Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  “She’s working on it,” Katy said, a note of warning in her voice.

  “Well, she should be,” James said.

  “If you tell her that?” Katy said. “You’d better send her a check.” Katy had become sharp-tongued—when had that begun? (Was it the boyfriend?) And too, she’d developed a mature woman’s body, solid-hipped, full-breasted, vexing. Sixteen. Hadn’t she been shy? Nothing about her seemed shy.

  “How long has the roof leaked?” he said.

  Katy shrugged. “A while.”

  And the image rose of a four-gallon bucket filling with water, a steady clear line from ceiling to bucket, dully pinging in the dark of the bathroom he’d retiled years ago.

  “Wait,” he said. “Isn’t there a light fixture in that ceiling?”

  “Oh,” Katy said. “We don’t use it.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, his face now hot. After he cleared the lunch plates and served the girls cookies, he wrote a three-thousand-dollar check to Nora.

  “Perfect,” Katy said.

  He’d just paid Theo’s tuition, the girls’ medical insurance; each month he contributed to their college funds. The latest check to Nora? He had not meant to defer, but then—what? Months ago he’d been impulsive with investments—a stock gambit had failed. He’d been stunned by his misjudgment; at least it was private, not professional. And now? He needed to transfer funds; he had not stopped at the bank. Next week he’d be paid. He loved his daughters—of course he loved them. Still, one gap, then another, would open between intentions and results.

  When he pictured the house (and often in those years he did not: his daughters simply appeared in restaurants or at the doors of train stations or cars, or in his own condominium), he pictured it as it had been before he moved out. If prompted, he could recall the flooded storage room, the seasonal wind damage, the annual need to regrade the drive and add gravel. But in his mind, the drive was well graded, and the house had neither a leaking bathroom ceiling nor a splintering deck. No, for James thick towels still filled the closets, along with new sheets, new boots, new coats; in the leak-free bathroom, amber glycerin soaps and pastel-handled toothbrushes lined the tile counter (these from the era the Murphys moved in year-round, after Rome, before Delia or even Sara—when Nora spent hours at the department store with Katy and Theo to distract them). What could he say of this? It was not the only slippage.

  He’d given up his marriage. You leave: you keep walking. You do not look back. Yet now back was not what it should be. Back fragments and leaps forward and adheres to your skin. And the mind slips; attempting to corral the whole and lock it in place both exhausts and makes you stupid. But if you can’t claim a present separate from the past? Then what? A kind of crushing. James could not have said how such a crushing might take place, only that a deathly sense washed over him. It was difficult to parse one story from another: how does anyone? No clean order, instead the tangled strands of boyhood and marriage and Rome further tangled with strands from his father, his mother, a line of dead immigrants and desperate farmers. But no. He had left. Leaving ought to mean leaving. Arriving ought to mean arriving. So again a boy escaped from a childhood apartment; once more a man reinvented his life. He had left, he had arrived: yet no matter. Nora’s notes appeared, redolent of a treacherous bygone era; the exigencies of the present still showed up slathered in history. What did he owe?

  The girls. His girls, his daughters. The younger ones seemed tall, though only compared to their younger selves: they were average height, or perhaps small for six and seven. Here they were, drawing birds and forests; here they were, playing Fish. A still point of clarity. Love: he loved them. But days later he would again feel suspended between lives, the bills for both too often converging, and again he’d defer, cross into a tightly fenced present, miss another due date. Nora would again send paper scraps, her messages hypercivil and snarky, Would you agree dental care for the girls is a sound idea?

  And again he would send a check, and again recommit himself to his present, evidenced by the condo he was renting, the house he was considering, the woman he was falling for. His daughters appeared in the present, lived in a house that belonged to their present. He needed to be mindful. But you could leave, you could start again, couldn’t you? Start, this time, with a patent attorney named Josie Brundige, thirty-eight and lovely, intelligent, single, free of trauma. He had taken her to lunches and dinner and the symphony, and three times made love with her at her Back Bay apartment. He’d been looking at houses along the North Shore commuter line. Maybe he’d marry again. Redouble his efforts. He would, he told himself, introduce the girls to Josie.

