Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  Deepti tells Jilly a bit more about reincarnation and how she sat beside her grandmother’s bed and watched her die. And about how she could actually feel, almost see, the life force escaping from her body at the moment of death. “One moment she was breathing and she was my grandmother, and then the next it all stopped and she became something, someone, else. Her face altered immediately. I can’t tell you how exactly, but her face in death wasn’t my grandmother’s. Something was gone from her. That’s the soul, I believe, and it will go on living somewhere else.”

  “Maybe,” Jilly says, and Isabelle looks at her sharply. Jilly, who tends to be so skeptical and caustic, isn’t dismissing the notion out of hand.

  “You really believe that—that the soul migrates?” Isabelle insists.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never witnessed a death. Have you?”

  Isabelle shakes her head.

  “So let’s go with Deepti’s version—you and this professor of yours knew each other in a previous life, or your souls did.”

  “Oh, Jilly, please.”

  “Maybe he was your neighbor and you saw him coming back from the market every day with onions and carrots sticking out of his grocery bag.”

  “Much too mundane for the connection we have.” Isabelle is teasing, but not completely, and Deepti watches her banter with Jilly without saying anything.

  “Okay, maybe he was your teacher in a past life and that relationship shadows this one. That’s what you feel.”

  Isabelle shakes her head.

  “What do you lose by believing that?” Here is Jilly beginning to push her point of view again for the sake of winning the debate. This Jilly, Isabelle recognizes.

  “It’s comforting,” Isabelle says finally, because she doesn’t want to argue with Jilly or because she’d like to believe it, or both. She doesn’t know.

  —

  MUCH LATER ON, WHEN THE HOUSE is that stark quiet of 3 a.m. and the three women are sleeping, Nate gets up from his laptop and slips into bed beside Isabelle. He gathers her warm body into his arms and she stirs, hardly awake, and then settles back into sleep.

  “I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he says very softly into her ear.

  “Mmmmm.” She has no idea what he’s talking about, but she wants nothing more than sleep.

  “That whole business about Jablonski and you—it’s a setup for disappointment, and I’m trying to prepare you.”

  He’s apologizing, Isabelle understands immediately. This is his way of doing it, obliquely, never head-on, but still…

  “Okay,” she says, and burrows deeper into his arms. That’s why she’s with him, she tells herself, because he cares about what happens to her. All the rest doesn’t matter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Daniel gets up early on Tuesday morning and rereads Isabelle’s pages from the week before. They never got around to discussing them because Isabelle, emboldened by their discussion of writing and freedom, asked Daniel about his first two novels. How he came to write them. And how much he took from his personal life, since the first one was about a man coming to terms with his difficult father’s death and the second about a divorce.

  “Everything,” Daniel told her. “I stripped my life bare.”

  “Without regard to the people you might hurt?”

  “My father was dead and my ex-wife thought I had been overly kind to her in the book. Not in real life, I might add.”

  “Don’t you have a responsibility, though, to the people who care about you?”

  “Don’t you have a responsibility to the work you are doing?”

  “Which is?”

  “To tell the truth, as you see it.”

  “Despite—?”

  He cut her off. “Despite.”

  Today he has to talk to her about the pages that complete Chapter One. What he realizes as he rereads them in the tiny back sunroom that he’s turned into his home office is that she has to get out of her own way. When she does, her writing is interesting; when she doesn’t, he feels like tossing the pages in the trash bin.

  —

  STEFAN, QUIET THIS MORNING, walks his father to campus. Daniel is grateful for the lack of strained conversation. The silence allows him to focus on his rising tide of panic, the tingling he feels along both arms, his ragged breathing, the sweat accumulating under his arms and across his palms, the certainty that he’s building up to a heart attack, the terror that he’s going to pass out here, on campus, in full view. Breathe in, he tells himself with one step, breathe out with the next.

