This Side of Married

by Rachel Pastan

  That night, Theo had to stay late at work. He told Isabel not to wait up for him, but it was only a little before ten when she heard his key in the lock.

  “Hello,” she called down from the bedroom, but he didn’t hear her. When he climbed the stairs and came into the room, he looked at her blankly. “You’re still up.”

  “It’s only ten.”

  He looked at his watch the same way he had looked at her, as though he weren’t really seeing it.

  “Everything all right?” Isabel asked.

  “I just got done a little early.”

  “That’s nice. For a change.”

  He puttered back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom, perched at the foot of the bed and turned on the news, then switched it off again, put on his pajamas in the dark, and got into bed.

  “I had lunch with my sisters,” Isabel said. Once this had been her favorite part of the day, talking with Theo in the dark, their bodies pressed together or loosely linked by a hand on a stomach, a leg thrown over a leg. Now he lay beside her without touching her.

  “Both of them?”

  “Listen. Alice and Anthony have set a date. We’ll have to find another weekend to go to Cape May.”

  Here they were in bed together and still there was a distance between them Isabel couldn’t bridge. Was it the sex that was missing or something more fundamental even than sex? And if so, what was it? Respect, affection, kindness, acknowledgment?

  “Alice Rubin is finally getting married,” Theo said. “Just when one thought it was never going to happen.”

  “I never thought that,” Isabel said.

  “Another ‘good’ marriage, too. Doctor, lawyer. I guess Tina will have to marry an Indian chief.” He laughed harshly.

  “Tina,” Isabel said, feeling the thrill of revealing an extraordinary bit of gossip, “is going to marry Soren Zank!” She waited for Theo’s response.

  “She’s what?” he said.

  “She’s marrying Soren Zank! But it gets even crazier.” She told him the whole thing, and when she had finished, Theo sat up and stared down at her.

  “You’re joking,” he said. “She’s pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Isabel said. “But so what? Let her go ahead and have the baby! Everyone should be childless because of us?”

  “She’s having the baby?”

  “She says she is. I would have said Tina was totally predictable, but never again.” She reached out and touched Theo’s chest. His heart beat fast and noiselessly, like a thief running. “While we’re sort of on the subject. I’ve thought about what you said, about making love getting too tangled up with trying to have a baby. I found my diaphragm. I thought—we could go back to how things used to be. Start again. Forget the baby part and just concentrate on us.”

  Under her hand his skin was cold. Gooseflesh stood out on his chest. When was the last time she had really paid attention to Theo’s body? She had been remiss, and she regretted it. “I miss you,” she said, and she found that it was true. Tears sprang to her eyes, and for a moment she was able to forget how she was betraying him. She kissed him gently. His lips were cold, too, but he surprised her by kissing her back, deeply, and then raising himself up and pressing her into the bed. He ran his hard, icy hand along her skin, and her whole body responded, arching toward him with a thrill that was partly relief. Theo had been right. They had lost this, and now it had come back to them. Love had come back to them, she thought as he lifted her nightgown over her head, as he squeezed her breasts in his cold hands with a kind of desperate passion she would have thought he was no longer capable of. Just as this bubble of thought lifted away and her mind was shutting down like a house going slowly dark at night, the fact plunged into her consciousness that what she was feeling was based on a lie. Her deception had precipitated it. Her body began to close itself against him. She tried to concentrate her way back to pleasure, but all she could think of was the pale circle of rubber in its case in the bathroom and that this new beginning must not be allowed to founder on subterfuge. She put a hand on his chest and pulled herself out from under him.

  In the bathroom, she looked at the flimsy cup with its thick rim, wondering whether it still worked. She held it up to the light. It seemed sturdy. She filled it with water and it didn’t leak. What more could she do? She rummaged in a drawer and found, miraculously, an ancient tube of spermicide. It didn’t seem to have an expiration date. She unscrewed the cap and squeezed some out, then eased the slippery disk into her body, where it floated like a moon—like a charm, warding off sperm and evil spirits. She washed her hands and opened the bathroom door.

  But something had happened. She could feel it as she lay down beside him—a kind of coldness burning through his skin. She kissed him, but when he kissed her back his desire seemed stoked by something beyond the bed, beyond the life they had together. Still they went on touching each other in all the familiar ways, just as their marriage went on through breakfasts and dinners and evenings out and exchanges of information about when the car needed servicing. She began to cry, but silently, so that Theo, who had his eyes closed, wouldn’t notice. So that he would mistake her trembling for the shudders of pleasure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The next day Dr. Rubin called Isabel from the hospital. Isabel could hear bells chiming and pages coming in over the public address system. “I only have a minute,” Dr. Rubin said, “but I wanted to tell you before you heard from anybody else. Isabel, are you sitting down?”

  Isabel, who had been on her way out, was standing in the kitchen with her handbag on her shoulder. There wasn’t any place to sit that the phone cord would reach.

  “I know this is going to be hard for you,” Dr. Rubin said. “Try to take it as well as you can. For your sister’s sake.”

  Isabel’s heart pounded. “What is it?” she said. “What’s happened to Alice?”

