“Hey!” she slapped his hand again.
“The least you can do is share your fries,” he said.
*
The phlegmy latch of complaint Ned coughed up all too frequently rose in his throat at the sight of his doctor.
Shouldn’t he be finished talking about the family romance?
Of course not! Like a stern housekeeper, knock, knock, knocking an iron against a shirt, banged against and scorching the shirt, never once looking up at Ned, Dr. K said, “Of course not!”
Ned stared at a filing cabinet, as attractive as an air conditioner — a box with handles — hardly soothing. He coughed. He did the hitching trick with his throat to clear it more vehemently. “I never really looked at your furniture before. Like the bookcase in the waiting room,” Ned said. “Where did that come from?”
“Where do you think it came from?”
“A lake house, that’s where the bookcase came from. A wet place that never dried out, a snotty-slime slime-colored cube entered unwillingly though the lake itself was velvet. I know I’m talking about cunt,” Ned said, and he reviled the attic-eclectic interior of Dr. K’s waiting room. The glass-fronted bookcase, in its black, cracked veneer, a wood leached of light as if the bookcase had been drowned, recovered, used in the lake house for cook books and jelly jars — one full of pennies — the glass-fronted bookcase housed a set of cloth books, watermarked and faded. To the doctor’s credit there were no Hieronymus Bosch prints, no ghastly garden of earthly delights.
“You make me more hateful than I am,” Ned said, by way of good-bye, then shut the door. Hardly polite, hardly charming.
Hardly the way you were at the craft talk is what a student had said last night — hip bones like hooks when she shimmied past him at the bar. The student had left with a craftier talker. Ned didn’t see, hadn’t looked out for, after — hadn’t what? Time was he would have taken advantage of a student.
Poor snake.
Ned walked down York, turned west onto a scabby street that should have been beautiful, not this mottled, unbuckled pavement, a narrow way all the way to a greater contraction, an underground entrance dank as the boathouse; subway stink and the usual terrors near the tracks before the train, and then he was on it — in it, a box that shunted downtown and made him faintly sick.
He once knew a girl with a crooked face — who was she? What did her eyebrows do?
“Isabel?”
The experience of calling after someone was an experience he no longer wanted to have. He was thirty-six. The fellowship that had funded him through Fife and London and Rome and Lime House was long since spent, so, too, his talents for attaching to comfortable people. With Stahl’s help he turned onto the track of associate-something. .
“Give me a break,” Isabel said. “Your thoughts are so depressingly obvious.”
“You’ll have to tell me because I don’t know what it is I’m thinking.”
“Working so hard, are you?”
Sometimes he came back to the White Street loft feeling good, but not today, which was a pity, for now there was the weekend to be got through in a rural part of New Jersey people did not mock. They were going to the country to see prosperous friends.
“Some fun,” Isabel said.
“What is it with you?” Ned took up their bags — hers, unusually light. “Did you remember to pack warm clothes?”
“I remembered the first-aid kit.”
The house they finally came to belonged to Ben Harris, Ben and Phoebe Harris now. The house, inherited, had three chimneys and outbuildings — a tool shed, a garage, a barn — all, like the house, painted white. The trees in the orchard were hoary with lichen, but the meadow, just mown, looked young. A picnic was shortly under way there, champagne and thawed hors d’oeuvres. Cheers to their prosperous friends! Ned chinged each glass, Phoebe’s last. “How does it feel to be adored?” he asked.
“I’m used to it,” Phoebe said. Then the torchy laugh — impossible not to smile although Isabel didn’t; Isabel, eating a carrot, made bone-breaking sounds with her teeth.
“I like a girl who eats loudly,” Ben said.
“Who do you remind me of?” Isabel asked. “Ned, who does Ben remind you of?”
He was wearily suspicious of the answer Isabel wanted and he would not — no, he shrugged. Ned wasn’t going to revisit the site, remorselessly circle that spot where their life was stained. . something to do with guilt and Hester Prynne feeling compelled to “haunt. . the spot where some marked event had given color to her lifetime,” and more lines from Hawthorne’s novel he once knew by heart and which applied to Isabel now lugging that carcass onto the picnic blanket: Lime House and Fife and weeks of rain and the sulfurous sky of London at night — pink, unreal. He could not remember a single night of stars when they lived in Lime House, but they had made love in that house, he had tried — God knows. He’d have to look up that Hawthorne line once he got home.
“You don’t have a copy of The Scarlet Letter here, do you?” he asked.
Not unless someone left a copy. Most of the books in the house were by writers out of fashion; a lot of books came from Ben’s great-grandfather’s library — but Hawthorne? “Wait,” Ben said, and, good host, he loped, long-legged back to the house to look.
Again Phoebe’s laugh, and it charmed Ned. “You,” he said.
“We’re getting old, Neddie.”
“We’re not.”
“Then where’s the urgent conversation?”
“Look what I found!” Ben was waving a book, no larger than a passport. Tanglewood Tales, Riverside Series, Houghton Mifflin. “Let’s see. A gift to John Wren, 1913.”
“Library smell,” Ned said, with his nose inside the book. He gave it to Phoebe, and she smelled, too.
“The stacks,” she said, “Mem Library.”
Isabel said it smelled like kindergarten to her, like construction paper and paste.
So the talk bumped down stairs — from books, to the book, to The Marble Faun, to Italy. “We didn’t tell you about Rome, did we?” So Phoebe began with a fennel dish. Their last best moment in Rome came down to food. “You remember, Ben? That place we found in the book?” The fennel dish she ordered was to start; it came hot in a little ramekin with Parmesan, raisins, and something else. Pine nuts? “I meant to remember. It was so good. The only reason we didn’t gain weight was because we walked miles every day, starting early in the morning.” The streets were washed and cool then, and the jasmine — that was everywhere — didn’t overwhelm them with its scent.
“When we were in Rome, it rained most of the time, but we did a lot of walking,” Isabel said. “We walked over six miles one day from the Spanish Steps to the Protestant Cemetery to see the poets’ headstones — and that was just in an afternoon.”
“You went with Fife,” Ned said.
“So?”
Phoebe and Ben had been in Rome for a wedding. A wedding in ivories and greens — deep, and deeper. The ceremony was in the afternoon on a formal lawn, cypress trees, hedges, a goldfish pond. Greek classic — the bride looked like Aphrodite in a generously pleated, high-waisted gown; in her hair, a wreath of ivory flowers, the same in the bouquet. The light was salmony. Orange made small appearances everywhere all night — orange being the bride and groom’s favorite color.
“A favorite color,” Ben said.
“We don’t have one,” Phoebe said, “if you’re wondering.”
“Look!” Isabel said, real surprise in her voice, surprise and something else — delight? She was on her knees. “Look what I found in the grass,” and she held out her palm.