  “How about the supermarket?” Katy said. He had tucked away his checkbook; he’d suggested mini-golf.

  “That’s what you want to do today?” he said. “Grocery shop?”

  “Well,” Katy said, “mini-golf later? But we could get ice cream—Sara, Delia,” she said, “don’t you want ice cream? And pick up a few other things.”

  “Mint chip,” Delia said.

  “Okay,” Sara said.

  In the supermarket, Katy filled the cart with premium brands. Provolone cheese and sliced ham from the deli, albacore tuna, tins of cocoa, chocolate-covered grahams.

  “That’s a lot of cocoa,” he told her. “A lot of ham.”

  “My coach recommends ham,” she told him. “I’ll just take the extra back with me.”

  She was, it seemed, as scrappy and canny as Nora—perhaps as scrappy and canny as James himself.

  “Of course,” he said. “Get whatever you want.”

  REPRODUCTION

  The Magdalen Reading

  Rogier van der Weyden (c. before 1438)

  NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

  A young woman ignores the drama around her; it seems she has learned to leave the room without her body. White head scarf, white book open in her hands, her dress a swath of green matching the grass beyond the background windows. A silent still point. The rectangular windows echo columns of text. It’s as if her scarved head and the white book are contiguous; as if the text transports her out of the room. She’s seated on a low cushion, immersed, though around her various red-and-blue-robed saints—Saint John, Saint Joseph—make their way toward the now-missing panel of the Virgin and child. But this panel, her panel, centers on the green, green dress and the young woman’s face—a clear white oval, eyelids half-moons floating over the book, lips dark pink and closed. On the floor beside her stands a curved white jar, white as the book, white as her head scarf, curved as her body beneath the green dress, settled here in the room of walking saints, whose own bodies block her exit, even as she travels beyond.

  She seems unaware of the saints, the painter, anyone else. Say she has the privacy of thought: perhaps the view out the window—a green field, a lake—reveals her interior life.

  A distinctive face, luminous: study her the way the artist did and you might grieve the loss of her, this contemplative girl, whoever she was, the passing centuries thin as light. And say you recognize something about her? How might you find her again, between here and the fifteenth century? Between here and a verdant elsewhere.

  SARA AT NIGHT

  The quietest Murphy, at least in those years. Like Theo, she preferred the company of books; like Nora, she took up drawing early. Shy, at times skittish. During family arguments she’d hide or daydream. Sweet, people called her. A good girl. She’d make drawings—birds, boats, flying beach umbrellas—she’d give to family members; she’d leave sea glass on the windowsills, pick rosehips and goldenrod and sometimes Queen Anne’s lace.

  She frightened easily: anger frightened her, including her own. She did not know how to insist. She did not know how to object. Mistreatment stunned her. In response, she would freeze, or rush away, or, if necessary, appease. Unnerved most often by Katy. A quick learner, an intelligent girl, and yet perennially bewildered. It seemed Theo and Katy and her parents shared a knowledge—or a separate realm?—to which Sara had no ac
cess and Delia was oblivious; perhaps there was no more room. Say she lived instead on a tree branch nearby, one that might snap and drop into the sea. Perhaps they would not notice. Her mother could be distractible, forgetful—how easily might she forget Sara? Already, for small moments, it had happened. A discordant silence came and went. Evidence of a deficit somewhere: was it, then, in Sara? So it seemed. Call it an inchoate sense of missing. In dreams her body became a stranger’s, her arms and legs went lifeless. She was still young when her sleep disturbances began; part of most nights she was awake while the others slept. During her grade-school years, she would wander the house—there was pleasure in wandering the house at night—and sometimes she’d doze in the living room or on warm nights watch the sky from the deck. Because of those nights, she glimpsed Katy and Tim half-naked on the deck, pressing against each other rhythmically, and later passed out on the deck chairs.

