Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  They walk across the rapidly darkening campus, two tall men keeping pace, Stefan thinner and rangier than his father. Daniel walks with his head down, concentrating on his feet. The last thing he wants is for some student to stop and talk to him. That would be a disaster, Daniel believes. The kid would be able to see the panic in his eyes, fear that has no cause he can pinpoint, no cure he can find.

  “So I was like, killing time, you know,” Stefan tells him tentatively, still unsure how to relate to this large presence walking beside him, “before five thirty when I had to be here, and I went in to watch the basketball team practice, and here’s the thought I had, Dad—I could play with them.”

  “You’d have to attend college first. Something you refuse to do.”

  “No, I’m just saying that I’m like…well, good enough to play with them. Well, maybe except for that Mohammed guy. He’s awesome. He’ll be drafted first round for sure.”

  More walking. More silence from Daniel. Stefan steals a sideways look at him and ventures a suggestion. “Maybe we can take in one of their games.”

  Daniel looks up at his son and his expression says it all: Are you crazy? And Stefan immediately understands his mistake and backtracks. “Oh, okay, right, too many people at a game. I get it.”

  Daniel nods and grunts. He quickens his steps. He wants nothing more than to be inside his house.

  “When are you going to get done with this thing, Dad?”

  “When are you going to get a job?”

  Stefan shrugs. He has no idea.

  “And there we have it—two unknowables.”

  —

  THE NEXT TUESDAY MORNING Daniel finds himself eager to get to campus, a feeling he can’t remember having had in the more than three years he’s been at Chandler. He has a hunch, or maybe just a gleam of a hope—something that’s in short supply in his life—that Isabelle will bring him pages he’ll be glad to read.

  “Let’s get a move on,” he tells his son, who is hunched over, elbows on the kitchen table, reading the sports section of the L.A. Times. It’s basketball season, and there’s plenty to read.

  Stefan glances at the clock above the stove. “We’ve got time,” and goes back to reading all the box scores of all the basketball games played anywhere across the country.

  Daniel doesn’t argue. He simply takes the paper from his son’s hands, folds it, puts it on the pile of the rest of the unread paper, and says calmly, “Time to go.”

  —

  ISABELLE CAN’T MAKE HERSELF LEAVE the bathroom. She hates the way she looks this morning. Well, okay, she hates the way she looks most every morning. She’s too tall, ungainly, she thinks. She wishes her hair weren’t such a nondescript brown and that it was thicker. She’d kill for some natural highlights. Her mother is beautiful. Every relative from the Abramowicz side of the family, her mother’s side, will sooner or later come forth with the same sentence: “Oh, Isabelle, your mother could have been a movie star!” But Isabelle came out looking like her father. Yes, Isabelle tells herself as she stares back into her own brown eyes, you look just like a tax attorney.

  She pulls her hair away from her face and wraps it up against the back of her head. No, she decides, and brushes it back into its customary curtain, which hugs both cheeks and is her fallback position. More hair, less face—much better.

  You’ve got to get out of here, she tells her reflection. You’re going to be late.

  The last thing she wants to do today is face Daniel Jablonski. She is certain, absolutely certain, that although she’s rewritten the first twelve pages, she hasn’t come up with anything that will surprise him, and the idea that she may, almost certainly will, disappoint him is unbearable to her.

  Only Jilly, knocking on the bathroom door, forces her out into the hall. Jilly, whose attire of choice seems always to be pajamas, is half asleep as she brushes past Isabelle, muttering, “Gotta pee,” and closes the bathroom door.

  In the kitchen, Nate is peeling an orange, drinking a mug of coffee, and studying. He says “Hey” to her without looking up from his book. “I’ll be ready in, like, five minutes.”

  And suddenly Isabelle can’t bear the thought of walking to campus with him, listening to him talk about the test he’s studying for, because she knows Nate well enough to know that if there’s a test waiting for him, that’s what he’ll talk about. She needs to get her head straight before she enters Daniel Jablonski’s office.

