“I worry about you,” she told Isadora. “You keep checking your palm, you hear me? You make sure that star is still riding in your flesh, nice and firm and high. It’s important. I want you to have a good, strong sense of who you are, of how special that is. Never mind what you can’t do right now, forget what anyone ever says about you; that star is your proof of being something. You’ve got to start opening yourself up, letting the gift happen. You listening to me?”
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as gifts,” said Isadora.
Duse shook her head. “Still the same stupid battle. You don’t have to know, you don’t have to believe. It doesn’t change what is, you know.”
Isadora didn’t want to argue. “Look,” she said. “There’s Daniel.”
Duse looked over at him. “You know,” she said. “I’ve never once seen a man with a star in his hand. I’ve had hundreds of hands just sweating their lives right into mine, but not one star in a male palm. I wonder if there are any.”
“Martin didn’t have a star.”
“No,” said Duse, “he didn’t. But he had other things, wonderful things.”
They both stood up when Daniel approached. He said he liked the way their red hair captured the light and held it.
“When you make definite plans, you call me,” Duse said. “I’ll get you any present you want.”
Isadora drove the whole way back, marking time with her hand, beating it against the wheel as she hummed to the radio. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said to Daniel, but he was asleep, his head dusting against the leather of the seats.
He was slow with making plans. Isadora, too, couldn’t be decisive about what she wanted. She only knew what it was that she didn’t want—a formal ceremony, a white dress, all sorts of people. They talked a little, but usually gave it up in favor of getting a pizza.
Isadora began writing again. She gave up the mysteries and began doing a little reporting, taking journalism classes and extra assignments. She was meticulous. She wouldn’t put anything in her work that wasn’t factual, and she found that she liked her work, she was good at it. “Maybe that’s my gift,” she told Duse, but Duse just sucked in a breath. “That’s not the same thing,” she told Isadora. “And you know it.”
Everyone seemed to be starting new lives. Allison had finished her thesis and was toying with the idea if moving to Boston with The Swimmer. She sulked out her decision at Daniel’s, her head buried in her arms. She wanted them to tell her what to do. “Maybe I shouldn’t do anything at all,” Allison said. “Maybe no one should.”
“I’m getting married,” said Daniel, almost defiantly.
“What?” said Allison. “And before I’ve told Isadora half of the horrors you do?”
“I know all about it,” said Isadora, trying to keep her voice bright.
Daniel was studying Allison. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re really angry.”
“Nothing. Everything’s fine,” she said. She dug her hands deep into her pockets, pushing them so roughly she made tiny rips in the seams.
“Come on, take a walk with me.” He looped an arm about her. “We always could talk things out that way.” He turned to Isadora; he said they would be right back.
Isadora didn’t get up to peer out the window until she heard them leave. She strained at the impossible angle of the glass. It cut them from her sight, made them invisible.
He wasn’t gone long, but he came back alone. “What is it?” Isadora said.
“Nostalgia,” said Daniel. “She just had this idea in her head of what it was like to be married to me; my going to marry you made her want that idea back, I guess. Don’t, Isadora, stop looking like that. She wants the idea, not the reality. And anyway, her idea of what it was like when we were married isn’t the same as mine. I think it never was, maybe that was the whole problem between us.”
“Daniel,” said Isadora, “we love each other, don’t we?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“No kind at all,” she said, and then she stood up. “I want to sleep,” she said. “You coming?”
She couldn’t feel as easy with Allison anymore. They were still friends, but whenever she tried to talk to Allison about Daniel, Allison glossed it over with jokes, she wouldn’t be serious. She began coming over to the house with The Swimmer, and when she talked, it was to him. Isadora watched them. They had all kinds of secret jokes and meaningful glances and she felt shut out and depressed. “Come on,” Daniel tried to soothe her. “She can like whomever she wants.”
Sometimes, too, Isadora caught Allison watching her, almost doing a study. It made her feel as though Allison expected something from her, it made her feel deficient. She couldn’t relax, she felt uncomfortable, and it wasn’t until she mentioned it to Duse that she got a response. Duse said that she had called the house once and Allison had answered, but she hadn’t liked the sound of Allison’s voice, she said there was something unfamiliar riding in it. “I don’t know why exactly,” Duse said. “There was just something in the cadences that bothered me.”
When Isadora thought about it, it was crazy. She had never put trust in Duse’s feelings, not anymore, but this one she carried with her, she pushed it to the back of her mind. This one lifted up the sudden raw guilt she was feeling, this one made her feel better, blameless.
16
Isadora became obsessed with the whole image of marriage. When she saw herself, it was always as attached to Daniel; she never allowed room for anything else, for anyone else. She was determined that she and Daniel would be different than Allison and Daniel. She didn’t want to replay any of their old life, anything that wasn’t really hers, and she wanted the marriage to be so good, so strong, that he’d never think of his past, he’d never have any wistful remembrances he might want to reenact.
