This Side of Married

by Rachel Pastan

  “Isabel,” she said, stepping into the house. “When someone says ‘Dr. Rubin’ I think they’re talking about my mother. Besides, you said you thought using last names was smarmy.”

  “Let me tell you, if I were a doctor, I’d make everyone use the title. ‘How are you, Dr. Goldenstern?’ ‘You’re an asshole, Dr. Goldenstern.’ It makes everything sound delightful.”

  She followed him into the house, taking in the worn blue sofa, the table and chairs, the cracked moldings, and the dusty, golden light. It was quiet. “Nice house,” she said, because it was, and also because she was determined to be polite.

  “Thank you. Any trouble finding us?” He had e-mailed her directions.

  “None at all. Where are the boys?”

  “Still at their mother’s. She brings them over Saturday mornings, but she’s usually late.”

  “Oh.” Isabel was taken aback.

  He shrugged. “I’m at her mercy. Worse, the boys are. She’s late getting them everywhere. To school, to their friends’ houses. It drives Bill crazy. Ethan doesn’t get bothered much by anything. He has sea legs.”

  “Why don’t you go pick them up yourself?”

  Simon smiled. “She doesn’t like me going over there. I don’t know why she cares, really. Maybe she thinks I’ll kill her new boyfriend in a jealous rage.”

  The situation, both in itself and in the way it reminded her of her own life, depressed Isabel so much that she sat down, uninvited, on the sofa.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Okay.” She didn’t really, but she suddenly needed a few minutes to herself. Sometimes the image of Theo and Tina ambushed her, and she couldn’t catch her breath. How could he have slept with her? How could he have unleashed on Isabel’s life not only jealousy and misery, but the endless, deadening, sordid negotiations about retirement accounts and jointly held mutual funds, not to mention pictures and furniture and towels? How much worse it must have been for Simon, having to bargain for his role in his children’s lives. When he came back in with cups on a tray, she asked, “How did you decide that your wife got to keep the house?”

  “Well, I left her. I moved out. There she was, still in it.” Simon sat down and stretched his long legs, crossed one over the other. Despite the topic of conversation, he looked more comfortable and relaxed than Isabel had ever seen him.

  Isabel said, “I’ve left Theo. We’re getting a divorce.” She hadn’t meant to tell him, but the words kept swimming around and around inside her, looking for a crack to escape through. She half expected he would smirk or even make a joke, but he didn’t.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because he did something unforgivable.” Tears came into her eyes.

  “Pretty much everything’s forgivable, if you want to forgive someone.”

  “I don’t want to forgive him,” Isabel said. “I don’t love him.” She found a tissue in her purse and blew her nose.

  Simon nodded. “You can’t be married to someone you don’t love. That would be unheard of.”

  Isabel wished she hadn’t said anything. “My sister Tina is getting married,” she said hurriedly, bitterly, hardly caring what she said as long as she got the subject changed. “I wonder if she loves the guy! I think she likes his money so much she hasn’t thought much about the rest of him.”

  “He’s wealthy?”

  “Yes. You met him. He was the big man with the beard at the nature center. It’s his nature center, he founded it.”

  “Soren Zank!” Simon sounded delighted. “So Soren Zank is going to be your brother-in-law! He’s made quite a flurry around here with his money and his zany ideas. The paper did a feature on him when he bought Foster’s Marsh. That land just missed qualifying as a Superfund site, and he thinks a couple of million dollars will clean it up.”

  “A couple of million dollars sounds like a lot of money.”

  “It does. But these things take tens of millions. Unfortunately, the best thing to do would probably be to pave the whole place over and build an office park or something.”

  Startled, Isabel stood up. “Let me take a look at that owl,” she said.

  He led her out to the back porch, a long, narrow, screened room with a table and a couple of chairs, a cardboard carton with some rags in it, a dish of water, and a carpet of green Astroturf scattered with owl droppings. The owl was huddled by the wall. It was a small, bedraggled thing with a tawny breast and a white spot between its eyes. Isabel put on the heavy gloves she had brought to protect her hands from the talons and picked it up. The owl rustled its wings feebly and blinked its big, round, golden-rimmed eyes. For a moment she let herself feel the thrill of holding it. She understood why Bill wanted to tame it, but she knew that a human could not really commune with a wild animal. A dog or a cat, certainly, they had been bred for it—but not a lion, not a frog with its tiny brain (she had dissected dozens of them and knew the precise size and shape of that organ, like a damp, shriveled pea), and not an owl. “What have you been feeding it?” she asked.

  “Different things. Hamburger. Little baby mice—pinkies. At the beginning it ate just fine, but now nothing tempts it.”

  The little bird trembled and dug its talons weakly into her gloved hands. It was nothing but bone and feather.

  “Get me a couple of towels,” Isabel said. He brought them to her. She covered the table with one and laid the bird down, holding it by the feet and examining its head for cuts or bruises. The eyes looked all right, bright yellow and clear. She turned its head to make sure the rotation was normal, looked into its ears, and then covered the head with the second towel to reduce the poor creature’s stress. She slid her hand slowly along the body, probing the strength of the pectoral muscles, the bones, and joints of the wing.

