Surprise Me (25 page)

“Yes.” Deepti sighs over the phone. “It’s everything else.”

“Exactly! Everything else gets in the way.” And then, after a pause in which neither woman needs to speak and both are thinking the same thought, Isabelle adds, “Well, you know exactly what I mean.”

“Yes,” Deepti says again, quietly.

It is not necessary for either of them to bring up the great sadness in Deepti’s life: Sadhil, the “perfect” one, buckled to his parents’ pressure and went home to India for a more or less arranged marriage, leaving Deepti to mourn quietly, as is her way, for years. Now Deepti has grown more skeptical.

“You’ve reverted to your Indian roots,” Isabelle keeps telling her.

“Perhaps,” Deepti allows, but she no longer believes in falling in love and living happily ever after. It is an American fairy tale that she let herself believe once and now has turned against with absolute finality. Perhaps she will never marry. Certainly she will never again expect to fall in love. She understands more and more the expediency of an arranged marriage.

So it is Deepti who keeps asking Isabelle the practical questions: “How do you want to live?” “What would make you happy?” and “Can you take the part of Casey he brings home to you and Avi and be content?”

At first Isabelle said yes vehemently and often to that last question, because in those early years, when Avi was just a baby, she was guarding closely her secret hope that Casey would change his ways, change his mind. She never said as much to Deepti, but her friend understood anyway.

Deepti would see the look on Isabelle’s face when Casey walked into a room, when he put an arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him and melted. She would watch Isabelle’s face relax into pure happiness when Casey put his head back and laughed. So Deepti never believed that the little bit of Casey that Isabelle had access to would be enough in the long run.

When Avi turned four and Isabelle’s parents moved back into her life, her mother was never shy to voice every criticism of Casey that flitted through her brain—“He missed Avi’s birthday
again
!” “He’s been gone for three months
already
?” “Why can’t he tell you when he’s coming home—does he expect you to just sit there and
wait
?” And Deepti saw Isabelle’s dissatisfaction with the arrangement she had with Casey bubble over.

In the past year, Isabelle questioned Casey before every trip, finally laying out what she has come to truly understand: “This is a choice, Casey. There will always be disasters.”

And Casey answered simply, without anger or rancor, “And I will always try to help,” leaving Isabelle feeling small and wickedly selfish.

Didn’t she used to admire that unwavering commitment Casey had always proclaimed to his work, his mission in life? He hasn’t changed, Isabelle admits with an honesty she struggles mightily to find. But she has, and probably not for the better, she feels. She’s become less tolerant, more prosaic, less benevolent…Well, of course, she is the unremarkable, conventional person her mother has always known her to be, and she stupidly wants the adventurer who is Casey to join her in the less than exciting, mundane world she inhabits.

“But that’s what you want, Isabelle,” Deepti reminded her over the phone this past week. “It isn’t wrong—it’s what you need. It’s what you think Avi needs,” she said, to add weight to her argument. “Aren’t you tired of being unhappy?”

“Oh, yes—exhausted.”

“Well, then.”

“Yes, well, then.”

—

WHEN SHE CATCHES SIGHT OF CASEY
’
S
blond head rising above the crowd of people striding rapidly toward the luggage carousels at San Francisco airport, Isabelle’s heart seizes with anticipation, heedless of her resolution to stay calm. Oh, it’s Casey! He’s smiling, so happy to see her! He puts his arms around her, and instantly every cell in her body meets his long-limbed body in perfect harmony. They hold on to each other.
This may be the last time
explodes into Isabelle’s brain even as her body hangs on to his. Guilt overwhelms her.

“Wow, it’s good to be home!” are the first words out of Casey’s mouth, and with his arm around her, keeping her close, he threads through the crowd and steers them both out to the parking area. He never has any checked baggage, only his backpack and a duffel bag which he carries on. No matter how long he’s gone.

And he’s talking nonstop. This is how Casey decompresses from his trips. He tells Isabelle about them in exhausting detail, and then he’s done. He never mentions his time away again. When he’s home, he’s home.

