Surprise Me (2 page)

—

ISABELLE STANDS OUTSIDE HIS OFFICE DOOR
and contemplates the etiquette of knocking. On the one hand, the man inside seems entirely preoccupied by a very personal conversation and it would be embarrassing to interrupt. On the other, she doesn’t want him to think she’s late for their ten o’clock meeting. After several minutes of debating and realizing that the argument inside isn’t subsiding, Isabelle knocks loudly. Should she now call out his name?

But she doesn’t have to. Daniel, pacing as Cheryl’s list of grievances continues to grow, hears Isabelle’s knock. Seizing on it, grateful for an excuse to end the conversation, he tells Cheryl, “I’ve got a student here,” and hangs up without waiting for her response.

“All right!” he calls out, and Isabelle opens the door.

Of course she’s seen his picture on the back of his two books, but that picture is hopelessly out-of-date, Isabelle now sees. It has done nothing to prepare her for the man who stands across the room from her.

It’s his physical presence that stuns her. He’s so much bigger than she imagined, maybe six feet three or four, and fleshier. Unlike most of her male professors, who seem suddenly, now that she’s standing in Daniel’s office, smaller and more cerebral, as if their bodies were an afterthought, this man takes up space.

“We have a ten o’clock,” Isabelle says. “Isabelle Rothman.”

“Yep. Sit down.”

There’s only a worn couch against one wall and a club chair of dubious color and condition in the corner. It probably was yellow once but now hovers somewhere between gray and beige and holds the imprint of a large man’s body in its cushions. She quickly chooses the sofa. The armchair seems too intimate. As she moves the books and papers from one small corner of the couch, piling them up on the middle pillow, he doesn’t attempt to help her.

She puts her hands in her lap, draws her long legs up, knees touching, the toes of her shoes on the floor, not the soles. Neither one of them says anything. She’s waiting for him to speak. He’s too busy watching her.

There are two large windows behind Daniel as he stands by his desk, and the bright morning light coming in behind him makes it difficult for Isabelle to read his face. Why isn’t he saying anything? Is he annoyed that she’s here? He read the first three chapters of her novel in progress and agreed to take her on, didn’t he? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he doesn’t remember what she wrote.

“I sent you the first three chapters of my book. About the girl who commits crimes.” She can’t bring herself to ask, “Did you like them?” so she waits again.

“Right,” he says as he rummages through the papers on his desk and on top of the table behind it, which runs underneath the windows. “Here they are!” he says triumphantly, as if he is totally surprised the pages exist.

“ ‘Outlaw,’ ” he reads on the first page. “Pretty bold title,” he says, almost to himself, as he scans the pages.

“She breaks into houses and steals things.”

Daniel looks up at her in surprise, and Isabelle knows in that instant he hasn’t read her pages. And then she doesn’t know what to do. Should she call him on it? He’s had all winter break to read them. She dropped the chapters off in his campus mailbox weeks ago. Oh, why didn’t she listen to everyone and choose someone more dependable?

Daniel unclutters the other end of the couch and sits down, her pages in his hand. They look at each other, and Isabelle has the uncanny feeling that the weight of his body has tipped the sofa on an angle and she’s having to work very hard not to slide down its length into his lap.

Up close, Isabelle has redeeming features, Daniel sees. Her skin is beautiful, even as it flushes now in embarrassment at their predicament, or maybe in anger. She wears no makeup, he can tell, and hides her eyes behind bangs, which her long fingers flick away from her forehead from time to time. There’s nothing about her that says, “Look at me,” but he finds himself looking anyway.

“Why this particular girl who takes this particular action?”

Isabelle has no idea. “She came to me,” is what she says, and Daniel knows immediately what she means. He can write only when something comes to him.

“Ah…” And then there’s silence as he quickly turns the pages, hoping for some clue.

“You didn’t read them, did you?” Isabelle can’t believe she’s confronting him, but she’s angry. Furious, really—an untamed emotion she rarely feels. But how long does it take to read forty-seven pages? Isn’t the six weeks of winter break long enough?

“I left them here, in the office,” he says, as if that’s an explanation. “By mistake.”

