The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  The apartment, a Victorian top-floor with low attic ceilings, was a rental that Anna had taken unfurnished, and though she hadn’t been able to paint the magnolia walls, she’d bought vividly colored furniture, pea green and sky blue and Indian pink. She’d hung pictures of Nina that she’d had enlarged, some of which featured Luca and Paolo, on beaches and in gardens. She’d installed Australian art and African masks and artifacts that were stand-in souvenirs of all the places she’d never been; Robert hated to travel and had been enthusiastic only about desolate Highland scenery and the conquering of hills.

  After breakfast and after dressing again in yesterday’s clothes, Nina returned to her mother’s bedroom and got into the bed and drew the top blanket, one of mole-gray velvet, up over her ears. She put one hand questingly under first one pillow and then the other and found Anna’s nightdress and held it to her face, feeling its silkiness and inhaling its motherly scent. On the top of the chest of drawers there were purple silk pajamas; she felt herself caught in a disappeared human event, suspended inside one of her mother’s last anticipated actions, changing the nightwear for an evening that wouldn’t come. It was too sad. It was too much to bear. Now she wanted urgently to leave, and went rapidly down the three gloomy flights of hard stairs, each with its ironwork banister, through the green halls, past the maroon-painted doors, each with its brass nameplate, its faint remnant cooking aroma. She wondered if she was still a bit drunk: she and Luca had finished a bottle of prosecco, and then most of two Romano & Sons reds they’d found in Anna’s kitchen. There’d been a note from Paolo sitting at the bottom of the box. Hope you enjoy, it said, and underneath that, with love from Paolo. Paolo, it turned out, had kept her mother supplied with wine. That’s how she saw it at the time, though of course it was Giulio who sent the boxes, and Giulio who asked Paolo to add the note.

  Luca’s arrival the previous evening had begun with a phone call. He’d heard from his mother, when he got home from the office, that Anna had died that afternoon, and was straight on the phone. Robert had answered and Luca had expressed his sorrow, in a rather ungainly, unprepared way, and then Robert had volunteered the information that Nina had insisted on staying over at Anna’s place. Luca rang her there and told her he was coming over with a cheesecake and a bottle of fizz. Nina had protested: she couldn’t eat cheesecake, she couldn’t drink. Her mother had died. Her mother had been taken from the apartment, like an object, like garbage, in a black bin bag disguised as a coffin. Luca said that no, on the contrary, prosecco was just the thing. They were going to celebrate her life, in just the way that Anna had when Mormor died. It had made a big impression on the Romano family, Anna’s insistence on a death being a celebration of love. So he’d arrived, and they’d hugged, and they’d drunk a lot of wine. They’d got drunk and then he’d kissed her. He’d said, “I know what it is that both of us needs.”

  Neither had any real idea what they were doing. This made Nina self-conscious and clumsy, but Luca became very grave, as if following unseen instructions. It was unfortunate that this in turn made Nina giggly. Luca had told her to shush.

  “Shhh,” he said. “Don’t think, don’t talk; concentrate on touch and sensation.” He climbed naked off the bed and got down on both knees and said he just wanted to look at her, and she became aware of the look that had taken charge of her face, the skeptical, embarrassed look. He ran one hand over her near thigh and hip and onto her stomach and crossed over a nervous frontier of some kind, and Nina went into spasm as if she’d been tickled, and laughed and drew away.

  He’d said, “You need to relax.”

  “You’re telling me to relax?” She sat up and drew her knees to her chest, raising the sheet and resting her forearms on it. Nothing now could be seen of her other than from the shoulder up. “Luca, my mother died today. She died. Here in this building. In the next room.”

  “Let me take you somewhere else than that.”

  “Somewhere else?” Nina’s voice was stridently practical.

  Luca stopped the stroking abruptly. He looked disappointed in her. “Nina. Don’t you want this?”

  “I’m really hungry.” She didn’t want her first sexual experience to be here, and not on this night, but there wasn’t any way of telling him that, not now. What she wanted was another kind of physical attention: to have her back stroked and her hair played with. What she wanted was toast. She wanted him to put his clothes on and go and make her some. She hadn’t been able to face the cheesecake.

