She stood at the front door and said, “I’m not going to wait up for you.”
“Don’t.” When she had gone, he pulled the blanket around his shoulders and hunkered down for the night. As a boy, aged eight or nine, his mother said he could sleep outside. He could sleep under the stars and as far from his house as the walled enclosure. Once he disobeyed her and slept on the neighbors’ putting green, a close-cut and cool, spongy mattress that still left its gross imprint on him. In the morning, one side of his face was stippled, red and warm against his hand.
Most golfers are like most managers: They’re not very good at what they do. This, in an e-mail from Phoebe, caravanning in Scotland — where was she now? Then it was the Old Course at St. Andrew’s, high-season greens fees. But where now?
Starless night, the upstairs windows were open, the hall light needlessly on. Was Isabel awake? He had put her to sleep with his story. Isabel had never met his mother; what would she have thought? Ned could hear Pet’s assessment of his wife: “It doesn’t look as if she can cook — that’s good.”
“Ned reminds me of a movie star with a few bad habits, none of them mine”—Pet talking about him in front of him. Oh, but she deplored his suspicious suits — dead men’s clothes from consignment shops. She’d met Phoebe and hadn’t liked her. Pet didn’t have to say it — he knew, he knew, he knew, but she said it anyway: “The charm of genteel poverty wears off mighty quick.” Mighty quick: Pet’s tough talk. The beauty of it was Phoebe broke it off for the same reason: He did not have enough money. For his part, still true.
Ned Bourne, Edward Bourne, E. C. Bourne, Neddie. What should he call himself but what he is, a bare, dry name, Ned. On the way to their bedroom, he drags his wet finger along the wall. Where the mark he makes gives out means he will be no good for tomorrow. He hasn’t enough spit. He wants to sleep. His eyes are shutting on the high season, no planted interest, no red anywhere for him but it is blunted and fecal.
*
In the morning, Ned wanted to talk.
“Let’s not talk about this now,” Isabel said. “Aren’t you tired of it? We have two more weeks with nothing asked of us. We should be nice to each other and work.” She walked away from where he sat at the edge of the bed. Downstairs in the kitchen the sensible sound of public radio put her in her place — and sure enough: another tornado in the poor flat states where so much weather seemed to happen.
The Barn, Maine, 2004
“Who was bleeding?” Dinah asked Clive. “You or me?” She had found a bloodstain, surely oral, on the sheets, but whose? Their wanton, close sleep! Most likely his, his mouth, the older, though he didn’t feel any pain.
“You’re welcome to look,” he said, opening his mouth.
So the day came on, another day with a sky blue enough to put the sun in its place, a sky as hard to look at as the sun, although she looked up after the incongruously sweet sound of the ospreys. Straight through the afternoon she squinted and still she didn’t see them until they were a dash, then out of sight. She wrote about the frog she had stared at the other day, the cold hysteria in his eyes, but frogs seemed too enervated for hysteria; they seemed lazy. The sound they made was a plucked string, the start of down-home Delta, slow. The afternoon went on and on and she worked on her geraniums — all firecracker reds in clay pots of different sizes, some atop an old blue box, all packed close. Maine classic. Clive was with Isabel on the bench outside the barn; the bench, once soldier blue, had faded to something like oyster, a color she liked. It did not need repainting, not yet. When the wood looked dried out and splintery then she would paint.
But here was a change she wanted to make next year no doubt — next year, would Isabel be in the picture? — next year she wanted to paint the bench on the screen porch black, eschew geraniums for a good leaf, no blossoms necessary. A part of her was sick of the drawn-out dying about the geraniums. From so little a rain as a shower they seemed to emerge sopped and spotted black and brown; they only looked durable; their lives were short. What bewildered her was how much she had loved them and for so long. Her high-school sweetheart, her first love, her young husband, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card, a rhyme — did he know she still loved him from time to time? Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. Endure was a word in another song. She didn’t always have to be in Isabel Bourne’s company; it was easier to lunch alone. What did Ned Bourne do for lunch? She had seen him the other day at Trade Winds shucking ears of corn to check the kernels, shucking fast and looking guilty about it. She had avoided him then, “glad to escape beguilement and the storm. .” Did Robert Lowell know how much she loved him? A bit of a bully, like Clive, only madder. No, it wasn’t madness in Clive, Clive wasn’t mad — he was selfish, which was a fault, but a fault a person could live with. The word endure again. Ned Bourne squeezing avocados at Trade Winds, poking the vegetables, no, poking the meat, “and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Patchwork poems while she waited for Clive, who had said the tide was high at four. She was ready to swim when he was and he was at four thirty, which really wasn’t late. Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. That didn’t mean she had to be in the model’s company. Clive knew this much and they went to the cove alone without Isabel.
Ah! The water was a gasp and Clive swam loudly in it — a splashy stroke — while Dinah, in sunglasses, treaded in a hot spot, hung, froggylike, which was not attractive, but her aim was to stay warm with her head up and out of the water and her face dry. She was from the middle of the country; she was used to lakes and had never grown used to saltwater in her eyes. Not to say she didn’t enjoy paddling in the ocean — she did — she almost didn’t want to leave, so soothing was it and the air today, so cold. He promptly put a towel over her shoulders as she emerged. “Here,” he said, and he put into her hand a stone he had found on the rubbly beach. The stone was bone worn and warm, not heavy, but rather light, and she turned it over in her hands, and thought of Sally, who liked to look for stones on the beach. Dinah kept them, the nicest of them, Sally’s presents, on the sills of the tool shed. Now Clive was offering her a stone because, she guessed, he knew how she missed Sally. He knew she wanted company. He knew she wanted to see his daughter, but he was not up for it.
*
He pushed what Dinah had set before him away. “Why would you expect me to be sunny? I’ve never much liked anybody in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Dinah said, and she took up the plate of fruit she had just put before him. “How would you like your eggs?”
Dinah jiggered vodka in her juice. Vodka, blue sky, birds. Clive was almost always nicer in the afternoon. (Sally, on the telephone: “Would everyone start behaving if I had cancer?”) But she had read somewhere statistics that prisoners were more likely granted parole if their hearing was in the afternoon. One explanation was people were generally happier in the afternoon.
“Sally wants to visit.” This, over a late, late lunch that would serve as dinner, just the two of them, a picnic, a bully bread with a leather crust and other hard food, like salami, and iced coffee — bitter and no cream to cut it, no sugar.
“Sally wants to visit.”
His response to the whistling-out-of-nowhere speed of her announcement was no response.
“She doesn’t mind about the house — though it was abrupt. She just wants to see us,” Dinah said. “Don’t be this way. Please. Whatever it is you’re fighting about. . ” Dinah hesitated because, in truth, she didn’t know quite why he would not talk to Sally. Undoubtedly, the cause was trivial.