Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  Even when the game ended and the throng exited Fenway into the city, despite the crowded sidewalks and occasional shoving, James’s elation did not end, not yet, but morphed into a sensation of contentment and possibility, as if he and Theo could go anywhere. Nothing distinguished them from the fathers and sons heading into restaurants or to evenings in unfamiliar towns: all seemed equal. Had he described it, James might have used the word normalcy, considered the day a return from exile.

  When they arrived at the house, the late-day light was clear gold, the bay cobalt. Katy and a redheaded MacFarland girl raced bikes up and down the empty street; on the deck, Nora paged through an art magazine while Sara dozed on her lap. They had dinner; James drank a cold beer. Theo described the three-run homer; Nora laughed, reached over and mussed Theo’s hair. A routine gesture of hers before but not since. It was and was not the same gesture; and the laugh clearly genuine, clearly hers but slightly altered, as if he had heard it from the next room. Was there, too, a missed beat? He paused, but then Sara threw her spoon on the floor.

  “So much for the spoon,” Nora said, and held out a pacifier.

  “Next weekend,” Katy said, “Lucy MacFarland’s coming back.”

  The bicycling redhead? “Oh good,” James told her. “How was your ride? Tires okay?”

  “I won,” Katy said. “But it didn’t really count.”

  “You were fast,” Theo said, apparently in a mood to like Katy.

  And then James was clearing the table, and washing dishes, and working on financials for the New York office while Katy read from a textbook covered in craft paper, her name repeated in wavy emerald letters on the front piece. Theo hid in a novel. Nora bathed Sara and settled her in her crib.

  Later, as James readied for bed, Nora smoothed cream on her hands, efficient and unself-conscious, and he could see then her deep fatigue, which of course had inflected her laugh. (Were there other inflections? He stopped at fatigue.) Recently, they’d begun to have sex again, gingerly, when not exhausted. He set out clothes for the morning: white shirt, gold tie, sepia shoes. She perched at the edge of the bed, watching him, her gaze shifting from the pressed suit to his face to the sepia shoes. Her thin blue robe adhered to the lines of her clavicle. “I’m pregnant,” she said. She addressed the pressed suit. “I need this to be okay.”

  How astonished they’d been when she became pregnant with Theo; happy with Katy. And Molly, yes, they’d planned for three. With Sara, anxious, but too the hope of—what?—a redemption? A turning away from death. Say you make that turn; say you see glimmers of redemption. Now another child? For the first time, the news less welcome; for the first time, a wish to stop. And yet that turning away; and yet those glimmers, the wish impossible.

  He and Nora were altered, this an altered life he could not steer. (Had he thought, for a moment, he could steer?) But okay. Nora was pregnant. Nora was waiting.

  He affected serenity. “How are you feeling?” he said.

  “Tired.”

  He nodded and crossed the floor to the bed. Do this, he thought, and mussed her hair. Do this, he thought, and kissed her.

  SMALL GIRLS AND KATY

  At first Katy would have to remind herself, almost daily: Delia Delia Delia. They’d grown accustomed to Sara, the baby who was not-Molly, although there had been moments when one or another of them would slip, using Molly’s name. It didn’t happen often. You’d hear the name aloud, then a flat confused silence before a change of subject. “You’re all Murphys,” Nora would say. “Sara with a touch of Connor.” No one argued. But the other baby photos revealed clear variations: Katy with the darkest hair, Theo fair, eyes deep-set, Sara’s baby face more oval. Molly and Delia round wide-eyed babies you could not tell apart.

  “Take a look at your Murphy cousins,” Nora said. “It’s all the same picture.”

  It was harder now to remember everything of Molly, even to say that laugh, that voice was Molly’s, this one Delia’s, because Delia too was a little wild, her happiness, her sobbing already dramatic, already washing across Molly’s first expressions.

