Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

When given a choice at the front desk, she chooses a room on the fifth floor so she can look out across the beautiful Berkeley campus and maybe capture some of the lightness she felt when she and Casey were cocooned in their tree house.

And then she falls asleep. She’s exhausted. The last two months have been the happiest of her life, but they’ve also worn her out. All that defying her parents’ expectations, her own reticence — a history that reads to her now like a playbook for misery. This, all that she’s experienced with Casey, is life full to the brim.

It’s when she wakes up, just as the Campanile is striking four o’clock, that she immediately realizes she has to go back to Orson Pratt’s house. Now that she has found a place to stay, she has to give him the number so he can give it to Casey.

She arrives at Orson’s door with an enormous bundle of flowers, winter blooms bought at a shop on Telegraph Avenue — giant snapdragons with stems two feet long, magenta stock with the musty smell she loves so much, interspersed with sprays of prickly pink Australian heather, all cushioned by shiny green leaves and wrapped in clear cellophane, finished off with a purple bow. She knocks and waits and no one comes. She knocks again with the same result. Just as she’s laying the flowers down on the doorstep, her note of apology tucked into the foliage, Orson opens the door. He’s wearing a silk robe over bare feet and white shins and looks furious to be awake.

“Oh, no.” Isabelle is dismayed that yet again, despite her best intentions, she’s annoyed him. “I woke you. I’m so sorry. I just…well, take the flowers and go back to sleep.” And she puts the bouquet in his arms and starts down the stairs.

“Is that all?” he finally says to her retreating back. “The flowers?”

And she turns around slowly. “Well, no, actually, it was to bring you the flowers, yes. To apologize, really, there’s a note in there…” She comes back up the steps and fishes the small white card out of the mass of flowers, shows it to him so he won’t miss it. “But also…I wrote down the number of where I’m staying — it’s on the back of the card — in case Casey calls. Do you think you could give it to him?”

“All right,” he says. His voice is weary.

Isabelle wants to add, Promise me you won’t forget, but of course she doesn’t. Instead she adds, “As soon as they have some phone lines up on Mindoro, I’m sure he’ll call.”

Orson stares at her. “How long have you known Casey?”

“About two months.”

“So you’ve never been through one of his trips?”

“No.”

“They can take a long time.” He puts it as delicately as he knows how. He’s not a delicate person.

“I would suppose.”

She’s not quite sure what he’s getting at. And he sees that, sees that she’s not processing what he’s trying to tell her, and he sighs. There’s something compelling about this girl. She looks so lost and so hopeful at the same time.

He sits down on his doorstep, wraps the silk robe around his legs, puts the flowers down next to him. “There’s always a flood somewhere or a hurricane or another earthquake or a famine that’s reached the tipping point.”

Isabelle sits down next to him on the step, folding her long legs under her, settling in. He seems to be inviting her to talk about Casey, and she wants nothing more in the world than to do that. She hungers to do that. “That’s why I admire what he does so much. There’s all this need and he doesn’t just brush it aside. I mean, some people give money when there’s a natural disaster, but really, how much effort does that take? And then there’s Casey, who sees a crisis and is there!”

“Every time,” Orson says pointedly.

“Yes! He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

Orson nods grimly and stands, the flowers in his arms. “There was no need, but thank you for these.”

Isabelle stands with him, suddenly realizing that she towers over him, both of them awkward now. “I’ll just go.”

He nods, then watches her make her way down the railroad-tie steps. She’s almost skipping until she stops midway down the staircase and turns to him. “You won’t forget?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking.

Orson shakes his head: no, he won’t. If Casey ever calls, he’ll tell him where Isabelle is.

Daniel surveys the faces of the students in his creative writing seminar, English 452 in the catalog, and despairs. None is Isabelle’s. Of the nine people sitting around the worn conference table in Room 17A of Holmes Hall (named after Julia Archibald Holmes, the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak, in 1858) on the campus of Colorado Plains College, eight look bored and the remaining one looks terrified.

Corinne Berlinger, in honor of the upcoming holiday Sunday, wears a red sweatshirt with Christmas bells ringing across her chest and the words to “Jingle Bells” floating beneath in wavy script. She’s the terrified one. He’s giving the class back their final stories today, and she seems to be the only one who cares what he thinks of them. Too bad she writes like an inferior Hallmark card. She’s not going to be happy with his comments.

The rest of the students have placed their backsides on their chairs in the spirit of doing time, like prisoners on a lengthy sentence. And none of them can write, either. Daniel chalks up the lack of talent to the preponderance of military bases in the Colorado Springs area — Peterson Air Force Base, Fort Carson, Falcon Air Force Base. He’s sure that the present or former military personnel who somehow end up in his classes haven’t the imagination to write creatively. That was his prejudice before the semester started and that’s his conclusion now as the semester limps toward its finish.

Daniel knows he should be grateful for this teaching job. He was desperate when he accepted it, but right now, after three months of reading his students’ work, he’d prefer to put a gun to his head than continue on. But he has to. He’s been offered a second semester, and since he has no alternative, he gave himself a stern talking to and found the appropriate answer: “I’d be glad to.”

And then there’s Stefan, who has stuck to him like flypaper, flapping around him constantly, never leaving him alone the way he used to when they lived in Los Angeles. It’s as if the drive to Colorado cemented some kind of attachment for his son that he’d been missing for the twenty-one years Daniel was absent from his life. You always pay for your mistakes, Daniel reminds himself. And now he’s paying for abandoning his two children as part of his first divorce.

Of course Stephanie was furious at him when he first left her. And when she kept the kids away as punishment, he wasn’t surprised. Even before the separation, his wife had watched the undeniable connection he and five-year-old Alina shared with a jaundiced eye. “Two peas in a pod,” Stephanie would say with alarm, as if it were a problem that had to be solved. Stefan, three years younger, Stephanie kept close to her before Daniel left — almost in counterbalance — and even closer after.

But he could have demanded to see them, could have stayed in Erie and fought for that right. Maybe even hired an attorney. Another man, a better man, would have. But he didn’t. He escaped to New York, where he could pretend to be someone else, a promising young writer, and never looked back. The least he can do is be honest about his own culpability. He chose the path of least resistance years ago, selfishly, and now he has Stefan mooning over him, trying to make up for all the years of drought.

And mistake number two: never finishing his much-maligned, rarely-worked-on novel in progress so he has to make his living teaching these Colorado dolts. Oh, where is Isabelle when he needs her cheeky attitude, her engagement ? Still in Berkeley, he supposes, although he has no way of knowing, because once she announced via e-mail that she was having great sex, her communications with Daniel ceased.