This Side of Married

by Rachel Pastan

  Isabel looked up into her mother’s broad, irritating, familiar face. She tried to imagine what would happen to it when she spoke, but she couldn’t. “Theo and I are separating,” she said, and stopped. Surely there was more to say than this, but she couldn’t think what it was.

  “You’re what?” Dr. Rubin said. She looked frightened, as though a part of the roof had just fallen in.

  Isabel didn’t say anything. It seemed foolish to repeat it.

  “What did she say?” Dr. Rubin asked, turning to Alice. Her expressive face had gone strangely blank, as though she hoped she was mistaken in what she’d heard and was waiting for confirmation.

  “She said that she and Theo are separating,” Alice said, and Dr. Rubin’s face went from red to white. She had worried for a long time about what Isabel’s failure to get pregnant would mean for her marriage, and although she usually had trouble keeping her thoughts to herself, she had been careful not to say anything about this. Indeed, only occasionally did she even permit the thought to ascend to her conscious mind. Most of the time it rattled around in the darkness like a mouse in the walls that you hope will go away.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, crossing the room and embracing her middle child, the stubborn, unreachable one who shut herself up inside her head and peered out suspiciously through her sharp brown eyes. “Oh, Isabel, I’m so sorry! You must be so unhappy!” She held her daughter tight and rocked her the way she used to during the long, gray, colicky nights when Isabel was an infant—so long ago. Before she herself had ever delivered a baby. Before she had gone to medical school, when the familiar, hectic, fulfilling life she led now lay entirely in the future.

  Isabel’s face wore the closed look she always had when she was trying not to cry. “I’m all right!” she said, pulling herself out of her mother’s arms.

  “What happened?” Judge Rubin said sternly, seeking refuge in the facts. “These things don’t just come out of nowhere!”

  “All marriages go through trouble spots,” Dr. Rubin said. “You just have to get through them. Even the best ones aren’t wine and roses every minute.”

  Still, Isabel said nothing. She looked down at the rug with its pattern of fruit and flowers. A garden design, it was called. She remembered suddenly the store on Lancaster Avenue where her parents had chosen it while she and Alice played among the piles of rugs. A dusty store with high, dirty windows and a smell of far-away places.

  Dr. Rubin, increasingly agitated, looked from one sister to the other.

  “Theo had an affair,” Alice said at last.

  Isabel flinched.

  Dr. Rubin looked startled, as though she had just managed to shore up one section of the roof and now another had caved in. “Not Theo,” she cried. “He’s never been the warmest person in the world, but he’s solid! I’ve always said he was solid.”

  “Isabel,” Judge Rubin said, “have you tried talking things through with him? Is he determined to keep seeing this woman?”

  Isabel looked up unwillingly from the entwined flowers of the rug. “He’s not seeing her anymore,” she said.

  “Well,” her father said, “then there’s hope!”

  “No,” Isabel said. “No, there isn’t.”

  “Oh, but sweetheart, you have to try to patch things up!” Dr. Rubin said. “After twelve years, you can’t just walk away!”

  Isabel made her voice as forceful and steady as she could manage. “There’s no hope of patching things up. I didn’t come here to discuss my options. I came to tell you what happened.”

  “You’re upset,” Dr. Rubin said. “Of course you are, after what you’ve been through. We’re on your side, honey, one hundred percent. Only you don’t want to be making important decisions when you’re so worked up!”

  How many times in her life had Isabel had to listen to speeches like this, as though she and not her mother were the impulsive, emotional one? “I know what I’m doing,” she said. She turned to her father, who, at least, could generally be counted on to insert some rationality into any situation.

  But Judge Rubin frowned. His gray eyes were stern and stony, and he looked as though, for once in his life, he was in complete agreement with his wife.

  Isabel thought about Tina. She only had to say a few words and the family would be destroyed. Wasn’t it already a terminal animal limping toward slaughter? Wouldn’t it be better to put it out of its misery?

