“Hello,” she said.
Simon looked at her. “We do keep running into each other,” he said, and then, to the boy he was holding, “Hey—didn’t anyone teach you not to hit your father?” He set the child on the ground. “This is Ethan, and that big one there is Bill. Boys, this is Isabel. Is it okay if they just call you Isabel? We can do Mrs., but it seems so . . . I don’t know. Smarmy.”
Isabel laughed. “I can hardly say I’d prefer it now, can I?”
“Why should you care what I think?” he said. “The boys don’t, do you, boys?” The children rolled their eyes. “You here by yourself?” Simon asked, looking around as though to see what children she was escorting.
“Yes,” Isabel said.
“You like zoos, do you?”
She could feel him thinking she must really have nothing better to do. “I used to work here.”
“Ahh. Were you a docent?” he asked, giving extra stress to the word as though he liked the feel of it in his mouth. “Do zoos have docents? We are here to visit the bird house for the twentieth time. Bill is interested in birds. He has all the accessories. Binoculars. A life list.”
“Ornithology’s interesting,” Isabel said to Bill, who was nine or ten. “They have all kinds of programs here.”
“We do all the ornithology programs, up and down the state,” Simon said. “Bill particularly likes raptors.”
“I’d like to have my own falcon,” Bill said, looking up at Isabel with his father’s golden brown gaze. “Like in medieval times.”
“Dad!” Ethan tugged at Simon’s pants. “Peanuts!”
“He’s such a wholesome kid, isn’t he,” Simon said. “Other kids want candy, but Ethan wants peanuts. Peanuts you shall have, my boy! Onward.” As they moved away across the asphalt, Simon called back over his shoulder, “See you at the wedding!”
Isabel waved, but he had leaned over to say something to the children and didn’t see her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Isabel had been going to have dinner with her friend Claire, but in the afternoon Claire called to cancel. Her daughter was sick. “Where’s Thomas?” Isabel said.
“Husbands,” Claire said. “You think they should be able to handle things, but when push comes to shove.”
Isabel wasn’t going to argue with her.
There was nothing in the house to eat, so she made a quick shopping list and found her keys, wondering if she would trust Theo with the children as little as Claire trusted her husband, if she and Theo had children. She thought about Alice and Tina, the way the family would stretch outward now. There would be new patterns, new tensions and points of view. What kinds of fathers would Soren and Anthony be? Pretty lousy ones, probably, if their pasts were any guide. Would Alice and Tina always be the ones to stay home with sick children? Or would they, like Doc, hire Cicilys to do it for them? Sunk in the gloomy reflection that this would perhaps be one of the functions of a childless aunt, Isabel did her grocery shopping quickly, then drove home and let herself in through the kitchen door.
Music was playing in the living room. Isabel put down her bags. She hadn’t expected Theo to be home. As she stood in the kitchen, someone said over the music, “We couldn’t have kept this up forever. It would have ended sooner or later. So it’s ending sooner.”
“That’s not the point. You cheated on me.”
“Listen to yourself. I cheated!”
“With that full-of-crap, bleeding-heart, save-the-whales moron!”
“He’s not a moron,” Tina said. “And neither am I.”
“You can’t blame me for being angry, Tina. I’m angry!”
“I never promised never to have sex with anyone else.”
“But you’re marrying him!” Theo said.
“Yes!” Tina said. “I’m marrying him! You were never going to marry me, no matter how unhappy you and Isabel were!”
Isabel couldn’t imagine what else they might possibly say, but she knew she couldn’t bear to hear it. She forced her dead feet across the kitchen floor.
Her sister saw her first as she sagged in the doorway. “Oh,” Tina said, taken aback. “We thought you were out.”
Isabel looked at Theo. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and a red tie. He had had his hair cut and he was freshly shaved, and although he should have looked haggard—angry or desperate or guilty—he looked only smooth and clean, as though he were made of plastic. It was as though he had gotten so good at looking a part that even now, when everything was ripped open and lying bloody on the floor, he couldn’t help himself.
