Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  Michael, with his generous heart, embraced them all. Before Isabelle, he had been a man without a family. His Russian immigrant parents used up all their energy, it seemed, getting the three of them to America when Michael was very small. Their premature deaths he attributes to a kind of wearing out of body and spirit as soon as Michael was safely in law school. His first wife was long gone, seeking more excitement than a staid law professor could provide. So he welcomed Isabelle’s family, however difficult, and they responded in kind.

  How is it, Isabelle often wonders, that she ended up married to a man her parents like? Both of them. Even her mother, the harder sell by far, lets praise for Michael slip through her lips every so often.

  And Deepti and Parmeet will look in on him, bring him Indian food for dinner and make sure he remembers to eat it. Their gratitude to Michael will never be repaid, they feel, because he introduced them four years ago.

  When Parmeet Joshi was recruited by Boalt Hall from his position as professor of international law at Gujarat National Law University, he came with accolades and honors. Michael expected a sort of legal celebrity, given Parmeet’s published work, the papers he had delivered at conferences all over the world, but the man he met was quiet, a bit shy, and self-effacing despite his scholarly standing. He knew immediately Parmeet would be a good match for Deepti.

  Michael loves Deepti almost as much as Isabelle does. They share the slightly subversive humor of genuinely nice people and a love of late-night conversations. Before Parmeet entered the picture, they would sit on the sweeping deck of Michael’s hillside home and continue talking well after Isabelle had gone off to bed.

  It was to Michael that Deepti could air her worries about the financial difficulties of her pediatric practice, given the population she served in East Oakland—low-income patients, mostly on Medi-Cal.

  And Michael would talk to Deepti about the politics of his law school. The in-fighting, the warring camps within the faculty. Isabelle could never keep the factions straight, but Deepti regarded all the inner workings of the school as a real-life soap opera. She was fascinated, and so Michael could go on and on, story after story.

  From all those late-night conversations and all the dinners the three of them had shared over the years, Michael felt he knew Deepti well enough to say to Isabelle, “I want her to meet Parmeet.”

  “A fix-up?”

  “Well…” Michael equivocated. Then: “Yes, okay, we can call it that.”

  “Great! Deepti needs a fix-up!”

  And Michael was right again; his instinct for people was solid. Deepti and Parmeet were married less than a year later, diffident people glowing with happiness, Deepti, past forty, was almost as shocked that her life had taken this unexpected turn as she was joyful. So Michael was a matchmaking genius, everyone acknowledged that, and perfect for Isabelle.

  —

  IT ALL BEGAN AT FULL OF BEANS in 2005. Most mornings when Isabelle rushed in, almost always late, it seemed, Michael would look up from his latte and laptop to see this tall woman with graceful hands talking to Alfredo as he made her cappuccino. These two people had an understanding. He gave her an extra shot of espresso and she always asked about his kids, whom he was eager to talk about. Since he had six, there never was a dearth of conversation.

  Michael liked how well Isabelle listened—everything stilled, her hands quieted, her eyes on Alfredo’s face followed his expressions as he talked. And Michael liked the questions she asked, as if she was genuinely interested. There was also something about the way she seemed perpetually out of breath, eager to catch up to a life that seemed always just a little bit out of reach, which appealed to him. He couldn’t have articulated why, but somehow he knew that he could provide ballast that might help Isabelle settle a little, maybe even allow her to sail forward in a more measured way.

  Sometimes, after listening to a story from Alfredo about one child or another, Isabelle would contribute a story about her own son, and Alfredo would laugh knowingly. “Oh, yes,” he’d say, “a wise child. You have your hands full.” And Isabelle would smile ruefully and nod, and it was evident to Michael how much she loved this “wise child” of hers.

  So she had a child but didn’t wear a ring. Perhaps there was hope.

  Most people’s eyes would slide right past Michael Davidov. He exuded a solitary air, a seriousness that encouraged people’s eyes to seek out the next person, who might be more interesting to look at and who was definitely more engaging in the moment. And there was something vaguely old-fashioned about him, a reticence that was slightly foreign, a legacy from his immigrant parents, who clung to their Russian roots even as they tried to adapt to America.

  Well into his thirties when he met Isabelle, he had made peace with his nature. He was content to be seen as just another Berkeley professor in a well-used jacket, button-down shirt, a large briefcase on the chair beside him, going over notes before his morning lecture. Conventional. Easily forgettable.

  But Michael’s secret was that he grew on people, that the more one got to know him, the more compelling he became. Underneath the seriousness were a wicked intelligence and the kindness that was Michael’s defining characteristic. And as he watched Isabelle day after day, the certainty grew within him that if he went about it the right way, this lovely, breathless woman might just see the good in him.

  Then came the day that, on an impulse, he followed her. He packed up his laptop quickly, grabbed his briefcase, and walked behind her down College Avenue, two blocks to the corner, where she stopped to unlock the front door of Noah’s Ark. He waited a minute, two, and when he saw the OPEN sign appear on the glass front door, he made his move.

  The bell on the door jingled as he entered the shop. The front counter was empty, the store silent. Didn’t he just see her—Isabelle is what Alfredo called her—unlock the door and come in?

  “Hello?”

  “I’m coming,” is called from the back, and Isabelle appears carrying the third incarnation of the original Mr. Coffee, heavy with water, up to the front counter. “Sorry,” she says, a touch out of breath, he notices, and apologizing as a reflex. “Can I help you?” She is busy plugging in the machine and not really looking at him.

  “You carry used textbooks?”

  “Some. What are you looking for?”

  “Economic Consequences of Intellectual Property/Copyright Decisions, by Belarsky and Margrove.”

  Isabelle shrugs. “I don’t think so—it’s a law book, right? But you could take a look.” She points. “Back wall.”

  And Michael makes his way through the overstuffed shelves to the back of the shop while Isabelle climbs aboard her tall stool behind the front counter and, to the reassuring accompaniment of the gurgling water, begins to sort the mail.

  And then Michael is back, standing in front of her with the textbook in his hand, and she looks at him fully for the first time. He could be descended from a long line of rabbis, is her immediate first thought: dark and serious, a prominent nose, large, compelling brown eyes, a face of angles, a masculine face that is not the least bit handsome. A face that in its Jewish soulfulness feels familiar to her.

  “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, pate
nts—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 Av
i, 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.