Trompe l'Oeil (23 page)

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 said 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.

Say you contemplate this world as she contemplates the world. Does the long view, the parallel act, bring you closer to her? Here is her arm—slender, white—her hand holding open the book. Here a foot, poking out beneath the hem of her dress as she sits on the ground. Tiny, in the corner. But the lines of the dress echo those of the hills and valley—and send you back to the expansive landscape, away from her single small corner. Again you study the print while she studies the printed text. In solitude, here outside the living world.

JAMES BY THE SEA

Spring. At least you could say that about the day: the North Shore crab-apple trees a frothy pink, lilacs in pale and deep violet blooming along the roadsides, the unfurling leaves a rare pale green. Thicker petals of ornamental magnolia, magenta and white, would bloom for one spectacular week, then scatter in the grass. On the weekends, James had turned ground for a small garden, vegetables and sunflowers. Only in recent years had he become a gardener, since the move to Beverly with Josie. Last summer when Sara and Delia visited, they seemed amused by his efforts, but they'd happily picked the cherry tomatoes, happily eaten the green beans. Sometimes while he gardened, they played soccer with Josie; sometimes they helped.

So he could anticipate, at least, a summer garden, more visits. Today he would have, on his way home, a wash of sunlight, time to walk along a North Shore beach—the thought like a distant plane approaching, still a speck, only a speck, as he drove north out of the city, not to Beverly but beyond it, toward Manchester-by-the-Sea. School buses now clogged the secondary roads, crossing guards in bright orange and black, like huge caterpillars, stopping him with a raised hand, small
towns busy with daytime routines of marketing and bakeries and dog walking, kids on Rollerblades and skateboards, kids on bikes, and at the playground, on swing sets swinging. The crossing guards waved him on.

More roadside deciduous trees, tall old-growth oaks and maples and high banks of shrubs, more pastel bursts fronting the lawns of grand houses on the route to Singing Beach. There, toddlers played in the sand, ringed by young mothers and nannies: at the far end, a gaggle of teenagers leaned together and smoked. James's first thought had been Blue Rock, even now—the far beach as he'd known it with his father. But he liked Singing Beach, the intimate scale of it, the blooming, well-to-do town, in which, as a stranger passing through, one could forget the outside world. Residents commuted to Boston just as they did from Beverly, men not unlike himself, executives, attorneys—but today he was not himself. Today he was a man in a car, and at Singing Beach he was a man on a bench watching the navy-blue sea, the lace edges of the fallen waves, the small whipped peaks in the distance. From the town came the muted whistle of a local train approaching the crossroads station. The shoreline had reconfigured since the last time he was there, the shoreline he remembered—one curving sweep of sand, a broad uninterrupted pie slice—now appeared as sand lobes riven by receding seawater, as if sliced by fine branching rope.

An emptying. He had not called Josie. He would tell her tonight. Her sister Liz was visiting: he would arrive home at the regular time and tell her after dinner, after they'd said good night to Liz. In this marriage, in this way, he was different.
Do not squander routine contentment, he told himself; do not squander Josie's. She was for him an anchor.

Down the beach, the clump of teenagers broke apart, some of them running kites: an electric-orange shield, a rainbow-tailed dragon. The kites he'd once built were simple, white paper diamonds, the frames raw flat wood, the string cheap brown stuff that scratched and cut his hands. In Blue Rock one summer he flew colorful fabric kites with Theo and the girls (Katy. Also Molly? Later, Sara and Delia), kites with better line and flexible frames.

It was better to be a man thinking about kites than it was to be the man he was today in Boston, the man he had not planned to be, in Boston or anywhere, ever. Parker took him to lunch—not anomalous, lunch with Parker, but not routine. This was how it was done. A good restaurant—in fact, a very good restaurant, Parker liked him, and Parker liked restaurants, and at least there would be a good meal, if you could eat the good meal. “I want to tell you,” Parker said, “I couldn't be happier with your performance,” and James's quick flush of pleasure—even now—cut short by the news of reorganization. “We don't have much choice here,” Parker said, though it wasn't clear whom he meant by
we
.

“I've been doing what I can.” Parker leaned forward, lowered his voice. “It's a decent severance. And you know I'll back you up. You tell anyone to call me.”

Parker appeared to be the same Parker he'd been when they entered the restaurant: when had the change occurred? Once there had been a different Parker: time, Parker announced, for a different James, not divisional VP but a kicked-out James,
and a hot-faced, tumbling James, held together by his suit and by the heavy furniture and deep grooves of dining-club mores.

“Give yourself some time,” Parker said. “It's a lot to take in.”

“I wasn't aware,” James said, “our division was involved.”

“This wasn't my decision,” Parker said. “They're going after senior people.”

“What about you?”

Theatrical and stung, Parker's laugh. “Could be. I'd bet a year.”

Something stilled in James, and he could see himself as from outside, an executive at lunch: he had done this before. The performing James, receding from the moment as he kept up the public face. And so he managed the dessert Parker insisted they order—a hand lifting a forkful of cake to the mouth, a mechanical chewing and swallowing—and the top-shelf cognac, more heat in his throat and face, as if it were a celebratory meal.

And as they returned to the building—Parker actually saying, “I think the world of you, James”—Parker keeping close, for an instant James wondered if the lunch had occurred at all, if in waking life he'd had the lunch he thought he'd had (nothing about the city confirmed the transformation, the tumbling, the sudden sham of his Italian suit, silk tie, the sham of his body, it seemed). Then Parker placed a hand on his upper arm as he opened the building door, and gently steered him not to the elevators but toward the approaching building guard, Ken. Ken, ex-Navy, a Red Sox devotee with whom James had swapped baseball and sailing anecdotes for a decade.