Trompe l'Oeil (19 page)

Better genes? Some families, Katy thought, even families with your name, were charmed, surrounded by a force field of
safety and ease. How was it you could share a name and not the magic? A nameless failing. Or a curse? To her the Murphy cousins seemed free of trouble, or almost free. She knew, for example, that Brian, the youngest and most gregarious, had a reading tutor. And this year Pamela—a serious figure skater, pretty, well liked—had fallen and injured her leg just before competition (sidewalk ice, no one's fault). She'd hobbled around, crushed. But everyone else rallied; the fracture healed; she was back on the ice. She still got to be Pamela, the way she'd known herself to be. Her brothers—Brian born the same year as Molly—remained her brothers; her parents stayed together.

As long as Katy could remember, the Patrick Murphys had lived in the same house in Wellesley. Now she rarely saw them, but when she did it seemed she'd opened a children's book she'd once read every day. They aged but remained the same: Aunt Carrie's same perfumy hugs, Uncle Patrick's jokes and kisses on her cheek, Pam's shy waves hello. Each time, the boys—playing street hockey or watching a TV game—seemed to stop without resentment, and call her name and invite her to join.

The house itself: windowed rooms opening out into more rooms. Nothing was a single color, or even a color you could name: the sofas and chairs covered in fabric densely woven with several threads, so you could only say,
More blue than gold
, or compare the fabric to something else—a season or a kind of holiday. Polished wood floors, Persian carpet, Mexican tile in the kitchen. Bowls of flowers on the tables, potted trees near the den windows, beyond which the lawn appeared an almost iridescent green.

Pam and her brothers seemed blithely unaware of what it all meant.

Her father had always wanted to be like Patrick, Katy could see that. Who could blame him? It seemed the Patrick Murphys paid no price. But wishes did not matter, Katy thought. Her father should know: you didn't get to choose which sort of Murphy to be.

Now they'd been invited to a barbecue at the Patrick Murphys', Katy and her sisters with her father. Her father said please. He said, “Please come with us, Katy. I hope you will.” He'd asked her on the phone. She'd paused. (Nora had recently told her: think. How? Katy asked. “Press your lips together and count to six,” Nora said.) So Katy told James, “Okay,” and pressed her lips a second time to listen to the details.

The day was, briefly, like a return to another life, one she had misplaced. The adults and kids milling through the house and vast yard seemed friendly, unsurprised to see her, as if she were another of the Patrick Murphys, as if in this place she might belong. Two eighth-grade girls hired as babysitters played with Delia and Sara: at the Patrick Murphys', Katy could do whatever she wanted. With her cousins and their friends, she played badminton. For a time along the traffic-less road they threw a Frisbee, and when they tired of running, threw the Frisbee for the dog. For a time she joined her sisters in the pool.

And the woman. How casual, the way Katy met her. Reddish-blond hair, willowy. Elegant. In shorts and a plain T-shirt, but
elegant. She was at the picnic table; she gave Katy some tongs for corn, and spoke to Katy as if Katy were one of the Patrick Murphys. She had noticed Katy at badminton with the boys; she'd seen her running for the Frisbee. “You must play something,” she said. “Or run?” She herself was a runner, a runner friend of Carrie's. She introduced herself as Josie.

Blue-gray eyes, a way of listening, it seemed, with her body: a stillness when Katy spoke. Though, too, an easy laugh. Originally from New Hampshire, near the coast. A small town. Katy talked. Told her about Blue Rock, the beaches off-hours, off-season, the best places to run. “Maybe with Carrie we'll do a run sometime,” Josie said.

Later, Katy returned to the pool, now with Uncle Patrick and Pamela and the girls, and after a time her father. She threw a small beach ball with the girls and James, then floated, a happy, lovely kind of floating: a cornflower-blue sky, near cloudless but for thin silky bands in the north.

After the party, after she and her father had shepherded Sara and Delia into the car, back into the city to toothbrushing and washing and bed, when the girls were finally asleep, her father asked, “Did you have a nice time?”

“Yes,” she said. Still happy. Still somehow afloat.

Her father was smiling, and not falsely; he did have a beautiful smile. “I'm so glad,” he said. “And meeting everyone? How was that?”

“Fine,” she said. “Totally fine.”

“And Josie?” he said. “What did you think of her?”

Perfect
, Katy almost said, but his gaze held a giveaway intensity. Had he been talking with Josie at the party? Katy could not
remember them together, but she'd been playing badminton and Frisbee; there was the pool; the Sox were on TV. Yet he knew her. And what Katy felt then was a kind of curdling, and heat, at what she could now see as a setup, unfurling backward, and the presumption—correct, wasn't it?—of how easily duped she could be, how dumbly eager to be liked. When kids acted stupid, Nora called them
dumb as lambs
; adults were
dumb as posts
. And Katy? Lamb or post? Imagining Josie's interest in her for her own sake, even imagining—hadn't she, just a little?—that Josie might see in her what others did not.
Perfect
, yes, but it was never Katy they wanted—it was the little girls, or Theo. Or if they'd heard the story, Molly (even dead, Molly claimed attention). Now James. Maybe Katy herself preferred to be duped: maybe she had it coming, knowing better but falling for the ploy.

“You like her,” Katy said, one stupid fat tear rolling down her cheek.

“Didn't you like her?” James said.