  Simon watched with interest as she worked. “What are you doing, exactly?” he asked.

  There was no obvious swelling or bruising, no broken bones. The owl was healthy except for the dehydration caused probably by the shock of captivity. “Just seeing how much damage you’ve done.”

  “We took very good care of it,” Simon said. “Bill has a book.”

  “A boy with a book can’t raise an owl,” Isabel said.

  “He’s a very smart and capable boy.”

  “You should have left it where it was.”

  “It had fallen out of the nest.”

  “How do you know?” Isabel asked irritably.

  “Because it was on the ground. It was lucky I found it. I knew Bill would take good care of it. He fell in love with it the moment he laid eyes on it.”

  Love at first sight, Isabel thought. She said, “I need to take it with me.”

  “No,” Simon said. “You can’t do that.”

  Isabel said nothing. She could feel her whole face frown with stubborn judgment—like her father’s face.

  “Imagine how Bill will feel if he gets here and it’s gone,” Simon said.

  “Imagine how he’ll feel if he gets here and it’s dead!” Isabel said.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?”

  Isabel spoke as calmly as she could. “Listen to me for a minute. Lots of birds leave the nest before they can fly. Usually the parents know exactly where the fledgling is. They keep it fed until it’s ready to hunt. Just because you found this owl on the ground doesn’t mean it was in any danger. And what’s worse, now that it has accepted food from your son, it’s probably imprinted on him. That means that even if it is revived enough to be released back into the wild, it won’t mate. Ever. It won’t recognize another owl as its own species. It will think it’s a person now.”

  “You’re kidding,” Simon said, shocked.

  “No, I’m not.” She busied herself settling the owl, wrapped loosely in the towel, into the cardboard box, trying to calm both it and herself.

  “You mean the parents were really taking care of it? Even though it was on the ground?”

  “I said probably,” Isabel said. “Obviously, I don’t know for an absolute fac
t.”

  “But you know for a fact that it won’t ever mate?” he pursued. “Or you just think it’s a possibility?”

  “It’s my professional opinion, okay? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Simon sighed and stroked his beard. Isabel wondered if that was why he had grown it, because he liked the gesture. “All right,” he said. “Take him.”

  “Thank you,” Isabel said. She picked up the box.

  “Thank you.”

  Out on the street, she put the owl in the backseat of Alice’s car.

  “Listen,” Simon said, following her, “I appreciate what you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing it for the owl.” She went around the car and got into the driver’s seat.

  Simon followed and held the door. “How would you like to have dinner sometime?” he said.

  Isabel looked up at him in amazement. “With you?”

  “We might have fun. I can’t say I’ve ever dated a herpetologist before.”

  The color rose in Isabel’s cheeks. She could hear how much he liked the word—herpetologist—rolling it around on his tongue as he had rolled docent. “No thanks.”

  Simon’s smile did not so much fade as freeze on his face. “Can I ask why not?”

  “Because you go around meddling where you have no business!” Isabel cried. “First my sister, then the owl! And I’m not a herpetologist. You were more accurate with what you called me before.”

  “What did I call you before?” he asked.

  She looked at him. A pulse beat in her jaw. “The little missus.”

  He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “That was before I knew you,” he said. “And it was in a private conversation.”

  “Before you knew I’d had an unusual career and might therefore be worthy of your interest,” Isabel said.

  “I’m not just interested in your career,” Simon said.

  In the backseat, the owl rustled feebly against the cardboard box. “I have to go,” Isabel said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  She brought the owl to her vet friend Beth Kaplan, who was pleased, if somewhat surprised, to see her. She was a plump, dark-haired woman in a white coat and sneakers who had worked with raptors in the summers in college.

  “Why didn’t you bring it to the zoo?” Beth wanted to know.

  “I didn’t want to give Allan a chance to harangue me.”

  Beth gently lifted the owl from its box. “What happened to it?”

  “It’s suffering from misplaced love,” Isabel said. She told Beth the story.

  “People,” Beth said, examining the owl as Isabel had done, “are stupid.”

  “I don’t know that I’d say this guy is stupid, exactly,” Isabel said slowly. “Thoughtless, certainly.”

  “Not to mention unscrupulous. Thinking you could keep an owl around the house as though it were a canary! Stealing it out of the woods.” She readied a syringe of rehydration fluids.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it stealing,” Isabel said. “He thought it was hurt.”

  “He thought it would make a nice pet for his kid.” She injected the owl under its wing. “I’ll keep an eye on it for a few days. We’ll see what happens.”

  Isabel thanked her. Beth was right, of course. She didn’t know why she was defending Simon.

  That evening when she checked her e-mail she was surprised to find a message from S. L. Goldenstern. Apprehensively, she double-clicked on the subject line (“Saw-whet, etc.”) and watched the long paragraphs of text materialize on the screen. This was the letter:

  Isabel—

  Having already nailed me as a meddler, perhaps you won’t be surprised to get this e-mail from me. You’re right to this extent: I never could leave well enough alone, or let sleeping dogs lie, or whatever the appropriate cliché is. I know you may be sufficiently fed up with me to want to delete this without reading it, but I hope that, having accused me of at least (by my count) two misdeeds, you will be willing to hear me out.

