“How long do you think you can stand still?” James said. “Everything around you is moving.” Though in fact certain things, many things, stood in place. The blue sofa, the kettle on the stove. And it depended, didn’t it, on how you defined motion? Often Nora seemed to go somewhere; she seemed to return. She waved an arm in the direction of the lamp.
“What?” James said.
If each day she too commuted, to Boston or nearer—if each day she too arrived at an office, a school, a gallery, gave over to that particular clock—and later each day returned to the same address, would she have discovered a different kind of motion (say, his) and sooner? Or was the fact of being Nora, rather than James, or James rather than Nora, the key? For months they’d received invitations formal and casual, for company dinners at restaurants, company soirees in private homes; for months they’d politely (Nora) or more effusively (James) declined. Nora could imagine herself on a small olive-shaped boat crossing the pool of a martini glass, but not at a cocktail party itself.
“An olive-shaped boat?” James said. The James who courted her might have laughed, but their courtship itself was a tiny receding boat. His tone had become corrective.
And he would persist. Because he was James. Because as a boy he’d learned to travel to another place in his mind, as if there were two chambers linked by a corridor, with doors he’d learned how to close. Since then the number of chambers had increased, hadn’t it? In the time she’d known him.
“Sooner or later,” he said, “you have to return to the world.”
Assuming a cocktail party was the world, Nora thought, and for a moment there was the flickering sensation of another room—a blue glass lamp, a white teacup, profuse leaves beyond a window filtering the light through square panes—she recognized as Lydia’s in Cambridge, that wafer of time before Italy. But now Nora’s mind also had hallways and doors.
Returning to the world without Molly: in some way Nora remained the holdout, lingering beyond the starched order of business and school days. Still waiting. Knowing better, yet watching for signs. She could see in Theo and Katy the grain of disbelief that Italy had ever occurred, the momentary slip into dream logic. Often, before Italy, they had found Molly in surprising corners of the Blue Rock house. Once again, the house was immediate and real, Rome unreal. You waited for a sign until you forgot that you were waiting, now and then remembering yes still waiting, if more secretively. Eventually the waiting diminished. This had been the case after her parents’ deaths, yet once or twice a year she’d still inadvertently dip into a blurry, suspended disbelief.
Eventually, she told James yes. She bought new dresses, new pumps, new lipstick, made an appointment at the hairdresser’s, as if she were still the sprightly Nora. She hired a good-natured, slightly hippie-ish teenager to babysit, a girl Theo and Katy both claimed to like. Yet the nights Nora and James went out, Theo would not wish them good-bye, and Katy would refuse to sleep anywhere but the couch.
Receptions at upscale restaurants; cocktail parties in lavish homes. James’s colleagues were not unkind, but they didn’t seem quite solid to Nora, as if perhaps they were made of lacquered sponge foam (but who was she to demand ballast?). She wore little black dresses and pearls. The women clustered and dispersed, weaving around and through the clusters of men, chatting about vacation spots and Junior League events, the men tossing statistics as they speculated about ball teams and venues, mall sites, business zones. There were the expected sexual jokes, mild in mixed company—allusions to prowess and voluptuous girls, innuendos tossed at the wives—the women’s cheerful remonstrations, James laughing (her James, his laugh) with the others. Nora stepped back and pretended to sip her drink, watching the proceedings over the top of her glass the way Katy might, or Molly, gazing back and forth between an effervescing drink and the party crowd.
She found herself pretending to like whimsical photos of cats.
At the Lowrys’, olives sank into cocktails. Nora drank a martini, and that night accepted a cigarette, though she hadn’t smoked around company people before. It was soothing, the martini; after the martini she too was smiling (she’d done this before, she could do this), and that appeared to be all anyone expected now, all James expected. He nursed his drink and complimented the women and elicited men’s opinions of the Bruins’ bench. They were happy talkers, the Lowrys and the Lowrys’ seventy-five guests. Nora was drawn instead to the furniture: the living room sofa was upholstered in black fabric covered with small white and red tulips, green leaves and curving stems framing the profusion of flowers. It occurred to her that she had seen the fabric somewhere else. Where? Or was it simply the pattern, reminiscent of Morris, an echo of a month she’d once spent paging through catalogs and drawing vines and leaves in a little sketchbook? An Arts and Crafts exhibit somewhere? She wanted to take off her shoes. She wanted to curl into a corner of the sofa and smoke a cigarette, or two cigarettes, and have another martini.
“What is it?” Claire Lowry, leaning in.
“Wonderful fabric,” Nora said. “So intricate.”
Claire Lowry smiled and lightly touched Nora’s hand. “Can we get you another drink?” She scanned the room for her waiter. “Tell George, dear, what you’d like.”
So a second martini appeared. She was not drunk, though she perceived a pocket of space between her body and the room. The Lowrys’ anniversary cake, a white baroque tower ringed with sugar roses, apparently belonged to an alternate universe, something Alice-like, transforming while you switched from martinis to champagne. Alluring, sweet, belying the frantic scrambling and concussive days, and she found herself slipping behind a kind of scrim in the mind, as if only a silhouette Nora remained at the party. She asked the waiter George where she might find another cigarette.
On the drive home James’s face settled into contentment, lips slightly upturned. He patted her arm before they pulled onto the highway, the streetlights sliding past the window, the air tinted deep greenish blue. The radio broadcast a harmonized jingle for a car dealership, the Bruins’ play-by-play. In Blue Rock, the sky was soft black, layered clouds revealing stars only toward the northwest, the moon hidden, the wind picking up, and when she stepped out of the car, all sounds seemed to give way to the slap of waves against the seawall and their sloshing ebb, and the gusting wind in which she felt encased. She followed James up the wooden stairs to the deck and through the door into the dark kitchen; as soon as she was inside, the wind fell away, the waves now a murmur conversing with the murmur of TV. For an instant James became the silhouette, receding as he approached the bright living room and the television and now-speaking babysitter. Then he stepped out of view. Nora stood in the kitchen without turning on the light, and the feeling of the scrim returned to her, and she imagined smoking the extra cigarette she’d tucked in her coat pocket; imagined the room’s shadow and the murmurs covering her. Diving into the moment the way seals dive into the sea, resurfacing elsewhere. But the TV murmuring stopped, and Nora left her pumps off at the door, the cold floorboards startling her back.