Trompe l'Oeil (31 page)

For James there was the memory-house of his uncle, and the house he and Nora renovated, though they often merged: in the cousins' sleeping room, light fell through the white sheers Nora hung years later. Some details slid and some remained static: the blue sofa was always backed by windows to a cerulean sea, a clear midday sky, the unchanging weather of vacation photos. He imagined meals with Sara and Delia not at the oak table he and Nora bought, but at Aunt Brenda's, topped in white-and-black enamel. Neighbors from Newton sometimes showed up as neighbors from Blue Rock before finding their proper place.

When he was working, stray images arose during his commute, as they had earlier in his life; later, when his heart trouble began and he stayed home to rest, he missed the house, summoned views from the deck and from the windows. At times his reading concentration waned; he grew impatient with his sluggishness, stunned by the ways his body had betrayed him. As if his body were for the first time separate from his conscious mind and his will, and now defying him. But you
waited while the body languished or healed, accepted small pleasures—a pear, returning daffodils, radio jazz. Old images surfaced, collected shortcomings exposed, as if one room in the mind after another had flung its doors open. Perhaps a summer moment with Molly at Blue Rock, her blankets and stuffed toys a pale pink smear beneath a bright window, or a window beyond which the sky had turned indigo and Molly herself stood drinking water from a cup. Though he could also conjure Sara dragging a pink blanket, a tiny Delia standing at a window.

Always the house in its earliest forms remained clearest to him, along with the varying skies: pink dawn reflected on the bay, dense clustered stars or the thick cloud cover and bracing wind. Difficult, but not impossible to push away the most troubled notes: the saddest Blue Rock might still revert to a distant point in a larger landscape, the size of a freckle, a leaf bud, a wren's surveying eye.

REPRODUCTION

Interior with Pink Wallpaper I, plate five

Edouard Vuillard (1899)

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

She's tucked toward the back, the blue-clad woman in a small arched doorway, a slice of blue room receding behind her—but here is the room you want, fifteen-foot ceilings and pink-and-red wallpaper—think of falling cherries, falling rosebuds—a shell-pink ceiling, tiered chandelier. One side table, a small lamp. Traces of blue echo through the room, but the point is the open space—how it holds the light—the sea of pink, the vivid red drops. A room in which you can breathe. Say you choose this room to replace the missing rooms: why not? A room you might enter in place of a bedroom now gone and untraceable. Look: such lovely high ceilings. If you might step into this chosen elsewhere? Say you could keep these colors, this bright air, the perpetually falling roses.

Perhaps there's space on the table for sea glass. Something from a former house, resurfacing on the nearby beach, a smoothed bottleneck or broken tumbler, washed out in the
storm. Any bit of glass might once have been yours. A shard from a blue bowl, the shade of the woman's dress, once kept on a chest of drawers. Fragments like it wash up wherever currents run. Still, how is it that objects you thought lasting are ephemera? Fragile as origami.

Rooms disappear. But might they appear again? What if, like the salon of Vuillard's
Waiting
, this
Interior
—the woman standing in a doorway, the pink walls blooming with roses—nonetheless awaits you? At least in the mind.

STOPPING MAN

You might choose some of the rooms you occupy, but how many? They appear; you walk through them; they disappear, soon or eventually. The strangest ones you rarely choose—say, a motel room near a donut shop. Or the hospital waiting room where Sara found herself with Josie after her father's heart attack. From the beige-and-white corridor, she left phone messages for Katy and Delia, Theo, Nora. Light fell in pale blocks onto the linoleum; Josie paced; they found two reading chairs, passed a crossword back and forth. From green cans, they drank ginger ale.

Sara had been on a bus, en route to the pool. Beside her, a girl read a book with a sexy vampire on the cover. A preschool-age boy kicked the seat ahead of him; his mother asked, “Are you a goat?” Josie called; Sara found the T. She arrived at the waiting room with her swim gear. Already he was in surgery.

She did not ask Josie,
Are you sure?
though it seemed germane; on Saturday, Sara and James had visited farm stands together. She'd bought apples: in her gym bag now, she carried one of them. He'd looked good; or she'd thought he looked good. She'd asked him—as she often asked him—
How are you?
His energy? His routine tests? Their walks had shortened; of late she'd been meeting him for lunch and a harborside stroll, or at his house with Josie. But there seemed no route from A to B: Saturday, a visit to farm stands. Tuesday a heart attack, bypass surgery.

