Isaac and Lena

Chapter 21: Audio and prose

Talmud

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 woke from his lovemaking with Evan.

He had betrayed both Lena and Evan.

He’d made love to Evan before while the affair with Lena was ongoing, but before, that lovemaking had given him the certainty he’d sought, re-established his place in the world, his assurance of the security of his life. While Evan slept, he considered the unthinkable, a phone call to Lena from his home to hers in the middle of the night.

Lena lay in bed, awake, next to me. She’d placed a book light on her Bible so as not to wake me and opened to Isaiah—the passage she knew now for sure that would be in the exhibit because two copies of this book had been found in the Qumram caves. She reread the section that would be displayed. It began “Go now and let us reason together, says the Lord.”

She’d been reading earlier in the day the rabbi’s discussion in the Talmud of this line where one of the rabbis, Rava, asked the question, “Why does the verse begin with ‘Go now’? It should have been written ‘come now,’ ” this line that speaks of sins that are scarlet and that will become white as snow. For the brochure, she’d explained the importance of the Isaiah scroll from Cave 1. She’d written, “This scroll, written in ancient Hebrew, is a millennium older than any other Hebrew text of Isaiah, as we now know it.”

And then she had put down her work on the brochure and gone on one of her chases after a detail that obsessed her. In this case, it was the words “Come now” that preceded the line about sin and redemption. She didn’t believe much in redemption—not certainly in the sense that God would forgive her. She wanted to know what the rabbis thought.

She had a computer program that allowed her to search the Talmud in English translation and so she typed in the two words “Come now” and found that the Hebrew words in the text, ‘lekhu na,’ mean ‘go now.’ It was a complex discussion that pulled threads from different passages, a discussion she didn’t fully understand but she could understand what Rava advised, “Go to your ancestors and let them reprove you.”

Now she asked herself, ‘Go now,’ ‘come now’? Which is it? If her mother would only speak from the dead and say to her, “Come now,” she’d answer, “I’m running out of time.” Then she thought, actually then she quoted—and I heard her. Her quoting was the first sign that she was slipping away into waking or sleeping dreams. She said out loud, When the blossom is past, and the bud is ripening into young grapes, and she drifted off to sleep.

Isaac, after making love to Evan lay in bed next to his wife, awake. While Lena slept and dreamt, he had his hand on the phone and thought, I’m out of control. A drink, maybe a drink would help. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a scotch, no ice, drank, thought of Karen, Scotch, rocks.

He said out loud, “Since I always think everything is about me,” and remembered how she’d laughed, said something about how they were alike, and that he’d dismissed that as idle chatter. Maybe she knew him better than he’d given her credit for. She’d said something cryptic or with her probably playful—trickery was her game—about dancing the dance of two or three or none.

But she was right. He’d wanted me in the picture so that he and Lena would dance the dance of three or none. I protected his world, this life with Evan that was everything and nothing.

“Everything and nothing,” he said out loud and thought, Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I say, the sort of thing Lena calls me on, tells me I’m full of it in her didactic way.

He probably did find her instructive, overbearing with all her allusions, half of them that he didn’t get. But more and more stuff she said must have rung true. She knew stuff about him. She knew him.

He was the damn fool. Him and his pronouncements, so sure of everything. So sure of nothing.

He poured himself another scotch and dialed her number. “Meet me at seven before work for coffee. The usual place. I’ve got to see you.”

She hung up without speaking. I said, “What?”

“Wrong number. Go back to sleep.”

“What an idiot. Do star sixty-nine. I’ll call the bastard back.”

And I would have done it.

“Go back to sleep,” she told me. She needed to dial a number, any number, in case I did do it.

I rolled away from her. I heard her press buttons on the phone. I heard her mumble, “So sorry,” and hang up.

“Who are you calling?”

“Wrong number.”

I was fully awake now. “But you were trying to get somebody. At this time of the night?” I was leaning over looking at the clock.

It’d be useless to try to evade me. So she answered, “358-1965.” She knew I knew the number but added, “My mother.”

At this, I turned toward her, leaned on my elbow that I’d propped on her pillow so that I was over her in a gesture of concern. “Your mother?”

The call that woke us both came in at 2:30 in the morning, on this day, June second. Ten years ago on this day her mother had died. She told me she’d forgotten. She should have lit a Yarthzeit candle on yesterday’s eve, at sundown.

The morning that Lena’s mother died she had held Lena’s hand and said those numbers, her phone number for the apartment where she’d lived. Lena’s mother had stopped eating nineteen days before she died—on Mother’s Day, of all days, as if her work were done and she knew it. She had bone cancer that had followed breast cancer. She was weak from no food and strong from resolve. She had trouble speaking. These numbers were all she could say. Lena laid her head on her mother’s chest, now barren with the devastation of surgery, but still the place where the comfort of her bosom had lain. Lena asked, “Keep in touch?” Her mother wrapped Lena’s head in her hands. She held Lena with the pressure of a strong hand determined to finish the work.

