Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  Or imagine that after a century, the woman in the painting—held aloft, long after Madame Fontaine’s death, the salon’s dismantling—still waits for the room to reassemble full scale, here in the living world. What if? Did you also, as a child, enter an unknown brilliant room? And in your rush of happiness presume that, in years to come, you’d return? That of course you’d live here.

  KATY’S PLACES

  First: the house in Newton, which in memory seemed to slide backward and shrink, the way her father had even then. As if James himself were the departing car, the receding lines of a midsized sedan, dark blue, spinning tires, red taillights, the rear window through which, each morning, one might glimpse his silhouetted head or only the reflections of trees. The sound would diminish, abate; in the evenings she’d wait for the reversal, the engine whir emerging from the weave of kid sounds and dog barks, leaf raking or snow shoveling or lawn watering along the block. In Newton, early on, the bay window: she could sit still then and wait, holding but not reading the illustrated book from which she remembered a forbidding gray castle with a cylindrical tower, the princess only a blur of pink.

  For Katy, the house in Newton first defined house. Her room painted yellow with white trim, a low wooden bed covered with stuffed animals; beside it, a dresser, a bookshelf, two bins in which she kept the toys of the moment, mostly miniature figures, human and animal, from various tableaux—farm scene, medical office, grocery—a postman in a blue uniform and a doctor in a white coat. For a brief time a Raggedy Ann that later became Molly’s. On the opposite side of the room, Molly had her own wooden bed, her own stuffed animals and dolls, her own bookshelf and dresser. Nora had painted yellow daisies on Katy’s dresser, pink ones on Molly’s. The house itself seemed indistinguishable from Nora: the most satisfying room the room Nora currently occupied. Though Katy explored, she did not stray far. Even when Nora hired a mother’s helper, Katy would trail Nora through the house.

  Theo seemed to care only that Nora was home. He did not wait by the bay windows for James to return from work—as if, confident their father would find him, he did not need to wait. Or as if he did not need anything. Theo’s room was from the start a separate realm into which Katy wandered only in his absence. Library books on volcanoes and stars, baseball cards, a dead butterfly, stones. Valuable because they were Theo’s.

  From the living room bay window she could see the Kellers’ blue house and the Santa Lucias’ white one, the O’Malleys’ lawn next door. She had lived there always—the same always occupied by Toby Keller and Elena Santa Lucia—a singular extending present interrupted only by summers in Blue Rock, where her father appeared not as a retreating car but as a laughing man.

  When the house in Newton emptied itself onto a truck, she ran back and forth across the unobstructed floors, tagging the walls, tagging them again, speeding past the sounds of her mother’s protests, as if her mother were a speaking television. She ran the stairs, the running becoming its own buffered sphere, like the interior of a car on the highway, a fast-moving bubble you stayed in apart from the world. You could go on forever, not expecting to be plucked from the driving rhythm, your body pulled straight up, grabbed and lifted by your father, today a full-sized man whose arms had you straitjacketed against his chest: Your mother said stop. But how crucial the motion, and you slapped at his arms, Katy, stop it, and the straitjacket seeming to tighten and you kicked and he kept saying enough now until you went limp and teary, after which he set you down, and Molly stood in the doorway watching while your mother told you to go get in the car with Theo, right now. And in the backseat, Theo watched you kick at the upholstery, until your mother brought Molly to the car. Out the window, the houses and trees began to pass as in a movie, and then a movie about highways and cars, one of them somewhere your father’s.

  After Italy, no one visited Newton again: for a time the house remained in her mind a space she could picture but never find her way back to, and one where Molly stood in the doorway, where Molly might still wear the pink pajamas and eat her toast alone. Eventually, in Blue Rock, the images from the Newton house began their retreat, becoming opaque and unpleasantly shadowed, like pond water in October.

