Isabel was in the kitchen with newspaper spread out across the floor, repotting the houseplants. “We’re having a special visitor,” Dr. Rubin said over the line. “A distant cousin. Do you remember I told you about some relatives of my grandmother’s who spent the war in hiding in Sweden? One of them married a Swede, but later moved to New York City. We used to see them sometimes when I was a girl. He would have been a second cousin of mine, I think, twice removed. I knew his children a little, but I haven’t heard from them in years. Decades! Since before I was married. We had a lot of cousins at the wedding, of course, but no one from that branch. And then at some point they got tired of New York and moved back to Sweden.”
Isabel never tried to follow her mother’s elaborate German-Jewish genealogies. It was all written down, anyway. Dr. Rubin kept the papers in a manila envelope in her dresser.
“Well, this morning,” Dr. Rubin went on, “I got a phone call from one of their children! I’ve never met him. I didn’t know any of his family was in the States, but he told me he’s been out in Silicon Valley for years doing some kind of computer thing, and now—you’ll never guess—he’s living in Philadelphia.”
“Wow,” Isabel said, trying to sound enthusiastic. She balanced the phone against her shoulder and tamped down the dirt around the cyclamen. “What’s his name?”
“Soren Zank. That’s the Swedish influence, I guess. His parents are no longer living, but they had told him he had relatives here. We had a nice chat on the phone, and he’s especially looking forward to meeting you girls.”
“How old is he?” Isabel asked.
“Well, of course I didn’t ask him,” Dr. Rubin said. “Late thirties, I would imagine.”
“That’s kind of old for Tina,” Isabel said. “And you wouldn’t want anything to interfere with Alice and Anthony.”
“You’re so suspicious, Isabel!” Dr. Rubin said. “This is just a little family reunion! And thirty-eight, say—or thirty-five—is not so much older than twenty-nine.”
Isabel gave up and offered, as she knew her mother expected her to, to pick up the bagels at Tannenbaum’s. When she was younger she sometimes found ways not to go to her mother’s brunches, but Doc made refusing so painful that it was scarcely worth the effort. She was like a steamroller and a puppy at once, a particularly irritating and formidable combination.
When Theo got home, Isabel dished pasta primavera onto two plates. Not her great-grandmother’s Royal Copenhagen, but the plain white dishes Theo had given her once for her birthday. (Was that how he thought of her, plain, pure, solid?)
“What kind of a day did you have, Izzy?” he asked.
The blind in the bedroom wouldn’t close properly; she had shopped for a new one. She had gone to the supermarket and run into Lucy Andrews, the wife of one of Theo’s colleagues. “Lucy got her hair dyed,” Isabel said. “Golden harvest. She told me where, in case I wanted to go.” She smiled, and Theo smiled back. It was a joke, of course. Isabel, with her natural brown hair just lately streaked with gray, didn’t even wear makeup.
“What do you think, though, really?” she asked him lightly, twirling pasta around her fork. “Should I dye my hair, now that I’m thirty-five? The gray makes me look a little washed out, don’t you think?”
“You look great to me,” Theo said. He always said that.
“Lucy also said you and Martin were finished with that Bartram deal. Congratulations. I thought that was what was taking up so much time.”
Theo ate an olive. “No, not the Bartram thing,” he said. “We’ve been done with that for a while. This new project is an outgrowth of that. Bartram wants to build a new office center near Pennsauken. Thirty thousand square feet. Only some of the land may have had some chemical contamination.”
“So they have to clean it up first?”
“We’ll have to see,” Theo said. “It might actually be safer to cover the whole parcel with asphalt than to go digging and release all that material into the air.”
“And cheaper, too, no doubt,” Isabel said.
“That’s not the point.”
“Anyway,” Isabel said, “I thought Bartram was retiring. I thought that deal was his swan song.”
“Oh,” Theo said. “Yes. But one of his kids is taking over the company.”
