12

Isadora hibernated away the Ann Arbor winter, the damp soggy spring, and one month before classes were over, she managed to dredge up a summer job. It wasn’t much, just a slave labor job tying together the punched index cards for the library catalogue and then refiling them, but it would keep her in Ann Arbor, would put a safe wedge of space between herself and home.

When she called her parents to tell them, Martin was exasperated. “But we miss you,” he said. “When are you coming home?” He said he found it impossible to understand how she could have worked her Christmas break on a paper, how she could have spent her spring break studying for exams, why she hadn’t been able to do those things just as well, if not better, in the comfort of her home. She didn’t interrupt his tirade, she couldn’t tell him that her home wasn’t Madison any longer, that that tie was in the process of being severed. He said he couldn’t understand why he and Duse couldn’t have come up to see her, even once, that whole year. They could have stayed in a hotel, he said; she still could have had her privacy, any and all of the freedom she needed.

It bothered Isadora to hear the cracks in Martin’s voice. He sounded older and she suddenly missed him. “I love you,” she told him, and then Duse got on the line, but Duse’s voice was arid. Her only comment was to ask Isadora what in God’s name was the matter with her. “I don’t know what’s with you and that place, but you don’t want us there. Fine. That’s fine, but we still want to see you. You’re our daughter. And if you don’t come home by the fall, we’re coming there, whether you like it or not.”

“I’ll be home by August,” Isadora said.

Ann Arbor quieted in the summer, everything tightened. A flux of students left, but a great number were simply too settled to even think about departures. Isadora began to spot the same faces now, there was suddenly room on the sidewalk to move, seats in the restaurants, and no line for the film co-op movies every night. Her job dragged tediously. She didn’t like the people she worked with. Her boss told her she wasn’t library material and suggested that come next summer, Isadora look someplace else for a job. “I see you writing letters on the backs of call slips,” he said. Isadora didn’t care. By four-thirty every day she could get free of that place and there was always light until ten, life until dawn.

It was in that summer that she met Daniel. She was leaving a late movie. It was midnight and she had only a few blocks to walk, routes speckled here and there with people so that she always felt safe. She picked out a path, following couples, crossing and looping the streets when they did, and she was a block away when she heard this insistent voice like a catcall, and she violently turned, thrusting her keys through her fingers.

“Those loaded?” said a voice.

She blinked in the darkness. “You scared me out of my socks,” she said, and then she peered at him. “What’s that, a parrot on your shoulder?”

He grinned. “Yup,” he said. “I like to take him with me when I walk this late. He likes the warmth. He never gets enough of it in this climate. And at night no one stops us. We’re left alone.”

He was older than she was, she thought, and he had a clean loose build, unkempt brown hair. He started apologizing to her for the scare, and he was so polite that she couldn’t imagine him attacking anyone, and when he offered to walk her home, she accepted, she was happy for the company.

His name was Daniel Whentworth and he told her that he owned a pet shop right outside the campus. “I can’t resist any animal,” he told her. “I keep the ones the shop can’t sell. The parrot comes from the guy who used to own the shop. That bastard ordered tropical birds that died and wheezed and gave one another bronchitis all winter long. This was the last of them. I took him in when I bought the shop. I figured I could care for him better in my heated house than in the shop with the doors always banging open and shut all day.

“There was a monkey left too, and I kept him until I could arrange to ship him back to Africa. He was toilet trained, but he missed a lot. I was always swabbing up his pee, on the floor, the tiled walls, the bathtub sometimes. He was fussy about what he ate and he tormented the cats every chance he got. That little sucker found a roll of masking tape once and he wrapped those cats up with it, nearly suffocated them. I was asleep; I couldn’t hear them mewing and it was only when I got up to get a drink of water that I found them. I stepped on one and it clawed me when I removed the tape. Everyone was delighted when that monkey left.” He told Isadora that now he had three cats, two dogs, a rabbit and a turtle.

“I never really wanted a pet,” Isadora told him. “Never had one. I used to like insects a lot, you know, catch them in bottles, watch the grasshoppers roaming the grasses, but I never liked the neighborhood dogs much. They rambled and slobbered and nipped my hands and I’d get terrified. I’d walk around with my fingers curled up so they couldn’t get me. And then there were the bats, too.”

“The what?” said Daniel.

“Bats. Madison is full of them. Once I saw a pack of dogs attacking this dying bat. I saw the wings, I heard them. At first I thought it was just a starling or something, maybe one of the big crows that dips into our neighborhood, so I yelled at the dogs, I stampeded them, and this one dog—I remember, a yellow short-haired big dog—” Here Isadora paused. “He twisted around and his muzzle was dull with blood.” Isadora dug her hands into her pockets. “I saw the bat, mangled in the street, and then I threw up. Right there. After that, I wanted a night light in my room because I was sure bats roosted in the ceiling lamp.”

