Evan (Evan seeks Isaac)

Who by Fire: Chapter 31: Audio and prose

Note: Update: Evan seeks Isaac …

You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. Come in the middle? Robert is the narrator who discovers after his wife Lena has died that she had a lover, Isaac. Evan is Isaac’s wife. Robert is on a search for how he lost Lena: He’s creating the story through memory, invention and a search for the truth and his role in what happened—and by stalking Isaac.

Evan (Evan seeks Isaac)

I recount. I imagine. I recall.

Call it invention if you like.

I hope for repair.

I take you back to June second, to what Evan did on the day that I sat in the Rothko room and decided I must take Lena to the sea, on the day that she rented the room on 21^st street

Evan sought Isaac. Evan sought the truth.

In the morning light after Evan and Isaac had slept after they’d made love, she laid her body flat on top of his. We breathe in sync, she thought and took in the sweet smell of his skin, her head buried in his neck, her legs limp against his thighs.

She wanted to call him when she got to her office but hesitated. Lena was in the way. She couldn’t get her off her mind. She tried to figure out why she couldn’t slip what Lena had told her into some folder in her head the way she placed her notes about her patients into the files with their names inside the cabinet in her office and left them there.

Every now and then, there’d be a story like Lena’s that she couldn’t leave at work. The patient—Evan prefers the term “client”—Julia, who’d just left was like this. Julia, a 35-year-old attorney had come to her because she was certain she had weird intuitions about other people, especially men, that would keep her from ever marrying. Julia had said to her during the session Evan had just finished, “It was when I saw that shadow in his eyes. That’s when I knew. I knew it, that he didn’t love me. Now what’s that about? I’ve been to law school. I have a highly analytical mind. What am I doing seeing shadows in eyes? What are we going to do about this, Dr. Schonfeld?” And when Evan hadn’t answered, while she was thinking about Isaac’s eyes, Julia had protested, “You won’t declare me crazy. I’ll declare me crazy. I believe I’m a witch. There now, I’ve said it.” Evan had laughed, then said, “We’ll discuss witchcraft in our next visit. In the meantime, keep a journal of your intuitions.” “Oh, so now, I’m to make a record of my foolishness. You know, Doc, I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t simply wing it on my own. Maybe my powers are as good as yours.” “Maybe so,” Evan had said and wondered if Julia would be back.

She hoped she would, but if not, she’d always be one of those clients whose story she wouldn’t be able to “file.” Lena’s baby sat there like that, like a slip of paper she couldn’t put away because the folders were jammed too close together.

So, she sat down with a cup of coffee and her plan to call Isaac to figure out why she couldn’t pick up the phone. If she’d aborted Jason or Rebecca—what a thought! They weren’t unknown fetuses. They were her living, breathing grown-up children and she liked to think she’d done a pretty good job with them. She and Isaac both had, but she figured that the way she couldn’t get Julia off her mind, the way she couldn’t get Lena off her mind, the way she couldn’t dial the phone had something to do with Isaac and the children.

When Jason was a baby, they went to the Memorial Day pool opening at the community center. It was many miles from the farm but all their neighbors with kids had joined to make sure the children learned to swim. The stay-at-home moms gave that as the reason, but Evan knew they were bored, hadn’t enough money to join country clubs and wanted a place to hang out and entertain their kids. Isaac had signed them up through one of the women he’d gotten to know—they’d been a bit flirtatious, but Evan hadn’t until now thought much about that. It had seemed harmless. That day she was carrying Jason in her arms. Isaac had Rebecca, three then, by the hand. There all the women were in 65-degree weather, chilled, goose-bumped, in high-on-the-hip-cut bathing suits that made them believe their husbands, or somebody else’s husband would be looking. They stood crowded together around charcoal grills set up for hot dogs to warm themselves. Now she could see Delores, that blonde he’d given a hug when they’d arrived. The women drank beer while their kids hung onto their legs and begged to go swimming in the icy pool. She could see Isaac in the pool with Rebecca, who jumped up and down in his arms, landing on her plastic inner tube. Jason screeched, cried, tossed in her arms. It was the noise and the crowd. She knew this the way she knew when he laid his head on her chest that he listened for the sound of her. She knew she had to get him out of there. Isaac said, “Don’t be silly. He’ll be fine,” but she left swiftly, drove back to the farm, knew Isaac would find a ride. She recalled that Delores had driven him and Rebecca home.