  But no. Families were never destroyed. They just went on and on, and the more a fuss you made, the more miserable things were for you. It was better to say as little as possible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It wasn’t very comfortable staying with Alice. The sofa bed made Isabel’s back ache, and the whole apartment was so small and crowded that it was difficult for the two of them to maneuver around each other. Still, Isabel was grateful to be there. She felt she had been living in comfort too long, that comfort had dulled her. It was as though she had been sleepwalking and had awakened now to a sharp ocean wind in her face. But when she tried to think about where she would go from here, she found herself lying on the sofa bed again, exhausted by the existence of the future.

  Theo called. “Where are the three-way lightbulbs?” he wanted to know. It was ten o’clock on Monday morning.

  “Are you at work?” Isabel asked him.

  “No. I can’t find the bulbs. Don’t you keep them in the linen closet?”

  “Why are you calling me?” Isabel said.

  “I love you,” he said. “I want you to come back.”

  “If you love me,” she said, “why did you sleep with Tina?”

  “That’s behind us,” Theo said. “It’s over.”

  Isabel hung up the phone. Her heart was pounding. For years Theo had barely paid attention to her, but now that she was gone he wanted her back.

  The next day he called again. “The oil company wants to know if we want a price cap on our bill. Do we do that?”

  “Why did you lie to me?” she asked. “Why did you say you wanted a family when you were actually destroying the little we had?”

  “It was always little to you, wasn’t it?” Theo said. “Without a baby.”

  “You know what I mean!” Isabel said.

  “I know that your whole life had become reduced to a single obsession,” Theo said.

  “Then why do you want me back?” she cried. She had prided herself on the way she had kept on going through all the shots and the syringe inseminations, the hormone-induced sleepless nights. “To deal with the oil company?”

  “I can’t believe you can even think that!” Theo said. “I love you!”

  “You haven’t been acting like someone who loves someone,” Isabel said.

  “Goddamn it, Izzy, what do you want from me?” he said, sounding more like himself.

  Isabel hung up and turned off the ringer. She lay on Alice’s couch and thought about her garden, wilting in the summer heat. Theo would never think to water it, and why should he? She hadn’t even liked him to be out there.

  She tried to stop thinking about Theo. She wanted to save her strength to put on a decent face for Alice when she got home from work. At least Anthony was in California. She wasn’t disrupting Alice’s life as badly as she might have.

  That night at dinner, Isabel told her sister, “When Anthony comes back you can go out and do stuff. You can spend the nights at his apartment. I’ll be fine, as long as I can stay here a little longer.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alice said. “I won’t leave you alone.” She looked tired. She had new vertical lines over the bridge of her nose.

  “Are you listening to me? I’m worried you won’t leave me alone! I don’t want to mess things up for you.”

  “You’re not going to mess anything up!” Alice said.

  Anthony was supposed to be back on Wednesday, but twice he postponed his flight, and by the middle of the following week, with the wedding getting ever closer, it wasn’t at all clear what his plans were. Isabel, seeing how
hard Alice was working not to be concerned, didn’t ask too many questions, so it was hard to know if Anthony was telling her as little as he seemed to be. Things were “going slowly,” Alice said. Complications “had arisen.” Anthony expected them to be cleared up soon, and he’d call her the very minute he got his ticket. Isabel wondered who was taking care of his patients. Doc hadn’t said anything about his absence, but then again Isabel had managed almost not to speak to her mother for nearly two weeks.

  Gradually, Isabel began to feel stronger. Her attempts to think beyond the next half hour were still hopeless, but she had more physical energy. She often found herself on her feet, looking for an outlet for it. She turned on Alice’s computer and caught up on her e-mail, accepting comfort electronically from Sarah and Claire and other friends, declining invitations for a cup of coffee or a meal. E-mail was fine—remote, quiet, controllable—but meeting people face-to-face was still beyond her. She didn’t want to see the pity in their eyes. She didn’t want Sarah—short and spiky-haired and sarcastic, who had never gotten along with Theo—to say or imply that Isabel should have known. Should she have known? Had he always had the potential for what he had done? Was it lurking in him like a bad gene, or like a nettle seed in rocky ground, waiting for rain? To drown out these thoughts, Isabel cleaned Alice’s apartment. She emptied drawers and scrubbed their back corners. She took the dusty curtains to the Laundromat. The next afternoon, more restless than ever, she was out on the streets, walking.

