“So go out,” he said. “Be courageous. See the city.”
She went to the theater first. Isabel had dividends enough to see the same production of
The Seagull
as often as she liked, and she was enamored of its desperate Nina . . . “How sweet it used to be, Kostya! Remember? How bright, and warm, how joyous and pure our lives were!” Isabel had played Nina in a college production: “. . . a man comes along, by chance, and, because he has nothing better to do, destroys her . . .”
On the day Isabel came back from
The Seagull
a second time, Isabel wrote her father to thank him for his generosity. In a postscript she wrote,
Hello to Anabel.
“I’ve never written my stepmother’s name before,” Isabel said. “For that matter, I’ve never written to thank my father. This is progress, wouldn’t you say?” She fanned herself with the letter.
“You’re a kinder person, are you?” Ned said with an English inflection, so that it sounded like a question.
*
The next day, in studentlike spirit, to be smart, at times smart—Vassar was her own doing, had nothing to do with her father’s money—Isabel went on a day trip to Cambridge with the Blue Guide and its rundown of the colleges and their famous members. Literary royalty—Milton had walked here. She unsettled herself with thoughts of sloughed-off skin on whatever had been touched. Maybe she would sit in some of Milton if she sat beneath the right tree in the right place. England’s trees, and whoever met or dreamed, picnicked or loved beneath them, were a wonder: the enormous reach of copper beeches, explosive heads. Yews, chestnuts, limes, gingkos. The dead oaks in Windsor Great Park were no less than gods sycoraxed in a moment of anguish.
Might they not be released and made green again at some greater god’s touch?
Anointment was what she sought, had sought. More than one visiting writer had said what matters most is staying in the room. She fell asleep in the room. Ned said, “Fine to stay in the room, but not all the time. You have to live.” That’s why she was drinking ale in the oldest pub in Cambridge, once known as The Eagle and Child, now just The Eagle with its RAF bar and plaques commemorating Watson and Crick, who drank here, talked, and thought. DNA—no small discovery. Isabel’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, Harley Chalmers Stark, came by a fortune through the garment trade and Wall Street; he was good with numbers, but Isabel was just so-so. The DNA got diluted, mixed up. From Isabel’s mother’s side came Eleanor, Isabel’s grandmother. She wrote children’s books. Her first and most popular book was published by a small press in Ohio.
Soap Bubbles for Christmas.
While Santa napped after his long night, the restless elves opened an undelivered gift in the sleigh: soap bubbles. They romped in the snowy landscape, blowing bubbles that froze on the boughs of a pine tree. Jack Frost painted the bubbles bright colors. Remembering this book and its maker did not inspire confidence so much as admiration for the maker’s use of her time. Isabel’s father went to Harvard, but her mother studied French in a women’s college that went out of business in 1982. Discomfited by the school’s reputation, her mother’s first disclaimer was
Don’t ask me to speak French but I got an A.
Her mother did not inspire confidence. Why couldn’t her mother have been an authority on something? A guy in the poetry division, August Mueller, had criticized Isabel for romanticizing the lives of artists. Artists were largely ignored, he scoffed; even if well funded, a group largely relevant only to themselves. Isabel had wanted to be an actress—was pretty enough but had not enough courage. Writing was hard. Ned had been the best of the writers in their year. Writing couples, how did they do it?
Isabel put the skinny triangles of bread on the side of her plate and ate the cheese and tomato.
One unexpectedly hot afternoon, she persuaded Ned to walk through Highgate Cemetery thinking it would make for the coolest exercise—reinvigorating, but it brought no extended relief. Ned complained. Better to be hot at home; at least there he could work. She was looking at the faithful mastiff at the foot of the pugilist’s grave when the midget father appeared. Out of nowhere, an old-apple face on a little body, followed by a midget boy with hair like a cap pulled low. After that, Ned preferred walking in the wide spaces of heaths, views, Parliament Hill.
*
“I’ve got an idea,” Ned said.
Lime House, when just a look could inspire anything.
Anything?
“How do you like this?”
“Yes, well. No, not exactly.”
“How about this?”
“Yes.”
“This?”
“A little.”
“This?”
“No. No, that hurts. That really hurts, Ned!”
Afterward, the only thing he could say was he wanted to give her pleasure.
“Not that way, you don’t.”
She showered in a plugged-up tub, then sat growing colder in the scum that was water.
*
“Why is it so important to you?” Isabel asked.
“I think if you knew the sensation you’d want to have it more often.”
*
A certain kind of woman—coarsely attractive, sensual, damp, bad skin—invariably told Isabel that Ned looked like an old boyfriend. Now, for instance, Sue Rassmussen was telling her how Ned looked just like this guy she knew back home in the States. Sue Rassmussen was talking about this guy, and as there was nothing expected of her in this conversation, Isabel turned away.
Of course, Isabel forgave Sue Rassmussen. Sue Rassmussen was only experiencing what others, what she, too, knew seeing Ned. He could quite literally stop conversation. Then again, Sue Rassmussen was a willful, aggressive, ugly woman. “‘Ned looks like this guy I know.’” Who would believe it? Who cared?
“You don’t have to come to these parties, Isabel”: Ned at her ear.
Once at just such a party—people interested in Ned, friends with Ned, friends with friends of Ned—Isabel overheard Ned saying how lucky he was to look across at her every morning.
Did she really want to miss out on Ned making deep impressions?
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!