“I thought you might be a cabernet man,” Theo said. “A man who appreciates a good wine is the same man who appreciates a good woman, and you’ve chosen the best of them! After Izzy, of course, although I always said if Izzy hadn’t been available, Alice would have been next on my list.”
Alice laughed. “What makes you think I would have been interested?” she said, smiling.
“People used to marry a wife’s sister if the wife died,” Isabel said. “But I hope it won’t come to that.”
“Anyhow, Alice is taken now,” Anthony said, enfolding her hand in both of his.
“I suppose you could still have Tina,” Isabel said to Theo.
“To Alice and Anthony,” Theo said, raising his glass. “I wish you all the happiness of marriage. May your passion never fade, and your true understanding never dim.”
“A very nice toast,” Anthony said before he began to drink. Isabel couldn’t help thinking that Anthony was doubtless an expert. He must have been on the receiving end of many engagement toasts over the years.
Over Isabel’s pork roast they had the usual conversations: travel, work, restaurants, current events. Anthony and Theo did most of the talking, comparing notes on Brussels and Montreal, Striped Bass and Le Bec Fin. Theo maintained his tone of exaggerated enthusiasm verging on irony, but only Isabel seemed to notice. Or maybe his tone was entirely right and it was she who watched the whole evening with weary, jaded eyes. She felt as though she were seeing with a kind of double vision. On the one hand here were two handsome, happy people, very much in love, but behind them lurked the ghostly images of two more desperate characters: an aging woman, frightened of loneliness, and a man who had failed (twice) at an endeavor at which he now asked them to have faith he would succeed.
The conversation moved on to opera, comparing Maria Callas and Renée Fleming. Theo said, “One shades the high notes with more finesse, but the other’s vocal purity is so extraordinary.” How did he know these things?
“I’m taking Alice to Madama Butterfly next month. I couldn’t believe she’d never heard it sung.”
“Anthony’s a big opera fan,” Alice said. “I promised to go to one opera a month, and he has to come hear one salsa band a month.”
“Is Alice going to get you to take salsa lessons?” Isabel asked Anthony. “She’s been pestering me to do it with her for years.”
“I go to all these parties with people I work with,” Alice explained. “Everyone dances. I’ve taken a few lessons, but I’d like to get better.”
“I’d love to learn to salsa,” Anthony said. “I’m pretty good at the tango.”
Of course he is, Isabel thought.
“How do you like the wedding dress?” Theo asked Anthony. “I hear it’s magnificent.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Anthony said. “Alice is superstitious.”
“I’m not superstitious,” Alice protested. “I’m just enjoying all the trimmings of being engaged.”
“Might as well,” Theo said. “In a couple of months all the fun will be over, and you’ll be settled into the grind of married life. Just kidding, of course.”
There was a pause. The French doors to the patio stood open, and a breeze moved through the room, smelling of flowers and exhaust fumes.
Isabel turned to Anthony. “How’s your father?” she asked. “Alice says you visit him every week.”
Anthony’s father, aged eighty-six, was confined by dementia to a nursing home in Cherry Hill. “He’s all right. Thanks for asking. Sometimes he knows me. Mostly, though, he treats me with this terrible, blank politeness. He likes Alice, though.”
“Not that he has any idea who I am,” Alice said. “But he kisses my hand.”
“He was always chivalrous,” Anthony said. “He just doesn’t know where he is.”
“He keeps asking for Anthony’s mother,” Alice said. “We don’t know what to tell him. He divorced her twenty years ago! Anthony’s poor stepmother goes to see him nearly every day, and he just looks at her and says, ‘Where’s Charlotte? When is Charlotte coming?’ Anthony says he spent as little time as possible with Charlotte when he was married to her. He worked all the time, and when he wasn’t working he was playing golf.”
Isabel had a flash of Anthony in a nursing home in thirty years saying to Alice, “Where’s Martha?” Or Janet, or Louise. Isabel didn’t know the names of his former wives. She had just recently learned the names of his children: Skye and Eugenie. Alice had always said that when she had children she would name them Paul and Ann.