Isabelle only half listens. “There was nothing but water, to the horizon line. And here and there you could see the tops of these big old trees poking out. And sometimes you’d see cattle swimming for land, all wild-eyed and frantic, or the carcasses of those who didn’t make it floating by, bloated, you know.”

The freeway is easy going, thankfully, and Isabelle keeps her eyes on the road, interjecting a “Really?” or “That sounds awful” when appropriate. But she’s been with Casey long enough to know that all he needs right now is to talk.

“Everyone was getting around by boats, I mean, there was no other way except these small, handmade boats because nothing bigger could really navigate the river. Under all that water were houses and trees and villages even. All gone. Destroyed by the water.”

“Terrible,” she murmurs, without taking her eyes off the road.

“The rice fields were completely flooded, of course, and we estimated that, like, probably five hundred thousand people were starving, so what we basically did is hand out as much rice as we could. That was it—feed as many people as humanly possible.”

Isabelle nods, but she’s trying to figure out how to begin her discussion while Casey continues nonstop. “And then the first cases of cholera were diagnosed and they had to bring in the medical team before it got…”

And as she half listens to how many people were affected and what medicines they had or didn’t have, she’s reaching for the courage to say what she needs to say. It’s only when she misses their customary exit off the I-80 that Casey stops talking.

“Babe, where are you going?”

“To your parents’.”

“Is Avi there? Are we picking him up?”

“No.”

Casey turns in his seat and really looks at her for the first time. “What’s going on?”

Isabelle shakes her head, then pulls off the freeway at the next off ramp and parks the car on a street of auto body repair shops and empty, trash-strewn lots, a desolate part of Berkeley she almost never sees. She can’t have this discussion while she’s driving.

She turns the engine off and stares straight ahead, through her windshield. Casey waits for her, silent. It’s one of the things she’s always loved about him—his ability to be quiet, to leave her some space. Now it only serves to make what she has to say harder.

“I think you should stay at your parents’.”

“Because?”

A good question. “Because” what? Isabelle searches for the words that will answer his question. All the rehearsing in the world hasn’t helped. She wants Casey and she can’t have him. She still—stupidly, insanely she knows—clings to some vestige of hope that he might change. She’s resolved that she can’t keep living like this; she’s too unhappy. But that doesn’t stop the desire to swallow her words and sleep next to him just one more night, feel the warmth of him against her, open herself to his body one more time.

And yet she has to say what she believes to be true. All those conflicting needs swirl around and silence her tongue.

“Have you met someone else?” is what Casey finally says.

“God, no, that’s not it.”

And Casey relaxes, leans back against the closed door, immediately relieved. “Okay. Then everything else is fixable.”

“No, Casey, it isn’t!” And she surprises herself with her vehemence, with a depth of anger that flashes bright, that she didn’t even know she possessed. “I’m not okay with all this anymore. I know I said I was. I tried to be. I wish I could be a better, more generous person, but I’m not. I’m selfish and needy and I want you here with us, Avi and me, more, a lot more. You’ve been away three days for every one you are home!”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“Casey, it is! It is! I kept a record because I knew you’d say that!”

“You marked off the days? You kept a time card on me?”

“We want you home with us, and that doesn’t look like it’s what you want, and so I’m driving you to your parents’ because we’ve got to begin to separate out our lives and this is the first step.”

Casey is quiet for a very long time. He simply looks at her, and she stares out the window and won’t, can’t, meet his eyes. She knows that if she did, she’d capitulate.

Finally, softly, he says, “I’m not any different from the guy you met six years ago.”

“I know! I know! But things are different. We have a child and he needs you and I…I want more than you are willing to give!” There—she’s said it. And it hangs in the air between them, and the worst thing that could happen happens. Casey doesn’t disagree. Doesn’t try to negotiate with her. Doesn’t say he’ll change or he’ll try.

“I do what I’m called to do.” It’s a gentle plea, but not at all what Isabelle wants to hear. It hangs there between them, an impenetrable wall, and slowly Isabelle puts her hand on the ignition key and turns on the car and Casey looks straight ahead at a skinny yellow dog patrolling one of the empty lots, nose to the ground, searching for something to eat, and Isabelle pulls out into traffic and drives him to Art and Louisa’s and leaves him there.

