“We were talking about relationships,” Isabel said.
“Sounds deadly.”
“How much can you ask for?” Sally said. “That is the question.”
“Ask for as much as you dare,” Dinah said. “I’ve seen the future.” More than once she had taken flowers to Wax Hill. Wax Hill, where the old folk bumped against whatever was held out to smell. “Their heads are no bigger than hydrangeas,” Dinah said. “That’s right. Look afraid.”
*
Goat cheese amid the three graces. Clive wanted to paint them as they were on the porch — his wife, his daughter, his sometime little-mistress with a governess’s self-abasement. Christ, Isabel, buck up, he was thinking. He walked over to the Adirondack chair and stuck a pillow behind her back, propped her up so she could speak.
“That chair is too big for you,” Sally said, and they switched seats.
The sofa was a better fit for Isabel. Everyone agreed. He was thinking of the composition now that Isabel was visible and his wife Dinah was at her drink, and Sally, his daughter, was talking — about? He could look at them or the cheese. So very pretty! Green sprigs and purple pansies, a fanned deck of crackers, a wooden spreader. Sally and Isabel had bought cherry tomatoes and a bread called Brot, thin shingles speckled with caraway and sea salt, also smoked oysters and smoked bluefish, olives, something tan, enough food to make a dinner but this was just to start. “What can I do to help?” he asked Dinah — pro forma, he knew, but intention, not action, was what counted, wasn’t it?
“Sit,” Dinah said, and he made to when he pulled himself out of the chair.
“What’s this?” He backed away to where Dinah was sitting.
“I’m sorry!” Sally took the yarn and needles off the chair and found the basket she had come with. “Hope nothing stuck you!”
“What are you making?” he asked.
“A modest scarf?”
“In brooding colors,” Dinah said and she touched his arm, and he put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. “Dinah,” he said because he liked to say her name.
Clive might have said something to Isabel, but he had interrupted Sally.
“Sally has a story,” Dinah said to Clive. Then, “How do you know this, Sally?”
“I saw them kissing.” Sally pulled herself forward in the chair. “Her poor husband looks a little like Henry the Eighth; he has a beard. At least I think he has a beard. If he doesn’t have a beard, he has a pointy chin.”
Clive liked his role in the gathering; nothing was expected of him beyond sitting, which he did largely, an open-armed posture, his drink held near the floor. Summer’s ease, in a soft, clean shirt, rolled sleeves, he saw the dark ropes of his arms were a lustful seducement to any Polly to be shoved against the barn. Somewhere in the house is a hat Dinah gave him, a straw hat with a straw band and a papery flower stuck in the band. August and he is playing Pan; in Maine, in summer, he grows younger. Where was the hat from? Where was the hat? He signaled Sally to interrupt and ask Dinah if she remembered where that hat was. “Do you remember that hat from Mexico?” he asked, and he described it, the hat she had bought him from — where in Mexico?
“Which hat?” She startled.
“The straw hat with the cornflower,” he said. “You bought it for me.”
She sat up and made herself a cracker, considering hats. “The one from Mexico,” she said, “from Zihuatanejo,” and her distant face told him she was upstairs in the closet looking for the straw hat from the market in Zihuatanejo. “I haven’t seen it,” Dinah said.
“So?” Sally was looking at him, bewildered.
“What?”
“What should I have done?” she asked.
“Sorry?” he asked. Sally, holding an overloaded cracker near her mouth, what was she talking about? “I don’t know,” he said, which seemed to be the answer, because she began to eat. She ate the cracker — it looked like a hoagie — and made another, added an olive. Ate it, ate it so fast, he picked off the pansy before it disappeared, but the perky cap of the goat cheese had collapsed; it looked hot and the Brot had curled. His drink was some kind of foam. He left to find his hat; he wanted to find and wear it. He wanted to wear it enough that he would open the attic on the chance it had turned into a souvenir. Upstairs in his closet he looked to the back of the top shelf. He had so many hats! He put on the Borsalino and felt raffish: la sua era una vita fortunata.
On the curb of a street in Trastevere, a melon-shaped woman in a housedress, short gray hair and stick legs, flats — the legs and the flats he remembered because she was rocking on the curb a little; she was walking a black dachshund, a smoothy, without shape, like her. Clive had seen that woman more than once in Rome and once he had followed her, so mesmerized was he by the backs of her elbows — the joint a dark line as made with a knife in the middle of capable dough.
“How handsome you look!” Dinah surprised him.
He said, “I had forgotten about this hat.”
“Better than the straw hat.”
Dinah said all the things he had come to expect her to say; she, his greatest champion, devoted, careful, kind. How could he assuage the pinch of remorse over Isabel except to admit that what he saw of himself in Isabel’s face had been flattering, yet he had abused her. He was vain, which was a failing, except that it had kept him in motion.
In an expensive store that looked like a bomb shelter, he had purchased a sweater for Isabel; nothing in the store suited Dinah although he had looked.
Oh, no custos morum, he, but a serial adulterer — he put the worst words to it — selfish, insensitive, yet he was not ignorant of Dinah’s forbearance but grateful. “Thank you,” he said to all of her compliments. “Thank you,” he said, and he held her, repeating, “I mean it, thank you.”
The advantages of an old wife, Clive thinks, are too often overlooked in the market economy. A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes. He is careless of last names, often can’t pronounce them; nevertheless, the young woman thinks she is known — why? She is, as they all are, a fungible creature with the same small disasters — sometimes a story. Isabel, in New York, months ago, dinner at King Arthur’s Court, said, “I know a lot of what I do isn’t interesting but every day has its scene or two.” How he had liked her for that and her flattering appreciation of his work, of course, her appreciation of him and for such slight returns — Christ. All young women should ask for more. If he had a granddaughter that is what he would tell her. He does have a granddaughter! He forgets about Wisia all the time.
He followed Dinah into the kitchen.
“You’re not going to wear your hat?” she asked.
Not now. Now he saw the clock was pointing at the grill and whatever was planned he offered to burn it.
The menu was salad and salad, thanks to Sally, who was trying not to eat meat.
“Really?” he said, pointedly skeptical.
“Steak tomorrow,” Dinah said.
Her answer cheered him. Here was an old wife who did not change an old man’s diet even if the change was healthful. On the porch Sally was still on her haunches and eating Brot and goat cheese while Isabel was saying, “Yaddo to rhyme with shadow. I’ve never been but I know how to say it.” Isabel had met Ned at Columbia. “One night after some reading,” she said, “we all went to a bar. There was talk about the Rapture, and I heard Ned say he wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that excluded his pets from heaven.” Isabel said, “I fell in love on the spot. He was seeing someone else then. Early in the summer, when the term was over, Ned called and asked if I would meet him in California. He needed to close his mother’s estate and his plan was to drive her car across the country to New York. ‘Was I up for a cross-country trip?’ I told him my suitcase was already out.”