“My friend Simon sends his regards to you,” Anthony said to Isabel. “I told him I was coming tonight and he made a special point of it.”
“Who’s Simon?” Theo asked Isabel.
“He’s the one Anthony brought to the anniversary party,” Isabel said. She felt hemmed in on all sides by irony, first Theo’s and now, through Anthony, Simon’s.
“He’s a reporter for the Inquirer,” Anthony told Theo. “He’s very good. He even had an offer once to write for The New York Times, but he wasn’t interested.”
“Why not?” Isabel asked.
“They would have had to move to New York. Marla was dying to go, but Simon said he was a Philadelphian and he was going to stay in Philadelphia.”
“That’s how Isabel feels, too,” Theo said. “She says she likes Philadelphia because everybody says what a terrible place it is.”
“I never said that,” Isabel protested. “I might have said that Philadelphia was pleasantly undiscovered.”
“She’s very strong-minded,” Theo told Anthony. “All these Rubin women are, you should know that. They always win all the arguments.”
“I wish I did,” Isabel said.
“Just so you know where you stand,” Theo said to Anthony.
“Of course, the whole point of marriage is two people making decisions together,” Alice said.
“Yes,” Anthony agreed. “If a person is very stubborn, it can be hard on a marriage. That’s why Marla ended up leaving Simon.”
Isabel was grateful to him for moving the conversation to less personal ground. The comment made her wonder what had ended his marriages, but she only said, “Because he wouldn’t move to New York?”
“That was part of it. Another time he turned down a promotion. They were going to make him an editor, but he said no. He said he liked writing. Marla was furious.”
“I don’t see that it’s one spouse’s business what the other one chooses to do for a living,” Isabel said, thinking about her own feelings when Theo entered the corporate world.
“They needed the money,” Anthony said. “Marla stopped working when the children were born, of course. And Simon insists on living in the city. If he had taken the editor’s job, they could have afforded private-school tuition and a house that wasn’t falling down.”
Theo said, “I hope you don’t think Alice is going to quit her job to stay home with babies.”
Anthony smiled. “I’m not worried about Alice,” he said.
But Isabel was.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next morning when Isabel got out of bed, her face in the bathroom mirror stared back at her with weary blankness. There were deep creases between her eyes and more gray in her hair than she had noticed before. Time was rushing on, it wouldn’t wait for her to sort out her life. Alice would be forty a year from November, and then Isabel would be next. She knew how relieved her sister was not to face that threshold single. Isabel thought about how she would feel if she entered her forties without a child. She knew if she didn’t have one by then, she probably never would. At the thought, panic fluttered through her like an illness. Panic could make you stupid. It could make you choose the wrong door. Was that what Alice was doing? Was there any way of knowing now—or could you never know until it was too late?
It wasn’t that Isabel didn’t like Anthony. She did like him, and anyone could see how happy Alice was. Isabel had spent years waiting for Alice’s happiness, but now th
at it had arrived, nothing felt right. She went downstairs. Theo was already shaved and showered, dressed in his new beige suit. She said, “I don’t know what to do about Alice.”
Theo was looking through the papers in his briefcase. “There’s nothing to do,” he said.
“I keep looking at her and imagining how she’ll look when he tells her he’s leaving her.”
“It seems to me they have as much of a chance at being happy as anyone,” Theo said.
Isabel looked at Theo’s slicked-back hair and his white shirt filled out by his broad chest. He reminded her of a Komodo dragon, slick and fast and dangerous. She formed the words inside her head: We need to talk about how things are with us. She needed to strike the right tone, to be calm, not to blame him. But how could she do that when she did blame him? When she was afraid of what would happen if she spoke to him? Theo had shut his briefcase and retied his shoe. I never used to be such a coward, she thought. She said, “I want to talk to you.”
Theo was already at the door. “I don’t think it’ll make any difference,” he said over his shoulder. Then the door shut behind him. Isabel didn’t know whether he even knew what she was talking about. Maybe he thought she was still talking about Alice.
