Isaac and Evan

Who by Fire: Chapter 19: Audio and prose

Adirondacks via Amtrak

Note: 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.

Isaac and Evan

When Lena didn’t come to work, when Isaac couldn’t reach her on the phone, he worked with uncertainty, the bones and his sense that something had gone awry.

Her silence, so rare and so welcome, or so he’d thought until he experienced it, gnawed at him.

He needed to reinstate the security of his life, its certainty. This is what Evan was for him—his life in the world. His hierarchy of risks threatened, he went home after work with the intention to make love to Evan.

Evan was on the phone with Jason, their son, who lived in Chicago. “Yes, when Dad comes, that sounds like a good plan.”

Isaac was going to visit him, and Lena and he had planned a way to be together on this trip because of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at The Field Museum and she’d presumed—or he had—that she’d need to go see it. He wanted this trip that he’d planned as a flight to Chicago with a return on the train—a train ride with a sleeper car, one of the few of those left in the nation’s web of trains that shuttled between cities with few people taking the leisurely slide through the Adirondacks that this train ride promised.

He must create equilibrium. He must make a move. He walked toward Evan, brushed the hair from her neck. He didn’t want to look in her eyes. She surprised him by turning to him and placing her hand on his crotch. This was a Karen-move, something she’d do and had done as soon as he’d gotten to her room in the Tabard Inn. He’d kissed Karen then, Lena on his mind. Now he didn’t kiss Evan. He recalled, instead, the feeling of his mouth on Karen’s—it was an obligatory kiss. Not perfunctory, of course, as he might kiss Evan on greeting her, but necessary. Karen expected it and so he’d kissed her, open mouthed. He was more aroused by Karen’s hand on his penis, his balls, her fingers pressing on the zipper of his fly, the cloth of his trousers than by the kiss.

Only Lena’s kiss aroused him. Her mouth was like the softness of her vulva, of her breast with the rosy color of her nipple. Her breasts were small, the nipples a pale blush of pink, as if she’d never aged, as if the childhood breast, the new nipple stayed with her—not like the dark strong brown of Evan’s. Isaac saw Lena’s youth in her tender rosy nipple that came erect to a small ball of hardness, not an elongated hardness—Evan’s nipple, Karen’s nipple, what Isaac had always thought of as a mature woman’s nipple, what he’d expected when he’d first seen Lena’s breasts. Lena’s was like no other nipple he’d seen and he defined her with this: a vertiginous circle of rosy innocence. The thought of her nipple aroused him. She would talk of Evan in words of her psalm—her beauty, something like that—reminding him, chiding him about Evan’s innocence, how he’d known Evan. But it was in pureness he found her, only in her did he find this innocence, he wanted to kiss only her.

It was she, in paradox, she who, in secret, defined him.

He hadn’t wanted to kiss Karen, and did. Now he didn’t want to kiss Evan, and did. With these moves—the first a violation; the second, an obligation—the duality of his life, its uncertainty pressed on his chest.

In seventy years, a heart beats two and a half billion times—or more—in my case, more. Their joke. Are we keeping score? And Lena had laughed.

Now Isaac felt the weight of his heart like a failed score, how the heart sinks with a loss. He looked at his watch that he wore on his right hand because he was left-handed. Lena would touch his arm above the watch crown, the knob that turns time, turned toward his shoulder, not his wrist, and say, “The way we’re turning left and right and forever toward the heart—where that turner points on the top of your arm, lies on the artery that goes from the hand to the heart.” He felt the weight on his chest as he touched the tiny crown on his watch. Crown. The baby’s head, the tiny piece of parietal bone he’d laid down, the chip of a bone, he’d held in his palm the last time he’d seen Lena, yesterday when she’d stood in his office.

Time

Evan put her arms around his neck. “Is Lena going to Chicago, as well? Jason tells me that the Scrolls will be there, that you’d mentioned the Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is Lena going?”

His need to put his life in order deepened. “She doesn’t leave the campus much, you know that. And the exhibit is mostly done from what I hear.”

“Are you going to make a move?”

“What do you mean?”

“Make love to me.”

This wasn’t like her. It was forward. It was as if he were with Karen. This was something she would say, asking for sex. And the question about Lena was troublesome, at best. “Why all this talk about Lena?”

“No reason really. Make love to me.”

“Have you talked to her again?”

She laid her head on his shoulder, her nose in the crook of his neck. “Make love to me, Isaac.”

Evan never asked for sex. Why didn’t she answer his question? And if he pressed? Caught, you could get caught. He would make love to her. He’d perform well to distract her, reassure her. A game—that’s how it seemed now—fraught with the possibility of failure.