  Later there was only Blue Rock, the always of Blue Rock the only apparent always—though always, too, the place her father was leaving behind (in her mind his car forever the same retreating sedan). It was the Shore Road house, pitched at the edge of the sea, Katy presumed to be indelible, her point of orientation not only from her college dorm and Tim’s Boston apartment but also from the string of increasingly large, well-appointed condos her father lived in, which she thought of as motels. In their North Shore house, James and Josie kept a bedroom they called Katy’s, a peach-and-white guest room with floral touches, hers, but only in relation to the other bedrooms or common spaces of the house: here she could close the door. Yet it was a room she entered only on scheduled visits, a house to which she did not own a key, in a town near the sea but not her town—and, strangely, not her sea. The beachside roads of Blue Rock, its cliff-side and harborside streets, the sand-filled town center became the measures by which she judged any elsewhere: Blue Rock or not–Blue Rock, Shore Road house or not.

  KATY WITH TIM

  When she and Tim agreed to live together, she first imagined Tim as he appeared across a polished table (the image from a bar downtown); and Tim in his bedroom (Tim’s body). The rest—to the extent that she imagined the rest—was borrowed from her father’s first condo in Cambridge (well if sparely furnished, fine natural light, the building brick, off Harvard Square) and bits from Blue Rock—her own bedroom, with its pastel walls and thick white bedspread and windows facing the sea. She’d finished college; graduation implied adulthood in a way that college had not. Tim arranged for a summer sublet, close to the T. They could move in together now, he said. A vital point: her paralegal job would begin right away (downtown, a high-end firm, thanks to Patrick Murphy). “A one-bedroom, a sublet, just for the summer,” she told first Nora and then James over the phone.

  Only the morning before the move did it occur to her that one-bedroom and summer sublet might have different connotations for Tim; or that the space she envisioned might be pure invention. Enough time to brace for the actual sublet, on the second floor of a saggy three-story building, its walls a patchwork of tattery brown-and-white wallpaper, one closet door punched in, mysterious stains on the ceiling and the mustard carpet. She managed to say nothing. She spent the first weekend scrubbing down the place, spread a sky-blue cloth on the kitchen table, flowered sheets on the bed. But it was a cardboard house, in a cardboard neighborhood, with only the sheerest divide between interior space and the overpacked block. In the heat, everyone’s windows stayed open. Walls hardly mattered.

  How was it that when she walked in Boston with Tim—on crowded streets, or the Common, at Fanueil Hall—she rarely considered the proximity of strangers? Most—even strangers right beside her—were unobtrusive. She’d attend to city pleasures, the familiar weight of Tim’s arm over her shoulders, Tim’s athletic grace. She’d forget about time; it later seemed those days of forgotten time were real life.

  But real life she could not access from the apartment. She and Tim worked opposite schedules, and the early weekday commute became a reprieve: here was a moment—if one without Tim—of leaving the house and that gray street for the broader and busier streets and the T, the air still cool; and then the buzz around Government Center, and the sense of possibility and purpose, into the river of women and men in suits and skirts and purposeful strides. At the office, the secretaries and paralegals poured coffee and shared pastries and greeted her by name. Her workdays felt clean, the time itself inflected by the well-groomed space and her research tasks.

  Yet at the end of the week, as the other staff collectively leaned toward the weekend, she faced a kind of exile. For the first month she spent her city weekends in the mysteriously stained apartment alone while Tim worked dinner shifts and stayed until close. Th
e street—the street that had become, distressingly, her street—had no green space, no shade. The heat would rise in a haze above the gray pavement.

  And over the course of the day, the haze transformed, it seemed, into noise: occasional shouts and throbbing music from apartments and from junk cars with bad mufflers and choking engines, party noise escalating at night. Tim remained untroubled: the apartment was temporary, and the worst noise subsided by the time he arrived home. Real life continued for him without disruption.

  The Friday the neighborhood noise reached its apex, Tim worked a double shift. Next door a skinny girl named Lori and her drummer boyfriend Todd threw a party that began at ten and each hour seemed to reach a grand crescendo only to extend to a later, grander one. It seemed as if partygoers had projected themselves into Katy’s sublet, smoking up the dingy kitchen and dank living room, stupidly flirting in her cramped bedroom, the flat air filled with the pounding of hard-soled shoes, amped-up guitar, an angry male cawing. Then a cloying jasmine incense—a failed attempt to mask the pot?—wafted in. Katy kept her lights off. The sound grew palpably weighty, both crashing and climbing skyward, until close to two, when a squad car arrived. A long-limbed cop stepped out, then a shorter one shaped like a turtle. The music went dead; the crowd dispersed almost instantly. One guy ran down the back alley while Todd was talking out front with the cops, head down, nodding.

