“How sad,” Dinah said, first to Isabel and then, hanging up the phone, to Clive. “Oh, pity the wives, ‘their brief goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.’”
“That’s good,” he said. “What’s happened?”
Dinah told him what she knew. “I hope he didn’t drive in the storm.”
“He slept in the car, I’ll bet,” Clive said. “Are you up for good now?”
And in truth, Dinah didn’t know, but she slapped the hairbrush around her head. No matter there wasn’t much of it, hair came first in the construction of her face.
“So I take it that’s the end of our morning?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “This doesn’t happen every day.” She saw the blazoned grizzle on his chest and his loose old arms, still muscled, still powerful, and she was moved, and put her hairbrush aside and went back to bed. His hair — there was so much of it, a silvery white, no yellow in it, and his eyebrows, darker. They moved when he talked, which was rarely, but Ned Bourne. . Ned, why did he have to come into her story all of a sudden?
*
The cheap princess phone looked like a giant aspirin, the oblong kind. “Fuck me. Fuck me to shit fuck shit!” The phone scratched in her ear and the ring lacked conviction. “Answer this time, you fuck. Answer.” But the first time she called, Dinah said hello. Oh, fuck. Isabel, stumbling through her story, considered the frenzied appearance of the house behind her: rag rugs skidded in her pratfall search for him — Ned? Closet door opened. Ned? By the time she made the second call, Isabel had straightened the house — nothing tippy or off — and she was lucky this time: Clive answered.
“Can you hear me?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes I can,” she said, and she threw herself into her sorrows: “Ned was just so nice to me for the first time in a long time. We talked.”
“Why do you think he left?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t cry.”
“Why ever did you think I’d be happier here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you’d come alone.”
“Even so,” she said. “This is your daughter’s house.”
“My house,” he said.
Isabel said, “It needs work.” All she had to do was lift the tatty skirt to the apron-front sink to be assaulted by the basement gloom of old pipes and a floor that looked tarred. “You should visit,” she said, and when he didn’t answer, Isabel told him about the Electrolux in the closet. “Vintage fifties,” she said, “easy.”
“Why did you?” she said, accusing, not asking.
“Sorry?”
“What was I thinking coming here?”
“Isabel.”
“Why don’t you love me?” she asked, and when he didn’t answer, she said, “It doesn’t matter,” and she pulled out the cord for the whiplashed finish, the big bang of nothing before she shoved the princess phone in yet another empty drawer. It rarely rang. Old house, the Bridge House, and the path to the other house, Clive’s house, was not quite as he had described it — no mown swath of lawn from one stoop to the other but houses out of sight of each other parted by land as hard as heath, a plaid field — fall-like — blocks of piney woods, another field with a mown path to Clive’s house, nameless, long and white. To walk from one house to the other was not to be undertaken lightly. In the plaid field, thorns scored the body and stung; nothing drooped but stood up in the heat — and today, huzzah! The out-of-doors roughly washed, not yet dry but cooler, cleaner, like walking through sheets on a clothesline. Down the hill across the road she went to where the incline toward the coast began steeply. Wild roses, pink scraps of color, sweet-smelling but hairy stemmed, full of prickers, hedged a narrow path to the rusty-colored stratum, the coast’s outcroppings that in the light looked holy but inspired thoughts of soft things bashed against them. (She had a plate in her hand.)
*
He must have walked — Dinah’s first conjecture when she saw him. There was an uncertain path, but a path, from the forest through the field to where the apple trees started and the lawn was nubbled, scant, mown, the chicken coop now a studio for Dinah to work in, and nearby the tool and potting shed for Dinah’s garden. The garden itself was delicately fenced, an illusion of nets in trellises and curly vines, broken vines — a boggy odor — tomato and squash; beyond that, nibbles of lettuce, mostly dirt and not so soaked, but its hard crust was white in the sun. Already! The young man must have walked from the village. What was it about this boy, the newly arrived Ned Bourne, that held her attention? For one, he was Isabel Bourne’s husband, and she wondered how a man handsomer than Rossetti could have failed his wife? Or she failed him? She imagined his days, dragging in to dinner, sickened by the ort of breakfast floating in the sink and nothing made. There may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them. Dinah had a garden and makeup and a tipsy habit — she had friends on the side. Poems? They grew.
Oh, why were the young so slow to turn to life when they had it? The handsome Ned Bourne from her window, Ned Bourne, seated on the bench, leaned back against the barn and looked up unwashed and overheated, open mouthed, yet handsome, drinking the cure of Clive’s attentions. He must have taken the highway, then cut through the woods the last two miles and across the field to the barn by foot. Barefoot, quietly arrived, scratched up, grubby, bloody, Ned Bourne, it seemed, had walked from the village.
If someone were to ask her was she still in love with Clive, Dinah would say, “Yes, very much so, decidedly.” It would not surprise her if Ned Bourne should come to love him — Dinah had seen Clive’s students brighten in his company, and she had watched the willing girls, too, one most unsteady from UT where Clive was a visiting professor. (Isabel Bourne didn’t seem so unsteady as sad. “I am not turning into the person I wanted to be” was what Isabel had said, a little drunkenly, sweetly, the night they parted company at the Clam Box.) The girl from UT wore jeans and English riding boots and tops that seemed as slight as scarves or made of scarves, a summery way about them, as sheer as curtains, lifting in a small breeze. The girl had no breasts to speak of. What was her name? Emma, Lynne, Lou? She asked intelligent questions although Dinah had heard such questions and their answers before, so that she dared to leave them, this Emma girl and Clive, to bob, in her fashion, in the pool. The pool was a part of the faculty complex — a hushed place, washed and planted and tended to by Mexicans. The sprinkler system spurted on at night. Not without surprise and certainly delight, Dinah remembers how she left them, walking bravely into unmitigated light — the blue square of water against pink verticals — she left them alone in a cool room, Clive and this girl, the sloppy human element, and Dinah did not look back. So now, why not guests? Why not Sally — on her way? And Ned? Ned, come from the village and the Clam Box, no doubt, but come in the spirit of one invited. Guests, of course, yes, even in sleep Dinah had heard Clive thrusting the lawnmower this way and that; a mown path, what was it but an invitation?
*
Clive watched Ned Bourne’s hair dry as they sat together on the bench outside the barn. The strands dried singly — red, brown, black, yellow — softened, blended, waved. From where had he come and why at this hour? At some point Clive told Ned that he should do whatever he had to do. (Clive later regretted this advice when he learned Ned was speaking of Phoebe. Phoebe of Phoebe and Ben — Ben was his nephew, for Christ’s sake!)
Ned told Clive that he had walked to the barn from the village because he did not dare drive home. “I lost my license,” Ned said, “but I drove to the Clam Box last night.” So the story came out, he went to see the girl — two girls, it turned out; a duller friend tagged along — the waitress he had noticed on the night he first met Clive.