The next day, a Monday, Isabelle goes into work. She drops Avi off at school, watching him fairly dance across the star stepping-stones to the front door of A Circle of Friends, happy, it seems to her, but she knows the reverberations will come. This separation she’s initiated will widen and Casey will be in their lives even less and Avi will feel the loss and she will feel guiltier. What a mess she’s made of things.

Her next stop is Full of Beans for her morning cappuccino—today she makes it a double—and then on to the bookstore to open it at nine, the way Meir likes. This morning there’s a large box waiting for her at the front door. She knows it’s new books, and there’s even a flicker of excitement amid the self-loathing she’s been indulging in lately.

Over the years she’s worn Meir down, and he has agreed to carry
some
new books, those that he deems worthy. True to his prejudices, he never consults the bestseller lists. He picks and chooses from the advance notices he gets from the various publishing houses. He agrees to carry new books by writers he esteems and to consider new works whose supporting quotes from other authors make the book sound promising.

These brown cardboard boxes that arrive unexpectedly and sporadically feel like gifts to Isabelle, and her eagerness to open the box and see what Meir has ordered this time makes her fumble with the keys and struggle to open the front door.

But there! She’s in. And she puts the heavy box down on the steamer trunk in the reading area, rips off the packing tape, and slowly, with great anticipation, opens the four folded flaps of cardboard. What riches will she find? What wonderful new book can she read and then discuss with Meir and argue over and read again?

The cover is blue, a bright gorgeous-day sky-blue, with the title across the front diagonally from left to right in thin white script, almost as if it were the trailing wisp of a cloud or the vapor from a plane as it skywrites
Out of the Blue
. And then she sees it, spread across the bottom in elegant black type, the author’s name: Daniel Jablonski.

That makes no sense. Daniel wrote a book and he didn’t tell her? After all the e-mails and confidences exchanged in the past two years, why would he keep this a secret?

She sits down on the sofa, cracks open the pristine cover, and finds the first sentence. It reads,
Lanie walked into my office without knocking, wearing high-heeled, buttery smooth, caramel-colored boots that made her seem six feet tall. I’ve always liked tall women.

No! Those are her boots. The ones she’s wearing now, in fact. The ones with the vine pattern along the outer edge that she wore often that last year at Chandler because they were new then and she loved them. And Lanie? Who is this Lanie? And why is she wearing her very boots?

Isabelle sinks into the musty sofa cushions, props the scrutinized boots up on the steamer trunk, and continues reading, devouring each page, whipping it over and eagerly beginning the next. When a small, white-haired man makes the mistake of opening the front door of Noah’s Ark and taking two steps into the store, Isabelle barks, “We’re closed!” then catches herself and says more kindly, “We’ll be open this afternoon, if you can come back. Sorry. I’m so sorry if I startled you,” as she escorts him out, turns the front door sign to
CLOSED
so she can read in peace, and spreads herself out on the sofa with Daniel’s book tightly clasped in both hands. And she reads. And reads.

When Meir shows up sometime after noon, she’s just finishing up.

“What’s with the
CLOSED
sign?”

Isabelle says nothing, not exactly trusting what will come out of her mouth. Instead she holds out the book so he can read the title.

“Ah, it’s here! It was supposed to be a surprise for you.”

“Oh, I was surprised!”

“He didn’t tell you he was writing it?”

“No.”

He takes it from her. “Great cover.”

“That’s not the point!”

Meir turns it over for the authors’ quotes on the back. “Wow, amazing blurbs. You see,” he says to her, as if they are in the middle of the first conversation they ever had, over six years ago, “Jablonski isn’t finished. He just had a little blip, a couple of bad books, but this one sounds like he’s back to his old form.”

“Meir! He stole my life! It’s all here, in the book. I’m there, or Daniel’s take on me, but everything else—what happened between us or what he wished to happen. Okay, it never happened, but he…maybe we…okay, we might have wanted it to, but Meir, he stole my life!”