Teddy, though, set it up with a party, and she insisted that Isadora come. Isadora spent days ravaging her closet, agonizing over skirts and shirts and her favorite pair of tatty blue jeans. She tossed things on the floor, she experimented with bits of glitter she scattered in her wild hair.
“What on earth is making you so nervous?” Duse said. “It’s just a party. Let me see that palm of yours. I’ll tell you how it will be, whether you should go or not.”
Isadora closed her fingers into a fist. “I’m going,” she said.
Martin watched Isadora pacing the house. He saw how she moved from mirror to mirror, as if one of those glasses might reflect a different face back to her, might show her something another had hidden. He thought she was lovely. He couldn’t understand the rough way her hands plundered her hair, the way she kept pinching at her nose, pulling at her lashes, sucking in breath after ragged breath. “You look wonderful,” he told her, and the doubt washing over her face, tinting it, startled him.
It was Martin’s idea to hypnotize her, just for a night. “What do you think?” he asked Duse. He told her he could make the girl courageous and witty, he could make socializing as easy and natural as her own steady breath.
“I don’t know,” said Duse. “I just don’t like the idea of her not having control, acting like someone she isn’t.”
“Come on, that isn’t what happens. I’ve explained it before.” It hurt him the way she dismissed what he did. He’d always thought that hypnosis might be the link they could share, the thing to bind them together, the way they both had something others distrusted and were spooked by. And even if she could never bring herself to accept it, if she could never let him put her under, he thought she might tolerate it the same even way he tolerated her sensations, her palms. “Well, it’s up to her,” he said, and Duse shrugged.
He colored his approach to Isadora with a little science. She had never been put under, had never had a cavity large enough to need any sort of painkiller, and, too, she had never seen him hypnotize anyone, since he wouldn’t do it at home. He always said it wasn’t a plaything, it wasn’t meant to amuse. He sat down with Isadora and explained the whole procedure to her, he said it had absolutely nothing to do with zombies walking with their hands outstretched, their whole bodies one big victim. “It’s a tool,” he told her. “All I do is suggest. The mind’s funny. It believes every single stupid thing you go ahead and tell it. It can’t discriminate. The trick is for you to have just one good time—even if it’s under hypnosis—and then that time will seed another time. What do you say? How about letting me do something really wonderful for you? I’d like to.”
Isadora fussed with the tufts on her chenille spread.
“Hey,” said Martin. “We’re talking science here. Lots of people use it to stop smoking.”
“Who does?” said Isadora. “What people?”
“What do you care what their names are. It’s enough that they do, isn’t it?”
Isadora pushed out a breath. “All right,” she said doubtfully. “Before the party.”
Martin was awfully pleased with himself, but when he told Duse, her face darkened.
“She never lets me do anything for her anymore,” Duse said. “I could help her, too, you know, I really could. I could open up a whole world to that one so she’d never be hurt, so nothing could touch her. I could help her find her gift, maybe.”
“She’s gifted enough,” said Martin.
Duse walked into Isadora’s room and waited until Isadora saw her. “I want to do something for you, too,” Duse said. Before Isadora could speak up, Duse said that all she wanted to know was whether or not Isadora might like to wear a bracelet Duse had. She said that it had been given to her by a client and had never been worn. “I haven’t even tried it on my own wrist,” Duse said.
“That would be fabulous,” Isadora said, smiling.
“It’s nothing,” Duse said. “It honest-to-God is nothing.”
Isadora was much easier to put under than Martin had thought. It made something clutch inside of him to see the hunger in that pale face, the need. She had waited until the last minute to ask him, and then she had almost crept over, her hair still damp from her shower, dripping points of water on her black silk shirt. Duse wouldn’t watch the hypnosis; instead she hustled about the house, she cleaned and polished and dusted everything that she could get her hands on.
When Martin finished hypnotizing Isadora, when she blinked awake, she said that she didn’t feel anything different. She panicked a little, but he assured her that it would take some time to notice what had happened. Isadora stood by her mirror and brushed her hair dry, making snapping sounds as she stretched her wet hair in the bristles, and gradually she began to feel the lightness. She could look at the reflection in the mirror and be content, be pleased.
