Ned came back to bed with crisps, a noisy snack and a salty, smiley pleasure, a pleasure to be in his company although she was often out of his company that he might work without distraction. He had a fellowship and a book he hoped to finish, and Isabel? Since the ashy collapse of the year before, she could not find a subject large enough — arguments in kitchens and her parents’ divorce? The time he almost left her but she cried and cried? Ned and Isabel often talked of the event and other dilemmas of purpose and direction—I’m not young! Isabel said, not a little surprised.
*
All too often a finger heavy on a key woke her, so that she put the laptop on the floor and sat before a pond of yyyyyyyys. Discomfort might keep her awake if not her subject. “I need a regular job when we get back,” she said to herself and then later to Ned, “I need a regular job when we get back to the States. I need something to do.”
Ned said, “Think of our time here as graduate school”—no matter they had both just finished.
But graduate school had been so jokey. She had honed skills in the thrift shops on Broadway, buying furred sweaters and looking like Twiggy. And her thesis? Isabel’s stories? The criticisms from her classmates had been spiteful or silly; the meanest of them closed on upbeat notes: Hope to read more! Really? Ned’s critiques were smart. He hit on the weak spots in ways that didn’t shame her. Whatever brought on the sick-making headaches was not much to do with Ned but sloth, envy, anger, uncertainty. Why couldn’t she live on a pot of tea all morning and a mirthful meanness writing?
“So go out,” he said. “Be courageous. See the city.”
She went to the theater first. Isabel had dividends enough to see the same production of The Seagull as often as she liked, and she was enamored of its desperate Nina. . “How sweet it used to be, Kostya! Remember? How bright, and warm, how joyous and pure our lives were!” Isabel had played Nina in a college production: “. . a man comes along, by chance, and, because he has nothing better to do, destroys her. .”
On the day Isabel came back from The Seagull a second time, Isabel wrote her father to thank him for his generosity. In a postscript she wrote, Hello to Anabel. “I’ve never written my stepmother’s name before,” Isabel said. “For that matter, I’ve never written to thank my father. This is progress, wouldn’t you say?” She fanned herself with the letter.
“You’re a kinder person, are you?” Ned said with an English inflection, so that it sounded like a question.
*
The next day, in studentlike spirit, to be smart, at times smart — Vassar was her own doing, had nothing to do with her father’s money — Isabel went on a day trip to Cambridge with the Blue Guide and its rundown of the colleges and their famous members. Literary royalty — Milton had walked here. She unsettled herself with thoughts of sloughed-off skin on whatever had been touched. Maybe she would sit in some of Milton if she sat beneath the right tree in the right place. England’s trees, and whoever met or dreamed, picnicked or loved beneath them, were a wonder: the enormous reach of copper beeches, explosive heads. Yews, chestnuts, limes, gingkos. The dead oaks in Windsor Great Park were no less than gods sycoraxed in a moment of anguish.
Might they not be released and made green again at some greater god’s touch?
Anointment was what she sought, had sought. More than one visiting writer had said what matters most is staying in the room. She fell asleep in the room. Ned said, “Fine to stay in the room, but not all the time. You have to live.” That’s why she was drinking ale in the oldest pub in Cambridge, once known as The Eagle and Child, now just The Eagle with its RAF bar and plaques commemorating Watson and Crick, who drank here, talked, and thought. DNA — no small discovery. Isabel’s great-grandfather on her father’s side, Harley Chalmers Stark, came by a fortune through the garment trade and Wall Street; he was good with numbers, but Isabel was just so-so. The DNA got diluted, mixed up. From Isabel’s mother’s side came Eleanor, Isabel’s grandmother. She wrote children’s books. Her first and most popular book was published by a small press in Ohio. Soap Bubbles for Christmas. While Santa napped after his long night, the restless elves opened an undelivered gift in the sleigh: soap bubbles. They romped in the snowy landscape, blowing bubbles that froze on the boughs of a pine tree. Jack Frost painted the bubbles bright colors. Remembering this book and its maker did not inspire confidence so much as admiration for the maker’s use of her time. Isabel’s father went to Harvard, but her mother studied French in a women’s college that went out of business in 1982. Discomfited by the school’s reputation, her mother’s first disclaimer was Don’t ask me to speak French but I got an A. Her mother did not inspire confidence. Why couldn’t her mother have been an authority on something? A guy in the poetry division, August Mueller, had criticized Isabel for romanticizing the lives of artists. Artists were largely ignored, he scoffed; even if well funded, a group largely relevant only to themselves. Isabel had wanted to be an actress — was pretty enough but had not enough courage. Writing was hard. Ned had been the best of the writers in their year. Writing couples, how did they do it?
Isabel put the skinny triangles of bread on the side of her plate and ate the cheese and tomato.
One unexpectedly hot afternoon, she persuaded Ned to walk through Highgate Cemetery thinking it would make for the coolest exercise — reinvigorating, but it brought no extended relief. Ned complained. Better to be hot at home; at least there he could work. She was looking at the faithful mastiff at the foot of the pugilist’s grave when the midget father appeared. Out of nowhere, an old-apple face on a little body, followed by a midget boy with hair like a cap pulled low. After that, Ned preferred walking in the wide spaces of heaths, views, Parliament Hill.
*
“I’ve got an idea,” Ned said.
Lime House, when just a look could inspire anything.
Anything?
“How do you like this?”
“Yes, well. No, not exactly.”
“How about this?”
“Yes.”
“This?”
“A little.”
“This?”
“No. No, that hurts. That really hurts, Ned!”
Afterward, the only thing he could say was he wanted to give her pleasure.
“Not that way, you don’t.”
She showered in a plugged-up tub, then sat growing colder in the scum that was water.
*
“Why is it so important to you?” Isabel asked.
“I think if you knew the sensation you’d want to have it more often.”
*
A certain kind of woman — coarsely attractive, sensual, damp, bad skin — invariably told Isabel that Ned looked like an old boyfriend. Now, for instance, Sue Rassmussen was telling her how Ned looked just like this guy she knew back home in the States. Sue Rassmussen was talking about this guy, and as there was nothing expected of her in this conversation, Isabel turned away.
Of course, Isabel forgave Sue Rassmussen. Sue Rassmussen was only experiencing what others, what she, too, knew seeing Ned. He could quite literally stop conversation. Then again, Sue Rassmussen was a willful, aggressive, ugly woman. “‘Ned looks like this guy I know.’” Who would believe it? Who cared?
“You don’t have to come to these parties, Isabel”: Ned at her ear.
Once at just such a party — people interested in Ned, friends with Ned, friends with friends of Ned — Isabel overheard Ned saying how lucky he was to look across at her every morning.
Did she really want to miss out on Ned making deep impressions?