Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  It was after 3:00 AM when James appeared in his robe. “That’s a good chair,” he said. Would she mind if he read on the couch? He carried in blankets, one for each of them, and an issue of Time, though he soon dozed. He appeared self-contained even in sleep—unlike Delia, who flung her arms and disordered the sheets, her face suggesting the quality of her dreams. Rare to see James sleep, so there was not much to compare. Might your sleeping self change over time? Maybe for someone like James, it stayed constant. Say you could enter sleep the way you could enter a beautiful room and close the door. Did anyone do that? The place she eventually drifted to was not a beautiful room but a calmer blankness, and when she later woke, her father was there on the couch, still self-contained, still himself.

  A turn? Was that the moment? The day her mother dropped her off in Beverly, the night her father found her drawing by flashlight? Or perhaps the moment in which a turn became clearly visible. Other moments had accrued before this—those summer weekends? He’d been more attentive since the downsizing. Still: James on the couch. Her father. In that moment (though for how long?) a father she might trust.

  Perhaps the father Sara had glimpsed as a toddler and forgotten? He’d never spoken sharply to Sara, at least that she could remember; he’d never been unkind. Had been, at times, affectionate and playful. But more often faraway, reduced to an idea. And what about money? That unkindness. The missing support unavoidable now—but before? She had thought it foolish—at best misguided—to rely on him for anything that mattered.

  In the morning James offered to make breakfast. Delia came downstairs in her pajamas and robe, Josie in her suit. Coffee brewed, glasses of orange juice appeared. And when Josie left for work, James called the high school to get the girls’ assignments, insisted Sara and Delia make a schedule (including a walk, including snacks), and cleared the table for them to work.

  And so they shaped those days, during which they received only short calls from Nora. In the late afternoons, Sara napped for an hour; nightly the den scene repeated. Delia grew quiet, and there was in both girls a strained attentiveness, as if they were listening for a distant bell. The Blue Rock house was lost but did not seem lost. Certain things Sara did not say, even to Delia, but a corner of the mind allowed: if in your mind, the house existed, might it also exist somewhere else? If you reached the correct universe, the correct highway exit. Say there was another space in which the house might still exist. Say that, like your house, your mother had dropped out of sight: if you were to find one, would you find the other? An alternate house, with an alternate Nora?

  “Sweetheart,” James said. “You really must sleep.” He handed Sara a glass of milk with honey. “Maybe no more chocolate at night?” This time he patted her head, and walked her up the stairs.

  Nora had never forgotten to pick up Delia or Sara; she was rarely late. Still—if she did not return? Meg’s phone connected them only to Meg and Louis—both alarmingly gentle—who would take messages and then speak with James. Nora called sporadically. A few more days, she said. I might have a place. She told them to go to the mall for new clothes. With your father, she said. Remember hats. Remember gloves. She would phone again tomorrow. And for a time—a few hours—the strain diminished, and they would concentrate on their schoolwork, or cook for James and Josie, or shop for hats and gloves.

  But only hours. They would want to speak to Nora again, and instead again reached Meg. They did not in those first days speak to Katy, who remained with Tim’s parents in Blue Rock. Katy was fine, James assured them. Connor and Tim were fine.

  After a few days, Delia began to miss her favorite jeans, a black-and-pink cardigan, long earrings made of dice, her suede boots; Sara a white lamb’s wool sweater, her turquoise-and-coral pinky ring, her pale green robe. Other longings accumulated. For a few days, James drove the girls the two hours to school in Blue Rock, stayed on the South Shore, and drove them back to Beverly. Hardly a workable plan. No one mentioned transferring schools; for a time the thought hovered, unarticulated. But after a week, Nora announced she’d found a three-bedroom condo in central Blue Rock, near the harbor and the high school.