She wants to say,
And you couldn’t come get them?
but she doesn’t. Instead she gets up, and so does he. Now they’re facing each other, and he sees that she’s tall for a girl. Isabelle, standing less than three feet from him, suddenly, gratefully, doesn’t feel too tall at all.

“I’ll come back next week. Maybe you’ll have had a chance to read them by then.”

He nods once, rakes his fingers through his hair, the color of beach sand. Doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t promise. And she walks out of the office with his eyes following her.

—

DANIEL COLLAPSES INTO HIS ARMCHAIR
as the door closes, overcome with regret. But there was no way, simply no way, that he could tell this girl that the walk from his house to his campus office was too difficult for him to navigate, that even the contemplation of it produced anxiety too great for him to handle. It’s a miracle that he made it today. Well, that’s how he feels every time he makes it—that it is only through the grace of God that he manages the ten-minute walk.

He knows what his condition is called: agoraphobia. When the thought of walking outside his front door began to give him sweats and heart palpitations, he went to the doctor. And after all the requisite tests for heart disease and endocrine problems and whatever else the doctor had to rule out, the proper diagnosis was given to him. The problem is, the cure is iffy and involves therapy, which he refuses to consider, and medication, which he’s afraid will interfere with his work. It’s a humiliating problem and he keeps it to himself.

—

“
I
’
M NOT GOING BACK,
”
Isabelle spouts suddenly into the muffled air of Brighton Library. It’s late afternoon; the library is crowded but very quiet—the scrape of chairs being pulled out, the soft plop of a book being dropped onto a wooden table, even the slight snoring of a boy at the next table whose head is pillowed by a well-used backpack.

Her boyfriend, Nate, sitting next to her highlighting his criminology textbook, shrugs and whispers back, “Okay,” and returns to his book.

“He made me
ask him
if he’d read the pages!”

“Right, then find someone else to work with.” He’s really not interested.

“It was degrading. The whole thing.” Isabelle is fairly hissing her opinion. An older man across the table wearing half glasses and a pained expression shushes her.

Nate points to the textbook, the man watching them. “Work to do. This is a library. We’ve talked about this already.”

“Okay.” She’s quiet for ten seconds, fifteen. Then: “But I mean it.”

Nate pretends she hasn’t spoken.

—

AT THE END OF THE DAY,
as twilight creeps into his office, Daniel stands at one of the large square windows and watches the campus empty out. He knows that if he were outside and the day were clear enough, he might be able to see the Pacific Ocean in the far distance as it absorbs the last rays of the lowering sun, but those days appear to be over—the days when he feels comfortable outside.

Once the old-fashioned lampposts lining the major campus walkways have switched on and the foot traffic of students has diminished to a trickle, Daniel begins to argue with himself about walking home. He knows he has to do it. He can’t sleep here. It’s ridiculous, but he’s broken out in a cold sweat, and no matter what he tells himself, he can’t seem to make his large body move toward the door. If his son, Stefan, were coming today, that would help, but he isn’t. He has a job interview, and if the planets are aligned just right, he might get hired to do something.

Then his eye falls on Isabelle’s pages and he sees them as a reprieve. He has to read them, doesn’t he? He owes it to her. He’ll read them first and then he’ll walk home.

The armchair beckons, just waiting to embrace his outsized body, and he sinks into it gratefully, puts “Outlaw” on his lap, and begins reading. After the first page he sighs—he was so hoping he’d find even a modicum of talent. The second page doesn’t change his mind, but on page 13 there’s a scene between the girl and a hitchhiker she picks up that brings him a surprise. Something unexpected. Thank God—there’s something to work with here. He settles in, stretches his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and reads on.

—

A WEEK LATER ON A TUESDAY
morning, eight minutes before their ten o’clock meeting, Isabelle is crossing the hilly Chandler campus, rehearsing the speech she will give Daniel Jablonski, preparing to do something that will be hard for her.

“It would be better,” she’s going to say, “if I worked with another professor.” She will make no mention of the fact that he never read her pages, that he lived up to his reputation of being unprepared, of not caring about his students, of being just plain weird. No, she won’t say any of those things. She’ll simply say with as much poise as she can muster, “It would be better,” so that there’s no room for discussion.