Tuesday. Josie offered few details: what was Tuesday? Less energy that morning? An impulse to stay home? Discomfort in his arm? And on the road? His chest? His breathing? He pulled over. He was alone in the car; he fussed with his phone, reached a hand out the window toward the passing traffic. A man stopped.

Crucial, that stopping man.

Tuesday: Her father waved. The man stopped. An ambulance arrived.

Now she and Josie waited. Katy appeared. Delia appeared. With or without them, Sara found herself caught in the elision between now and
always
. Monday evening she'd spoken to James by phone—no one could deny Monday evening. Surely a speaking breathing father was lasting proof of a speaking breathing father.

Later, in the
ICU
, James's legs were made vulnerable by, it seemed, the hospital gown. They'd lost muscle tone, appeared in that ICU to be partly bleached, miniature landscapes of scars and spots, burst capillaries and heavy blue veins. Diminished overnight? Sara had paid attention; she'd thought she'd paid attention. For years, he'd worn the same sort of khaki trousers. But she'd seen his legs, hadn't she? When had she last seen his legs?

The
ICU
. The hospital's parallel insomniac universe: his room, nurses' station, cafeteria, waiting room, a slow addled
relay with her family. Say you've fallen into that world: there will be blankets. Hot and cool liquids, bells, screens—occasional TVs. Other families, also blinking and in limbo. What happened to Saturday? If you took the right elevator, could you find it again?
Let's get out of here
—but what might it mean to leave? No one can tell you. No one knows. Perhaps after a stranger has coded, you think,
Let's please stay indefinitely. May we move to a general-care floor; may I drink this bad coffee forever
.

ROMAN STREETS

One narrow street appears to be another: Rome will never be the Murphys' city. Or, rather, only their city of disorientation, the realm in which they are lost. The specialty market's grappa display is nowhere near the English bookshop; gelateria signs—a chain—appear as if by mistake. Here is a bridge; the river curves; a fresh start, another maze. Might the map conform to someone else's city? Perhaps it is a map of Madrid. Too soon fatigue sets in. Say the Murphys wander alone, apart from each other, unknowingly retracing each other's routes. At noon one rests at Campo di Fiore; another leans against the Pantheon. One crosses the Ponte Mazzini, another Ponte Sisto. Approach and they melt into the tourist crowds, emerging at intersections where the vendors hawking scarves ignore them. The hotel rooms are empty; they have not found the hotel. Perhaps they have stopped looking. Perhaps the object of the search has changed; perhaps it has changed again. In the evening lights float along the Tiber—lights and the reflections of lights—like unnameable dreams. Are they here? From the bridges and riverbanks, one Murphy then another peering out?

BLUE SUIT

In the middle of the wake, the Murphys adjourned for lunch. Appearing—as they had at other moments—an ordinary middle-class family, if extended now, asymmetrical, still handsome and poised. Well dressed, as if for a performance? They took up two tables at the restaurant—white cloth napkins, chrysanthemums—a self-possessed Nora settled with the kids at one end. Even Josie appeared normal. Or especially? Sara ordered like a normal woman. Should she—should any of them—have appeared sadder? Yet this was one thing they felt sure of: how to order lunch. For an hour the world became, again, knowable. Soup or no soup? Bread or no bread? (Yes for Theo, now distance running; no for Katy, on a diet; others equivocal.) A small bubble of time within the larger bubble into which they'd tumbled. They drank tea and coffee and milk and juice: they ate.

Then they returned to the funeral parlor. James was still there, waiting, it seemed—his physical presence, the fact that he hadn't
left
, an unexpected relief. He'd been laid out in a midnight-blue suit and silk tie, his eyes closed—as they might be, Sara thought, on a commuter train. The mild surprise that he did not sit or speak repeated itself; nonetheless here was
a family gathering—the cluster of chairs occupied by Murphys—and here was James.