  And when Sara and Delia returned with Nora to Blue Rock—the roads lined with half-melted snowbanks and slush and chunks of gray ice, the sky a matching diffident gray—town seemed exactly the same town they’d left, yet also (and deliberately) estranged. As if the town, downsizing by a fraction, had picked which house to burn, which residents were unnecessary. This impression persisted despite daily offers of help from neighbors and friends, the high school faculty, the swim team, the owner of the Harbor café. They did not drive down to Shore Road—though from the harbor at night you could see out to where the road approached the pond, and the cluster of house lights, and their pocket of dark space.

  The condo was at first an undifferentiated emptiness, each room a beige-carpeted box. Beyond the windows, strips of snow-covered lawn bordered a row of saplings, the buildings nearer the harbor, the parking lot. Some days it seemed as if they’d been traveling, their luggage misplaced, their dislocation temporary as they waited for their possessions and the house itself to catch up with them. And in fact for months relied on card tables and folding chairs—which did nothing to break the illusion. In the morning Sara woke, still oriented to the obsolete world, then readjusted. She did not miss Katy or Tim or Connor, but the notion recurred, if fleetingly, of a waiting house in a parallel world from which they all had become detached.

  She did not have language for this. None of them did. Delia referred to their lost possessions as “old,” which made them sound outgrown, deliberately discarded. While Nora navigated the insurance (she’d kept up her payments, a small miracle), she perseverated about “value,” of which there seemed to be many kinds. Other language dropped out: for weeks, no one mentioned the daily tides.

  On the phone, Katy—now house-hunting—spoke confidently of square footage and school systems. It seemed that, if one Katy had fallen apart in the motel room, another—assertively pragmatic—had popped up after she left. No one spoke about the motel—at least not directly—but between Nora and Katy, that silence marked a new, decisive border.

  A paradox: for Nora and the girls, daily life became easier. The condo’s location simplified their routines—the walk to school, a longer walk or fast bike to the harbor, five minutes to the office. Perhaps, Nora mused, she should have sold years before (though now her windows looked out on a patch of brown grass and snow, a row of other condos); perhaps she should have rebuilt. She’d been lucky to get a high price for the lot; erosion would continue to wear at the near beaches and seawall and access roads, storms would tear at the houses. But that year without the sea—and after—she felt irrevocably diminished. As if the horizon had steadied her, somehow shielded her from the raw, workaday substrate of each morning.

  Still, at first Nora insisted no one visit Shore Road even to see the MacFarlands, whom they would meet in town. Sara and Delia pretended not to care. But when the ice was gone from the roads, Sara biked to the beach. She could still see the lines of the foundation; she could almost imagine the house rising up, almost imagine Nora climbing the air where the stairs had been, or imagine herself floating where her bed must have stood. Now there was a clear view from the far side of the street and the more distant pond to the sea. From the air it must have appeared as a gap in the string of houses, a lost tooth. That day Sara gathered stones and shells from the beach: if she’d had a camera with her, she might have photographed the site, but by the time she returned again, it had already begun to change, new owners preparing construction.

  With the insurance payment and the sale of the lot, money worries diminished. That spring, James became, again, an executive, now managing a startup off 128. A bizarre inversion: the lost house, the found money. At the condo, a chafing normalcy insisted itself.

  III

  ROME

  Apollo and Daphne

  Gian Lorenzo Bernini (c.1622–25)

 
GALLERIA BORGHESE

  A consuming desire; a desperate flight from that desire. Here’s the moment when the chasing Apollo, eternally young, reaches the fleeing Daphne, their bodies muscular, graceful, both nearly breathing and nearly out of breath; and too the moment when in desperation she cries out. Not to Apollo: he can’t hear beyond the rapid whir of his desire, the drive to possess her, but certainly possession will shatter her. She is not fast enough; his hand rakes her hip. They almost fly, her hair streaming behind her, her mouth roundly open in terror. It’s her powerful father she beseeches, and in calling him escapes, her body transforming as we watch: her fingers now turning to branches of leaves, her toes taking root, one slender leg now covered by a sheath of bark.