  “It’s a waste of time, you know,” Stefan says finally as they’re passing in front of the science building, Dunham Hall, and Daniel looks at his son, really for the first time this morning. That’s the thing about a panic disorder: it tends to fill up a person’s consciousness. Now he sees that Stefan is dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans without holes in them, a miracle in and of itself. He must have yet another job interview.

  “You go in with that attitude, you’re guaranteeing it’s a waste of time.”

  “You’re telling me it’s mind over matter?”

  “Something like that.” Daniel can’t have this conversation now, out in the open, while he’s walking. It takes too much concentration simply not to pass out.

  “I just walk into the interview with a positive attitude and everything works out?”

  Daniel grunts, puts his head down, walks faster. They cross the quad in front of the student union, only the stone steps—there are twenty-seven of them; Daniel counts them every time—to go before they’re in front of Lathrop Hall.

  “Why don’t you try that yourself, Dad, and tell me how it works out?”

  Daniel hears the anger in his son’s voice but he can’t deal with it now. Nothing matters except getting to his office. He opens the heavy door into Lathrop—finally, inside!—and takes the stairs with long strides.

  The two men reach the second-floor landing together, anxiety fueling the father, anger fueling his son. Daniel doesn’t stop; his focus is lasered on his office door, midway down the hall on the right. If he can get inside, he’ll be fine, he’ll be able to breathe, this thumping of his heart will quiet. He doesn’t see Isabelle leaning against the opposite wall, waiting for him, two white Starbucks cups in her hands.

  But Stefan sees her. “Hey—you waiting for my dad?”

  Oh, his son, of course. Isabelle can immediately see the resemblance—the high cheekbones, the blond hair that furrows away from a broad face. And the ice-blue eyes.

  Isabelle nods, but Daniel can only concentrate on getting his key into the door and the door open. He fumbles with it. Of course he does—his hands are shaking. Stefan doesn’t help; instead he directs his attention to Isabelle.

  “Stefan Jablonski,” he tells her.

  “Isabelle.”

  “You a writer?”

  She hesitates, then: “Your dad and I are trying to sort that out.”

  “Oh, you’re in trouble, then.” Daniel disappears into his office, gone from sight, so Stefan can say, “Can’t you find someone else to help you with that?”

  Isabelle looks at him, stunned. What a strange thing for a son to say. “I don’t want to find someone else.”

  “He’s got writer’s block, you know. He can’t help himself, so good luck with his helping you.”

  “Are you coming in?” Daniel bellows out the office door.

  Stefan turns to go. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Isabelle watches him walk down the hall, his shoulders hunched against some private trouble she doesn’t want to even think about now. Wow, angry kid.

  “Isabelle!” Another summons from inside the office, and she takes a deep breath, gathers her courage—it’s always hard for her to begin these meetings. What is he going to say? Did he like her pages? Does she have it within her to be a writer? Will he give her what she needs? All those questions are swirling in her brain as she forces herself to walk into the office, the two cappucci
nos in hand. She finds him in his customary place, sitting behind his desk.

  “You drink coffee?”

  “I’m not supposed to,” he says as he reaches for the white cup.

  She settles into her corner of the couch. They look at each other. Each samples the coffee. She waits. He pulls her pages from his briefcase and puts them in front of him on the desk. All eating up time. It feels like he doesn’t want to begin, and Isabelle tenses in anticipation.

  “You need to get out of your own way.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Too much head and not enough heart.”

  “Oh.”

  And she’s wounded. He can see that. She flicks her bangs over her eyes, a cover-up, and he curses himself silently. How can he put it so she understands? He tries again. “You need to stop thinking so much when you write and let your instinct take over—that’s when your writing takes off.” And then, more gently: “That’s when you have a voice.”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t…”

  “Here,” he says, “this is good. ‘She chose each house by its degree of difficulty. The more impenetrable, the bigger the high. The house on the corner had bars on its windows and a sign outside that read “Armed Security Detail.” Bingo! The jackpot!’ ”

  He looks at Isabelle, who seems to have been swallowed up by the corner of the couch. “I like that,” he tells her again, because she looks so miserable, “but not this.” And he pushes ahead because he wants her to see what he sees. “ ‘The moon cast a hoary glow across the backyard pool, turning it into quicksilver. The black branches of the apple tree waved in the wind like witches’ fingers pointing the way to the cellar door.’ ” He looks up again. Now she looks even more inconsolable.

