Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt Page A

the famous actress and how she had used her hands to convey Mary Tyrone’s suffering. Isabel was moved by it, but her heart really went out to Jamie. “He is the sufferer; Edmund can write and has this thing with his mother.” Ned gave Isabel his handkerchief, and she used it and said, “Oh, that was sad, that was stunning, that was terrible. Families. Oh, God!”
    “You okay?”
    “Hardly.” The way the actress had used her hands —those palsied gestures—how pitiably empty they were, the hands and the gestures. To see a great performance is a gift from the gods and she remembered the heartwrecked peacock king with the golden round in his hand—Richard, the poet, in tears, defeated, talking of the death of kings. This was at the Globe; Isabel had stalked him, the actor, stalked in her fashion, prowling the frowsy stalls of tourist traps for pictures of him and greats aged or dead, old programs and photographs, anything to do with the small-seeming actor who played the king or any of the other odd crushes then in England on the Lime House adventure. Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter. The lascivious peeper in No Man’s Land says “what is obligatory to keep in your vision is space, space in moonlight particularly, and lots of it.” No moles, no nose hairs, no moon-pit pores. Isabel had considered this idea on more than one occasion and was relieved to feel still young enough that it did not quite apply to her. The fishtail lines at her eyes were faint; they didn’t last beyond her smile, and she didn’t smile much, not in Ned’s company, anyway, not much anymore—why?
    Ned, not for the first time, sat on the edge of their bed and said, “You’re going to have to be the initiator.”
    O, so bring out the three-prong speculum, the ratchet-mouth gag, the diddle kit, and forceps.
    “You’re easy to please,” he said.
    So she had always believed.
    *
    Clive Harris blew at his coffee and looked at the mess on his daughter’s plate. First time together in New York since Ben’s wedding last year, and already Sally was glum. He said, “There are people in the world who love you, Sally, and want you well and happy.”
    Sally said she was fine; really, she was fine and she smiled and sipped water and turned the crust of her potpie into crumbs as she described her day thus far. A grotesquely crippled French woman from Algeria had shared at the meeting the astonishing fact that she could not drink water straight. Water by itself made her sick. She couldn’t stand the taste. The French accent made her story more convincing. Also the French woman had a beautiful face—there was Arab in it—but no legs to speak of, little stumps in corrective boots. However could she have had babies? Sally asked. “I mean, I wonder,” and she looked at Clive.
    “Terrible!” she said.
    Sally was changing doctors and medication again.
    “It takes about six weeks to get happy,” Sally said, and she pulled her sweater tighter and shivered although the diner was warm and served jolly food—comfort food most called it: potpies, meatloafs, creamed spinach. Alas, no good desserts, and Sally? Sally cried.
    Clive handed her a handkerchief.
    “You know what it is?”
    “What?” he asked.
    “I need to sit under a sunlamp for a couple of hours every day.”
    Sally, Sally, Sally, shaped like an egg, warm brown and large, he wondered at her: AA meetings and cripples. Why should it be but that she was ungainly, shy, unsure, a girl, a woman really, a woman with some talent—his daughter—and quite alone but for sharing her problems with strangers? Something about Sally—there was the will to fail or did he mean flail? Headaches—he didn’t want to know about headaches or pills and sunlamps and whatever the hell it took to get happy.
    The girls Clive had known—so many girls, where were they? Where were the girls who had found their way into his room when he was a boy, sixteen, great age—everything worked.
    Clive almost wished Sally