Surprise Me (9 page)

It is a stifling summer in New York, each day blooming hotter than the last, and every morning as Isabelle takes the train into the city with her father and returns home at the end of the workday, she feels Daniel’s Isabelle disappear a tiny bit more into the humid, noxious air.

At the beginning she held on. That first week, as she and her father settled into seats on the Long Island Railroad, lucky if their car had some degree of air conditioning, Isabelle would take out her laptop and enter Melanie’s world. She would make notes, try out bits of dialogue, talk to her characters. Eli, sitting next to her reading
The
Wall Street Journal,
would glance over from time to time but not intrude.

Or she would write postcards to Daniel, quick notes as the train sped toward Manhattan, telling him she was working, planning her next chapter. Once in a while she’d get a cryptic card back with no salutation or signature—
What if Melanie used a horse for her getaway instead of a car? A horse so black he couldn’t be seen in the night?
Isabelle laughed out loud as she read that one—a horse in the middle of the city?

At her desk, in her father’s sterile law offices, when she felt stupefied by the statistics she was compiling for some case or another, she would log on to the office’s AOL account and e-mail Daniel. Stefan, who still had had no luck finding a job, turned out to have the savvy to set up an e-mail account for Daniel (and not coincidentally himself) at the house.
Don’t worry,
Daniel wrote to her after she had complained one day that she was stuck, at sea with Melanie’s story,
it’s okay to get lost
. She contemplated every sentence he wrote because she knew he was trying to nudge her toward the unexpected. Surprise me.

How is it possible to know someone so well, as she now feels she knows Daniel, and know almost nothing about his life? Of course, she knows his son and that Daniel suffers each day with his agoraphobia, but outside of that she knows nothing. Does he have other children? What happened to his marriage? Why was he at Chandler? Was he working on another book? Whom did he vote for in the last election? She couldn’t have answered one of those questions, and yet there is a certainty within her that she knows him.

At the beginning of their second week of travel, her father puts aside his paper and begins to talk. Anyone watching the two of them sitting side by side in the crowded, stuffy, rapidly warming train car would have easily guessed they are father and daughter, the resemblance between them so apparent—the same light brown eyes that are almost hazel, the same long limbs, the same graceful hands, the same air of apology which hangs from their shoulders and hunches them inward. Ruth’s constant admonition to “stand up straight” throughout Isabelle’s childhood never really took. She is her father’s daughter and has learned to bow her shoulders against all possible onslaughts, just as he does.

That morning at breakfast Eli and Ruth had made sure to flagrantly ignore each other, the air between them sizzling with more resentment than usual. Isabelle and her brothers ignored the ignoring.

“Your mother’s having a hard time right now.” Eli starts the conversation as the train gathers speed away from the Rockville Centre station.

Isabelle mumbles, “Hmmmm,” and continues typing, her laptop angled so her father can’t read the screen.

“I’m worried about her.”

“Oh, Daddy.”

“No, really, this is different.”

And at that Isabelle feels compelled to close the computer, turn, and have a conversation she doesn’t want to have.

“She’s a creative person, Isabelle, and she doesn’t have an outlet.”

So am I!
Isabelle wants to yell but doesn’t. Being home in the Rothman realm, she feels as though some entity is holding a hand over her mouth, muzzling every sentence she longs to shout.

“That’s why she gets depressed, you know. And snappy. She’s been searching so long without finding the right thing.”

“Maybe she
isn’t
a creative person, Dad.” Isabelle knows she sounds snappy herself. She tries harder to be gentle. “Maybe she wants to be but really isn’t.”

Eli thinks about that for a moment as the train stops at the Valley Stream station and he watches crowds of men, already sweating through their light-colored shirts, their suit jackets over their arms, push into the aisles, raising the temperature in the car just by their bodily presence.

“Well, that would be worse, then, wouldn’t it?” Eli finally says. “That would mean she’d be perpetually unhappy.”

“Dad, she is!”

“No, no, you mustn’t say that. That sounds so hopeless.”