  “We’ll eat afterwards,” Luca said, moving in and pushing her gently back onto the bed and setting the sheet aside.

  The thing she’d imagined would be momentous was brief and unarousing, a quick exertion in her passive body, Luca not meeting her eyes as he moved, his face fascinatingly vacant. Nina kept it to herself, the brevity of it and how impersonal it had been. In any case it had been fine: Luca held her tightly afterwards, saying he was sorry about Anna and that he’d miss her. He said, “It hasn’t sunk in yet that she’s gone.”

  “Gone,” Nina said, as if it were a word new to her. “Oh no, no. I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to see her face again. This is goodbye. Not even goodbye. I couldn’t even say goodbye to her.” She’d cried and cried.

  “We had sex twice, and both times it was because someone we loved had died,” Nina said, taking coffee from Dr. Christos. The cup wasn’t quite inside the saucer’s indentation and almost slipped off as it was passed across the bed.

  “Had sex. I don’t like this ‘had sex.’ It’s so unromantic.”

  “What do you prefer? Made love? We made love.” In retrospect that was far too romantic a phrase. “Then when I stopped crying, Luca proposed. He said I needed someone to take care of me. He said he wanted to. He said, ‘Will you marry me, Nina, and love me the whole of my life?’ He looked as if he meant it.”

  “And you said no.”

  “I said no. And I’m afraid that I laughed.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “It was shock. It was the surprise that made me laugh. I wasn’t laughing at him, as he insists that I did. Anyway. Yes, I offended him. He got dressed and he left. Recently when we talked it was obvious that he still minded. He said, ‘You laughed at me, when I asked you to marry me.’ I said, ‘My mother had died; she’d just died,’ but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Laughing was the unforgivable thing. I reminded him that he hadn’t even come to the funeral; he’d sent flowers from Italy, suddenly finding he was needed in the Roman office.”

  “That must’ve hurt.”

  “He said it was my fault. He said that I’d made him very low, but that Italy had worked its magic on him. I said, ‘And Francesca, she worked her magic on you, too, didn’t she?’ Depressing, how people talk to one another, isn’t it?”

  Arriving that morning in the cab from her mother’s apartment, her mother’s key still enclosed in her fist, Nina saw the family house and its contents differently, as if she were visiting it a long time later, as if months had passed since the death and not eighteen hours. Once she’d showered and dressed, once Luca’s persistent scent and wetness had been removed, she went into what had been her parents’ room; when Anna left, Robert had moved into the spare bedroom and its single bed. In a way that was undefinable the room smelled of Nina’s childhood. She looked at herself in the cheval mirror, at the skinny twenty-year-old with the bags under her eyes, hungover and no longer a virgin and exhausted by crying. The girl who was her — and simultaneously not — was wearing dark jeans and a sky-blue American college sweatshirt, the red socks and a pair of red-laced Doc Martens. She opened the wardrobe door and was confronted by a row of Anna’s dresses. Anna was dead; everything in every moment repeated this impossible thing in her brain. Not only that, but Luca wasn’t going to be hers, though for the time being that was something she felt nothing about. She couldn’t, she couldn’t; it wasn’t possible to have all these feelings at once. She took out a Liberty print dress, a shirt dress her mother had ma
de from a purple and blue floral fabric, and took her clothes off and put it on, and put her hair up, pulling down strands to sit by her ears, and rubbed baby oil into her arms and shins, and smeared Vaseline on her lips and eyelashes. There she was, reflected back at herself, a hybrid Anna-Nina, near identical to the Anna of the early photographs.

  Photographs. Nina cast an eye over the bookcases and didn’t see the albums, which were bound in a dark-red leather. She pulled the chair from the dressing table and swept her arm across the top of the wardrobe and found nothing. After standing surveying the room, she returned to the wardrobe, opening its pine doors and pushing her hands between the coats so as to open up a space, and there they were, stacked on the bottom beside a jumble of shoes. She pulled three of them out, took them into the sitting room, and settled herself in the elbow of the sofa.