“You look beautiful,” said Duse, coming into the room.
“I feel that way,” said Isadora, amazement sliding her voice up an octave, coloring the motion of her hands.
“But you were always that way,” Duse said.
“No,” said Isadora. “No, I wasn’t.”
Martin drove her to Teddy’s, smiling at the relaxed way Isadora was sitting, at the contentedness that seemed to emanate from her. He ruffled her clean hair; he said he had told her it would be easy, hadn’t he, and he was dazzled at the suddenness of her smile, at the way she seemed to indicate that she had known that all along. When she lifted herself free of the car, she bounced.
She didn’t see Teddy when she walked into the house, but she didn’t care, she didn’t even really look. Her long black velvet skirt had pockets, but she let her hands drift at her side, she let them have life. A boy in the corner had a tin bottle of brandy and he was passing it around, tilting the mouth of the bottle to each outstretched finger pointing toward him. A clot of people was sucking brandy from their fingers, and from one another’s fingers, and when the bottle was offered to Isadora, she touched it to her pulse points. She daubed it on her as if it were perfume. When she introduced herself, when she said her own name, she was laughing.
She didn’t have to worry about who she was, and for once, Duse didn’t seem to be riding the air around her. It was the first good party she could remember. Usually, she made the dim corners her own, she kept a wine glass, full and jiggling and blood red in one hand, and she would sip herself into a haze. If she danced, she kept her eyes shut. She might slit open her lids enough to maneuver, but if she focused, it was on anyone, anything, but her partner. She was used to lying at parties, to claiming headaches so she could leave early. She sometimes said she had a jealous boyfriend out of state so people wouldn’t wonder why she pressed her back so deep into the lonely white expanse of wall for most of the evening, so they wouldn’t feel sorry for her. Sometimes, too, she wore a ring, and said that a boy had given it to her.
This party, this time, was curious. She couldn’t really pinpoint the things she did, the events she made happen; she only knew that she was creating something. Dances slurred and slopped into one another, partners changed, but she seemed to know everyone almost as soon as she had her mouth around their name, and she was surprised to find how easy it was to like everyone. It was almost as if she were standing back against her old familiar wall spot, watching someone else wearing her body like a suit of clothing, seeing her shimmer through the evening, waltz by herself so that everyone had to stop and see just how she moved and swayed and swooped along the curves of the music, her hair buoyed up on the sound.
She remembered coming home piled into a car, shoveled into a cramped back seat with three boys. She could almost reach out her hand and separate the cigarette smoke. Usually she would have to beg for a ride home, call a cab, or be humiliated by having Martin come for her, waiting at the door to dash out before he could lumber into the party. She didn’t know either of the boys who sandwiched her in the center. One of them kept a red hank of her hair threaded in his two fingers. He occasionally nuzzled it, press
ed all that red against the white of his face. She could feel the hypnotic suggestions draining from her, she felt herself sink a little; and when that happened, before she was pulled up again, the hands attached to her hair seemed sudden and weighted and dangerous. The other boy beside her, a blond, was scribbling her name and phone number on both soles of his red sneakers. He made the letters big and blocked and inky with meaning, with intent. He reminded her of the tattoo artist. She felt confused, distracted.
“I remember every goddamned thing this way,” he said to her, looking up, capping his pen and shoving it into his back pocket. “Hard to sit on these things,” he said. “I used to write things I needed to remember right here in my hand, on the palm. But I kept sweating, smearing the messages right off. I tried the backs of my hands, too, and that was kind of okay except that then every fool on the street could read my hand, my notes. Every smug bastard with a grin on his face meant that someone was treading on my information, and I didn’t like that. This way, no one knows my messages but me. I mean, who in hell’s gonna look at a sneaker sole unless they think you stepped on their gum or their contact lens or something? The only thing that ever worries me is when it rains.” He grinned at her. He has braces, she thought, startled. Tommy, his name is Tommy.