He patted her shoulder. She liked the way his hand felt, and he told her that she just hadn’t met the right animals. “You wait,” he said. “Come and meet mine. You’ll fall in love.”

She was silent for a moment, she noticed how dry her mouth had become, and then she said that the parrot didn’t look friendly.

“Really? He usually loves women. Actually, this little goodie hates everyone but Allison, my ex-wife. God but Allison worshiped this thing. She’d uncage him all day. She could hold out her baby finger and he’d fly right to her, give her gentle little peck kisses against her lips. I’d just take a step toward this bird and he’d bite me. Allison used to tell me that the bird didn’t like me because I didn’t play with him enough. Jesus, I tried. I mean I took him out once and put him on the couch behind me. It was all right, I thought. He was walking back and forth, being a bird, languid, silent, but then suddenly he thrust forward and bit me on the back of my neck. I was so startled I couldn’t think. I just grabbed him with both my hands and threw him on the floor and then Allison stormed into the room, shouting at me, accusing me of abusing the bird. She said I was jealous because the bird liked her and not me.”

Isadora cast a doubtful look at the parrot.

“Oh he’s fine now,” Daniel said. “Although he has his days.”

“How come you have him if he was Allison’s?”

“I’ll tell you if you have lunch with me tomorrow. I promise to leave the parrot home.”

“In that case—” said Isadora, her smile hidden by the night.

They ate on the Diag, the grassy patch of land in the center of campus. He had packages of dried apricots and cashews and smoked Gouda cheese that you had to tug apart with your fingers. She brought a gallon jug of cheap wine because she was nervous. She didn’t have to be. The spaces in their conversation were almost immediately filled up by him. He ran on words.

He told her that he was thirty-four, that he had married Allison when he was twenty-three and a biochemistry major and she was a history major, that they never had kids, just animals. “Those pets were our children,” he said. “I did kind of want kids, but whenever I brought the subject up, she had all kinds of wild stories for me, things about dogs mauling infants, about cats taking babies’ breath away. I told her we could always get rid of the animals, but you know, I probably wouldn’t have been able to. It was probably just talk on my part about having kids. I liked the idea of it, that was all.” He sighed. “She just liked the idea of it too, only she couldn’t admit that that was the truth.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know,” he said.

He told her the pet store had started as a summer job, something to keep him in Ann Arbor, but he fell in love with the place, and he couldn’t wait for the owner to retire so he could buy it. He read about animals, he was happy, and the next year, he dropped everything to become a pet dealer full time. He said he loved it the moment he got up and could think about going into the shop, knowing it was his. Sometimes Allison would wander by and the two of them would watch the shop and talk to the customers and care for the animals. “God. What a good time,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I divorced her because she hired a detective. Can you imagine? When you marry someone—when you love them, for God’s sake—you’re supposed to know who they are, you’re supposed to let them tell you, but Allison—she never trusted anything. She never even thought to ask me what she wanted to know. I didn’t even notice the detective at first. I was used to people trailing after me because of the animals. I almost always had one with me, a dog in from the breeder that I was walking until the owner could pick it up, a bird; once I had this tiny tree frog I kept on my palm.

“Anyway, I noticed this guy—in a suit—always near me, even when it was just me, no animal or anything. It disconcerted me. I changed routes. I was always swooping and zipping in and out of stores but there he was. I got tired of it, so one day I just went right up to him and asked him why the fuck he was following me around like that, and he kind of looked at me, startled at first. He regained his composure and said I was mistaken. Then, very politely, he asked me for the time. I told him it was time for him to stop following me, and he left. Casually, unhurriedly, you know, as if nothing was wrong. I even went into Detroit once for this dog show, and there he was, right in the goddamned stands, binoculars strapped around his neck.”

Daniel shook his head. “Look, I’m really good at spotting lies. Allison was always a terrible fibber; her face always gave her away. I gave her a chance, though. I really did. I asked her if someone was following her, too, and then I saw what went on her face when I asked. I heard the way her voice changed. She had never been jealous. Look, there just wasn’t any reason for her to feel something like that. I never saw many women in the shop, it was too far from campus, and I loved Allison. I really did. She was so funny, so bright, and if she wanted to know something, all she had to do was ask me. I’d never hide things that were really important to her.

“I asked her if she had hired a detective. I wanted to know why she would even think of doing such a thing. I wasn’t angry, not then, but she became furious. She screamed at me that I was the one who was jealous because she was still going to school and was surrounded by guys while all I had was animals.”

