Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  ALSO BY DEENA GOLDSTONE

  Tell Me One Thing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Deena Goldstone

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover photograph © Enric Montes/Millennium Images, UK

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Goldstone, Deena.

  Surprise me : a novel / Deena Goldstone. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-54123-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-54124-4 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3607.O48595S87 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015027280

  ebook ISBN 9780385541244

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Deena Goldstone

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: January 1994 – May 1994

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: June 1994 – October 2000

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: Summer 2014

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Alvin,

  who first told me that “it’s okay to get lost.”

  PROLOGUE

  On January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake jolted most of Southern California awake. It lasted twenty seconds but felt interminable, a blind thrust quake producing the highest general ground acceleration ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America.

  Although the epicenter was in the San Fernando Valley, about twenty miles northwest of the center of Los Angeles, damage occurred up to eighty-five miles away.

  Isabelle Rothman, a senior at Chandler College, located several miles east of downtown, and at least thirty miles away from the quake site, was tossed out of bed, onto the floor of her bedroom, books and a dresser tumbling around her. Immediately she saw it as the wakeup call she needed: Life is unpredictable, have some courage.

  A few blocks away, Daniel Jablonski, starting his fourth year as some sort of ill-defined visiting professor at the same college, woke to the sound of a freight train rushing through his rented campus house. It took him all of the twenty seconds of shaking and rocking to realize he was in the midst of one of California’s legendary earthquakes. And not much more time than that to understand that here was the consummate confirmation of what he had come to believe in his life: that all is unstable and there is no safety.

  Opposites attract.

  Part One

  JANUARY 1994 – MAY 1994

  CHAPTER ONE

  Isabelle strides across the beautifully manicured Chandler campus lost in her own internal, and achingly familiar, monologue of indecision. The subject matter varies according to the problem at hand, but the need to mull over, argue with, and second-guess herself remains the constant. How many hours of her life has she wasted this way? she wonders. More like days, months, even years. Does she ever make a decision without this particular form of agony? Does she ever make a decision at all? is probably a better question, or does she simply throw up her hands and slip into change?

  The dilemma for today is whether she’s done the right thing by signing up for a tutorial with Daniel Jablonski. The campus wisdom on him, given freely by everyone she consulted, was unanimously some version of Jablonski, he hates doing these one-on-ones, so mostly the guy doesn’t show up for meetings. Or, even more ominously, The guy’s been known to sit there the entire hour and never say a word. Not one word! He’ll stare at you, that’s it. What will she do if there’s nothing but an hour of staring ahead of her? She has no idea.

  And yet…and yet…there are his two early novels, published almost twenty years ago, which Isabelle has read and reread and reread again, and they are luminous. If only she could learn to write like that. That’s her secret hope, told to no one and barely acknowledged even to herself: that Daniel Jablonski might lead her to that rarefied place.

  Even that wish feels like a sort of heresy to Isabelle. Nothing in her background or the very clear expectations given to her by her parents has pointed her toward a career as a writer. Her father would be horrified—there’s no stability there. And her mother would be incredulous—Isabelle a writer? Not remotely possible.

  Teaching—that’s the profession they had all agreed upon. And it had seemed, when she started college, to be exactly the right choice. In love with literature, Isabelle envisioned a life of losing herself in the endless pages of very long and distinguished novels and communicating the wonders of other people’s minds to young, hopefully eager students.

  Then, on a whim, she took a class entitled “The Psychodrama of Drama,” taught by a visiting professor who was both a psychiatrist and a published novelist and who required all her students to keep a journal. They were to write for twenty uninterrupted minutes per day, every day, without correction or rereading. For Isabelle, it was as if the gates of Hoover Dam had been blown open. To her astonishment, torrents of words and memories and then, finally, exaltation cascaded out. Until that moment, she had never known she had anything to say.

  Head down now on this bright and brisk January morning, gesturing to herself from time to time as each new thought occurs, Isabelle passes the student union and the bookstore, built around an outside quad in a style that mimics the historic California missions—thick white walls and red tile roofs. All the buildings at Chandler owe a debt to the Spanish architecture of the early days of the state.

  And along every path, California native plants have been arranged in complementary combinations. Within a few short weeks, because February brings spring to Los Angeles, the California poppies, which are just beginning to sport tight little nuggets of buds, will bloom a buttery, golden yellow and all the salvia will send up thin wands of pink or red or purple bells held high above their gray-green rosettes of leaves. But Isabelle notices none of it.

