Revenge?
Note: You can start reading here or anywhere and then go back if you like. 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.
With what I know about Lena’s visit to Evan’s house, I feel invaded, violated. I think, What if Evan knew? And doesn’t one violation lead to another? Isaac’s meeting with Karen? The way fire spreads.
Isaac and Lena, who both worked downtown at the Smithsonian, lived divided by that space. He, in northern Maryland, a small community beyond the cookie-cutter houses of suburbia, close enough to the subway to make commuting possible, far enough away to find the land where Evan gardens, flowers and herbs, and where Isaac farms—that’s what he calls it, but he knows little about real farming, the kind my father used to do. Lena’s and my house—I don’t live there anymore, not since some time before she died.
I live now downtown on 21st street in a small flat with my piano that I try to play—but the house, our house stands on three sloping acres in Virginia’s rolling hills.
One balcony from a small bedroom off the master bedroom overlooks the hills, and I know Isaac will climb this balcony to get to her bedroom. The inevitability of this event, of his invasion not only into our parlor—where he’d been, where the Matisse once hung—but into our bedroom seems likely to me because she had, in a sense, invaded his house, Lena present in Evan’s parlor. He took her there.
His house lies on flat land that he tills on weekends, planting potatoes. He loves them from the garden despite their abundance in stores, claims nothing tastes like them, and the usual tomatoes, the failed corn. He doesn’t have either the soil, the skill or the climate for corn—it grows better on Maryland’s Eastern shore and in Iowa, but still he persists the way he persisted with his forbidden love. △
Robert, Chapter 9, next
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Love,
Your writing is so beautiful Mary. I love your attention to details! This passage was particularly touching and masterful: “he inevitability of this event, of his invasion not only into our parlor—where he’d been, where the Matisse once hung—but into our bedroom seems likely to me because she had, in a sense, invaded his house, Lena present in Evan’s parlor. He took her there.” I’m learning from you.
So wonderfully damning!