16

Isadora became obsessed with the whole image of marriage. When she saw herself, it was always as attached to Daniel; she never allowed room for anything else, for anyone else. She was determined that she and Daniel would be different than Allison and Daniel. She didn’t want to replay any of their old life, anything that wasn’t really hers, and she wanted the marriage to be so good, so strong, that he’d never think of his past, he’d never have any wistful remembrances he might want to reenact.

She was through with solitude. She wanted to be with Daniel all the time now. That was who she was. He had always taken long, loose walks by himself and she had never really minded. She was always busy with her course work, cataloguing plants for botany, writing columns for journalism. She had always cherished privacy, the quiet, and too, she had liked how Daniel bounded back in to her, his face flushed from the night, the way he was bouncing with things to tell her. Now, though, she told him she wanted to come with him on his walks and at first, he seemed pleased.

She noticed he was happy too, to see her when she strode into the pet store to make him have lunch with her. He was pleased when she came by at his closing time to walk him home, even pleased when she would come into the bathroom and pull back the shower curtain to talk to him.

She wanted to be everywhere that he was. If he wanted to read, she would spread out her books beside him; they could be quiet together. If he wanted to see his friends, she would be there too. She tried to know his daily itinerary, and she often just showed up where she knew he would be.

The first time she noticed he was less than happy to see her, though, was when she showed up at a lunch he was having with one of his old college buddies. He had told her about the meeting, but his face changed when he saw her. He was polite enough, and the friend gave her a big smile and half of his salad, but he was moody on the way home.

“Couldn’t I talk over old times?” he said.

“I wasn’t stopping you.”

“But you were. I wanted to include you. You know how you get when you think I’m paying more attention to my friends than to you.

“I’m not like that anymore,” said Isadora. “At least I try not to be. Wasn’t I nice to your friend?”

“That’s not the point.”

She took his hand, she rubbed his fingers. “Smile,” she said, not stopping until he did.

He was going out for a walk and she bounded up to come. “Is—” he said. “I kind of want to go by myself. Is that okay?” She shrugged, but she was hurt by the relief in his face, and that night she bit every nail on her left hand.

She kept track of the walks he seemed to need to take. It was humiliating for her. It made her need to be with him even more and she found herself clutching. She found out one time from Allison that Daniel had helped her move a heavy chest of drawers one evening. “I bumped into him,” Allison said, but when Isadora asked Daniel, he was reticent, he said simply that it was no big deal and he wanted to know why she was asking about it in the first place. “I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“Isadora—” he sighed, and then the phone rang, and he let it go.

She came home one day and Daniel was out, so she laced up her brilliant red Keds and sprinted out to find him. She ran four blocks before she saw him, and she was too out of breath to call. He didn’t see her for another block, when he stopped to pat a dog, and when he turned, his face was suddenly irate. “What, are you following me?” he said.

“I wanted to be with you,” she said, still panting, hooking her body over so she could rest her hands on her knees.

“You could have shouted, you could have let me know you were behind me. You didn’t have to sneak up on me.” He shook his head. “Damn,” he said, but he let her join him.

They walked the suburbs, stalking back yards. Daniel showed her which dogs to avoid, which he could charm with the easy clapping of his two hands. He told Isadora some stories, and his mood seemed to brighten as he traveled. He said he had fallen in love with this clothesline in a back yard. “It was white,” he said. “The two metal poles holding it up looked like they were polished.” He had stopped to examine the metal. The sun was glinting and reflecting from it, and he wanted to run his hand along it to feel the captured heat. “This young kid ran out of the house screaming for me to get out, over and over. His voice was almost hysterical. I just couldn’t imagine someone getting so riled up so I tried to calm him. He just got madder, so I left.”

All that exploring left Daniel restless. “We should move,” he said. “Maybe it would be wonderful to leave a place just at the point when you were the most in love with it. You could carry that place with you that way, you could reach right in and feel your hand hard against it. It could even become a memory to cling to, something that would always stay good, and would always retain a little mystery to it, too, because you wouldn’t have had time to get jaded, to get bored and familiar. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good to leave when you feel like staying. I don’t want to become an Ann Arbor regular, part of the scene. Some of the people I see look as if they’re ready to turn right into cement.”

“We can move,” said Isadora. “I’ll go anywhere except Madison.

“Anywhere,” he said. “To the ends of the earth.”

She called Duse to feel her out about transferring to another school but Duse’s voice was clouded. She said she didn’t feel very well. The veiling over her speech made Isadora a little uneasy, but she shook it off. Duse had always been full of surprises.

