Trompe l'Oeil (13 page)

Later, alone in their bedroom—another night estranged, untouching—James asked her, “Did you set
that
up?”

“Oh, please,” Nora said. She sighed. “Think what you like.” On Saturday, they viewed six houses in Wellesley—none “the right match” for James.

Christmas: Blue Rock harbor strung with white lights, the houses in the neighborhood sporting red-ribboned wreaths, candles in the windows. The briefest peace.

BLIZZARD

Early January: the remains of Christmas seemed like an abandoned theater set that Nora then dismantled. The moment had already slid beyond the holidays' penumbra, and with January came winter's harsh deepening, as if to complete the erasure. Near-constant, buffeting wind, sometimes a whistling, a kind of arctic speech punctuated by snow and freezing rain, and more snow, which spread and froze in drifts and wavy patterns along the beach. And in the stormy mix, the neighborhood became static, summer houses boarded up, year-rounders taking refuge indoors. On a clear morning, the sun reflected off the snow and the bay turned cerulean; Nora took the girls down to the beach, and later gave them cocoa and read their books aloud, the day's equilibrium momentarily restored.

That Monday, when James kissed her good-bye, he seemed blankly innocent (but of what, exactly? She couldn't say). By daylight, a gray churning sea, wind, the slight rocking of the house, snow by midmorning. And the dismantling continued: warnings of storm surge high enough to flood the neighborhood access road. It happened every few years, yet still the evacuation order surprised her. She had just cleaned the house,
and the rooms smelled of soap and lemon oil. It was counterintuitive to leave. Even as she packed overnight bags and loaded the girls into the car, the snow falling thickly, the paradox rankled her, as if someone—town hall, the meteorologists, the local cops checking the houses along the shore—had misunderstood. Here was the warm kitchen, the fresh pot of soup; in the bedrooms, layered quilts and flannel sheets; there the stormy, snow-filled roads. You had to leap, unseeing, beyond your own perceptions.

The shoulderless two-lane roads near the shore had long since iced over, the visibility dropped to squinting distance—taillights disappearing two houses ahead—the car itself rocking in the wind. Roads improved a half mile inland, and she managed to collect Katy at the middle school, then drove the three girls to the high school, where a gym teacher and several boys—Theo among them—set up cots on a basketball court.

A teacher from social studies brought a television on a tall rolling cart and plugged it in near the low rickety bleachers: a meteorologist on-screen moved his hands in circles over eastern Massachusetts, as if polishing the map. There were cookies for the girls, apple juice. Along Route 128 and I-95 dense traffic seemed to have frozen. Around Boston the snow was falling at two inches an hour. The storm surge could be fourteen feet.

Only now, from the high school gym, could she picture the house afloat like a bath toy. And yet the impulse to stay had felt like intuition, or perhaps wisdom. How did one know when to trust one's own mind?

From a hallway pay phone, Nora left a message at James's office.

In one of Nora's bags, Katy found Play-Doh and set the little girls to making blue and yellow animals. Eventually, the staff put up a telephone message board beside the snack table and posted weather updates: the snow would fall through the night. Eventually, a message appeared from James:
Will stay in the city. Very glad you're okay, love to the kids. Love, James
.

Rare to see
Love, James
in handwriting other than his own—as if from a florist. And what had become of the authentic
Love James
, the original one? For a moment, it seemed possible that the authentic
Love James
had written to her from Boston, having bested
late day sorry James
. But then, too, she'd been swayed by a clean kitchen floor.

In television footage of I-95 the cars had ceased to look like cars and appeared instead as white lumps along a white line, bumps embedded in the skin of road, as the road itself became less distinct, at points blurring into the surrounding land or made visible by additional tall white clumps that once were buildings and trees. In the hotel, James was grateful for the silence, the carpeted corridors, the sustained electricity, though of course a blackout was possible. He requested extra blankets from housekeeping, in case the heating went.

Other stranded men in suits filled the hotel lounge. An atomized assortment: at the bar some watched television coverage of the storm, others in club chairs read, only now and then
glancing at the TV, the live camera's wall of snow, the red-faced reporters in parkas, buffeted by wind and snow, huddling while the cameras swayed. Then the view changed to the coiffed anchors and the windless studio interior. James befriended the bartender, tipping heavily, bought drinks for three attorneys. Beyond the hotel windows, the heavy whipped snow fell from a different atmosphere, a snow globe reversed.

Peace at the hotel. Peace and scotch. When he thought of his children and Nora, they seemed to him untouched by the storm, as if the high school he'd phoned were nowhere on the forecaster's map. Or as if they'd all gone to watch basketball. He pictured the kids on the bleachers, drinking cocoa, an image now suffused with tender light. Yet when he imagined the life he wanted, he pictured tonight's arrangement: a city hotel room, single occupancy. Or a suite from which he could come and go. Not, he understood, a passing wish. He stilled in the face of it, as he traced the logic of the desire.