Isabel smeared her tears into her cheeks with her fingers. Some part of her refused to accept that Tina was here even as she looked at her sister’s angry face, her brown arms ending in tangerine-nailed fists. It seemed to her that all her life Tina had been there, worming in where she had no business, refusing to go away. Standing outside the door, pounding her fists to get in.
“It’s not like you love him!” Tina said. Her china doll eyes were streaked with mascara and swollen with tears, as though she were the one whose life had been sacked and plundered and set aflame.
“How can you possibly know how I feel?” Isabel cried.
“You as much as said so! You never appreciate anything you have!”
“And you always think you deserve anything you want!” Isabel had never felt so wild. Fury seared her. She shouted, “Did you know Soren asked me to sleep with him? We had coffee at Xando, and he offered to make me pregnant! Is it true that it only takes him once?”
Tina’s face blazed. “You’re lying,” she said.
“Ask him!” Isabel yelled. She sat on the sofa. It felt hot and prickly and stiff, a sofa chosen for how it would look in the room. “And you, you’re such a—” Isabel cried, turning to Theo, trying and failing to think of a word to describe him. She hated him. She was furious with Tina, but she hated him.
He looked at her wearily, turning his palms up in a hopeless shrug, his thick wedding band catching the light. “Oh, Izzy,” he said. “Oh, God. What did we do to end up here?”
Isabel’s mind fizzled and sparked. “I didn’t do anything!” she yelled, and began to weep so fiercely that she surprised herself. Because Tina was right. It wasn’t as though she were losing anyone she still loved.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Isabel went out through the front door and walked to Alice’s apartment. No one tried to stop her. She thought she might regret having left the car, but she needed the time walking gave her. Not to think, for she was incapable of thinking, but for her mind to churn and roil down the sidewalk as she tried to comprehend what had happened. She was trembling so badly that halfway there she had to sit on a bench and wait for the strength to continue. It was evening and people were coming home from work, in dresses or coveralls, one in a nurse’s uniform, another in khaki pants and a checked shirt. They carried purses and plastic grocery bags and looked eager to get where they were going. How did she look? Like an ordinary person tired after a long day or like the ghost she was? How many people walking down 12th Street on a sunny July evening were choked with betrayal or rejection, loss or despair?
As she approached Alice’s, she tried to prepare herself for the possibility that Anthony might be there, too, but nobody was home at all. Isabel had a key, but she hadn’t brought it. She began to cry again, there in the vestibule beside the steel mail slots. She sobbed in painful gasps, burying her face in her hands. She couldn’t go home. The thought of taking a taxi to Devon, to her parents’ house, came to her, and it seemed such an appropriate and terrible idea that she began to cry even harder. Then the street door opened and Alice came in, carrying her battered briefcase. Isabel fell, weeping, into her arms.
Alice helped Isabel up to the apartment and sat with her on the sofa. Isabel looked up at her sister’s white, frightened face. “I’ve left Theo,” she said.
Alice’s look of terror eased slightly, and Isabel could tell she was already thinking it could be patched up someh
ow.
“He’s having an affair,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Alice asked.
“I went into the house and he and Tina were there together.”
“No,” Alice said. “No. You misunderstood.”
“Yes, they are. Yes.” The word was like a knife she was pressing into her own hand. “She was breaking up with him. Because of Soren. She’s choosing Soren over him.” Isabel lay down on the couch and sobbed.
