Trompe l'Oeil (32 page)

Stand before her long enough and something in the mind begins to shimmer. The dama appears as alive as the soft-bellied guard pacing the museum. Here's another elision, one more
liminal point: a hair's breadth of distance divides you from her. How vivid this girl, how mesmerizing her blue gaze, defying judgment. Perhaps she defends the unicorn. Perhaps she defends the unicorn's reality.

She is not at all dead. She is herself; she is covertly Raphael. And for the briefest instant it seems to you that she is
here
, nearly able to step from the canvas; not only visible but also conscious. As if in fact you see each other. In that moment, she might be as real as you are; or you as fierce and lucid as she.

ROME III

It occurred to Sara once, and then again—in that storm of other thoughts—that if she were her father, and dead, she would go to Rome.

And so she left from Logan, first to the crush of Heathrow, then to Rome on an early morning flight. She stepped from the plane onto walking ramps and into corridors empty of anyone but fellow passengers, and it seemed as if they were backstage, or as if bleariness veiled them from the city. But passengers from other flights began to appear near passport control, and then the space thickened irreversibly, the silence and murmurs now Italian silences and murmurs, and near her German and Dutch and Hindi. She was a kind of sleepwalker, moving through fragmenting and re-forming crowds, alert to the pressing details—baggage, euros, exit, taxi—while the voices and light, soon the morning light in Rome—seemed to wash over her. The taxi sped inches from the adjacent speeding cars, passing through what became for her the
first
Rome, highway giving way to utilitarian boulevards and ordinary modern streets, working neighborhoods and billboards for auto repair and cosmetics, graffitied concrete walls of apartment buildings, laundry lines on stacked balconies,
a Rome insisting on the present. Almost resisting the impositions of history—or, at least, the history Sara might impose. And once the taxi reached the Centro Storico, that resistance gave way to what seemed a ubiquitous past composed of countless discrete pasts, tilting toward the light or stacked in shadow, excavated or hidden, the present still elbowing in, the present spinning in the crowds and markets, the Vespas and Fiats vying for lane space, the rush-hour buses, the street vendors selling scarves at tourist sites, selling roses. And in the café beside the hotel, a quieting and narrowing of focus: the immediacy of a cappuccino and a biscotti, the barista's conversation, mellifluous and to Sara incomprehensible. She slept for a day in a small hotel near Piazza Navona, then began walking.

Say she was following a thread, or what she imagined to be a thread, that might lead to James, or to Molly. To Nora, to Theo and Katy as they once had been. Say she tried to apprehend the contours of before and after, and what else they'd left behind. Say that, in seeing what they'd seen, she might name what had eluded her.

And yes, it seems possible to suspend the present, but only for a moment; just as one might ignore the past—for a moment—without consequence. Off-season yet the streets buzzing with ordinary urban life, the rush-hour crowds and students and city workers, and the peppering of classical guitarists on bridges and in piazzas, and the clusters of vacationing families in the Piazza del Popolo; couples on holiday along the Tiber, American students in Trastevere bars. Cafés and more cafés, flower vendors hawking the long-stem roses so aggressively that couples pay them to go away. The Pantheon fills with tourists crowding in
to photograph Raphael's sarcophagus; on the floor of San Luigi dei Francesi, an engraved stone marking a French child's burial. Outside this church, then the next, begging women, one with small children, another with a teenage girl. Dome after gilded, muraled dome, as if the heavens in fact are here, and outside the church the mirroring brilliant daylight, perhaps in confirmation. At the gelato shop off Campo de'Fiori a well-heeled family of five, a boy and two small girls: in a church in Trastevere, an Irish-looking blonde and two girls strolling.

Even now, in those rare retellings of the Murphys' trip to Rome, no one ever names the church, the street, the hotel. Perhaps would not. It's possible Katy and Theo do not remember; maybe after time Nora and James forgot; or maybe they imagined that by naming the place they would reify the tragedy. And so, yes, any church might be the church, any busy street the street. To ask—
this one?
—is to imagine Molly running. James and Theo wave, Nora palms an orange, Molly lets go of Katy's hand. Here? The immediate disastrous consequence. And isn't Sara, much later, another consequence? Of course for Rome, their story—and hers—is the size of a dust mote. There are so many lives, so much talk, so much other humming above the dense silence.