The phone rang.
“Cousin Isabella!” Soren Zank said. His voice burst across the telephone line. “I’m calling to follow up on your promise to give a talk at my nature center. We have an opening later in the month.”
Cousin Isabella! It was so absurd, it was almost charming. “Oh,” she said, pulling herself back with an effort to the sunny, slippery, everyday surface of life. “I don’t know.”
“I’d love to tell you about the Zank Center,” Soren said. “Face-to-face. What a coincidence, but I happen to be in your neighborhood.”
“I can meet you at the Xando on the corner of Walnut in half an hour,” Isabel said, though it was obvious he had hoped to be invited to the house.
The Xando was the café where Isabel had discussed deceit with Valerie Fullerton. Soren was already there when Isabel arrived, and he embraced her as he had the first time they met, crushing her breasts against the waffle weave of his shirt.
“You look wonderful,” he said when they had sat down at a table in a quiet corner that was immediately far less quiet. Soren seemed too big for his chair, partly because of the way he waved his arms when he spoke, like a dog who can’t stop wagging its tail. “I like a woman who doesn’t dye her hair. What’s a little gray, after all? Just a sign that we’re human! We’re mortal. I grow my beard for the same reason. Why fight nature? What’s the point?”
Isabel smiled. “Why wear clothes, either? Or take showers? Or drive?”
“You’re teasing me,” he said, returning her smile. “But animals wash. It prevents disease. As for driving a car, I always prefer to walk when there’s a choice, like your American Thoreau says in Walden. And I’d be happy to do without clothes if I thought I wouldn’t get arrested.”
“How about at home?” Isabel asked. “With the curtains shut.”
“Oh, absolutely! And I spend a month at the Esalen Institute every year, just to discharge my batteries. Most people go nude there, it’s very peaceful. Or, if you have your eye on someone, so much the better! Desire announces itself, not to mention being more quickly satisfied.”
“Some people think overcoming obstacles is part of the fun,” Isabel said.
“I won’t argue with you. There are different methods for different seasons. Variety is spice, no?” He leaned across the table. Isabel was glad for the approach of the waiter, who took Soren’s order for a soy milk latte and her own for a cup of tea.
“Tell me about the nature center,” she said when the waiter had gone.
Soren’s pale Viking eyes lit up, and his strong-featured face became suffused with pleasure. “The Zank Center started with a donation of land from one of the old estates. Inheritance taxes are so high, many heirs can’t afford to hold on to the properties. We’ve gobbled up almost two hundred acres by now.”
“Gobbled?” She was amused to see that his eyes held the same gleam when he talked about his nature center as they did when he was talking about sex.
“Better us than the developers! Better us than the pharmaceutical companies! We’ve turned the main house into an education classroom. Conservation people come and talk to kids about what they can do to save the earth. We had one guy come and talk about organic farming. Someone else explained about the destruction of the rain forest. It was very nice. And then at the end the children could use their dollars and quarters to buy endangered land in Brazil.”
“What if they didn’t want to?” Isabel asked, half-appalled and half-amused.
“We have other little things. Stickers and coloring books. To raise money for the center.”
“Well, I’m afraid I’m not a conservationist,” Isabel said. “Or an idealist, either.”
“I disagree. I think you are an idealist,” Soren said. He leaned across the table again, and she could smell him, a strong smell of woodsmoke and laundry detergent and beard. “I think anyone looking at you could see that you’re not willing to settle for second best.”
Isabel leaned back in her chair, holding her cup of tea in front of her. “I guess I could talk about frogs.”
“You have the most beautiful eyes,” he said. “Like deep pools in a forest where nobody ever goes.”
“Soren,” Isabel said.
“Please,” he said. “I can see you’re unhappy! Anyone can see it. And I know why. I know you haven’t been able to conceive.”
Isabel, who had been only amused and slightly irritated, was now shocked and angry. “How do you know that?” she asked. But she knew how.
