Grand Design
Fiction. A companion piece last month's essay, "Pursuit."
I met Isak in the kitchen at a friend’s party on a Sunday night in November. We were the only non-coupled people in the room and I was wary of that usual, convenient pressure. But we left together anyway. He was big, not fat but broad shouldered and tall, and some previous girl had scared him into being overly tender in bed. My not so polite requests that he not be so tender seemed to turn him on. “That was good, wasn’t it?” he said afterwards. Tuesday night he came over, bringing pad-see-ew and one large Sapporo; Wednesday he made omelets from my fridge leftovers. Thursday we ended up back at mine for an efficient ten minutes during his lunch break. Saturday he left for a week-long holiday home in Norway and then I didn’t hear from him, even after he was supposed to have returned.
I was in the final year of my dissertation and told myself it was fine. Walking the dense mist around Kelvingrove duck pond each morning with last night’s pages in my shoulder bag, I reminded myself why I was here. I’d come to Glasgow after waking one night four years ago in my Sacramento apartment drenched in sweat with an image of the blue and white columns of the University of Glasgow pamphlet stretched across the inside of my forehead like an opaque picture window. I applied only there and accepted admission by Certified Mail the day it was granted. I’d been strict, tunneling deeper and deeper into Baumgarten, Hutcheson, Home, and Gerard. I’d begun dreaming in German; entering the furrow: the art of knowing, Good, Truth, and Beauty. I phoned home every three weeks at the time I’d set with my mother. The burgundy address book she gave me was blank aside from the extensions of certain librarians and the number for the cheaper typist I’d found at the copy shop across the river where I bought my pages once a week. I’d never been the type of nice girl looking for a nice boy to bring home to her nice parents. Growing up, I bit and pinched on the playground and had to be taught to control my rage. My parents were nice, but old-fashioned. My father spoke less and less English and more and more German each year.
But then there he was, a month later, sitting on Comp Lit Jenny Stein’s low sofa holding a beer. I walked up and he put a hand around the back of my knee. When I asked if he wanted to go to mine, I didn’t even feel ashamed for letting him off the hook, not asking where he’d been. But in my bed, he started sobbing and told me his best friend from school died while he was home. At one point, I crawled from bed for his sweater because my room was drafty, but in that hour I think we grew as close as two people could ever be. Like the smallest, tightest walnut part of me had loosened. Or finally loosened, though I hadn’t known the finally part until then. Isak wanted some Valium type pill he had at home. We walked thirty minutes across Glasgow to where he was living, a massive flat owned by an uncle who lived in Oslo. The pills sat by a glass next to the bathroom faucet. He swallowed one dry. In the dark green tiled shower, he cried again while he kissed me. The bedroom windows looked out over an empty flagstone courtyard. The next morning, Isak slept late and I found coffee in the freezer and made it on the stove with a Bialetti. Walking through the somber flat with my porcelain cup and saucer, I felt a fierce urge to take Isak from that cold place.
And now, July, back in Glasgow again for a week after two years gone. I’m at this Partick café sitting across from a fellow American, a friend of a friend, to whom I’m supposed to be giving advice on making a home abroad. Today’s my final day before heading home to San Francisco; this breakfast date was last minute, almost didn’t happen. A gummy Cath Kidston oilcloth covers the table; the chairs are teal and artfully chipped. Something New Wave on the stereo. It’s been two years and I’m not going to try to find him—don’t even know if he’s still in Scotland. Reordering the cutlery around my plate, I’m feeling fine about it, not feeling much of anything but bored as Lydia, a floppy-looking woman from Illinois, tells me how she met her boyfriend. Her mauve blouse is somewhat Shakespearean, the wide ruffled cuffs skirting a thick glob of leftover egg yolk on the table’s edge. Because I’m watching the lace for traces of egg, it startles me when Lydia suddenly stands. She is kissing someone, gesturing for them to sit down, and saying, “I know you’ll be squirming Isak, but I’m telling Sue our story.”
Lydia loops back to the beginning of her story and begins again: “So I absolutely believe in signs, in fate. And this is just so much proof of all that. I had an 8:33 a.m. train from Glasgow to Ardrossan Harbor and a connecting ferry to the Isle of Arran. He was at one of those phone stations, digging through his pocket for change and finding none and for some reason I—the girl who never talks to strangers—walked over and held out my coin purse and said, ‘Help yourself.’ He laughed and said thanks and then I was gone.”
Because he’s seated next to me, it is easy enough to look straight forward at Lydia—or rather at the general oval shape of her face, the particular violent quiver of her beaded earrings.
And Lydia streams on: “When it was time to go through the turnstiles, I stood checking my ticket, God knows why. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him coming towards me. I got nervous and moved away from the entrance. He must have had a question about his ticket because when I looked back, he was speaking to someone in an information vest. I knew in my bones—my heart and soul— that we were taking the same train.”
It’s dumping outside and to leave I’d need my umbrella from the stand behind Lydia, which seems impossible. I finger the edges of my shawl, imagine pulling it over my head and bursting out the café door. I think of words I could say that might make Lydia stop talking: stop, please, no, fire, bunions, Chernobyl, cyanide. Suddenly a hand weighs down my knee.
Lydia continues: “They were only boarding the last three train cars. I chose the second car and he did too, but the front section, not the back where I was. Then he stood next to me in the walking line from the train to the ferry. Eventually he shuffled in front as the line became single file. He wore a green sweater and hiking boots. I didn’t see him on the ferry and I didn’t see him on Arran.”
