She didn’t like the feeling. She was pressed to the ground knowing there was another woman on the edges of her relationship. Just what could Allison give him that she herself couldn’t, just where was she deficient? She watched the phone, and every time it rang, she flinched. She needed Daniel to be totally hers, to be something no one else could bite a piece from.
It carried over to his friends. She and Daniel were sitting at an outside table at Dominique’s one afternoon, sipping cheap red wine, when two of his college buddies ambled by. She was annoyed when he asked them to sit down. While the three of them reminisced, she lifted up her free hand and settled it along Daniel’s arm, she reached up to touch his hair and brush it from his face, she lay her head against his shoulder. Once, she pinched his thigh and when he said, “Hey—” and pinched her back, she relaxed. When one of the guys mentioned Allison, she visibly stiffened, she became very shy and silent.
“So what have you been up to?” one of them asked her, trying to draw her out.
“Daniel and I are all tied up with the animals,” she said, but her voice sounded cold even to her, and she was grateful when he turned back to Daniel, when he picked up their conversation again. Daniel looked at her curiously, but she didn’t say another word the rest of the afternoon, and every time Allison’s name cropped up, she took another sip of wine. By the time Daniel stood, ready to leave, she felt vaguely sick.
“Hey—” said Daniel. “What was wrong back there? Why were you so unfriendly?”
“I wasn’t unfriendly,” she said.
“Isadora—”
“I wasn t.”
He dropped her hand and looked at her, his face cooling.
“I liked it when it was just the two of us there,” she said.
“We can’t always be alone together,” he said. “There are other people in the world, you know.”
“Fine. Be with other people,” she said. “I’m going back to my place and sleep this wine off.”
“Oh no—” he said, looping his arms about her, making her stop right in the center of the street. “So you like to be alone with me and then first chance you get you have to go to that apartment of yours by yourself. Why don’t you just move in with me today and we’ll lock ourselves away for the weekend?”
“I don’t have to move in,” she said. “I just want us to spend more time alone together. That’s all.”
“Well, we could if you moved in,” he said.
He was getting annoyed. He had always assumed she would move in with him. Their relationship had been going in that direction for some time now. He had seen how she brought more and more of her clothing to his house, how she had accordioned all his clothing to the back of the closet to make room for her assortment of silk shirts and pleated pants. He knew the animals liked her; he had seen how Scale nuzzled Isadora’s hand when his own was right by its mouth. He was used to finding her beside him, to touching her, to smelling her body in the sheets. He had waited for her to willingly give up her place, and now he had finally had to ask her to. It didn’t make sense, he said, for her to pay the extra rent, and he didn’t really see why she kept her place at all. “How come you pull back from me?” he demanded. “Why this dance back and forth?”
“It has nothing to do with that,” she said.
“What has it got to do with then?”
“I write at my place.”
“That’s shit,” he said. “You can write at my place. Why are you shaking your head like that. You’re so damned secretive with me. What do you think I’m going to do, steal your stuff and write my name in over yours? I wish I could write. I’d force every goddamned person on the streets to look at my stuff. I sure as hell wouldn’t cloister it the way you do. How can I know you if you won’t let me know your writing, if you won’t trust me enough to let me read it?”
“Oh please.”
She felt bound in by her own half-truths. She really hadn’t done much writing since she came to Ann Arbor. All she had were some scribbled ideas for mysteries, with neat solutions, with no loose ends. She sometimes would scoot over to her place after a class, just to check the lock, the mail. She liked to sometimes sit at the table there and scrawl a few notes, but she didn’t do any real writing. Was she a writer? She wasn’t sure anymore if she still felt that driving pull, but she was afraid if she gave up her place, she’d give up the chance to find out. And the truth, too, was that she needed that place—even if she never went to it—so she wouldn’t feel completely dependent on Daniel, so she would know that if anything happened with them, she would have a place to come back to, a place of her own with nothing of him in it.
“I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I’m contradicting myself.”
“You sure are,” he said. “And I’ll tell you. It’s a hell of a way to make a relationship.” He was suddenly gloomy. He looked at her and then he touched the tip of her nose. “I’ll see you,” he said, turning, going the other way, leaving her to stand on the sidewalk, fighting herself not to call him back, not to voice her need.
Just before Isadora met Allison, Duse had her first introduction to Daniel. Isadora had popped out one of her lenses on the floor again. She had made Daniel herd all the animals into another room so they wouldn’t lap up her lens. Daniel came back into the kitchen to find Isadora on the phone with Duse, asking about her lens. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and at first he thought it was because she couldn’t see anything without those artificial eyes she popped in every morning. She put the phone down and went into the other room and he picked up the phone and said hello. He was surprised at the intelligence in Duse’s voice. After what Isadora had told him, he had half expected cracking cadences, looping swarms of words, but even her silences seemed charged to him. He could feel them as if they had eyes, as if they studied him. He told Duse that he was in love with her daughter. He thought it sounded gallant, that it was the kind of thing a mother might want to hear. But when he said that he was taking good care of Isadora, Duse snorted.