  Molly as a four-year-old remained more distinct. Katy’s memory diverged from Theo’s, holding to different details and perhaps different Mollys. Italy blurred: a church, a heavy door beyond which a high ceiling appeared roped with gold, paintings of apostles and saints swooning. But there was more than one church, and another swooning on the street. Nora naked, washing. The back of Molly’s dress, her legs moving, almost in flight. And now Katy couldn’t say for sure where they were standing. Or sitting? She’s supposed to keep hold of Molly’s hand. Sometimes Molly shakes her hand away—so typical of Molly. Sometimes Molly lets go and holds out her palm, so that Katy can give her a coin. But are they in Rome? The flat palm, a copper round. In Newton, Katy gave Molly pennies.

  And for a moment, Molly might have sat outside the church, but she did not sit on the bed with Theo and their mother. No one wants to leave the bed. Glasses of water appear. Katy will have to move from the spot beside her mother when her father and Molly come back, of course. The coveted space, the space she is always giving up; but where are they? It’s taking too long. If they return, she will relent, offer the space without complaint. There are splinters of hot light at the curtain’s edges, and she has to turn her head toward the pillow. She clings to her mother, and then her father returns without Molly. Every time he returns, it is without Molly. Here the story never alters, and here the same pinprick recognition: after the truck, the blood, how could she expect Molly back?

  With the little girls, Nora was worn out, but she had also returned—the playful Nora Katy had forgotten. Nora’s false laugh, the tinny one, erupted only around people she disliked, the real laugh until now a remembered thing they’d gone without. Katy waited for it to fill other moments, but nothing she tried made Nora laugh, and in the failure Katy found a thick clumsiness, and the sad puzzle as to why it took the little girls to bring her mother back, her own efforts doomed from the start. But the little girls called—Tee, Sara called her—and Delia reached for Katy, squealed when Katy entered the room. With them Katy too felt lighter, and part of her mother’s lightness. When the girls were sleeping and she occupied a room alone with her mother, she was no longer as light. She was simply Katy.

  And still there were moments when her mother faded out: you had to watch for lapses. She might start to make sandwiches, and then leave the room, forgetting, or might drive halfway to the market before turning and driving to the library. Dropping into the space that was what? Katy kept watch, herded the little girls whenever they went out. She would have liked to tell her father that her mother still dreamed in the middle of the day, but he was hardly home at all.

  Between her parents, a rising disturbance. Their Newton way of fighting had been looser, more dramatic and somehow less serious, airy, the big gestures also self-consciously cartoonish: eventually they’d made bug eyes at each other, or stuck their tongues out. But this fighting was different, guarded and tense, the low chattering of dinner plates on a heavy wobbling tray, a rapid clacking punctuated by a stomp or a word—no or lonely or go—and blown through with shushing. Katy and Theo listened together, the fight becoming an approaching train, moving closer and closer and reaching a crescendo only yards away, then—as if their eavesdropping were apparent—retreating, ssh clack ssh clack ssh.

  Weekends and evenings when her father was home his arms were full of baby girls, or he was reading his files, or speaking heartily on the phone. He was difficult to catch. In winter, Katy forwent the luxury of sleep and padded down to the kitchen just after 6:00 AM and found him alone with his coffee, already in his suit. He stood at the counter eating a muffin, scanning the paper. On good mornings he called her K-kat. K-kat, what’s up today? Some mornings he kissed her on the cheek. Some mornings he mussed her hair. Cereal for you? he offered. She shrugged and poured herself a glass of milk. Blueberry muffin? he said.

  It was the prize for getting up early, these moments with h
er father, the added prize of a muffin. But the moments were brief: the little girls woke early, and soon they were in the kitchen with her mother. Soon one or another of them was on her lap—Delia either cranky or lively, Sara quiet and vague—and Katy was coaxing them to eat Cheerios, trying to minimize the spills. The girls babbled and tossed Cheerios on the floor, and their city-bound father slipped away while Katy was distracted, forgetting a kiss good-bye.

