Surprise Me (30 page)

“We had it—wow, great! What are the odds?”

“I had a hunch. You know, I’ve walked past this store maybe hundreds of times and today I just had an instinct—time to come in.” He smiles at her and his face transforms, all the gravity banished, and he looks almost boyish. She smiles back.

“What do you teach?” she asks as she rings up the heavy book.

“How do you know I teach?”

“You could be the poster guy for ‘professor.’ ”

Michael does a quick inventory of his body and clothes. “Oh, no—that bad?”

“It’s not bad at all. You teach at Boalt?”

“Yes, intellectual property law. Well, I guess that’s self-evident, too.” He holds up the newly-paid-for book.

“What is that—intellectual property?”

“Copyright, patents—the work of the mind. How the law protects writers, artists, inventors.”

“Interesting.”

“Do you really think so? Most people’s eyes glaze over when I mention what I do.”

“Well,” she says, grinning at him, “I have a special place in my heart for writers.” She gestures around the store with its thousands of books. “Obviously. It’s great to know that someone out there is interested in protecting them.”

And Michael blushes at the compliment, and she sees it and is charmed that so little praise could elicit so much appreciation. What a nice man. She almost tells him that, then thinks better of it. She tells him later, though, often, and always gets the blush.

They begin to say hello to each other on the mornings their paths cross at Full of Beans. Sometimes Isabelle will sit for a minute at Michael’s table and chat before she rushes off to open the bookstore. Finally Michael asks her to dinner, and Isabelle finds herself saying yes without any attendant excitement or rush. A nice man, good conversation at dinner. Why not? She can’t remember the last time she went on a date.

For years after she asked Casey to move out, his presence in her life and Avi’s, even as it diminished, was enough to occupy Isabelle’s emotional landscape. At first, she couldn’t find a way to have a casual connection with him, an “appropriate connection,” she would say when discussing Casey yet again with Deepti.

And Deepti worried about her. In their late-night conversations, Isabelle in Oakland and Deepti in Baltimore as she finished up her pediatric residency, she would ask Isabelle the crucial question often and in different guises: “What good has your separation done if all you do is talk about and think about Casey?”

“He doesn’t live here anymore. We’re not having sex anymore…at least mostly we’re not.”

“Isabelle!”

“I’ve only weakened a few times.”

“Isabelle!”

“I know.”

And she did know. Deepti was right, but it took her years to truly disengage, to genuinely not
want
Casey anymore. It happened slowly, excruciatingly slowly, like peeling off a bandage from a badly scraped knee, millimeter by millimeter, but now, five years after their initial conversation in the car, Isabelle can say to Deepti, “I’m done with him,” and mean it.

Perhaps that’s why she said yes to Michael. She really doesn’t know. He asked, she said yes. It seemed reasonable to agree. How different their beginning was from those heady days with Casey when Isabelle was swept away.

She and Michael talked and talked, not in the hectoring way Nate had often had with her, or the needy, self-revelatory way her father often used. But conversation for the pure pleasure of examining things—ideas, concepts, stories. Michael loved to tell stories. Isabelle felt he was a thwarted writer, and Michael didn’t disagree.

“It was never an option,” he told her early in their relationship. They were sitting in Gregor’s Russian Restaurant in San Francisco, with its starched white tablecloths on square tables, eating melt-in-your-mouth beef brisket and crisp potato latkes with applesauce, and Isabelle was taken right back to Sunday dinners at her nana’s—her father’s mother. Her mother’s mother never cooked anything.

“I didn’t need to be reminded of all the sacrifices my parents made to bring us here,” Michael told her. “It was obvious. My father had been a research chemist in St. Petersburg, and he was lucky to get a job as a janitor when we arrived. So getting a good education and choosing a solid and prestigious career—that was my end of the bargain to uphold.”