Evan, with her hands around his neck, said, “Let’s play a game. You love games. Here’s a riddle one of my patients told me. He said that almost eighty-nine percent of all kindergartners can answer this and only two percent of all adults can get it.”

“Did you get it?”

“I’m not telling. Want to play?”

Again this wasn’t like her. She was vixen-like, teasing him, like Karen, and he was aroused by the change and the danger. “Give. Let’s hear the riddle.”

“You have the whole night to get the answer, but you can’t sleep until you do. Still want to play?”

“Sure.”

“It’s greater than God. It’s more evil than the devil. The poor have it. The rich need it. There’s one more line but it makes it too easy if I tell. So that’s the riddle for you. What do say?”

Sex and evil. Women, his women, with the exception of Karen, were beginning to resemble one another. Lena’s question, Am I evil? It was after they’d made love. Were his wife and his mistress both determined to be good little girls? He was sure he was no longer good. He was certain of so little, though certainty remained his goal, but of that he was certain. He said, “I need to think,” and he did. Lena’s hands on his penis, around his feet, the embrace of comfort in the morning. I’ll go to bed with Evan, in the beds of three women in three days. He said, “I don’t believe in the devil.”

“Oh, golly, neither do I. You know that. Come on, I’ve made dinner.” She led him to the table in the backyard, where she’d served lunch to Lena. She served him the same meal that Lena had barely eaten. Evan had refreshed the salad, added more of her pickled beets, another can of tuna in olive oil. The dessert was also the same, creme anglaise and blackberries. She’d made enough for the evening.

He didn’t know Evan was moved to her seductive behavior by Lena’s secret revealed—the way that word “shame” came from her—awkward, sudden, with a quick flutter of her hand. The man she’d loved, carried the baby for too long, the man who’d left her “barren,” such an old-sounding word, so formal. Evan had placed cut peonies on the table because of Lena’s words, “It’s a profusion of petals.”

Peony

He didn’t know any of this, but he knew Evan sought her way to him, that she was in charge now, not him.

After dinner she took him to the bedroom. She said, “Place your hands on the bureau.”

He did.

She placed a quarter on each hand. “Another game while you think about the riddle. You lose if a coin falls off.” She undid his belt, his waistband, his zipper. She took off his shoes, his socks.

“On the brink of disaster,” he said.

She laughed. She took his trousers down. Ridiculous, that’s how he must look. Her hand was on the inside of his thigh. “What’s the answer to the riddle?”

“I don’t know.” He turned, the quarters fell to the floor. He unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her bra. Her nipples were hard, long. He was repelled but took one in his hand, pressed it hard, harder than he’d ever done. He wanted to hurt her.

She lay back on the bed, pulled her panties off, reached for his penis inside his boxers. He was soft. She rubbed him, up and down, up and down. Would she take him in her mouth? She’d never done that. He pulled away and put his mouth on her vulva. Her body quivered but she pulled away, said, “Let’s lie together. You on top of me, naked.”

He took off his shirt, his undershirt. She was naked. He got on top, his head in her shoulder. Her hands on his buttocks.

They repeated the patterns of touching again and again. It became play, not like any sex they’d had before—to Evan sex had been serious stuff—but now she laughed. He was slow to respond. She was forceful, determined and she joked. “I can get you, said the big bad wolf.” She played with his penis, holding it in her palm, looking at it, pushing it aside, sitting on him, sliding off. She played. He went to her vulva with his mouth, pressed her nipple hard.

She said, “If you eat it, you’ll die.”

He laughed. “I am eating it.”

She wrapped her legs around his neck.

“I won’t die.”

And she came.

He rolled over next to her, naked, tired, unaroused. He saw Lena’s rosy nipple, the soft lips of her vulva that beat like a heart, held him, squeezed him when he was inside, while she held back orgasm. She’d say, “If I have it, we end.” He’d come out, lay beside her, his hand on her—a throb that came and came with his hand simply lying on her between her legs. And now he turned to her, unable to control himself, bursting into her, barely thrusting. He rolled into the ringing bell of love. But he was inside Evan. Out of love.

He rolled onto his side and she curled her body around his back. “You know how you hate to lose.”

“Yes.”

“You lost the coin game.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the answer to the riddle?”

“I don’t even remember it,” he lied. He didn’t care. He’d done what he’d had to do. Nothing was left to do.

“You know how you hate to lose.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing.”

Could she read his mind? Nothing was left to do, the word, “nothing” in his head, an accusation.▵

Coming next, I Am No Hero, Chapter 20

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