“I’m a member of the family, after all,” Soren said. “Your mother knows I would never tell anyone. What she doesn’t know is that I can help! I can help you, Cousin Isabella, if you’ll let me.”
“No,” Isabel said. “No, you can’t.”
“Listen to me. I’m not bragging,” Soren said. “I don’t believe in flattery or self-promotion, but this is just a fact.” He drew himself up in his chair, but Isabel was too astonished to make use of the brief silence to stop him, and he went on. “You were there when I said I was the father of five children. Well, the truth is, that’s an understatement. I have five boys by my ex-wives, but there are at least two or three other children who belong to me. Possibly more! More important, each time it only took once.” Here he looked solemn and paused to let the significance of his statement sink in. “I understand you’ve had tests. Your eggs are healthy.”
Isabel, awash in rage and shame, could not speak.
“I am offering you my services,” Soren said. “It would be, I assure you, no hardship on my part.”
But now he absolutely could not be allowed to go on. “No!” Isabel said, and then, seeing his surprise, she continued, “Thank you. I mean, I can see you’re trying to be nice. But it’s absolutely out of the question!” Suddenly the situation made her want to laugh, but she was afraid if she started laughing, she would never stop. The look of puzzlement on Soren’s face reminded her of Daisy when Isabel refused to throw the slimy tennis ball dropped at her feet.
“You don’t need to worry about anyone finding out,” Soren said. “I can be as quiet as a grave.”
“Oh, I’m sure!” Isabel said, trying to match his solemnity. “I’m sure you can. But listen, I’m married!” It was ridiculous that she was saying it: that circumstances were forcing her to say it.
He sat back at last, looking annoyed. “I didn’t think you were so small-minded,” he said. “In this modern age, you know, certain attitudes have outlived their usefulness. Like stone axes!”
“Some of us are still attached to prehistoric weaponry,” Isabel said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Isabel had an appointment to see her gynecologist for her annual exam. As she was leaving the house, it occurred to her to bring her old diaphragm along to see if it w
as still usable. It seemed to her that she had to do something. She had given in too easily when Theo said he didn’t want to have a child. If she did nothing, things would go on as they were indefinitely. Theo seemed to think the life they were living was an acceptable life, but how could they pretend to have any kind of marriage if they didn’t even sleep together? How could there be any possible future for them? If Theo’s problem was really the entanglement of sex and the attempt to procreate, why not separate the strands by using birth control like everyone else? It was, at least, a place to start.
Isabel got her medical care at her mother’s office. In college she had used the health service doctors, but afterward it had seemed easier to go back to the medical group than to find her own OB/GYN. Of course, it was not her mother she saw, but Dr. Ignazio, who had known her since she was a girl.
Connie, a tall woman with a cascade of wet-looking hair, was at the check-in desk today, as she had been for as long as Isabel could remember. “Hello, honey,” she said. “How are you, doll? Here for your annual? We’re all so excited about your sister and Dr. Wolf. I always knew Alice would walk off with the best of them.”
“How are you, Connie? How’s Zachary?” Zachary was Connie’s grandson.
“Oh, you know how boys are,” Connie said proudly. “Go and have a seat, Dr. Ignazio will be with you in a minute. Oh, I remember when you three were in here crying about your booster shots.”
“You must be thinking of Alice and Tina,” Isabel said, smiling. “I never cried.”
“You,” Connie replied. “You had a set of lungs.”
The nurse was a short woman with a sharp face, bright black eyes like a bird, and a way of cocking her head when she looked at you the way a bird would eye a worm. “Just slip your shoes off and we’ll get a weight on you,” she chirped, leading Isabel down the hall. “What I wouldn’t give for your figure, honey. I hope you’re not on one of those crazy diets. Nothing but grapefruit. Nothing but steak. Or that Slim-Fast business! It’s not good for your body to starve itself like that, especially for a woman wanting to start a family. Not that any of them work, I’ve tried them all. But you were always a skinny little thing. Legs like sticks. Your mother used to say you never ate anything she cooked. You were a picky one!”
This Side of Married Page 10