Perspective

Who by Fire: Chapter 24: Audio and prose

Note: You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. What’s happening now is Robert is talking about how he met Lena and what he’s discovering about himself.

For background if you’ve 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.

It was raining the day we followed her mother’s hearse in a limousine up the winding path to the family plot. Lena had said, “I wish I could believe the heavens were weeping.”

I thought it an odd thing to say, oddly sentimental for Lena. And yet, when she longed to give me her body in her grief, when I rejected her, I didn’t tell her that I saw her mother look down at us from the heavens. I didn’t tell her because I don’t believe heaven exists and because this would be worse than sentimental; it’s irrational. But I saw her mother hover with angels who floated in cold, blue air, their hands entwined in her pure white hair, and I thought she’d see our coupling like a monster-fish floating in a sea of sheets. I allude here askance to a poem that speaks of angels braiding one another’s hair while mortals make love—its title is “Privilege of Being.” I’ve read it in one of Lena’s books, the page flagged, one of the books that surrounded her while she died.

The privilege of being must be the gift of understanding how key connection is because it is elusive.

I offered Anguilla to her. I offered the sea and she accepted. It was June, the low season and we got away quickly. I knew I had to act. We were on a plane by the following Saturday. She came willingly—and with the knowledge that she was ill.

In Anguilla, Lena’s breasts in moonlight were translucent, the blue veins visible beneath her skin.

We had arrived to a startling sunset: a sky smudged with gray, dusted with gold and lit with blue iridescence. I saw the broad expanse of sky as we left the airport and small town, drove closer and closer to the ocean. I saw the reflection, light patterns, glimmering sea as omens for a new beginning, a shift from the summer of despair. I shouted to Lena and the cab driver, “What a glorious sunset!”

I’d done the planning quickly. She said when I presented her with the tickets, mid-week, inside a long jewelry box that I’d saved from a bracelet I’d given her long ago, “I know I said I’d go and I’m sure, precise as you are, that you told me the date, but wouldn’t it be better if we went after? I still have stuff to do.” The exhibit of the Scrolls would open in the fall.

I was stricken, of course, and of course, I couldn’t or wouldn’t say that. I said, “I can change it.”

But because she was the one with perfect pitch, she heard despair in my simple sentence and also anger—for I had planned it all and at no small cost, something I probably said at some point. I know I said it. And so we went.

The night we arrived, I made love to her. This lovemaking came long, long after the last time I’d touched her before her mother died. I thrust into her—not cruelly, not without arousing her. I wanted release. I took her. She let me. Her passivity was not what I wanted.

The next morning on the beach, I told her to move her chair, said, “Let’s go down a ways. See there, there are two umbrellas together.” She’d been sitting alone before I came down.

“I don’t want to get up again.” She was wearing a bathing suit she thought too brief for her years and, though there were few people on the beach, she didn’t want to walk in front of them. She was thin and still beautiful with her age that showed on her thigh, her hip, the dimpling I recall now with tenderness.

We learn too late how the imperfections tug at memory.

Her foolishness annoyed me. I’d told her that when she talked about her body, its flaws, she made me see her that way. I said, “How dumb to do that.” I explained that she made reality with words. I thought I was wise, clever, and now know I was cruel.

I never had her sense of the right thing.

And Isaac was the right thing? you might say. A paradox? you may ask. But now paradoxes ring like bells.

“Then I’ll take most of the shade,” I said, “if you won’t move.” I lugged another chair next to hers.

If Isaac lay in the other chair, I suppose he would have looked out at the sea, rubbed his stomach, his hairy belly, which is not as flat as mine. He would have sighed, contented. He wasn’t fat, to be fair to him, but my body, from my rigor, my determination, was like my body when I played football for Whiting High, when I ran track, when I rode my bike long stretches over the Iowa hills. I didn’t wear my age but I’m well aware of it in the ache in my shoulder or my knee or my hip. Isaac wore his fifty years in his full middle. He would have patted his soft bulge and laughed, “Ah, m’dear, come lay your head on my anatomy, or as we say in the trade, Camper’s fatty layer.”

He wouldn’t have said, “Now there’s a high-strung chatter. Do you hear her shrill voice?” The woman nearby with her husband. “We’ve got to move.”

Lena sat. She denied me with silence. Anti-minimalism. I opened my book and tried to read.