  She studied her parents, her sisters, studied Theo, who seemed to assert himself the way her father sometimes did. Theo could be sweet to her: often Theo would make her laugh. And when he visited from college—and he did sometimes, especially in the summer—in the first days they’d play beach games with Delia, they’d go to movies and make sundaes and together they’d read books. At first, she’d feel bolstered, in some way brave. But after a time he’d become irritable, withdraw into his own books and squint at interruption; he’d squabble with Nora about the car and end up taking his bike—to the harbor, he’d tell them—and return the next afternoon. And in better moods, he would sit on the deck and drink beer—with Tim, when he was there. Then Katy would become snappish. Theo would ignore her, ignore Delia and Sara though Sara herself had not changed. The games and beach walks that had pleased him before had not changed. But maybe it was her lack. Perhaps he’d run short of patience for her; perhaps he had good reason. Toward the ends of his visits, he’d cheer up, but his happiness—like her father’s heartiness—seemed staged and fleeting.

  His third year in college, Theo began to bring a girlfriend to visit. Between visits the girlfriends changed. Nora would shrug; Sara would move into Delia’s room, giving her own room to Theo and his friend. In the day, the girlfriend might sleep in the sun on the deck or walk in the tidal shallows, dreamy and remote, like a girl in a painting. At night, Theo and the girl would retreat into Sara’s room. As usual, Sara wandered. From the upstairs hall, she could hear Theo and his girlfriends, her own bed creaking and the women moaning, and her brother moaning. Whispered laughs behind the door. She wanted to hear and then unhear them; later she’d try to remember and unremember.

  At some point, Theo’s girlfriends ventured to the bathroom. Sometimes Sara was in the hall with her glass of water, and the girl saw her and waved an embarrassed wave—the girl maybe wearing a T-shirt, her legs slender, her toenails painted. Her bare feet appeared elegant and frank. The girl would duck into the bathroom, and Sara would hear the sound of running water. Sara would return to Delia’s room, where Delia heard nothing; Delia slept through everything. And in the morning, Sara was tired, always tired, but alert, watching Theo in the kitchen, now the more ordinary Theo, and his girlfriend, who was showered and neatly dressed and contentedly sipping coffee. Theo flirted with their mother and with Delia and the girlfriend, he flirted with Sara, and she smiled hesitantly. Lighten up, doll, her mother might say, and Sara would stand close and let Nora pet her head.

  Though there was the morning at breakfast when Sara answered the phone and a cheerful voice, a woman, a Shelley, asked for Theo. Sara held out the phone to him, saying, “Shelley?” and their mother glanced up, and the visiting girlfriend whose name was not Shelley paled and swallowed coffee in small rapid sips. Theo took the call on the extension, and Delia inquired with great seriousness about the girlfriend’s ear piercings (sometimes, even then, Delia could step up this way). No one mentioned Shelley again, or the French-braided girlfriend, who never returned.

  If Theo was in a hurry to leave—he was often in a hurry—Sara might find the bedroom strangely disordered, her bedside books and her embroidered pillow and stuffed animals lumped in a corner. As if it were still, or again, his room. The sheets were damp in patches or crusted and streaked with white stains, a gamy-salt smell rising, a slight low-tide reek. She’d push open one of the windows, let sea air rush in, pull the sheets from the bed and drag them down to the laundry room and stuff them in the washing machine before Nora got to them. Tucking in the clean sheets was harder, but Katy would help, as if in commiseration or tacit agreement to shield Nora (though from exactly what? Sara could not say). The disorder seemed at times a kind of aggression. She was eight. She felt a queasy buzzing, the heat that could precede tears. If anyone had asked Theo then, he would have answered, surprised, I had to pack, I had to go, certain that was the only truth.

  Katy reminded Theo to change the sheets, but he didn’t always, and then the mess seemed all the more deliberate. Sara would strip the bed and a mixed-up kind of shame would resurface. At least Katy would roll her eyes and clown. Let’s clear the air in here, Katy would say, and sometimes, Let’s clean this place up and go for sundaes. Like their mother, Katy could fall into distraction, her gestures slowing while she gazed out a window, her lips pressed together, brow furrowing. It didn’t last long. Sara herself daydreamed; they all watched the sea. In those moments, loneliness would settle into Sara, persisting until she called Katy back, and until Katy shook off distraction and smiled, until Katy told her, Let’s go.

