Surprise Me (34 page)

One day he asks her to describe the bookstore. He wants to be able to “picture it in my mind.” He wants to be able to place Isabelle there when she’s back in Oakland. And so she describes the corner it’s on—College and Crescent, within walking distance of the Berkeley campus but not too close. How the front door is glass and she’s left the old-fashioned bell Meir had attached to it to announce a customer. How the front counter is tall and she sits on a high stool behind it.

“Is that where you e-mail me?” Daniel asks.

“Mostly, on my laptop.”

And Daniel nods; he can see her there now, doing it.

She tells him the story of how she convinced Meir, years ago, to carry some new books and display them at the very first table you see when you walk in. She describes the small, cozy sofa to the right of the front door, slipcovered now in a deep burgundy twill, and the steamer trunk they use as a coffee table and how people can sit there and browse through a book, even put their feet up on the trunk, since it’s well worn, and relax into the reading experience.

She tells him about the changes she made after Meir died eight years ago. How she painted the walls of the shop, which probably hadn’t been touched since Meir first bought the store, a warm cream color and replaced the rickety old metal shelves with custom-built wooden ones. How she hired an old-fashioned sign painter to etch onto the large front window of the store, the one that fronts on College,
NOAH
’
S ARK, BOOKS
in shiny black letters shadowed with a sliver of gold, and underneath the store’s name,
MEIR SCHAPIRO, FOUNDER
.

She tells Daniel how she’s kept all the books she inherited. She couldn’t throw out a single one, even though many of them were so esoteric she knew no one would ever buy them. But she just dusted them off and reshelved them. They were Meir’s children, it felt like, and there was no abandoning them. So the shelves at the back of the store remain a shrine to Meir’s belief in the unpopular, the obscure, the arcane, the unloved. Once in a while she’ll sell one of those books. In fact, that’s how she met Michael. And Isabelle tells Daniel that story, which she can tell he appreciates.

In those free-ranging afternoon conversations, Isabelle and Daniel move back into the easy intimacy that they once took for granted. The talk flows without pause. They interrupt each other without hesitation, tease each other occasionally, know exactly what the other means even when the other is searching for the right words. It’s so easy to talk, so easy to amuse, so easy to understand exactly the point.

But today when Daniel wakes, he’s furious. He’s pulled himself from a dream he immediately wants to forget. Images linger—a stark and empty hillside, merciless wind, and the sky dark with heavy clouds—a goddamn Victorian novel! He’s dreaming a scene that belongs in
Wuthering Heights
. He’s had the dream before, various versions of it. There’s always a gaping hole in the earth, bottomless, a closed coffin which somehow he knows is his, and cries of grief coming from a source he can’t locate in the dream. Not very subtle. Even his dreams have gotten mundane and predictable, and he’s disgusted with it all—himself, his situation.

He tries to sit up, impatient with the beautiful afghan that gets tangled in his feet, impatient with the oxygen line, which wound itself around an arm as he slept, impatient with Isabelle, who tries to help.

“This is all taking too long!”

She knows he means this long, slow march to the end, but she asks him anyway. She wants him to start talking to her about it all. “What is, Daniel?”

“This dying business. It’s taking too long!”

“Maybe there’s a reason.”

“Yes, the universe has a sick sense of humor.”

“Maybe you’re not done yet. Maybe you have things to do.”

“Oh, spare me, Isabelle, you sound like some New Age blissed-out
airhead
! ‘Things to do’? Yes, I have things to do, but they all involve living, and all that’s fucking ahead of me is dying! So stop serving up nonsensical pabulum like I have ‘things to do.’ ”

The vehemence of his words, the blatant attack on her, backs her away. She’d like to walk right out on him, but she feels she can’t. The best she can do is move across the small room and sit at the kitchen table. Turned away from him, she watches the rustle of the birch leaves, bright green against the paper white of the trunks. She’s disappointed in him—wounded, if she’s honest. Daniel, of all people, knows how often she calls into question her own intelligence, feeling in her darkest moments that she doesn’t have the uniqueness, the smarts, she would like to, and that is exactly the soft spot he went for. Unfair, uncalled for, even if he’s sick.

