Deena Goldstone: Surprise Me

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.

“Nate?”

And he’s there, leaning against the doorframe of the dining room, which they’ve designated the communal study area, his long, somber face almost as familiar to her as her own. They’ve been together since high school, nearly six years, primarily because, even though Isabelle didn’t want him to, Nate followed her out to California for college. She never found a way to tell him not to come.

“What surprises you?”

He hates these open-ended questions, she knows, and she can see it on his face — the furrowed brow, the exasperation, the indecision.

What he’d like to do is sidestep the question. The conversation Isabelle wants to have is guaranteed to waste precious minutes.

He tries for diplomacy. “I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

“No, I need a jump-start here. I have to write something that surprises Daniel Jablonski.”

“Then ask him.”

Isabelle is exasperated. “I can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work, then?”

“He tells me to surprise him and I have to come up with something by next week that does.”