She couldn’t remember giving him her name though, but she could remember telling other people, lots of them, and then he suddenly poked her, making her start. “Tired?” he said. “It’s no wonder.”
“What?” Nothing was connecting, and she feigned sleep, planting her head straight back, resisting the shoulders of the boys. When they dropped her off, she muttered her goodbyes and climbed out of the car, feeling those eyes on her, those hands teasing along her forearms. Protectively, she wrapped both of her arms about her torso, a human coat. “Hey, it isn’t cold”—a voice split the night. She turned and forced a smile, gave a bright, brief wave of goodbye. “I’ll call you—” someone called, but she didn’t turn to see who it was.
The house was dark. She could hear Martin snuffling in his sleep, could feel Duse’s silence. It didn’t mean anything. Duse had never been the type to perch herself on the rough edge of the couch and grill for answers. Duse always said that she had more than enough ways to see into lives if she wanted, that she didn’t need to ask questions the way everyone else did. When Isadora finally slid into bed, her hands over her head, she remembered that she hadn’t seen Teddy or her boyfriend all evening, and the really funny thing was, that she hadn’t even thought to ask where they might be.
In the morning, hér head was on fire. Hypnosis, she thought, and then she remembered all the brandy she had drunk, all the wine. Martin was already at work, but he left her a note which said she could call him if she liked, and that he knew the party had gone well. Isadora found a note, too, from Duse, who had gone to visit a client. Duse hadn’t mentioned the party at all.
Isadora closed her eyes, trying to give herself that same giddy hypnotic feeling, but her head remained cottony. When the phone rang, she jerked it up after the first ring; she wouldn’t wait for the second, for the sound that almost bored right through her.
That call was the first of three that morning, the first of three different movie invitations. There was a complicated series of names she had to write down on a scrap of paper with a raw stub of pencil. She couldn’t place names with faces; she laughed nervously and toyed with her hair on the phone, sometimes she just sputtered excuses. By the time the third call came, she was in a damp panic. She had accepted three different invitations for the same movie. She phoned Teddy, but Teddy’s blather about her boyfriend and how they had driven from the party to a motel up north depressed Isadora and she invented a doorbell to cut the connection.
As soon as Martin came through the door that evening, Isadora begged him to hypnotize her again. “You don’t need that anymore,” he told her. “That was the whole point. And look at you. Three dates in one day. Don’t you think that’s something for just one party? All I did was suggest the possibility to you. It was you who fulfilled it, not me.”
“Oh please,” said Isadora. “Just get me through these dates, then I won’t ever ask again.”
“But you don’t need it. What do you want to be dependent on something like that for? Come on, Isadora.”
“Oh please,” she said. “Please.”
He pushed out his breath. “You can do self-hypnosis then. Teach yourself, take the responsibility. It’s no good being this dependent on someone else for things you already have anyway.”
“I can’t do it myself. I know I can’t.”
He hated the look washing over her face. He felt it taking hold of his own skin, transforming him. “Three more times,” he said. “But that’s it.”
She was smiling at him when Duse came in. Duse was casual. She wanted to know what Teddy wore, what the food was like. When Isadora took the bracelet from her arm and handed it to Duse, she saw suddenly how Duse fingered the metal, how her touch was becoming probing, knowing. “Now I see why you were so quick to give me that bracelet to wear,” Isadora said, her voice sharp.
Duse gave her a queer look and then slapped that bracelet back into Isadora’s open palm. “Here. A present. It belongs to you. Not just for a party, but for good.”
Isadora rubbed the cool metal with her fingers. “There’s not that much me on it,” Duse said quietly, and then she picked up a magazine and sat down. She began to read.
Two evenings later Isadora spread herself across the couch and read a magazine while she waited for her date. She didn’t care that she was wrinkling her peasant skirt, that the nubby fabric of the couch might rip her tights. She was confident, rapt; she was full of love for Martin for keeping his promise and hypnotizing her again.