And he knows it. He sits on the couch silently cursing himself and fumbles to apologize, something he’s rarely moved to do in this life.

“You need to stop pushing me,” is what he comes up with.

She shakes her head, not looking at him. There are tears there for the first time since she’s come—this is all so hard, he’s in so much despair—and she doesn’t want him to see them.

“Will you make us some tea?”

And she gets up and busies herself with the kettle and the stove. She takes some deep breaths.

He watches her, silent. There’s an emptiness between them, and she lets it fill the room. She has no idea what to say.

Finally he starts talking. “I started the book way before I knew I was sick.”

“I know that.”

“But maybe some part of me knew it.”

“Maybe.” And then she turns to face him and asks carefully, “What were you writing about?”

“Old age. Dying. Even though I felt completely fine. Explain that.”

It’s a genuine question, and she thinks about it a moment before she answers. “You’d just turned seventy. You knew what was ahead of you, and you wanted to work it out in your writing before you got there. That’s what you do, Daniel—you figure it out as you write.”

And she brings the two mugs of tea over, sits on the sofa with him, hands him his. They take a sip, and then Isabelle thinks of what she’s going to say next and a small smile plays at the corners of her mouth.

“That’s what we writers do,” she tells him, amending her earlier statement.

And he grins back at her, giving in, she feels, agreeing.

“Yes,” he says, “that’s what we writers do.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

N
ow, in the afternoons, instead of listening to Isabelle read to him from someone else’s work, Daniel lies on the sofa and talks to her about his unfinished novel. About how his character, whom he has named Jack Dyson, came to him.

There had been an op-ed in the Sunday
New York Times
about the approaching fifty-year anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, that moment in history when for the first time college students took over a campus and demanded their right to a voice. The point of the piece was to contrast the activist students of the sixties with the self-involved students of today, their concerns narrowed to their own personal dramas, brought to them on tiny cell-phone screens. But Daniel’s attention had been caught by a brief mention of a former activist who had been one of the acknowledged student leaders and had then spent the rest of his life in the margins.

It was easy to Google Bob Gelfant and learn that here was a man who had led students into Sproul Hall in 1964 to begin the Berkeley sit-in, who had quit college to travel to Columbia University when that campus exploded, then to Kent State in 1970, where four students had been killed by the police. After that he had gone underground and continued to organize and protest and defy the laws he felt were unconstitutional. He was rumored to be part of the Weathermen, but whether or not that was true, he had slipped out of sight.

Daniel wondered what this man, who would now be in his seventies, thought of the sacrifices he had made for his ideals, whether his youthful choices and their consequences haunted him.

“I decided that my guy, Jack, had been on the run for at least twenty years,” Daniel tells Isabelle now. “Along the way he had acquired a wife and two children, and they all assumed new identities every time they moved, and that was often because they could never stay in one town too long. He managed to evade arrest for decades. The question for me was, what would such a man think of his life at the end of it? When he was facing his own death.”

“You wanted to write about regrets.”

“Yes,” Daniel said, “because even if a man is following an inner imperative, even if he feels he has no choice in the matter, there are losses along the way. That was the question I was exploring in the book.”

“What were Jack’s primary losses?”

“One of his daughters, the oldest one. She blames him for her mess of a life. Those years of hiding and fear—she believes all that furtiveness ruined her and that it’s his fault.”

“Ahhh,” Isabelle says, and then keeps quiet. She waits for Daniel, and he finally says, “Echoes of my own life. You can say it, Isabelle, I’m not an idiot.”

“Do they reconcile? In your book, do the father and daughter reconcile?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t finish writing it.”

“I’d like to know,” she says, and leaves it at that.

—

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AFTER ISABELLE
has made them lunch and cleaned up and Daniel has made his way to the couch and quieted the round of coughing the exertion has cost him, each of them settles in. Daniel wraps the afghan around his legs. Isabelle pulls an easy chair up alongside and continues their conversation of the day before.