  “Do you see the difference?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He’s exasperated. It’s so clear—the first is interesting, the second is derivative and overwritten. “Well, think about it,” he says, without a note of kindness in his voice.

  “You give me all these tasks and I have no idea how to accomplish them.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Maybe everyone is right. Maybe he isn’t up to it. Maybe she shouldn’t be here.

  “Well, yes, it’s a sort of…vote of confidence.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Well, that’s your problem.” What does she want of him?

  “It feels like a cop-out.”

  He starts to redden, a flush working its way up his neck. He’s trying with this girl, he really is, and she won’t meet him halfway.

  “Take a leap, dammit, Isabelle!”

  And she flinches at his tone—frustrated, angry, maybe dismissive.

  “You want to be Melanie, be Melanie.”

  And the lie comes flying out. “Who said I wanted to be—”

  “Have some guts!” he almost shouts, piercing her at the core of her worst and most shameful flaw.

  And now they’ve both said too much. She wants to scream at him, How am I supposed to do what you want? He bites his tongue to prevent an inappropriate apology from spilling forth, asking forgiveness for transgressions well beyond the scope of this student, this room.

  God, he wants it to be different with this girl. He pushes back from his desk. He can’t look at her. It’s better to stare out the window and let a cavern of silence swallow up their heated emotions.

  He hears her get up, walk to the door, open it. Then: “Why do writers have writer’s block?”

  He turns quickly, caught off guard as she had hoped, but he doesn’t hesitate. He tells her what he believes. “Self-loathing.”

  —

  REMORSE. AS FAMILIAR TO DANIEL as his own hand. A neat, smooth package with no corners or edges he can use to pick it open and air it out. A tight, hard ball of regret he turns over and over as the shadows lengthen in his office and he sits marooned in his dilapidated easy chair.

  —

  ISABELLE SWIMS LAPS IN THE campus pool. There’s no sound but the muffled slap of her arms through the water, no expectations beyond hitting each of the walls and turning toward the next. Whenever she wants the noise in her life to stop, Isabelle gets in a pool and does laps.

  In the middle of an unexceptional Tuesday morning, there are only a few other dedicated swimmers, as determined as Isabelle to finish their laps. She registers their presence peripherally, but the last thing she wants is to acknowledge any of them. She needs the isolation of the water. She needs to stop thinking.

  When she’s done, when she can no longer lift her tired arms one more time, there’s a calm that comes. And from that calm, she hopes, a sense of what to do.

  Walking home, her long hair wet and dripping, her body humming quietly with exhaustion, Isabelle realizes she has to apologize. He doesn’t deserve her anger.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY FINDS ISABELLE EXAMINING the dusty bookshelves of Seaman’s Rare and Used Books on Lorenzo Street, close to school. Unlike UCLA, which has transformed the part of Los Angeles known as Westwood into a college town, Chandler hasn’t managed to do much to gentrify the streets surrounding the campus.

  As beautiful as the college itself is, up a gently sloping hill from the urban sprawl, the city streets below it are a mixture of small appliance shops, fast-food restaurants—Popeyes, Burger King—and one sprawling mall anchored by a Food 4 Less and a 99 Cents Only Store. Here and there on the side streets are a few shops and a café or two which cater to the students and professors up the hill. Seaman’s is one of those.

