time?” he said.
    “I don’t want a next time,” Isabel said. “I’m poison.”

The White Street Loft
New York, 2004
    If a street had seasons, White Street was early spring, too colorless, hardly sentimental, no budded touches, nothing risen but March, secular and cruel. To think she had lived on this street for almost two years when the plan had been to rent the loft for six months, meanwhile look around to buy, get permanent. Oh, what was she doing? Shaking her bag for the sound of her keys to get into the loft quickly. The space was dark, though known, and she ran through it to where the oven hood shone holy. Weirdly overheated, she ran cold water over her wrists. “Too much excitement,” she said aloud to herself, and felt the water’s sting and wondered if, when Ned came home tonight, she would tell him about Clive Harris calling.
    But why do that? G, remember G? But this was different. G was no more than a punk girl in a bedsit; whereas Clive Harris, well, Clive Harris was older, established, a painter with a following. He came from money and had kept it. Think of James Merrill, James Merrill, a patrician poet of the last century—“a relic,” a classmate had said although Isabel found him attractive. Those artists with their attendant wives, partners, mistresses, muses, observing summer’s gyre in inherited homes on islands and coasts—that was the sweet life, wasn’t it? James Merrill in a documentary wore a white bathrobe, or was it a kimono? The taut cords in his thin neck pulsed when he spoke in his aristocratic voice. To admit to being transported by the sound of his voice—was she elitist and out of date? Maybe, probably. But why tell Ned of Clive except to stir in him some feeling for her as at the beginning, when anything was possible. Then if he so much as caught her staring at him—the book she was reading no more than a fan—he often put down his own book and went to where she was sitting and put his head in her lap.
    Relief not to be hungry at all but rather pleasantly distracted by the body’s other parts. Nipples, for example, hers prickled, and she touched herself and leaned into the corner of her desk, and she played—the way she remembered as a kid, skipping little words over the placid future: ram, cat, slut, cunt —rubbed against the corner of her desk. If Clive were only a woman was a thought that was pleasurable.
    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.