The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (28 page)

“We had sex twice, and both times it was because someone we loved had died,” Nina said, taking coffee from Dr. Christos. The cup wasn’t quite inside the saucer’s indentation and almost slipped off as it was passed across the bed.

“Had sex. I don’t like this ‘had sex.’ It’s so unromantic.”

“What do you prefer? Made love? We made love.” In retrospect that was far too romantic a phrase. “Then when I stopped crying, Luca proposed. He said I needed someone to take care of me. He said he wanted to. He said, ‘Will you marry me, Nina, and love me the whole of my life?’ He looked as if he meant it.”

“And you said no.”

“I said no. And I’m afraid that I laughed.”

“Oh dear.”

“It was shock. It was the surprise that made me laugh. I wasn’t laughing at him, as he insists that I did. Anyway. Yes, I offended
him. He got dressed and he left. Recently when we talked it was obvious that he still minded. He said, ‘You laughed at me, when I asked you to marry me.’ I said, ‘My mother had died; she’d just died,’ but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Laughing was the unforgivable thing. I reminded him that he hadn’t even come to the funeral; he’d sent flowers from Italy, suddenly finding he was needed in the Roman office.”

“That must’ve hurt.”

“He said it was my fault. He said that I’d made him very low, but that Italy had worked its magic on him. I said, ‘And Francesca, she worked her magic on you, too, didn’t she?’ Depressing, how people talk to one another, isn’t it?”

Arriving that morning in the cab from her mother’s apartment, her mother’s key still enclosed in her fist, Nina saw the family house and its contents differently, as if she were visiting it a long time later, as if months had passed since the death and not eighteen hours. Once she’d showered and dressed, once Luca’s persistent scent and wetness had been removed, she went into what had been her parents’ room; when Anna left, Robert had moved into the spare bedroom and its single bed. In a way that was undefinable the room smelled of Nina’s childhood. She looked at herself in the cheval mirror, at the skinny twenty-year-old with the bags under her eyes, hungover and no longer a virgin and exhausted by crying. The girl who was her — and simultaneously not — was wearing dark jeans and a sky-blue American college sweatshirt, the red socks and a pair of red-laced Doc Martens. She opened the wardrobe door and was confronted by a row of Anna’s dresses. Anna was dead; everything in every moment repeated this
impossible thing in her brain. Not only that, but Luca wasn’t going to be hers, though for the time being that was something she felt nothing about. She couldn’t, she couldn’t; it wasn’t possible to have all these feelings at once. She took out a Liberty print dress, a shirt dress her mother had made from a purple and blue floral fabric, and took her clothes off and put it on, and put her hair up, pulling down strands to sit by her ears, and rubbed baby oil into her arms and shins, and smeared Vaseline on her lips and eyelashes. There she was, reflected back at herself, a hybrid Anna-Nina, near identical to the Anna of the early photographs.

Photographs. Nina cast an eye over the bookcases and didn’t see the albums, which were bound in a dark-red leather. She pulled the chair from the dressing table and swept her arm across the top of the wardrobe and found nothing. After standing surveying the room, she returned to the wardrobe, opening its pine doors and pushing her hands between the coats so as to open up a space, and there they were, stacked on the bottom beside a jumble of shoes. She pulled three of them out, took them into the sitting room, and settled herself in the elbow of the sofa.

The first one she opened was entirely of trees, garden trees and village trees in black silhouette and in close-up. To have amassed a whole album of pictures of trees … it was almost too much. The tree studies had been possible only because of Anna’s absolute confidence; her safety, her illusory safety. The trees made Nina cry again. She said aloud, “Oh, Mum,” as she turned over the pages. They were more upsetting, the tree pictures, than the last family album, chronicling the final holiday, its pages of views and sights and buildings and lunches. It had been Anna’s camera and so there were few pictures of her and Robert together, but plenty of Nina and her dad, doing holiday things in holiday backdrops. It was Anna’s first visit to France, somewhere she’d longed to go.
Robert had organized it as a surprise. They’d spent a week in a villa near Nice, before traveling west, a chunk of the Midi at a time, past vineyards and canals, past salt flats and hilltop castles, over the Pyrenees and into Spain. Nina studied the photographs closely, but couldn’t see any of them written there, the things that her father later said he’d felt. Why had he organized the trip? He hadn’t needed to. It was an odd thing to do in the circumstances. Perhaps guilt was at the root of it, guilty even before the fatal thing had been said, wanting to give material compensation in advance to a woman he no longer loved.

Nina took some of the photographs from the third collection with her to Greece. They’d been fixed to the pages with glued-on corners and had been easy to take out. She’d put them into a manila envelope and had them now, some held in a pile in her hands and the rest scattered onto the white sheet. This album had been dedicated to Grandpa and Mormor’s summer home, somewhere that Robert never visited; he’d use Nina and Anna’s absence to get on with work undisturbed. The lakeside setting was quietly spectacular, though the house itself was rudimentary, with a basement at the damp ground level and plank stairs going up to a wide veranda, its main room fitted with two curtained box beds in niches. Nina always said she had fantastically happy memories of being there, each summer with her mother, and that was true when she was ten, but at fourteen she’d been bored after the second week and had itched to get back to Paolo and Luca.

