Read Online Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt - Free Book Online Page A

seemed to be talking to her watch. Had she been drinking? He wasn’t going to give her any more money no matter what it was for.
    The interviewer, ever hopeful, said, “Italy?”
    Yes. His mother had taken him. He was eight years old and he liked looking at paintings, especially the noisy terrors recorded in Renaissance paintings, paintings of those suspect and traitorous early Christians so inventively tortured, drawn and quartered, boiled, burned, defenestrated. Some figures had no more dimension than drapery, flayed as they were or flung from the Tarpeian Rock. The dogs, unleashed, were outraged, bullet-headed hounds in the likeness of Cerberus—savage mouths.
    “I couldn’t stop looking,” Clive said, although his own horrible imaginings dismayed him. Now, for instance, he thought of Sally and the ways she might be hurt, had been hurt—on her own, by him, by others. The bruise on her neck had a black center she should have concealed—it was not becoming. Why didn’t she know? She was forty and he was . . . didn’t matter; work was life’s imperative. Wisia was eight—his age when first he saw Pauline Borghese. Such a slender invitation, breasts no more than suggestions, Canova’s Pauline reclined on her marble chaise under a vague wrap.
    Clive talked about the massacre of the innocents, another image first encountered with his mother in Italy. He had always suspected adults of violence, but up until then he had not seen that much of it. His own parents were model and kind. (In truth, his mother was neither, but Clive felt no obligation to be truthful.)
    A gunshot. That’s what it sounded like when Sally dropped the heavy coffee-table book on the floor.
    “If there’s a better time,” the young man said.
    “No, no, no, no, no. Now is fine,” he said, but he could hear at the other end of the gallery, Sally was making those sounds he knew for the mewling preamble to I’m sad. I’m tired. I’m sorry, though she didn’t mean it. Clive moved his chair closer to the young man, saying, “I’m not going to look back at her.” But he was looking back. Yesterday in a flirtatious coat, she had swayed for attention. Look at me, listen to me, help me: the tedious refrain to Sally’s song of herself. Her neediness unsettled him or was it unseated him?
    But he talked on. He had given so many interviews in his lifetime: Clive had grown up in Boston, which was as far as he went besides acknowledging he had had parents. He liked to hint at having known harder times as if his impeccable academic background had come by way of scholarships. “I’ve a brother and a sister, both older, not artists.” He had loved to draw from the beginning, but from whom had he inherited his gift? His mother, yes, she had had such ambitions.
    “I should add my father was an architect of some distinction.” Why did he say this now—a fact known but not uttered by him in past interviews—why except that Sally was present and he hoped she was listening, oh, how many times had he told his daughter yearning was all very fine but only the doing counted?
    Sally banged the book shut.
    Clive said, “My feeling about form is that it’s discovered. My friend P. A. Ricks says the same is true of fiction—not an original idea.” Yes, Clive knew a lot of writers; his wife, Dinah, was a poet.
    If Dinah could see now how Sally lumbered around the glass island to look at the gallery’s paintings, Dinah wouldn’t wonder at his reluctance to see more of his daughter. Clive called out, “I don’t think Torvold wants us in his offices, Sally.”
    Why did he have to speak to her as if she were twelve years old?
    To have an awkward daughter came as a surprise. How often Sally stood too close to a person, bumped into railings, stumbled. He was afraid for her—and for the glass table and the cylindrical vase of calla lilies. She should not be near anything that wasn’t planted in the ground.
    What was on his mind, the young man asked, when he