  NORA’S COLLECTION

  It began haphazardly and remained on the cheap, the color values erratic. In high school, Nora kept a few of Meg’s reprinted Annunciations; in college, she taped postcards and museum sale posters to the cinder-block walls, reproductions she imitated in her own first paintings. When she first lived with James, she’d save exhibit postcards friends mailed from abroad, or pick them up at local shows, or cut pages from old books or magazines. The Dutch, the Italians, a handful of the French, stored in shoe boxes she’d cover in colored gift-wrap. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Ruisdael, Da Vinci, Bernini. La Tour, Matisse, Vuillard. The Magdalens she’d call “sad Marys.” The backs of many remained blank, as if waiting for inscription, though some had vacationers’ scribbled messages, dates and stamped locations. On the dresser of the bedroom she shared with James in Blue Rock, Nora kept two small frames in which she displayed favorites; on the wall beside the north window hung a corkboard on which she posted others, changing them according to mood.

  Rarely, she’d hang a portrait—say, a Vermeer—in the kitchen, above the girls’ semi-fauvist paintings and drawings of flying kids and orange swans, or tiny boats skimming over the blue outline of a hand. Her drawings from school she kept in a thin brown portfolio in her closet. In a happier moment, two of her paintings—the ones Theo kept—hung in the upper hallway at Blue Rock. A pink-toned Vuillard-influenced interior, and a portrait of Nora’s mother reading.

  ANOTHER SUMMER

  She dreamed of driving in the rain in what seemed to be Paris, though she was driving a station wagon. It was an uncomplicated plot: she needed to get home before the school bus carrying Theo and Katy; she needed to pick up Molly from the babysitter. She was running late—why was she running late? She’d been visiting her other life, a friend, a museum, something that James and the children had no part in. And now she was driving, and though brick buildings and green parks flashed by, she seemed to be driving in place.

  How transparent, her dreams, but recognizing their transparency did not prevent their repetition or the accompanying anxiety, or alter her waking life. Of course, in this dream Molly lived, and waited at the babysitter’s (though where were Sara and Delia?), and for a moment after Nora awoke, Molly still waited, and then the dream gave way. Wind gusts whipped the side of the house, and when they subsided she could hear the little girls in their room, Delia chatting then calling for her.

  She did not speak to James about these dreams, believing he’d be irritated by their repetition or by her dream portraits of him: he was never there to pick up the children, never there to collect Molly from the babysitter’s (though in truth, he devoted weekends to the family). But the days and weeks accumulated when they’d forgo not only talk about dreams, but anything beyond the tasks of the day, both of them in rigid traces. Some days Nora had no chance to shower, others no chance to eat. Often, James returned at eight, exhausted. Small daily affections, ordinary endearments—at first with subtexts of a promised later—took a perfunctory spin as the fatigue accumulated, the space between them widening. On bad days, “sweetheart” meant What now? or Again? or No. Not the first marriage sustained by etiquette, but after a while, you begin to lose track. Some days, James appeared to her as dreamless and drone-like, if also—and unjustly—impatient. Her weeks seemed a cast-iron box containing the house and children, which she hoisted and carried without respite, few moments to acknowledge she was lonely.

  Yet this: the salt breeze, the taste of salt breeze. Always she took solace from the shore—even returning from the supermarket, you’d move from the main onto secondary roads and then, finally, near the cliffs of Blue Rock, you’d catch the first glimpse of the sea, the view as you approached unfolding, sapphire and vast, once you crested the hill.

  She followed the road along the cliff, which then veered inland and down toward the harbor, brilliant now too in the afternoon, sailboats rocking on their moorings, and in the distance other white triangular sails cutting fast across the blue. The road led around and down to another access road, to the beaches, to Shore Road.

