Trompe l'Oeil (8 page)

“Theo and Katy are in school,” Nora said. “Adjusting.”

“Of course,” Lydia said.

It was difficult to suspend certain knowledge. Lydia too, had taken care of Molly, and of Katy and Theo. Loved them. At least, in the Blue Rock kitchen Lydia did not weep or assault Nora with her own grief. Offered no false comforts: chrysanthemums were only themselves. Nora had been distracted, and was now more so. She had Theo; she had Katy. Certain desires could lead to ruin, though how to identify which ones? You could not say ruin began with oranges, only that oranges were present. What was her desire for Lydia?
Let's sit
. She had said that in Rome. A flimsy command, hardly words at all. There had been hand-holding, hand-waving. Why recount any of it? You had to accept the ruin: here, this is yours. On the far side of ruin, Lydia wore a fringed jacket. She belonged there. Nora did not.

“I don't know how to do this,” Nora said. She seemed to be speaking underwater; or perhaps the light had thickened. “Talking,” she said.

“Do you want tea?” Lydia said. “What do you need?”

The kettle stood in the sink; Nora had been filling the kettle. “Oh,” Nora said. Could she drink tea? This was something she did. It seemed irrelevant.

“I'll rest,” Nora said. “Maybe I'll just rest.” She heard herself tell Lydia, “Today's not the best day.”

A space Nora had once associated with Molly remained as an empty quadrant of air, or a kind of silence housing all things Molly or attached to Molly's death, and therefore ever-deepening. Distraction, yes: regularly, the day's anchors would slip, Nora would slip with them into that space, and then rediscover her kitchen minutes later. As if she were driving a long distance and, coming upon a tollbooth, realized she'd made no notice of the last fifty miles. What had happened in those miles? There must have been road signs, exits. On the radio a broadcast of some kind. Or, in the kitchen, Katy or Theo, asking a question, or handing her a plate, and the dishwasher now emptied.

So, the territory took shape: solid ground would accumulate after Molly, but that blank air would remain, and Nora would continue to disappear into it and reappear in a different moment. Italy, when it surfaced, was always overlit, the piazzas swimming. Time please for lunch. The hotel. Time to return to the hotel with the family, with Molly, as they had for days without thought. Perhaps this was how they'd gone wrong: delaying lunch.

And James. With the routines of the office, he could skate over the accumulating weekdays. But the grief would open up in him at night: his bad nights seemed all the same repeating night. Once or twice a week, in the early hours, Nora would find him struggling in sleep, overwrought, his breathing labored, his face damp. “What?” He'd be shaking his hands, flapping them around. “Jimmy,” she'd say. His hands. “Jimmy,” she'd repeat. “Bad dream.”

He'd become alert then; for him, the bedroom would define itself as bedroom, Nora as Nora, his dream already becoming a dark cumulous layering pushed into the distance, and his heart racing. And his hands? He'd curl and flex his fingers.

She might be stroking his face. Some nights she'd give him glasses of water. Some nights they'd make love, and his panic would melt into that.

WINTER

Beyond the windows the sea turned from greenish gray to slate gray to solid onyx. Katy trailed Nora from kitchen to living room to laundry room and back, often on pretext of helping. When Nora finally stationed herself in one spot to read the news or mix biscuit dough, Katy would settle nearby. This pattern repeated over weeks, months, the distance between Katy and Theo having widened, Nora having found steady routine. Say that for Katy, the house became saturated with Nora, or what she could find of Nora. Say its imprint on her as
home
originated now: after Italy, in the variations of winter light, the months indoors with her mother. Perhaps this was the germ of Theo's slow retreat into a different life: he took refuge on the blue living room sofa, from which vantage point he could glance up from his books to the kitchen, the stairs leading down to the laundry room. Separate but still within view. Nora appeared to be Nora. Katy appeared to be Katy; Theo, Theo. And yet. At moments the house might seem to be a constructed set, solid furniture apparently hollow and insubstantial; this perception floated from one of them to the next, occasionally resting with James. At moments their bodies seemed equally
hollow; at others, completely in charge. In all weather they ran and walked on the beach. They kicked soccer balls against the interior seawall (Theo) or threw stones (Katy), ran, or swam at the local pool until exhausted.

Short days, the coast bound in slush, wet snow, thin panes of ice, pelting rain. Other days snow swept across the coast. The cloud cover seemed permanent, varying between a featureless gray sheet and ridged, surging dark storm clouds. The longing for spring blurred into other longings: James longed for the very house in which he lived, but a past, summer-tinted version. Surely it could not help to look back. Subversive, how such longing came upon him, say, in the early mornings when the roads were barely salted, as the moving red trails of taillights glowed through the blue-black predawn, or after work, when dusk had already passed and the sky along the South Shore was a blanket of chalky indigo. Always, it seemed, he was driving in darkness, and in the wash of traffic he imagined he could hear the surf. There were occasional clear days, clear frigid nights. He longed for cool nights in spring and summer, and autumn, when the days might still be brilliant, the bay a fat sapphire melting at the edges—longed for autumn as if the recent one had failed to arrive. He could not say what this meant.