She carefully chose boots to wear today so that she’s even taller—her beautiful, handcrafted, caramel-colored boots with a singular, lyrical vine etched along the outer edge. She loves these boots and they give her confidence and she’s at least six feet tall when she’s wearing them, and maybe Daniel Jablonski’s height, his just plain mass, won’t seem as intimidating.

Isabelle takes the stairs to the second floor of Lathrop Hall, the staccato sound of her boot heels on the wooden floor announces her approach, and her rapid knock punctuates her arrival. She opens the door without waiting for an answer.

Daniel is sitting behind his desk as she enters. He doesn’t stand up.

“Professor Jablonski,” she begins, “I think it would be better if—”

“I like the blackbirds,” he says, watching that simple sentence drain all the starch out of her stance.

“You do?” she says, and sinks down into the corner of the couch.

“I wasn’t expecting them,” he says. “It’s always a gift to read something you’re not expecting.”

He thinks
my
writing is a gift?

“Here’s what I learn about Melanie.” He rummages for her pages, somewhere on the mess of his desk, and pulls them up, scans the page in his hand. “It is Melanie, right?”

She nods.

“When she won’t let that boy, that wreck of a boy that she picks up hitchhiking, throw those stones at the birds, I see something in her worth paying attention to.”

He gets up and takes his place on the opposite corner of the couch. “I want you to surprise me some more.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Rewrite the pages up to that scene and bring them next week.”

He stands up. Her comprehension lags a moment. Oh, the meeting is over. That’s all? It must be, because he’s walking back to his desk and she understands she’s supposed to leave. She does.

—

ISABELLE STANDS OUTSIDE
Daniel’s closed office door, motionless. She’s trying to figure out what just transpired. Was she given the brush-off? Was he truly complimenting her work? Is that all he’s supposed to do—tell her to rewrite and leave her to it? She’s mystified. He didn’t exactly teach her anything, but still, she feels like she was given something. In less than five minutes. How is that possible? What is it? Maybe his expectation that she can do it. Is that it? She almost turns around to go back into that office to ask him, “What just happened here?” but she doesn’t. She walks away down that long hall much more slowly than she arrived.

—

DANIEL JABLONSKI IS PLEASED
with himself. He feels the meeting with Isabelle went well. He could honestly compliment her work. He gave her direction.
Now let’s see what she comes up with.
He has no idea how mystified Isabelle is by their interaction. Being a self-taught writer with nothing but junior college classes, which he rarely attended, in his background, he has no idea what a writing mentor does. He thinks the whole idea of teaching someone to write is a fool’s errand. Writing is mysterious and mercurial and maddening, and he certainly has no idea how to help someone do it better.

He can’t even help himself. He settles his large body into his desk chair, turns on his computer, brings up his working file, and stares with dismay at what he wrote yesterday. And he groans. It’s bad. It’s awful. It’s irredeemable. He deletes two and a half pages with ruthless abandon, feeding his secret terror that he will never finish another book. Each day as he turns on his computer and faces the words he wrote the day before, he wants to weep. Sometimes he does.

His last novel was published over eight years ago. When it sank like a stone in water, the depression and anxiety that he had been trying to hold at bay for almost a decade washed over him, sweeping away his marriage to Cheryl (a good thing) and rendering him agoraphobic (a bad thing) and hopeless about his work (a devastating thing).

This novel in embryo, his fifth book, refuses to gain viability. He prods it each day nonetheless. He doesn’t know what else to do.

—

IN THE RAMSHACKLE WOODEN HOUSE
she rents on the edge of campus with Nate and her other roommates—Jilly, who barely makes it out of bed each day, and Deepti, who rarely lifts her head from her books—Isabelle also stares at her computer screen. Rewrite the first twelve pages so that they surprise Daniel Jablonski.
What the hell does that mean?
No answer comes to her. Nothing. And then, gratefully, a distraction. She hears the front door slam shut and she knows Nate is home. Neither of the girls announces her presence with a preemptive slamming of the front door.