  She had not thought about which way to go, but her legs took her north on 12th Street, past the church with its redbrick spire and the restaurant where she and Alice sometimes used to meet for breakfast. In another ten minutes she was at the edge of her own neighborhood. She passed the grocery store where she shopped and the local florist, and still she kept going—past Pine Street, past Panama, and here was Spruce now, and she turned up it, walking along under the canopies of the familiar trees.

  On Quince, Isabel stood on the brick sidewalk. Her house looked the same as it always had, tall and handsome. The only sign of her absence was the grass that had grown long in the tiny square of front yard. She took out her key and let herself in.

  It was a warm, breezy day, but inside everything was shut and stifling. Isabel went around pulling back curtains and opening windows. If she had expected to find a mess, she was disappointed. The couch cushions looked as if they had not been sat on at all. There were no dishes lying on the counters, only a plate and an empty cup in the sink. The house felt listless, lifeless, like a depressed person who didn’t want to be disturbed.

  She pushed open the French doors and went out into the garden. The coreopsis, the hollyhocks, and the nasturtiums all looked more or less as she had left them. The grass, as in the front, had grown, but the biggest change was against the east wall, where the cleome had burst into bloom. The five-foot plants sprawled out along the brick, pale pink petals drooping from the spidery fingers of the leaves. The sight of it was a shock, and it came to Isabel as she looked at them that life could not be suspended just because you were unhappy. Marriages dissolved, people fell sick or succumbed to depression, families drifted apart—and still life continued on, gorgeous and inexorable. She sat down, feeling on the verge of some great decision. She was still sitting there half an hour later when Theo came in in his gray suit and polished shoes.

  “Oh, Izzy!” he said, and came across the bricks to put his arms around her.

  She leaned into him and let him take her weight, putting her hands up against the fine material of his suit jacket. He kissed her, and she found herself waiting for something. For her heart to leap, perhaps. For forgiveness to fill her up, or joy, or at least a settled resignation.

  “I’m so glad to see you.” Theo tilted her chin up with his finger and looked down at her. He wore a serious expression, behind which Isabel thought she could see the glint of victory. He kissed her again, but she drew away and sat down. He sat beside her and covered her hand gently with his. It was the way she used to treat animals at the zoo, wooing them in order to (for instance) ram a needle into their haunches. Gloom enveloped her like a kind of gauze. It was so familiar, sitting in silence here in the garden with him.

  “Hey, guess what.” Theo said after a while. “We got the permits to go ahead with the building in Pennsauken! Remember the one? The EPA guys had a million questions, but in the end we worked it out. We got our variances, and the neighbors are going to get a little park, and there are clauses spelling out every procedure for every contingency if soil contamination turns out to be above levels once they start digging. But I don’t foresee any liability. I wrote those clauses myself, and they’re watertight.”

  He paused, and Isabel knew she was supposed to say something, but what was there to say? So there was going to be another office park on contaminated ground in New Jersey. In another minute she would go into the kitchen and start dinner. Life would resume as though it were a stopped clock that could be wound up and reset for the correct time.

  But still she sat where she was as the light in the garden shifted and faded and the shadows lengthened across the bricks of the patio. The streetlights came on.

  “Isabel?” Theo said. “Izzy? What are you looking at?”

  “Oh, the cleome.”

  “They look great,” Theo said. “You’ve always had such a touch with the flowers.”

  Isabel looked at him. “What?” she said, a worm of anger startling to life. “I what?”