Isabel told him about Soren Zank. “Alice says that Doc told her he made billions in computers and is using it for wetlands restoration. He has some big project down in Delaware he’s working on.”
“Alice took a moment out of her whirlwind romance to call you?” Theo said, unable to mention Alice and Anthony’s relationship without irony.
“Alice is happy,” Isabel said. “Things are going well.”
“Things are going fast,” Theo said. “God knows Alice deserves to be happy if anyone does, but a month ago who had even heard of this guy? And he’s divorced? Do we know the circumstances? Like, for instance, did his wife have some good reason to dump him?”
“It’s just like you,” Isabel said, “to assume the worst.”
“And yesterday you tell me Alice is telling you that her friend’s husband does beautiful wedding ceremonies. That’s the kind of thing I expect to hear from your mother.”
“You and I were talking about weddings when we hadn’t known each other very long,” Isabel said.
“So now you and I are a paragon?”
For a moment they looked at each other across the table, and it seemed possible that one of them might say something—might take an ice pick to the glacier that had become their life together. But the moment stretched out. Neither of them said anything. The food cooled on the white plates.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sometimes sex was the place Isabel and Theo could still reach each other. Tonight in bed, Isabel put her arms around him. With her eyes shut it was possible to feel they were still in that first bed in the apartment on West Spruce, with the glow of the streetlight slipping in around the edges of the shades.
In her head, Theo still looked the way he had at twenty-three, skinny and loose limbed, but really he was thick through the chest, solid, his biceps taut under his skin like a mouse inside a snake. He said working out at the gym relaxed him, but he was far less relaxed than he used to be. A twitch ticked in his jaw where there used to be a dimple. She could feel it, tonight, under her lips. She kissed him, and he kissed her back, briefly, and then turned onto his side, pulling her arms comfortably around him and holding them in place. She moved her hands across his chest. “Theo,” she said softly, “don’t go to sleep.” She ran her tongue along his ear.
Theo pulled himself up out of her arms and sat, leaning back against the headboard.
“What?” Isabel kept her tone light. “If you don’t want to have sex, fine!”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, letting the silence work. Isabel lay where she was, the warmth she had felt for him the minute before shrinking and cooling inside her until it was like a stone.
“Izzy,” he said at last, “I know your cycle as well as you do. I should, after all this time.”
Now it was as though her heart itself were the stone, pummeling the inside of her chest. “I wasn’t thinking about that,” she said, but it was true that it was the fertile part of her cycle.
“I don’t want to make love by the calendar anymore,” Theo said. “I’m tired of being an insemination device.”
“You’re not an insemination device.”
“I can’t stand it,” Theo said. “Hope and disappointment every month! I feel like making love has become so—intertwined with it that I don’t even remember what it used to be like.”
She could hear his words, but she couldn’t take them in. “I remember,” she said. She remembered the way his face used to go slack with sensation—opening up, becoming entirely legible.
Theo laughed now without softening. Then he looked solemn. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t do this anymore.”
“What do you mean? What do you mean you ca
n’t?” Isabel felt panicked. She was on a raft and the horizon was slipping out of sight.
He raised his palms in a gesture of helplessness.
“You mean you won’t!”
“I mean, Izzy, that the situation is impossible.”
Now Isabel sat up, too. She pushed her hair back to see him better, but it immediately fell forward again, into her face. “Yes,” she said. “If you refuse to have sex with me, I’d say having a baby is impossible!”
“Izzy,” he said, as if she were the one being unreasonable.
“Have you decided you don’t want children?” Her voice was so calm, she hardly recognized it. It was as if she had asked him whether he wanted the light on or not. Do you want to stay up and read? Do you want a child? Do you want our life together to continue?
Theo waited a long minute. “Not at this price,” he said at last.
“Why do you get to decide that?” Isabel cried.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said again. And he did sound sorry, but even more than that, Isabel thought, he sounded relieved.
