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  Praise for The First Desire

  “Accomplished. . . . Reisman’s sumptuous prose, and her canny knowledge of the corrosive ways an average family can come apart, make The First Desire a lovely, absorbing companion.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (editor’s choice)

  “Reisman’s hypnotic prose makes her . . . characters live. And her sympathy and wealth of detail make the Cohens’ world our own: specific, inescapably flawed, unpredictably meaningful and very, very real.”

  —People

  “Only fiction can feel as real as this—and only in the right hands. . . . You needn’t be from Buffalo to be swept away by The First Desire. You need only be from a family.”

  —USA Today

  “A book of rhythms and reveries . . . rich in atmosphere. . . . The First Desire is a mystery story, left unsolved because the mystery is identity itself.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Reisman’s first novel is mesmerizing . . . . Reisman demonstrates a rare, poetic understanding of family dynamics . . . [and] writes with beauty and precise imagery . . . . This realism, subtly laced with tenderness and compassion, distinguishes a novel whose addictive embrace continues after the last page has been turned.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A debut of luminous, distinctive quality . . . . This is a writer quietly taking her own bold course, and to travel with her as she does is a joy.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Haunting. . . . Reisman’s genius [is having] produced a book that generates its own world and holds the reader captive, willingly, to its landscape. Reisman creates this miracle through the power of her writing.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A continuing testament to the paradoxical ease with which family ties unravel. . . . Intensely affecting and thought-provoking.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “A superb new writer. . . . Reisman, whose sensually charged, often outright stunning style strongly evokes Virginia Woolf . . . proves herself a rare master of internal drama, able to isolate the moment that effects a sea change within a lifetime of compromise.”

  —Vogue

  Copyright © 2015 Nancy Reisman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reisman, Nancy, 1961-

  Trompe l’oeil: a novel / Nancy Reisman. -- First U.S. edition.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-941040-04-1 (ebook)

  1.Dysfunctional families--Fiction. 2.Loss (Psychology)--Fiction. 3.Marital conflict--Fiction. 4.Grief--Fiction. 5.Domestic fiction.I. Title.

  PS3568.E5135T76 2015

  813’.54--dc23

  2014045523

  First US edition 2015

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com

  for Jeanne, Linda, and David for Rick

  & always, for Robert and Rena

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ROME

  PART I

  HOUSE I

  THE DIVIDE

  THE MURPHYS I

  MOLLY AND KATY

  ROME I

  ROME II

  NORA’S PLACES

  JAMES

  ROME

  FUNERAL DAY

  BLUE ROCK

  ROME

  NEW SCHOOL

  HOUSE II

  AFTER I

  WINTER

  COCKTAILS

  REPRODUCTIONS

  SARA

  A DAY AT THE PARK

  SMALL GIRLS AND KATY

  NORA’S COLLECTION

  ANOTHER SUMMER

  ROME

  FALL

  BLIZZARD

  HIGH TIDE

  ROAD DAY

  HOUSE III

  PART II

  ROMAN CAFÉ

  NORA AFTER JAMES

  ROME

  THE MURPHYS II

  HOUSE IV

  KATY IN LOVE

  FIFTH BIRTHDAY

  COLD

  MISSIVES FROM NORA

  REPRODUCTION

  SARA AT NIGHT

  AT THE PATRICK MURPHYS’

  NO CAFÉ

  NEWS

  ROME

  DRESSES

  HOUSE V

  AWAY

  TRUCK REDUX

  REPRODUCTION

  KATY’S PLACES

  KATY WITH TIM

  REPRODUCTION

  JAMES BY THE SEA

  ROMAN CONVERSATIONS

  CHURCH PANTRY

  HOUSE VI

  PREGNANT

  REPRODUCTION

  INTERIOR WITH CHEERIOS

  PARTY NIGHT

  STORM

  MOTEL

  POST-FIRE

  PART III

  ROME

  THE MURPHYS III

  SARA’S PLACES

  WALKING

  AFTER II

  HOUSE VII

  REPRODUCTION

  STOPPING MAN

  ROMAN STREETS

  BLUE SUIT

  ROME

  ROME III

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ROME

  Prospettiva

  Francesco Borromini (c.1652–53)

  PALAZZO SPADA

  Rome, the first time: imagine wandering the historic center, the centuries crowding together, tourists in bright scarves speaking languages you can only glean, Vespas cutting fast around the clustered pedestrians. Turn a corner, another, onto a momentarily quiet street: here’s one more residential palace, almost tucked away. A doorway, a hall, a courtyard where you’ll find a scattering of fruit trees. And in the courtyard, in this city of arched passageways, yet another arched passageway opens before you. This one appears as an alluring question, suggesting elegant spaces beyond, perhaps a dinner table set for eight, a Persian carpet; or a music room, a piano, tall windows. From the courtyard, you approach. Four sets of double columns flank the arch, and repeating rows of blue squares cover the curved ceiling, echoing the floor’s square tiles. At the passageway’s far end, a statue—a male nude in centurion’s headgear—rises in profile, one arm extended forward, one leg extended back, as if he is in motion through that other corridor. A good distance, it seems, from the courtyard’s exterior arch. Beside the orange trees, the museum guide—stylish, middle-aged, lipsticked, a woman like many women in Rome—smokes a cigarette and says, Yes, I will show you. She gestures toward the passageway. The archway and second hall beckon, but she does not usher you in. Instead the woman hands you her cigarette and enters the passageway as you remain beside the trees. She steps forward, though as she moves, the archway ceiling seems to press down on her, the space itself shrinking, forcing her to stoop. A quick shock, an architectural joke: it’s a foreshortened stage, the far end child-sized, the statue a miniature. The woman steps back out and reclaims the cigarette; and now, again, defying you and what you have just seen, the space reasserts itself as the long, high-ceilinged hall, the unfurling space a deft false promise. And—too—a wish?