Alice’s heart skipped horribly in her chest. She found she could imagine that Tina would do it. Tina would borrow your favorite jeans and never give them back. She would take food from your plate, even if she were eating the same thing. And Theo had grown more opaque as the years passed, saying less, his green eyes glinting as if he wanted something but wasn’t willing to say what. She eased Isabel’s head into her lap and held her, smoothing the hair back from her forehead the way Cicily used to do when they were children. She remembered one time when Isabel had barreled in from the school bus weeping, flinging the front door open so that it banged against the wall and the cold, damp air swept in. Her face was red and her clothes were muddy, and she threw herself onto the floor. In a moment Cicily was beside her on the polished wood and had gathered her in her arms. There they sat for half an hour or more, Cicily stroking Isabel’s hair and speaking to her softly, as though she were a wild animal she was trying to tame. Alice had never learned what caused it, but she remembered Cicily saying to her later, “Your sister feels things worse than other people. She tries to pretend she doesn’t, but she does.”
Now, at last, Isabel stopped crying. She sat up and blew her nose. “Is Anthony coming over?” she asked, both wanting to know the answer and needing to feel she could have a normal conversation, that normal life was not entirely blasted away.
“No. I just took him to the airport.”
“The airport?” Isabel said blankly.
“He had to go to California. His friend Simon is going out there for some reason, and he needed Anthony to go with him.”
In all the turmoil, Isabel had forgotten the fragment of conversation she had overheard at the medical group. “Why?” she asked.
“I don’t exactly understand why,” Alice said honestly.
“I saw Simon Goldenstern this morning,” Isabel said.
“That’s strange,” Alice said. “What did he say?”
Isabel tried to remember. She thought if she could concentrate on Simon, she could be calm for a minute or two. But the memory drifted out of reach. She saw Theo: cool, handsome, weary, as though the weight of their life together were too much for him. She saw Tina’s teary, puffy face, the face Theo had kissed. Tina, with her shallow thoughts and her selfishness and her painted nails. Was that what Theo wanted? Tina, who took whatever caught her eye. Who got pregnant without even trying. Rage blazed through Isabel’s skin, lit her up like a wronged goddess. She was shaking uncontrollably, and she held on to the dusty cushions of the couch with both hands as though they might save her, looking up into Alice’s face as though there might be something there for her, some calm or comfort. Alice put her arms around her and held her tightly again, but it didn’t help. They weren’t children anymore, and Alice’s embrace had lost whatever potency it had once possessed, back in those long-ago days when the worst thing one of them could say to the other was, “I wish I didn’t have a sister!” Oh how Isabel wished that now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That night Isabel slept on the foldout sofa in Alice’s living room. Or rather, she didn’t sleep but lay awake staring at the shadows on the walls and listening to the traffic on the street below. Eventually the sun lit up the cluttered, dusty, brightly colored room. Buses roared past and cars honked. People called to one another. It was Saturday morning. Isabel got out of bed and went into the kitchen alcove to make coffee. A minute later Alice came out of her bedroom in her robe, looking as though she hadn’t slept, either.
They had agreed the night before that Isabel would stay with Alice for a few days at least, while she thought about what to do. The first thing was to get some clothes from the Quince Street house. The second was to tell their parents something. Both sisters agreed the elder Rubins would have to know Isabel had left Theo, but apart from that, it was hard to know what to tell them. Whatever it was, Isabel wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. She wanted to do everything she had to do and then crawl into a corner and stay there.
On Quince Street, Alice went to ring the bell and Isabel waited in Alice’s Civic. The front door opened and Alice stood talking to Theo on the stoop. Then she came back to the car and said, “He’s going to go wait in the back.”
Isabel didn’t want Theo in her garden, but she nodded. She was trembling again, and the facade of the house seemed to ripple as she went up the steps, as though she were looking up at it from under water. She opened the door and went into the dark hall. Theo’s hand closed on her wrist. “Isabel,” he said.
She jumped, but he held her tight.
“I told you to wait outside,” Alice said. She used her lawyer’s voice, but it didn’t work on him.
“I need to talk to you,” Theo said.
Isabel tried to shake him off. “I don’t want to talk!” Once a large tree boa had wrapped itself around her arm so tightly, it had taken two men to get it off.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “I want to tell you I’m sorry. I did a terrible thing, but I love you.”
She stared at him, at his tired eyes and his taut face. He looked as though he meant what he said, but he had lied to her for so long that she thought she probably didn’t know how to tell. “How long was it going on?” she asked.