He stretched and looked at Isadora. “I don’t know. Maybe it was my fault. I destroyed some trust myself just by bringing up that detective stuff. She kept asking me where I thought she would come up with the money to hire someone. She showed me her bank stubs, and I said she was lying, that I could tell she was hiding something. “Oh, Mr. Psychic here,” she said.

Isadora sat up. She shook her head at the chunk of white cheese he was starting to hand her.

“I think she hired a detective. I think that was just the kind of love she had, where she wanted nothing better than to crawl right up inside of me and live there, see things through my eyes, breathe my air, be me as well as herself. Love like that isn’t love. Not to me. If she didn’t hire that guy, then who did? Someone had to; he didn’t follow me for kicks. We got divorced a few months after that. We just couldn’t trust each other.

“It’s funny, but it’s been three years now, and I still like her. When I see that girl, I still get these flickers, that attraction; I feel everything racing inside of me. She wouldn’t see me for months after the divorce, and she wouldn’t take any of the animals, not even the parrot. She said she had to have a new place, a new life with nothing of me there to remind her of the past. I hated the parrot, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I used to leave the windows open, hoping it would fly out and someone would steal it for his own. It’s a gorgeous bird even though its disposition is horrid.

“We became friends a year ago,” he said. “She came over one day because she said she missed the parrot. It was funny to see her after all that time. We had had no real contact. She wouldn’t take alimony, and during the school year Ann Arbor’s so crowded I didn’t see her, and summers she took off. She was very cold to me, very polite, but as soon as she saw that bird she grinned. It went crazy, making noises, talking the few words it actually knew.

“I made tea and we started talking, we became friends. Not at once. It was like she was all of a sudden a new person, someone I didn’t know, and it was fun to figure her out all over again, to maybe come to some different conclusions about her.

“We see each other all the time now. She just lives a few blocks away, but I still have all the animals and she never got new ones. She said it made her feel disloyal to even think about it. We check up on each other, see who is dating whom, that sort of thing. But the only thing is that we can’t talk about the divorce, about the detective, not if we want to stay friends.” He rubbed one hand over his chin. “Maybe that’s why we can’t be lovers again.” He smiled suddenly at Isadora. “Gee, you look pretty,” he said.

He stood up, started dusting himself off. “You could meet her if you want. She pops by the place. She kept her old key because she said she worried about the parrot. She wanted to be able to see him.”

“Oh,” said Isadora, standing, letting him help her up.

Isadora began spending time with Daniel. She liked the pet store, liked the way he wouldn’t cage things unless he had to, the way he wouldn’t stock dogs or cats but drove out to a breeder’s to pick out the best animal and then bring it back for a guaranteed sale. If a person changed his mind, then Daniel kept the animal himself. He did a funny kind of testing on all the animals before he selected them. He jiggled keys to see if they were curious, he watched how they were when he put his hands on them, hands scented with other animals, other breeds.

He was careful about the people he sold to as well, even more careful than about the animals. He wouldn’t sell to anyone who said they wanted a show dog. “All that foolishness,” he told Isadora. “Prancing and showing off, being unanimal.” He wouldn’t sell to people who babytalked animals, either, because he said it demeaned the animals, it took away their dignity. He liked people who treated animals the way they would treat their friends.

Daniel liked to have Isadora stand with him and watch the customers come into the store. He said he could automatically pick out the ones who were good with animals. He said he knew just by a walk, just by the way someone flexed his hands.

“My mother says she can tell about things like that too,” said Isádora.

“She can?” He was interested.

“She thinks she can,” said Isadora. “It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you.”

“No maybes. Not with us.”

Isadora was used to dodging out of conversations about Duse. She always tried to gauge the information she would reveal according to the manner of the question thrust at her. But Daniel was silent. He didn’t ask anything, even when she stopped after her first sentence, waiting, giving him a chance to be like most people she had encountered. He didn’t raise his brows or snicker, and when she mentioned the funny marking she carried in her hand, he simply took the hand and opened her fingers so he could see for himself.

She stopped talking while he looked, and when he felt her hand tense, he looped toward her and kissed first her face and then the marking. When he freed her hand, she continued with her story. She relaxed because he was leaning so casually along the wall. When she was finished, she asked if he believed her.

“I told you I know about lies,” he said. He crouched and dug out a packet of fish food from under the counter and started to tap and flutter flakes into the tank.

“Well, what do you think?” she persisted.

He stopped the feeding. “I don’t know,” he said looking at her. “I believe your mother does those things. I believe that she thinks there’s some power involved. But the thing is, I don’t know how all that jells with me. I like to think it’s true, but I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” said Isadora.