She never really thought about the future of her dates, about whether or not they might stretch into something more, something deeper. All she thought about was the fact that she was really going out, that someone had liked her enough to ask her, and that she would have a good time. She would be able to go back to school and drop another male name casually into a sentence.
When she thought about the hoax of it, she was usually by herself, the spell worn off. Then she worried that she was becoming a kind of phantom, that one day the real her would be ferreted out, her deficiencies thrown up in front of her. Her dates were mirages. She knew that, but even so, they still fed her, they still offered the kind of wonderful nourishment a false lake does in the belly of the desert.
Isadora’s first date was with a boy named Howie Newman, a senior at another high school in Madison. He was the one who had scribbled her name on his sneaker. She didn’t mind him trooping into the house, hair shaggy on his collar, his jacket rumpled and patched on the elbows with black suede. She saw how Duse touched that jacket, how Duse called Howie into the other room, but she felt so light, so sure of herself, that she didn’t think to mind. When Howie came back out to her again, his face was stubborn, dark, and he took her elbow, nearly pushing her out into the night.
He waited until they were in his car, a battered brown sedan, and then he told her that her mother (he emphasized that last word, twisting it right into an obscenity) had told him that he had better cultivate some strength as soon as he could because she saw a weak and listless life ahead of him. She had told him that she felt it in his sleeve. “Then she smiled,” Howie said, “as if I should be grateful for her spoiling my whole damned evening that way.” He wanted sympathy, he couldn’t understand how Isadora could just sit there so untouched. He had no way of knowing how the hypnotic spell wouldn’t let her sink into depression or uncertainty, wouldn’t let her drift in a sludge of emotion. The date was ruined. He didn’t try to touch her and after the movie he drove her home. He didn’t call her back. “Never mind,” Duse told Isadora. “He wasn’t your destiny.”
Isadora, already worrying about her next date, a week away, had little space left for worrying about her first.
Isadora’s second date was with a boy named Gino
, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. Martin later told Isadora that he liked Gino because of the bite he had. It was tooth talk, but it had made Isadora flush. It made her remember the way Gino had nipped at the curves of her neck, the way he had made wet spots on the tissue weave of her shirt as he suckled her shoulder. She hadn’t seen the movie when she went with Howie because she was so conscious of how good she felt, and she didn’t see that film with Gino because he kept pivoting her body toward him, kept pushing her around in her seat so he could get at her. She let herself be tugged, let herself drift and die right in that feeling. She had one long red scratch running the length of her stomach into her pubic hair where he had managed to pry his whole hand down into her jeans, where she had flexed her whole body, had had to make it one long line because of the way he had touched her.
She was fine on that date. It was only afterward, when she woke up the next morning, the spell driven free, that she became frantic. She rubbed Vaseline into her scratch, soothing it. Then she touched the rawness of it, she was mesmerized by the way her skin heated, by the way her flesh could remember, could relive a sensation so easily. Her own mind couldn’t—it had to be hypnotized to act the same. The only thing interesting about Gino, though, she realized, was his touch, and she couldn’t explore that without hypnosis. Just thinking about it made her bumpy with fear. She tried to talk Martin into an extra session, but he was adamant, he was stone. She had one hypnosis session left, and she was saving it for her last date, a few days later. There was nothing else to do but give up on Gino, on those hands of his, the way they read her. When she was home and the phone rang, she flinched, she dashed for the shower and ran the water. She sat on the edge of the tub waiting for the incessant ringing to subside. She sometimes thought up dialogues they could have, ways she might see him without hypnosis, but her speeches never seemed true. She worried that he might just show up at her door one day, and then she would have to pretend nonchalance. He never called back though. He never showed up, and it was only when she spotted him in the Rat sharing a beer with a darkhaired girl that she relaxed; but even so, it was queer, too, because at the same time, she felt something falling away from her, something she might like to keep. She sensed the rejection; she worried that maybe even under hypnosis she wasn’t good enough, complete enough, for anyone.
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