Isadora’s Epilogue

Isadora would never really accept Duse’s second stroke. There were other kinds of deaths than just the one riding in your palm—Duse had said that—but the doctor never liked it when Isadora said how much it bothered her to see Duse suspended in a half death like that. He narrowed his face at her, he made his eyes sharp and grim, and he said that Isadora should get right down on those blue-jeaned knees of hers and pray her thanks to God that Duse was living at all.

“Half living,” said Isadora.

No one could give her any certainties. Duse’s doctor said that there was never any defined boundary for a disease; he said that every person really colored their ailment, everyone made an illness peculiarly theirs and theirs only. Duse, he said, might regain her speech, might be able to eventually flutter some movement into her arms and legs, even her memory might reappear. He didn’t know. But then again, he said, it was always possible that Duse could stay in that limbo until yet another stroke, or her death.

It did something to Isadora. She had shouted at him. She hadn’t cared that the nurses flustered toward her, willing her silence, that heads turned. She had accused that doctor of everything she could think of. She said he had probably overmedicated Duse right into this stroke, she accused him of not medicating Duse enough. The doctor shook his head at her. He held up a yellow plastic file and said that Duse’s blood work showed a complete innocence of any of the medication he had been prescribing her. “That’s not normal,” he said. “There should at least have been some residue. She must not have been taking those blood pressure pills at all. She was rational, she was an adult. What did you want us to do, hold her mouth open and force those pills down her throat? That medication was to help. If you want to blame someone, stop getting all fired up at me; look to the real person in charge.” He sighed audibly. Isadora could almost see the whooshing of air. “It happens, you know,” he told her. “She lost her husband, maybe she wanted to be with him.”

“No, that’s not it,” Isadora said, but he ignored her, he went right on talking about the mechanism of stroke, how erratic it was and how no one could predict anything. “Hey look,” he said, “she could have had another stroke regardless.”

Duse stayed in intensive care for three weeks. Isadora sleepwalked from the house to the hospital, always carrying something in her hand, although they wouldn’t let her put it in the ward. She had flowers, candy Duse couldn’t eat, books she wouldn’t read. She would walk carefully toward Duse, her smile patchy on her face. For the first moments when she saw Duse, when she saw all that red hair slanted on the pillow, she could think Duse was just in trance, just concentrating. It was something she did for herself; it made it easier to be there, to see the eyes unfocused.

She was startled to find she wasn’t the only visitor. Clients kept trickling in, and it was one of them, a woman in her forties named Ellen Perry, who told Isadora, outside intensive care, that she thought it was time for Duse to be home.

“You won’t even have to hire a nurse,” she said. “I used to be an RN, worked for years, and I still know what to do. I want to care for that woman. I spent all my Mondays last year at your mother’s, you know that? I sobbed over my coffee because that son of a bitch of a husband of mine left me for some eighteen-year-old boy. You know what that mother of yours told me? You know what she said? She studied my hand like it was an encyclopedia and then she said that my lines were changing, that they showed good things. She showed me a different destiny, a different plan. I could get through the days knowing that.” Ellen made a small face. “I know it sounds crazy, but I could bear the pain knowing it was going to get better. And it has.

“It’s up to you, of course,” said Ellen. “I could commute or I could move in. You won’t be there. You have school, your whole life. And you can forget about paying me. I don’t want money, not from Duse.”

“Of course I would pay you,” said Isadora.

Ellen smiled. “Good. You want to do it then.”

It was Ellen who became a kind of surrogate Duse for Isadora, who got that girl through the details. Ellen decided how it should be, when she should move in, how she should be paid. She even hired a lawyer to set it up so she could draw her pay from Duse’s bank, so Isadora wouldn’t even have to deal with that. Isadora sat on the front porch and watched Ellen move in, and by evening that woman had dinner for the two of them, and then they went to pick up Duse.

Isadora wandered the house. She was always going in and out of her mother’s room. Sometimes she would just sit on the bed and wait for Duse to say something, to lift up those hands of hers and gesture. If Ellen walked by, she would come in and sit with Isadora. Ellen was never as upset by Duse’s stroke as Isadora. Ellen said it could just be a permanent trance, that as a nurse, she had never really seen a stroke that gentle. You could tell that just by Duse’s eyes, she said, by the way they always seemed to be dusting across the room, never settling, almost dizzy with life. “I’ve seen lots of strokes,” Ellen said, “so I should know.”

