Surprise Me (11 page)

CHAPTER SIX

D
aniel Jablonski gets Isabelle’s e-mail as he’s packing up his campus office. Over the summer the board of trustees ousted John Liggins. The word around campus was that he should have spent as much time fund-raising as he did raising the diversity profile of the school. With Liggins’s departure came Daniel’s notice that the Visiting Scholars’ Program was being terminated. He was out of a job. And, not inconsequentially, a house.

“But where are we going to live?” Stefan’s voice spirals upward into a twirl of anxiety. He has thrown in his lot with his father, and now it looks like they are being tossed out onto the street.

Daniel shrugs. This latest development has come as a complete surprise. Just getting through each day takes all of Daniel’s concentration. Contemplating the future isn’t even on his radar screen.

“You can always go back and live with your mother. All you have to do is get a job.”

“That’s not so easy! Why do you think that’s easy?”

“Millions of people do it every day, Stefan,” Daniel says reasonably, and that only ratchets up his son’s panic.

“And maybe I don’t want to go live with Mom! Maybe that’s like…going back! Maybe I want to live with you!” Stefan spits these words at Daniel as they stand in the kitchen, his angry tone almost managing to eclipse the tender sentiment:
It’s you I want.

Daniel is struck once again by evidence of the anger running hard and deep beneath his son’s seemingly benign exterior. Stefan will go weeks barely speaking, hardly interacting, treating Daniel as if he were an annoying impediment, and then suddenly,
boom!
An explosion of feeling, usually anger. It’s like living in the middle of the siege of Sarajevo.

“You can stay with me,” Daniel says calmly, “wherever I end up.”

“But where?”

“I don’t know right now, Stefan.”

“But you have to! I don’t want to end up in, like, a homeless shelter!”

“Really? My guess is even homeless people don’t want to end up in a homeless shelter.”

“Dad!”
is fairly screamed at Daniel.

And then Daniel smiles, a small grin that lets Stefan know he is playing with him just a little, and it defuses the anger instead of escalating it.

“Okay,” Stefan says, “I get it. Calm down.”

“If we’re lucky, I might just be able to find us somewhere to live.”

But first Daniel has to pack up his campus office. He’s been putting it off—that walk to campus—and Maintenance and Housekeeping has been reminding him daily, with less and less civility, of his responsibility to “vacate the premises.”

Because he never put any effort into making his office comfortable or even serviceable, the packing up takes no time. A few books, the handful of acceptable pages of his woeful novel, his computer. It’s as he opens his e-mail that he sees Isabelle’s note, sent the day before.

Daniel,

I’ve done something completely out of character…

A good start, Daniel thinks as he sits down to read the rest. She needs to shake up her life. Maybe she has.

I went to visit my friend Deepti in the Bay Area, and I met a friend of her boyfriend’s and decided to stay here and not go back to Long Island. I’ve known him for a week.

Daniel leans back in his desk chair and contemplates these last two sentences. He doesn’t like them, but he doesn’t know exactly why. Perhaps he’s being parental, he tells himself, not happy that she’s made such a precipitous decision based on a few days. As for the spark of jealousy fueling his disquiet, Daniel doesn’t move in that direction.

But, oh Daniel, I’ve been suffocating all summer at home and I haven’t been able to write at all. Now I will, I know it. Berkeley is an amazing place and Casey is this amazing guy who makes me feel capable of anything!

“Shit,” Daniel says in his empty office, and he gets up and begins to pace the perimeter. She’s having great sex. That’s all it is. Well, of course, at her age, there’s little else. He remembers great sex. He remembers he would do most anything at Isabelle’s age to have it. He remembers feeling he had invented it. He must have. No one else could be experiencing what he was; otherwise, they’d be doing it twenty-four hours a day and the world would grind to a halt. So he understands, but he doesn’t like hearing about it.

He makes himself sit down and finish reading the e-mail.