  “No, not Alice,” Dr. Rubin said impatiently. “It’s Tina. I hate to tell you this, honey, but your sister Tina is pregnant. She’s going to have a baby, and what’s more, she’s going to marry Soren Zank!”

  It was amazing, Isabel thought, how her mother managed to sound mournful and exultant at the same time. The thought helped ease her back from the rush of terror. She let out her breath. “I know,” she said. “Alice is getting married, so Tina has to do something even more dramatic.”

  “You know.” Doc was taken aback.

  “I just found out,” Isabel said, hoping Doc’s feelings weren’t hurt by not being the first person Tina had told.

  “You’re not upset, are you?” Doc said. “I know how long you’ve been waiting. But these things just happen sometimes.”

  “Believe me,” Isabel said, “I would rather never have children than have them with Soren Zank.”

  “Please don’t talk that way in front of Tina,” Dr. Rubin said. “I remember the way she used to follow you around, gazing up at you with those big brown eyes, when she could barely walk!”

  “Not me,” Isabel said. “Alice.”

  “You were six and starting a new school, and you thought you were such a big girl. You used to shut the door to your room right in her face. Well, I always said it was your right to be alone, if that was what you wanted.”

  Isabel drove to the zoo to meet her former boss, Allan Jefferson, the senior vet on the team. She had hardly been back since she’d quit, but she had agreed to take a look at some treefrogs the reptile and amphibian curator had purchased. She’d heard that the man who had got the job she’d wanted had quit after six months, wooed by a better offer from San Diego, so she didn’t have to worry about running into him. She remembered when he had come to interview—Ed Mulcahy—a big man, very confident, smiling at everyone under his big mustache as if to say he already knew they’d hire him. He knew; Allan Jefferson knew; the head of the zoo knew. Apparently only Isabel hadn’t known.

  It was a hot summer day, and the entrance courtyard was crowded with families and camp groups. During th
e years of working here, Isabel had come almost not to see the children as she threaded her way among them, but today they caught her attention as though they were the creatures on exhibit. They were exotic, at least to her, and as out of reach as if they were on the other side of the glass. A boy of four or five held tightly to a red balloon. A fat toddler chased the pigeons. She watched two girls in plaid dresses holding hands as they skipped toward the ticket window. She thought she could remember holding hands like that with Alice.

  She passed Monkey Junction, the statue of impalas leaping, the vending machines selling soda, candy, disposable cameras. She breathed in the smells of hot asphalt and animals and sunscreen, the familiar smells of the place she had sped around in a golf cart with her vet’s bag, unlocking doors and gates with her master keys, most of the animals known to her by sight. The place she had wandered through with Alice and Cicily, awed by the strange animals, fascinated by the way they moved and the sounds they made, Cicily having to speak to her sharply to move her from one enclosure to the next. She never wanted to leave the one where she was, she might miss something—a lion roaring, a wolf cuffing its brother, an orangutan turning to look straight at her with its big brown eyes. She had loved the zoo as a child as nowhere else in the world. She had wanted to be a zookeeper the way other girls wanted to be ballerinas.

  She went into the Penrose building, stopping to chat with the secretary and the lab technician, exclaiming over the orphaned baby marmot and hearing who had left in the past year and which animals had died. As she approached Allan’s lab, she could hear him talking. Not yelling, although that was the effect, but scolding in his dry, precise, scathing voice. “Didn’t you X-ray the leg? That’s the first thing you should have done! It’s not as though we’re talking about a rhinoceros, though we have X-rayed those more than once when the occasion required it. Go back and do it.”

  Isabel waited in the hall until the recipient of the reprimand emerged, a young man who seemed to be trying to pull his head back into his body like a turtle.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” the young man said glumly.

  Allan stuck his head out of the door. “Isabel! Come in.” He smiled out from his gray, leathery face, looking the proper veterinarian in his white lab coat and heavy boots. “Did you meet the new resident? Sandy’s been with us, what is it, Sandy, six months now?”

  “Three months,” Sandy said.

  “Three months! It seems longer. Sandy’s from Cornell. Top of his class, allegedly. Sandy, this is Isabel Rubin. She was the resident before you. Isabel could diagnose a sick gorilla by the smell of its wind.”

  Then why didn’t you hire me for the team, Isabel thought.

  “Nice to meet you,” Sandy said, and skulked off down the hallway.

  “That one’s got about as much sense as a yak,” Allan said.

  They went into the lab. Its scarred benches were cluttered with microscopes, syringes, cotton swabs, slides, and bottles of supplements, and it smelled of rubbing alcohol and dung.

  “You should be nicer to people,” Isabel said. “Crotchety isn’t as charming as you think.”

  “Guess what?” Allan said. “Jesse’s fertile again. We’re going to try semen from that tiger in Seattle this time.” Animals were often bred with animals from other zoos to promote genetic diversity. Sometimes the breeding was done in person, but increasingly, artificial insemination was used. A technique that Isabel herself had experienced, it failed as often as it succeeded, especially in the megavertebrates like tigers.

  They went into the next room and looked at the small, brown, toadlike frogs. Orange lesions were scattered among their normal blackish markings.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Isabel asked.

