Still in My Suit

Chapter 23: Audio and prose

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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.

On the way home that night Lena bought salmon, Boston lettuce and red potatoes. She lit the grill outside, washed the fish. She rummaged through her recipes for the one Evan had given her. She got out Dijon mustard, olive oil, ground cumin. But she had no mustard seeds. Always without, always something missing. She grated some orange peel and a bit of her skin. She didn’t have the right tool. She had a large metal grater that had been her mother’s and that wasn’t good for the task. She’d had to keep rubbing her hand against the inside of the grater to try to get the moist peel off. A bit of blood oozed, not enough to run for a bandage but enough to require that she press her finger with a paper towel, that she stop, look—the raw salmon, its sweet pink color like the grated skin on her finger. She could see the cooked fish on the plate, herself eating, the bones, the flesh in her mouth, but not able to chew or swallow. She could hear me, “You must eat,” see herself spit out a morsel. With her finger wrapped tight in a paper towel, she stood in front of the raw fish on the plate when I walked in the kitchen.

“Should I light the grill?” I asked. “You usually grill it, don’t you?”

“You haven’t even changed out of your suit. But, yeah, I guess we should grill.” She threw the bloodied paper towel in the trash.

“You cut yourself. Let me see.”

I had her hand in mine. “It’s nothing,” she said. “A scrape.”

“I think a little first aid’s in order,” and I was off to the bathroom, back quickly with a tube of Neosporin and a Band-Aid.

I washed her finger and covered the scrape. “Sit down. Dinner can wait. How about some wine and you can help me with the crossword puzzle. I saved it for you.” I sat down at the island and pulled it out of the inside pocket of my jacket, laid it on the table. Then I was up again, had the fridge door open, got out a bottle of Chardonnay.

“What are you doing?” Lena asked though she could clearly see. For one thing I always drank red wine, particularly with salmon and for another I hadn’t gone upstairs to change.

“I know you’ll know this one. October bloom, five letters.”

“When did you have time to do the puzzle?”

“I played hooky today like you—not all day, but, when you saw me, I’d been to the Phillips, sat in the Rothko room, that room you like. It was a good thing to do, to be alone, take some time. I sat there for a while, had the Times with me, was thinking about you, about how you used to do the puzzle, but you don’t do it anymore. Why is that?”

“Robert, what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. Or maybe I am.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, something,” I admitted. “I don’t know. Tell me, what did you do while you were playing hooky?”

“Aster.” It was June, when if she planted asters for Gershon they would bloom through autumn, in October there’d be pink, yellow, blue, violet blossoms when the annuals would be dying on the vine, the geraniums in crusted brown from red, the maple leaves gone orange. And so it was with Isaac. The affair had all too tritely run its course like the romance novel gone wrong, like their banter with its undercurrent of reality.

“Aster,” he repeated.

“What?”

aster

“An October bloom. Aster.” Yes, she’d plant them. Those container gardens, full of leaves, branches, dirt. She’d clear away, use a shovel to mix and chop the old leaves, add potting soil and dirt she’d buy in bags and lug them onto the old deck. The earth would ground her. She’d plant flowers that would open, bloom, give color like pink sweetness, that would fill an old man’s mind with memories, of the time maybe he’d given asters to someone he loved, of the look on his lover’s face when she’d taken the flowers, wrapped in crisp white paper, tied with raffia.

I’d once given her wild flowers from a shop tied with this string and laid them in the cradle of her arms. This is the way a woman holds the flowers a man gives her. She’d held them that way, like a hope for the child she knew she’d never have.

“You see, I knew you’d get that one.”

I could find her through the things she liked to do. Even a simple game could be a way back to her. I’d take her on vacation and make sure we got the Times every day. Over cappuccinos or cafe au laits—that’s what she likes—we’d sit on a patio near the sea.

Again I saw tall windows, glass like a recurring dream. I said, “I have this dream and I keep dreaming it. I’m in Whiting and I see a lot of houses. One is glassed, an architectural feat, glass all around; another has tall wide windows and another arches like horseshoes, Moorish, I guess, that open to the light. I don’t know if I’ve dreamt it or seen it, it’s on my mind so much. I think, when I go to Whiting, I’ll drive the pick-up across the tracks and see them. It’s silly, I know. But I think I’ll need to drive the pick-up over to check and then sit like a fool on the street in front of the cottages, shacks really, that have been there since I was a kid where my father, in that way of his, always said the white trash live. And this dream—or maybe I’m hallucinating—makes me want to take you some place, away.”

“You? Hallucinating? I’ve got that covered. How I go off, as you say.”

Yoann Boyer on Unsplash

I’d opened the wine and poured her a glass. I held my glass up for a toast. “Yeah, maybe I need to do a little more of that. Hallucinating, as you say.” I am at a loss.

“And does that mean a non sequitur would be okay?”

“Well, you wouldn’t be you without one, now would you?”

“But you know how you hate it when you can’t follow me.”

“Try me.”

“I met an old man today when I was walking around, when I was playing hooky. And something about him… I don’t know, I guess it was the gardening clogs he was wearing—he doesn’t garden, you see—made me think about getting old, that we don’t really understand what happens to the mind, the body even while it’s happening to us. But more how we don’t understand when we look at old people, how we keep our distance, say things to make sure they know we’re not them.”

“Why are you talking this way? You’re not old.”

“Remember my father? When the old man screamed, my father, who never yelled or raged or called a name, when he cursed and spit and took my hand in his mouth to bite it? Do you remember?”

“He was sick. He was dying. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“I think now it was because he knew what he couldn’t remember. Remember how he said, ‘I’m confused.’ Your father says that sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a different story. He also says, ‘Grass turns to milk.’”

“Well, it does, doesn’t it? When you think about it.”

“Oh, so now you’re an expert on cows, huh?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“The First Law of Thermodynamics.” I know it too well.

“Oh, is that the one that says you make fun of me?”

“Come on, Lena, don’t play dumb with me.” She knew it well too.

“Go ahead, explain it to me again.”

“There’s only so much energy to go around and it gets changed, i.e., grass turns to milk.”

“So, dust to dust, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“I feel old, Robert, old and worn. And crazy like my father at the end.”

“You’re not crazy, Lena. But something is wrong. I think it’s me.”

“No, no, it’s not you.”

And that was the problem. It wasn’t me, was it? Now that she knew what she’d known with Isaac, no matter how shameful it was, no matter how misguided, no matter what I did, she’d be missing something, but it wasn’t my fault. I now know she thought it was her fault, that she was ill, that she deserved it.

She said, “I shouldn’t have married you.”

“And how does that follow? Not that I can’t handle a non sequitur here. It’s not me but you shouldn’t have married me? You seem to think that follows?

“Only because I knew things when we married. I knew I’d be wrong for you. I knew it and I married you anyway.”

“But don’t I get a say in this?” I didn’t want to ask her what she meant. I thought she was telling me something about what was wrong with me, something I couldn’t fix. I didn’t want to hear it. “Don’t I get to say if you’re wrong for me?”

“Well, yes, of course, but what do we do?”

“I want to go on vacation. That’s what we do. Come with me.”

“You’re still in your suit.” It must have been all she could think to say.▵

Table of Contents

Coming next, “Perspective” Chapter 24

Love,