Sometimes on their walks, Daniel seemed to forget Isadora. He would go right up to a front door and peer into the interior of a house, not stopping until the owner came out and asked what he thought he was doing. Isadora, embarrassed, would shift her weight on the pavement, would will the time to pass. Daniel could be a real charmer when he wanted. He complimented the owner of the house until he saw the face in front of him loosen. She heard him tell someone that he learned about lives by how people lived.

Sometimes they ran home in the dark, not seeing things cleanly against the darkness, bumping into trees, until Isadora sprinted ahead and ran, small and fast.

It was funny. The closer she tried to get to him, the more he pulled away. Sometimes at night she’d wrap her legs about him, she’d try to talk to him, but he’d just shake her off, he’d just say he was sleepy. If she persisted, he would stumble out of bed, and she would hear him fumbling in the bathroom, clicking out aspirins from a bottle. One particularly bad night, she heard him dialing the phone, and she got up, wrapping the blankets about her as she trailed into the kitchen and leaned in the doorway. He looked up and sighed at her, he told her to go back to bed, and when she wouldn’t, he hung up, he led her there himself. She didn’t ask who he was calling.

The one time he got really furious was when she opened a letter addressed to him. She wasn’t even thinking of it. She simply saw him as an extension of her own self—they inhabited each other, and she saw the letter as both of theirs. She had the letter unfolded when Daniel walked in and saw her and his face changed right in front of her. He was angry enough with her to be silent, and she trailed him telling him she was sorry, she didn’t think it mattered, and she only stopped her pleading when she saw how it was making him angrier, more distant, more unreachable. “I won’t do it again,” she said, but he just looked at her.

It was a Tuesday night. She was trying to finish a botany paper and Daniel was out on one of his jaunts. At least, she thought he was. He wasn’t home when she got in, and although he had promised to be better about letting her know where he was, there had been no note. It didn’t matter. She had work to do. She studied until ten, and then she went outside to buy Vogue. She wanted to thirst over all those clothes she didn’t think she would ever be able to afford, and that she knew she’d probably never wear anyway.

She came back an hour later to find Allison hovering over Daniel on the couch. Allison was wrapping ice cubes in a red face cloth, trying to secure the cloth so it would lie on Daniel’s head.

“Jesus, what’s wrong?” said Isadora. She felt everything tightening up inside of her and she moved her shoulders, her arms, to get rid of the stiffness.

His head was bruised with color, and he told her he had just taken one of Allison’s Percodans. “He knew I had every drug you’d ever want so he called me. All those years he did nothing but make fun of my pill passion, and now just look.”

Daniel looked at Isadora, lifted his hand to her, reaching out. “It’s only a baby’s bump. No big deal.”

He said he had been running around, sliding from neighborhood to neighborhood, when he found that metal laundry pole again. He had to look at it, had to touch it again, but he wasn’t paying attention, and there were all kinds of different-colored pieces of laundry flapping on the line. He ran smack into one of the poles, and it felled him, made him bump down to his hands and knees, all-foured like a suburban pet. His head dipped and he couldn’t seem to focus the pain out of his eyes. He tried to pull himself up, to unpeel one of his hands from the cement and lift it to his head to see if he was bleeding. He said he knew something was wrong, he kept worrying about staining the white cement with his red, about ruining one of the white sheets. He said he managed to lift his head up enough to see that same little kid staring out at him, pale and fearful, but when Daniel started to open his mouth, the kid shouted that no one was home. He kept shouting, he made Daniel wince with the sound, every word a blow. Daniel clapped his hands over his ears, muffling the shouts, trying to stop them from reverberating inside his skull. He got up, using his hands as suction cups to lead him along that house to the door, but the kid pulled the curtains.

Daniel managed to get to the next house where a woman let him in and gave him aspirin. She recognized him. “She said she used to see me tearing like a wild thing through the streets,” Daniel said, trying to grin. “I apologized to her, but she held up her hand, she told me it was entertaining.” She felt his head with her own, letting her feathery blonde hair dip into his face. She treated him as if he were a baby, and when she realized what she was doing, she pulled back, embarrassed. “That’s what happens when you spend all your time with kids,” she said. She called the house next door to reassure the little boy; she told Daniel he had been ruined by rigid parents, that they told him the Devil was waiting to tug him to hell by his heels if he misbehaved. “You ever see that kid walk?” the woman said. “He prances, he won’t keep his toes on the earth for one second longer than he has to.” Daniel rested his head on the cool linoleum of her table top and listened to the phone, to the way she worded her sentences. “He’ll be dandy,” she said.