Occasionally at work, too: in the office elevator while punching buttons, an unbidden image might appear. He'd mentally review a risk analysis, sift numbers, wait through the floor stops, and then he'd tumble from the analysis to the deck under a slant of orange light, a slant of yellow light, cirrus clouds sweeping east. Salt. The old October feeling of walking away while one's name is being called.

COCKTAILS

“How long do you think you can stand still?” James said. “Everything around you is moving.” Though in fact certain things, many things, stood in place. The blue sofa, the kettle on the stove. And it depended, didn't it, on how you defined motion? Often Nora seemed to go somewhere; she seemed to return. She waved an arm in the direction of the lamp.

“What?” James said.

If each day she too commuted, to Boston or nearer—if each day she too arrived at an office, a school, a gallery, gave over to that particular clock—and later each day returned to the same address, would she have discovered a different kind of motion (say, his) and sooner? Or was the fact of being Nora, rather than James, or James rather than Nora, the key? For months they'd received invitations formal and casual, for company dinners at restaurants, company soirees in private homes; for months they'd politely (Nora) or more effusively (James) declined. Nora could imagine herself on a small olive-shaped boat crossing the pool of a martini glass, but not at a cocktail party itself.

“An olive-shaped boat?” James said. The James who courted her might have laughed, but their courtship itself was a tiny receding boat. His tone had become corrective.

And he would persist. Because he was James. Because as a boy he'd learned to travel to another place in his mind, as if there were two chambers linked by a corridor, with doors he'd learned how to close. Since then the number of chambers had increased, hadn't it? In the time she'd known him.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “you have to return to the world.”

Assuming a cocktail party was the world, Nora thought, and for a moment there was the flickering sensation of another room—a blue glass lamp, a white teacup, profuse leaves beyond a window filtering the light through square panes—she recognized as Lydia's in Cambridge, that wafer of time before Italy. But now Nora's mind also had hallways and doors.

Returning to the world without Molly: in some way Nora remained the holdout, lingering beyond the starched order of business and school days. Still waiting. Knowing better, yet watching for signs. She could see in Theo and Katy the grain of disbelief that Italy had ever occurred, the momentary slip into dream logic. Often, before Italy, they had found Molly in surprising corners of the Blue Rock house. Once again, the house was immediate and real, Rome unreal. You waited for a sign until you forgot that you were waiting, now and then remembering
yes still waiting
, if more secretively. Eventually the waiting diminished. This had been the case after her parents' deaths, yet once or twice a year she'd still inadvertently dip into a blurry, suspended disbelief.

Eventually, she told James yes. She bought new dresses, new pumps, new lipstick, made an appointment at the hairdresser's, as if she were still the sprightly Nora. She hired a good-natured, slightly hippie-ish teenager to babysit, a girl Theo and Katy
both claimed to like. Yet the nights Nora and James went out, Theo would not wish them good-bye, and Katy would refuse to sleep anywhere but the couch.

Receptions at upscale restaurants; cocktail parties in lavish homes. James's colleagues were not unkind, but they didn't seem quite
solid
to Nora, as if perhaps they were made of lacquered sponge foam (but who was she to demand ballast?). She wore little black dresses and pearls. The women clustered and dispersed, weaving around and through the clusters of men, chatting about vacation spots and Junior League events, the men tossing statistics as they speculated about ball teams and venues, mall sites, business zones. There were the expected sexual jokes, mild in mixed company—allusions to prowess and voluptuous girls, innuendos tossed at the wives—the women's cheerful remonstrations, James laughing (her James, his laugh) with the others. Nora stepped back and pretended to sip her drink, watching the proceedings over the top of her glass the way Katy might, or Molly, gazing back and forth between an effervescing drink and the party crowd.

She found herself pretending to like whimsical photos of cats.

At the Lowrys', olives sank into cocktails. Nora drank a martini, and that night accepted a cigarette, though she hadn't smoked around company people before. It was soothing, the martini; after the martini she too was smiling (
she'd done this before, she could do this
), and that appeared to be all anyone expected now, all James expected. He nursed his drink and complimented the
women and elicited men's opinions of the Bruins' bench. They were happy talkers, the Lowrys and the Lowrys' seventy-five guests. Nora was drawn instead to the furniture: the living room sofa was upholstered in black fabric covered with small white and red tulips, green leaves and curving stems framing the profusion of flowers. It occurred to her that she had seen the fabric somewhere else. Where? Or was it simply the pattern, reminiscent of Morris, an echo of a month she'd once spent paging through catalogs and drawing vines and leaves in a little sketchbook? An Arts and Crafts exhibit somewhere? She wanted to take off her shoes. She wanted to curl into a corner of the sofa and smoke a cigarette, or two cigarettes, and have another martini.