Ellen said that things like that—tragedies—were in the palm and that sometimes there was a real purpose for them, a way to learn. If Duse didn’t have memory left, then it was even more like a reincarnation in life, a way of starting fresh. Isadora, listening, let herself be lulled and lightened, let herself believe because she wanted to, but as soon as she stood up and went into another room, her mind would crowd. She would see how it was, she would see Ellen washing out Duse’s bedpan, cutting up Duse’s dinner meat so fine and so tiny that it was hamburger. When Isadora felt her tears, she went to Ellen, and that woman would tell her about lines and tragedy and incarnations all over again.

As the summer faded toward the fall, Isadora discovered others beside Ellen—a whole crazy, devoted network of clients. They were mostly women, middle-aged, well dressed, and although they all came to the house one by one, they quickly found and formed a bond with one another. Someone said that they all really should have done that a long time ago, when Duse was well, and Isadora, listening, thought how much Duse would have hated that, how she would have dismissed all of them as sheep.

The network knew who Isadora was. It startled her at first the way some of those women would recite back parts of her life to her, almost claiming Isadora’s heritage as their own. And they all had stories about what Duse had done for them, how she had given them confidence by showing them the talents in their lines or how she had found priceless rings and old sweaters. One woman even claimed that Duse had cured her of bronchitis, but Isadora looked doubtful. “Duse never claimed to be able to do anything like that,” she said, but the woman shook her head, the woman said that Duse just never took enough credit, and that was all.

Sometimes, though, it was all a little sad. The women who paraded up that walk didn’t really have any other place to go. One woman told Isadora that she had been searching for weeks for another palmist to replace Duse. She was certain, she said, that something very odd was happening in her lines, and she had to find someone to interpret it for her. She said that the only people she had been able to locate either charged extravagant rates or they had their offices up five floors of rickety stairs in what she called the “hell zone” of the city. Someone else told Isadora that they had placed an ad in the paper. Isadora flinched a little; she knew all about ads. “I got stacks of mail,” the woman told her, “but stuff from college babies, kids doing research, from bored old women who had read a few paperbacks, and some business cards from some real hucksters wanting to sell me different machines to open up my own powers.”

Ellen was philosophical. “The thing is,” she said, “no one is Duse. That’s the real trouble, right there.”

The network cared for Isadora. She wanted to stay close to Duse so she let one of the women pull some strings so Isadora could go to school at the University of Wisconsin, ten minutes away, instead of New Mexico. Ellen wouldn’t let her commute though; she reminded her how much Duse had hated anyone who let himself be martyred and Ellen would never be able to live with herself if she let Duse down by allowing Isadora to stay in the house.

The whole network was like that, all of them pushing Isadora out, forcing her into some semblance of independence. They think I don’t belong here with them, Isadora thought, they think I’m not like them. She had mixed feelings about that. The way they all knew they belonged was something Isadora thought she might like—it was the thing that welded them together that she doubted. At first, to get Isadora out of the house, she was asked to do errands, to get bread or milk. By the time she got back to the house she’d see the loaf of bread pushed to the very back of the bread box, she’d see the milk in the bottom of the freezer. She began to notice, too, how the network treated Duse now, how they almost started making a church of her (The Church of Duse again, Isadora thought wryly). Isadora began leaving the house just to escape all the piety. Duse would hate that, she thought; she’d take one look at all that adoration on those faces and order all of them off her property, out of her house.

She came home one night to find Duse’s hair sliced off, stiffly waved, banged to her brows. “Doesn’t she look nice?” Ellen prompted uneasily, holding up a mirror so Isadora could see just how the back waved.

“My God,” said Isadora. She wanted to pick Duse right up and get her into a shower, to dump those cement curls under the spigot and wash them free. She wanted to make Duse familiar to her again, she wanted to make her real.

Ellen was saying that a cut like that was a real snap to care for and that absolutely everyone needed a change, didn’t Isadora agree? Isadora reached out her fingers to touch Duse’s hair; then, instinctively, her fingers found her own disheveled mane. She clutched hanks of her own hair, she gave little nervous tugs to see how firmly rooted it was. “You like it, don’t you?” Ellen said. Isadora’s hand retreated, fished down into her pocket.

“You’ll get used to it,” said Ellen.