  And after the cops had left and the party apparently shrank to a few loyal stragglers smoking cigarettes and clinking beer bottles on the porch, Todd yelled—from the middle of the street—“Who called the cops? You suck.” Pivoting slowly, 360 degrees. “You really suck.”

  Did she? The accusation seemed true, though she’d called no one. How was it that Todd had caused the disturbance, and she was a pariah? Yet the sensation remained, even after Tim returned from work and they’d made love, even after a short night’s sleep.

  On Saturday, when Tim left to pick up coffee, he ran into Lori and Todd outside, their voices floating up through the sublet’s windows. Too bad, Tim said, he couldn’t make the party. “You guys free for a while now?” Tim said.

  When he reentered the sublet, Tim offered Katy the coffee, kissed her on the mouth, and took a six-pack of beer from the fridge. “Hey, sweet pea,” he said, “you want to have a beer with Todd and Lori?”

  Katy pressed her lips together. “No thanks,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Okay, then,” he said, and left with the beer.

  Fleetingly, it seemed the water stains, the sticky heat, and the vegetable rot from the outdoor trash might emanate from Katy herself. As if she were a squalid thing in the squalid box she now resembled. And real life?

  She counted to twelve. Then she called Nora. “It’s just so hot in the city,” she said.

  “Honey,” Nora said, “how about a cool shower? Why don’t you take a shower and drink lemonade.”

  Honey.

  “Katy?” Nora said.

  “If I take the bus down, do you think you could meet me?” Katy said.

  That day, the house in Blue Rock was quiet but for faint shouts carried from the near beach. The girls were babysitting down the street. Katy drank a lemonade and slept for an hour in the room that was still her room, the bed that was still her bed. Awoke again herself—which suggested, of course, that she had not been herself. Who then had she been? The question hovered, casting a weird buzzy shadow. She could not answer. She was thirsty, but there would be more lemonade. And now, yes, she was home. She was herself. She put on a bathing suit and sat on the deck. Late that night, Tim drove down to the shore, and the two of them stayed at the house through Sunday dinner.

  For the rest of the summer, Katy spent the weekdays in Boston and tried to detach from small daily shocks: bare feet in urine drops Tim left near the toilet, a mouse drowned in the saucepan she’d soaked overnight. Each weekend she spent in Blue Rock.

  In late August, she and Tim moved to Cambridge, to a place she’d found on a side street not far from Porter Square, a large one-bedroom apartment in a solidly built house, beside other well-tended houses—houses with rosebushes, scattered maples, patches of grass, window boxes of geraniums. The apartment had good floors, good light, a white kitchen. Here she could be herself, couldn’t she? Live her real life? She found a running route through the upscale parts of Cambridge and around the Harvard campus, and sometimes she’d follow along the river. Tim worked Tuesday through Saturday; on Wednesdays, she’d meet James and Josie for dinner. On Fridays, she’d stop by the law firm’s happy hour.

  Still, her loneliness and all of its shadings surprised her. Even in the short days of late October, she felt the Friday rush hour impulse to find a bus to Blue Rock, or ride the red line to Braintree and catch a local there. Just before Halloween, she returned after work to the apartment, the streets already dark, the air already chilled, and found the familiar disarray—Tim’s running gear on the bathroom floor, unwashed dishes, beer but no groceries—and with it arrived a familiar despondency. No wildflowers or bowl of apples or shells on the kitchen table, no note for her, nothing like Blue Rock, where each room seemed to be as Nora left it, casually ordered, clean and unfussy.

