Prosperous Friends Read online

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  Described by John Ashbery as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful,” Christine Schutt’s prose has earned her comparisons to Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty. In her new novel, Schutt delivers a pitch-perfect, timeless and original work on the spectacle of love.

  Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, doubt and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened and mature perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, Dinah, a poet. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah who seem to prosper in love and those like Ned and Isabel who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.

  * * *

  Christine SchuttPrologue

  Postdoc, London, 2002

  The White Street Loft, New York, 2003

  The White Street Loft, New York, 2004

  The Bridge House, Maine, 2004

  The Barn, Maine, 2004

  In Transit, 2004

  The Bridge House, Maine, 2004

  Longfield’s Beauty, Maine, 2004

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Christine Schutt

  A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

  To Diane Williams

  Prologue

  Such exorbitant crying! Just when the old woman thought she had stopped crying, the girl would start again. The sound raised in the old woman gladness and amazement, and she lay awake to listen, but all she heard was crying; the rest she made up.

  Infidelity? Boredom?

  The old woman went downstairs to turn off the lights left on for the young couple now upstairs. She went close to the registry to see their names, but decided not to look.

  What else did the old woman let herself know? Their car was like everyone’s car. New York plates. They were a couple; they had signed in under the same name. The girl’s name started with a large and upright I, but she was not wearing a ring and the boy stood apart as if he were single. They were traveling to East Blue Hill but for how long was a question they had answered differently. The girl said maybe six weeks; the boy said three.

  The boy, the old woman thought, was very pretty. A girl would cry over losing him, but this much?

  The girl’s kind of crying was at a pitch that befitted a graver occasion. The girl’s crying was wholehearted, a baby’s kind, in no way self-conscious; but unlike a baby’s crying, the girl’s had nothing to do with discomfort or hunger. Hers was purely announced sorrow.

  The old woman had heard and so had the old man.

  The old man, the next morning, looking at the ceiling, asked, “What was that last night?”

  The old woman shook her head and said, “Wasn’t it terrible?”

  “So she wasn’t moaning?”

  “Honestly,” the old woman said, and she looked back at where he lay with his hands behind his head. This was crying, the sound of which made the old woman believe that she, the girl, was in the right. Whatever cause was being fought, the girl deserved to win for her sincerity. Her swept, stripped crying was like an empty room, the boxy shadows on the walls, the unfaded parts against which beds and desks had pressed. Whoever had lived there, slept there, adjusted in front of a mirror there, was dead.

  The rooms left by the old woman’s dead are all yet unused. The closets are full; in a laundry basket still are her father’s best shoes in shoe trees, a box, tissue paper.

  Spendthrift mourner.

  Ten years come August. She should clear out Daddy’s room to add a room to the Wax Hill B & B.

  Ed and Aura’s is a farmhouse laddered with additions and trellises of clematis and roses; the inside walls are thin; the floors, slant. The rooms the Kyles let are low-ceilinged in the way of farmhouses, but the best of these, with the morning light, Aura gave to this couple. Aura gave the couple the whitest room because of the girl but also because of the boy. Aura had looked at the two when they were reading the brochures Aura always gives to guests. Aura considered their faces — they were probably not so young, not a girl and a boy, though she was of an age that turned everyone under forty into girls and boys, and so, too, these guests. The girl’s straight eyebrows, her wide-open expression, the girl’s face and the boy’s face — she would not tire of looking at them.

  No matter. The couple left the next morning. They left before breakfast, which Aura thought was wasteful.

  Age is some of the story. Aura has a spot on her hand that she is watching grow. Halved in a fold of skin for a time, it has looked like shadow, but now the spot is larger and outstandingly itself; nevertheless, Aura believes only she knows the brown declivity for what it is.

  Ed is eighty-two and proud of it.

  Postdoc, London, 2002

  The stone faces she saw on either side of the prior’s door looked surprised.

  She always expected grotesque but not so Ned, no. Ned Bourne was walking into the world with his arms open, whereas she, she suspected, everything she knew about people came from looking at them through a window. Now there was Ned to take her to sacred places, to the Ship of the Fens, a cathedral in the marshes. They stood on the threshold of the prior’s door and felt how much cooler it was; the stones, cool and wet.

  “Feel,” Ned said, and Isabel held out her hand and touched the wall, clammy as a toad’s but then think of all that had happened in this church!

  “Come here,” Ned said. He was braced in a corner in shadow. “Here,” he said when she was closer. “Come here.”

  “Someone will see,” she said even as she leaned against him and he rustled up her skirt. “Oh my, Ned!” Ned, skilled in astonishment as from the start. “Really,” she said, almost giving in to feeling but not quite — almost, nearly, a familiar breach in the intimate scene. She could only act excited, which he surely knew, and on the drive back to London, slashing past what they had passed before, the slurry view was all she saw: nothing still or edged but it was gone. Car turned in and paid for, day trip done.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, and she looked up and saw he was far ahead. Why so fast, but Isabel Bourne caught up at the crosswalk and took hold of his hand and ran through the throbbing warning. A cold front or a damp front, in any case, a new front was coming in: The change for the worse in the weather chilled them. At home they drank soup and he sang aloud to her, “‘The grave’s a fine and private place.’”