“What would this Jack Dyson have to do to win his daughter’s forgiveness?”

“I don’t know that he could. His daughter is angry beyond all measure. And a mess. Did I mention she’s a complete mess?”

“Several times.”

“Well, that’s the problem.”

“How much of this have you written? How many pages do you have?”

Daniel waves his hand in the general direction of the wooden table where he works. Isabelle has no idea what he’s doing.

“What?”

“It’s in the cupboard there—the pages. Two hundred and some.”

“And?”

“Oh, Isabelle, don’t be dense. Go get them and read them and then we can have an intelligent conversation.”

She leans over and kisses him. “You are a dear and infuriating man.”

“Right, right,” he says, but he’s smiling.

—

ISABELLE TAKES THE PAGES HOME
with her to Bev’s, where she’s staying, and settles down to read in one of the two small love seats framing the fireplace. It’s quiet in the old Victorian house because Bev spends the evenings with Daniel, cooking him dinner, which he barely eats, putting him to bed, and staying with him until Daniel insists that she go home.

While she’s gone, Isabelle plans to get a good look at Daniel’s novel in progress. The manuscript rests on her lap, but instead of picking up the first page, her hands lie idle. She looks around the overstuffed living room, decorated with all the handicrafts Bev is constantly making—knitted throws of mohair and wool, patchwork pillows, a beautiful circle quilt hung on one wall like a tapestry.

Daniel would feel claustrophobic in here,
was Isabelle’s first thought when she walked in almost two weeks ago. It’s such a feminine space, the room narrow, as these late-nineteenth-century houses tend to be, and overcrowded. Daniel is such a large man. There would be no breathing space in these little rooms for him.

Okay,
Isabelle tells herself,
focus,
but she can’t make herself pick up the first page and begin reading. She’s afraid, she knows. What if it is as Daniel said—awful? It’s not as if he has an unblemished record as a writer. There were those two books in the middle of his career that never worked, that were universally labeled failures. What if there’s no hope for this work in progress? Could she lie convincingly enough to give him some measure of happiness at the end of his life? Should she? Wouldn’t he know she was lying? Wouldn’t he be devastated if he truly believed this work was irredeemable? Why did she even start this? Why couldn’t she have just come and spent time with him and left him in the good hands of Bev?

Of course she knows the answer. She owes him this. The read. The honesty. The attention to a work that might not be all that it could be. He did that for her when she was a student with dreams of writing and no confidence who walked into his campus office and all but prostrated herself in front of him. And when she was struggling with her book and sent him chapters to read, and he sent her back pages and pages of thoughts and suggestions and encouragement in just the form she needed to continue. So now she must read these pages and be honest in her response and find a way to tell him, no matter what she thinks, so that he feels compelled to finish the book.
Wow,
she tells herself,
talk about a tall order.

She picks up the first page.
When you’re dying,
she reads,
it’s pretty late for regrets. Jack Dyson would be the first to tell anybody who needed to know that here he was, dying, and he had jettisoned all his regrets. But he would be lying. He had one last, great regret, and he feared he was going to die with it wedged in his heart.

“Oh…” Isabelle murmurs to herself in the silent room. And she stretches out, her back against one arm of the love seat and her feet hanging over the other. She gets as comfortable as she can on the small structure and reads on.

A little after nine o’clock Bev opens the front door and Isabelle looks up. She hasn’t moved in hours.

“How is it?” Bev asks without any preamble, almost as anxious about Isabelle’s reaction as Daniel.

“How is he?”

“Already cursing himself for giving you the pages.”

“Of course.”

“Well?”

“I’m only about a third of the way in…”

Bev sits down on the opposite love seat, trying to read Isabelle’s face. “And?”

“This is vintage Daniel.”

“Meaning it’s good?”

“Meaning it’s very good.”

And Bev collapses back into the overstuffed pillows. “Oh, thank the Lord.”