It seemed to Isabel that she did not sleep all night. But when she opened her eyes at last, it was morning and Theo’s side of the bed was empty. Sunlight lay in yellow stripes across the bed and the house felt still, like a great boat run aground. Outside she could hear traffic, birds, buses, footsteps, but it was as though those sounds reached her faintly, from very far away, the way the sounds of San Francisco’s New Year celebrations were said to reach and torment the prisoners of Alcatraz. Ordinary life still went on outside the windows, while inside the house, up in the bedroom where the rays of light fell like gilded bars across the bed, everything seemed to have been battered to bits in a storm that had blown out to sea in the night.
And yet, Isabel reflected with a kind of despair, sitting up and looking around her at the maple dresser and the silver Mexican mirror above it, at the jewelry box and the books piled on the bedside table—everything was exactly the same. Even her body made its ordinary demands: to be voided and washed and fed, as though it were a dog.
Downstairs, in the bright, spotless kitchen, Isabel drank some coffee. She missed Daisy, who would have nudged her snout under Isabel’s hand, looking for affection. Who would have jumped her front paws up onto Isabel’s shoulders and licked her face, then pranced at the leash on its hook and wagged her tail until Isabel took it down. It would have been better to walk with Daisy, but Daisy wasn’t here. Nonetheless, Isabel grabbed her purse and went out.
At the corner she remembered that she hadn’t locked the door and had to go back, struggling with the key while the black shutters loomed above her and gawking crows gathered in the alleyway. She went up Quince Street, past the town houses with their iron railings, and turned on Walnut. By the open glass doors of a café, someone said, “Isabel!” She turned away instinctively, but the voice called again, quite close now, “Isabel—Isabel Gordon!” (which was not her name, she had never changed her name from Rubin) and a firm hand took hold of her sleeve.
“Oh, hello!” Isabel said, feeling her face arrange itself into a semblance of a smile, amazed that it could still do that. It was Valerie Fullerton, a blond woman with lavender eyelids and smiling scarlet lips, the wife of Theo’s colleague, Charles Fullerton. Years ago she had been a financial analyst, then quit her job, had three children, and taken up horseback riding. Whenever Isabel saw her she was dressed as though on her way to lunch at the Four Seasons. Isabel had liked her ever since, at a Christmas party, she had overheard somebody ask Valerie what she did and Valerie had laughed and replied, “Whatever the hell I feel like doing.”
“Isabel Gordon,” Valerie Fullerton repeated now. “How are you? I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“I’m all right,” Isabel said. “How are you?”
“Come have coffee with me,” Valerie commanded, and she propelled Isabel by the elbow into the Xando café. It never would have happened, Isabel thought with irritation, if Isabel had had the dog.
“I’ve just left the kids with their grandparents,” Valerie said when they were seated. “We’ve been up at their place all weekend, fishing. Madeleine caught a little trout. She’s just turned four, it was her first fish! I took miles of video.”
Isabel smiled at Valerie’s pleasure and at the image of the little girl, who had been a toddler sucking on a pacifier the last time Isabel had seen her, proudly reeling in the trout, and then immediately she began to cry. Tears dripped onto the table even as she turned away and let her hair fall across her face. To her relief, Valerie said nothing. When she had some control over herself, she wiped her eyes and tried to smile, her face red with misery and embarrassment.
Valerie watched her, her eyes soft under their bright lids. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
Isabel shook her head.
“Listen, honey,” Valerie said. “Terrible things have happened to me, too. Did you know I was married before? My first husband left me for another woman. Then I had cancer, when I was thirty. I lost a breast.” With her free hand she touched her left breast through the cream silk sleeveless sweater. “This one’s not real.” She smiled. “You’re not going to tell me anything I haven’t heard before.”
“I can’t get pregnant,” Isabel said, and her voice broke. After a minute, when she felt that she could go on, she explained, looking up into Valerie’s still, thoughtful face as she talked, although her eyes kept straying down to the false breast. It looked exactly like the other one, round and firm, lifted elegantly in its top-of-the-line brassiere, like an emblem of the impossibility of ever telling a falsehood from the truth.
