James called to tell Nora directly. October, a windy Saturday afternoon. He called, and there was a moment—there often was a moment after long silences between them—before time caught up with her. A moment of hearing his voice and answering in an unguarded way. This could happen when she had been reading or sleeping or alone for a long while. The unexpected voice, the voice of her marriage, warm now, her lack of defense. He’d been dating someone, he said. He said they would be marrying.
She was in the still, cool kitchen, filling the kettle. Swans on the pond, the pond reflecting the moving pink and violet clouds, swans swimming through the colors’ reflections. She listened. His announcement and patter were rehearsed, though a stranger listening might not think so. He could memorize speeches and deliver them as spontaneous eloquence, something Nora recognized; she wondered if the new woman detected the difference, or would ever detect it. One more bit of intimate knowledge Nora hadn’t lost, one way in which the alien James was not a stranger. A further insult, it seemed, to witness his new life, but she saw no way out. This was why, Nora imagined, parents kidnapped their children and moved to Brazil.
“We’ll take it slow,” he said. She did not know whether “we” meant James and the woman, or James and Nora, or all three of them. Next summer, he said. Perhaps midsummer.
“Okay,” she said. “I see,” she said, and more than once repeated. She’d let herself think in the near term only, had veered away from his private life—as long as it was separate from the girls, she’d told him, it was his business. And the kids had said nothing. But now she knew and would have to find space for this knowledge, a way to navigate it daily, with no apparent end. It seemed you could in fact start a second life, if you were James: you could walk away from the prior life, the one that had anchored you so utterly. And if she’d left, before? After Rome there seemed no other path. Before that? Would she have left the children with James? No. She’d have to reel back further, before Theo.
The girls had met her as a guest of Patrick’s, James told her.
“Patrick. I see,” she said. So, too, the likely end of her remaining Murphy ties. “Do they know?”
“Katy,” he said.
“And Theo?”
He and Josie had taken Theo to dinner on Theo’s last visit.
Which explained too why Theo had been so adamant about her private life. Didn’t she want to date? If she met someone, why not? She’d said she had no time. “If it’s what you want, Mom, there’s always time,” he’d said, but no, she’d told him. He could not understand. How tightly scheduled her days, with Delia and Sara and Katy, her job, the house; how catastrophic ordinary car trouble could be. The endless searches for bargains, the errands and repairs packed into the days the girls spent with James. To make him understand she’d have to say too much. “But if it’s what you want,” he repeated. At one of Katy’s games, Theo watched from the sidelines with Nora and the goalie Ellie Burnham’s father, Lloyd, who joked with Nora and Theo and shared a bag of pretzels. When they said good-bye, Lloyd Burnham kissed her cheek—“See you, hon,” he said—and kissed Katy’s cheek, and shook Theo’s hand.
In the car Theo said, “What about him?” and Katy snorted, “He’s married, Theo. Remember the sail club lady? Ellie’s mom? Didn’t you scrape up one of those boats?”
“Okay, so not him. Someone else,” Theo said.
“Get me a new dishwasher,” Nora told him.
And when Theo brought it up again later, she said no. A vehement no that seemed to take Theo by surprise. They were at the kitchen table drinking tea, and a flat silence hung over the room for a moment before Theo said, “Okay,” and Nora said, “I need to look after the girls. Don’t worry.” But it seemed to Nora that Theo was confusing her with the Nora of the cocktail dresses, or the one who took him as a small child to cafés; or even the Nora who had rediscovered pleasure with James one last summer. Maybe Theo saw the Nora of that summer or maybe he imagined she could step back into that moment, the inevitable betrayals of the body notwithstanding.
And perhaps she should be grateful that Theo could not see the hairline fractures that might with one more collision, one more betrayal, become unbreachable fissures. Though Theo no longer lived in Blue Rock; Theo could be wishful; there was plenty Theo didn’t see.
Nora could not explain herself. The steady small physical attritions were not what kept her alone, but they troubled her more as the plain facts of Josie Brundige’s life unspooled, and Josie herself became a presence: a woman younger by a decade, lovely, her body a lovely body. There was a youthful lushness about Josie, and a surety to her movements Nora could not remember in herself.
And how was it that the body of another woman could within minutes make one’s own body seem alien? On an ordinary Sunday, she picked up the girls at James’s condo, and Josie was there, just leaving: the passing of ships, a handshake. Josie wore jeans and a sweater, but had the look of a Lord & Taylor ad. The girls called Nora, ran to Nora, she hugged them; Josie left, and the moment ended. James walked Nora and the girls to her car, careful, polite. As she was leaving, he handed her an envelope, a check for house money. As if he were buying peace, or reasserting severance. “Next week,” she said.
She did not want to imagine James’s desire: she imagined James’s desire. And her own, the idea of being in Josie’s presence, the way one might feel if one were not Nora. What her children might feel? And although Nora knew better, knew that no one escapes loss, Josie in the hallway with her equanimity and her red-gold waves and still-taut curves appeared free, and therefore more haunting. If James had not been in love with Josie, would Nora have seen Josie this way? Maybe not. Or in that moment, seen herself as almost without gender, at least not one she recognized? Strangely exiled, if on a familiar coast.