Surprise Me (10 page)

“What just happened?” Isabelle asks Deepti without taking her eyes off the field.

“Casey made a goal.”

“You know him?”

“He’s on Sadhil’s team.”

“Casey.” Isabelle tries out the name and that’s all it takes: she is lost.

The rest of the game is a blur to Isabelle, because she doesn’t understand a thing about soccer and because her eyes never leave Casey’s long, tanned body as he runs and runs and attempts another goal, which is blocked, and runs some more.
Doesn’t he ever get tired?
He doesn’t.

Deepti points out Sadhil, dark and lean, standing in front of the other large net. He’s the goalie for their side, Deepti explains, and his job is to keep the other team’s ball from going into the net. Even from this distance, Isabelle can tell how intense he is, how focused on his task, and she wants none of it. Her eyes won’t stay on him. She wants the speed, the motion, the abandon of Casey as he flies up and down the grass field in endless pursuit of the ball.

When the game is over and the spectators mingle with the players, Deepti leads her to the sidelines to meet the very serious Sadhil. His team has lost, 2–1, and as the goalie, Sadhil holds himself responsible for those two points.

“You mustn’t,” Deepti tells him. “No one, not even a professional soccer player, could have blocked those shots.”

Sadhil tilts his head toward Isabelle and says with a smile, “Your friend is a bit biased, I think.”

And Deepti blushes again and Isabelle feels she should be somewhere else. These two people want to talk only to each other, and then she spots him, Casey, at the end of the field, next to the net. He has an arm around a teammate’s shoulders. They’re laughing, the game over, the loss absorbed, it seems. And then she watches Casey grab his duffel bag, sling it over his shoulder, and begin to walk across the grass toward the Bancroft Avenue exit.

He’s leaving! No! Not yet!
And Isabelle acts without even a split second of contemplation. All she knows is that if Casey reaches the street, he is lost for good. And so she sprints across the grass, feeling the spongy thickness beneath her sandals, and then the dry, hard cinder of the running track that rims the field. Oh, no, he’s too far ahead of her. She won’t reach him before he walks through the gate and is gone forever.

“Casey!” She has no idea who this person is inside her who’s yelling at a perfect stranger.

He turns around, a puzzled look on his face. “Hey,” he says, but he waits. Then, as she comes closer: “We know each other?”

“You made my first goal. I mean, I’d never seen a soccer game before and we walked in and there you were kicking the ball into the net. And I was…well, overcome.” Did she really just say that? She cannot believe she’s standing there having this conversation in which she knows she sounds like a complete dork. But it is as if her volition has been taken over by a tyrant who wants what she wants: Casey.

“You seemed so…oh, I don’t know…filled with joy.” And now she’s totally embarrassed and desperate to back away before she says another stupid thing.

But Casey is listening to her, for some odd reason taking seriously what she has just said. “When I make a goal, it’s like…like every cell in my body explodes into this manic happiness.”

Tears spring into Isabelle’s eyes. “How lucky you are,” she says softly. He has to lean forward a little at the waist to hear her. If only…if only she could feel like that just once in her life.

“Yes,” Casey says quietly, “I know.”

She goes home with him then. She has just enough presence of mind left to tell Deepti where she is going and then she is gone.

Casey lives in a tree house built of unpainted cedar shingles and situated high up in the Berkeley Hills on a narrow, winding street overgrown with pines, red maple, and California sycamores. Isabelle’s first thought is that she may well be entering a fairy tale, because there they are, the many, many steep steps that the princess must master to reach the tower and her prize. As they climb upward, each step a railroad tie anchored into the hillside, Casey explains that the house isn’t his, that he is house-sitting for a professor on sabbatical leave. When they arrive, finally, at the front door, hand in hand, Isabelle is out of breath, but Casey is not even winded.

The view through the living room windows is breathtaking—San Francisco Bay and the city skyline. She recognizes the Transamerica Pyramid with its needlelike spire and the blockish Bank of America Center from the pictures Deepti has sent. Below the house is a panorama of green, the tops of hundreds of trees leading down to the campus.

