Prosperous Friends Read Online Free PDF

guest book away,” Ned said. “If you need room for anything,” he said, “I’ve got room in my bag.”
    *
    London had happened so fast. Good-bye to the heath and the horse guards, to the floridly decorated flat. They were in the bedroom in Golders Green, alone, alone and together in the intimate familiar that was marriage—wasn’t it? And she had nice clothes, too, didn’t she?
    “Come here,” she said.
    “Here?”
    “Where else?”
    “Isabel.”
    “What?”
    “Do we have time for this?”

The White Street Loft
New York, 2003
    “Right on time,” a beige woman said, and, “I’m glad because it turns out I don’t have a lot of time.”
    “Neither do I,” Ned said, which wasn’t true; the rest of his day, his week—his life!—was a blank, so he bucked up to make the most of it now with Carol, the woman in beige, who already knew the menu, though he asked for chili and a salad instead.
    “Big mistake,” she said. “Call the waiter back. “
    “Too late—I’ll live.”
    The commonplace salad came in the middle of an anecdote about antidepressants—“Had she lived,” Ned was saying, “I don’t know what my mother would have done with her time. I emptied the house when she died. I remember finding tooth whitener in her medicine cabinet; it was packaged like narcotics. The vials didn’t have an expiration date. They were poisonous, I’m sure.”
    The woman in beige slapped away his hand. “Do you want some of my frites ?” she asked.
    “I do want some of your freet, ” Ned said, and she swept some onto his plate, saying, “All you have to do is ask.”
    “That’s enough,” he said.
    Carol got down to business then, talking and eating at the same time while he, uninterested in his insipid salad, ate her salty fries and watched the bracelet she wore slip up and down her arm as she cut into her skinny steak.
    “Is that made out of coconut?” Ned pointed to the bracelet.
    “Elk horn, thank you. Look—” She halted, ascertained. “Do you want to feel?” she asked as she slid the bracelet off her wrist.
    He rubbed it with his thumb. “Neat.”
    “Look,” she began again, “the stories are good, but a first collection of stories is a hard sell, think memoir.” The beige woman used her knife efficiently. “That story you just told about your mother wasn’t bad.”
    “What the hell,” he said. The bangle didn’t fit, and he gave it back to her, to Carol Bane—big-deal deal maker, Carol Bane. She was Stahl’s agent, but the fat man was not off the mark when he described Carol Bane as deeply uninterested in books except to sell them, and this was true; she was a book-hating, hateful . . .
    “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