The storm abated: days, still, digging out. Days at the hotel, the high school. They'd been lucky: the house had suffered minor damage, though the street had filled with debris. On the phone with Nora, James spoke quietly. She was readying to leave the high school then. In his hotel room, the heater whirred; beyond his window, the city seemed a canvas of dream shapes, white on white. He told her he'd be home as soon as he could; he'd find an open market somewhere, a video store. Maybe he'd pick up wine, buy chocolate for the kids.

And then he left the hotel and entered a kind of tunnel, traveling slowly down the passable roads, detouring now and then, recorded piano concertos sustaining him. Walls of snow on the roadsides, higher mounds in the parking lots, wind buffeting the car. At the Blue Rock house, he donned his work gear and he and Nora bailed and pumped salt water from the ground-level storage room and restarted the furnace; cleared broken boards and ripped plastic and part of a rowboat from the road and the short drive, pulled armloads of seaweed, stray shingles, and fish from the deck. For dinner they boiled spaghetti, heated cans of soup. After, he read to the little girls; Theo and Katy watched videos. He did not—would not—think of the hotel.

Say that hotel wish, with its clarity and fervor, would pass: a fleeting, snow-infused dream. For a few weeks after the storm, he breakfasted with the kids every morning before work and drove home directly in the evening. On the weekends he finished house projects, necessary repairs. He remained in a kind of holding space. Now and then, watching Nora with the girls, or alone with her in the evening, he glimpsed the spritely, beloved Nora, and felt a cautious pleasure, a delicate thing he did not want to crush. In fleeting optimistic instants, he thought that might be enough. Small rushes of affection carried him for a time, yet they coincided with the sharpening sense that another James, the James he believed he'd once been, had loved another Nora, and while that James had not chosen to stop, now there were other Jameses and other Noras crowding up the landscape. And if there was a way out of the story, any way out of the Rome in which those other couples had for years continued to wander, it wouldn't—how could it?—be together.

HIGH TIDE

Nora paid scant attention when her sister described a Nova Scotia trip: clouds and tides, vibrant summer days, the northern lights waves of green in the deep night hours. But later the tidal images returned. Stealthy, those tides: a thin membrane of water lapping, then thickening with long waves, apparently incremental yet deceptive, so that from moment to moment the change appeared small, the final accumulation monumental. You could be caught out on the flats, too far from shore. And at high tide, the bay now brimming, those flats unimaginable. It seemed the mind would not acknowledge any state but the present.

When James told her he'd taken an apartment in the city—signed a lease on a one-bedroom in Cambridge—he said, again, the commute was too much.

“The commute,” Nora said, latching on to
Cambridge
, latching on to
one-bedroom
.

“You know that,” he said, but he pressed his lips and furrowed his brow, familiar tells.

“And the house search?”

He gazed at the space beside her, a midkitchen column of air. This she had not let herself anticipate. Despite the bleak
contentious months, despite estrangement. For a few weeks he'd been present again. Of late, his attention faded in and out, though with less rancor. A one-bedroom? Sara was just four, Delia almost three, Katy and Theo still at home. James did not allude to weekends or pretend he'd return. Shouldn't she have seen this coming? (Once, hadn't she imagined leaving?) She'd taken his discontent for midlife flailing, damaging but impermanent. And yet to imagine such a thing—to hold it in your mind—and keep each ordinary day intact seemed beyond her. As had so much else. She was, she thought, an idiot, but how would it help to dwell on her idiocy? There were whole realms of thought she'd learned to avoid and now there would be others.

“Nora,” James said. “This is what I'm doing.”

James in Cambridge, as if he were still the former James-in-Cambridge. Or as if he had filched her desire, reshaped it for himself. What if, in Cambridge, there were after all some other Nora, a Nora who had not borne a child at twenty-four; or one who had left her marriage instead of traveling to Rome? Did it matter? If another Nora could exist, she'd continue to exist elsewhere, apart from the parenting Nora: once, say, a Theo exists, one cannot unthink Theo. One cannot unthink Katy, or Sara or Delia. Cannot unthink Molly.

A one-bedroom, and the lease signed: a one-bedroom for now, though it had, he said, a large living room, it had, he said, room for a sleeper sofa. A bigger place, he said, would be too expensive.

“What about the kids?” she said.

“We'll make it work,” he said. “We'll have slumber parties.”

His public face, as if she were a client. “This is what I'm doing,” he repeated. “This is what I need to do.”