  I

  HOUSE I

  For the Murphys, there was always the house and the idea of the house, one relatively more stable than the other. From a distance it appeared camouflaged, a silver-gray box perched on st
ilts; beyond it the sea. To each side, other sea-weathered boxes, variations, one smaller, another with a single peak. The air smelled of salt, seaweed at low tide, smoke from charcoal grills or summer campfires on the next beach. From the deck and the beach below, one could see the Massachusetts coast stretching out and falling away, and in the space beyond, the sea, a vast openness, Massachusetts Bay merging with the Atlantic, the curving arm of Cape Cod reaching far to the southeast and the distant east, leaving the shoreline unprotected from Atlantic swells. A beautiful rough corner of the coast: a spit of land on which the town’s early residents would never have built, instead choosing the far side of the harbor, or the inland cliffs. But the longer one lived there, the more permanent the house seemed, even as it rocked in the wind. The storms might slam in directly, but there were long stretches of beach to walk, where small stones mixed with sand, and the sea’s blue, the mixed greens and grays, shifted with the light, going violet or sapphire or slate. Out unshuttered front windows, from the weather-beaten deck, from the east- and northeast-facing bedrooms, the sea appeared and reappeared.

  Different years, different versions. First, the house had been a ramshackle summer outpost Nora and James had scrimped to buy from James’s uncle, a place of ease despite or because of the off-plumb doorjambs and slanted floors and salt-worn wood. Outside stairs led up from the narrow street to the broad wraparound deck, where in summer they drank cocktails with their friends; a windowed door opened into a large kitchen, drafty or breezy depending on the month. They renovated and winterized; still, the wind was undeniable, and at night the house swayed lightly, enough so that water in a bowl might register the smallest of tides. Grand ill-tempered swans moved between the shelter of the brook-fed pond to the beach, crossing the narrow bridge of land down the road from the house and into the shallows, startlingly white against the sea.

  At first, the Murphys spent summers there. Or Nora and the children did. James drove down for weekends and August vacation time. Theo and Katy were in grade school then, the youngest, Molly, still at home. From one year to the next, the scenes of leisure blurred into each other, as if contiguous with the preceding summers, all other seasons forgotten. Cousins and friends arrived for beach days and barbecues and drinks out on the deck. And then, the year James’s promotion came through, they planned a shorter season in Blue Rock, to follow a two-week trip to Italy.

  It was a slippery moment in their marriage, a crossroad. They had agreed to move from their small house in Newton to a place with more room, but only that. Where to remained vexed. James pushed for the wealthier cloistered suburbs; Nora missed Cambridge, where they’d once lived. In careful tones, they avoided the straining subtext, and when the Newton house sold, they put the furniture in storage, deferred. James had dreamed of travel; Nora had studied art. Rome would give them perspective. And there would be summer in Blue Rock, which from the vantage point of spring always seemed an endless unspooling of days, July a broad yellow plain with no apparent horizon beyond the brimming gold edges of August. For each of them, there was the pull of summer light over the sea, like something remembered from the deepest dream, a vast fluctuating gem that seemed to alter the rooms of the house, the narrow road, and, with luck, briefly, oneself, into their most vivid incarnations.

  In June, just after the school year ended, the family flew from Logan Airport.

  THE DIVIDE

  In the moment of traveling to Rome, James was still a familiar, recognizable James, still visible to Nora as the ardent, playful man who’d once courted her. Still also perceptible the wash of hopeful anticipation from their early days in Cambridge, that first buoyancy; how brightly dappled their lives had seemed, rising, moving further and further from the respective narrow rooms in which they’d lived as children into a lofty expansive space. As if those days, that rising, promised to define all to follow. Even after Theo was born, and despite the late-night hours, cut-up naps, bleary days; he was nonetheless an easy baby, and Irish-fair, blue-eyed, quick to learn. For his first year, they marveled. On weekends, James played hiding games with Theo, stacked blocks to knock down, lifted Theo in flying sweeps. He’d carry a bundled Theo around the neighborhood repeating aloud the names of objects and colors (yellow, bird, truck). Sometimes Nora and James would take Theo to matinees, where he’d easily doze or drink from his bottle and watch the changing images on the screen. On clear weekdays, Nora tucked him into the stroller for visits to coffee shops, or carried him on the local bus to visit her mother in Somerville. If the afternoon was bitter or stormy, Theo would sit in her lap or lie beside her on a blanket for long stretches as she paged through books of art reproductions. She imagined no reason to want any life but her own.