That woman wouldn’t let Daniel go home by foot, but insisted on driving him. “The kids are all at scout meeting with their father. He adores uniforms,” she said, making a wry face. She pulled on an old gravy-dotted blue jacket and she let him lean on her so she could get him into her car, a little white VW. She made him sit right beside her so she could brace herself against him if he tottered, so he could give her directions. “And make ’em good,” she said. “I get lost real easy.” Before he got out of the car, she slipped something into his pocket. When he pulled it out, when he unfolded that sheet of paper, he saw her phone number and her name. Jillian, it said.

“She looked like Allison,” Daniel said.

“Of course,” said Allison, “Daniel doesn’t like his mystery too mysterious.”

Isadora looked up at Allison, who was watching her. “I gotta get going,” Allison said, rising up. “The Swimmer’s waiting. You call if you need anything. I left a whole bottle of Peres on the table for you. Any left over, I want. Don’t you let him toss them out, Isadora.”

Isadora walked her to the door. “Typical Daniel, isn’t it,” said Allison.

“What?” said Isadora.

“Use your eyes, would you,” said Allison. “You really don’t need me to tell you what’s going on, do you?”

“What do you mean?” said Isadora.

“I gotta go,” said Allison. “Talk to Daniel. You tell each other things, don’t you?”

“Wait a minute—” said Isadora, but Allison was down the steps and was gone.

It was Scale who noticed something wrong. He stuttered his body into the bed the next morning, rumbling his throat at any other animal who tried to come up, too. He barked at the cats, he snapped at the parrot, and he bit Isadora, who smacked him with the flat of her hand. He nipped at whatever section of flesh he could find until she bodily picked him up and banished him from the room.

Daniel slept a lot. He picked at his food and didn’t seem to want anything but the blue banana popsicles she got at Sergeant Pepper’s, the corner grocer. She called every other doctor in the yellow pages, but none of them would come to the house and Daniel refused to go to an office; he said he was better. “One more day in bed,” he promised.

He got up the next day, went to work, came home. He did seem fine, and she stopped worrying. But one day when she dropped over at the shop, she saw him leaning over a fish tank, smoking a cigarette, letting the ashes float on top of the water. “Hey—” she said, laying her head against his shoulder, inhaling his scent. “You’ll give those things fish cancer.” He didn’t smile back at her; he made his brows jump and then he stubbed the cigarette out into a paper cup. “I hate cigarettes anyway,” he said.

When they walked home, she waited for the routing, the sudden spirals he liked to make, but he followed a stubbornly linear course, he walked one end of the sidewalk until it turned into street, then he crossed and began on another strip. He was methodical, unadventurous, and she tried to hold onto his arm, to break up the silence. She asked if anything was wrong.

“I’m terrific,” he said, crossing the street, not even looking to see if she was following him.

Isadora had lunch with Allison. They talked about Daniel. She kept trying to peel answers out of Allison, she kept thinking that that woman knew something she didn’t. “Come on,” said Allison. “He seemed fine to me. He gave me back all my Peres except for one, so he’s not in pain. Maybe he’s just getting jittery about getting married again.”

“What?” said Isadora, startled, one hand floating up to her hair.

“You know, cold feet. He threw his back out two days before we got married. For no reason at all. He hadn’t been lifting anything, doing anything. He just got out of bed funny. He had to lie flat on his back for a whole day. He was fine for the ceremony. Stop worrying. I know how he is.”

“He hit his head,” Isadora said. “We haven’t even set a date yet.”

“You haven’t?” said Allison. She paused, stirring her coffee. “Did you ever call that Jillian person, maybe she knows something. Daniel likes to talk to strangers, you know. He’ll tell them his whole life story.”

“I guess,” said Isadora.

She did try to find Jillian. She waited until Daniel was asleep and then she groped in his pockets for the number. She pulled out the notes he had made to himself: BUY COOKIES, GET CLEANING, but there was no number, no name. She riffled through his address book, but there was nothing there. It made her feel queasy inside to see Allison’s name there but not her own. She shook the feeling off.

She took walks through the suburbs, she tried to find the house with the clothesline, but she had no sense of direction, and she ended up getting lost, having to go to one of those bland houses and ring the bell to ask how to get back to the main street. She was grubby in black jeans, a fraying black tee shirt, and her hair was crinkled in curls and dirty. The directions she got were sketchy, the face of the woman giving them hostile. Isadora walked until her feet cramped up and then she had to sit right down on the sidewalk and run the circulation back into them. She sprinted the rest of the way, stepping down on those spiny tinglings as her feet gained back their blood.

She confronted Daniel that evening. She said she felt he was being different with her.

“Different—what are you talking about?” he said. “What’s the matter with you, being this suspicious? Allison said you were asking all kinds of questions about me. Why couldn’t you just ask me?”