  The first one she opened was entirely of trees, garden trees and village trees in black silhouette and in close-up. To have amassed a whole album of pictures of trees … it was almost too much. The tree studies had been possible only because of Anna’s absolute confidence; her safety, her illusory safety. The trees made Nina cry again. She said aloud, “Oh, Mum,” as she turned over the pages. They were more upsetting, the tree pictures, than the last family album, chronicling the final holiday, its pages of views and sights and buildings and lunches. It had been Anna’s camera and so there were few pictures of her and Robert together, but plenty of Nina and her dad, doing holiday things in holiday backdrops. It was Anna’s first visit to France, somewhere she’d longed to go. Robert had organized it as a surprise. They’d spent a week in a villa near Nice, before traveling west, a chunk of the Midi at a time, past vineyards and canals, past salt flats and hilltop castles, over the Pyrenees and into Spain. Nina studied the photographs closely, but couldn’t see any of them written there, the things that her father later said he’d felt. Why had he organized the trip? He hadn’t needed to. It was an odd thing to do in the circumstances. Perhaps guilt was at the root of it, guilty even before the fatal thing had been said, wanting to give material compensation in advance to a woman he no longer loved.

  Nina took some of the photographs from the third collection with her to Greece. They’d been fixed to the pages with glued-on corners and had been easy to take out. She’d put them into a manila envelope and had them now, some held in a pile in her hands and the rest scattered onto the white sheet. This album had been dedicated to Grandpa and Mormor’s summer home, somewhere that Robert never visited; he’d use Nina and Anna’s absence to get on with work undisturbed. The lakeside setting was quietly spectacular, though the house itself was rudimentary, with a basement at the damp ground level and plank stairs going up to a wide veranda, its main room fitted with two curtained box beds in niches. Nina always said she had fantastically happy memories of being there, each summer with her mother, and that was true when she was ten, but at fourteen she’d been bored after the second week and had itched to get back to Paolo and Luca.

  The older photographs, the black and white ones, were of Anna just before she met Robert, Anna at twenty-two at the lake house in a swimsuit. The swimming costume had its own molded pointy breasts, and Anna’s small waist had been accentuated by its belted style. She sat with her legs to one side, revealing long brown tapering thighs, one hand up, laughingly protesting to the camera operator, and the other holding on to her floppy-brimmed hat. There were pictures of Grandpa and Mormor, too: Grandpa Sven had a ship’s captain’s beard and smoked a pipe, the constant drift of smoke narrowing his eyes into sea-blue slits, and had distinctively calloused, gnarly hands with enlarged knuckles. His being frustrated creatively at the furniture business was the reason that the lake cabin had become an ongoing DIY project. Over the years he’d refurbished and remodeled it, installing its paneling, its carved beds and window frames, its built-in storage, its beautifully dovetailed dining set, and Anna had photographed his improvements. Nina saw her mother with the camera, barefoot in shorts and a bikini top, her smooth, tanned back. She smelled her sun-warmed, lake-silty skin.

  “Why did Anna leave the Norwegian pictures in the wardrobe?” Dr. Christos asked. “Surely they were precious to her.”

  “It’s a good question,” Nina said. “Sometimes I worry that it was because the album upset her. As if it reminded her of a time in which she was about to make a bad decision.”

  “Marrying your father was a bad decision?”

  Nina didn’t answer. She ran her forefinger over a close-up shot of Mormor, whose real name had been Kristjana, whose dad had been Icelandic and who was as short as Sven was tall. Traces of her were seen in Anna’s long nose and wide cheekbones and little chin, but she’d had dark almond eyes, and brown hair that even in her youth was striped with bands of wiry gray. She’d been photographed at the desk by the window, in the act of writing a letter, and Nina found that she was beginning to imagine herself living and working at the lake. These days her main duty at the publishing house (one she didn’t often admit to) was as a rewriter, reworking poorly written books, and other than for fitting in with the publisher’s schedule she had no obligations to be anywhere. She could spend part of the year in Norway and have people to stay; the people she loved could come and go in drifts. She saw, in her mind’s eye, Dr. Christos coming up the wooden steps, barefoot with bits of wood he’d found for the stove. Evidently she could imagine him there, for there he was, as if his visit were already a memory.

