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.
“What is it?” Ned asked.
Ben looked closely into her cupped hands. “A baby mouse,” he said, “at least that’s what I think it is.”
“Awful! Get rid of it,” Phoebe said.
“I can’t do that.”
Ned looked again and saw that the pink knob was, yes, probably a mouse, a hairless runt, jostled from the rodents’ wagon-train retreat. Why leave the nest at all, he wondered, but that the afterbirth that slicked the nest might have drawn predators—who knows? “You could put it there,” Ned suggested to Isabel.
“What?”
“Under the tree over there, next to the roots, cover it up with leaves. Its mother might come back.”
“Are you crazy?”
He watched as Isabel took the infant mouse into the house. Phoebe stood to follow. “I’ll go,” Ned said, and he started after Isabel, calling her name. “Isabel?”
Inside, Ned watched as she turned her side of the room, the guest room, into a close, incubated space.
“What are you doing?” Ned watched as she moved the decorative bedside lamp and put in its place the desk lamp with the arm bent low so the halogen might gently warm him—him?
“It’s a rodent, for God’s sake.”
“I need an eyedropper,” she said, “and some warmed-up milk. No sugar,” she said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Use your first-aid kit. I’m going back outside.”
But Phoebe and Ben were carrying the picnic, or what was left of the picnic, inside. Ben was going into town to get charcoal; Ned intended to stay near the mouse emergency, but in the end he stayed near Phoebe. On the screened porch, drinking rum, he sat with Phoebe while his wife ministered to a mouse. Upstairs in the guest room Isabel was squeezing milk onto the pink knob’s face or its anus—drowning what was already dead? He confessed it saddened him that he and Isabel were past caring about appearances.
“Stop fretting,” Phoebe said. “Come with me. You haven’t had the tour.”
Phoebe walked him through the oldest parts of the manse she had married; a bricked-up fireplace accounted for one of the chimneys in what could have been a breakfast room off the summer kitchen—
Imagine, two kitchens!
—so many rooms and so many of them unused. No, Phoebe had never thought of marriage in terms of sets of china; she was a bit overwhelmed. “But I love it,” she said. “More of everything—look!” He pressed against the old glass and saw the barn from the workroom window. “Yes,” she said, “the barn.” But first the summer kitchen and its narrowing to the fix-it room made greasy as a pipe for all its use.
“Not here,” she whispered. Her lipsticked lips against his ear. “Here,” she said, and the newly married Mrs. Benjamin Chester-Harris threw up her arm as she might toss away a hat, and she was his old flame again, Phoebe, a sly shepherdess—hardly dumb—in Ned’s arms in yet another room of indeterminate use but for chairs and windows and there, as abruptly situated as a closet, a bathroom only big enough for elves.
“My God!” The sink—for a child?—came to Ned’s knees.
“Quick,” Phoebe said.
*
Sometime in the middle of a dreamless night, Ned woke to Isabel crying into a towel she held over her face. He thought he had been gentle enough, wishing her good night, and quiet enough when he finally came to bed, so that to see her awake now—“What’s the problem?”—awake and at the jagged end of crying, trying to catch her breath, to speak, to say, “Nothing, nothing’s the matter.” She yawned and yawned until, visibly composed, no longer out of breath, she said, “I’m not crying over you if that’s what you think. You can do as you please.”
If the rodent wasn’t dead then, it was dead by morning. It was gone from the room, the bedside table cleared, and the lamps returned to their rightful places; Isabel, fully dressed, sat composed in a chair, reading a book on terror. Breakfast with the host and hostess was equally sedate.
The New York Times
was on the table, a bowl of grapes, cheeses, salami, hard-boiled eggs, and bread.
“I’m still in Italy,” Phoebe said.
In the car, Isabel remarked on Phoebe’s ass. Salami and cheese are not the breakfast foods she should be having. So the cheerless drive home began.
*
Why not compound defeat was Ned’s response two weeks later, when he came home to a blind dog of uncertain age, a shih tzu mixed with something, so sick upon rescue, Isabel had thought to return him, but it was too late now with the dog in her lap and the loft’s lights dimmed. She was smiling in the corner near her desk where she had made up a crate. She had sprayed her own perfume onto the fleecy mat, so the dog might know her.
“If it makes you happy,” he said. Met with a dog less alive than a stuffed one and just as pliable, Ned could only say, “If this is what it takes, if it makes you this happy.”
She said it did make her happy although she did not sound convinced. Isabel held the dog close—spoke softly to him about going to bed. The scene was dismal, and Ned sighed to see the dog let himself be fitted into the crate. Then for a while it seemed the dog was awake. Hard to tell. Ned had yet to get too near the crate.
“I almost forgot. Doggie bag!” he said and held up the dessert he had ordered over lunch. “I didn’t eat it and Carol never finishes hers.” Carrot cake, wrapped separately, and crème brûlée, skidding in its container: two of Isabel’s favorite sweets.
“I thought you just had lunch with Carol,” she said. “Why were you having lunch with Carol?”
“Why do I always have lunch with Carol?” was the answer he gave even as he saw Phoebe ask the waiter, please, could he make a doggie bag?
Now Ned put the desserts out on separate plates. “We could do this for dinner.”
“I don’t have anything else in mind,” Isabel said.
So they drank red wine and shared the carrot cake—“So good,” Isabel said—and she came around the table and kneaded Ned’s shoulders.
Her being nice made Ned feel guilty about seeing Phoebe—God knows, not Carol—but when he remembered the blind shih tzu and the fact of Isabel’s touching him after cold dinners, no dinners, silence and silence, it annoyed him.
“Thank you for letting me foster this dog,” she said, and she kissed his cheek.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You sound tired.”
“I am.”
Her joyless “All righty.”
“What is it now, Isabel? Huh?”
The grunting of the disgruntled; they’re both too tired to fight.
Later, they lay in bed listening to the dog’s wheezy breathing. “Will you help me?” she asked. “If we could just do this one thing together, I think. . . .”
He could hear in her voice that she was as lonely as he was, but for answer he could only say her name, “Isabel”—an equivocal answer at best.
*
Ned saw the dead eye, a pink glistening marble, and the other an otherworldly blue, cataracted, scratched. The dog was in pain and made the most tormented cries. The head doctor whose name came first on the board though he wore blue jeans and a checked shirt and eschewed a white coat, the head vet came in to see if the younger vet attending the dog, a pale girl with a tiny face and enormous eyebrows, had applied a topical anesthetic. Ned didn’t understand her answer, but he liked the skinny boy in the green outfit, even though the green outfit suggested he was only a helper, an assistant—not a real vet. The head vet looked as if he should be fishing whereas the helper was doing the difficult work. He was holding the dog, and over its screams he was joshing, calling the dog “BK,” an upbeat endearment, a twist on Brooklyn, the name the pound had given this desolate being because the blind shih tzu had been found in Brooklyn on Neptune Avenue, a stray.
Then the girl vet poked out pellets of impacted crap, which explained the dog’s great thirst. Unplugged, BK wagged his tail for the first time since Ned had known him.
But a week later, the vet informed them that BK’s blood indicated the start of kidney failure. More tests were necessary. And the very next morning, Isabel carried BK back to the vet where she was given new pills for the dog on top of the other, and Puralube ointment, an ocular lubricant for the cataracted eye. In the loft BK mostly slept.