  “Some kind of intradermal mites. We can’t get rid of them. I thought you might have some ideas.”

  “Now that I’m gone, you find you can’t manage without me,” she said.

  Allan smiled his leathery, thin-lipped smile. “Actually, Isabel, I’m sure you heard that Mulcahy left. The job is available. Tom and I were wondering if you might still be interested in it.” Tom was Tom Henderson, the head of the zoo.

  Isabel stared at him. “You’re joking,” she said.

  “We need someone who can start immediately,” Allan said.

  Isabel didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, he was throwing her a lifeline. On the other, why should she come running back the moment they asked her to? Her pride resisted. “You’re not going to do another search?” she said.

  “Not if you’ll say yes,” Allan said. “You’re a great vet, Isabel. If it had been up to me, we would have hired you instead of Mulcahy in the first place.”

  Isabel laughed. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She didn’t know, pride aside, whether she wanted to come back. All around her were animals—a juvenile red panda, a Bornean earless lizard, a marmoset—that should have been elsewhere, leading different lives. In forests, in rivers. How had they ended up here, looking out through cages in a climate-controlled building? Was the fact of their presence here acceptable? Were their lives acceptable lives? Safe, dull, predictable, unnatural. She shut her eyes against this train of thought, which she knew to be sentimental and unprofessional. Next thing I know, she thought, I’ll become a vegetarian. Like Soren.

  “Another thing you should know,” Allan said, “is that my job will be available soon. I’m pretty sure Tom will hire an internal candidate.”

  “Your job?” Isabel said. “Are they finally firing you?”

  Allan looked serious. “I’m almost seventy years old. Most people my age have already retired.”

  Isabel was astonished. She knew that Allan was getting older, but he had seemed like the last person in the world to consider retirement. He loved the work too much. He was the work, as far as she was concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked him. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m perfectly fine! But that’s part of the reason for leaving now. My mind is all right, my body has a few little aches and pains, nothing serious. But I look ahead to eighty. Eighty looks old. People don’t walk so well, they don’t think so well. I figure I have ten good years. I’ve thought about what I want to do with them.”

  “I would have thought you would have wanted to work.”

  “I have worked. Gertrude wants to travel. She wants to spend a year in Greece. We always meant to go. God knows how long we’ve been talking about it. How much more time do we have?” Allan’s wife, Gertrude, was a plump, white-haired woman who smiled a lot but never had much to say. She had never held a job, had never gone to college. Isabel didn’t understand the marriage. Allan was one of the few truly brilliant people she had ever met. He knew an extraordinary amount about animals. He was also sharp and judgmental, but he always spoke with affection of his sweet, rather dim wife, using the tone of voice he otherwise reserved for his favorite zoological specimens.

  “Listen to me,” he told Isabel. “You need to get back to work. What have you been doing with yourself all year? Sitting around, watching soap operas? Waiting for something to happen to you? That’s not how it works. An alligator doesn’t sit on the riverbank and hope something will swim into its jaws.”

  “You’re the alligator, not me,” Isabel said. “Anyway, they’d never choose me for the director’s job. I wasn’t even first choice for the team.”

  “So you weren’t first choice! So what?” Allan said. “A hundred and fifty people applied for that job. Is second choice really so bad?”

  “Let’s take a look at those mites,” Isabel said.

  The first year she worked at the zoo, Isabel had been part of a team of vets operating on Liza, the young Indian elephant, who had a tumor on her leg. She had never seen anything so huge operated on before, and it had been a difficult and exhausting procedure. But Liza had recovered and gone on to give birth to Zorro, the baby elephant beloved by the public. Zorro had raised zoo attendance figures by nearly a thousand per month. Today,
on her way out, Isabel stopped by the elephant enclosure to take a look at him. Liza wasn’t outside, but there was Zorro curling his tongue around the eggplants that lay on the ground, tossing them in the air and catching them while the spectators ahhed. She felt a flash of pride, remembering his mother limping around with the tumor on her leg and the moment in surgery when her huge heart had almost stopped beating.

  “Look, Bill,” someone said. “Betcha didn’t know elephants ate eggplant.”

  “They have to eat something besides peanuts, I guess.”

  “I want peanuts! Dad, can we get peanuts?”

  “In a minute, Ethan. Do you know why elephants eat eggplant, boys?”

  Silence.

  “Because eggplant starts with the letter e. Elephants only eat foods that begin with the letter e. Eggplant, escarole, and empanadas. Do you know what the botanical name for peanuts is? Empeanutus crunchola.”

  “Dad!”

  “In fact, if I were you, I’d watch out. What letter does Ethan begin with?”

  Isabel turned. Simon Goldenstern stood with a deadpan expression by the rail while a small boy punched him in the legs. An older boy stood beside him, skinny and shaggy haired, with big eyes fringed by dark lashes. Simon picked up the smaller child. “Stop that—get off of me, boy!” he said, holding Ethan close to him.

  The child screeched with laughter, flailing his arms and legs.

  “Dad,” the older boy said, “let’s go. I want to see the condors.” He bit the corner of a cuticle as he spoke, and Isabel could see that his nails were chewed raw.