This hand Lena had known when her mother fitted a filmy tissue paper pattern on her for a dress she would make for the skinny little girl who couldn’t find one that suited her at age twelve because she was so slight. One firm hand laid the paper on her naked shoulders. The other lay beneath to protect her skin from the pins. To ensure the fit, her mother pressed the flat of her palms on Lena’s shoulders. These same strong hands had pinned, basted and re-basted Lena’s wedding dress that was borrowed from a cousin, that had fit but that to her mother’s dismay grew bigger as Lena grew thinner as the day of our wedding approached. She, who had ensured that Lena’s clothes would fit, she, whose hands remained firm in this last gesture, had placed a coda on her life with numbers spoken in what Lena wished to see as code.

“It’s the middle of the night. Come.” I wrapped my body round Lena’s back and legs.

I’d not done this for so long perhaps she’d forgotten that my body, the length of my thighs, the weight of my arm could comfort.

I think now that she didn’t believe she deserved my comfort. She slid away. “It’s too warm.”

I got up, opened the window, threw off the comforter. “Come,” and she did. She slid into the curve of my body and wept.

She and Isaac had never and would never lie in this continuous slide of body on body into sleep. My move to this shape, our upper bodies like the curve of the moon, our knees fitted against one another formed a v and there she lay in the fulcrum of my embrace.

Lena’s father had told her a story about crying back the dead. He said when cried back, the person saved from death was doomed to lose a faculty in the process. She was saved from death after the abortion, after the bleeding. At home barely able to get up, she must have gone about her apartment, listening to the voice of her father who said things like “Rainbows happen with the sun at your back,” off-center nuggets that would make you think he were a Scot full of wise sayings or a Scandinavian with tales about trolls instead of a poor Jewish man who sold shoes on Gaye Street in East Baltimore.

She told me about the ‘crying back’ when she’d told me about some procedure she’d had before we married. She’d said that when she was bleeding, she’d unlocked all her doors, the door to the apartment, the door to the building.

I now think she unlocked all the doors to be sure that death would not be prevented. But she’d been saved, a part of her missing forever.

I pulled her to me.

Again she feared the crying back. Now I understand this. She tried to pull away from me, but I tightened my hold on her. I took her to me in the night when she’d thought that the space between us in the bed would never be crossed again, and she fell asleep in my hold and in the memory of her mother’s hold, of her mother’s bosom, barren and full with all that her mother had held there in that flat place on her chest, of all the times where, she, her only child, had laid her head. She fell asleep in the fullness that was the absence of her mother’s breasts.

But I had not cried her back. I had not saved her.

***

In the morning, she must have met Isaac.

“I know we’re about to be caught,” she said when he handed her a cappuccino, large, one shot, extra milk, the way she liked it.

He’d bought it before she’d come in so they wouldn’t have to stand in line. He knew she wouldn’t be late. Lena was reliable though this was the last thing she’d ever say about herself. He said, “The coffee crime.”

She laughed.

They clinked paper coffee cups the way they’d done that day at Isaac and Evan’s house. He said, “No matter what happens I want one night with you. One whole night.”

“And that’s all you want, huh? Very romantic.”

“Yeah, the impossible. That’s me, the dreamer.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because we both know I’m a bit crazy, that my dreaming is getting in the way, that I’m, maybe as Evan would say, losing it.”

“Evan wouldn’t say that. She’d ask if you were all right. She’d want to understand. That’s her business and she’s good at it. And I do need to talk to you about her. Lena, she told me you called her.”

“Did you know that a man can have a baby when he’s old?”

“That would be a miracle at any age.”

“Don’t be funny. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I know you don’t want to answer my question. You and my wife are having conversations. So, I suppose you called her for a consultation on the knotty question of whether a man can have a baby after his threescore and ten? You could have asked me. I would have said, Yeah, so I’ve heard. Why, I could be eighty and impregnate you.”

This would have been his clumsy way of telling her he now knew what he was doing, that he was finding his way.

I think of how his words would have registered on her face. He’d shamed her, the last thing he’d wanted to do? Or was it?

“I shouldn’t have called Evan. What we talked about was your case, the baby in the suitcase.” This was the half-truth that shamed her.

Some damage control was in order. “Look, you and Evan have known each other for years. This isn’t the first time you’ve talked to her. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s just that she told me about it at dinner and she was concerned, in that shrink way of hers. And I didn’t know how to answer because I think I’ve been out of control. Me on your balcony. Maybe it’s me. I’ve put you on the brink.”