Casey hasn’t let go of her hand, and she doesn’t want him to.

“Do you want something to drink or—?” he starts to say, but she shakes her head before he can finish. She wants him. That’s all.

“Well, we can sit out on the deck. The sunsets are amazing.”

She finds herself putting a hand on the side of his face, her thumb across his beautiful lips to silence him, and he understands. He doesn’t say another word. He brings her to him—his arms are strong and muscled, his body warm from the exertion of soccer—and gently kisses her.

“Yes,” she whispers.

In the bedroom, he watches as she undresses, and she finds to her surprise that she wants him to. And then he can’t watch anymore and comes to her, touching her bare skin, bringing her to the unmade bed, apologizing for the mess, but she shakes her head—she hasn’t even noticed.

She reaches for him and pulls the weight of his body onto hers and now they’re gone, consumed by what their bodies want and nothing else. So this is sex. She wants to weep for the person she used to be. What if she had never known this? What if she had gone her whole life thinking that what she and Nate did in bed was all there was?

Isabelle is all feeling and no will. She cannot utter a single word, and she doesn’t need to. Casey knows. Somehow he knows what she wants, what she needs. And somehow she knows the same about him. They have been bewitched, and they flow into their enchantment, greedy and reckless.

—

AS THE AFTERNOON LIGHT BEGINS TO SOFTEN
, Isabelle and Casey lie side by side, naked and silent. The trees outside the bedroom windows sway in the perpetual breeze off the bay. Neither of them has spoken a word. Their breathing slowly quiets, and Isabelle can now hear the campus Campanile strike the five o’clock hour. She waits until the last tone has thinned into nothingness and then, finally, she’s able to say, “What’s your last name?”

Casey laughs, delighted. “That’s your first question after all that?”

“I want to know who you are.”

“Mendenhall.”

“Tell me something else.”

“I sorta thought that was amazing.”

She turns on her side so she can look at him. “About your life.”

He runs his hand from the curve of her hip down the long bone of her thigh and cups the back of her knee. “Was that just
my
opinion?” he asks softly.

She can’t answer. He’s touching her. The warmth of his hand on her leg renders her mute. “More…” she finally murmurs, and as he envelops her body with his, words flee again.

Isabelle wakes some time later to find herself alone in the bed. She hears the shower going in the bathroom. Outside it’s finally dark. She has no idea what time it is and no desire to find out. The only time that matters is the moment she’s in, here, in Casey’s bed. She is frankly astonished at herself, but she doesn’t want to think about that now. She doesn’t want to think about anything ever again. She’s never before understood that life can be pure feeling.

When Casey comes out of the bathroom, naked and so gorgeous that she can’t believe he’s real, she finds herself asking, “Are you married?”

And he sits down on the bed and grins at her, shaking his head. “No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Not at the moment.”

She considers these tidbits of very reassuring news, then: “Do you want to ask me something?”

“Will you stay?”

And so she does.

She doesn’t call her parents until the day before she is supposed to return to Long Island. The week she spends with Casey only reinforces her decision to stay. He is kind and funny and, most astonishing of all, he finds reasons to be delighted at the offerings of the world. She wants to understand those reasons. She wants him to teach her to live in the moment and be happy.

She places the call when he isn’t home. She has no confidence that the Isabelle who is Eli and Ruth’s daughter won’t be battered back into existence by the conversation she knows she is about to have with her parents. She doesn’t want Casey to witness that transformation.

Her parents, each on a phone extension, are, of course, “shocked, simply shocked” that she isn’t coming home, her mother furious and her father puzzled. She offers them little explanation beyond one sentence: “I found out that this is where I want to be.” She knows if she offers specifics, if she tells them about Casey, arguments will follow. So she is cryptic and unmoving.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d send my clothes out, but if it’s too much trouble, no worries.”

“And where exactly should we ship them to, Isabelle? A P.O. box?” This from her mother.

“If you send them to Deepti’s, that would be fine.”

“So you’re staying with Deepti?”

“No.”

“Isabelle,” her father pushes into the conversation, his voice tight with worry, “it doesn’t sound like you’ve given any careful thought to this move. The best thing to do would be to come home, discuss it all with your mother and me, and then see what makes sense for you.”