The older photographs, the black and white ones, were of Anna just before she met Robert, Anna at twenty-two at the lake house in a swimsuit. The swimming costume had its own molded pointy breasts, and Anna’s small waist had been accentuated by its belted style. She sat with her legs to one side, revealing long brown tapering thighs, one hand up, laughingly protesting
to the camera operator, and the other holding on to her floppy-brimmed hat. There were pictures of Grandpa and Mormor, too: Grandpa Sven had a ship’s captain’s beard and smoked a pipe, the constant drift of smoke narrowing his eyes into sea-blue slits, and had distinctively calloused, gnarly hands with enlarged knuckles. His being frustrated creatively at the furniture business was the reason that the lake cabin had become an ongoing DIY project. Over the years he’d refurbished and remodeled it, installing its paneling, its carved beds and window frames, its built-in storage, its beautifully dovetailed dining set, and Anna had photographed his improvements. Nina saw her mother with the camera, barefoot in shorts and a bikini top, her smooth, tanned back. She smelled her sun-warmed, lake-silty skin.

“Why did Anna leave the Norwegian pictures in the wardrobe?” Dr. Christos asked. “Surely they were precious to her.”

“It’s a good question,” Nina said. “Sometimes I worry that it was because the album upset her. As if it reminded her of a time in which she was about to make a bad decision.”

“Marrying your father was a bad decision?”

Nina didn’t answer. She ran her forefinger over a close-up shot of Mormor, whose real name had been Kristjana, whose dad had been Icelandic and who was as short as Sven was tall. Traces of her were seen in Anna’s long nose and wide cheekbones and little chin, but she’d had dark almond eyes, and brown hair that even in her youth was striped with bands of wiry gray. She’d been photographed at the desk by the window, in the act of writing a letter, and Nina found that she was beginning to imagine herself living and working at the lake. These days her main duty
at the publishing house (one she didn’t often admit to) was as a rewriter, reworking poorly written books, and other than for fitting in with the publisher’s schedule she had no obligations to be anywhere. She could spend part of the year in Norway and have people to stay; the people she loved could come and go in drifts. She saw, in her mind’s eye, Dr. Christos coming up the wooden steps, barefoot with bits of wood he’d found for the stove. Evidently she could imagine him there, for there he was, as if his visit were already a memory.

All the July days they’d spent at the lake when she was young had merged into one, a single remembered holiday made from condensing all the summers. The visits had come to an end when Nina was fourteen, the year that she was openly bored, although the boredom wasn’t the reason. Grandpa Sven died. They had gone to the funeral together — Robert was excused — in head-to-toe black, Anna in a fitted suit and a hat with a veil like Jackie Kennedy. Anna said she’d have to do a lot more visiting from now on, a plan Robert wasn’t keen on, saying they should bring her mother over, to a good nursing home. But it didn’t matter in the end. Kristjana survived her husband only by one autumn, and then at Christmas she, too, was gone.

Two of the photographs had become stuck in the envelope. Here was Anna at a wedding in a green silk dress, the one with the Chinese collar, her hair pinned and twisted in a complicated updo, and here she was pictured at a dance in a gold off-the-shoulder number. It occurred to Nina that she’d never seen a picture of her mother in which she wasn’t smiling. Anna had always kept the household buoyant. Had she known that Robert might fall out of
love with her if her buoyancy faltered? Even if she had, she couldn’t have foreseen the catastrophe that would come when Nina went to university. Lately, Nina had come to feel at one with her mother on this question of jollity. She had felt, her whole married life, that she carried the mood of the marriage in herself, at once dictating and embodying it. If Nina was withdrawn Paolo took his cue and was more so, and the whole house took on a dreary aspect, the food like ashes in their mouths. Luca was different. Luca upped his own jollity and raised the morale. He would have said, “Come on, droopy face, we’re going out for dinner.” He would have found a funny film; he would have taken off his sock and talked to her via a hand puppet; he would have made a chocolate fondue; he would have instituted a thumb war; he would have insisted she dance with him; he would have been physically overpowering, dragging her off the sofa and rolling her across the rug, persisting until she smiled into his eyes and their bond was reestablished. That’s how Luca was, and they were all things he’d done with his sister-in-law already, at family get-togethers and on holidays. Paolo had never done any of them. Paolo seemed to expect Nina to provide; she was depended on as the source of fun and lightness in his life, as if Nina were really Anna all over again. This had been clear to Nina when she moved out, that Paolo had married her thinking he was marrying Anna, and that it had been a mistake. He’d referred, in the last conversation in their marital kitchen, to the trouble he’d had with her depressions. He was dragged down, he said, and he didn’t want to be dragged down.