“Not long, Isabel. God, I wish it had never happened at all. It was a mistake. I was so unhappy about the way things were with us.”
She wished he would stop using her full name. What did it mean? It made him seem as if he were reading lines. “Let go of me!” she said.
Theo let go. “Things have not been good the last couple of years,” he said. “I admit that. But it hasn’t all been my fault.”
“We were trying to have a family,” Isabel said. “Or I thought that was what we were trying to do.”
“You were obsessed with a person who didn’t exist!” Theo said. “You never used to be like that. When you were working, at least you had something real to focus on!”
“When I was working?” Isabel cried. “What does that have to do with anything? Why are we even talking about me? You lied! You let me take terrible, awful drugs and all the time you were going out and screwing my own sister!”
“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “I said I was sorry.”
“So you’re sorry,” Isabel said. “So what?”
“So,” Theo said, “I want us to have another chance.”
Isabel looked at him in disbelief. She felt she must be missing something, something he could see that she couldn’t that made his words somehow reasonable. “I think you just can’t bear the idea that anyone would leave you,” she said, and walked past him up the stairs.
All the way to Devon, Isabel sat with her knees pulled to her chest. Theo had said that she had changed. He said he loved her. Had she changed? Could he possibly still love her? She burned with hate for him. She could see, etched in the blackness inside her eyes, what his head would look like as it exploded: the smug look on his face blasted away.
The car stopped. Isabel looked up and found herself at her parents’ house. The roses were blooming. The flower beds were neatly edged and mulched. The air-conditioner compressor buzzed above the sounds of the birds.
Alice looked at Isabel.
“Let’s get it over with,” Isabel said.
They rang the bell. Prince barked on the other side of the door, and their mother’s voice called, “Just a minute! I have to get control of the dog!” This was her way of making robbers think she had a Doberman.
“It’s Alice and Isabel,” Alice said.
Dr. Rubin opened the door.
“My goodness,” she said. “Come in. If you’d called first, I would have had something in the house for lunch. Down, Prince, don’t jump. Are you all right, Isabel? What’s wrong?” She put her strong, ringed hand to Isabel’s face. “Are you sick?”
Isabel pulled away. “I’m okay.”
For a moment Dr. Rubin looked hurt. She picked up Prince and stroked him. The little dog panted, watching the sisters with his bright black eyes. “All right,” Doc said, and led the way into the living room. “I was just talking to Tina on the phone. Which caterers were you thinking of using, Alice? Tina says Clifton’s has gone downhill, but Market Square is so expensive. Of course, Soren says the sky’s the limit, but there’s such a thing as virtue in moderation.”
They had reached the living room, in which the faded couches and battered coffee table of their childhood had long since been replaced by low, uncomfortable, elegant furniture from an Italian design store. Only the rug was the same, linking the people they were now to the people they had been. Judge Rubin sat in an armchair, reading the paper, wearing khakis and an old shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He smiled when he saw his daughters and got to his feet.
Isabel let him embrace her. Her only idea was to put one foot in front of the other, to get through the next half hour however she could.
He looked at her with his sharp eyes. “You look tired.”
“I’m all right.”
“Your mother hasn’t slept a wink. You’d think she’d never had a daughter get married before.” He smiled at her with a thin warmth like winter sunlight, all the more precious for its scarcity.
“I don’t know what to do about Tina,” Doc said. “She wants to have an entirely vegetarian menu. But people will be coming from all over the country! They’ll expect something substantial. I’m not saying it has to be steak, but we can’t just serve them carrot sticks.”
“It’s her wedding,” Judge Rubin said in the tone in which he might have said, “It’s her funeral.”
Dr. Rubin, who had clearly run up against this dead end before, changed the subject. “Where’s Theo?” she asked Isabel. “Don’t tell me he’s at the office on a beautiful Saturday morning.”
This Side of Married Page 13