  She’d thought—what was it? That she and Tim were together, which meant not only the sex and goofy singing but also—was she wrong?—that together you were in it—a shared space, a shared state. Once in Blue Rock she and Nora had been in it together, hadn’t they? With Sara and Delia. The it that was both house and more-than-house. Before the girls, there’d been another it, nameless but marked by the church steps in Rome, steps with Nora and Molly, then only Nora. Her father and brother seemed to recede into the distance, always, beyond a divide she could not cross. And if that divide began as a street or piazza (did it? she could no longer tell), it had long since metamorphosed. She’d never pictured Tim on the far side of that same divide—and still did not—but implicit, now-visible limits bounded whatever together she shared with Tim; apparently other divides existed. In truth, one might be separate and alone.

  Yet when Katy imagined her mother, Sara, and Delia together, she imagined them as a single unit, theirs the house within the house. Another us—or them—none of them alone. The house within the house seemed an undifferentiated space free of loneliness: if one occupied that space, one would, she presumed, be equally free. Here then the dream, or the impasse: the question was how to return, step inside, go back.

  And now through the apartment windows, the Cambridge trees appeared to be stage props. Here inside lay the crusted dishes, here the dirty laundry, despite her efforts. Again disorder had replicated; again the day confirmed that her simplest desires—the clean space, a conch shell on a bare wood table—were irrelevant; she herself irrelevant.

  She was failing, wasn’t she? Here, proof, in the face of which—what had spilled on the floor?—she found herself blinking. How pathetic her hopes, how plainly stupid. Not everyone is deserving, it turned out, some people, yes, but some are deluded, some cursed—how long can you pass? A clean space, a bowl of apples? No. She’d be denied these things—perhaps always. Even Tim, who loved her—or said he loved her, and in those moments seemed convinced—even Tim denied her these things. And how, yes, stupidly, that same day at the office, she’d laughed with her coworker Ava. A passing joke Ava made, a Halloween reception and a creepy senior partner—he can go as he is—Katy had laughed, both of them had laughed. As if she belonged in that office; as if beyond the office she possessed something, it, a home, a clean room, windows and trees, a table and a bowl of apples, a shell, perhaps a note signed xoxo, or yellow mums on the windowsill. No clothes on the floor, nothing dousing the little hope from Ava’s laugh, or trumpeting that Katy’s good things were dumb luck about to vanish.

  On his break after the dinner rush, Tim called. And how to explain anything to him?

  “I was running late for work,” he said. “Katy?”

  She was still teary, her voice clogged up and ugly. “Oh, don’t be sad, Katy,” he sai
d and promised to be more mindful (for a few days, he would be). He’d market tomorrow; tonight he’d bring her pumpkin pie. The next week, they’d decide to elope. “Be patient, sweet girl, just wait,” he said. He sang to her on the phone, an improvised riff about waffles, the maple syrup he’d bring home for breakfast.

  REPRODUCTION

  Magdalena Poenitens (Penitent Magdalen)

  Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1555–56) Etching with engraving

  This time, there’s a kingdom and beyond, craggy mountains and outcroppings of rock, quiet valley below, a curving river briefly divided by an island, banked by groves of trees etched as round and flame-shaped puffs, snug houses tucked in among them. Look left in the distance: at the river’s edge, here’s the fortressed town, on the bluff above it, a castle. Another bluff, another castle. In the right foreground stands a tall tufted evergreen, like a dancer’s ruffled dress. Singular, just not quite outsized, this tree—larger than the distant mountains and hills, the background castles, the rock outcroppings. The evergreen marks the edge of a hilltop forest: along the bluff runs a curved road. Two mules, one with a rider, make their way around the hillside.

  From all of this, the woman has secluded herself. In the right corner of the foreground, nearing the edge of the print, she’s tucked away in a rough shelter of spiked logs. Hidden from the road; nearly hidden from your view, and closer in scale to the tiny mules and their rider. She’s in shadow, though here’s her illuminating halo, and a small glowing cross. Here’s the ubiquitous skull, the open book.

  Her face is barely visible, her features suggestions. She reads—her book a world, or a doorway to a world?—ignoring the visual splendor, the mountains and river valley, the fortressed town and castles. In the distant sky hangs an orb with an elaborate cross.