Picture them, the young Murphys. Nothing has happened yet. They've been sleeping off jet lag; say they linger at the hotel. If they do not explore Rome, and Molly averts her disastrous run, the years ahead promise some ease. It's unlikely, Sara thinks, that she herself will appear: they seem complete without her (though not, it seems, without Delia. She can't say why). They are at breakfast, drinking coffee and hot chocolate. It's not yet too late.

What to say to Molly? She is still only four. Sara would like to tell her,
Wait. Hold on to Katy's hand. Live
. But if she lives, will Sara? If Sara is predicated on Molly's run, how can Sara stop her? Given a chance, how could she not? Molly must not run. Sara must not vanish. If Sara could? She'd say,
Let's get out of here
.

Again and again on these days walking Rome, searching out the family for whom she did not exist, she has felt a pull toward the stone of the streets and benches, the bits of dirty grass, an impulse to lie flat and gaze at a sky alternately gray and Della Robbia blue, or a patchwork of both, or rimmed with orange. No one mentioned rain; she has not imagined rain, but it might have been raining that day too. She has only the church, the girl running, the truck, the quick erasure, the subsequent repeating loops. The impulse to see and resee.

The Murphys in Rome? They left decades ago. Say they are like memories of a house that exists only in the mind. Is it ever exactly the same house? And if it could exist untroubled? Or if the corollary exile might end?

Nora once kept a tiny print of Raphael's
Dama con liocorno
in a shoe box, the image cut from a magazine. Perhaps she saw the painting here: a skeptical girl with limpid sea-colored eyes and the perfectly rendered unicorn in her lap. A girl five hundred years older than Molly, and in the viewing moment, almost as real. In that moment, more seems possible, doesn't it?

Why not imagine that after all, with what remains, you can continue? Imagine that although James is dead, and Molly is dead, you are not. Say that, beneath this sky, in this or any city, you do not fall. You do not fall. You walk.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My profound thanks for the remarkable support, generosity, and insight of Gail Hochman; to Meg Storey for her lucid, intelligent editorial eye and dedication to this novel; and to Carin Clevidence, for her tireless manuscript readings, spot-on critiques, and sustaining friendship. Big thanks to Heather Sellers, to Rick Hilles, and to Rachel Teukolsky and Peter Guralnick for their thoughtful manuscript readings, conversations, support, and faith in the work. I'm happily indebted to Liss Platt, Claudia Manley, Mercedes Cebrián, Dave King, and Jenny Humphreys for their insights into art-making, writing, and the city of Rome; to Sarah Van Arsdale, Elaine Sexton, Robin Messing, Raymond Johnson, Natalie Baszile, Susan Choi, Melissa Zieve, Allison Norton, and Jeff Norton for their friendships, insights, and encouragement. Thanks to the Vanderbilt English Department, to my colleagues Kate Daniels, Mark Jarman, Lorraine Lopez, Tony Earley, Justin Quarry, Janis May, Margaret Quigley, Jen Holt, Mark Schoenfield, and Vereen Bell, whose kindness and support have made all the difference; and to Vanderbilt's
MFA
and undergraduate writers, whose openness, inventiveness, and generosity continue to teach me.

I wrote
Trompe l'Oeil
over time with the great good luck of residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Blue Mountain Center, the Brecht House, the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Corporation of Yaddo; and with support from the Tennessee Commission for the Arts and from Vanderbilt University. Many thanks to all. Abiding gratitude, always, to my husband Rick Hilles, and to my Buffalo family: David Reisman, Sofia Reisman, and Betsy Abramson, Linda Reisman and Jack Reisman, Jeanne Reisman, Len Goldschmidt, and Deborah Goldschmidt, Janet Gross, Lo Wunder, and Sue Cooperman, Judy and Len Katz, Mort and Natalie Abramson, Jill Polk, Isabella Polk, Lorinda Tennyson, and Wendy Teplitsky. My gratitude beyond words to Rena and Robert Reisman.

© RICK HILLES

NANCY REISMAN
's debut novel,
The First Desire
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book and a recipient of the Goldberg Award from the Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her story collection,
House Fires
, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including
Tin House
,
Glimmer Train
,
Narrative
,
The Best American Short Stories 2001
, and
The O'Henry Award Stories 2005
.