Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  “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.”

&
nbsp; 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Daniel 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 c
ourse, 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!