  All the July days they’d spent at the lake when she was young had merged into one, a single remembered holiday made from condensing all the summers. The visits had come to an end when Nina was fourteen, the year that she was openly bored, although the boredom wasn’t the reason. Grandpa Sven died. They had gone to the funeral together — Robert was excused — in head-to-toe black, Anna in a fitted suit and a hat with a veil like Jackie Kennedy. Anna said she’d have to do a lot more visiting from now on, a plan Robert wasn’t keen on, saying they should bring her mother over, to a good nursing home. But it didn’t matter in the end. Kristjana survived her husband only by one autumn, and then at Christmas she, too, was gone.

  Two of the photographs had become stuck in the envelope. Here was Anna at a wedding in a green silk dress, the one with the Chinese collar, her hair pinned and twisted in a complicated updo, and here she was pictured at a dance in a gold off-the-shoulder number. It occurred to Nina that she’d never seen a picture of her mother in which she wasn’t smiling. Anna had always kept the household buoyant. Had she known that Robert might fall out of love with her if her buoyancy faltered? Even if she had, she couldn’t have foreseen the catastrophe that would come when Nina went to university. Lately, Nina had come to feel at one with her mother on this question of jollity. She had felt, her whole married life, that she carried the mood of the marriage in herself, at once dictating and embodying it. If Nina was withdrawn Paolo took his cue and was more so, and the whole house took on a dreary aspect, the food like ashes in their mouths. Luca was different. Luca upped his own jollity and raised the morale. He would have said, “Come on, droopy face, we’re going out for dinner.” He would have found a funny film; he would have taken off his sock and talked to her via a hand puppet; he would have made a chocolate fondue; he would have instituted a thumb war; he would have insisted she dance with him; he would have been physically overpowering, dragging her off the sofa and rolling her across the rug, persisting until she smiled into his eyes and their bond was reestablished. That’s how Luca was, and they were all things he’d done with his sister-in-law already, at family get-togethers and on holidays. Paolo had never done any of them. Paolo seemed to expect Nina to provide; she was depended on as the source of fun and lightness in his life, as if Nina were really Anna all over again. This had been clear to Nina when she moved out, that Paolo had married her thinking he was marrying Anna, and that it had been a mistake. He’d referred, in the last conversation in their marital kitchen, to the trouble he’d had with her depressions. He was dragged down, he said, an
d he didn’t want to be dragged down.

  Nurse Yannis came in to see Nina, scowling. “Your light is still on,” she said. “You must turn it off and sleep.” The nurse’s initial friendliness seemed to have petered out, and nor had her mother come to the hospital to kiss Nina’s hands; it hadn’t been mentioned again. Had Nina annoyed or offended the nurse in some way? She turned off her light and lay blinking in the dark. Though she was aware that the repertoire of quotable days was small and repetitive, there remained many things to be nostalgic about. Though Luca wasn’t one of them. Not anymore.

  When Nina arrived to take Anna out to lunch the last time — though she hadn’t known it would be the last — her mother had been making a quilt by hand, out of old cut-up dresses. The radio was on and she hadn’t heard the door; Nina, who’d let herself in, surprised her by appearing in front of her, and Anna had knocked her sewing box onto the rug. They’d searched thoroughly and were confident they’d found all of the pins, but one had been missed. It had stuck in Luca’s foot, at 2:00 a.m. on the night after she died, when he was looking for his shoes. It had gone in deep and it had hurt him. Remembering this, lying sleepless in the island hospital, it was hard not to see it as a warning.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Nina looked at her watch for the fifth time.

  “When are you expecting him?” Dr. Christos asked, as if he didn’t already know.

  “About three. The boat gets in just before three.”

  “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Of course.” Nina found she was patting the sheet. She was sitting on top of the bed, dressed in white trousers and a thigh-length white smock, and long stone necklaces in sea blues and greens that she’d bought at the gift shop. Her arms were brown against the white.