Now I can continue Melanie’s story. Now I feel I can take all that you’ve given me and go forward and write. There’s only one problem. And Daniel, you’re the only one I can say this to—I’m terrified. Does all this make sense or am I being completely insane, as my parents have said?

Isabelle

Daniel hits Reply and then takes a minute to stare out his window. He will miss this view. The Chandler campus is beautiful, stately and very reminiscent of Old California—lacy jacaranda trees that bloom shocking lavender flowers in the spring, Engelmann oaks with ten-foot-tall camellia bushes in their shade, Mission Style buildings, gentle hills, and views to the ocean. He has no idea where he (and he supposes Stefan) will end up, but he has to address Isabelle’s question first. He starts typing.

Isabelle,

Terrified isn’t so bad. Terrified tells me you’re taking a leap. Use those long, strong legs and jump.

Daniel

He hits Send, pleased with his response, and has a quick visual memory of the last time Isabelle marched into this office. The day was unbearably hot and she was wearing shorts. Her legs were gorgeous.

Enough of that,
he tells himself as he sits back in his chair. He needs to be facing the very real question of what to do next. Is there someone, at some college, who will take him in? And then he sees Isabelle’s response pop up in his in-box.

Daniel,

Terrified isn’t so bad as long as it isn’t “terrified to leave the house.”

Daniel grins in his empty office. Okay, she’s cheeky. She’s called him on it. But there’s more.

I don’t want to be afraid. I know you don’t either. What we would give to be free of it!

Isabelle

Oh, Isabelle—how does she manage to see into his soul so effortlessly? Because of course she’s right. Fear has become his constant companion. When did it first show up? He remembers a boyhood laced with fear, but that was of a whole different order, that was fear with a clear cause.

His father, already disappointed with life by the time Daniel was born, had a temper, was a screamer, and Daniel and his older brother, Roman, would find ways to stay out of his path. They became practiced disappearing artists who slipped between houses, ran the alleys, hid out in the comfort of other people’s families. This was the early 1950s, and everyone they knew in the Polish section of Erie, Pennsylvania, had lots of children. When Gus Jablonski was “in a mood,” as Daniel’s mother called it, his two sons would seek shelter at someone else’s dinner table. And be welcomed.

But then, when Daniel was eight, there was his father’s accident. A load of steel rebar. A surface slicked by overnight rain. One second with his mind elsewhere and Gus Jablonski slipped, crushing three lumbar vertebrae. The subsequent spinal fusion yielded only chronic pain. “An ironworker’s lot,” his father always said, still proud of his profession, the buildings they created, the bridges that stood only because some arrogant, foolhardy men were willing to put their bodies on the line for them.

After that, things got particularly bad at home. Some days Daniel would see his mother dressing his large, barrel-chested father the way she had dressed the boys when they were toddlers. There’s the memory of Gus sitting on the edge of the bed, wincing, as his wife slowly guided each of his arms into its shirtsleeve. Next she would kneel in front of him, working the buttons of the shirt closed, buckling his belt, and tying his shoelaces. Sometimes Gus would place a hand on her head—in gratitude or subjugation, Daniel was never sure.

After the beginning months of false hope yielding little improvement, there were the years of frustration and fury, accompanied by bouts of drinking to dull the pain. Those were the years that Daniel practically lived at Benny Janusz’s, his best friend’s, house. The nights with Benny’s family helped him weather the worst of Gus’s alcohol-fueled despair. More times than not, when morning came and Daniel warily reentered his own cramped kitchen, he would find his father at the breakfast table, head down, reading the paper. And his mother always gentle, always there, calm now to match the calm in the kitchen. Something would have transpired during the night to make his father subdued and penitent. Even as a child, Daniel could tell the storm had blown over.

On those mornings, Roman, a grin on his face, would throw Daniel his catcher’s mitt—“Let’s go, Dan-de-lion!”—and the boys would escape into the neighborhood streets, sure to be able to scrounge up enough boys with a quick tour of the surrounding blocks to make their version of a baseball game. Suddenly all seemed right with the world. There was enthusiasm and silliness, the blessed release of physical exertion, and often happiness. So that was different, Daniel understands, because the fear didn’t stick around. It didn’t invade his very spirit.