Isadora spent a lot of time in the picture gallery. She touched Duse’s features, she touched her own. She began to think that maybe her grandfather had been right, that pictures had nothing at all to do with real flesh, that the camera lied and lied and lied. Those prints were only as real as memory, she thought, and everyone knew just what damage different memories could do to faces. She could look at prints of Duse’s strange open palms and remember how those hands had always been scented with perfumed creams, that image would dominate everything else. Duse, though, would look at that print and feel the lines working their way into her hand.

She concentrated on the real Duse. She sometimes went upstairs and gave her mother manicures, lifting up Duse’s hands, one at a time, creaming the skin, leaving the nails clean of polish because Duse had always said that color destroyed the natural beauty of the hand. When Isadora was finished, she would press those hands against her own, she would try to match up the lines.

She got through her schooling. It was lonely for her in Madison. She didn’t feel any sense of place. The network found her an apartment, very clean and bare, and she wouldn’t buy one thing for it. She didn’t want it to have any personality, she wouldn’t stamp it with anything of herself. Sometimes she had bats, and she kept a special hard-bristled broom for them that she learned to wield and threaten with, but she never could make contact, she never could kill even one of them.

She once shut a bat into a room, but she couldn’t stand to hear it banging against the walls, trying to get outside, so she went outside into the Madison winter, the cold so stiff and bony that her breath seemed to waft out solid. When she came back, her hands chapped and red, her whole body shivering because she had grabbed the first thing in her closet instead of her heavy winter coat, the room was silent. Even so, she waited before she opened the door; she turned on the radio so the bat would somehow know she was here, so it, in turn, could let her know that it still lived. She finally called Manpower and hired someone—paid them twenty-five dollars—just to come and remove the bat. She could tell that the man they sent over thought she was nuts. He slid his gaze over her, he shook his head. It took him all of five minutes. He went in with a covered dustpan and came out rattling it so she could hear the bat was there, and when she stepped out of his way, he grinned. Isadora didn’t want anything to do with death.

She tried to fill her life with mindless detail. She made lists for herself to go shopping, to get to the cleaners. She spent hours rearranging every single one of her drawers. She saw a lot of movies and she tried not to think, not to see how alone she was.

In the end, though, she couldn’t keep all her yearning at bay. She began missing Daniel again. Sometimes she thought that if she only knew that he was alive, she could get through her days. She could even see other people if she could patch his name into her faltering conversation, if she could still connect him up to her. “My lover is coming back soon,” she said aloud. “My lover is on vacation for a while where there aren’t any phones or letters.”

She sent Christmas cards to his parents, making them herself out of expensive watercolor paper, inking in the designs herself. She wrote a few lines sometimes, but Daniel’s parents never responded; she never even got a store-bought card from them. She wondered if they had anything to tell her. Maybe Daniel’s body had been found in the Pacific, his car parked right in the tide, the whole floorboard alive with tiny sand crabs and minnows. She wouldn’t know, the police wouldn’t contact her because she wasn’t his wife. Damn identity, she thought. She sometimes thought about calling his parents, but she was afraid. Maybe it was better not to know, to just hope.

Sometimes, too, she tried to find Allison. She went to the library and plundered the Boston phone book. She searched the wedding sections of the paper, but both were blank and innocent of her name. Sometimes, when Isadora was really tired, when the library was cool and silent of people, she would shut her eyes. She would think DANIEL, she would think ALLISON, and then she would jerk her eyes open, she would flicker her gaze down into the paper before her, the death pages on her left, the weddings on her right. It was a stupid thing to do, a child’s game. Only Duse had thought Isadora had a gift.

The network tried to fix her up with men, hoodwinking her with a careless dinner invitation, putting her beside astrologists and herbalists and a few times beside doctors and lawyers. They were always nice enough, but she never let them take her home, she never went to dinner with them, and she said she didn’t have a phone. Instead of dating, Isadora wrote film scripts. When she told the network, casually, in conversation, Ellen asked if Isadora were doing automatic writing, she warned Isadora not to let a spirit have too much power over her pen, not to let it take control and write whatever it wanted. “I knew someone who taught themselves how to do that,” Ellen said. “You, of course, have a star. It’d come natural to you. That woman spent hours just doodling circles, over and over until she recognized a world. It got faster, she was reeling off the sentences, and then they got fouler and fouler, all about murder and possessed people. It took her months of special hypnosis to get rid of that.” The hypnosis jerked something tight up inside of Isadora, made her remember Martin, made her smell his aftershave. Isadora never mentioned writing to the network again, and they soon gave up asking because of her silence.