  AT THE PATRICK MURPHYS’

  Before Rome, one Murphy family must have appeared a close variation on the other: the men in successful careers, the homes in well-off suburbs, three children close in age, Murphy dimples, deep-set Murphy eyes, often tending to blue. Patrick’s wife, Carrie, was also Boston Irish and slender, though dark-haired and slightly taller than Nora. There were mirrored bits of history: Patrick and James together at Blue Rock, Patrick and James caddying. And then Rome—the paths radically diverged—and the divorce. But when you looked closely, the histories contrasted more starkly: Without Rome, would another branching have occurred? Had she asked herself, Nora would have thought so. James might not have seen it: he had worked to bridge the gap, envisioned closer convergence. After Rome, the Patrick Murphys called often, visited less; postdivorce, James would meet Patrick for dinner or golf, join his family for holidays. A certain boyhood reprise. For a time, Nora kept in contact with Carrie, exchanging Christmas cards and well-wishing notes, sending birthday gifts for the kids.

  Better genes? Some families, Katy thought, even families with your name, were charmed, surrounded by a force field of safety and ease. How was it you could share a name and not the magic? A nameless failing. Or a curse? To her the Murphy cousins seemed free of trouble, or almost free. She knew, for example, that Brian, the youngest and most gregarious, had a reading tutor. And this year Pamela—a serious figure skater, pretty, well liked—had fallen and injured her leg just before competition (sidewalk ice, no one’s fault). She’d hobbled around, crushed. But everyone else rallied; the fracture healed; she was back on the ice. She still got to be Pamela, the way she’d known herself to be. Her brothers—Brian born the same year as Molly—remained her brothers; her parents stayed together.

  As long as Katy could remember, the Patrick Murphys had lived in the same house in Wellesley. Now she rarely saw them, but when she did it seemed she’d opened a children’s book she’d once read every day. They aged but remained the same: Aunt Carrie’s same perfumy hugs, Uncle Patrick’s jokes and kisses on her cheek, Pam’s shy waves hello. Each time, the boys—playing street hockey or watching a TV game—seemed to stop without resentment, and call her name and invite her to join.

  The house itself: windowed rooms opening out into more rooms. Nothing was a single color, or even a color you could name: the sofas and chairs covered in fabric densely woven with several threads, so you could only say, More blue than gold, or compare the fabric to something else—a season or a kind of holiday. Polished woo
d floors, Persian carpet, Mexican tile in the kitchen. Bowls of flowers on the tables, potted trees near the den windows, beyond which the lawn appeared an almost iridescent green.

  Pam and her brothers seemed blithely unaware of what it all meant.

  Her father had always wanted to be like Patrick, Katy could see that. Who could blame him? It seemed the Patrick Murphys paid no price. But wishes did not matter, Katy thought. Her father should know: you didn’t get to choose which sort of Murphy to be.

  Now they’d been invited to a barbecue at the Patrick Murphys’, Katy and her sisters with her father. Her father said please. He said, “Please come with us, Katy. I hope you will.” He’d asked her on the phone. She’d paused. (Nora had recently told her: think. How? Katy asked. “Press your lips together and count to six,” Nora said.) So Katy told James, “Okay,” and pressed her lips a second time to listen to the details.

  The day was, briefly, like a return to another life, one she had misplaced. The adults and kids milling through the house and vast yard seemed friendly, unsurprised to see her, as if she were another of the Patrick Murphys, as if in this place she might belong. Two eighth-grade girls hired as babysitters played with Delia and Sara: at the Patrick Murphys’, Katy could do whatever she wanted. With her cousins and their friends, she played badminton. For a time along the traffic-less road they threw a Frisbee, and when they tired of running, threw the Frisbee for the dog. For a time she joined her sisters in the pool.

  And the woman. How casual, the way Katy met her. Reddish-blond hair, willowy. Elegant. In shorts and a plain T-shirt, but elegant. She was at the picnic table; she gave Katy some tongs for corn, and spoke to Katy as if Katy were one of the Patrick Murphys. She had noticed Katy at badminton with the boys; she’d seen her running for the Frisbee. “You must play something,” she said. “Or run?” She herself was a runner, a runner friend of Carrie’s. She introduced herself as Josie.