*
At the Clam Box so many weeks ago Dinah had met Isabel for the first time. She had met Ned, too, a girl more than a boy with small, decisive features, sleepy eyes, side part. Caramel as a color of hair on him looked new; he was a sleek boy in an ad for cologne, ambivalent or shy. Dinah remembered how she had looked at Ned more emboldened than she was wont to be and afraid. Over steamers Dinah told him she wouldn’t want to be any part of any kind of interview with Clive, especially one that might turn into more, into a long story, a novel, some sort of book. He had asked would she talk to him on other subjects then, and she had said, yes — boldly. He never visited but once, and that, for the last time.
Dinah and Clive beyond the checkout at the Trade Winds grocery resumed their conversation about the Bournes. “How did you know Ned was talented?” Dinah asked.
“He told me. He told me his agent was Carol Bane.”
“Who’s Carol Bane?”
“I don’t know. He said her name in a way that made me think I should know.”
Clive, in loose clothing, scootered the grocery cart and hiked on, a kind of skateboard, stuttering down the incline to the car. Here in the parking lot, in the yellowing middle of things, some reds out there, thrashed colors, his shirt was flying open; his pants were full of air. He offered his high spirits for the ride home. The anodyne of cheer; he said he was healed and whole; he lacked for nothing. And she? Dinah? Isabel, Sally? Who needed pills?
Sally needed pills. Dinah had seen her shake some out, not count, and take them.
“They seem to be working,” he said. “She holds still longer.”
“You are so critical.”
He was not! He was lost in good feeling! He had his fox — he didn’t deserve her. What a sight in the high grass. Years earlier a suggestion of horses in motion stampeding toward the viewer, a palette of blues, whites, yellows, greens. Not much green, not like now; then his misery had been in the making of the paintings: to be bound indoors, tender treatment, on his butt all day because of a heel spur that had brought him to the ground when first he stepped on it — pain! A bone was broken.
“‘Pain has an element of. .’? What? No, I didn’t forget.” Dinah knew Miss Dickinson’s terms for absence, emptiness, nothing; she knew the poet was well versed on the subject of pain and that the poet was right; the sudden erasure of the world so completely was a white astonishment. The horses were a response to that moment when pain felled him and the world was white. Sally had said of the horses, “There’s a lot of air in the paintings.”
He healed.
In this way Dinah and Clive drove back home talking about the fox, the horses, pain. Talking about Sally. Talking about Sally at the farmer’s market with Isabel Bourne.
“Should I say Stark?” Dinah asked. “Isabel Stark?”
He shrugged, taken up by the effortlessness of his summer life in Maine. He had his health; his body worked.
“Sally says that despite appearances Isabel likes food”—good news, good news for the starving young woman disappearing before their very eyes.
A few weeks ago, Clive had painted Isabel, and when he thought of her frame in the window frame, the light so blue, he saw the window was the angular element while she was some pale blue strokes. The sky was alive; it thrummed against the eyes — God’s fist.
How could Isabel have gone off the road where she did?
Shape, color, light, the fine details of a face were of no interest to him except to know now that the shape in the window had come to the Bridge House hopeful of repair and had been broken.
Longfield’s Beauty, Maine, 2004
“Age,” Dinah said. “I don’t know how else to talk about it. I am not modern.” A remark purely true just to see her as she was, Dinah, dated as a finned car in pants she called pedal pushers. Dinah said, “I still go to bed in mascara on the chance I’ll be seen by a lover.”
The possibility that Dinah might be as unfaithful as Clive had not occurred to either woman, or so Dinah inferred from the dead air. “Does that surprise you?” she asked.“A lover?”
Isabel didn’t answer. After a while, Sally said, “Does me.”
“Oh, Sally,” Dinah said.
“Does Dad know this?” Sally asked. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“We were talking about age,” Dinah said, explaining the mascara business had to do with her horrible discovery that she had caught up to Clive in years. He had grayed, sure, but not collapsed. “Can you believe I was once Clive’s student?”
The same downturned eyes whenever Clive smiled, but he didn’t smile enough while she was a smiling idiot, a stained bone with unnaturally blonde hair. “Have you ever seen this color?” she asked.
“Your hair is white though, isn’t it?” Sally asked.
“Careful,” she said, taking a big, round ring, like a thistle, spiked, off her finger so that Isabel might inspect it.
Dinah had Isabel’s attention. “Imagine me forty years younger,” she said, and she made a doused sound of something hot hissed out.
*
Was it too early to drink? There was only the sun to go by, and the sun said, Fine! Go ahead! You must be thirsty! The summer porch was Dinah’s favorite place at any time of day in the high season. Just the high season?
“The high season depends on location, don’t you think?”
The first and only other time Isabel had eaten with Dinah had been at the Clam Box at a corner table, a room the color of wet stones, rigging, nets, markers, traps, and on the table a pot of steamers and a smaller bowl of sudsy broth and a bowl of melted butter. Steamers at the Clam Box. The stomachs, dipped in butter, insinuated themselves on the way to her mouth, ugly and lustful at the same time. Steamers for starters with Ned and Isabel Bourne.
“We were a little drunk then,” Isabel said, recalling her confession in the bathroom: I’m not the person I wanted to be. That was easy enough to say when tinkling between stalls, wasn’t it? Isabel had said it, I’m not the person I wanted to be, and Dinah had responded, Who is ever? Dinah had wanted to tell the girl then, I know and you should know. . she wanted to say, If you’re looking for someone to listen to you. . Clive liked to think he was a listener. . Dinah had wanted to say, You will be hurt — but the poor girl was already.
Now she said to Isabel that her memory of the Clam Box was of a girlish woman in a rucked peasant blouse and Chinese slippers, especially the slippers.
“I’ve always been partial to them.”
“What about espadrilles?” Sally asked. “What about me?”
“What about you?” Dinah asked and was out of the room before a rejoinder. She was going to make drinks, throw together an appetizer plate, a bowl of olives — whatever people nibbled on at this hour — maybe cookies? Maybe everything the girls had bought at the farmer’s market? By the time she came back to the conversation, Sally had moved next to Isabel so to see the bay and the blue sirens on the other side, Acadia and island sisters. From the quiet on the porch, close, sororal, Dinah inferred confessions had been made. Isabel, perhaps, had cried; her cheeks looked chapped. Onto this stage Dinah carried a tray with a pitcher of New England iced tea and tall glasses filled with ice and stems of mint. Sally fished out the mint, smelled it, bit a leaf, said it tasted dusty.