Robert

Who by Fire" Chapter 17: Audio and prose

Phillips Museum

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.

Robert

After the dinner that night, the difficult exchange that I’ve recalled for you, I did not go to work when I left in the morning. I parked my car and walked to the Phillips Museum on 21^st street so that I could sit in the Rothko room in what to me was the museum’s basement. This room is on street level but it sits under a long winding stairway that ends in the annex. I’ve often thought the room is missed by tourists who don’t cover every room of the museum because they enter the main floor after climbing the front steps to the grand entrance and follow the museum’s floor plan that leads to the next level up, stories that belie their actual locations. The first floor is the second; the second, the third; the basement, the first. In the annex.

Fitting. My life, out of order because my wife seems out of reach.

The floors confuse the average visitor. But I’m not the average visitor. I can see the floor plan. I can see how the architect designed the flow of people. I can sit here in the basement in the Rothko room and know that I am on the first floor. This kind of reasoning is what I’m good at. I can reason my way out of this and make sense of Lena.

I’d not called the office. I’ll be late. I heard my boss’s words, “Facts matter, people count, speed wins.” William refuses to relinquish the strategic budget decisions. He takes the so-called facts from me and makes the budget a fiction—the numbers jiggled around to fit the programs. The budget ends up being a Rube Goldberg contraption with me as the accountant who makes it look as if it makes sense. I am a fiction like the budget. So much for facts and people. Speed is what William wants and speed is what he gets.

But William’s rally call makes sense.

What exactly were the facts about Lena? Something was amiss. I didn’t know how to find out. And she counts. And I was losing. And speed wins.

I simply sat and looked. The paintings are untitled or numbered. This used to bother me because I thought Rothko chose an easy out by not deciding how to name his paintings and then was further annoyed when I learned that even the numbering system was inconsistent—it’s impossible to figure out if the sequences of numbered paintings mean anything. This lack of order, what I considered a lack of attention to detail used to rile me. Is Rothko trying to make it clear to me that he doesn’t mean to mean anything?

But today the sweeps of yellow, red were all I could bear. I saw the red border, watched it slide into the ochre yellow, color on color. Though I knew rationally that the paint lay in squares, I didn’t see anything inside right angles. I heard music, pianissimo, saw my hands poised above the ivory keys of my piano, saw the black notes of Debussy’s “Broulliards,” watched the score move across me in a fog, notes on staffs emerged like high beams, blurred my vision. I heard in trills of notes, in single notes that rang out, in the quiet that defined Debussy for me, the sound of mist, of water and vapor and air. I, who viewed myself as always present, always the observer, always rational, able to judge what I perceived, sat here in the mist of notes, remembered sound that left me helpless, absent. I could not touch the keys I’d seen before me because they were covered by the fog of what I heard that came to me with such clarity. It was as if I’d never heard before this music that I’d memorized and now recalled in the chaos of wind and water. And I was sitting in front of a painting. That was all and it was enough.

I’d felt this way watching a PBS documentary. The paintings of an autistic woman whose story was told by a famous neurologist (the one who’d awakened catatonic patients with carefully concocted medications; zombies coming alive, like gentle monsters or ghosts) had held me, frightened me. The paintings’ dark windows, empty rooms. I’d switched the station, not waiting to find out why the woman painted darkness, shadow, heard briefly the doctor’s words, musing on whether the paintings reflected a world in search of perfect order.

Rothko room

The Rothko paintings surround the small room where I sat, the light, low against the colors that placed me in this state where I heard music I’d thought before to be atonal, black and white keys struck oddly, simultaneously, without form and now seemed to me to have recreated in sound the restraint that merely represents. The music and the paintings placed me in that place so different from the place I knew, where I awoke, certain of my world and what I knew about it.

I tuned in to the classical music station at exactly six a.m., showered with the water always at exactly 90 degrees Fahrenheit because I’d bought a plumbing fixture for nearly six hundred dollars that ensured that certainty, went to work, wearing one of my five suits with the shirts that I’d picked out with the help of an elegant saleswoman named Roberta, who wrote down for me which shirt and tie went with which suit and that I never varied, had dinner at home with Lena, to whom I often suggested what we might have so that I’d be sure she didn’t repeat something I’d had at lunch.

Now I got up, stood closer, looked at the words to the side: Untitled, 1954.

I thought of things I should do. Take her on vacation. Where? Do the crossword puzzle with her. She used to like that.

I sat down, pulled The New York Times out of my briefcase—I got both The Post and The Times but liked the financial coverage in The Times, got The Wall Street Journal at work, left The Post for Lena. She no longer did the puzzles regularly. I imagined us doing this morning’s puzzle, as if I’d stayed home on the spur of the moment—something I never did. Thirty-six across: “sine and cosine.” She wouldn’t know this one; she’s lousy at math. I’d say: “ratios.” She would smile, write it in and I would see, in the way the corner of her eye turned up with her smile, that sweet curve of her wrinkles. Find one she would know.

Play the piano for her—The Pathétique or the Schubert in G flat that had made her weep when I still played, or could I create in Debussy’s “Broullairds” the quiet reticence, notes that hold back melody, that create mist and fog because when we hear these notes we know what it’s like not to be sure about what we see?

I stared at Untitled.

I imagined a house inside the painting: windows from floor to lintel. In Whiting, Iowa, there are no tall windows. I used to live in the tallest house in town but the windows need to be small because the cold is fierce in winter and the heat must be conserved if the house is to survive the winds that blow strong across the flat land.

I saw tall wide windows in my town, Moorish arches, open-air doorways.

Before we’d married, she told me one day that she’d seen the shadowy figure of a man in the townhouse next door that had been empty all summer, that was being repainted for the next tenant. She’d taken the day off, had gone outside because she smelled paint fumes. The front door of the house next door was open. A figure stood at the top of the stairs, with his hands near his crotch—covering his groin? Adjusting his equipment? Masturbating? She was alone, no neighbors around, everyone working. She was frightened. Yet, she couldn’t take her eyes off the painter. Was he the painter? The new tenant? The shadows in the stairs, the light behind the man disturbed her. His hands, of course. She stood at the front door, didn’t move away though she knew she should.

I couldn’t understand this and had told her firmly never to behave irrationally this way again for her own safety.

Now I know that she was transfixed by the shadow and the light.

In the Phillips Museum, I thought, Take her some place where the air blows through, where the archways are high. Take her to the sea. She loves the sea, its clarity and mist.

Call my travel agent.

Consider Italy.

Take her again to the Amalfi Coast. Positano. Rocky coast.

Consider the Caribbean. Anguilla. Sand and sea.▵

Evan, Lena and Isaac, chapter 18 coming next

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