Jason, who worked in a Gap clothing store during the day, told her in their last phone call that he’d saved enough money to rent some space in a loft with other struggling painters. He said he’d met a woman who worked with wood, doing unusual prints and that he’d taken her to a photography exhibit at the Art Institute, how moved they’d been by the soldiers, French and Israelis before and after training for military service, how the men and women were changed, ingenuous to war-ready, hardened in uniform and in the eyes. He said he’d gotten an idea for a new painting. He’d gotten Isaac’s gift, a gift Isaac had let go.

Evan still tinkered with the piano though she was in no way gifted. She’d begun when she was nine and hated the lessons and the practicing that came with them. When she was twelve, she told her mother, “I think by now I should be able to hear music when I look at a score and I can’t. My teacher can do that. I don’t think I ever will.” Her mother had said, “So, you have to be that good, huh? You can stop if you want. But maybe if you don’t expect so much from yourself, you could play and like it.” This was good advice and she’d quote her mother on this with clients who set the bar too high. She’d gotten good at seeing that in herself and others.

When Rebecca was in third grade, Evan knew she had to get her out of Mrs. Paidy’s class. Rebecca didn’t say she didn’t like her. She didn’t say anything when she came home from school.

She went to her room and Evan would find her with her head on her homework, asleep, and bring her to the kitchen for dinner. So, Evan went to school for a conference and heard Mrs. Paidy explain in excruciating detail how bad Rebecca’s handwriting was. Mrs. Paidy had examples: blue-lined paper with rows of triple lines. She could remember her own childhood and her own reach of the pencil from one dark blue line through one pale blue line for a capital letter, for the cross of the s exactly on the pale blue center line. Her penmanship was good. But that day in Mrs. Paidy’s classroom, the blue-lined paper looked like a music staff, reminded her of the piano scores she could never hear in her head. Rebecca’s papers were readable, but none of the script met the blue rules on the page where they should, as Mrs. Paidy demonstrated with her red pen. Rebecca had been reading since she was three. Penmanship for this child would never be a high priority. Evan met with the principal and in her low-key style—she didn’t berate Mrs. Paidy; rather she praised her: “A stickler for details. She’ll produce responsible students. That’s for sure.” But she also had Rebecca’s IQ scores in hand and gently persuaded Mr. Johnson to attend one of Mrs. Paidy’s classes, to watch Rebecca, who the following week was moved to Barnard—a burly, bearded teacher who resembled Isaac and whom Evan called to thank when Rebecca graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan. Rebecca now had her law degree from Northwestern and was doing low-paid work in North Carolina for a retired judge who devoted himself to ending the death penalty and to finding attorneys to handle death penalty cases. She earned money on the side by teaching English as a second language at a Hispanic community center.

The soft spot at the center of Jason’s and Rebecca’s tiny infant heads, this vulnerable spot, was not a memory for Evan—it was how she saw each child when the door opened for a visit home, it was the center of her heart, it was how she knew what Lena meant when she said about the peonies, “the way they open” with her hand in the flower’s petals. This was the way Evan opened to her children. Evan knew now what Lena’s strange words—“the blossom drops, the ripening of grapes”—meant: the fruit of their lives. That’s what she’d lost when she’d aborted her baby. That’s what they, what she and Isaac, had together, and Evan knew what they had, they could lose.

She decided not to call him. She decided to show up.

Before lunch—she intended to catch him early—she looked in the mirror to check her make-up, not that she wore much. Her skin was clear, though crinkly around her eyes, and she made no effort to hide her age, but she did want him to want her again. She did want reassurance. I guess that’s my reason for going, she said to herself. Always analyzing. Why do I do that? She’d hoped he’d call in the morning, the way he did when they were young after they’d made love—a brief call. He used to say, “Good morning, sweetheart,” and that would be all, but enough.