“Hell, people can be whoever the hell they want, just as long as they don’t lie about it.”

She saw how he was watching her and she began to feel as though he were peeling a layer of skin right off her, trying to see who and what she was. She felt suddenly that the slightest touch could wound, would scar. She was glad when she noticed the time, when she had a class to dash off to. She became all motion, whisking out of the store and back into the shiny hot streets.

Daniel lived on East Williams Street, in an old clapboard house, and the place seemed to belong more to the animals than it did to him. Walking into his house, Isadora understood why Allison hadn’t taken any of the animals with her when she left. The three cats—a money cat, a calico, and a black—sunned themselves on the front porch and stared insolently at Isadora as she picked her way clear of them. Inside the house, the parrot was walking the bare wood floors, its claws clicking and skittering. Both dogs—a sheep dog and a fox terrier—were fighting on the couch, pawing one another and growling. Daniel led her through the house on what he called the animal tour. He showed her the rabbit hutch and the turtle tank that was braced with cat food, the only food the turtle would eat. “The cats hate cat food,” Daniel said. “I have to buy them cheap hamburger and mix it with an egg. The money cat will eat dog food though, but only the dry kind.”

All the animals had names, sounds he rattled off to her, uncommon and unanimal. He gave them the names of things—the cats were Lamp and Table and Stovepipe, the dogs were Curtain and Scale, the rabbit Frypan, and the parrot Cigarette. “The names just fit,” Daniel said. “I mean, look at the son of a bitch. Doesn’t he remind you of something stubbed down into an ashtray?” He grinned at her; he kept grinning until the smile caught, until her mouth traced his. It was not such a crazy thing, naming animals like that. She knew all about naming rituals from Duse.

Isadora began spending time at the house and she got used to mopping up the animal dust with the seat of her pants every time she plunked down to rest. Everything she wore seemed magnetized for animal dander, for the dirt the cats tracked silently in. She couldn’t sit down anywhere without the animals jouncing toward her. The cats wound in and out of her legs, the dogs propped their muddy paws on her knees, and even the parrot ventured sitting on her shoulder, although she never felt entirely comfortable with the big preening bird. They all seemed to like her, but it would take her a while to loosen up enough to like any of them.

At first, when she saw an animal approach, she would just go into another room, shutting the door, ignoring their scratching pleas to be let in. When Daniel appeared, she would feign surprise at the animal sound, she would immediately open the door. She tried convincing the pets with her body that she didn’t want them in any kind of proximity to her; she nudged them back with her sneakered feet, she pushed them with her fingers.

She would learn to tolerate the animals because of Daniel, and then, later, because of the magnanimous greeting they always gave her when she stepped into that house. It was a cacophony of sound; they made her feel as though no one was more important to them. They would jockey for position, scrambling on top of one another to get to her hands. She would learn to really love only one of them, though—Scale, the terrier.

When she first saw Scale, he had a stiff cardboard clown collar about his neck because of a cataract operation. The collar was to prevent his scratching the stitches out. But he was a persistent dog; he didn’t care about the stitches, and it was Isadora who found him bleeding on the floor. She had to force herself to focus, to unstick her two hands from the wall and make herself go to him. He had chewed the collar free. She wasn’t sure how he had managed such a thing, but there it was, in two pieces. She and Daniel got the dog to the vet, but the eye was lost.

Scale came home from the vet in a few days and Isadora was startled at the way that dog trailed her. He nuzzled her ankles, he kept watching her with his good eye as if he knew the part she played in his canine drama. She was sleeping at Daniel’s now, and Scale slept in the hollow of her stomach. Sometimes he’d cock his head at her, tilting so he could always see her. He wouldn’t leave when they rolled into lovemaking, and she got used to his presence, to the way he fidgeted and moved on the bed so he wouldn’t be crushed in their heat.

The parrot was the only animal she disliked. She told herself it was because that bird had a foul temper, but really, it was because it was Allison’s bird.

It was a month before Isadora met Allison. Isadora was always a little tense when she walked into Daniel’s because she half expected Allison to be there. She had never seen a picture of her. Daniel had told Isadora that he had ripped up all of Allison’s pictures when they divorced, and now that they were friends, he saw no need to take any others. He said that if he wanted to look at her face, he could just call her up, that he didn’t need any celluloid. She kept asking for descriptions, but he kept changing his adjectives. Sometimes he said Allison was a little plump, other times he said she could use a few pounds. He never saw any discrepancy; he said change was the beauty of living.