“Maybe you were trying to end it. We’ve both crossed the lines we laid down. But then I know what you want, the one night, all night.”

“We could have that when we go to Chicago. We could take the train. No one would be the wiser. You know you need to go to Chicago to meet with that guy you write to, to see the exhibit. You need to go. And I’m going to see Jason. It’s perfect.”

“And what would Evan think if she knew I was going?”

“She asked me if you were going, but I told her you weren’t.”

“Doesn’t it worry you that she asked?”

“Lena, everything these days worries me. Let’s go to Chicago.”

“My mother died yesterday, ten years ago. I’ve always remembered the day, but didn’t until you called last night when the day was over, when it was today. If I could forget that day, if I could forget to remember that, then something is wrong. Don’t you think that’s right?”

“Your mother?”

And so Isaac posed the same question I’d posed in the night. “Yes, my mother.” The afghan, the blue-white water from powdered milk. Her kitchen. “When I was twelve, I’d sit in summer under a tree on the long sidewalk in front of the brick houses, all separated but all alike from the outside—cookie cutter houses. When I was a kid, it seemed to me that no one was outside but me. It was hot—summer humid. I sat under a sapling. But then I was little too. It was cool in that bit of shade. We didn’t have air-conditioning in those days. When she was old and sick, when I knew she was going to die, I went back to the old house, stood on that same curb. Those small sapling oaks had grown. They filled the sky, crossed the street with their leaves, shaded everybody’s front yard. But the trees were still all in a row so straight you’d think someone had measured with a string or had a surveyor’s eye to get such even placement. Maybe somebody did that, the sort of thing you’d do.”

“Flattering me, again, huh?”

“We’re on the brink of disaster.”

“You think?”

“Just the waiting and the shade, barely any from the little saplings. I’d look for four-leaf clovers or lie on my back and stare through leaves over my head, look for shapes in the sky the way kids do. My mother was inside. My father was at work. When my mother called me in for dinner, I went. She wore an apron, and the kitchen was hot.”

He said and knew, though he didn’t know why, that it wasn’t a non sequitur, “I made love to Evan last night and all I could think of was you.”

She wouldn’t play the non sequitur game with him when she heard this. She’d have known for certain that it wasn’t a non sequitur. “How did it begin?”

“I came home and she did something, grabbed my crotch, I think, while she was talking on the phone.”

“Subtle. What did you do?”

“I kissed her.”

“And did you make love then?”

“No, much later. But she asked if I was planning to make a move. I didn’t answer, but I knew I had to.”

“Be more specific.”

“Ten-thirty.”

“Be more specific,” she said again.

“From ten-thirty to one. Is that what you mean?”

She’d meant, Why did you think you had to? But his words echoed instead. From ten-thirty to one?

He continued, “This is weird that we’re talking this way. All I could think of was you.”

And now she said it. “From ten-thirty to one?”

“It took me so long to get going because I couldn’t get you out of my mind and because of that, because of what we did, she said we came together. I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I shouldn’t have told you.” And then, he said. “Yes, that’s how it was.” He repeated, “All I thought of was you.”

I’d never make love to her from ten-thirty to one. Not ever. She and I never played, as she’d imagine they must have played.

She would never have this because she would never have her lover. He was imagined, after all. This is how she thought of him now. Imagined. She’d made him up.

And now she knew not only that Isaac didn’t exist, but, what was much worse, that he would never exist, never become real. That he was a deep loss. That he was like a death. That he was like the baby—a scar inside her womb.

She said, “When I woke this morning, I heard a bird call. It was light but sounded like an owl, oo-ah, whoo whoo, whoo, a stop and then again, like a telegraph message, like words in code.” Like her mother speaking to her, ‘lekhu na’.

“The mourning dove, probably.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, that’s what it was. Lekhu na,” she said. “Like that. Isaac, go now.”

But he didn’t go. He stood with her.

He’d seen these large wood-brown birds land outside his kitchen window in his gardens. He’d seen them in pairs and knew they stayed together for a year, some for life. When he saw one alone, the female usually, the pale brown one, he knew that its mate, the blue on his crown, his call, had alerted a watchful eye and that the dove had likely been shot by a hunter in the woods near his farm—they were fair game where he lived.

When he built the greenhouse, he’d be able to watch them feed—the doves, the nuthatch, the chickadees, the rare red-eyed vireo—from inside. He decided he’d make the greenhouse free-standing—not attached to Evan’s potting shed, a place to go, not a private place because of all the glass, but protected in winter, humid; oppressive in summer maybe, but a comfort because he’d be alone, could look out, hear the birds.

Lena said again, “Isaac, go now.”

Lena, who deciphered her own code, had said what he’d hoped he’d never hear. He heard the dove’s call, coo coo-ah.▵

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Coming next: Lena’s Garden, chapter 22

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