I don’t remember which book I was reading. I do remember the books all around her when she wept over the Second Law of Thermodynamics. She had Maimonides, two volumes, one gold, one aqua. Not lovely—book covers are rarely so—but the color reminded me of the water that day in Anguilla though that water remains for me indescribable because I associate it with the translucent beauty of her breast in moonlight. When I asked about the books she kept nearby, she said, referring to herself in the third person and not answering my question, “She ended up reading a lot of Maimonides.” And I laughed.

If Isaac had been with her at the beach, he would have rubbed his dark beard and hair.

He doesn’t show his age in his full head of dark hair but in his beard that he rarely has trimmed, that’s flecked with gray, wiry strands. When I see him close up, when I study his face, I find it unkempt because of the hair on his cheeks. I would shave to create a clean edge. He isn’t beautiful, but she must have thought him so.

My body is defined with muscle, perfected in my discipline.

He’d have caught the light, her lover. Perhaps that’s what she thought as she lay next to me. Perhaps she would have compared him to the white bird that seemed to stand mid-air above the aqua water.

Now I know, because time gives up such things the way it gives up secrets, that it was the white-tailed tropicbird, phaethon lepturus.

The wind gusted up the beach with a single pale pink cloud. She might have thought of the inside of his mouth. Clouds turned and rolled with the wind and moved across the beach, one single broad-backed cloud that swept across the water, the sand, her book, her beach wrap, trickling rain in the midst of the wide band of sun. I said, “They should’ve told us there’d be a fucking hurricane.”

“Is there one?” She opened her mouth to the rain, stood in sun and water, both at the same time on that beach that day.

“My hat’s wet, sandy. You could be impaled by a blowing umbrella. You, lying there as if nothing’s happening.”

“And what is happening?” The rain in a broad band of sun and the wind must have seemed to her wild and safe and easy with warmth.

“What a way to go,” I said, “stuck in the heart by a beach umbrella.”

“I’m going now.” She walked back to our room.

She’d known she should act before the trip. That was her hesitation, not as she’d said, in concern for the exhibit of the Scrolls. The Scrolls obsessed her for reasons I’ve tried to discover but now know had little to do with the details of her job. Instead of getting the biopsy—she did do that on our return—she rented the room on 21^st Street—and she agreed to go away with me.

From that rented room, I’ve collected what she’d left: her books, with the little flags she’d pasted on the edges of the papers, with the sentences yellow highlighted: On Anna Karenina she placed her mark not on Anna but on Levin: This is the deduction of reason.

In Anguilla, we had a private tiled deck sheltered on the sides and full to the sun and water. She gathered her glasses, her book, her bottle of water and walked away while the swift moving cloud left the beach with the force of the warm wind.

She sat alone on the patio deck chair, away from me, sure I’d gone into the sea I loved, that I’d float and calm (she used the word as a verb with me), and, calm I did. She got away from my anger that I couldn’t explain, that I believed she should have understood. It’s not that I knew the why of anything then, or what I presume now to know. It’s that I had my ways. She’d married me. I’d taken her as she was. She should have taken me as I was.

This was what Levin learned to do with Kitty, and blamed himself: I shall still blame her for my own fears and shall regret it. But I find this last section of the book pedestrian, preachy. The story, already over. She’d marked Levin’s words: What am I doing? Knowledge, unattainable by reasoning, has been revealed to me personally, to my heart, openly and beyond a doubt, and I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in words and by my reason.

Her copy of Madame Bovary has no cover, a paper back with the torn frontispiece taped to the bare binding and the title scratched in her scrawl on it. She’d flagged the appendix, The Trial of “Madame Bovary,” and had highlighted these lines: (The words of Flaubert’s attorney in this matter.) Monsieur Flaubert constantly emphasizes the superiority of the husband over the wife, and what sort of superiority is this? It is that of duty fulfilled, while Emma strays from it!

You may ask, Was she so pedestrian as to leave me a bread-crumb trail?

When I returned that day in Anguilla I watched her from the path. The eucalyptus around her filled with chirping. There were goldfinches, bright yellow breasts, black smooth heads with white bands above their eyes, a broad wash of yellow on their rounded breasts. The tiny birds jumped from bush to table. They filled the bush and hopped from branch to table looking for crumbs from our croissants. They were wild and yet tame: willing to come forward, perhaps from days of hotel guests’ daily plates of rolls.

She’d wanted very much to go back to Anguilla. She wanted it when she was cold, when she knew that time was short. The vacation had been wildly expensive, and I’d spent the money in uncharacteristic desperation.