“I am,” said Isadora. “I am asking you.”

“I told you, I’m fine. I don’t like you to be like this.”

He pushed himself up from the table, using his hands to brace himself. He didn’t bend to kiss her and she watched how he rubbed his temples as he left. All the time Isadora thought, What way do you like me to be? But she was silent.

She went to the medical library the next day and searched through the books. She was a little intimidated by all the white coats, the serious expressions, and she felt smothered by the books. There were eight shelves on the head, and she ended up just grabbing a handful of books, stooping under their weight, and settling them on a table. It made her feel worse reading about head blows. There were sudden blood clots that could dim your sight, there were things that could make you just drop dead. One book said that your whole personality could change, but then the text stopped. It didn’t say anything about how you could change it back to the way it was. Isadora hunched over those books for three hours, and then, more confused than ever, she slapped them shut, she left them bunched on the table. Daniel, she thought, Daniel.

She did some prowling of her own. She asked Allison over and kept watching her; every five minutes Isadora wanted to know if Allison saw the changes in Daniel. “You’re crazy,” Allison said. “I keep telling you he’s just jittery, that’s all. He was that way before we got married, it’s the whole thing of belonging to someone, it makes him nervous.”

“Did he tell you that?” Isadora said, and when Allison shrugged, Isadora turned away. She wouldn’t believe that, not with the way Daniel had pushed her to confide in him, to live with him and not keep her own place, not to be so separate. She went to the pet shop when Daniel was at lunch and asked his assistant, a lanky young man, if Daniel had gone home sick. She was trying to be cagey, to avoid coming right out and saying that she thought something was very wrong, but the assistant just said that he was busy, that it was all he could do to keep track of the animals, let alone Daniel.

Daniel didn’t make love to her the way he used to anymore, he didn’t seem as though he wanted to consume her. He always managed to get into bed long after she did, no matter how she dallied. She’d brush every single one of her teeth, she’d cream her face and hands, she’d plop into a living room chair and try to read. When she finally slunk into bed, exhausted, and when he finally lay beside her, she would try to talk, to coax; she would sometimes be whispering to him how she felt for minutes until she would notice the evenness of his breath, she would sense him asleep.

A week later, she came home with boxes of Chinese take-out, a surprise. She thought they could set the wedding date, make it final. When she got to the house, she saw that the front door was tilted open. She could see slices of the living room, could see a drift of animals moving in and out of the room. “Hey, Daniel—” she called. She went inside, still holding the cartons, leaving the door open. She kept glancing back at the outside; it reassured her.

She wandered the rooms, maneuvering in and out of the animals as they begged for the food. His clothes were still rumpling on the floor, his drawers were still half open, crowded with unmatched socks. She thought he’d be back. He probably just went on one of his mystery walks, that was all. She went into the kitchen and started chopping a salad, and then, because she couldn’t stand the closeness of the house, she decided to run. She could always reheat the food. It would be more fun to eat with Daniel anyway.

She didn’t bother to shuck off her clothes and change. She took the dogs and ran as she was, in a long skirt and top, for almost forty-five minutes. The hem of her skirt ripped, and there were big half moons of sweat under her arms. She had a pulse of dampness along her spine, and her mascara sweated into twin stains. She panted her way back into the house. “Daniel—” she called.

She ate alone, picking at her salad, feeding spoonfuls of the Chinese food to the animals. When she finally fell asleep, in the living room, the lights were on in every room of that house.

She tried at first to pretend nothing was wrong. She waited in the house for two days, not answering the phone, tensing when it rang, sure it was Daniel. The silence, the way his ringing wouldn’t catch, would force him to come home and talk to her, would make him tell her what was wrong. She went to the pet store late at night—Daniel kept an extra key—and she sat in the shop until three, waiting, and then she walked home.

She was suddenly very aware of herself. She would look at her reflection in the mirror for hours, touching her face, wondering what was the matter with her, what was so wrong about her face, her hair, her eyes, that he didn’t want them. What was wrong with her mind, with who she was, and oh God, she worried, she wondered, what was she going to do with all those things just by herself?

She was embarrassed walking on the streets when people she knew stopped her. It unnerved her that the first words out of their mouths were always about Daniel—how was he, what was he up to. She was mute, she didn’t tell anyone that Daniel was missing, that she didn’t know where he was.

It was terrible without him. The animals must have sensed something because the dogs chewed the rug, one of the cats ripped apart her lace blouse and she wept into the severed sleeve. At night, she couldn’t sleep. She dragged Scale into the living room and tried to make him curl up into her lap, and when he struggled to leave her, to extricate himself, she wept again. Every cell of her beat time along with the clock. Please, she thought, oh please.