Lydia stops as the waitress comes to take our order. He should tell her now. I say to myself: if he doesn’t, I will.
“Want some scran?” Lydia asks Isak.
His eyes flit quickly to me—he knows I find any American’s use of Scottish slang beyond reproach. But now that he’s looking at me, I can’t help but take in his face. The same pale, almost bluish skin under his eyes. The mole by his right ear. Dark, nearly black eyebrows at odds with his pale hair, now shorter than I’d ever seen it.
“Am,” Lydia says to the waitress. “I’ll take the full Scottish.”
I can feel something contorting my face and look down, turning inward while the world whites out.
When the waitress leaves, Isak says nothing. I say nothing. Lydia gets back to it.
“Two days later, I went to a fancy bistro in West End on Byres Road. I planned to write through a lavish meal, but the portions were small and I kept accidentally making eye contact with my server which she thought meant next, next, check please. I’d had this grand vision of detailing the whole emotional landscape of my day amidst the ambient chatter of other diners, but barely wrote a word. So I ended up at a bar.
“And yes, it was there that I saw him. Who’s to say for sure, but had he not been wearing that same green sweater, I don’t think I would have recognized him. Had the waiter not been the chatty, flamboyant type and given me unsolicited advice on the cocktail menu, I wouldn’t have had the courage to say, ‘If that guy at the bar in green gets another pint, would you let me pay for it and tell him it’s from me?’ And so here was another element of fate: would he or wouldn’t he get another drink.”
The last time I saw Isak was seven days after it happened. We were in his flat’s small library, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a wall of windows looking out onto the courtyard. The bookshelves’ middle row had antique folios held open by thin golden cord to display black and white botanical illustrations. Seeing him sitting there on the white leather couch after a week apart made the separation of the previous days acute. I hadn’t ever wanted a baby—didn’t even know I was pregnant—but I couldn’t shake the sight of dark, thick blood in the German Department's narrow toilet stall. I gave the dean’s secretary the number of Isak’s flat and he came to campus, walked me back to my apartment. He went out to the market and came back with chamomile tea and hard little tangerines. I told him I wanted to be alone that night and he obeyed. I said I’d call the next day, but stayed in bed and didn’t call. It was on my way to drop pages off with the typist that I saw the wall calendar in the bookshop window: California Missions. Something cracked open inside me and instead of going to the copy shop, I went to the registrar and put in a request to finish the final months of my dissertation by mail, remote from California.
“You could come,” I said to him that last day in the flat’s library. I wanted to reach across the sofa to touch his hand, but didn’t. “I can’t,” he answered. He reminded me of his grandmother’s 90th birthday party in Umeå next week. I was supposed to go with him to visit his mother’s family farm in Sweden. “And my mother,” he said, and didn't need to say more. But then he surprised me. “Maybe afterwards?” he said. “I can call you and we can see?” I slid across the couch toward him and lay my head on his shoulder.
“It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?” Lydia is saying now. “The universe. You think it’s leading you one place, but all along it has its own, am, grand design.”
Isak never called me. When I called the flat the phone just rang and rang. Something—I don’t know what—stopped me from calling his parent’s number in Oslo. Pride, maybe? Fear?
Do you even have feelings? Isak said that to me during our one and only fight.
“Anyways,” Lydia is saying. “Enough of that. Am, Sue, what do you miss about Glasgow?”
Under the table Isak’s hand is still on my thigh.
“Have you noticed you’re saying your ums like ams?” I turn to Isak. “Have you been letting her get away with that?”
I feel Isak’s hand stiffen and then slide away.
“We know each other, actually,” I say.
Lydia looks dumb and startled, as though awakened from a dream. “You and Isak?”
I say nothing.
Isak clears his throat. “When she lived here.”
Lydia laughs, a high-pitched sound. “Isn’t that funny!”
“Funny,” I parrot back.
“Am, what are the odds?!”
“Sue,” Isak says, and I have to breathe around it, like a side stitch, my name. “Why didn’t you call me?”
I laugh. It’s a loud bitter bark.
Lydia recoils. I want one of her purple earrings to catch on something and rip her lobe in two. And I feel Isak’s gaze on the side of my face.
“Me?” I turn to him.
“You never called me back.”
“Called you back? You never called. I called the flat so many times.”
“I was with my mother, in hospital.”
“Isak,” Lydia says.
“I never saw any messages,” I say.
“I left messages on the answering machine.”
“Nope.”
I am speaking, I know I am, but the whole exchange feels like it’s happening to someone else. Like a tennis match watched from the stands, I could check my wristwatch or take a sip of coffee without halting the state of play.
Isak rattles off a phone number and I recognize the Sacramento area code. “What’s that?”
“Isak,” Lydia says again.
“Your phone number.”
“That’s not my phone number.”
“Isak, you never told me your mother was sick,” Lydia says.
The waitress is suddenly there, placing a bulbous red and brown pile of food in front of Lydia. She sets a plate in front of me, two poached eggs and white toast. Something about it—the translucent bit of the egg, the sheen of melted butter, the red and blue flowers on a green vine looping along the plate’s border—resonates. Like Deja vu, but heavier and down in the gut.
“How is your mother?” I ask Isak.
“Alright.” He’s still looking at me. “Back in Umeå. My grandmother is dying.”
“Of what?”
“Old age,” Isak says. “That’s mine.” He’s pointing to the eggs, but doesn’t take the plate.