  Believe it or not, I feel terrible about your sister. But believe, too, that what she’s going through now is nothing compared to what it would have been like when, once they were married, Tony began to sleep with other women. You may say that I can’t know for sure that this would happen, but I do. I’ve known Tony for almost thirty years. It’s his nature to cheat, and he likes women. He likes your sister, certainly—maybe he even loves her, but he is not capable of being faithful to her. Within months of each of his two marriages he was having affairs. Discoveries, tears, recriminations, broken promises—better your sister never marry anyone than that she endure what Laura and Selena endured! I went through it myself with Marla, and I know. I confess that I have done what I could to keep Tony away from Alice. I did bully him into going to California, partly because he had made a promise to his kid that I wanted to see him keep, and partly because I hoped that he would get distracted once he was out there and break things off with your sister. I was pretty sure some other woman would catch his eye, which is exactly what happened. On the plane from Philadelphia to Oakland.

  And who is going to protect the new woman? you may ask. Who indeed. Still, I can’t feel I did wrong with regard to Alice. I can’t say I’m sorry about it, because I’m not. I’m sure Alice is better off, and I have to say that that knowledge makes me sleep better at night.

  As for the owl, I still can’t shake the picture of it, trembling and blinking in that box. I can only say it looked nearly as miserable to me when I came upon it in the woods, half-invisible in the dead leaves under a tree. I’ve never seen a bird just sitting on the ground like that. It didn’t occur to me to leave it there any more than it would have occurred to me to leave a lost child crying on a street corner. I know you think I should have known better. I may, I admit, have avoided thinking it through more carefully because I was thinking instead about my son. To understand this, you have to know a little about Bill. Even as a baby he was exceedingly sensitive. He didn’t like loud noises. If the people around him were angry or upset, he was distraught and couldn’t be comforted. Imagine how it must have been for him growing up in a household in which his parents were often upset and angry. He taught himself to read when he was four, and his fantasy life has been his escape and, I truly believe, his salvation. Still, the last two years as my marriage to his mother fell apart have been hell for him, and he has withdrawn even further into himself. Sometimes I think he wants to take scissors and snip himself out of the fabric of life altogether.

  And so, if I seized a chance to give him a gift I thought would help reconnect him—to bring one of his fantasies to life—and if I was willing not to think very hard about any harm that might come to an animal because of the benefit to him, well, so be it. No doubt if I had thought it would have done him any good, I would have killed the poor little owl with my bare hands. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

  As for not considering you worthy, as you say, of my interest before I knew what you did (or at least, as you keep reminding me, used to do) for a living, I am in no way comfortable about it. Certainly a person should be judged by who she is, not by what she does. But at the same time I can’t help feeling that any person, man or woman, who has no intellectual or professional attachment to the world cannot be very interesting, at least to me. No doubt this is a personal failing. This e-mail seems to have turned into a veritable catalog of my failings. There are more, of course, that I haven’t mentioned, but probably you’ve guessed most of them anyway.

  If, in spite of all this, you at any time reconsider your decision not to have dinner with me, I would be very pleased. I’m egotistical enough to believe you might enjoy yourself. And besides, I owe you something for rescuing the little saw-whet.

  S.G.

  Isabel read the e-mail through with growing amazement and outrage. First she was simply appalled by the effrontery of his trying to justify himself to her. She could not accept his excuses about Alice. Nothing he could say could convince her that anyone had a right to sche
me to come between two people the way he had. If he had reasons he thought Alice should stay away from Anthony, he should have said so and let her make up her own mind. Who was he to impose his own judgment?

  She began the paragraphs about the owl with the same attitude, so angry that she refused to accept his rather extreme description of his son. The sentence about killing the owl said it all. He was selfish as well as arrogant. He as much as admitted that he was interested in dating her only because of her job. The reiterated invitation for dinner was beneath regard. She moved the mouse into position to delete the message—but she was not ready to click the button just yet.

  She scrolled back up to the top of the e-mail and began again, reading with more attention this time, not skimming over the sentences to see what came next. On second reading, it occurred to her that she herself had tried exactly what, a few moments before, she had thought Simon should have done about Alice and that it had done absolutely no good. In her heart Isabel knew there was nothing anyone could have said about Anthony that would have made Alice change her mind. The more people pointed out his flaws, the more tenaciously she would have clung to him. Furthermore, what Simon wrote about how hurt Alice would have been if Anthony cheated on her was not dismissed so easily the second time. On first reading, she had more or less skipped over this part, as it was so painful to read. But this time she had to acknowledge that she would have done almost anything to preserve her sister from what she had gone through with Theo.

  And, she had to admit, it was hard to reread the description of Bill without her heart softening. She had seen him, after all, at the zoo, his fingernails bitten bloody. He was only a boy, ten years old. Who could blame a father for wanting to help his child? What struck Isabel this time about the reference to killing the owl was not the horror of it, but the honesty.