“That one takes care of herself,” Duse told him. “Don’t you even try.”
She asked him questions. What did he do, why did he do it, what was Isadora up to. He was bombarded, but he answered as best he could.
When Isadora came back into the room, both eyes open and wet, a little red, she took the phone, turning her back to him to talk with Duse. He heard her say her father’s name and then she hung up.
“Well,” she said, “my father said for me to be careful with older men, but my mother said that you have a fine strong voice and she senses good things in it.” Isadora looped a red ring of hair about her finger. “She knew where the lens was. Almost, anyway. She said under the couch, but it was an inch away. I get so nervous about those lenses that I need someone who is really positive it can be found to calm me enough to find it.”
“So your mother liked me?” Daniel said, vaguely pleased.
“You just better worry whether I like you,” she said, dropping both arms onto his shoulders, letting go of her weight, for just a second, so he could swing her, so she could glide free.
Isadora met Allison on a Friday. She was following Daniel into the house, balancing a pizza carton. It was hot and she had to keep fretting her fingers against the white cardboard. Allison was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, cooing at the parrot. “Well, hey—” she said, standing, dusting off her jeans. She was very tiny, with a small pale face, and black hair that she wore in a short silky braid down her back. She had tied glittery gold ribbon about the bottom of her braid. “Are you a dancer,” she asked Isadora, glancing at the black leotard, “or just another girlfriend?” She laughed when she saw Isadora’s face. She said she was only kidding, that Daniel had talked nonstop about Isadora, and then she introduced herself as Allison.
Isadora didn’t want to like Allison. She took the pizza into the kitchen, straining to hear what they were saying, shushing the animals. She slapped the pizza onto one big plate and set it on the table with a pitcher of lime
ade.
Allison stayed for dinner. She didn’t ask and she wasn’t formally invited, she simply got up and helped herself. She was full of conversation and she kept darting questions at Daniel, who seemed easy and relaxed with her. Was the parrot eating? Had Daniel seen such and such a film? Did he know she was seeing a swimmer?
Isadora was intent on Daniel. It startled her when Allison started asking her questions, when she seemed genuinely interested in Isadora’s responses. Allison wanted to know what Isadora wrote about, why she liked mysteries, whether she would ever leave one unsolved. Isadora said not if she could help it. She asked again if Isadora danced, if she liked the animals, and she wanted to hear about the bats in Madison.
They talked for so long that when Daniel said he had to rush out to the shop for a moment to check on a potentially ill fish, Isadora didn’t look up. Allison was telling her about the stubby little town she had grown up in, north of Ann Arbor. When Daniel started the car up, the only one who really noticed was Scale, who howled and balanced against the picture window.
She became friends with Allison. She would never really rid herself of that twist of jealousy, and she was always a little tortured when she came into the house and found Allison already there, settled, angled toward Daniel as they played chess. She herself didn’t know how to play. Sometimes, too, when it was very late, Allison would just camp out on the couch, a yellow army blanket tossed over her, her feet exposed. She always said she was going to get a can of Mace or a good knife for her walk home; she always said, too, that she supposed that she could take one of the dogs for protection, but still she burrowed down into that couch.
Allison and Isadora saw a lot of movies. Daniel, who couldn’t sit still for more than a half hour, would run the animals in the Arb, the grassy sprawl of park on one side of the campus, while the two women sauntered from film to film. They ate themselves sick on popcorn and when they saw foreign films, Isadora, who was fluent in French, told Allison the smut the subtitles had left out. Isadora had a good time when they were together, and sometimes she would forget just who Allison had been to Daniel, she would start to confide things about him to her, until the quiet of Allison’s response jolted her back into memory.
Sometimes Allison came to the house with her swimmer. His name was Peter Winslow, but she never called him anything but The Swimmer; she made that name a title. He was polite and very muscular and he carried himself like a dancer. He ignored everyone but Allison, although he would play a few games of chess with Daniel, more for Allison than for himself, because he knew how she liked to talk with Isadora.
“I don’t like The Swimmer,” Daniel once told Isadora.
“He’s okay.”
“You like Allison don’t you?” Sure.
He paused. “Well, she’s a great friend, but she wasn’t such a hot wife.”
Isadora looked at him for a moment and then went over to him, molding her body against his, almost as if she were trying to become him.
There were fights between Allison and Daniel, battles that forced Isadora into retreat. Daniel made a cause out of the pills Allison was always taking, of the way she would surreptitiously slide a pill into her hand and then pop the medication onto her tongue under the guile of a long yawn. She said she had sinus trouble so bad that her head seemed rubberized. She claimed she had ulcers and headaches. She said she had had all kinds of tests done, but she had thrown up the barium they had made her drink, she had spoiled her X-rays by moving, and no one had found anything. “You know why, don’t you?” Daniel said, slanting his eyes at her.
“Oh, hush up,” said Allison crossly.