She was through with solitude. She wanted to be with Daniel all the time now. That was who she was. He had always taken long, loose walks by himself and she had never really minded. She was always busy with her course work, cataloguing plants for botany, writing columns for journalism. She had always cherished privacy, the quiet, and too, she had liked how Daniel bounded back in to her, his face flushed from the night, the way he was bouncing with things to tell her. Now, though, she told him she wanted to come with him on his walks and at first, he seemed pleased.
She noticed he was happy too, to see her when she strode into the pet store to make him have lunch with her. He was pleased when she came by at his closing time to walk him home, even pleased when she would come into the bathroom and pull back the shower curtain to talk to him.
She wanted to be everywhere that he was. If he wanted to read, she would spread out her books beside him; they could be quiet together. If he wanted to see his friends, she would be there too. She tried to know his daily itinerary, and she often just showed up where she knew he would be.
The first time she noticed he was less than happy to see her, though, was when she showed up at a lunch he was having with one of his old college buddies. He had told her about the meeting, but his face changed when he saw her. He was polite enough, and the friend gave her a big smile and half of his salad, but he was moody on the way home.
“Couldn’t I talk over old times?” he said.
“I wasn’t stopping you.”
“But you were. I wanted to include you. You know how you get when you think I’m paying more attention to my friends than to you.
“I’m not like that anymore,” said Isadora. “At least I try not to be. Wasn’t I nice to your friend?”
“That’s not the point.”
She took his hand, she rubbed his fingers. “Smile,” she said, not stopping until he did.
He was going out for a walk and she bounded up to come. “Is—” he said. “I kind of want to go by myself. Is that okay?” She shrugged, but she was hurt by the relief in his face, and that night she bit every nail on her left hand.
She kept track of the walks he
seemed to need to take. It was humiliating for her. It made her need to be with him even more and she found herself clutching. She found out one time from Allison that Daniel had helped her move a heavy chest of drawers one evening. “I bumped into him,” Allison said, but when Isadora asked Daniel, he was reticent, he said simply that it was no big deal and he wanted to know why she was asking about it in the first place. “I don’t know,” she said miserably.
“Isadora—” he sighed, and then the phone rang, and he let it go.
She came home one day and Daniel was out, so she laced up her brilliant red Keds and sprinted out to find him. She ran four blocks before she saw him, and she was too out of breath to call. He didn’t see her for another block, when he stopped to pat a dog, and when he turned, his face was suddenly irate. “What, are you following me?” he said.
“I wanted to be with you,” she said, still panting, hooking her body over so she could rest her hands on her knees.
“You could have shouted, you could have let me know you were behind me. You didn’t have to sneak up on me.” He shook his head. “Damn,” he said, but he let her join him.
They walked the suburbs, stalking back yards. Daniel showed her which dogs to avoid, which he could charm with the easy clapping of his two hands. He told Isadora some stories, and his mood seemed to brighten as he traveled. He said he had fallen in love with this clothesline in a back yard. “It was white,” he said. “The two metal poles holding it up looked like they were polished.” He had stopped to examine the metal. The sun was glinting and reflecting from it, and he wanted to run his hand along it to feel the captured heat. “This young kid ran out of the house screaming for me to get out, over and over. His voice was almost hysterical. I just couldn’t imagine someone getting so riled up so I tried to calm him. He just got madder, so I left.”
All that exploring left Daniel restless. “We should move,” he said. “Maybe it would be wonderful to leave a place just at the point when you were the most in love with it. You could carry that place with you that way, you could reach right in and feel your hand hard against it. It could even become a memory to cling to, something that would always stay good, and would always retain a little mystery to it, too, because you wouldn’t have had time to get jaded, to get bored and familiar. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good to leave when you feel like staying. I don’t want to become an Ann Arbor regular, part of the scene. Some of the people I see look as if they’re ready to turn right into cement.”
“We can move,” said Isadora. “I’ll go anywhere except Madison.
“Anywhere,” he said. “To the ends of the earth.”
She called Duse to feel her out about transferring to another school but Duse’s voice was clouded. She said she didn’t feel very well. The veiling over her speech made Isadora a little uneasy, but she shook it off. Duse had always been full of surprises.
Sometimes on their walks, Daniel seemed to forget Isadora. He would go right up to a front door and peer into the interior of a house, not stopping until the owner came out and asked what he thought he was doing. Isadora, embarrassed, would shift her weight on the pavement, would will the time to pass. Daniel could be a real charmer when he wanted. He complimented the owner of the house until he saw the face in front of him loosen. She heard him tell someone that he learned about lives by how people lived.
Sometimes they ran home in the dark, not seeing things cleanly against the darkness, bumping into trees, until Isadora sprinted ahead and ran, small and fast.
It was funny. The closer she tried to get to him, the more he pulled away. Sometimes at night she’d wrap her legs about him, she’d try to talk to him, but he’d just shake her off, he’d just say he was sleepy. If she persisted, he would stumble out of bed, and she would hear him fumbling in the bathroom, clicking out aspirins from a bottle. One particularly bad night, she heard him dialing the phone, and she got up, wrapping the blankets about her as she trailed into the kitchen and leaned in the doorway. He looked up and sighed at her, he told her to go back to bed, and when she wouldn’t, he hung up, he led her there himself. She didn’t ask who he was calling.
