Deena Goldstone: Surprise Me

“She needs the space.” He completely understands.

“There are so many people hovering.”

“Expecting things of her.”

“Yes!”

“Okay, that makes sense.”

And Isabelle beams.

“So now you need to get that into the pages.”

And the smile vanishes. “How?”

“How indeed,” he says.

—

“HE SAID, ‘HOW INDEED’? REALLY? HE DID?” Jilly’s voice rises in an incredulous crescendo. The four roommates are sitting around their kitchen table drinking beer (Nate and Isabelle) and wine (Jilly) and eating pretzels (Deepti), along with sliced salami, which everyone but Deepti is eating as their dinner.

When Jilly isn’t sleeping she tends to be assertive or, to be less charitable, aggressive. Her opinions are always stated at high volume and with no ambiguity. Deepti often watches Jilly openmouthed and fascinated.

“Isn’t he supposed to be telling you ‘how indeed’ to do it?” Jilly won’t let up. “Isn’t that the whole point of an independent study?”

Isabelle shrugs. “I have no idea how this one-on-one is supposed to work. I’ve never done it before.”

“I’m with Jilly,” Nate chimes in. He loves living with three women and listening to them talk. Guys don’t talk the same way. Hell, guys don’t talk much at all, and he’s a verbal guy. He likes the give-and-take. He likes the arguments, but he especially likes to win the arguments, and with three women he usually does. He’s supremely confident that he’s going to make a very capable criminal attorney.

“Chandler is paying him, right? His job is to teach you to write better, is it not?”

Isabelle shrugs. Is it not? When Nate starts using phrases like that, she knows enough not to engage. Inside his head he’s playing out some kind of game, and she doesn’t want Daniel Jablonski to be the football they kick back and forth until Nate wins his point.

“That’s all you’ve got, a shrug?” Nate leans forward, his body in what Isabelle has privately labeled his attack mode, index finger pointing. “You know he’s on thin ice already? He’s got a reputation as a slacker, you know that, and you’re having the exact fucked-up experience you could have predicted, right?”

“He wrote two amazing novels, Nate.” Isabelle can’t help herself. She has to say it.

“Like maybe twenty years ago. They don’t count.”

“Of course they count. He wrote them.”

Nate sits back in his chair now, crosses his arms. “Circular logic.”

Isabelle should let it go, she knows that, because Nate will never understand why she is desperate to work with Daniel Jablonski — the reward-to-effort ratio doesn’t pan out for him. But there she is, with the need to defend him, Daniel, as she now thinks of him.

She starts talking quietly and slowly, as if her tone and pace can lower the agitation level in the kitchen to a simmer. “Maybe when he says, ‘How indeed?’ what he’s really saying is that writing is baffling.” Isabelle looks first at Deepti, the most sympathetic listener at the table, then Jilly. She doesn’t look at Nate. “That he has as much trouble doing it well as anyone else.” And then Isabelle lays her fledgling hope on the table. “And that maybe he sees me as part of the group…as a writer.”

There, she’s said it, and nobody is laughing, not even Nate, and so she’s emboldened and she continues. “Maybe what he’s saying is that we’re all trying to find the exact words to convey what we need to say, even if we don’t exactly know what that is until we write it.”

“Well, there’s a recipe for success.” This from Nate as he gets up. The sarcasm in his voice ends the conversation and makes Isabelle feel dismissed and stupid. Did she really think he was hearing her?

“It works for me, Nate.”

He stops at the doorway and looks at her. “Really? And you got all that from a ‘how indeed?’?” He shakes his head. “A little creative writing going on in your explanation, maybe?”

And Isabelle has been shamed into silence.

“I’ve got a real paper to write.” And he’s gone.

“Men,” Jilly says, “they’re all bullies.” And that assessment sits on the table among the three women until they hear Nate go into the bedroom and close the door.

“You understand something about this professor, Isabelle, and he understands you, no?” Deepti’s voice is quiet, to keep Nate from hearing, to soothe Isabelle a little, because Deepti can see she is agitated.

“Sometimes it feels like that, which is weird, because we barely know each other.”

“In this life, perhaps.”

“Oh, Deepti.” And Isabelle smiles at her, shaking her head; they’ve had this discussion of reincarnation and karma and old souls before.

“There is more than we know,” is all Deepti says now, with a shrug and a small smile, and to Isabelle’s surprise, Jilly agrees.

“There better be more than we know or else what’s the fucking point?”

At that, both Isabelle and Deepti laugh, Deepti hiding her grin behind her hand, slightly scandalized still by Jilly’s language. And Nate is forgotten as the women sit in the warm kitchen and begin telling stories to each other.

Deepti tells Jilly a bit more about reincarnation and how she sat beside her grandmother’s bed and watched her die. And about how she could actually feel, almost see, the life force escaping from her body at the moment of death. “One moment she was breathing and she was my grandmother, and then the next it all stopped and she became something, someone, else. Her face altered immediately. I can’t tell you how exactly, but her face in death wasn’t my grandmother’s. Something was gone from her. That’s the soul, I believe, and it will go on living somewhere else.”

“Maybe,” Jilly says, and Isabelle looks at her sharply. Jilly, who tends to be so skeptical and caustic, isn’t dismissing the notion out of hand.

“You really believe that — that the soul migrates?” Isabelle insists.

“I don’t know. I’ve never witnessed a death. Have you?”

Isabelle shakes her head.

“So let’s go with Deepti’s version — you and this professor of yours knew each other in a previous life, or your souls did.”

“Oh, Jilly, please.”

“Maybe he was your neighbor and you saw him coming back from the market every day with onions and carrots sticking out of his grocery bag.”

“Much too mundane for the connection we have.” Isabelle is teasing, but not completely, and Deepti watches her banter with Jilly without saying anything.

“Okay, maybe he was your teacher in a past life and that relationship shadows this one. That’s what you feel.”

Isabelle shakes her head.

“What do you lose by believing that?” Here is Jilly beginning to push her point of view again for the sake of winning the debate. This Jilly, Isabelle recognizes.

“It’s comforting,” Isabelle says finally, because she doesn’t want to argue with Jilly or because she’d like to believe it, or both. She doesn’t know.

—

MUCH LATER ON, WHEN THE HOUSE is that stark quiet of 3 a.m. and the three women are sleeping, Nate gets up from his laptop and slips into bed beside Isabelle. He gathers her warm body into his arms and she stirs, hardly awake, and then settles back into sleep.

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he says very softly into her ear.

“Mmmmm.” She has no idea what he’s talking about, but she wants nothing more than sleep.

“That whole business about Jablonski and you — it’s a setup for disappointment, and I’m trying to prepare you.”

He’s apologizing, Isabelle understands immediately. This is his way of doing it, obliquely, never head-on, but still…