  White bodies suspended in marble, stone transformed to muscle and sinew, skin and leaves. It’s her face one returns to, and then the astonishment of her body, the smooth belly and high breasts, and from her raised arms, the hands unfurling leaves, and along her slim leg, the spreading bark.

  Forever she calls out to her father; forever he saves her—though she will no longer be herself—the story a soundless repeating loop.

  And if he cannot save her?

  Another story, another loop, a girl for whom desire and flight have merged.

  And what if in Daphne’s expression you recognize a haunting both nameless and familiar? If in Apollo’s? No one can run fast enough. Down near the Piazza del Popolo, there are cafés, shops, ordinary conversations. A glass of wine? Count the days, years you’ve dreamed of stone and leaves.

  THE MURPHYS III

  Mistaken for twins on occasion, as young children. Later, even during high school years, referred to as “the twins” by neighbors who knew they were not. Neither Sara nor Delia would make the correction. At a distance one might notice only the sandy-blond hair, the slender builds and short statures, the fair skin; closer up the blue-gray eyes, one oval face with a slightly aquiline nose, one round face, a more buttonish nose, the same precisely curved lips. They were thirteen months apart, and some years that mattered; but no one would confuse Delia’s face for Sara’s, or Sara’s for Delia’s. To Joanie MacFarland, “Nora’s girls” referred to all the Murphy daughters, “twins” to Sara and Delia only. Shorthand, yes, but also slippage from that early resemblance between Molly and the young Delia? At times it seemed “twins” conjured Molly too, referring to an approximate category centered around Delia—Molly Delia’s dead twin, Sara her fraternal one, the number of pregnancies irrelevant.

  To Sara, at times they had seemed a trio, though Molly appeared as a peripheral blur Sara struggled to define. Delia’s curiosity—intermittent, less vexed—had focused on Molly’s taste in games or food or color (did Molly also love jam?) and rarely involved Rome. Nor was Delia troubled by resemblance and mistaken assumptions. During childhood, if relatives slipped and called her Molly, she answered “Delia” in the lighthearted tone of a party hostess. As a teenager, and later, she too mixed up the baby photos. “Maybe my cheeks were fatter?” she’d say. “Hard to tell.” Yet how fully Delia occupied her own body: for her, the questions ended here.

  Paired, yes, but not mistaken. Acquaintances referred to Sara as “the quiet” one, Delia “the lively.” In school, Sara earned straight As, Delia—bright but unpredictable—a few more Bs, the occasional C if the teacher was, as she explained to Nora, “a turd.” It was Sara who remembered to bring their lunches to school; Sara who closed the house windows during storms; Sara who knew when they’d visit James. Delia planned beach picnics and baked cookies and lobbied for trips to the mall.

  They were unserious competitors, though they joined teams and sometimes won (Sara mainly wanted to swim; Delia to socialize). Only to each other did they speak of disappointments in their siblings and their father; together they worried about Nora. Well liked, both of them; still, Sara could be morose, Delia clownish to a fault. Boyfriends. To Sara, Delia’s resembled retriever puppies. To Delia, Sara’s were dopily earnest or brooding and mute. As high school girls, both first had sex, Sara with a boy who lived near the harbor and showed her his boat designs and stole beer from his parents. He rushed, not needing, he said, a warm-up. “Oh, God,” Delia told her. “I hope he gave you a beer.” Though Delia’s own first time was unlaughing, a constrained educational exercise with a boy from varsity soccer.

  Not twins. After high school the moniker dropped away; once they left Blue Rock for college, they were plainly sisters, though only later could they sort the implications. Sara moved to Western Massachusetts; Delia stayed near Boston. They talked on the phone, they pursued degrees; in certain ways they mystified each other. Delia joined social committees: she event-planned, she networked. Sara hung out in cafés and slept with disaffected men. And mulled: really, did the mulling help? Would sports? Maybe she could try a local league, or pickup games; Delia played Frisbee and met a sweet guy named Mike.

