Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt

advantage of the stunned or wounded, although his appetite, of late, had dulled. And why cloak his intentions so darkly? He wanted to be kind if only Isabel would hold still and let him look at her: bark-brown hair and eyes; eyes wide apart, pale face.
    “What about your wife?” she asked.
    “What about my wife?”
    They stood on the sidewalk, empty taxis passing. “What’s her name?” Isabel asked.
    “Dinah,” he said.
    “I’ve never known a Dinah before,” she said.
    “Now you do,” he said. “It’s a name people like to say.”
    He made a large, showy whistle and a cab swerved in with accompanying verve, and Clive offered her up and sent her home. The cabdriver was on the phone speaking in a furious language, and Isabel was glad to get out of the cab, away from the close, coarse—too mortal—smells, his and her own. The cloudy partition, his impossible name. Only the turban helped. A Sikh.
    Poughkeepsie first, then London, now the city Nick Carraway liked, and she still saw the world as through a window. Why couldn’t she be like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or maybe she was like Fitzgerald, and “both enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
    On her way to the tutoring center the next afternoon, hot spots in the making bristled high inside her legs and it took all the willpower she could muster to keep from wheedling her hand down her tights to press her cooler fingers against the heat of what was happening: hives, scrofulous signs she saw when she chugged down her tights in the ladies’, hot, dime-size, repellent pustules—pink, itchy—high on the inside of her legs. Hives. “Fuck me!” And she scratched at the hives until they popped, like blisters, with warm blistery water inside. So much for sitting comfortably with the dull boy Adam. Did he like The Great Gatsby ? The two-hour session heaved along and she really couldn’t tell. Adam read so flatly she took over, so what did they learn together, she doing most of the talking, both of them wriggling in their seats?
    Once home, she drank soup and took hot baths but still felt dirty. Worse, Clive Harris did not call, not the next day or the next, so was it any wonder she got sick? Here again were the near-dead, weird days when she lived as in a closet in her migraine hell: her bed, a box of rags; her heart, a corner, spooky. Sometime in the night—the next night, the next day?—Ned crossed the room; then the room emptied of people, and Isabel shut her eyes but they wouldn’t stop working: The pink underside of her eyelids, a million pixels, blinked; the sight made her sick, but when she opened her eyes, she turned sicker—always the way with her.
    *
    “Clive?” The curtains in the bedroom were drawn, and she was speaking softly from her bed.
    “Isabel?”
    “My God, this phone is heavy.”
    “Isabel,” he began, but she had to hang up, and when the phone began to ring again, she pulled out the cord. Had she called him or he her?
    *
    There was weather outside and she asked Ned to describe it.
    “Milky sunshine,” he said.
    “What?”
    “That’s what I heard on the radio this morning.”
    “My skull,” Isabel said, “it feels vacuumed.”
    She thought Ned would say yes if she asked him to stay but she didn’t ask; she waited until she was sure he was gone. “Ned?” The answering silence was sweet then and she slept.
    This time—but what time was that?—she answered the phone and heard Clive’s voice.
    Oh, come over, come over and look me over the way you did! If only she knew what to say. The phone was in her hand. Was that all? Would that be all? I’m feeling better? Now, when her body was ringing, why weren’t they making plans for the future?
    But she was feeling better.
    *
    And Ned wasn’t surprised at her recovery. Isabel was not one to miss a play, especially if she liked the actors. And the actors! But after the play so often came the theater fug. On this night, Ned and Isabel walked and talked about