The one time he got really furious was when she opened a letter addressed to him. She wasn’t even thinking of it. She simply saw him as an extension of her own self—they inhabited each other, and she saw the letter as both of theirs. She had the letter unfolded when Daniel walked in and saw her and his face changed right in front of her. He was angry enough with her to be silent, and she trailed him telling him she was sorry, she didn’t think it mattered, and she only stopped her pleading when she saw how it was making him angrier, more distant, more unreachable. “I won’t do it again,” she said, but he just looked at her.
It was a Tuesday night. She was trying to finish a botany paper and Daniel was out on one of his jaunts. At least, she thought he was. He wasn’t home when she got in, and although he had promised to be better about letting her know where he was, there had been no note. It didn’t matter. She had work to do. She studied until ten, and then she went outside to buy Vogue. She wanted to thirst over all those clothes she didn’t think she would ever be able to afford, and that she knew she’d probably never wear anyway.
She came back an hour later to find Allison hovering over Daniel on the couch. Allison was wrapping ice cubes in a red face cloth, trying to secure the cloth so it would lie on Daniel’s head.
“Jesus, what’s wrong?” said Isadora. She felt everything tightening up inside of her and she moved her shoulders, her arms, to get rid of the stiffness.
His head was bruised with color, and he told her he had just taken one of Allison’s Percodans. “He knew I had every drug you’d ever want so he called me. All those years he did nothing but make fun of my pill passion, and now just look.”
Daniel looked at Isadora, lifted his hand to her, reaching out. “It’s only a baby’s bump. No big deal.”
He said he had been running around, sliding from neighborhood to neighborhood, when he found that metal laundry pole again. He had to look at it, had to touch it again, but he wasn’t paying attention, and there were all kinds of different-colored pieces of laundry flapping on the line. He ran smack into one of the poles, and it felled him, made him bump down to his hands and knees, all-foured like a suburban pet. His head dipped and he couldn’t seem to focus the pain out of his eyes. He tried to pull himself up, to unpeel one of his hands from the cement and lift it to his head to see if he was bleeding. He said he knew something was wrong, he kept worrying about staining the white cement with his red, about ruining one of the white sheets. He said he managed to lift his head up enough to see that same little kid staring out at him, pale and fearful, but when Daniel started to open his mouth, the kid shouted that no one was home. He kept shouting, he made Daniel wince with the sound, every word a blow. Daniel clapped his hands over his ears, muffling the shouts, trying to stop them from reverberating inside his skull. He got up, using his hands as suction cups to lead him along that house to the door, but the kid pulled the curtains.
Daniel managed to get to the next house where a woman let him in and gave him aspirin. She recognized him. “She said she used to see me tearing like a wild thing through the streets,” Daniel said, trying to grin. “I apologized to her, but she held up her hand, she told me it was entertaining.” She felt his head with her own, letting her feathery blonde hair dip into his face. She treated him as if he were a baby, and when she realized what she was doing, she pulled back, embarrassed. “That’s what happens when you spend all your time with kids,” she said. She called the house next door to reassure the little boy; she told Daniel he had been ruined by rigid parents, that they told him the Devil was waiting to tug him to hell by his heels if he misbehaved. “You ever see that kid walk?” the woman said. “He prances, he won’t keep his toes on the earth for one second longer than he has to.” Daniel rested his head on the cool linoleum of her table top and listened to the phone, to the way she worded her sentences. “He’ll be
dandy,” she said.
That woman wouldn’t let Daniel go home by foot, but insisted on driving him. “The kids are all at scout meeting with their father. He adores uniforms,” she said, making a wry face. She pulled on an old gravy-dotted blue jacket and she let him lean on her so she could get him into her car, a little white VW. She made him sit right beside her so she could brace herself against him if he tottered, so he could give her directions. “And make ’em good,” she said. “I get lost real easy.” Before he got out of the car, she slipped something into his pocket. When he pulled it out, when he unfolded that sheet of paper, he saw her phone number and her name. Jillian, it said.
“She looked like Allison,” Daniel said.
“Of course,” said Allison, “Daniel doesn’t like his mystery too mysterious.”
Isadora looked up at Allison, who was watching her. “I gotta get going,” Allison said, rising up. “The Swimmer’s waiting. You call if you need anything. I left a whole bottle of Peres on the table for you. Any left over, I want. Don’t you let him toss them out, Isadora.”
Isadora walked her to the door. “Typical Daniel, isn’t it,” said Allison.
“What?” said Isadora.
“Use your eyes, would you,” said Allison. “You really don’t need me to tell you what’s going on, do you?”
“What do you mean?” said Isadora.
“I gotta go,” said Allison. “Talk to Daniel. You tell each other things, don’t you?”
“Wait a minute—” said Isadora, but Allison was down the steps and was gone.
It was Scale who noticed something wrong. He stuttered his body into the bed the next morning, rumbling his throat at any other animal who tried to come up, too. He barked at the cats, he snapped at the parrot, and he bit Isadora, who smacked him with the flat of her hand. He nipped at whatever section of flesh he could find until she bodily picked him up and banished him from the room.
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