The Last Place You Looked

Who by Fire: Chapter 26: Audio and prose

Note to a very few of my subscribers—and I thank all subscribers for being here 💞: A few of you may be receiving this chapter 26 for the first time because Who by Fire: a novel is a “section” — I have fixed who receives the serial.

Tip: I recently learned this: If you are new Substacker, better not to use “sections” to organize your Substack. Use “Groups” instead.

Update on Who by Fire: Robert discovers more about what happened to Lena while he recounts their trip to Anguilla.

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 Last Place You Looked

I’ve heard that color can’t be remembered or that color memory is a gift like perfect pitch. Whether or not one has perfect color memory, color evokes memory, the way of all the senses. Like the scent of apples and pears—her skin. Like the sound of the first four notes of the Schubert in G flat—the echo of her climax in my mind. The red-orange-pink of the tiles I see in the old brick in the buildings where I live on 21^st Street—her mouth when she slept and then when she was gone, when all that was left was memory and my obsession with fire (blue, red, white, green, black fire) and with perspective.

After two days in the Anguilla sun and a night of deep sleeping, we were well-rested though not in tune with one another. Before dinner, we went to the bar. It was a Moorish bar with the lusty feel of the foreign: The draped ceilings, the curved open doorway, the white walls, the Persian carpets on adobe floor tiles.

There was a man sitting alone at the bar, unusual in this deserted resort peopled by couples staying in separated villas. Lena, wondering about the man alone, said, “Let’s sit at the bar.” She walked over and sat one bar stool away from him.

“Why would you want to sit at the bar?” I asked loud enough for the man and the bartender to hear, loud enough to embarrass her.

She didn’t answer.

“Why would you want that? With the water near the tables? We can watch the sea if we sit at one of them. I’d think you’d want to do that.”

She moved away from the lone man and sat at a table with me.

“Now, you’re annoyed,” I said.

“Of course, that’s not true,” when, of course, it was true.

I bought a bottle of Barolo Salvano 1996, a good Italian red, reminiscent of our trip to Positano, and refilled her glass through dinner. I had ordered her dinner for her, planned ahead privately with the maître d’ to surprise her: a tomato carpaccio with salmon tartare, fresh pea soup with lobster, fillet of beef in saffron broth with tomatoes and basil. She declined dessert and coffee, but I ordered cheese—ash goat, gorgonzola and pecorino pepato—and we finished the Barolo. She was lightly inebriated when we walked back to our villa. We could have gone on the road from the main house, but we took our shoes off and walked on the beach. No one was out when we’d made our way to our villa and the sand was lit in moonlight. She was wearing a camisole with no bra and a pair of silky trousers that she’d rolled up above her knee. I walked on the sand behind her, following her footsteps. Lena had imperfect feet. She had bunions but otherwise delicate narrow feet with long slender toes.

I took her hand.

She said, “I could be in love with the man at the bar.”

“You’re crazy about me and you know it.”

She laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“The thing is no matter how awful I am, and I was an idiot in the bar, I’m often an idiot, we’re stuck on each other. We’re not stuck the way you think.”

“How’s that?”

“As in, I have a decent marriage and I’m stuck with it.”

“But I’m not stuck. I could leave.”

“But you haven’t. There must be a reason for that. Maybe you’re stuck on me.”

“Yeah, well, what if you’re right?”

“It means everything if I’m right.”

She leaned into me and the strap of her camisole slipped off. I stepped back and said, “Let me look at you.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t think I ever do. You think I take you without looking. Let me look at you.”

Her breast was bare in the moonlight and the dimpling I’d seen in her thigh and that I recall with such tenderness I saw in her breast on the curve of flesh below the nipple. I said, “Could I touch you? You’re so beautiful. I want to touch you. Only touch you.”

“Yes.”

And she laid her head on my shoulder. I could feel her tears soak through my shirt onto my chest.

When we woke in the morning after making love, she turned toward me and told me this dream.

She said, “I was at the bar smoking and you took me to jail. You were the non-smoking, abstaining jailer. Everyone in the jail was under terrible pressure to do everything right and everything in a hurry. This is a crude dream. Can I tell it to you anyway? Will you mind?”

“No, I want you to tell me.”

“I had parcels and make-up. Everyone in jail wore black and though I was a woman, I was a man in the dream. Well, I was both. All the inmates wanted to rub their penises against the leg of another inmate. Only one kind rehab jailer—that’s what we called him—allowed this. You wouldn’t allow this. But you needed it too but abstained. All the inmates and the rehab jailer smoked. You didn’t smoke. We all wanted the rehab jailer to be in charge of us. But I was stuck with you. So, I left. This was a jail that I could leave. The way dreams work. I gathered all my make-up and all my black bags and asked you to come with me. You stood in front of me naked. I could see your thick penis and dark blond pubic hair.” She ran her fingers through my pubic hair and I became aroused. “But you refused to come with me, threw my bags out the door, threw me out.”

“I’d never throw you out.”

“But you have refused me.”

“And I’m sorry for that. I’ve hurt you. I keep hurting you. But I don’t mean to.” And I made love to her again, the breast with its dimpling, its lump in my hand.

After I made love to her that morning, I said, “You are the last place I looked.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Whenever you lose something in the house and you say, I’ll never find it, I say, ‘Where’d you find whatever you’ve lost before? In which place?”

“And I say, ‘I can’t remember.’ ”

“And I tell you, ‘It’s the same for all lost things.’ ”

“Yeah, yeah, the last place you looked,” and she laughed.

She is the color blue, her delicate nostrils, her pale, translucent eyelids, the filigree of skin at the edges of her eyes when she lay on the cold metal slab in the tiled basement of the funeral home.

And perspective comes from this place.

Galileo, with his crude imperfect “Optick Tube,” found Saturn in 1610 when no one believed what he saw was possible, a planet with disappearing arms—the way he saw the rings. His perspective created such danger he revealed it in an anagram written in Latin.

When she walked in the sand, her feet made marks like arrows or inverted hearts on the sand because the bunions in her shoes had made the slender big toe angle in toward her other toes. There was no space between her big toe and the next digit. In the light of day, I came out and followed her in her bikini. I took pictures of her while she held her gauze beach wrap above her head in the breeze, unashamed of what she called her aging body. I took pictures of her footprints on the sand.

Perspective places the viewer in an unsafe space. Vermeer’s camera obscura gave him a nearly photographic external view that he kept secret because, perhaps, he feared the repercussions. Matisse’s shifting perspective risked the accusation of “beast.”

I am both outside and inside my wife’s perspective and decidedly unsafe.

On a frigid January night after she died, I went out on my fire escape. I saw Saturn in the north sky, the first star to appear that night. The planet is second in size only to Jupiter but its specific gravity is less than water. It is so light the planet could float in a bathtub if one existed big enough to hold it.

It is light because its center is a gaseous fire. Its core is 21,150 degrees Fahrenheit, so hot that the winds that blow across it create rings of yellow and gold. It is far from the sun and surrounded by icy cold moons. These things are known only through the perspective of telescopes, infrared spectrometers, ultraviolet imaging, plasma waves and space travel that have revealed the paradox of cold and fire.

I ask, Can the perspective of memory on the mortal journey that is an interminable chain of longing lead to forgiveness?▵

Table of Contents

Coming next: “The Closet” Chapter 27

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.

Love,