  There was one last good summer. As the weather warmed, the tensions between Nora and James began to fall away. He arranged for two weeks off, and the first morning left bed at sunrise and ran, before anyone else had stirred. There was, in both of them, a listening, something perhaps instilled by the sea, Nora might have said, though James would say only that the summer calmed him. They had not expected to return to each other so quickly, and did not mention it, as if saying anything might sweep away what seemed itself another dream. Yet, in that moment, it was as if they were younger, a sensation at once new and comfortingly familiar, James his playful attentive self.

  Two weeks of runs in the mornings; two weeks of lounging with Delia and Sara on the beach. Once, he and Katy lunched together down at the harbor front; once, he and Theo rented a canoe and paddled along the cove. In the late afternoons, he and Nora had drinks with the neighboring MacFarlands; evenings, if the wind was down, dinner out on the deck. He and Nora did not argue; it seemed they had nothing to argue about. It had something to do with the air, the body giving over to the place. Blue Rock lulled him; in summer it had always lulled him. Soon there was little beyond the immediacy of the moment. In the morning, he would find the daily Globe, quickly skim it, and set it aside, shedding interest in anything beyond the requirements of the day or the house or the schedule of tides.

  And in Nora, the rigidities, the resistances melted away: she found, then, the return of desire. The cumulative effect of the light, shifting from orange at sunrise to clear lemon, of the sky’s cornflower blue streaked by high white cirrus clouds. The sea became cobalt, red tones tinting the waves late in the day; when the sky was overcast, a deeper green tipped by whitecaps. Sunsets to the west still splashed pink into the eastern sky and across the water, the clouds reflecting the pink and the water reflecting the clouds. There was the cumulative effect of the tidal lapping, the black starry nights and the paler black nights, the curved reflections of the moon; the cumulative effect of breathing, of no longer holding her breath, not knowing until then that she had been. The effect of her late-night stirrings, when she would slip outside, barefoot and in her robe, to the deck or even to the beach, downwind from the open house, so that the breeze would sweep away all sounds. Then she could let herself tumble, let a spasm of breathless grief pass through her, after which she again found the air, and leaned back and watched the stars. Sometimes James found her there and led her back to bed, and he was, then, her James, his the body she would fall into.

  And when he began again his commute to Boston, the hours of light stretched long enough to give him clear pink early mornings, and the late hours of syrupy light, the shift through orange to indigo; more drinks with Joan and Pete MacFarland, easy dinners on the deck, the kids content after their days at the beach, Theo reading, Katy beading bracelets and showing them to James, the little girls climbing onto his lap.

  August thunderstorms, predawn lightning cracking wide the black sky over the black sea, jagged lines to the northeast, and the felt-sense of water spilling over in the dark. The weather Nora loved to sleep in, and often could not, because the little girls would wake. There was a lull in the storms, the rain diminishing to a mild drizzle, when James got up. She would later remember wanting him to stay in bed with her, to make love before the kids woke, and after to loll in bed listening to the rain, as they used to. “Come back,” she said, and for a moment he did. For a moment he lay against her, skin damp and smelling of soap and of James, the clove/shaved-wood smell she thought
of as his. She could feel his weight, and wanted to stay like this, with the rain falling, and the sea sounds mixing in, and the world beyond the room asleep.

  A moment. Then he was dressing in a wheat linen suit and blue shirt and striped tie, transforming himself into the citified James, and he was down the stairs. In a few minutes the scent of coffee began to rise. In the distance, a faint rumble, another storm coming through. The little girls would call any minute, and the morning’s ease or difficulty would depend on how the storm affected them, how well they’d give over to a change of plans. Because there was in these storms a permission to ignore the day as you’d expected it would be, to break open the hours, follow their eccentric configurations. The lightning streaked over the sea, jagged but oddly delicate, followed by tremendous thunder. After dawn, the sea was gray-green and ribbed with whitecaps, and yes, she could hear the little girls, a somewhat plaintive “Mama,” from Sara. And when Nora went to find them, Delia was standing up in her crib, facing the window, watching the fat streams of running water, her face ecstatic.