He offered several times to phone Allison and have them all share a dinner, but Isadora always slid right into an excuse. She had cramps, her hair was tacky with dirt and she didn’t have time to wash it. It was funny, though. Isadora could always tell when Allison called. She herself never answered Daniel’s phone, although he insisted it was her phone too. She listened when he spoke on the phone, she heard how he molded his voice. She’d hear Allison’s name in his mouth, she’d wonder at the way he laughed. He stayed on the phone for a very long time when he spoke with Allison, but when he hung up he never told Isadora what they had talked about, and she never asked. She always launched into a conversation about something else entirely.

Sometimes, when Isadora walked into Daniel’s house, she thought she could tell whether Allison had been there or not. Daniel said she had all her afternoons sewn up because she was writing a thesis and the only time she could see the animals was around ten, a time that neither Isadora nor Daniel were home. Isadora would sniff at the air, trying to catch a new scent, an energy she wasn’t familiar with. She sometimes thought she sensed something different in the way the animals moved, in the sluggish prowling they did.

She didn’t like the feeling. She was pressed to the ground knowing there was another woman on the edges of her relationship. Just what could Allison give him that she herself couldn’t, just where was she deficient? She watched the phone, and every time it rang, she flinched. She needed Daniel to be totally hers, to be something no one else could bite a piece from.

It carried over to his friends. She and Daniel were sitting at an outside table at Dominique’s one afternoon, sipping cheap red wine, when two of his college buddies ambled by. She was annoyed when he asked them to sit down. While the three of them reminisced, she lifted up her free hand and settled it along Daniel’s arm, she reached up to touch his hair and brush it from his face, she lay her head against his shoulder. Once, she pinched his thigh and when he said, “Hey—” and pinched her back, she relaxed. When one of the guys mentioned Allison, she visibly stiffened, she became very shy and silent.

“So what have you been up to?” one of them asked her, trying to draw her out.

“Daniel and I are all tied up with the animals,” she said, but her voice sounded cold even to her, and she was grateful when he turned back to Daniel, when he picked up their conversation again. Daniel looked at her curiously, but she didn’t say another word the rest of the afternoon, and every time Allison’s name cropped up, she took another sip of wine. By the time Daniel stood, ready to leave, she felt vaguely sick.

“Hey—” said Daniel. “What was wrong back there? Why were you so unfriendly?”

“I wasn’t unfriendly,” she said.

“Isadora—”

“I wasn t.”

He dropped her hand and looked at her, his face cooling.

“I liked it when it was just the two of us there,” she said.

“We can’t always be alone together,” he said. “There are other people in the world, you know.”

“Fine. Be with other people,” she said. “I’m going back to my place and sleep this wine off.”

“Oh no—” he said, looping his arms about her, making her stop right in the center of the street. “So you like to be alone with me and then first chance you get you have to go to that apartment of yours by yourself. Why don’t you just move in with me today and we’ll lock ourselves away for the weekend?”

“I don’t have to move in,” she said. “I just want us to spend more time alone together. That’s all.”

“Well, we could if you moved in,” he said.

He was getting annoyed. He had always assumed she would move in with him. Their relationship had been going in that direction for some time now. He had seen how she brought more and more of her clothing to his house, how she had accordioned all his clothing to the back of the closet to make room for her assortment of silk shirts and pleated pants. He knew the animals liked her; he had seen how Scale nuzzled Isadora’s hand when his own was right by its mouth. He was used to finding her beside him, to touching her, to smelling her body in the sheets. He had waited for her to willingly give up her place, and now he had finally had to ask her to. It didn’t make sense, he said, for her to pay the extra rent, and he didn’t really see why she kept her place at all. “How come you pull back from me?” he demanded. “Why this dance back and forth?”

“It has nothing to do with that,” she said.

“What has it got to do with then?”

“I write at my place.”

“That’s shit,” he said. “You can write at my place. Why are you shaking your head like that. You’re so damned secretive with me. What do you think I’m going to do, steal your stuff and write my name in over yours? I wish I could write. I’d force every goddamned person on the streets to look at my stuff. I sure as hell wouldn’t cloister it the way you do. How can I know you if you won’t let me know your writing, if you won’t trust me enough to let me read it?”

“Oh please.”

She felt bound in by her own half-truths. She really hadn’t done much writing since she came to Ann Arbor. All she had were some scribbled ideas for mysteries, with neat solutions, with no loose ends. She sometimes would scoot over to her place after a class, just to check the lock, the mail. She liked to sometimes sit at the table there and scrawl a few notes, but she didn’t do any real writing. Was she a writer? She wasn’t sure anymore if she still felt that driving pull, but she was afraid if she gave up her place, she’d give up the chance to find out. And the truth, too, was that she needed that place—even if she never went to it—so she wouldn’t feel completely dependent on Daniel, so she would know that if anything happened with them, she would have a place to come back to, a place of her own with nothing of him in it.