  “I’ve got to go now,” she says without waiting for his response and is out of the kitchen, down the hall, out the front door.

  —

  DANIEL IS READY FOR ISABELLE, sitting at his desk, when she knocks lightly and walks in. He watches her come in, does a quick inventory of how she looks. Without a word from either of them, she hands him the new pages, his eyes eager to read what she’s brought.

  It’s beyond unbearable, but she has to stay in his office as he reads the pages, so she begins to walk around it. Her back to him, she pretends interest in the books in his bookshelves, the view outside his window.

  It’s only twelve pages, but he takes forever to read them. Maybe he’s reading them more than once. Isabelle doesn’t know, because she’s consciously not looking at him. Finally, her curiosity gets intolerable and she finds herself turning around.

  The pages are on his desk. As he finishes one, he carefully picks it up, turns it over, and places it in another pile. His concentration is total. She could disrobe and he wouldn’t even see her. Now why did I even think about that? Isabelle asks herself, mortified and already blushing at her own thoughts.

  She sits on the couch, in her place at the corner nearest his desk, hunched over her drawn-up knees as she was the first day, and watches him read her work. She can’t help it. She watches. It’s excruciating.

  Daniel is focused so intently on the pages that he doesn’t even feel her eyes on him. At long last, he takes the last page, picks it up and lays it on the pile of read pages, and looks up at her.

  “I like what she says to the hitchhiker when he gets into her car.” And here Daniel picks up page 4, which he’s dog-eared, and reads from it: “ ‘You talk to me while I’m driving, I’ll stop the fucking car. Middle of traffic. On the highway. I don’t care.’ ”

  And Isabelle finds she can breathe again. “It’s Melanie being tough.”

  “I see that, but it’s just over the top enough for me to understand she’s working herself up to it. She’s talking like some stiff from New Jersey, so she’s probably scared of this kid.”

  “Yes, she is! You got that?”

  “And she wants to set the dynamic—‘You better watch your ass with me.’ ”

  “She behaves the opposite of what she’s feeling.”

  Daniel nods. He knows something about that. “You let us see that. That’s good.”

  That’s good, he said. What I wrote is good. Isabelle smiles and leans back, puts the soles of her feet on the floor, unclenches her hands and lays one on the armrest of the sofa. Something has loosened within her. He’s validated her instincts—how amazing is that!

  Daniel pushes away from his desk, opens a lower drawer with his foot, and props both feet on it. They look at each other. There’s a lull, but the tension has drained from the room and each can take a deeper breath. This is going to work. They’ve both decided at the same time without a word being spoken about it.

  After watching her in silence, Daniel finally speaks. “No boots today?”

  Isabelle looks down at her Nike sneakers and says the first thing that pops into her head. “Today I was beyond help. Even my boots wouldn’t have made me feel like an equal.” And then she looks directly at him. “Today I was throwing myself on your mercy.”

  “And how did I do?”

  “You surprised me,” Isabelle says with a smile, and Daniel grins back at her, appreciating this tall, lanky girl who has filled his office with something like a sensation of pleasure long missing from his life.

  —

>   “TELL ME MORE ABOUT MELANIE,” Daniel says when Isabelle walks into his office the next Tuesday. He doesn’t read the pages she hands him, the rest of Chapter One. He lays them on his surprisingly neat desk, pushes back in his rolling desk chair, thumps his feet onto his opened drawer, laces his fingers behind his head, and waits.

  “Aren’t you going to read the pages?”

  “Not right now. Now I want you to talk.”

  Isabelle wasn’t prepared for this. Is that the point? she wonders. Has he calculated a way to catch her off guard?

  “She grew up with a lot of expectations.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, the usual.”

  “I don’t know ‘the usual.’ My expectations, I guarantee you, weren’t yours.”

  Isabelle finds her spot on the couch, moves a basketball out of the way so she can sit down. She wants to ask him what his expectations were, but she’s not sure that’s allowed. In a rush of courage she does it anyway. “What were yours?”