“Oh, men,” Valerie said impatiently. “They have to be in control of everything! If they can’t be in control, they have to think of a way to make it seem as though they are.”
“But what should I do?” Isabel asked. She felt desperate. For a moment she had looked upon Valerie as a kind of oracle, but now she was making the jaded, clichéd comments of the kind of woman Isabel was determined never to be.
Valerie laced her fingers together and settled them on the table with a clank of bracelets. “You’ll have to use your feminine wiles,” she said.
Isabel looked at her blankly.
Valerie laughed. “This is your call, isn’t it? Theo goes out into the world, he does what he likes. Doesn’t he? Who’s going to carry the child, feed it, care for it nearly all the time?”
Still Isabel waited for Valerie’s words to resolve themselves into something she could understand and do.
“When I wanted a new car and Charles thought it was too much money, I just told him the mechanic said that it looked like the transmission on the old one would go within a year. I knew he wouldn’t check up on it. He hates talking to mechanics.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Isabel stepped out of the café, a city bus pulled up to the corner. It was the same bus she used to take when she was working at the zoo. As the doors opened, Isabel could see a few women with children, young men in baggy pants, and one old lady weighed down with shopping bags. A black woman with two white children sat behind the driver. “I’ll find it,” the woman said wearily in a Caribbean accent, and began to rummage in a straw bag on her knee as the doors hissed shut.
Cicily used to take them into the city on the R-5 train, to Independence Hall or the Franklin Institute. Cicily approved of museums, but she had no use for paintings. “What are you going to learn in there?” she said scornfully as they passed the grand entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Don’t be wasting your time. You stick to science and that! You girls are going to be something, like your mother is.” It was strange to Isabel how Cicily, so slim and tall and cool and beautiful, admired their mother. “She’s not relying on anybody,” Cicily said. Self-reliance was her doctrine, as the primacy of family was Dr. Rubin’s. If Isabel told Cicily that a friend had sat with someone else at lunch, or promised to invite her to a party and then changed her mind, Cicily never had much sympathy. “People w
ill do that to you,” she’d say.
If she told her mother, Doc would call the other girl’s parents, likely as not. Better to keep your mouth shut.
When the Rubin girls were growing up, it wasn’t so common to see children with babysitters. Isabel felt that people stared at them: two (later three) small white girls with the tall black woman. It never seemed to bother Alice, but it made Isabel feel conspicuous and peculiar. Sometimes she hung back until Cicily scolded, “What’s Dr. Rubin going to say if I lose you!”
The train didn’t go to the zoo. When Cicily took them there, they had to transfer to the trolley or the bus, and it was a long trip. Still, they went. Cicily and Alice liked the elephants and the peacocks, also the seals swimming in the blue water. Neither of them liked the reptile house. Cicily would frown in the dim hall. “It’s like being trapped underground,” she said. “What do you want to look at these infernal creatures for, Isabel?”
Isabel didn’t know. She just loved them, the cool, still elegance of the snakes draped across their branches, or curled and coiled up, doubled back on themselves, barely breathing. She liked the turtles, too, beak-nosed under their tiled shells as though they had been carved out of rock and the rock were still part of them. She liked the motionless alligators with their jaws wide open, cooling themselves in the summer heat.
“It smells like brimstone in here,” Cicily complained. It was as close as she got to mentioning Satan (the Rubins didn’t want her talking about religion with the girls), but Isabel knew what she meant. Sometimes Isabel thought the snakes held her attention because they bothered Cicily so much. Mostly nothing bothered her or impressed her. “I’ve seen worse,” she’d say of a bee sting or a cut lip. Or, “Don’t think you can impress me with your bad behavior!” She wasn’t afraid of big dogs, or of thunder-storms, or of homeless people in the street, but the snakes unnerved her. They didn’t even do anything. They just lay there in the dark behind a solid inch of glass.
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