The Closet

Who by Fire: Chapter 27: Audio and prose

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Note: Update: Robert goes into Lena’s closet to think, understand?

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.

The Closet

When we returned from Anguilla mid-June, June nineteen actually, Lena had the biopsy the next week. The surgery followed. By June’s end, she lay in the rented room in Gershon’s home.

At our home that I’d not yet sold, I went into her walk-in closet in the small bedroom off our bedroom. This room with its balcony was where she retreated. And now she had retreated further, to the townhouse near Dupont Circle, not far from the Phillips Museum we both loved.

The pain in my chest was so hard against my heart I went to her closet like a child who seeks the comfort of his mother’s breast.

I lay there on the floor in the scent of her perfume that drifted from her clothes. On three sides of the closet hung trousers, skirts, jackets, blouses—grouped in colors, if one could call her wardrobe colored. I don’t think I’d ever noticed before that she dressed in only black, white and beige. You’d think this would’ve been something I would have known. While I lay on the floor, I could see her in the camisole she wore in Anguilla. I could reach up and touch its bottom hem. It is beige with a barely discernible black pattern. It hangs next to the trousers she’d rolled up to walk in the sand. These silky beige trousers are lined with a material so light, so delicate that it reminds me of gauze like her beach wrap that she held above her head in the wind and the gauze that wrapped the wound on her breast. She’d said, “I always thought I would get it because my mother had it, and my aunt had it, but I thought I’d be much older.” She said this while she was wrapping the gauze around the drains, and added, “It’s disgusting, these bodily fluids oozing from me.” She was ill and I understood in some technical, medical way that she was not one of the lucky ones, that she would die soon—cancer of the breast that would go to the liver.

I wept at the sight and scent of her clothes. I lay there with my hands along the hems of blouses, and slacks, and I lingered on the edge of the camisole. I said out loud, “I don’t know what’s wrong” though I knew she had had a part of her breast removed and why.

I got up, showered, shaved, dressed. I wore lose fitting jeans and a beige shirt.

I chose the shirt for its neutral color. I chose it because it was soft like the camisole and because she had bought it for me and because I hoped that she would lay her head on my chest.

Gershon let me in and I went up to the room she’d rented. This was where she chose to recuperate. She had not come home and I didn’t know why.

She wore drawstring pajama bottoms that I’d never seen before (she always wore nightgowns to bed), a loose fitting silk blouse that was unbuttoned. I saw the drains that emerged from the gauze and boxes of bandages and pills and salve on the bed stand.

She had the small pillow that I’d never seen before. Its cover had a pale blue and white checkerboard pattern and a white ruffle around the edge. She held it near her breast. I began with the pillow. “A tiny pillow,” I said.

“Yes, a baby pillow, a gift.”

“Who brought it?”

“Evan Schonfeld. You remember Evan? Isaac’s wife.”

“Yes,” I said. “An odd gift.”

“No, it’s perfect, small and light. Practical because I can lay it under my side. It fits perfectly, small enough to fit under, a little support that keeps me from lying on the sore place.”

“And your pajamas? I’ve never seen those before.”

“Gershon’s.”

“Can we talk about why you’re here?”

“I’ll be home soon.”

“Why aren’t you home now?”

“Robert, please.”

I sat down in the small armchair in the room, lay my head back and shut my eyes. I was in her closet.

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I saw a brown finger on a door latch, the white lines in the knuckles, the rung of a ladder against a balcony, locked doors with easy catches and a floor that slides forward spilling out the contents of a room.▵

Table of Contents

Coming next, “Losing Her” Chapter 28

Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money,’ but I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.