“I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I’m contradicting myself.”

“You sure are,” he said. “And I’ll tell you. It’s a hell of a way to make a relationship.” He was suddenly gloomy. He looked at her and then he touched the tip of her nose. “I’ll see you,” he said, turning, going the other way, leaving her to stand on the sidewalk, fighting herself not to call him back, not to voice her need.

Just before Isadora met Allison, Duse had her first introduction to Daniel. Isadora had popped out one of her lenses on the floor again. She had made Daniel herd all the animals into another room so they wouldn’t lap up her lens. Daniel came back into the kitchen to find Isadora on the phone with Duse, asking about her lens. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and at first he thought it was because she couldn’t see anything without those artificial eyes she popped in every morning. She put the phone down and went into the other room and he picked up the phone and said hello. He was surprised at the intelligence in Duse’s voice. After what Isadora had told him, he had half expected cracking cadences, looping swarms of words, but even her silences seemed charged to him. He could feel them as if they had eyes, as if they studied him. He told Duse that he was in love with her daughter. He thought it sounded gallant, that it was the kind of thing a mother might want to hear. But when he said that he was taking good care of Isadora, Duse snorted.

“That one takes care of herself,” Duse told him. “Don’t you even try.”

She asked him questions. What did he do, why did he do it, what was Isadora up to. He was bombarded, but he answered as best he could.

When Isadora came back into the room, both eyes open and wet, a little red, she took the phone, turning her back to him to talk with Duse. He heard her say her father’s name and then she hung up.

“Well,” she said, “my father said for me to be careful with older men, but my mother said that you have a fine strong voice and she senses good things in it.” Isadora looped a red ring of hair about her finger. “She knew where the lens was. Almost, anyway. She said under the couch, but it was an inch away. I get so nervous about those lenses that I need someone who is really positive it can be found to calm me enough to find it.”

“So your mother liked me?” Daniel said, vaguely pleased.

“You just better worry whether I like you,” she said, dropping both arms onto his shoulders, letting go of her weight, for just a second, so he could swing her, so she could glide free.

Isadora met Allison on a Friday. She was following Daniel into the house, balancing a pizza carton. It was hot and she had to keep fretting her fingers against the white cardboard. Allison was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, cooing at the parrot. “Well, hey—” she said, standing, dusting off her jeans. She was very tiny, with a small pale face, and black hair that she wore in a short silky braid down her back. She had tied glittery gold ribbon about the bottom of her braid. “Are you a dancer,” she asked Isadora, glancing at the black leotard, “or just another girlfriend?” She laughed when she saw Isadora’s face. She said she was only kidding, that Daniel had talked nonstop about Isadora, and then she introduced herself as Allison.

Isadora didn’t want to like Allison. She took the pizza into the kitchen, straining to hear what they were saying, shushing the animals. She slapped the pizza onto one big plate and set it on the table with a pitcher of limeade.

Allison stayed for dinner. She didn’t ask and she wasn’t formally invited, she simply got up and helped herself. She was full of conversation and she kept darting questions at Daniel, who seemed easy and relaxed with her. Was the parrot eating? Had Daniel seen such and such a film? Did he know she was seeing a swimmer?

Isadora was intent on Daniel. It startled her when Allison started asking her questions, when she seemed genuinely interested in Isadora’s responses. Allison wanted to know what Isadora wrote about, why she liked mysteries, whether she would ever leave one unsolved. Isadora said not if she could help it. She asked again if Isadora danced, if she liked the animals, and she wanted to hear about the bats in Madison.

They talked for so long that when Daniel said he had to rush out to the shop for a moment to check on a potentially ill fish, Isadora didn’t look up. Allison was telling her about the stubby little town she had grown up in, north of Ann Arbor. When Daniel started the car up, the only one who really noticed was Scale, who howled and balanced against the picture window.

She became friends with Allison. She would never really rid herself of that twist of jealousy, and she was always a little tortured when she came into the house and found Allison already there, settled, angled toward Daniel as they played chess. She herself didn’t know how to play. Sometimes, too, when it was very late, Allison would just camp out on the couch, a yellow army blanket tossed over her, her feet exposed. She always said she was going to get a can of Mace or a good knife for her walk home; she always said, too, that she supposed that she could take one of the dogs for protection, but still she burrowed down into that couch.