She called Allison on the morning of the third day. When Allison heard what was going on, she said to wait, that she would be right over.

Allison was panting when she arrived. “I ran,” she said, clutching her side. “What the hell is wrong with you, not telling me something like this? I have a right to know.”

Isadora looked at her hands, fumbling the fingers together. She kept shaking her head, trying to dislodge the images of Daniel folded up on the road, bleeding into his brain, all that brilliant red lathing his memory, erasing even her own face from his mind.

“It was the bump,” Isadora said.

Allison gave her a sharp look, but she said nothing, and it was Allison who picked up the phone to call the police. Isadora saw what that did to Allison, how it reshaped her face. It amazed her how much information Allison knew. That woman could recite Daniel’s car registration, the year of his car, she knew his social security number. She had been married to him, Isadora thought. When Allison hung up, she was fuming. “Damned cops,” she said. “They laughed at me, they thought it was a big joke. ‘Two days,’ they kept saying. ‘Lady, two days is nothing, wait a week.’ They said it was as common as milk for men to come back home drunk and loony with love again. I told them about the head bump, you heard that, didn’t you? They couldn’t have cared less.”

Isadora sat helpless while Allison called the store and asked for Daniel. “You could have done all this, you know,” Allison said. She was getting irritable. “Call his parents,” she told Isadora. “Come on. They don’t like me.”

Isadora didn’t want to call. It would be terrible if he were there, terrible if he weren’t. How could she explain anything to anybody. She made Allison sit right beside her as she dialed. Daniel’s mother answered and as soon as she knew it was Isadora, she was squeezing in her questions. When were they coming to visit, when was the wedding, could they have a picture of Isadora because Daniel had told them how lovely she was.

Isadora knew as soon she heard those questions that Daniel wasn’t there. She started out the story, she tried to get the words right, but even as she was speaking, she found herself separating out, becoming a bystander listening to her own voice. She was baffled, disbelieving, she felt the sense of story there, the unreality. When she was finished, she was silent, and then Daniel’s mother spoke.

“You poor baby,” she said, startling Isadora. But then she started asking more and more questions, her voice drying up the sympathy, becoming suddenly metallic. She wanted to know just where Isadora had been when this head injury occurred, when Daniel went out, why he had felt the need to be alone. Had she called a doctor? Had she called the police? Isadora could hear Daniel’s father in the background, but she was drained, she didn’t want to retell the story to him, to anyone. When Daniel’s mother told Isadora to call her if she heard anything more, it sounded to Isadora like an order.

“I can’t stand it,” said Isadora, hanging up.

It was Allison’s idea to call Duse.

“I don’t want comforting. I want Daniel.”

“Isadora,” said Allison. “She’s a psychic, isn’t she? Maybe you don’t believe that stuff—I don’t know if I do either—but she did find that little kid, didn’t she?”

Isadora swabbed her face dry with her sleeve. “She never said she did. Other people said that. All she said was that that kid was alive.”

Allison touched Isadora. “That’s enough,” she said.

“I want Daniel,” said Isadora.

“Listen to me—” said Allison. “You don’t have him.”

Isadora slumped into a chair. I don’t have him, she thought, and when she started weeping, Allison put her hands on Isadora’s back. “It’s okay,” she said. “You have Duse. She can help.”

Isadora made the call, but all the time her fingers were hooking into the numbers, she knew she wouldn’t be able to tell Duse anything. As soon as she heard Duse’s voice, she started to weep, she had to hand that receiver over to Allison and beg her to do the talking.

Allison’s voice was clear. She explained about Daniel, how no one knew where he was and no one seemed able to help. “That girl,” said Duse. “Why didn’t she call me immediately? Never mind. I know why.” She told Allison that both of them should drive out to see her. She didn’t want Isadora going alone, she didn’t think her girl was in any state to do that. “You bring lots of his clothing, you hear me?” Duse said. “Things he lived in, that haven’t been washed clean of his scent. And bring pictures of him, something that shows his palms if you have it. I read that hand. It’s funny. I never noticed anything, but lines change.”

Isadora, her head to the phone, her face parallel to Allison’s, pulled away. “She never noticed anything in my father’s palm before he died,” she said flatly.

Before Allison got off the line, she told Isadora that Duse had to speak to her. “You don’t have to talk,” Allison said. “She said she knows you’re upset, that she just wants you to listen.”

Isadora put the phone to her ear. For a moment, there was no sound. Like holding a seashell, she thought, cupped up to your ear, waiting to hear the sea, that wonder, to hear the ocean swell inside the clean hardness of a shell.

“Isadora,” said Duse. “I can fix everything.”