  And at first she recognized the emerging shadow as temporary disturbance—the move from Cambridge to Newton, the vicissitudes of another pregnancy—paired with hard losses, her mother’s death, her father’s decline. Yet the disturbance persisted and deepened, stranding her far from that early expanse. Soon her father, too, was gone. How had this transpired? It seemed she’d been choosing bananas; she’d been laundering sheets. Her mother called, frightened. Snow fell. She drove to a hospital; she iced cupcakes; she dressed Theo in blue pants. But now the cupcakes belonged in the Newton kitchen, and Katy had arrived. Where were her parents? Or for that matter James: she missed James, whose work claimed most of his time. Katy, a baby as beautiful as Theo had been—the eyes more hazel, and the hair a fine dark amber—cried far more often, slept lightly, quickly grew restless. An uncalm baby, a girl who took hours to quiet, responding only to Nora. Eventually Katy settled, happy to be walking, running, a fast-moving girl with strong limbs, impatient with books, impatient with small puzzles and quiet tasks, a girl who loved the multihued beach ball and the tub of blocks and strove to keep up with her brother. A girl of raw energy, as a toddler happiest on the playground or in the backyard snow, as long as Nora remained nearby.

  If Nora glanced away, she’d turn back to find soup cans on the pantry floor, a carton of milk spilling over the edge of the table, Katy watching the cascade, or the blue bath beads—a gift forgotten on a low shelf—rolling and smashed in Katy’s hands, one in Katy’s mouth. Spit it out. Katy, spit it out. Katy. Now. And finally Let’s have a cookie instead and Katy spitting out the shrinking blue globe, her face puckering with the bitter chemical taste, near to sobbing at Nora’s frustration. Sweetheart, Nora would soothe. And then Katy would hug her hard, in what seemed a silent begging for forgiveness; Theo stood in the doorway watching, a red wooden train car held in midair. Theo, cookies? And Nora offered a hand to him as she carried Katy.

  They were good children, lovely children—though when exactly had the moment shifted from almost enough to something less? She’d said yes and yes again to this life with James, yes to some deferrals—a gallery job? A little studio? James spoke earnestly of his career, what a step up could mean to him, to the family. Might she wait? Perhaps until the fall. Or soon after. How reasonable it had sounded; how quickly she’d agreed. Oblivious, it now seemed, as the status quo altered, the consequences multiplied. During summer in Blue Rock, the sense of possibility returned, though she could not say why. Their Newton neighborhood—lush old-growth trees, smaller well-tended houses—was friendly enough, occupied most of the week by women and younger children, the men commuting to the city or to companies on 128. Days at the park with local kids, Theo and Katy seemed happiest; or down the street at the neighbor Lydia’s. Lydia owned a good swing set and a new sandbox, a three- and a five-year-old. She warned her girls, Don’t break your heads, on the swings, her irreverence drawing Nora in. An appealing chaotic barn-red house in which the kids’ toys were perpetually scattered, Lydia’s surreal sketches pinned to the refrigerator alongside the girls’ finger paintings, her larger paintings lining the halls. Had Lydia been stealthier with time than Nora? More disciplined with art? Maybe. Certainly Lydia had, Nora thought, accrued more knowledge, a worldly savvy—as if she’d traveled abroad alone. During the
first months of their friendship, it seemed that little mystified Lydia.

  Both of their husbands worked in the city, a realm apart, and for the dozens of small decisions that steered each week, Nora consulted Lydia, and vice versa: with their kids, they spent hours of most days together, their partnership shaping itself around the children’s hourly or momentary needs. Sometimes they’d settle in at one house, sometimes the other. You could not hold tightly to your hopes for the day, but with Lydia it did not matter. One could always read stories, and if not read stories, build block towers to push down, or draw animals, or make a parade. If the children would not nap, you made up songs. And while Lydia made up songs, Nora managed to get in the laundry; while Nora led a parade, Lydia started soup. And too they shared occasional distraught mornings, when Lydia would call early and drop her girls at Nora’s for an hour or sometimes more. Nora would give them milk in blue cups, settle them with Theo and Katy on comforters spread over the living room floor, and read stories of sentient teapots and kind bears. Later Lydia would arrive, slightly winded, and lie on the comforter and let her daughters climb over her.

  There were, too, fleeting despondent moments of Nora’s own. The morning, say, when she woke from a dream of her father stopping by her Newton kitchen for coffee, his coat snowy from shoveling—her dream-time pleasure and surprise at his arrival, and the notion that she should have baked (though she could offer toast and jam)—but then one of the kids called, or maybe a door opened, or James spoke. Six AM, and snow in fact falling, but her father was dead again, and James was leaving for work, and her throat seemed to close. She tended to the kids, her throat constricted, and at seven called Lydia. In minutes Lydia arrived with her girls and together they cooked breakfast. Nora did not have to explain the dream, and Lydia did not ask.

  More than once Lydia said aloud that she was lonely in her marriage. She said it before her girls started school; she said it when Molly was an infant.

  “I leave Dan notes,” Lydia said. “That’s all we do. Write notes.”