Prosperous Friends Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,