Isabelle studies her father’s earnest, guileless face and realizes there’s no getting out of this conversation, which they’ve had countless times before, and that there’s no good resolution to it. They will discuss Ruth’s dissatisfaction and her struggles and her migraines and her “courage,” as Eli calls it, to forge ahead to find herself until the train pulls into Penn Station. And they will get nowhere. They never have.

The forty-minute ride each morning gives Eli the opportunity to vent. Isabelle is relieved to discover that he seems too caught up with workday events to continue the conversation on the way home. He has set aside the morning commute to unburden his heart.

At first his comments are all couched in concern for Ruth, but after not too many days the morning monologues become laments about his own lost life, his bad choices—marrying Ruth being one of them.

“Why did you, then, Daddy?” Isabelle asks one morning, when she can’t bear the thought of his laundry list of could-have-been’s and should-have-been’s gathering steam.

Eli doesn’t answer right away. He stares out at the landscape whizzing by, baking in the already brutal sunshine. His voice is tinged with wonder and a certain pleasure as he tells Isabelle, “I couldn’t believe this amazing creature who was your mother back then would even look at someone like me. But for some reason—and I still don’t know what it was—she saw something in me.” For an instant he seems proud of the younger Eli. “So I threw away all judgment and let passion have its way.”

In the sweltering train—no air conditioning today—Eli shakes his head at his own foolishness. “A big mistake.” And then he repeats it to drive home the point. “
Big
mistake. And I’ve been paying for it my whole life.”

Isabelle turns away. She so doesn’t want to hear these things from her own father.

“I should have chosen someone solid. Someone steadfast.” Eli looks at his daughter’s profile as she feigns interest in the passing terrain, anything to avoid eye contact, anything to discourage these inappropriate revelations. But her father isn’t done. “Someone like Nate.”

Isabelle shrugs. He’s right. Nate is steadfast. He calls her daily from Washington, D.C., where he’s gone to establish himself, working as an intern in the Justice Department before law school at Georgetown in the fall. “Good contacts,” he explains to Isabelle, and she’s sure he’s right. He plans ahead; his life all carefully mapped out, with her participation already drawn in. All she has to do is acquiesce and all the moving parts will glide effortlessly forward. He’s guaranteed her that—success, security, predictability. Why doesn’t she come down to D.C. and work at something—“It doesn’t matter what,” he tells her—while he goes to law school? That question has become the daily refrain. She’s not doing anything that she can’t leave behind, is she? What’s stopping her?

She finds she can’t answer him. And she hates this about herself, that she clings to the well-worn path of least resistance. All those years of refereeing between Eli and Ruth have robbed her of the ability to speak her mind, deference a habit so deeply ingrained in her now that she can’t find a way to say to Nate, “You. It’s you that’s stopping me,” without sounding cruel. And so she listens to his monologues and pretends interest and deflects his questions. One thing is clear to her, though: after talking with Daniel for five months, she no longer wants to talk to Nate at all.

“Yes,” she tells her father now, “Nate is steadfast”—to stop the discussion, to have that agreement between them so that Eli will feel he can stop talking. But he’s not done yet. He needs her to know that it is important—no, crucial, because she is on the cusp of all things bright and beautiful—that she make the right choices. Everything hangs in the balance, as Eli knows. Everything.

“Don’t live a life of regret,” he tells his daughter.

“How do you avoid that?” Isabelle finally asks him one morning when she’s heard the same admonition many times.

And all Eli can say is, “Be careful.”

And of course that’s the last thing Isabelle wants to be, because it is the one thing she always is.

And then she meets Casey.

When the blistering summer finally cools and the first sharp edge of autumn marks the early mornings, Isabelle faces the fact that she’s still in New York, still without a plan of action, still fending off Nate’s campaign to have her move to Washington, and that she has to do something about it all. But being home has resurrected the vacillating Isabelle.

And then a thought: Deepti! She promised Deepti, didn’t she? It is so much easier to fly to San Francisco and visit Deepti, who’s in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and who has been pleading with Isabelle all summer to come.

On Isabelle’s first morning there, a Sunday, Deepti takes her across the bay to Berkeley for breakfast. They sit at a small square table on Buon Mangia’s tiny front patio, really just a part of the street corner that the restaurant has appropriated for its own use. No one seems to mind that the sidewalk is marked off as an eating area by cement planters filled with lavender and sage and that everyone must walk around them to cross the street.

