Deena Goldstone: Surprise Me

On January 17, 1994, at 4:30:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake jolted most of Southern California awake. It lasted twenty seconds but felt interminable, a blind thrust quake producing the highest general ground acceleration ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America.

Although the epicenter was in the San Fernando Valley, about twenty miles northwest of the center of Los Angeles, damage occurred up to eighty-five miles away.

Isabelle Rothman, a senior at Chandler College, located several miles east of downtown, and at least thirty miles away from the quake site, was tossed out of bed, onto the floor of her bedroom, books and a dresser tumbling around her. Immediately she saw it as the wakeup call she needed: Life is unpredictable, have some courage.

A few blocks away, Daniel Jablonski, starting his fourth year as some sort of ill-defined visiting professor at the same college, woke to the sound of a freight train rushing through his rented campus house. It took him all of the twenty seconds of shaking and rocking to realize he was in the midst of one of California’s legendary earthquakes. And not much more time than that to understand that here was the consummate confirmation of what he had come to believe in his life: that all is unstable and there is no safety.

Opposites attract.

Isabelle strides across the beautifully manicured Chandler campus lost in her own internal, and achingly familiar, monologue of indecision. The subject matter varies according to the problem at hand, but the need to mull over, argue with, and second-guess herself remains the constant. How many hours of her life has she wasted this way? she wonders. More like days, months, even years. Does she ever make a decision without this particular form of agony? Does she ever make a decision at all? is probably a better question, or does she simply throw up her hands and slip into change?

The dilemma for today is whether she’s done the right thing by signing up for a tutorial with Daniel Jablonski. The campus wisdom on him, given freely by everyone she consulted, was unanimously some version of Jablonski, he hates doing these one-on-ones, so mostly the guy doesn’t show up for meetings. Or, even more ominously, The guy’s been known to sit there the entire hour and never say a word. Not one word! He’ll stare at you, that’s it. What will she do if there’s nothing but an hour of staring ahead of her? She has no idea.

And yet…and yet…there are his two early novels, published almost twenty years ago, which Isabelle has read and reread and reread again, and they are luminous. If only she could learn to write like that. That’s her secret hope, told to no one and barely acknowledged even to herself: that Daniel Jablonski might lead her to that rarefied place.

Even that wish feels like a sort of heresy to Isabelle. Nothing in her background or the very clear expectations given to her by her parents has pointed her toward a career as a writer. Her father would be horrified — there’s no stability there. And her mother would be incredulous — Isabelle a writer? Not remotely possible.

Teaching — that’s the profession they had all agreed upon. And it had seemed, when she started college, to be exactly the right choice. In love with literature, Isabelle envisioned a life of losing herself in the endless pages of very long and distinguished novels and communicating the wonders of other people’s minds to young, hopefully eager students.

Then, on a whim, she took a class entitled “The Psychodrama of Drama,” taught by a visiting professor who was both a psychiatrist and a published novelist and who required all her students to keep a journal. They were to write for twenty uninterrupted minutes per day, every day, without correction or rereading. For Isabelle, it was as if the gates of Hoover Dam had been blown open. To her astonishment, torrents of words and memories and then, finally, exaltation cascaded out. Until that moment, she had never known she had anything to say.

Head down now on this bright and brisk January morning, gesturing to herself from time to time as each new thought occurs, Isabelle passes the student union and the bookstore, built around an outside quad in a style that mimics the historic California missions — thick white walls and red tile roofs. All the buildings at Chandler owe a debt to the Spanish architecture of the early days of the state.

And along every path, California native plants have been arranged in complementary combinations. Within a few short weeks, because February brings spring to Los Angeles, the California poppies, which are just beginning to sport tight little nuggets of buds, will bloom a buttery, golden yellow and all the salvia will send up thin wands of pink or red or purple bells held high above their gray-green rosettes of leaves. But Isabelle notices none of it.

Is it possible for her to learn something from a man everyone describes as a recluse? Who will show up this morning in his office, the Jablonski who wrote those two stunning, emotionally raw books or the taciturn eccentric everyone describes? Or maybe…oh my God, a new thought…maybe they are one and the same!

As Isabelle climbs the stone stairway that leads to the upper campus, she joins the tide of students rushing to their ten o’clock classes. Through the heavy wooden door of Lathrop Hall and into the classroom building they go, en masse.

It is at the second-floor landing that Isabelle pauses. Here are the professors’ offices. Here it is quieter. She reminds herself to take a few deep breaths as she contemplates what’s in front of her. The hallway is long, with many tightly closed doors on each side. The wooden floor is worn from a hundred years of students’ feet shuffling along its narrow length. The old-fashioned ceiling globes, positioned every fifteen feet, are impossibly dirty and give off a weak light. She hears a male voice loudly imploring someone to “hold on a minute…Now hold on!” and as she nears the fourth door on the right, the door she needs to knock on, the raised voice gets louder. That must be him. He must be yelling at someone. Not a good start. She wants to turn around and leave.

—

DANIEL JABLONSKI IS ON THE PHONE with his second ex-wife, and they have reached the point in their habitual conversation that they are shouting over each other. Why is it that his divorce from Cheryl seems to fill up more of his life than their short, misguided marriage ever did? Why can’t she be more like his first wife, Stephanie, who transferred another man into the slot labeled “husband.” Simon Bannister is a man better suited to Stephanie, Daniel readily admits, although he isn’t sure his children felt the same way years ago, when Simon entered their lives.

“Old news,” Daniel manages to interject as Cheryl rants on about how their marriage blew her life off course and how she’s never been able to regain her momentum, which of course is all his fault.

“Why are we still having this conversation?” he asks Cheryl, but she doesn’t even miss a beat. Her diatribe continues. She’s crazy, he now believes. And he was crazy to marry her. Desperate is more like it, fevered to believe that love or something like it would jump-start the engine of his writing career, which, after the success of his first two novels, had rapidly descended into oblivion.

Daniel has a great fondness for his third and fourth novels, but apparently no one else does, neither the critics nor the book-buying public. He has no idea why. Writing for him is a mysterious process, and he has no explanation for the fact that it yielded first two books of wondrous reviews and respectable sales and then two books that fell off the face of the earth.