I awake in the morning, look at the curtain at the window, see the light shifting with the breeze that moves the leaves outside. In front of me stuffed bears sit on the TV, anachronistically as if in a young girl’s bedroom, in a perpetual hug wearing a souvenir button with the title from the play we saw on our honeymoon, Blood Knot.

I’m on the right side of the bed—the side I always thought was the left.

We argued about this. She’d said, “Why do you like the right?” I said, “I sleep on the left.” “No, you don’t.” It was a silly argument, but one I was determined to win, its importance validating my view of the world. I argued that no one, no sensible person would determine the right or left of a bed except by standing at its foot and looking at it. She said, “But I think of myself in the bed, sitting up like Ozzie and Harriet, chatting with you about our day and ready to curl on my side and sleep. And I’m on the left. Get it?” “Ridiculous,” I said, “so ridiculous that we should begin asking people when we go out to dinner, ‘Which side of the bed do you sleep on?’ That’ll make you see how you see the world.” “And how’s that?” she asked. “Oddly, at best,” I said, sure I’d won.

When I argued with her, I saw myself outside the bed the way I used to look at a painting.

When Vermeer laid down his orthogonals, the lines on angles that converge at the woman’s sleeve in The Music Lesson, the vanishing point, the place where he established the painting’s horizon, his view was outside the painting.

Vermeer The Music Lesson

If it is true that his use of light and his perspective came from the camera obscura, an external view, if you will, a lens, then he experienced the image as a photographer does, from outside the frame he creates. His lens allowed him to examine his world as no one before him had. The perspective in the painting is so unusual, so scientifically accurate, if you will, that when I look at The Music Lesson, I’m able to imagine myself inside the painting. I stand next to the woman who plays the virginals (not the clavichord).

The woman is Lena, and I stand to her right, her back to the painter, the angle of her profile in my full view. I see what no one else can see.

In Vermeer’s painting, the mirror, which holds the woman’s reflection above the piano, gives only a partial sense to the viewer who stands outside.

Matisse Pianist and Checker Players

Matisse’s use of perspective was strikingly different. In the Pianist and Checker Players, Matisse, an accomplished violinist, placed two violins on the wall to the woman’s right. She is playing the piano. The left side of her face can be seen when you look at the painting and she has her back to the two men who play checkers in the striped jackets. Isaac disliked the flat perspective because he didn’t see that what Matisse did was look at the objects from different perspectives and paint them that way, very different from the photographic accuracy of Vermeer.

Matisse looked at the piano as if he faced it. He stood behind one of the checker players and looked at the woman’s back. The bureau, which lies on the wall to the woman’s right, he painted also as if he faced it. The violins on the armoire that faces the right side of the bureau, he stood in front of to paint. I think of him moving about inside the room he painted to see the room and the people from different perspectives. He did this with the floor. He looked at the rug from above and the result is that the floor tilts. The people in the painting look to me as if they may slide out toward me. What Isaac would describe as flat, I describe as oddly three dimensional like characters on a movie screen who step out into the theater. Lena and I went to see a Woody Allen film where he pretended this happened. It was one of her favorites.

When it was over, she said in her cryptic way that stays fixed in my memory, “Perspective comes through longing.”

We buried Lena’s mother at the cemetery where her brothers and sisters and parents were buried, where we would bury Lena’s father five years later and where I would not bury her.

Her father was buried in the last remaining space in the family plot. When Lena’s mother died, the space beside her was reserved for him. That’s the way the brothers and sisters had planned the plot that sits under a large oak after they buried their parents six months apart. All the children married and none divorced. All lay side by side with the spouses they’d lived with longer than any had lived with their parents. I suppose not all were blissfully happy. Lena would be better at recounting who was not and who might have been. But I’ve long ago concluded that such musings are rarely accurate. Evan and Isaac certainly appeared the perfect couple—even their children seem somehow perfected by the appearance of their parent’s love that stands on weak footing.

At the cemetery, the old oak had to be removed because it was not a good choice, lovely as it was with its wide shade over the graves and its magisterial authority at the top of the hill. But oaks have large, sprawling root systems and the roots began to upend the graves, disturb the headstones, create havoc with the family that lay disintegrating in the earth among the roots like the underbelly of a marriage. ▵

Table of Contents

Coming next, “Damselfly” Chapter 25

I know, I know: Everyone is asking you this. But if you like this that comes totally from my heart and over ten years of research, consider going paid? You can always change that without fully unsubscribing:

Love,