“I don’t care what makes sense, I’m doing what I want.”

“But—”

“No regrets, Dad.”

And at that he is silent, but her mother isn’t done. Not once have any of her children defied her in such an egregious way.

“Isabelle, people your age make all sorts of mistakes with their lives because they’re flailing around. This is what happens the year after college.”

“I’m not flailing.”

“All right, but you’re not thinking clearly, either, and you’re too far away for me to figure it out for you. So come home tomorrow the way you planned and then we’ll see.”

“No,” said simply again, without anger but also without equivocation. Her refusal hangs in the empty air between them. Then: “If it’s too much trouble to send my clothes, forget it.”

Her mother’s voice is low and hard-edged. “I want to see you get off that plane at JFK tomorrow afternoon, Isabelle, do you hear me? And if you don’t, don’t bother to come home later.”

“Ruth!” Eli is frankly shocked. “Your mother doesn’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean or don’t mean.”

“It sounds like you’re telling your daughter she’s not welcome to come home.”

“She can come home tomorrow the way she’s supposed to.”

“But you’re threatening her.”

“Your poor choice of words, Eli, not mine.”

And Isabelle has disappeared off the radar screen again. Eli and Ruth are at it, and Isabelle knows the trajectory of this fight will be like all the others. Quietly—she’s not sure they’ve heard her—she says, “I’ll be in touch.” And she hangs up.

Her hands are shaking, but she is proud of herself. She didn’t give in—a victory! Now the harder call: Nate.

She’s ashamed of herself; that’s what makes the call to Nate so much more difficult. Ashamed that she let this relationship continue on well past the time she wanted to be in it. Ashamed that it became a habit, a sort of annoying habit which was more trouble to stop than to continue. In that thoughtlessness, she understands now, she gave false hope. And the time has come: she’s going to have to pay the price of her own cowardice.

Nate is disbelieving. Her precipitous move across the country is so unlike the Isabelle he’s known since high school that he feels like he’s talking to a stranger.

“You’re doing what?” is the first thing he says after she tells him she’s staying in Berkeley.

“Staying here. Not coming home—well, not coming back to Long Island.”

“But you said you were coming down to D.C.”

“No, Nate, you said I should come down. I never said I would.”

There’s silence on the line.

“You do that a lot. You assume what you want is what I want.”

More silence. She can almost hear his brain twisting itself into knots trying to figure out what she is telling him.

“You’re where you should be—in law school. And I’m where I should be—the Bay Area. And we should be separate.”

She waits. He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s better.”

“How is that better?” comes out of a strangled voice. “It’s not better, Isabelle, it’s not what we planned at all. It’s a curveball thrown into the works and it fucks up everything.”

“Your plans, you mean.”

“Yes, my plans. Our plans.”

“No, Nate, my plan is to stay right here.”

They go round and round with this until finally Nate is screaming at her that the only explanation is that she’s gone nuts! They made plans. They’re practically engaged.

“No, we’re not, Nate. I never said I’d marry you.”

“You never said you wouldn’t!”

“I’m saying it now.”

And there’s an intake of breath, as if suddenly he believes her, as if suddenly his whole world tilts on its axis.

“Why are you doing this to me?” It’s a whine.

“You’ll be better off. I promise you, Nate, in the long run, you will.”

“Don’t you condescend to me!”

“I’m sorry, Nate.” And she is. Sorry for how long it took her. Sorry for letting him think what he wanted to think. Sorry for disrupting his plans. But not sorry for making the call. She puts the receiver gently back onto the phone and stares across the treetops to the bay and the city on the hills. And then it all hits her—a sharp slice of fear that cuts through her happiness. What has she done? Thrown away everything that kept her steady and anchored. And unhappy and dull, she reminds herself, but still her anxiety grows. Can she do this? Does she have the courage to grasp and hold what her heart wants?

Daniel. She’ll e-mail Daniel. He saw her as a person with possibilities. He’ll tell her she has a future. Somehow. Somewhere. Daniel.