Like the other Murphys, she had begun to adapt to her father's appearance—the stubbornly closed eyes, the distinguished suit, the mistake of the casket. He had, at least, appeared. The trouble—as Sara came to call it—materialized when the wake ended and she could no longer see him. As if all events until then—the
ICU
with its bleating machines, the calls, the arrangements—had been edgy, eccentric theater. Then for her his body—James himself—became purely conceptual. The terms flipped; an air lock broke; the world emptied. And then a kind of numbing? James had been so very still, then gone, and Sara numb—should it surprise?—in Sara's zombie-mourner state, a little confusion about who was dead? (And why would burial seem a mutual abandonment?)

What could she say to the others?
Are you a little dead? This arrangement seems criminal
. Worth trying Delia, if she could find more palatable language. Delia, she knew, would make an effort, if only to keep Sara company. But it seemed that for each of them, a different James had died. After the burial, Josie and Theo visited with Murphy cousins; Delia collected her kids; Tim and Katy ferried out-of-town relatives to yet another dinner; Nora withdrew. Like Katy and Theo, Nora seemed both present and elsewhere—had the balance just tipped to elsewhere? More likely they'd remained the same.
Are you a little dead?
Sara herself was obtuse. For an extended moment, her father had been present. Then the moment ended. Now his absence seemed to collide with a shifting unnamed vacancy she'd thought she'd outgrown.

Calm days, at first, following the funeral—say it was the calm of shock. Or of distraction: Theo in town, staying with Nora, smaller gatherings with Murphy cousins. Every day Sara spoke to Delia and Katy; almost as often she talked with Josie, twice met her for dinner. Then daily life resumed; it always resumes, whether one is ready or not.

The chronic insomnia recurred. Whenever she could, Sara slept. On Saturdays, she began walking again, revisiting places she'd gone with James. As if she were waiting. As if he would call; as if he would appear in Concord, or in Marblehead. During the week, Cambridge seemed to imitate the Cambridge she lived in; normal routines seemed like imitation life.

And there were dreams, with and without James, often of the house. A dream, say, of opening a door to discover she's found the Blue Rock kitchen, Nora pouring tea, Delia lacing running shoes, Katy sifting mail. She walks upstairs alone and finds the hall is full of animals. A huge tabby sprawls in the bathtub. An enormous dog, heavily muscled, fur a bristly white, naps halfway down the hall to Nora's room. Sara's room is as she left it, but now the dog's awake, growling and barking beyond the door frame. She shuts the door, but it's badly cut, off by several inches, and the dog shoves his snout and one heavy paw underneath. At some point she is sweating and shouting. No one intervenes. At some point she wakes up.

Or the dream in which her voice mail has filled with messages: they must be from her father. But he can hardly speak. She hears only thick syllables—is that him? He sounds awful—then obscure pop songs spliced together. It's a code, isn't it? He's played the songs because he can't speak. But the puzzle's
too difficult, she's not clever enough—she keeps trying, going back to the sad thick syllables, the quoted pop songs, discerning less and less.

And over those strange weeks, yet more insomnia: it seemed as if a kind of chasm had opened, and with it the confusion of absences she could not unmix. She tried to reach Nora, who texted back
Sending love. Let's talk soon
. So often Sara couldn't find her—it was terrible not to find her. Where had she gone? (Could she be lost?) And James was gone—dead—but what did that mean? Last seen in a midnight-blue suit; last seen unspeaking. The box in the ground explained nothing. Body, suit, box: more sleight of hand, more theater. James was a person: a person had to be somewhere.

ROME

La dama con liocorno

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1506)

GALLERIA BORGHESE

Try to look away: how long before you're drawn back? The dama's young, maybe sixteen, eyes the aquamarine of an island sea yet the gaze grave, unflinching. Raphael painted her seated on a veranda: beyond her, an aqua sky, aqua brushstrokes suggesting trees along the low horizon. Set against all that blue, the amber and burgundy of her variegated skirt, her light amber bodice, the burgundy sleeves almost wide enough to be wings. Red tones echo in her hair, her ruby-and-pearl necklace. In the galleries, is there anyone else like her? So you take a moment to register that her tawny lapdog is not a dog at all, but a miniature unicorn—the small face equine, delicate horn tightly curled, the size of a fountain pen. Its dark liquid eyes focus in the distance, well beyond the gallery space.