She finished school and took a job writing human-interest articles for a paper. They said they might give her a byline after a year or two and she could pretty much be her own boss. She liked writing facts, making words clean and defined and understandable.

She wrote one film script, a play really, about Duse. She meant it to be a purging, she wanted to understand. She sent the proposal around, and she got six rejections, all of them polite, all of them basically the same. The last one made her face brutal. Write about what you know, it said. Then, underlined, bracketed in blue, it said I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS. NO ONE IS REALLY LIKE THAT. Isadora carefully clipped the words out and framed them in silver over her headboard.

Duse had her last stroke in the winter. Everyone told Isadora that it had been very quick. Ellen sat beside her at the funeral, clamping her arms about Isadora, tightening the pressure when Isadora started crying. Ellen kept trying to tell Isadora that Duse would be back, that there was no way on earth you could keep that one away, and she didn’t care what Duse had promised Isadora. Ellen said that she wanted to buy the house so someone would be there when Duse did come.

“What?” said Isadora.

But she couldn’t convince Ellen of anything, not that Duse didn’t already inhabit parts of the drapes, the weave of a rug, that just by running your fingers over the surface of a table, you couldn’t pick up a current Duse had left. Isadora couldn’t convince Ellen that she had no legacy from Duse. She’d see Ellen watching her, smiling as if the two of them shared some secret. One day, Ellen approached Isadora with a complaint. She had a headcramp, she said, and when Isadora fished out two aspirins from her purse, Ellen’s smile turned funny, she closed her fingers about the pills and shook her head. “You’re her daughter,” Ellen said, as if Isadora needed reminding.

She couldn’t bear it. She was back and forth in that house trying to tie up loose ends, never alone. The phone was always ringing, but the calls had nothing to do with sympathy. All that pity traveled back to itself. Those callers just felt abandoned. They wanted to know when Isadora was setting up shop, when she would start doing whatever it was that Duse had taught her. When Isadora protested, when she said they were wrong, callers reminded her of her star. No one was bothered when Isadora said she couldn’t do anything, and even Ellen said that Duse herself had suggested that that gift wouldn’t flower until Duse had died. “Her identity was so strong,” Ellen said.

“Nothing’s flowering,” said Isadora. “Everything’s dying.”

But Ellen’s words were insidious; they cropped Isadora’s dreams short, they woke her up and made her turn on her light so she could study her palm. She got out of bed and began trying to make lists. She divided pages in half, on the left side she put the things Duse always considered her gifts, her rights of birth; on the opposite side, Isadora listed possible rational explanations for each talent. Palm reading was just book stuff, she thought. The psychometry—well, maybe Duse was just a good guesser, maybe she had an exceptionally logical mind. Duse’s dying when she said she would was just Duse’s carelessness, her refusal to take her medication. It had nothing to do with fate, with destiny. Maybe, too, Duse had just hypnotized herself right into unshakable belief. She thought she could do certain things—so she could.

The thing Isadora couldn’t let go of, though, the thing that she wore like a splinter, was Duse’s insistence that Daniel was alive. She wouldn’t destroy that with a rational explanation.

Duse was right. She didn’t come back. Isadora never dreamed about her, never saw one feature of that face swimming up toward her. She even found an old scarf of Duse’s lining a trunk, long and filmy and white, and she started missing Duse so much that she wrapped the scarf about her wrist, she shut her eyes and yearned and waited, but the only thing that happened was that her sweat prickled along her skin, and she daubed herself dry with it.

She let Ellen buy the house. She spent another month gradually cleaning her things from the place, taking the things of Duse’s that she wanted. The network all gradually left her alone when they saw how Isadora wouldn’t help them, how she would give them her queer pinched-up looks when they offered her their palms. Some of the clients thought she was ungrateful, a few came right out and told her she was fresh. People started coming to the house to see Ellen now, never Isadora, and she began to like the easy way she could just drift in and out of there, without having to stop to be polite, without having to answer anything.