  And he answers without hesitation. “That I follow my father and older brother into the trades. They were ironworkers. Do you know what that is?”

  Isabelle shakes her head.

  “Every bridge you see, every skyscraper, the skeleton was forged by ironworkers. Men who don’t need to be especially smart, but they sure have to have a strong back and be built like an ox.” Daniel looks at his own large body, now gone to flab, and shakes his head. “Once I fit the bill.”

  “And so you did that?”

  “Anything but. I loaded cargo onto and off the ships on Lake Erie. I painted houses. I hung drywall. None of that much better than being an ironworker, but at least I could say it was my choice.” Daniel shakes his head at his own youthful naïveté. “Even though it wasn’t, of course. No skills, no choices.”

  “Sometimes you can have skills and it can still seem like there are no choices.”

  “We’re back to the expectations again.”

  “Yes. The expectations Melanie had laid on her made her rob houses.”

  Daniel laughs out loud, a big whooping laugh. He’s delighted at her complete lapse in logic. “You’d better explain yourself.”

  “That doesn’t make sense to you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Isabelle pushes herself off the couch and begins to walk around Daniel’s office. Sometimes she needs to move to think. Daniel watches her, silent. He knows how to do that. The student gossip on that score was right—sometimes he lets an entire hour go by without speaking.

  Today Isabelle is wearing a Chandler College hoodie zipped up over a T-shirt. The school colors are orange and black, and Daniel has never been able to get over the perception that the whole campus is perpetually celebrating Halloween. She pulls the hood over her head, encasing herself in black cotton knit and hiding her face. She needs to shut him out to be able to organize her thoughts.

  “It’s different being female,” she begins. “You’ve got society’s expectations of you, which are really rigid, and your parents’ expectations, which can be idiosyncratic, but still, and sometimes the only way to break through those two straitjackets is to burst out of them, do something so dramatic that there’s no going back. That’s what Melanie does. She doesn’t want to become the person everyone else sees.”

  “Which is?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—good, kind, responsible, predictable…boring.”

  “Nothing worse than boring.” Is he teasing her gently? She thinks so but doesn’t know him well enough to be sure.

  She stops her pacing and faces him. “Melanie wants to shock everyone into backing off.”

  “So that she can be…what?”

  “Free,” jumps out of Isabelle’s mouth.

  “Being an outlaw makes her free?”

  “She chooses it.”

  “No,” Daniel says slowly, “she is acting in reaction to, just the way I ended up loading ships. It’s not a free choice, a choice that comes from the core of a person.”

  “Like?”

  “Like writing.”

  “Oh.”

  He watches her face as she attempts to sort through what they’ve just said. Such an easy read, all the emotions flitting across her face in rapid succession. He’s sure she has no idea.

  “Writing is a sort of freedom?” she asks finally, tentatively.

  “At its best, it can be.”

  And there’s silence. What they’ve just said feels so intimate that Isabelle doesn’t know how to proceed. How do you get there? she longs to ask but can’t. How do you get to be free?

  “Melanie robs houses for the same reason some people join the Peace Corps.” She expects Daniel to laugh again at her logic, but he doesn’t.

  “She needs the space.” He completely understands.

  “There are so many people hovering.”

  “Expecting things of her.”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay, that makes sense.”

  And Isabelle beams.

  “So now you need to get that into the pages.”

  And the smile vanishes. “How?”

  “How indeed,” he says.

  —

  “HE SAID, ‘HOW INDEED’? REALLY? HE DID?” Jilly’s voice rises in an incredulous crescendo. The four roommates are sitting around their kitchen table drinking beer (Nate and Isabelle) and wine (Jilly) and eating pretzels (Deepti), along with sliced salami, which everyone but Deepti is eating as their dinner.

  When Jilly isn’t sleeping she tends to be assertive or, to be less charitable, aggressive. Her opinions are always stated at high volume and with no ambiguity. Deepti often watches Jilly openmouthed and fascinated.