  It is a tiny place, jam-packed with books stacked in piles on the floor and on chairs and crammed tightly onto flimsy shelves. The only way to find something is to devote several hours to browsing or ask Oscar, who is permanently installed, it seems, behind the front counter. He must be in his eighties, but it’s hard to tell. It’s entirely possible he’s in his sixties or even younger. He has the look of a person who never sees the light of day. Pasty skin, thinning white hair, rail thin, spine curved like a C, chain smoking. And always reading a book in poor light.

  There’s little light throughout the store. Isabelle can barely read the titles in the poetry section, which takes up a back corner of the store, but finally she finds what she’s looking for, a copy of Philip Levine’s What Work Is.

  She wants to take Daniel a small present, a way of apologizing for yesterday, and she remembers from an interview he once gave that Philip Levine, a working-class poet from Detroit, had had a huge influence on his decision to become a writer. If Daniel could write about what he knew—his own hardscrabble neighborhood of Erie, the men who broke their backs doing manual labor and broke their families with the resentment that kind of life causes—well, then, maybe he could become a writer, too.

  Finally she finds the slim volume with its brown cover and simple black-and-white photograph of a child at work in a factory and takes it to Oscar at the front desk. He never rings up a purchase without commenting upon it. He may well have read every book in his store.

  “He won the National Book Award for this collection, did you know?”

  Isabelle shakes her head. She doesn’t much like poetry; it seems a code she hasn’t yet cracked. “It’s a gift.”

  “So you want it gift wrapped?”

  She looks around the dusty counter with its ashtrays, cigarette butts, stacked books, and old magazines in teetering piles. “You gift wrap?”

  “Are you kidding me?” And he grins, his yellow teeth stained from decades of smoke poking through his thin lips. “I always ask just for the reaction.”

  “You’re a mean man, Oscar,” Isabelle says as she takes the small paper bag he finds for her book, and he chuckles.

  —

  SHE KNOWS WHERE DANIEL LIVES. In the small community of Chandler College, things like that are common knowledge. There’s a row of houses bordering the campus that the college rents out to professors at a much-reduced rate,
and with a couple of questions to the right people, it’s easy for Isabelle to find out which one is his.

  She walks there now. Her plan is to leave the book in his mailbox with a little note she’s already written. It simply says, Next Tuesday can we start over? Isabelle. She spent more than an hour trying out different messages, everything from an out-and-out apology to a note that didn’t mention what had happened between them at all. She feels guilty for exploiting what his son told her—that he has writer’s block—to wound him. She has no idea what he’s feeling—disappointed in her, probably, ready to wash his hands of her; she’s not sure. It never occurs to her that Daniel’s guilt may be exponentially larger than hers.

  He doesn’t have a mailbox, not the kind that stands on a post near the curb. He has a mail slot in his front door, which means she has to walk up the front path of his house and try to slip the book in silently.

  The problem is, there’s Daniel, watching her from one of the living room windows. So now what should she do? She realizes she has to ring the doorbell. She has to have some sort of interaction, which is the last thing she wants. Keep it short, she tells herself. Don’t make conversation. Leave quickly.

  When her foot reaches the doormat, a black rubber number with the school crest on it, Daniel opens the door. He’s barefoot, wearing old jeans that sag even on his ample frame, and a rumpled striped sweater with a tear along the neck seam. He hasn’t shaved and his beard is laced with white. He looks terrible. Older. He doesn’t say anything, simply waits for her to start.

  “I was at Oscar’s bookshop, you know, on Lorenzo, and I saw this book of poems, and I remembered that you said in some interview that Philip Levine was a strong influence for you, and I thought I’d pick it up and give it to you…” She trails off. He still hasn’t said anything. “You’ve probably got it anyway,” she says as she hands it to him.

  He shakes his head, then opens the door wider. “You want some coffee?”

  She doesn’t. She wants to go. This was a terrible idea, but she finds herself saying, “Sure.” Trapped again by indecision, by her inability to state what she’d like, she finds herself closing the front door behind her. She sees his retreating back off to the left, entering a room she assumes is the kitchen. He hasn’t said another word but she follows him.