  Is it possible for her to learn something from a man everyone describes as a recluse? Who will show up this morning in his office, the Jablonski who wrote those two stunning, emotionally raw books or the taciturn eccentric everyone describes? Or maybe…oh my God, a new thought…maybe they are one and the same!

  As Isabelle climbs the stone stairway that leads to the upper campus, she joins the tide of students rushing to their ten o’clock classes. Through the heavy wooden door of Lathrop Hall and into the classroom building they go, en masse.

  It is at the second-floor landing that Isabelle pauses. Here are the
professors’ offices. Here it is quieter. She reminds herself to take a few deep breaths as she contemplates what’s in front of her. The hallway is long, with many tightly closed doors on each side. The wooden floor is worn from a hundred years of students’ feet shuffling along its narrow length. The old-fashioned ceiling globes, positioned every fifteen feet, are impossibly dirty and give off a weak light. She hears a male voice loudly imploring someone to “hold on a minute…Now hold on!” and as she nears the fourth door on the right, the door she needs to knock on, the raised voice gets louder. That must be him. He must be yelling at someone. Not a good start. She wants to turn around and leave.

  —

  DANIEL JABLONSKI IS ON THE PHONE with his second ex-wife, and they have reached the point in their habitual conversation that they are shouting over each other. Why is it that his divorce from Cheryl seems to fill up more of his life than their short, misguided marriage ever did? Why can’t she be more like his first wife, Stephanie, who transferred another man into the slot labeled “husband.” Simon Bannister is a man better suited to Stephanie, Daniel readily admits, although he isn’t sure his children felt the same way years ago, when Simon entered their lives.

  “Old news,” Daniel manages to interject as Cheryl rants on about how their marriage blew her life off course and how she’s never been able to regain her momentum, which of course is all his fault.

  “Why are we still having this conversation?” he asks Cheryl, but she doesn’t even miss a beat. Her diatribe continues. She’s crazy, he now believes. And he was crazy to marry her. Desperate is more like it, fevered to believe that love or something like it would jump-start the engine of his writing career, which, after the success of his first two novels, had rapidly descended into oblivion.

  Daniel has a great fondness for his third and fourth novels, but apparently no one else does, neither the critics nor the book-buying public. He has no idea why. Writing for him is a mysterious process, and he has no explanation for the fact that it yielded first two books of wondrous reviews and respectable sales and then two books that fell off the face of the earth.

  —

  ISABELLE STANDS OUTSIDE HIS OFFICE DOOR and contemplates the etiquette of knocking. On the one hand, the man inside seems entirely preoccupied by a very personal conversation and it would be embarrassing to interrupt. On the other, she doesn’t want him to think she’s late for their ten o’clock meeting. After several minutes of debating and realizing that the argument inside isn’t subsiding, Isabelle knocks loudly. Should she now call out his name?

  But she doesn’t have to. Daniel, pacing as Cheryl’s list of grievances continues to grow, hears Isabelle’s knock. Seizing on it, grateful for an excuse to end the conversation, he tells Cheryl, “I’ve got a student here,” and hangs up without waiting for her response.

  “All right!” he calls out, and Isabelle opens the door.

  Of course she’s seen his picture on the back of his two books, but that picture is hopelessly out-of-date, Isabelle now sees. It has done nothing to prepare her for the man who stands across the room from her.

  It’s his physical presence that stuns her. He’s so much bigger than she imagined, maybe six feet three or four, and fleshier. Unlike most of her male professors, who seem suddenly, now that she’s standing in Daniel’s office, smaller and more cerebral, as if their bodies were an afterthought, this man takes up space.

  “We have a ten o’clock,” Isabelle says. “Isabelle Rothman.”

  “Yep. Sit down.”

  There’s only a worn couch against one wall and a club chair of dubious color and condition in the corner. It probably was yellow once but now hovers somewhere between gray and beige and holds the imprint of a large man’s body in its cushions. She quickly chooses the sofa. The armchair seems too intimate. As she moves the books and papers from one small corner of the couch, piling them up on the middle pillow, he doesn’t attempt to help her.

  She puts her hands in her lap, draws her long legs up, knees touching, the toes of her shoes on the floor, not the soles. Neither one of them says anything. She’s waiting for him to speak. He’s too busy watching her.

  There are two large windows behind Daniel as he stands by his desk, and the bright morning light coming in behind him makes it difficult for Isabelle to read his face. Why isn’t he saying anything? Is he annoyed that she’s here? He read the first three chapters of her novel in progress and agreed to take her on, didn’t he? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he doesn’t remember what she wrote.