They always seemed to be inside rooms—restaurants, theaters, classrooms, where she went to watch him teach, then her own living room, then Avi’s room as Michael made a real effort to get to know him. At the beginning that was hard going. It was impossible, really, for Michael to follow Casey, who crowded whatever space he was in, who made the world exciting, who was the ultimate romantic figure, all his focus totally on the moment at hand. And when Avi was the target of that attention, the little boy filled up with pride and a devotion to his dad that left little space for any sort of substitute.

Michael understood early on that he couldn’t compete, and so he let Avi come to him in his own time. And it took years. Years when Avi and Michael were polite to each other but little else, then teenage years when even Avi’s politeness was in short supply. Michael lost faith during that time that they would ever find a way toward each other, and his sorrow about it spilled over into his day-to-day conversations with Isabelle. She couldn’t find the words to comfort him, because she wasn’t sure Avi would ever see in Michael what she had come to cherish. But finally, when it was almost too late, he did.

Six years after they all began living together and four years after Isabelle and Michael married, when Avi was seventeen and a junior in high school, he began to switch his attention from his largely absent father to his steady and available stepfather. Maturity? Casey’s increasing absences? Michael’s faithfulness? Isabelle guessed a little of all of those contributed to Avi’s turning to Michael, who was simply grateful. He had been waiting a long time.

Now the two men have a bond that’s largely unspoken but very strong. They both love Isabelle. They see the good in each other even as they acknowledge how very different the studious Michael and the adventure-seeking Avi are. It’s understood by both that they would stand beside the other if ever their presence was needed. And that their small family, which they’ve cobbled together, would be honored.

For Isabelle, her turning point came a couple of months after she and Michael began seeing each other. It was an early morning in March and she had gotten up with enough time to have a cup of coffee and skim the
Chronicle
before her day began in earnest. It had taken her years to have the discipline to actually do it—get out of bed early—but it made such a difference to have a half hour to herself before getting Avi up, which always took some doing, and driving him to school, and stopping by Full of Beans and hopefully spending a few minutes with Michael, and then opening the store. Meir came in later and later these days, now that he’d passed his eighty-first birthday. All the attendant ills of his heedless lifestyle—high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and especially gout, which somehow delighted him, since it was such a literary affliction—were taking their toll. And so she found herself leaving the bookstore later and having less time at the end of the day. A quiet half hour in the morning somehow made all that possible.

As she gathered in her newspaper, which never seemed to make it up onto her front porch, as she would have liked, she noticed that Fanny hadn’t turned the TV off the night before. She often forgot these days. If Meir was eighty-one, Fanny would be eighty-five. And she had slowed down, too. Not her mouth or her opinions, but her knees kept her mostly at home, and her cough seemed constant and more debilitating.

Isabelle peered in the front window. Yes, the television was going, blasting away, really, since Fanny’s hearing had diminished along with everything else. But she wasn’t stretched out on her BarcaLounger. She must have made it to bed but forgotten the TV. And then Isabelle saw her, sprawled on the floor, facedown, her arms above her head as if in surprise, positioned between the living and dining rooms, motionless.

“Fanny!” Isabelle screamed as she pounded on the window. “Fanny!” And then she ran to get the emergency key Isabelle had long ago insisted upon, despite Fanny’s resistance to anything so practical.

As soon as she opened the front door, she knew immediately that Fanny was gone: there was a void, a startling absence in the house. “Fanny…” she said softly as she knelt beside her body. “Oh, Fanny…alone, you died alone…Oh, no.”

Michael came as soon as she called him and put his arms around her and held her as she cried and called the police and the mortuary and turned her head into his shoulder so she wouldn’t have that awful image of Fanny wrapped in a body bag, being carried out for the last time.

And it was Michael who sat with her and helped her tell Avi what had happened. For Avi, at almost ten, this was his first significant death. And Michael knew something about that, having seen both his parents through theirs.

It was Michael who went and retrieved Fanny’s ashes and stood with Isabelle and Meir, who could barely stand, so overcome with grief was he, as they sealed the ashes away in the mausoleum at Mount Sinai Cemetery in Orinda.