Isadora, though, relied on Allison. The woman was a pharmacy in herself. When Isadora had a headache, when she was riding a panic attack, she got Valiums from Allison; when her stomach cramped, she got Donnatal. Allison seemed to know more about ailments than the student health service, and there was no wait. “Would you both stop,” cried Daniel. “Jesus. Two of a kind.”
Allison had her own accusations, fevers of memory which she paraded for Isadora. “When we were married, Daniel cleaned out the medicine chest, but he didn’t throw out the bottle like any normal person, not Daniel. Why should he when he could have the absolutely brilliant idea of replacing all of my pills with sugar pills. He had a chemist friend of his make them up so they looked just like the real thing. Daniel searched my drawers for pills. And he even had the nerve to sugar up my hidden stash. I knew the difference. My body knew the difference. It hurt. I felt something wrong inside of me, and when I took enough of those sugar pills, they made me vomit.”
“Here we go,” said Daniel. “The same old song and dance. Why can’t you see the way you were? You never needed any pills, and I never once saw you throw up, either. I would have remembered that.”
They accused each other of having convenient memories; they rehashed every single fight they could remember, every single jealousy, and it was odd to Isadora how their stories never matched, how their words weren’t mirrors of one another. It made her uneasy that they could have such different truths, and it made her crazy wondering who to believe.
The worst of it was it made her doubt Daniel; for all his talk about lies, was he himself somehow lying? How could people see things so differently, she thought, and then her eyes flickered back down to the lines in her own palm. She clenched her fist, and stood right up. She wouldn’t stay in that room if they were going to be starting in on each other. She didn’t want them asking her advice either, making her remember some incident she might have participated in. She didn’t want to end up doubting anything else, not another thing, not now.
She began to overanalyze her own feelings and hurts. She felt jealous of Allison, she wondered what parts of Daniel Allison still held. She couldn’t confide something like that to Daniel—it made her too vulnerable. All those years of hiding her inner workings from Duse, those times of tightening the loose words inside of her, had made Isadora reticent. Oh, Daniel knew that something was bothering her. He saw how she could wolf down a whole pack of Oreos, prying the cookies open, scraping the white cream with her small even teeth, but she never opened up, she never even lifted her eyes to his. And when he got up and left the room, she didn’t follow; she continued to eat, methodically, unthinking.
She could write about it. She scribbled pages into a violent-green notebook that she kept on the dresser. She only wrote in it when she was upset. Daniel knew how she was about privacy, and even when she left the book right out on the bed, the pages ruffling open, he wouldn’t touch it, he would detour.
It was Isadora’s idea to have him read the entries. At first, she simply left the notebook on his desk, hoping he’d leaf through it, that he would take the hint. When she saw how he avoided it, though, she had to take the notebook and plunk it down right into his lap. She had to give him permission.
It became a funny kind of habit with them. He’d never touch the notebook unless she put it right into his top drawer, and he’d read it only when she was out of the house. He couldn’t stand her nervous pace, the way she kept rushing water down into a glass, drinking it so he could hear her gulping.
She wrote about Allison. She said she felt deficient, that she felt that sometimes she had to have everything of him that Allison had had, and then she could start to have more. He waited until Isadora got back to the house and then he made her sit with him outside on the porch. Isadora never did much talking at these times, but she listened. She cocked her head to one shoulder, and then, gradually, as he spoke, she rested her head against his shoulder, her hands settled along his thighs. He told her that she wasn’t Allison, that Allison wasn’t anything like her, and it was stupid to make comparisons.
She picked at her palm, she reminded him of Duse, how all that talking about how she could be more because of her star had made her feel like less. “It’s the same with Allison,” she said. “Every time you tell me about something wonderful she used to do, it sounds to me like you want me to do the sam
e thing, and when I can’t, I feel just the same as if I were nothing.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, and then seeing her face, he told her that she was a star; he tried to tease her up from her mood. And when he couldn’t, they just sat, their bodies touching.
It was funny how different it was with Allison, how much easier it was for Isadora to talk to her, even about Daniel. Allison was her friend. You didn’t worry about your friends leaving you all the time the way you did with your lovers.
Daniel had told her Allison was jealous. Isadora saw that as something they shared and so, one afternoon when the two women were walking toward the campus for ice cream, Isadora brought the subject up.
Allison was a little startled when Isadora said she was jealous of her. “But I’m not the one to be jealous of,” Allison said. “I don’t want Daniel. Not anymore.” She glanced at Isadora. “He told you I hired a detective, didn’t he? I never did that. I was never jealous of him, not that way. If I was, do you think I would be wandering in and out of that house, do you think I could even be cordial to you, let alone be your friend? Where would I even get the money for something like that. Ann Arbor isn’t exactly New York. Anything I ever needed to know about Daniel I could find out for myself, just by asking some questions. He’s crazy. I had to listen to that stuff about some guy following him for weeks at a time. I thought he was being paranoid, but when he said I hired that man, then I got angry. Ann Arbor’s full of loonytunes; it could have been anyone who just happened to trail Daniel for God knows what reason. Daniel never liked an explanation as reasonable as that, oh no, not him.”
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