“Do you know the waitress I’m talking about? She has a lot of hair?”
Clive suspected it was Ellie but he would not say.
Ned shrugged.
Clive was sure it was Ellie, Ellie Phlor, whose thoughts came out the size of beads strung together with like, like, like, like never, like what the? Ellie Phlor was rumored articulate in other ways.
“No,” Clive said, “no idea.”
The bench on this side of the barn was in the shade, and the grass there still wet enough for Ned to wash his feet in it. “What’s the time, anyway?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Clive said, “near noon?”
Ned lifted himself off the bench and followed Clive to the back porch, where he sighed to sit again.
“I didn’t think your house was so far from town.”
“No one offered you a ride?”
“There were not so many cars on the road. It was late,” he said.
“You look as if you might fall asleep.”
“I might.”
Sunday, midmorning, very quiet but for that shrill insect sound of old, the whistle of childhood’s high summer, that sound heard once, twice, then Dinah arrived with drab yellow drinks that worked miracles.
Dinah said, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” She touched Clive’s shoulder, saying not to worry, mostly lemonade.
“Whatever you’ve mixed, I feel better already,” Ned said.
*
Overbleached, Dinah’s hair shocked around her head inspiring tenderness in Clive as he attended the sad case of the handsome Ned Bourne, whose eyes were closed — poor bastard. The spectacle of the Bournes. He phoned Isabel to tell her that Ned was with them on the porch, but when he heard a busy signal, Clive grew angry. All of a morning ruined — or nearly. Back on the porch, he saw Dinah ministering to Bourne; she had his feet in a pan of warm water and Epsom salts.
“He’s resting his eyes,” Dinah said, “which is good.”
For a moment, he thought he might work, but then Dinah told him about Sally and the airport and the storm, bigger than last night’s rain, that was still on its way to them. And Sally was on her way, too.
“I knew it,” he said.
“I like her company, Clive, very much. I like women.”
*
Ned, dreamy, was making his way across a room of shirtfronts and bare arms. He was looking for Isabel, who had disappeared. Somewhere in the crowded room of dressy people, most of them his age, was his wife. I am looking for my wife. I am looking for Isabel; but there was the crone again, the old witch with the mustache. Damn it. He startled awake in a wicker chair on an empty porch. His feet felt powdered, and when he looked down, it seemed to him they glowed opalescent. Epsom salts, the sound of the words was soothing until he remembered where he was and the way he had walked the seven miles from town to Clive’s barn. He must have started the car, then smartly thought better of it: Safer to walk, but how did he lose his shoes? He banged his pockets for keys or a wallet — nothing.
They had left him sleeping on the porch. The house was still and he was alone, but feeling healed, able to walk home. He made a soft exit and walked on the grassy verge of the road. Had he put his hand on the halo of Dinah’s head? Had he kissed Clive? They seem to have disappeared if ever they were there. The soundless bay was a gray line beyond a grayer shoreline; the sky was growing wider. Here in the company of large elements Ned felt how it must be for Isabel with him. Pitchforked treachery on a bonfired night, and she, in the midst of it, insubstantially dressed.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he saw her.
*
Standing in the yard at the back of the house, not so much a yard at all but long grasses, field asters — what some call weeds — Isabel pulled her hand up the long stems to things and took off the leaves until her hand, stained, hurt and smelled smoky.
“I understand,” she said, “if we’d spent the summer apart maybe.”
“Who knows?”
“That was the plan,” she said.
“For you, maybe.”
“With you, I don’t know, I don’t know if I can, I have ambitions, you know, I. .,” she faltered, ashamed, unable to say what she wanted to be and silenced by a familiar expression of his — a broil of hurt and suspicion. Who was to say what anyone might make of a life, but Isabel was stung by the little startles of those who knew her at what she had become. From the girl most promising — no book, no significant publications either, and online didn’t count. She kept a journal; but she had not been a success, except perhaps outwardly in marriage. And now the marriage was over.
*
“I’m sorry,” Ned said again when he came downstairs with a packed bag and his computer. He had thought as she had thought, but why comb through expectations? Theirs, a short romance, three years if Columbia counted, no more than a sniffle, an accumulation of scenes in thrift shops and workshops, a whimsical wedding in a rhinestone casino. I will if you will yes. Las Vegas, 2002. Road trip in his late mother’s car — the Solaris convertible, cherry red. (Do the really rich own cars in bright colors? Her father’s Mercedes was silver and sedate.) Ned’s mother had wanted to keep her Mercedes. “I can’t keep up with the upkeep”: Pet’s joke. She was already sick, so why not trade in for an optimistic car and find someone to drive her? The housekeeper’s husband, of course!
The hungry eye followed by the numb, dumb discovery Ned made at the little there was to remember, and nothing that others hadn’t already known. Some images repeated: His mother, in shades of yellow, orchidaceous, was in love with the royals. (“That poor maligned duchess!” Pet said.) Their crests, their pugs, their cigarettes. Weak light with fog bank for background, Pet, in velvet slippers and round tortoiseshell sunglasses, sipped coffee at the umbrella table. The umbrella was furled, the blue pool, pale; nature for Ned was just bushes and flowers.
“Don’t cry,” he said before he saw Isabel’s expression. Most of the big cries, as she called them, had happened on the road, at hotels, motels — weeks ago in the Wax Hill B & B on their way to Clive and the Bridge House. In the B & B they had suffered all night in a white box because, uninvited as he was, she wanted Ned at the Bridge House if it meant he was giving up Phoebe. Then she could concentrate, if she knew he had given up Phoebe. He had hoped to.
And as to Clive, what was she to him but a different shape to paint?
Ned said Isabel was more than to paint. He turned away and once in the drive looked back again at her wide-open face: It was made for wonder. Straight, finger-thick eyebrows, gray eyes, soft expression, Isabel.
“Good-bye,” he said.
She seemed unmoved to see him go, said, “Thanks for leaving me the car.” And a dun-colored cab came slyly out of the fog and up the drive. Ned approached with a thuggish duffel bag. The trunk popped up, and the driver emerged, a shapeless man — two eyes, a nose, somewhere a mouth — distinctive as a carrot, gone hairy, limply aged. He fit the occasion, self-described as from the county, that northern bareness, seeming flat but for Katahdin on the map. Fog was nothing to a man from Aroostook used to much worse; whereas Ned, Ned was from a softer part of the country and bound for an even softer place: Bermuda of the pretty clichés — pink sands, turquoise waters. Phoebe had said hurricane season is best for lots of reasons.
Honestly!
Her voice in his ear’s a hoarseness he loves to hear. That and her money was why she got away with everything.