A clogged feeling behind her face began to expand and she walked very quickly to the condo's guest bathroom and locked the door, then leaned into the wall beside the stack of matching brown-and-beige striped towels and pinched her upper arm until the sting pulsed on its own. Kicked the cabinets open and shut. Under the sink found a box of tampons—not Katy's brand. Josie's then? Katy unwrapped one experimentally, whipped it by its white cord against the towel rack, making a dull whap. Against the wood and the porcelain tub, the sound was more satisfying. When she grew bored, she curled up on the bath mat and pulled a dry towel around her and closed her eyes, pretending to be in the bathroom in Blue Rock.

She didn't expect her father to call her out of the bathroom, or to try to speak to her from outside the door: only Nora would have. But when she finally emerged, he was still sitting on the sofa with his water glass.

“I do hope you had a good time,” James said, as if she hadn't just been whapping the walls of the bathroom.

Katy pressed her lips and counted. “I'm going to sleep now,” she said. “You are meaner than you think.”

NO CAFÉ

Say the Murphys have left the café; or say they never found it. Perhaps they are hiding on the Palatine Hill; perhaps hiding from each other. Or searching for the moment before the moment. It's a terrible relief to be alone. Separately they all fall under white trucks; separately they lie on city sidewalks reflecting on the sky; separately they retreat into hotel rooms. Bells ring heavily, then quiet.

The city repeats itself. The Murphys do not speak the language, and are in fact no longer “they”: only the vaguest and most attenuated notion of
they
or
we
or
us
persists, a fading ray aimed back toward a fading concept, sometimes called Molly.

Say their steps displace small stones, tear bits of fallen leaves—gray chips, gold specks, russet flakes. It's January. After days of rain, light floods the city. Gardens and paths throughout Rome echo and echo with Murphys.

NEWS

James called to tell Nora directly. October, a windy Saturday afternoon. He called, and there was a moment—there often was a moment after long silences between them—before time caught up with her. A moment of hearing his voice and answering in an unguarded way. This could happen when she had been reading or sleeping or alone for a long while. The unexpected voice, the voice of her marriage, warm now, her lack of defense. He'd been dating someone, he said. He said they would be marrying.

She was in the still, cool kitchen, filling the kettle. Swans on the pond, the pond reflecting the moving pink and violet clouds, swans swimming through the colors' reflections. She listened. His announcement and patter were rehearsed, though a stranger listening might not think so. He could memorize speeches and deliver them as spontaneous eloquence, something Nora recognized; she wondered if the new woman detected the difference, or would ever detect it. One more bit of intimate knowledge Nora hadn't lost, one way in which the alien James was not a stranger. A further insult, it seemed, to witness his new life, but she saw no way out. This was why,
Nora imagined, parents kidnapped their children and moved to Brazil.

“We'll take it slow,” he said. She did not know whether “we” meant James and the woman, or James and Nora, or all three of them. Next summer, he said. Perhaps midsummer.

“Okay,” she said. “I see,” she said, and more than once repeated. She'd let herself think in the near term only, had veered away from his private life—as long as it was separate from the girls, she'd told him, it was his business. And the kids had said nothing. But now she knew and would have to find space for this knowledge, a way to navigate it daily, with no apparent end. It seemed you could in fact start a second life, if you were James: you could walk away from the prior life, the one that had anchored you so utterly. And if she'd left, before? After Rome there seemed no other path. Before that? Would she have left the children with James? No. She'd have to reel back further, before Theo.

The girls had met her as a guest of Patrick's, James told her.

“Patrick. I see,” she said. So, too, the likely end of her remaining Murphy ties. “Do they know?”

“Katy,” he said.

“And Theo?”

He and Josie had taken Theo to dinner on Theo's last visit.

Which explained too why Theo had been so adamant about her private life. Didn't she want to date? If she met someone, why not? She'd said she had no time. “If it's what you want, Mom, there's always time,” he'd said, but no, she'd told him. He could not understand. How tightly scheduled her days, with Delia and Sara and Katy, her job, the house; how catastrophic ordinary car trouble could be. The endless searches
for bargains, the errands and repairs packed into the days the girls spent with James. To make him understand she'd have to say too much. “But if it's what you want,” he repeated. At one of Katy's games, Theo watched from the sidelines with Nora and the goalie Ellie Burnham's father, Lloyd, who joked with Nora and Theo and shared a bag of pretzels. When they said good-bye, Lloyd Burnham kissed her cheek—“See you, hon,” he said—and kissed Katy's cheek, and shook Theo's hand.

In the car Theo said, “What about him?” and Katy snorted, “He's married, Theo. Remember the sail club lady? Ellie's mom? Didn't you scrape up one of those boats?”

“Okay, so not him. Someone else,” Theo said.

“Get me a new dishwasher,” Nora told him.

And when Theo brought it up again later, she said no. A vehement no that seemed to take Theo by surprise. They were at the kitchen table drinking tea, and a flat silence hung over the room for a moment before Theo said, “Okay,” and Nora said, “I need to look after the girls. Don't worry.” But it seemed to Nora that Theo was confusing her with the Nora of the cocktail dresses, or the one who took him as a small child to cafés; or even the Nora who had rediscovered pleasure with James one last summer. Maybe Theo saw the Nora of that summer or maybe he imagined she could step back into that moment, the inevitable betrayals of the body notwithstanding.

And perhaps she should be grateful that Theo could not see the hairline fractures that might with one more collision, one more betrayal, become unbreachable fissures. Though Theo no longer lived in Blue Rock; Theo could be wishful; there was plenty Theo didn't see.

Nora could not explain herself. The steady small physical attritions were not what kept her alone, but they troubled her more as the plain facts of Josie Brundige's life unspooled, and Josie herself became a presence: a woman younger by a decade, lovely, her body a lovely body. There was a youthful lushness about Josie, and a surety to her movements Nora could not remember in herself.