Isadora was suddenly aware of a new face. This woman started showing up, a young woman who would always sit in the old chintz chair by the window, who was always surrounded by one or two of the network. Isadora never bothered to introduce herself and no one looked up anymore when she walked into the room. At first, Isadora thought the woman was just a friend of a client, or a client she had never met, but then she spotted her reading someone’s palm, she saw how the network was gravitating toward that woman.

She began to hear Duse’s name threaded into the conversation less and less now. Ellen told her how that new woman was becoming the network’s new focus. She insisted to Isadora that no one, absolutely no one, could ever take Duse’s place, that everyone was still waiting for some sign from Duse. She said, that as a matter of fact, there were even some among them who thought that Duse herself had managed to send this woman their way. The woman’s name was Stephanie Barlow, Ellen said, and then, pitching her voice lower, Ellen said that Stephanie said she was a medium, that spirit voices came right up through her, although no one had really seen that happen yet. “Maybe even Duse will come through,” Ellen said.

The whole Stephanie business made Isadora glum. That woman had heard about Duse from a neighbor, she herself had never even bothered to visit while Duse was alive, and now she was just making herself at home. What was worse was that everyone was letting her. Everyone but me, thought Isadora. She didn’t like the polite way Stephanie smiled when Isadora introduced herself; it ate away at her, until later, while she was eating her dinner, she realized what it was. Stephanie had not said one syllable about Isadora being Duse’s daughter, and not one of the network sitting around her had mentioned it either.

So that was how it was. All that need looking for a focus, zooming in on one woman. Well, thought Isadora, if you didn’t have certainty in yourself, then you just had to go out and find someone else who did.

It made her uneasy with jealousy. She watched those women, she saw the placid way they drew closer to Stephanie, the way they unburdened themselves as easily as they sipped Duse’s tea. Why couldn’t she have that, why wasn’t it simple for her, too? It reminded her of the time she had actually gone to Confession, of the way she had just wanted to feel her face loosen up into relief the way she saw the other church faces do. She wanted the answers everyone else seemed to have, the absolutes, and instead, that confession had made her even more rigid with nerves, more skittery with her own doubt.

Isadora knew all about need. She suddenly realized just how much nothing she had, how she ached and missed and yearned. She had to escape—over and over, she told herself to go—and then she took action. She applied for journalism jobs as far away from Madison as she could manage. Out of five hundred resumes, she had three interviews, one of them in California, in La Jolla.

It hit her on the plane. She had been too frantic about packing, about buying something professional to wear. Daniel’s parents lived in La Jolla. It was the closest contact to Daniel that she had had in months. They’d see her, wouldn’t they? They’d let her inside, let her see the rooms Daniel had grown up in, let her touch his things, the toys he loved, the stuffed animals he held in his arms before he even met her. For the first time in months Isadora felt herself taking in oxygen. She was giddy with hope, and that hope made her just a little superstitious. She fingered the marking in her palm. Calling his parents was one thing—actually being in the same city, actually being able to sit in the house Daniel grew up in, was another. Maybe the clue here was belief. She could make fun of the network all she wanted, but when it came right down to it, those women seemed content enough, they weren’t riding one panic attack into another the way she herself was. She remembered how Duse said Martin was her destiny, how you didn’t question things like that, according to Duse. This could be destiny, too, couldn’t it, this sudden single interview in Daniel’s hometown—a fated way to reconnect. Daniel’s alive, she said, touching her star, promising someone, something, that if he really were, if he were at home, then she would never doubt gifts again, she would send money to all the poor, she would eat right, she would do anything, anything, she would do everything.

She was afraid to call. She dallied and then she went to her job interview, but she couldn’t concentrate. A few times she thought she had been asked a question. She’d jerk her head up, but the interviewer was just dandling a pencil, searching his mind for the next thing he needed to know. Even when the job was described to her (researching subscription information) and she knew she didn’t want it, she still couldn’t quite relax; she kept thinking I’m not meant to work here, I’m meant to find Daniel, that’s why I’m here, that’s why.

When she left the interview, she walked around the block a few times and then she called Daniel’s parents, her eyes shut, her finger on her star. Her tongue felt pasted in her mouth. Please, she thought, oh please, please. Daniel’s mother answered, her voice silky, but she invited Isadora over, she seemed pleased to hear her voice.

Daniel’s house was a white ranch with blue shutters. Isadora tried to feel what it must have been like for him to grow up there. Daniel’s mother had her sit in the living room on a red velvet couch. She apologized for her husband being out. “Golf,” she said, lifting her hands. “You know how it is.”