In her office bathroom, she opened her blouse. Her breasts, full inside the bra she’d chosen, the one with the lace across the top edge, the one she’d worn yesterday, put on before he’d come home. Now she saw that it was visible beneath the blouse with the rolled edge that angled down to the v between her breasts, the scalloped sleeves and the white on white outlines of large poppies on sheer fine cotton, the one she’d wear under her suit when they had a dinner party on a work night and she wouldn’t be able to get home to change, the one she’d chosen this morning though they had nowhere to go tonight.

She thought of women in her practice who told her stories about making love in offices during the day, about appearing at a boyfriend’s door, ready to seduce, about being taken or rejected, stories of desperation she heard too often. She wouldn’t try to seduce, but it helped her to look at herself, to see the possibility in her body, to see what he’d seen last night when she took off her blouse. She wondered, with her blouse open, Should I go to see him? She’d asked him to make love to her, something so unusual for her, though she’d never refuse him when he came to her, when she lay passively waiting for him, a hand around his head to comfort him, to encourage him, but nothing else, and he would touch her.

She’d waited passively for too long—he was drifting from her. And then last night, he’d put his mouth on her in that place where she was open, vulnerable—he’d only done that once before in all the years they were married, when they were on their honeymoon—and she wasn’t sure then or last night that she wanted it, but she came so suddenly, without thinking or trying, without the fantasies she used to go away, to let go: She’d imagine another woman with another man. The man would ask the woman, a young woman, to remove her clothes, lift her skirt, slip a bra strap off her shoulder. But last night she didn’t need her imagined man—he was always in a blue pin-striped suit like the one Isaac had worn at their wedding. She hadn’t needed the perfect young woman with thin thighs, small breasts, perfect toes, unmarred by shoes and walking and age, the slim ankle with the gold bracelet like the one she’d worn when she was young. She’d wanted him so badly. She’d touched him and, as in the other rare times of lovemaking lately, he wasn’t aroused.

Did his way of bringing her without his own arousal mean that he didn’t love her? Or did it mean he was unselfish, that he could wait and bring her but that the rush couldn’t be his. She’d thought, Such a good man he is. Why couldn’t she tell him she’d trade her rush for his giving over? Or would she? And just as she’d thought that very thing, he’d come into her so forcefully, so fully that she knew he must still love her.

She applied rouge, lightly on the bone of her cheek, not enough to be noticeable but enough to give her a bit of courage. She had an aunt who, as she got older, used to turn her back, put on lipstick, then turn around and say, “It’s magic. Ten years younger, right?” When Evan, still a young woman, would laugh and agree, her Aunt Shirley would kiss her on the mouth and Evan would sense in the smooth, silky feel of freshly applied lipstick how alive this woman was as she aged. She could have used that kiss on her mouth. She buttoned her blouse, picked up her purse and took a cab to the Smithsonian.

She stood outside the castle, the old red brick building that was the landmark for the vast organization of museums, researchers, scientists. The fairytale castle, a building she identified with stories of Rapunzel, Snow White, Guinevere. She stood in sun and shadow as clouds moved across the mid-day sky—rain was coming. She saw the color of the brick change from a deep ruby red to what she thought of as velvet rose, the color of her Scarlet Climbers at the edge of her garden. The shadows deepened, the rain began, and there was Julia in her head again, intuitions and all.

“Foolish,” she said out loud, standing in front of the Smithsonian castle. “I’m a foolish schoolgirl in the body of a grown woman.” She had no business walking in on Isaac unannounced—something he would never do to her. But she concluded that sometimes too much analysis is simply that. Maybe she didn’t need to know exactly why she did what she was about to do. She knew she needed to see Isaac in the middle of the day and that was that.△

Table of Contents

Coming next: Chapter 32: “Isaac and Evan”

Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money’: I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.

Love,