They’ve landed in the Gourmet Ghetto on the north side of the university campus, and people come here primarily to eat. Chez Panisse, the mother of the American slow food movement, is just down the street.

“Local farmers, local flavors—I guess that’s the best way to describe it,” Deepti explains to Isabelle as they eat their blueberry pancakes and homemade maple syrup and drink their delicious freshly roasted free-trade coffee. “Sort of the antidote to fast food.”

The weather is perfectly sweet—in the high sixties, with a faint breeze carrying the scent of the bay. Somehow Deepti, sitting across the table in her rose-colored sari, fits into the landscape here. In college, in Los Angeles, she always looked a bit exotic, but not in the eclectic mix that is Berkeley.

Isabelle turns to see, up and down Shattuck Avenue, scores of people eating, talking, idling, with nowhere pressing to go. She realizes suddenly, with a deep sigh, that she hasn’t felt this relaxed all summer.

“Yes,” Deepti says, acknowledging the relief in Isabelle’s sigh, “the whole Bay Area, there’s something gentle about it.”

“Do people really live like this?” Isabelle asks, watching parents leisurely stroll the sidewalks with chubby-cheeked children riding high on their shoulders in baby backpacks. On the patio of the café across the street college students are grouped together at a round table, talking, endlessly discussing, and laughing, and ordering more coffee. At the opposite corner barefoot children splash in a shallow fountain as their mothers sit on the tiled edge and gossip. No one seems to have a sense of urgency. “Where are all the unhappy people?”

Deepti smiles. “All around you.”

Isabelle shakes her head. “It doesn’t seem like it.” Then she has to tell Deepti about her summer, even though the telling brings angst into this sanguine day. “My father and I took the train into the city every morning, and there usually wasn’t any air conditioning, even though there was supposed to be, so the train was a sauna, and my father had this campaign going to spend each morning commute unburdening himself about twenty-two years of misspent life. Every morning. All summer. Every day added up to
Look how miserable I am
.”

“No,” Deepti says, dismayed. She can’t imagine her own father ever complaining, let alone unburdening himself. “Once my father broke his foot tripping on a concrete step and he never said a word about it. Just used a cane and limped around the house until it finally healed.”

“One of his revelations was that he made a mistake marrying my mother.”

Deepti nods. She’s not surprised. She remembers graduation. “And yet they stay together, even though in America it’s so easy to get a divorce.”

“I know. It’s their addiction, I think. Their unhappiness.”

“People expect too much of marriage here.”

“To be happy together?”

“Contentment comes—if your expectations are in the right place.”

“Oh, Deepti, that’s so Indian of you.”

And Deepti laughs. “But I am Indian.”

“Don’t you want love?”

And here Deepti blushes.

Isabelle sees it immediately. “What? What is it?” And then she knows. “You met someone!”

“That’s all. I met someone.”

“And?”

“And we’re going to go watch him play soccer after we finish breakfast.”

“Oh, good.”

“We can walk there. It’s just down Shattuck at Bancroft.”

“See,” Isabelle insists, “we don’t have to cram ourselves into stifling public transportation. We can just stroll like all these other happy people.”

Deepti smiles at her. “He’s a resident in emergency medicine, and his name is Sadhil. It means ‘perfect.’ ” And here Deepti giggles.

Isabelle stares at her openmouthed—Deepti giggling? “I can’t wait.”

But it is Casey Isabelle sees as soon as she and Deepti are seated on the sun-warmed bleachers of Goldman Field, part of the university campus. Casey kicking the ball so hard it is a missile into the net. A goal!

And then he is racing up the field, arms streaming straight out behind him as if he were a 747 about to launch itself airborne. And then he is jumping, screaming in triumph, his fist in the air, his teammates mobbing and embracing him. Years later Isabelle understands the irony in her first sighting of Casey, but at the time all she sees is golden limbs, streaming blond hair, and joy. Unfettered, unquenchable joy! It is thrilling.