They small-talked and then Isadora blurted out how unhappy she was about Daniel, she asked if there had been any news, all the time her finger pressing into her star.

Daniel’s mother looked startled. “News?” she said. “About what?” She peered again at Isadora. “You don’t know, do you?” she said suddenly. “You never got the letter, did you?”

Isadora pulled herself up straight. “What letter?” she said. “He’s alive, isn’t he?” She could feel something lighten right up inside of her.

“Well, yes, I should hope so,” said Daniel’s mother. She looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then, very slowly, her voice low, she told Isadora about Daniel, about how he had shown up there at home one month after Isadora’s call, his grin sheepish and shamed, his hands in his pockets. They had shouted at him, had asked him where his head was, and didn’t he have any feelings for anyone but his own damned self? “We told him we had called the FBI, that you were splintering apart, that we were ready to go crazy ourselves. He hedged at first, he said he had no real explanation. He was always like that, but he told us he had written you a letter, that it explained everything. I told him he should call you, and he said he was going to.

“He had some crazy excuse about the bump, how it had jolted his thinking, had made him think how chancy things were, how you could be almost killed in one moment and saved the next, that everything was timing.” Daniel’s mother snorted. “Timing, my foot. I told him I never heard a poorer excuse in my entire life, that it didn’t explain anything, but he wouldn’t listen. Not at first. He said I didn’t understand, that what he meant was that he was seeing things differently.” She sighed. “Honey, I hate to tell you this, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t the bump on his head as much as who was there—that woman, the one who reminded him of Allison.”

Here she interrupted herself, she reached over and touched Isadora and Isadora felt something folding up inside of her, telescoping up. “He never really got over Allison. He carried her up inside of him for a long, long time after they split. He was almost going to patch things up once, but he was stubborn about that detective business.”

“She didn’t hire a detective,” said Isadora, her voice dull, but Daniel’s mother just shook her head.

“What does it matter?” she said. “Daniel believes that she did and he couldn’t stand her claiming that much of him, taking even his privacy from him.”

“He said I did that too,” said Isadora.

“Did he, honey?” Daniel’s mother was preoccupied, half listening.

“He never called, he could have told me himself,” said Isadora. “I never got any letter, any news.”

“He didn’t want you to find him, I guess,” she said. “I can’t believe he never called you, I can’t believe you didn’t get the letter. A letter’s the coward’s way out anyway.” She looked at Isadora. “Look, he won’t get over you, don’t you worry. He said he loved you. I remember that. He just said you made him feel a little smothered, that it made him react against you and he thought it was better that he just leave.

“Oh now, don’t. Don’t look like that,” said Daniel’s mother. “I don’t feel very proud about my son, I don’t think what he did was right. Not one bit. He has the blame, not me, and now you’ll hate me.” She stretched forward and wrote something on a sheet of paper; she handed it to Isadora, all the time talking about how she was going to give Daniel a good piece of her mind. The idea, not calling Isadora, not letting her know.

She was crying when she called information for Daniel’s number. She didn’t care that it was the very center of the night, that everything was sliding into another time, another morning, she didn’t think that he might not be there, or that he might be wrapped around another woman, another scent. She dialed the number, she let it ring and ring, all the time thinking how his hands felt when they were touching her, how his face felt against her own, how it was to see herself in his eyes, to see his motions matching hers.

On the ninth ring, she put her finger to her starred marking. Please, she thought, please, please, and on the next ring, he picked it up. She heard his voice, slow with sleep, and then she felt herself crack open. She stumbled out her name and then his and then she waited. There was silence on his end. She waited for a sigh, for her own name so she would know he was there, so she would know that she had made a connection. His voice could mend the fissures, she thought; she could just reach out and grab onto it and pull herself to safety.

“Daniel—” she said and then she heard it, her name, from his voice and she breathed it in as if it were oxygen.

He apologized. He asked if he could please call her back in the morning. They could meet, he said, he would explain everything to her.

“No,” she said. “You won’t be there. I know you won’t.”

“Oh Isadora—” he said.

“I know what happened,” she said. “I had to hear it from your mother. You told her and you couldn’t even tell me. How do you think that made me feel? I was supposed to be your wife,” she said, starting to cry.