  Night’s disarray and rain and his disappointed face.

  “What is it I can do for you, Isabel? What is it you need?” Ned asked.

  If only she knew, but she never. .

  “Never?”

  “Don’t act as if this is news, Ned, please.”

  He took her hand and led her to bed and the cold ordeal of readying for bed, which was readying for something else, and she was not ready. “Relax,” he said, and he worked to help her relax, stroked, kissed, used his hands inventively until after a while he rubbed himself against her mouth, her wet mouth moving, and the electric feather that was her tongue. He could, he could. “That’s good what you’re doing. Don’t stop.” And she didn’t and he was satisfied. “But what can I do for you?”

  If only there were something she could think of.

  Las Vegas, a summer ago, 2001, she was up for anything — no matter the small results: early-bird special, Tex-Mex, fried. Las Vegas lo
oked like Candyland but the colorless sky was a desert, and it was hot, hot. She had never been to Nevada — never to Utah or Wyoming, a lot of states, really, so they had meandered, Isabel Stark then and the persuasively all-to-everyone Ned Bourne.

  How was it she was here with him now in London, but she was, she was Isabel Bourne, changed and unchanged. Already she had seen so much with him: the orange canyons of Zion and Bryce, where they had looked up silenced by slabs of righteous nature. In the weathering weather of Wyoming a girl needed steams and cold cream every night. The mountains, yes, the Tetons, yes, spectacular, goes without saying, but flat stretches of fenced-off pale land made for bleak memories, not a tree or animal in sight, only carcasses twisted in barbed wire.

  “Nothing?” Ned asked, swinging away from her in the bed, seated at its edge, waiting for an answer that was no more than a smile at the sight of his muscled legs. She reached out and petted him.

  “Whatever you’re getting for yourself, get me some.”

  On that road trip across the country, they had sussed out state specialties but what were the English specialties? Toad in the hole, Cornish pasty, shepherd’s pie, Ned had every intention of trying it all, bangers and mash, Stilton and port. In Minnesota they had discovered the pies were custardy, merangued, but what had been served up in South Dakota? Had they driven through at night? She remembered seeing buffalo. Buffalo in dirty coats slugging in the high grass — graceful, calm, as if eating were a kind of meditation.

  Ned came back to bed with crisps, a noisy snack and a salty, smiley pleasure, a pleasure to be in his company although she was often out of his company that he might work without distraction. He had a fellowship and a book he hoped to finish, and Isabel? Since the ashy collapse of the year before, she could not find a subject large enough — arguments in kitchens and her parents’ divorce? The time he almost left her but she cried and cried? Ned and Isabel often talked of the event and other dilemmas of purpose and direction—I’m not young! Isabel said, not a little surprised.

  *

  All too often a finger heavy on a key woke her, so that she put the laptop on the floor and sat before a pond of yyyyyyyys. Discomfort might keep her awake if not her subject. “I need a regular job when we get back,” she said to herself and then later to Ned, “I need a regular job when we get back to the States. I need something to do.”

  Ned said, “Think of our time here as graduate school”—no matter they had both just finished.

  But graduate school had been so jokey. She had honed skills in the thrift shops on Broadway, buying furred sweaters and looking like Twiggy. And her thesis? Isabel’s stories? The criticisms from her classmates had been spiteful or silly; the meanest of them closed on upbeat notes: Hope to read more! Really? Ned’s critiques were smart. He hit on the weak spots in ways that didn’t shame her. Whatever brought on the sick-making headaches was not much to do with Ned but sloth, envy, anger, uncertainty. Why couldn’t she live on a pot of tea all morning and a mirthful meanness writing?

  “So go out,” he said. “Be courageous. See the city.”

  She went to the theater first. Isabel had dividends enough to see the same production of The Seagull as often as she liked, and she was enamored of its desperate Nina. . “How sweet it used to be, Kostya! Remember? How bright, and warm, how joyous and pure our lives were!” Isabel had played Nina in a college production: “. . a man comes along, by chance, and, because he has nothing better to do, destroys her. .”

  On the day Isabel came back from The Seagull a second time, Isabel wrote her father to thank him for his generosity. In a postscript she wrote, Hello to Anabel. “I’ve never written my stepmother’s name before,” Isabel said. “For that matter, I’ve never written to thank my father. This is progress, wouldn’t you say?” She fanned herself with the letter.

  “You’re a kinder person, are you?” Ned said with an English inflection, so that it sounded like a question.

  *

  The next day, in studentlike spirit, to be smart, at times smart — Vassar was her own doing, had nothing to do with her father’s money — Isabel went on a day trip to Cambridge with the Blue Guide and its rundown of the colleges and their famous members. Literary royalty — Milton had walked here. She unsettled herself with thoughts of sloughed-off skin on whatever had been touched. Maybe she would sit in some of Milton if she sat beneath the right tree in the right place. England’s trees, and whoever met or dreamed, picnicked or loved beneath them, were a wonder: the enormous reach of copper beeches, explosive heads. Yews, chestnuts, limes, gingkos. The dead oaks in Windsor Great Park were no less than gods sycoraxed in a moment of anguish.