Allison and Isadora saw a lot of movies. Daniel, who couldn’t sit still for more than a half hour, would run the animals in the Arb, the grassy sprawl of park on one side of the campus, while the two women sauntered from film to film. They ate themselves sick on popcorn and when they saw foreign films, Isadora, who was fluent in French, told Allison the smut the subtitles had left out. Isadora had a good time when they were together, and sometimes she would forget just who Allison had been to Daniel, she would start to confide things about him to her, until the quiet of Allison’s response jolted her back into memory.

Sometimes Allison came to the house with her swimmer. His name was Peter Winslow, but she never called him anything but The Swimmer; she made that name a title. He was polite and very muscular and he carried himself like a dancer. He ignored everyone but Allison, although he would play a few games of chess with Daniel, more for Allison than for himself, because he knew how she liked to talk with Isadora.

“I don’t like The Swimmer,” Daniel once told Isadora.

“He’s okay.”

“You like Allison don’t you?” Sure.

He paused. “Well, she’s a great friend, but she wasn’t such a hot wife.”

Isadora looked at him for a moment and then went over to him, molding her body against his, almost as if she were trying to become him.

There were fights between Allison and Daniel, battles that forced Isadora into retreat. Daniel made a cause out of the pills Allison was always taking, of the way she would surreptitiously slide a pill into her hand and then pop the medication onto her tongue under the guile of a long yawn. She said she had sinus trouble so bad that her head seemed rubberized. She claimed she had ulcers and headaches. She said she had had all kinds of tests done, but she had thrown up the barium they had made her drink, she had spoiled her X-rays by moving, and no one had found anything. “You know why, don’t you?” Daniel said, slanting his eyes at her.

“Oh, hush up,” said Allison crossly.

Isadora, though, relied on Allison. The woman was a pharmacy in herself. When Isadora had a headache, when she was riding a panic attack, she got Valiums from Allison; when her stomach cramped, she got Donnatal. Allison seemed to know more about ailments than the student health service, and there was no wait. “Would you both stop,” cried Daniel. “Jesus. Two of a kind.”

Allison had her own accusations, fevers of memory which she paraded for Isadora. “When we were married, Daniel cleaned out the medicine chest, but he didn’t throw out the bottle like any normal person, not Daniel. Why should he when he could have the absolutely brilliant idea of replacing all of my pills with sugar pills. He had a chemist friend of his make them up so they looked just like the real thing. Daniel searched my drawers for pills. And he even had the nerve to sugar up my hidden stash. I knew the difference. My body knew the difference. It hurt. I felt something wrong inside of me, and when I took enough of those sugar pills, they made me vomit.”

“Here we go,” said Daniel. “The same old song and dance. Why can’t you see the way you were? You never needed any pills, and I never once saw you throw up, either. I would have remembered that.”

They accused each other of having convenient memories; they rehashed every single fight they could remember, every single jealousy, and it was odd to Isadora how their stories never matched, how their words weren’t mirrors of one another. It made her uneasy that they could have such different truths, and it made her crazy wondering who to believe.

The worst of it was it made her doubt Daniel; for all his talk about lies, was he himself somehow lying? How could people see things so differently, she thought, and then her eyes flickered back down to the lines in her own palm. She clenched her fist, and stood right up. She wouldn’t stay in that room if they were going to be starting in on each other. She didn’t want them asking her advice either, making her remember some incident she might have participated in. She didn’t want to end up doubting anything else, not another thing, not now.

She began to overanalyze her own feelings and hurts. She felt jealous of Allison, she wondered what parts of Daniel Allison still held. She couldn’t confide something like that to Daniel—it made her too vulnerable. All those years of hiding her inner workings from Duse, those times of tightening the loose words inside of her, had made Isadora reticent. Oh, Daniel knew that something was bothering her. He saw how she could wolf down a whole pack of Oreos, prying the cookies open, scraping the white cream with her small even teeth, but she never opened up, she never even lifted her eyes to his. And when he got up and left the room, she didn’t follow; she continued to eat, methodically, unthinking.

She could write about it. She scribbled pages into a violent-green notebook that she kept on the dresser. She only wrote in it when she was upset. Daniel knew how she was about privacy, and even when she left the book right out on the bed, the pages ruffling open, he wouldn’t touch it, he would detour.

It was Isadora’s idea to have him read the entries. At first, she simply left the notebook on his desk, hoping he’d leaf through it, that he would take the hint. When she saw how he avoided it, though, she had to take the notebook and plunk it down right into his lap. She had to give him permission.

It became a funny kind of habit with them. He’d never touch the notebook unless she put it right into his top drawer, and he’d read it only when she was out of the house. He couldn’t stand her nervous pace, the way she kept rushing water down into a glass, drinking it so he could hear her gulping.