  High GPAs, both of them, and graduate programs. Delia trained in physical therapy; Delia wanted kids. In these choices, she was clear. Less clear about Nora, who’d sometimes be unavailable for weeks; less clear about the distance from Theo, to whom she mailed outlandish postcards and holiday gifts. He sent comic responses and expensive presents. It was something, a relationship of sorts, if from a distant sphere. Only once, when Theo had been out of touch longer than usual, Delia said, “Maybe I have too much Molly.” “He’s like that with everyone,” Sara told her. Delia did not worry about her relationship to James: amicable monthly visits and weekly phone calls seemed enough. She did not worry about Katy, whom she saw often, and whose life her own soon began to resemble.

  A marriage. Two girls. A house in the outer suburbs.

  To Sara, Delia’s life seemed lucid and precisely chosen and unimaginable. In college the subjects Sara studied—sociology, art history—posed abstract questions that led meanderingly to rare concrete jobs. She waitressed; she temped; she joined a community garden. Only later, after a master’s and a return to Boston, did the work improve. In the intervening years, Delia spoke to her with an apparent patience that continued even after Sara resettled and found what Delia called a “grown-up job” in nonprofit media. Delia at thirty sent rainbow-colored party invitations and thank-you notes; this Delia arranged family dinners—pizza, but dinners nonetheless—and invited Sara to block parties and birthday gatherings.

  Sara could not explain Delia; neither could she explain herself. By her early thirties, her work anchored her as much as any work might. She too could write thank-you notes; she too remembered birthdays. It occurred to her that for Delia a spouse might be another kind of twin. Unclear how many such pairings a life might sustain, or how long they might last. A bond separate and distinct from the kinship Sara felt in friendships and relationships, though she’d been in love—or a state she understood to be love—several times. Men. Thrilling, at first. It was always easy, in the beginning, to lose herself in sex, but the more intimate the relationship became—and the more familial—the more she retreated. As if she were at first escaping into pleasure, but later (and more dangerously) began to vanish from herself. It had happened even in the most hopeful of relationships, despite apparent trust, elated future planning—that brief feeling of arrival as if the place of arrival might not also be a point of departure. And then? A growing disorientation, her body again becoming a separate thing. Questions arose, reasonable questions—other cities, children, how to shape a married life—and there appeared, again, a vanishing point beyond which she could not imagine or travel, and in its contemplation felt herself receding. It did not seem to be a matter of wanting or not wanting; she had never said, “I don’t want that.” She didn’t know. It was as if she couldn’t speak the language. As if she were hearing Russian: she knew only English and French.

  At thirty-two, she left a man she’d been with for three years. Hadn’t she loved him? He had not pushed for children; he too did not know. He’d studied architectural history. What he’d wanted, it appeared, was a worldly recognition she unde
rstood to be fame, though that desire was hard to parse from his dazzling curiosity and solid work ethic. He would not have used the word fame. He would have said professional advancement, perhaps correctly. The desire, the ambition, had nothing to do with her, but it appeared to take on a life of its own, like a permanent house guest from whose company she’d withdrawn. Maybe she could not judge; maybe her own desires were timid and sparse.

  “Your own what?” Delia said. “Maybe you just don’t like him anymore.”

  This sounded true. “I thought I did,” Sara said. “I thought a lot of things.”

  “You did,” Delia said. “I know.”

  SARA’S PLACES

  The first time Sara visited Theo in California—before she started college, long before she really traveled—it seemed she was flying to the edge of the world, a point from which she could fall, or, if not fall, become lost in anonymity. As if, so far from New England and Nora and Delia, she became unfamiliar to herself. For a panicked moment, she imagined herself stranded there, exiled, unable to adapt or return. Then the panic abated; she struggled to explain it to Theo. They were at a café in Berkeley. He nodded and kissed her on the cheek. “We all miss the house,” he said. He suggested sushi for dinner.