  Might they not be released and made green again at some greater god’s touch?

  Anointment was what she sought, had sought. More than one visiting writer had said what matters most is staying in the room. She fell asleep in the room. Ned said, “Fine to stay in the room, but not all the time. You have to live.” That’s why she was drinking ale in the oldest pub in Cambridge, once known as The Eagle and Child, now just The Eagle with its RAF bar and plaques commemorating Watson and Crick, who drank here, talked, and thought. DNA — no small discovery. Isabel’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, Harley Chalmers Stark, came by a fortune through the garment trade and Wall Street; he was good with numbers, but Isabel was just so-so. The DNA got diluted, mixed up. From Isabel’s mother’s side came Eleanor, Isabel’s grandmother. She wrote children’s books. Her first and most popular book was published by a small press in Ohio. Soap Bubbles for Christmas. While Santa napped after his long night, the restless elves opened an undelivered gift in the sleigh: soap bubbles. They romped in the snowy landscape, blowing bubbles that froze on the boughs of a pine tree. Jack Frost painted the bubbles bright colors. Remembering this book and its maker did not inspire confidence so much as admiration for the maker’s use of her time. Isabel’s father went to Harvard, but her mother studied French in a women’s college that went out of business in 1982. Discomfited by the school’s reputation, her mother’s first disclaimer was Don’t ask me to speak French but I got an A. Her mother did not inspire confidence. Why couldn’t her mother have been an authority on something? A guy in the poetry division, August Mueller, had criticized Isabel for romanticizing the lives of artists. Artists were largely ignored, he scoffed; even if well funded, a group largely relevant only to themselves. Isabel had wanted to be an actress — was pretty enough but had not enough courage. Writing was hard. Ned had been the best of the writers in their year. Writing couples, how did they do it?

  Isabel put the skinny triangles of bread on the side of her plate and ate the cheese and tomato.

  One unexpectedly hot afternoon, she persuaded Ned to walk through Highgate Cemetery thinking it would make for the coolest exercise — reinvigorating, but it brought no extended relief. Ned complained. Better to be hot at home; at least there he could work. She was looking at the faithful mastiff at the foot of the pugilist’s grave when the midget father appeared. Out of nowhere, an old-apple face on a little body, followed by a midget boy with hair like a cap pulled low. After that, Ned preferred walking in the wide spaces of heaths, views, Parliament Hill.

  *

  “I’ve got an idea,” Ned said.

  Lime House, when just a look could inspire anything.

  Anything?

  “How do you like this?”

  “Yes, well. No, not exactly.”

  “How about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “This?”

  “A little.”

  “This?”

  “No. No, that hurts. That really hurts, Ned!”

  Afterward, the only thing he could say was he wanted to give her pleasure.

  “Not that way, you don’t.”

  She showered in a plugged-up tub, then sat growing colder in the scum that was water.

  *

  “Why is it so important to you?” Isabel asked.

  “I think if you knew the sensation y
ou’d want to have it more often.”

  *

  A certain kind of woman — coarsely attractive, sensual, damp, bad skin — invariably told Isabel that Ned looked like an old boyfriend. Now, for instance, Sue Rassmussen was telling her how Ned looked just like this guy she knew back home in the States. Sue Rassmussen was talking about this guy, and as there was nothing expected of her in this conversation, Isabel turned away.

  Of course, Isabel forgave Sue Rassmussen. Sue Rassmussen was only experiencing what others, what she, too, knew seeing Ned. He could quite literally stop conversation. Then again, Sue Rassmussen was a willful, aggressive, ugly woman. “‘Ned looks like this guy I know.’” Who would believe it? Who cared?

  “You don’t have to come to these parties, Isabel”: Ned at her ear.

  Once at just such a party — people interested in Ned, friends with Ned, friends with friends of Ned — Isabel overheard Ned saying how lucky he was to look across at her every morning.

  Did she really want to miss out on Ned making deep impressions?

  Sue Rassmussen was at the party for Jonathan Loring, from Ned’s class, whose memoir, No One to Say It, had just come out in Italian, and Jonathan, never modest, handed Isabel a copy to appreciate the gravity of its cover — not just the image — but the weight of the cover’s paper itself. Nessuno Lo Dice. Jonathan said, “For Italians a book is a work of art.”

  “It’s a nice-looking book,” someone said, “but Italians don’t read.”

  Sue Rassmussen was at the party where a woman leaned over the balcony, sick. The host, some new friend of Jonathan’s — Carl? — ran down the stairs with a bucket of water he tossed at the bushes. He ran up and down the stairs with a bucket two or three times, puckishly apologizing, saying he was anal.

  The party where Sue Rassmussen’s conceit grew into a rash that Isabel scratched bloody was like so many of the parties Ned and Isabel went to, entered into together, moving around the room to talk to him and her and her. Once, a woman in an ash-colored alpaca sweater was the attraction for Isabel, but at the occasion where Isabel encountered Sue Rassmussen, there was no such woman in moon, ash, or evening colors.