Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Read Free Book Online Page B

Waste of time to be mean, but when had she ever been wise? She had kissed another man, not her husband, at a wedding, which was not a big deal, except that today she hoped to kiss this man again with clearer intentions. She had really almost forgotten him. Clive Harris, he said in a voice unused to being forgotten. The Union Club. Ben and Phoebe’s wedding, remember? She remembered. Also the visit to Ben and Phoebe’s, the mouse, and a moment when she stood at the guest-room window looking out at Ben Harris, some distance from the house in the vegetable garden, practicing good husbandry with a rake and seeds. His long reach and the steady way he worked. Ben Harris was a good man, and his uncle, Clive Harris, the painter, was he so very good? Her own reflection in any surface was most often pleasurable—except that she was too fat! Too fat! But Fife had said, “You’re skinny enough, just dull.”
    Now there was tonight with Clive Harris at a restaurant in Midtown, but she had plans she had to change first. She explained to Ned that she had been invited to dinner by Ben Harris’s uncle, Clive Harris, and that, in the flush of the invitation, she had forgotten about the reading. “I’m sorry to miss him,” Isabel said, then, “but this way you and Stahl can really talk. And who knows?“ Who knows was an inducement to go anywhere, meet anyone, try anything, but his easy acquiescence to her absence made her wonder: What event was it first diluted the marriage, or was it an absence of event, Isabel’s failure to make something worth regarding? Where was her book, her business, her flaring discovery? She spoke no other languages, had no hobbies—unless reading was a hobby. She was paid like a hobbiest in the freelancing world. Also she tutored. She had work.
    *
    “You put me in mind of my daughter,” Clive said. “You’re about the same age.”
    “I’m thirty-four,” Isabel Bourne said.
    “Right,” he said. “Sally’s forty. I’m glad you look surprised.” Clive leaned across the table nearer to Isabel. He knuckled her cheek: How warm she was, blushing. Their waiter was smitten, too, and directed his attention solely to Isabel and talked at length of what could be had from the dessert case. According to the waiter, there was, yes, indeed, an eight-layer cake if she cared to look.
    But no, she didn’t.
    “I trust you,” Clive said, and the waiter seemed surprised to see Clive and noted the order as if calculating all—eight layers, fifteen dollars, plus wine, sea bass, a decorative appetizer, how old—how much was that? Clive might have been Isabel’s father.
    “Clive?” she asked.
    “Isabel? I bet they have sorbet.”
    “Orange, raspberry, lemon, coconut.”
    “Raspberry,” she said to their careful waiter, who bowed and backed away.
    A halfhearted restaurant with swagged Arthurian touches—torchlights and crests, blood-brown carpeting—only the tapestries of courtly love and valor were missing. He thought of dungeons, plagues, Boccaccio and his pigs: Stink was linked to putrefaction; putrefaction to pestilence; a pleasant smell meant purified. Isabel’s hand was all lily of the valley and clean; her nails were shell. “You are inspiring,” he said, “but this restaurant we’ve found . . .”
    “Is silly,” she said.
    Clive smelled her hand once again, and the restaurant turned buoyant, and the service, the service was, well, here came their waiter with dessert already: the eight-layer cake, white with red filling, weddinglike and flouncy on a tablecloth scraped so clean that the dinner seemed to be starting again, and Isabel was saying she would like it to start again. “And I’m not fond of Wednesdays.”
    “Ah, hah.”
    “Would there be anything else?”
    “No thank you.”
    “I’m baffled,” she said once the waiter had left. “You baffle me.”
    Not a remark to answer, but Clive smiled at the small hook Isabel used to catch him. He, a ravaged carp, practiced in taking