She wrote about Allison. She said she felt deficient, that she felt that sometimes she had to have everything of him that Allison had had, and then she could start to have more. He waited until Isadora got back to the house and then he made her sit with him outside on the porch. Isadora never did much talking at these times, but she listened. She cocked her head to one shoulder, and then, gradually, as he spoke, she rested her head against his shoulder, her hands settled along his thighs. He told her that she wasn’t Allison, that Allison wasn’t anything like her, and it was stupid to make comparisons.

She picked at her palm, she reminded him of Duse, how all that talking about how she could be more because of her star had made her feel like less. “It’s the same with Allison,” she said. “Every time you tell me about something wonderful she used to do, it sounds to me like you want me to do the same thing, and when I can’t, I feel just the same as if I were nothing.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, and then seeing her face, he told her that she was a star; he tried to tease her up from her mood. And when he couldn’t, they just sat, their bodies touching.

It was funny how different it was with Allison, how much easier it was for Isadora to talk to her, even about Daniel. Allison was her friend. You didn’t worry about your friends leaving you all the time the way you did with your lovers.

Daniel had told her Allison was jealous. Isadora saw that as something they shared and so, one afternoon when the two women were walking toward the campus for ice cream, Isadora brought the subject up.

Allison was a little startled when Isadora said she was jealous of her. “But I’m not the one to be jealous of,” Allison said. “I don’t want Daniel. Not anymore.” She glanced at Isadora. “He told you I hired a detective, didn’t he? I never did that. I was never jealous of him, not that way. If I was, do you think I would be wandering in and out of that house, do you think I could even be cordial to you, let alone be your friend? Where would I even get the money for something like that. Ann Arbor isn’t exactly New York. Anything I ever needed to know about Daniel I could find out for myself, just by asking some questions. He’s crazy. I had to listen to that stuff about some guy following him for weeks at a time. I thought he was being paranoid, but when he said I hired that man, then I got angry. Ann Arbor’s full of loonytunes; it could have been anyone who just happened to trail Daniel for God knows what reason. Daniel never liked an explanation as reasonable as that, oh no, not him.”

“You know, the thing was that I divorced Daniel for another reason, for something that had nothing to do with jealousy at all. It was sex. It just wasn’t right; I never really felt that we had a good fit. I mean, we’d walk the streets, looking like lovers and everything, but all the time, my eyes would be sliding back and forth. I kept scanning those long streets for someone else, for a set of eyes that would spark against mine. I’d send out signals, my own charged-up chemicals. I loved Daniel. I really did, but I still wanted another pair of hands to be rubbing my back, any other mouth to be feeding on me. Every single night I’d pretend to be sleeping. I think I must have had a whole continent of headaches and stomach pains and colds. I’d rub my own throat raw just by coughing. I scratched the sound from my throat until I was hoarse. I got good at illness. Sometimes I could just get up in the morning and if I really concentrated, I could make my throat sore, I could give myself a baby of a fever.”

She traced her neck with her fingers. “I used to wonder and worry why the sex wasn’t good. I mean, I loved him, didn’t I? How come I couldn’t love his body too? Look, you see how we are now, maybe it’s just easier to be friends now that I don’t have to slide into bed with him.” She glanced at Isadora. “Oh God, I didn’t mean to make you nervous. I love Daniel, but he’s just my best friend, not my lover.”

“The Swimmer,” said Isadora. “Is it different with him?”

“I feel The Swimmer’s hands on me even when they’re not,” said Allison, rubbing her bare forearms, shivering. “I breathe that one in like air.” She shook her head, she fiddled with the tag end of her braid. “Daniel once told me that my problem was simply an under supply of hormones. He said it could be fixed if I would go see someone.” She sighed. “Know why I don’t bring The Swimmer by that much? I couldn’t keep my hands off of him. I’d want to tear his jeans off and wrestle him down to the rug, animal hair and all. I think it would hurt Daniel, sensing that; I think it might make him feel as though something very crucial was missing in him, something he could do nothing about.”

When Allison left, Isadora went home. She put three blue candles into the bedroom and lit them so that the shadows blurred along the wall. She fed all of the animals and put them outside, their noises rending the night. She changed the sheets on the bed and spritzed them with cheap perfume, and when Daniel came back into that house, she was pouring wine into jelly glasses. She wouldn’t let him speak. She went over to him and tumbled him down to the floor with her.

It was nearing fall when Isadora finally bought herself a ticket home, hoping to thwart a visit by Duse. She didn’t like leaving Daniel, but he couldn’t get away. Allison helped her to pack, sitting on the bed, talking about Duse. “God,” said Allison, “how can you not be fascinated with a mother like that? All my mother does is stack recipe boxes along the kitchen counter.”

Isadora stopped packing for a moment. “So does mine,” she said.