But this fear that has taken up residence now is as much a part of his cellular being as his DNA. Daniel remembers it crept into his life surreptitiously around the time he was contemplating his fourth novel. The writing of it brought him no joy, and he had the nagging suspicion that it would fare no better than his third, which was roundly panned by the very same critics who had praised his first two.

He’d lost his gift, he realized. Lost his compass, which had been unerringly true. Lost the ability to write from a sacred place within him. Lost his way. That’s when the fear began to seep in—when he didn’t know in which direction to turn, when he married Cheryl on a desperate whim, hoping that her crazy life force might jolt him back to himself.

And then the fear just grew and spread like a malignancy. At first it showed up occasionally, attaching itself to public events like book readings, when there was still hope for his fourth book, or parties. Then it piggybacked onto whatever trip Daniel had to take. Getting on an airplane became agony. Braving crowded spaces like an airport or a mall or even a supermarket became next to impossible. Finally, when he landed at Chandler College and settled into his perfectly adequate rented house and campus office, he thought maybe familiarity and routine would beat it back into hiding, but no, the fear exhaled and spread out even further, across every mundane aspect of his life. Why? He doesn’t know.

How do you combat something that won’t show its face, something that won’t stand up and declare itself, something that will only insinuate itself and slither soundlessly as it strangles the breath and twists the heart?

Daniel feels entirely defeated by this form of fear.
Terrified isn’t so bad,
he wrote to Isabelle. Can’t he be honest even with her? Terrified is crippling.

And that thought stops him cold—the word he chose,
crippling,
because the memory he has is of his father attempting to stand up straight, attempting to walk out of their house under his own power, existing only for the relief his pain medication would bring. “A cripple,” self-declared when he was drunk and reveling in his own pathos.

Daniel picks up the phone. Anything’s better than following that line of logic. He may have his own trouble leaving the house, but there’s something he still can do. He can talk, schmooze, call in a favor without groveling. There must be some college somewhere that will take him in. It takes an afternoon of talking to people he used to know, but finally his phone calls lead him to Harry Axelrod, fellow failed novelist, former drinking buddy from his early years in New York, and current chair of the English Department at Colorado Plains College in Colorado Springs, wherever that is. Harry can offer him a spot for a semester—one of his teachers is out on maternity leave.

“Sold,” says Daniel, grateful. He’ll worry about the semester after that when it comes.

He tells Stefan they’re moving to Colorado.

“How are you going to get there?” is his son’s first question. “I mean physically get there.”

“You’ll drive me.”

“Whoa! Road trip!”

“Exactly,” Daniel says grimly, anticipating the fifteen hours alone in the car with his son as Stefan fairly dances around the room in anticipation of the same.

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
eptember melted into October, then November began, and Isabelle was afraid of the amount of happiness she felt.
Can this be real?
she asked herself at random quiet moments. Often, while watching Casey sleep beside her, sprawled on his stomach, his face stripped of all but his innate sweetness, she felt compelled to put the flat of her palm on his warm back in order to feel his breath flow into and out of his lungs.
Is this real?

One early morning as they were hiking through the centuries-old redwoods of Muir Woods, Isabelle simply stopped, needing to look around her, needing to see so she could remember. Arrows of sunshine, shot from hundreds of feet above them, pierced the haze that clung to the tops of the trees. A living cathedral. Hushed. Simple.

“What is it?” Casey asked her.

“I need to remember how happy I am.”

“Oh, baby,” he said and took her hand, “there’ll be lots more.”

On a Sunday morning in early November, bundled in sweaters over pajamas, their feet in heavy wool socks propped up on the deck railing, sipping their morning coffee, waking up slowly, not a word being spoken, their eyes watching the fog lift across the bay, Isabelle felt it again—
Can this be real?

Everything else had fallen away, and rather than feeling unmoored, she felt weightless, able to skim along air currents and never fall.