Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

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.”

“Yes,” says Isabelle softly, “on this one, even I would thank the Lord.”

Isabelle reads well into the night and sleeps very little. The more she reads, the more convinced she becomes that Daniel must finish this book. Not only because it’s quintessential Daniel — beautiful and tough — and deserves to be finished, but because it has a certain energy within it, a pulse, a life force even, that she knows will carry Daniel with it if she can get him to engage.

The next day he’s sitting outside on the bench overlooking the meadow, portable oxygen canister parked by his side. She can see him waiting for her as she strides past Alina’s garden and through the wildflowers.

“How did you get here?” she asks him when she’s within shouting range.

“I fucking walked — what do you think?”

“By yourself?”

“Please, Isabelle, I’m not at death’s door yet.”

And she grins as she sits down next to him on the bench. “Apparently not. Apparently you still have the ability to write great pages.”

And he’s more pleased than he even imagined he’d be by her validation. “It’s worth something, the book?” And he shrugs, as if to say it all doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things, but she’s not in the least bit fooled.

“It’s worth finishing. You have to, Daniel.”

“I don’t know.”

“I know. It’s wonderful.”

—

THEY FIND A RHYTHM THAT WORKS for them. At the beginning Daniel sits on the couch, or lies down if it’s later in the day, and talks. His thoughts are randomly arranged, jumping from scenes he wrote early in the book to pivotal arguments between Jack and his teenage daughter much later. Sometimes he’ll ask Isabelle to read from the manuscript pages; he needs to remember exactly what he wrote or to hear it out loud to see if it holds.

When he’s ready to write, Isabelle opens Daniel’s laptop and types. She makes sure to get down exactly what he says. The next day, after she’s printed out two copies of what he’s dictated, they read it together and hash it out — what works, what doesn’t, what’s unclear, what’s redundant, what slips easily into the novel as written and what doesn’t. Daniel takes a pen and edits the hard copy. Isabelle makes tea. They take a break and talk about other things, then they begin again.

One day, as Daniel is describing a memory Jack Dyson has of his daughter when she was only five, when there was still love and trust and silliness between them, he stops in midsentence and simply looks at Isabelle until she lifts her head from the computer and meets his gaze.

“What?” she asks.

“We began in a room. We end in a room.”

And Isabelle doesn’t disagree. She simply nods. “Yes.” Then, with a grin: “We’re room people, you and I.”

“Womb to room.”

And Isabelle laughs out loud.

—

DANIEL HAD LEFT OFF WRITING in despair when Jack’s daughter slipped into the underworld of the homeless. Rachel’s disappearance from the book, Jack’s impotent agony about it, seemed to be too much for Daniel to unravel.

Eventually, after they have discussed all manner of things and Daniel has rewritten the earlier pages, they reach that section and Isabelle asks questions meant to lead him gently to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page of text: How long does he search for her? Is she living with a group of people or on her own? Does she stay in Portland or move to another city in Oregon?

Sometimes Daniel will answer quickly, spontaneously, and then they’ll have a direction, a path to explore. Sometimes he’ll just shake his head and moan, “I don’t know. I should know, but I don’t!”

But they continue to talk, and gradually Daniel finds his way forward. One afternoon he sees Jack encounter Rachel as she pushes a shopping cart across Burnside Bridge in Portland. The scene comes to him fully formed — he sees it in his mind’s eye. And that day’s writing goes easily. He talks quickly; Isabelle types as fast as she can. Both of them are drained but elated at the end of the day.

But more often the days move slowly. The talk between them is desultory, with lots of expanding silences. But they continue. That’s what has been established: that they will continue as long as Daniel can. No one is backing out now, and so the pages accumulate slowly.

As the book edges toward its finish, Daniel becomes more convinced that Jack and Rachel never reconcile. “Too neat,” he tells Isabelle. “I’d rather end with an acknowledgment of the calamity that life is.”

“Okay,” she says, in as neutral a tone as she can manage, but Daniel hears something in her tone. Of course. Their intimacy has always been grounded in their work, and they are so finely attuned to each other.