He whooshed out a breath. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I tried to. I did write you a letter, I even put it into an envelope, but I just couldn’t bring myself to mail it, I couldn’t tell you because there wasn’t space enough. You were right there inside of my lungs, sometimes I felt that you were using up my air and it scared me.”

“What are you talking about,” she said. “You’re the one who kept prodding me to move in with you, saying I was distant, secretive; you’re the one, not me.”

“Well, that’s right,” he said, “but later, I don’t know. I just felt I had to have space for myself.”

“That Jillian—” she started hesitantly.

“You think I slept with her?” he said, his voice edged. “Now you’re suspicious. I went through all that with Allison, I’m not going through it with you.”

“You saw Allison?” she said baffled.

“We understand each other, that’s all.”

“I went through hell.”

“Isadora,” he said. “So did I.”

“No. Not like me, not like I did.”

“Look. I can’t talk about this anymore, not tonight. Give me a number, I’ll call you tomorrow. I promise. I swear.”

“I want to be with you, I want to touch you, I want to taste you—”

“Taste. That sounds like devouring.” He laughed a little.

“Aren’t we going to be together, Daniel? Can’t we just try?”

“I don’t know, Isadora,” he said. “We’ll talk. I don’t know.”

She took her finger off her star. There was no protection for her, no hiding place, everything was up for grabs. “What if I say no?” she said, and he said that all that meant was that they wouldn’t see each other, that was all.

She said, “I don’t want to ever see you again,” as if she really had the choice, as if that really gave her any control at all. She hung up, not even knowing if he had heard her and then she sat up on her hotel bed staring at her reflection in the mirror.

She got up and started fiddling with the pencil on the dresser. She touched her starred marking with it, and then she dug and dug and dug until she drew blood.

She got a job in Connecticut, writing a little news section for a local paper covering regional events. Weekends, she sometimes went up to the beach, driving the little white VW she had bought. She was burning her skin. She never used sunblocks or lotions; she liked the way her skin peeled from her. It made her think of rebirth, of the way animals molted. She remembered a tarantula Daniel had once shown her. She had jittered back, annoyed that he would scare her, but then he had picked the thing up, he had shown her that it really wasn’t a spider at all, just the molting. A shell. A new spider was somewhere else.

Isadora dated sometimes. She tried not to compare everyone to Daniel, and she always failed; men always seemed to see it in her face. She thought, wryly, a little bitterly, that it was what Duse would have called a sin of identity. She never heard from Daniel, and she never contacted him again. She had dreams sometimes, but never about Daniel, never about Duse. Sometimes, she thought that lack made her hunger for them all the more.

She stopped thinking about the gift business, whether Duse had really had one, whether she herself had even had the potential. What did it really matter anyway. Duse had believed she had had a gift, but all that was simply part of who Duse had been.

Who Isadora was was something more complicated. She didn’t really share all that much with Duse. Hair. Eyes, maybe. She had shaped her life first wanting a gift, wanting to be Duse, then not wanting a gift, negating her mother. There had been Allison, too, all that trying not to repeat Allison’s mistakes with Daniel, all that trying to be more than Allison for Daniel. And Daniel, too, who should have made her glad for her differences, had been the widest hurt inside of her. She had wasted all that time trying to live right up inside of him. The cleaving together part of marriage had seduced her. All that had been part of who Isadora was, part of how she saw herself.

So that was it then. She was really the only one left. Her father was dead, Duse too, Allison had disappeared, and Daniel was lost to her. She was still Duse’s daughter—she would always be that—but she wasn’t Duse. Things that began with her mother would probably just end with her. She could guess who was on the phone before she picked up the receiver, she could have a dream or two come true, but it didn’t have to mean one damned thing, it could just be coincidence. You could always believe whatever you wanted, whatever you thought you needed.

Isadora was getting up from sitting in the sun one day, lifting her hair off her back to flounce off some of the sun sweat, when she noticed her palm flowering out. There was her meshwork of lines, that tangling. She stared into her palm for a moment, feeling the old flickering, the way it had been way back when she was just a kid in the strange paradise, how lovely it had been to believe like that. Then Isadora blurred her vision, she pushed her hand back into her pocket, shoved it deep. She would stop sitting in the sun like that. She’d go out right now and pick up some hand cream, something that smoothed, something with a good intoxicating scent to it so she’d always remember to use it, so she’d never forget.