I love this man,
Isabelle found herself thinking, when her thoughts should have been of Fanny and all their years together and all her neighbor had given Avi and herself. And she did think of that often in the days and weeks to come, but at the moment, as pale spring sunlight filtered into the dank room from the narrow skylight and Avi leaned back against her legs, needing to be touching her, and Michael put a hand on Meir’s arm to hold him up, she suddenly realized that she loved Michael Davidov and that he probably loved her.

With Fanny gone next door, Isabelle’s half of the duplex never again felt like home to her; there was always a sense of loss associated with it now. And when Michael asked them to move in with him, she discussed it with Avi, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to offer an opinion. “Whatever, Mom,” was the best he would do.

Michael lived in the perfect house to begin anew. It had been rebuilt by the previous owner on the site of their original stucco house, destroyed by the inferno that was the 1991 Oakland hills fire. Over three thousand homes were incinerated that Sunday in October, and many people hadn’t had the heart to rebuild. But not the Constantines—they had had the courage and the stubbornness and the money and the vision to construct a house completely of concrete, glass, and steel. Anything that could burn was eliminated from the building plans. It was all form and line and open spaces, tucked into the hillside with grand views of the bay. The garden was planted with spiky succulents.

Michael bought it ten years later because of its unrepentant modernity. After his divorce he was looking only to the future, and he felt the house made a statement that he was ready to embrace. Isabelle understood that immediately, and it comforted her. She was also ready to look only forward, as long as Michael was by her side.

Daniel was the one anchor to her past life that she had no desire to cut loose. After her precipitous visit to Winnock in the summer of 2000, their e-mails became more intimate and far-ranging and funny. They knew each other in a more fundamental way now. The days together, the sex, had opened up areas of feeling and connection that had been incipient but never realized. Now they both felt more
entitled,
as Isabelle had put it. They e-mailed many times a day if they felt like it, or sometimes days or weeks would go by without contact, but it didn’t matter. Once they began again, it was as if no time had passed. There were no requirements they honored, no prescribed way they had to be with each other, only acceptance and an almost visceral understanding of the other. When they needed to, one or the other would pick up the phone and call.

Daniel started that custom one day in the spring of 2001, about six months after Isabelle’s visit to Winnock. What had happened during the previous week was so unexpected, so unsettling, that an e-mail couldn’t contain it. He needed to hear Isabelle’s voice. He needed her immediate, unfiltered response to translate what he had just experienced into some emotional language he could understand.

Stefan had shown up on his doorstep unannounced, after almost a five-year absence. All he knew about his son were the few crumbs of information Alina grudgingly doled out when he asked, “Have you heard from your brother?”

“He’s in Youngstown,” Alina told him the first time he asked.

“Why Youngstown? What’s he doing there?”

And Alina shrugged, conversation finished as far as she was concerned.

When Daniel asked for an address or phone number, Alina would shake her head. “He e-mails me.”

“Then could you give me his e-mail address?”

“Let me ask him first.” But she never would. And gradually Daniel gave up asking, in much the same way he gave up communication with Stephanie when she proved so difficult. To Daniel, it always felt like every move forward he tried to make concerning his children netted him nothing but resistance, and so when he opened the door of his cabin early one April morning to see Stefan loping across the awakening meadow still wet with dew, he was stunned.

“Stefan!”

“Hey, Dad. How’s it goin’?” his son called as he neared, as if they had seen each other the previous week instead of almost five years ago. He looked pretty much the same—scruffy, unkempt, wearing old jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt with the arms missing.

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting you.”

Daniel took Stefan into town with him and they sat at his customary round table in Bev’s Bakery and Stefan started talking and didn’t stop. Fairly quickly Daniel understood that his son had “found God,” or a reasonable facsimile as far as Stefan was concerned.

“It’s like this, Dad. When the car broke down in Youngstown, it wasn’t some kind of random thing.”

“What were you doing in Youngstown?”

“On my way back to Colorado Springs. That’s where I was going.”

“Oh, Stefan…” Daniel murmurs.