Sue Rassmussen was at the party for Jonathan Loring, from Ned’s class, whose memoir, No One to Say It, had just come out in Italian, and Jonathan, never modest, handed Isabel a copy to appreciate the gravity of its cover — not just the image — but the weight of the cover’s paper itself. Nessuno Lo Dice. Jonathan said, “For Italians a book is a work of art.”
“It’s a nice-looking book,” someone said, “but Italians don’t read.”
Sue Rassmussen was at the party where a woman leaned over the balcony, sick. The host, some new friend of Jonathan’s — Carl? — ran down the stairs with a bucket of water he tossed at the bushes. He ran up and down the stairs with a bucket two or three times, puckishly apologizing, saying he was anal.
The party where Sue Rassmussen’s conceit grew into a rash that Isabel scratched bloody was like so many of the parties Ned and Isabel went to, entered into together, moving around the room to talk to him and her and her. Once, a woman in an ash-colored alpaca sweater was the attraction for Isabel, but at the occasion where Isabel encountered Sue Rassmussen, there was no such woman in moon, ash, or evening colors.
*
“Let’s just try this.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Let’s.”
“No. Why don’t you just give in to what I can do for you? Most guys would.”
*
His idea had to do with women. Why did it surprise her? He had said as much before. Pick anyone in the theater was Ned’s suggestion between acts, The Maids—very chilly. When she didn’t pick, he did, and his choice alarmed her, but later she shut her eyes and imagined, even as Ned inventively opened her with his fingers and his tongue, imagined he was working on the young woman in the orchestra seat two rows ahead of them, a dark head of crimped hair that caught the light and looked wet. Isabel needed to touch it to know what it was about the wet hair on the small hard head between her legs; it was the girl’s fingers Isabel held, not his.
“You were close, I thought.”
“I thought, too.”
*
But she thought a lot of things. She thought a girl who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts would be discreet! Who was she kidding? G had an earring in her eyebrow. Her hair was the color of mud and dense; her breasts were no more than red cones. Her body was tough but her reactions to dogs, milk soap, cocoa were as goggly as her eyes. G was young; she missed camp. “S’mores,” Isabel had said, “I know all about them.”
“How did you meet this G?” he asked.
“How did we meet? We met here at the National Portrait Gallery. I was browsing in the gift shop. I was waiting for you then, too. She just started talking to me.”
“About?”
“Her favorite portraits? I don’t remember now, besides you’re late, Ned.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
He gave her the postcard G had sent of a naked old woman with a slab of paint for a pubis. The gray stroke could have been a headstone. On the back of the card in a hand hard to read was the message: “‘Flesh is the reason why oil painting was developed.’ De Kooning. When are you going to let me do you?”
Isabel stood in front of Mary Wolstonecraft. The woman’s forehead was serenely unlined although hadn’t Godwin sullied her reputation?
“Fuck Godwin. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now. We met. It was nothing.”
“Liar,” he said, but his pretty mouth had a greasy shine as if he’d sucked on buttered toast.
But it was nothing was true. No more than a chance to sit in a bedsit, and there to kiss a young woman and watch her work at herself—I like to be debased. Was that it? Isabel had thought at the time. Far more instructive than G on that rainy afternoon had been seeing Ned in the evening. He didn’t know her secret then, a secret ugly as a cyst was ugly or G was ugly, and that, Isabel had thought at the time, her secret, the elixir of betrayal, was exciting. But the days she accounted near perfect — and there were many of them — were book dry and predictable. They involved his reading in the morning and her writing awake at their shared desk, a walk after lunch, then her reading, his writing, and tea, and afterward more reading, sometimes to each other before the making of dinner. There were the cloudy afternoons, too, when she went to the British Museum and found perspective—here I am; there they were. She liked the centaur carved in high relief who was making away with a headless woman, but she ducked as through a tunnel past the brown disappointment of jewels like rusted nails, worn stone lions — abashed or indifferent or dumb — funerary kraters and Attic symbols, a cup, gold ingot, crushed. What was to be said about the gold cup but that someone very important lived in Kent thousands of years ago?
*
The girl Ned and Isabel had watched in the checkout line at Boots looked fourteen or fifteen, young. Her fingers were raw, the nails chewed and misshaped. Her hands were very small and, except for the fingertips, quite pale, and her arms were pale and led to the pale and hairless rest of her, there and there, or so Isabel thought.
Ned thought so, too. “Stand up,” he said. “Turn around and let me shave you.”
Isabel stood. She did as she was asked. These were the days when she was up to the humiliation of being handled all for nothing.
“Nothing?”
“What am I supposed to feel?”
“Oh, fuck it. As long as you’re satisfied.”
“And you’re not?”
He was pinching her nipple.
This was an education, wasn’t it.
*
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“My mother.”
“If I didn’t believe in what I was doing,” Ned said, and Isabel could hear that he was smiling next to her, behind her, very close in bed. Her mother’s visit had been overlong, and their routine had been necessarily shelved to accommodate a chary woman, crammed with opinions but few questions. How could her mother resist Ned, but she did, had. Poor Mom.
Her mother, in a dust-colored dress, wore a face as inviting as a rake, yet why should the woman be enthusiastic about their marriage? Her mother’s drama, the generic one: replaced by a younger version of herself rosy enough to wear red without in any way seeming menopausal. “Red is menopausal after forty,” her mother said. She was probably right.
“My mother is scary.”
“You’re nothing like her.”
“Really?”
Ned was holding Isabel in the narrow bed of her girlhood, or so she imagined, and she was a girl again and barefoot on the landing, her mother down the hall in an ataractic dark and all very quiet, the house, Isabel’s. The chairs whined “pet me” and she ran her hand along the railings as she passed through the house, through the house and out the back door. She was moving quickly over the lawn, and when she looked back she saw her footprints in heavy trespass. Isabel lay on the stone bench in its ruff of thorns. The roses have a long reach!
“Careful.”
“I’m being careful,” he said.
Sharper inhalations in her girlhood’s bed.
The sheets are heavy; the hour is wrong. “I’m all fucked up,” she says.
“You’ll get used to it.”
She is already used to it.
“Stay with me now,” Ned says. (Every part of her corked.) “Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at what we’re doing.”
He is quiet above her then, and maybe it’s the way he is moving. .
“Concentrate!”
But she’s a girl after all; she wanders; she makes things dewy. She gets overexcited! The noise, the bed — my mother!
*
It was that time of year, everything dying, when Isabel turned a corner and a blast of underground air at the newsstand made her sick.