  “I sent you the first three chapters of my book. About the girl who commits crimes.” She can’t bring herself to ask, “Did you like them?” so she waits again.

  “Right,” he says as he rummages through the papers on his desk and on top of the table behind it, which runs underneath the windows. “Here they are!” he says triumphantly, as if he is totally surprised the pages exist.

  “ ‘Outlaw,’ ” he reads on the first page. “Pretty bold title,” he says, almost to himself, as he scans the pages.

  “She breaks into houses and steals things.”

  Daniel looks up at her in surprise, and Isabelle knows in that instant he hasn’t read her pages. And then she doesn’t know what to do. Should she call him on it? He’s had all winter break to read them. She dropped the chapters off in his campus mailbox weeks ago. Oh, why didn’t she listen to everyone and choose someone more dependable?

  Daniel unclutters the other end of the couch and sits down, her pages in his hand. They look at each other, and Isabelle has the uncanny feeling that the weight of his body has tipped the sofa on an angle and she’s having to work very hard not to slide down its length into his lap.

  Up close, Isabelle has redeeming features, Daniel sees. Her skin is beautiful, even as it flushes now in embarrassment at their predicament, or maybe in anger. She wears no makeup, he can tell, and hides her eyes behind bangs, which her long fingers flick away from her forehead from time to time. There’s nothing about her that says, “Look at me,” but he finds himself looking anyway.

  “Why this particular girl who takes this particular action?”

  Isabelle has no idea. “She came to me,” is what she says, and Daniel knows immediately what she means. He can write only when something comes to him.

  “Ah…” And then there’s silence as he quickly turns the pages, hoping for some clue.

  “You didn’t read them, did you?” Isabelle can’t believe she’s confronting him, but she’s angry. Furious, really—an untamed emotion she rarely feels. But how long does it take to read forty-seven pages? Isn’t the six weeks of winter break long enough?

  “I left them here, in the office,” he says, as if that’s an explanation. “By mistake.”

  She wants to say, And you couldn’t come get them? but she doesn’t. Instead she gets up, and so does he. Now they’re facing each other, and he sees that she’s tall for a girl. Isabelle, standing less than three feet from him, suddenly, gratefully, doesn’t feel too tall at all.

  “I’ll come back next week. Maybe you’ll have had a chance to read them by then.”

  He nods once, rakes his fingers through his hair, the color of beach sand. Doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t promise. And she walks out of the office with his eyes following her.

  —

  DANIEL COLLAPSES INTO HIS ARMCHAIR as the door closes, overcome with regret. But there was no way, simply no way, that he could tell this girl that the walk from his house to his campus office was too difficult for him to navigate, that even the contemplation of it produced anxiety too great for him to handle. It’s a miracle that he made it today. Well, that’s how he feels every time he makes it—that it is only through the grace of God that he manages the ten-minute walk.

  He knows what his condition is called: agoraphobia. When the thought of walking outside his front door began to give him sweats and heart palpitations, he went to the doctor. And after all the requisite tests for heart disease and endocrine problems and whatever else t
he doctor had to rule out, the proper diagnosis was given to him. The problem is, the cure is iffy and involves therapy, which he refuses to consider, and medication, which he’s afraid will interfere with his work. It’s a humiliating problem and he keeps it to himself.

  —

  “I’M NOT GOING BACK,” Isabelle spouts suddenly into the muffled air of Brighton Library. It’s late afternoon; the library is crowded but very quiet—the scrape of chairs being pulled out, the soft plop of a book being dropped onto a wooden table, even the slight snoring of a boy at the next table whose head is pillowed by a well-used backpack.

  Her boyfriend, Nate, sitting next to her highlighting his criminology textbook, shrugs and whispers back, “Okay,” and returns to his book.

  “He made me ask him if he’d read the pages!”

  “Right, then find someone else to work with.” He’s really not interested.

  “It was degrading. The whole thing.” Isabelle is fairly hissing her opinion. An older man across the table wearing half glasses and a pained expression shushes her.

  Nate points to the textbook, the man watching them. “Work to do. This is a library. We’ve talked about this already.”

  “Okay.” She’s quiet for ten seconds, fifteen. Then: “But I mean it.”

  Nate pretends she hasn’t spoken.

  —

  AT THE END OF THE DAY, as twilight creeps into his office, Daniel stands at one of the large square windows and watches the campus empty out. He knows that if he were outside and the day were clear enough, he might be able to see the Pacific Ocean in the far distance as it absorbs the last rays of the lowering sun, but those days appear to be over—the days when he feels comfortable outside.