  “Isn’t he supposed to be telling you ‘how indeed’ to do it?” Jilly won’t let up. “Isn’t that the whole point of an independent study?”

  Isabelle shrugs. “I have no idea how this one-on-one is supposed to work. I’ve never done it before.”

  “I’m with Jilly,” Nate chimes in. He loves living with three women and listening to them talk. Guys don’t talk the same way. Hell, guys don’t talk much at all, and he’s a verbal guy. He likes the give-and-take. He likes the arguments, but he especially likes to win the arguments, and with three women he usually does. He’s supremely confident that he’s going to make a very capable criminal attorney.

  “Chandler is paying him, right? His job is to teach you to write better, is it not?”

  Isabelle shrugs. Is it not? When Nate starts using phrases like that, she knows enough not to engage. Inside his head he’s playing out some kind of game, and she doesn’t want Daniel Jablonski to be the football they kick back and forth until Nate wins his point.

  “That’s all you’ve got, a shrug?” Nate leans forward, his body in what Isabelle has privately labeled his attack mode, index finger pointing. “You know he’s on thin ice already? He’s got a reputation as a slacker, you know that, and you’re having the exact fucked-up experience you could have predicted, right?”

  “He wrote two amazing novels, Nate.” Isabelle can’t help herself. She has to say it.

  “Like maybe twenty years ago. They don’t count.”

  “Of course they count. He wrote them.”

  Nate sits back in his chair now, crosses his arms. “Circular logic.”

  Isabelle should let it go, she knows that, because Nate will never understand why she is desperate to work with Daniel Jablonski—the reward-to-effort ratio doesn’t pan out for him. But there she is, with the need to defend him, Daniel, as she now thinks of him.

  She starts talking quietly and slowly, as if her tone and pace can lower the agitation level in the kitchen to a simmer. “Maybe when he says, ‘How indeed?’ what he’s really saying is that writing is baffling.” Isabelle looks first at Deepti, the most sympathetic listener at the table, then Jilly. She doesn’t look at Nate. “That he has as much trouble doing it well as anyone else.” And then Isabelle lays her fledgling hope on the table. “And that maybe he sees me as part of the
group…as a writer.”

  There, she’s said it, and nobody is laughing, not even Nate, and so she’s emboldened and she continues. “Maybe what he’s saying is that we’re all trying to find the exact words to convey what we need to say, even if we don’t exactly know what that is until we write it.”

  “Well, there’s a recipe for success.” This from Nate as he gets up. The sarcasm in his voice ends the conversation and makes Isabelle feel dismissed and stupid. Did she really think he was hearing her?

  “It works for me, Nate.”

  He stops at the doorway and looks at her. “Really? And you got all that from a ‘how indeed?’?” He shakes his head. “A little creative writing going on in your explanation, maybe?”

  And Isabelle has been shamed into silence.

  “I’ve got a real paper to write.” And he’s gone.

  “Men,” Jilly says, “they’re all bullies.” And that assessment sits on the table among the three women until they hear Nate go into the bedroom and close the door.

  “You understand something about this professor, Isabelle, and he understands you, no?” Deepti’s voice is quiet, to keep Nate from hearing, to soothe Isabelle a little, because Deepti can see she is agitated.

  “Sometimes it feels like that, which is weird, because we barely know each other.”

  “In this life, perhaps.”

  “Oh, Deepti.” And Isabelle smiles at her, shaking her head; they’ve had this discussion of reincarnation and karma and old souls before.

  “There is more than we know,” is all Deepti says now, with a shrug and a small smile, and to Isabelle’s surprise, Jilly agrees.

  “There better be more than we know or else what’s the fucking point?”

  At that, both Isabelle and Deepti laugh, Deepti hiding her grin behind her hand, slightly scandalized still by Jilly’s language. And Nate is forgotten as the women sit in the warm kitchen and begin telling stories to each other.