  Theo blinked at her. “What did I say?” he said.

  “The flowers. I have such a touch with the flowers!” It seemed to sum up everything—how small her life had become. The way he patronized her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Theo said.

  “You come home and tell me about your triumphs, and admire my flowers!” She was starting to feel wild again, angry and desperate.

  “Izzy,” Theo said, “what am I supposed to talk to you about? What else are you doing in life right now?”

  “I was trying to have a baby!” Isabel said.

  “Why couldn’t you just have found a normal job?” Theo asked. “Why did you always have to be so exceptional? Why was there only one job in the whole world for you?”

  “Not the whole world,” Isabel said. “Just Philadelphia.” She could hear how ridiculous it sounded.

  “If you like to garden, be a gardener! Something. A horticulturist!”

  “Why do you keep talking about this?” Isabel demanded. To her mortification, she began to cry. “Are you saying you slept with Tina because she had a job?”

  “Isabel,” Theo said patiently, “I can’t make you forgive me. You’re going to have to do that yourself.”

  “I don’t forgive you,” Isabel said. She got up and looked at him, at the angry, turned-down corners of his mouth and his soft, short hair and his green eyes. Why did people say green eyes were serpent’s eyes? She couldn’t think of a single species of snake with eyes that color. Snakes were always being maligned, but it was people you couldn’t trust. “I don’t forgive you,” she said again, and went out through the gate, hurrying up the alley-way before she could change her mind.

  It was a beautiful night. A handful of stars were visible in the orange-tinted sky above the rooftops and the gray shapes of the trees. The air was warm on her face, but she felt like a shadow moving along the dark streets. No job, no child, no husband: she was all failure. She was air moving through air.

  And yet, as she crossed streets with long strides, as she ducked past slow-moving old women pushing carts of laundry and couples walking side by side, not speaking—as she smelled honeysuckle blooming in someone’s yard and the sharp scent of a lit match—she began slowly to come back to herself. She inched back into her own body, filled up the space. Because she was free after all, wasn’t she? Free of a marriage in which she had been unhappy for years. Theo had cut a door for her and she had escaped through it, had tugged it open and fled. Her will was still intact.
It flexed itself stiffly like a disused muscle, wondering how much it could lift. She was healthy, she was educated; she was relatively young. She could get a job tomorrow—some kind of job. Maybe it was true that not working had been a mistake: a mistake born of arrogance. She didn’t have to be a herpetologist or a zoo veterinarian, there were lots of things she could do. Weren’t there? The brighter stars in Cassiopeia twinkled down at her from the sky, and she began to walk more slowly. Music seeped out onto the street from an open window, and it struck her as though a string inside her had been plucked that she had been given a gift. Life lay all around her. It was the air she moved through.

  She walked east through Old City, where Philadelphia had begun. Here and there you could still stumble across a cobble-stone street, across eighteenth-century houses with painted cornices and street mirrors. Beyond Front Street lay the Delaware River, a wide black sleeping snake across the back of which the great bridges arched: the Walt Whitman, the Ben Franklin, the Betsy Ross. She loved the names of them and the way the city, spreading weedlike in three directions (and overrunning even the Schuylkill River as though it were nothing but an irrigation ditch), ended abruptly here in a clean line the way a garden would be edged with a sharp shovel. Amid the smells of car exhaust, and the sulfur of the chemical plants, and the acrid stink of the refineries, she could smell the sea, and her heart lifted.

  It was late by the time she made her way back to Alice’s and climbed the stairs. She was tired from walking, but her mind still felt clear and her spirits were high with edgy euphoria. She had stopped and bought a bottle of wine, but she put down the bag as soon as she came through the door and saw her sister sitting in the corner of the sofa in the dark, staring blankly out the window into the glare of the streetlight.

  “What happened?” Isabel asked.

  Alice turned and looked at her. She tried to smile, but the effort only brought tears to her eyes. “He’s not coming back,” she said.