Sixteen
Nina had relocated to Rochester during a glorious spring.
Blue skies, soft breezes, lengthening days leading into comfortable nights.
Everyone joked about the winters, and though she’d been told to prepare herself for the cold and the snow, no one had warned her about the unrelenting gray, about how the sky seemed to have a physical weight to it.
About how damp and biting the days felt when the sun refused to show itself.
Nina felt the lack of light in her bones.
Today, she was chaperoning Bridie’s French class on a school trip to MAG, the Memorial Art Gallery.
She often volunteered for these jaunts because she loved spying on the girls within their school configuration, but Honey was a near-constant parent chaperone and Nina was dreading seeing her today.
Last month, a group of students had gone to a yoga studio run by the new drama teacher’s girlfriend, Priscilla.
Fern and Bridie had loved Priscilla and everything about her: her tights, her long braid and bare feet with painted toes, the quiet but forceful way she spoke.
They loved the apartment with its bay window and a wicker chair that hung from the ceiling alongside a bunch of dangling spider ferns.
Nina was fascinated, too. Is this what her life would be like if she was still single in Rochester right now?
The first thing Priscilla taught them all was belly breathing.
She made the girls put their hands on their stomachs to make sure their bellies expanded on the inhale, “the opposite of how most people breathe.” Honey fidgeted throughout the entire demonstration, angrily eyeing the dust balls in the corner of the room and complaining she couldn’t possibly expand her stomach.
“It’s not how I breathe,” she whined. And when they all got into Nina’s car to drive home, Honey told Fern and Bridie to ignore what Priscilla had said.
“Why?” Fern asked. “Why can’t we breathe to expand our horizons?”
“Because it will make you look pregnant.”
“Mom!”
“Well, it will. You girls need to stand straight and suck your stomach in, keeping it flat and firm. You won’t get a husband otherwise.” Honey’s favorite threat.
As Nina stood in the soaring Fountain Court, in front of the namesake fountain, which a little plaque told her was a replica of a Renaissance-era piece in Florence, she vowed to visit this elegant, peaceful space more often.
The teacher was speaking to the girls in French, and though Nina could make out a word or two, she didn’t pay attention until the docent arrived and they started their tour and Soeur Jeanne fell back with Nina and said to her, with concern, “Are you okay? You look pale.”
“I do?” Nina said, genuinely surprised. She believed she was doing a great job with her exterior self, acting normal, looking normal. “I am a little tired,” she said to the nun. “And these gray skies—”
“Bien sur,” said Soeur Jeanne. “But when the sun does reappear, we will appreciate it so much more.” She gave Nina a self-satisfied pat on the arm and Nina had to steel herself not to flinch. She gestured that she was heading to the ladies’ room. “I’ll catch up with you,” she said.
If Bridie’s teacher hadn’t said anything, she might have assumed her pallor was due to the horrible lighting in the restroom, but she could see she looked terrible. She hadn’t been eating or sleeping well since she’d told Finn he would have to move forward without her. And now this thing with Sam.
When Nina replayed the days at the conference, looking for signs she might have missed, she couldn’t remember a single one.
No kind of palpable energy between Garret and Sam.
Sam wasn’t nervous around Garret or vice versa.
Neither of them seemed to pay more attention to each other than anyone else.
What she did notice that weekend was how cultish the whole thing felt.
It was the same at all those places: the Kodaks, the Xeroxes, the Finnegan’s Grocers—they all declared themselves families as if they were engaged in some kind of higher purpose and not peddling food or film or paper.
These paternalistic organizations run by men who seemed incapable of saying they were out to make a lot of money and protect their respective fiefdoms. No, they had to attach emotion to it, a sense of belonging to a greater good, a greater God.
Funny how organizations mimicked religions.
They all had mottos and retreats and acceptable clothing and spun highly specific visions and dreams for the future, all in the service of something they deemed noble.
She guessed they forgot about the money changers in the temple.
Had she misinterpreted her entire marriage?
Could it be that Sam wasn’t attracted to any woman, ever?
In a way it was a relief. In another way it was devastating.
The morning after Margaret brought Sam home, Nina pulled The Joy of Sex off the shelf where she’d put it after liberating it from Clara’s room (she was relieved Clara had filched the book; the illustrations would have terrified Bridie) and searched the index for homosexuality.
But even that book, with its pages of prose and illustrations devoted to heterosexual relations in the tiniest and most enthusiastic detail, had barely anything to say about men having sex with men, except that men who wanted to “become” straight would need help overcoming “nonrelations with women.” This seemed to place the blame squarely on Nina, which couldn’t be right.
She knew Sam loved her, in his way. She even believed he admired her physically.
He liked her hair a certain way; he bought her beautiful clothes and jewelry.
He just didn’t want to touch her. She knew from her years living above Margaret’s that plenty of gay men had made peace with their choices.
She knew some of them were divorced. She knew some of them maintained a pretense of a heterosexual marriage. But none of them were her husband.
The morning after Margaret brought him home from the bar she’d inherited and made into a welcoming space for gay patrons, Sam apologized to her for overdoing it.
“Overdoing what?” she asked coolly.
“The drink. You know, when out with clients you have to match them one to one.”
“Really?”
“Not a rule, but an unspoken practice,” he said. “And that guy from PARC can really put it away.”
“Garret?”
“Yeah. Garret. He’s quite a drinker.”
“And Margaret?”
“Margaret?”
Did he look genuinely surprised or was he feigning surprise? “My old landlady Margaret. Remember her?”
“Not really. What about her?”
“She drove you both home. I assumed from her bar.”
“God, I don’t know. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even remember coming home.”
She believed that part. “She has a bar downtown.”
“I don’t know. There were a bunch of us and we went to a few places. Nowhere I’d ever been before.”
She didn’t push. She pocketed the information and for a few delirious days believed she had a free pass out of her marriage.
But then she would imagine Clara and Bridie home alone with Sam, an image that always brought her up short, and now was even more complicated.
She was stymied and confused, and the only tolerable option was staying with her girls.
What other choice did she have? For all she knew, the drink with Garret really was nothing.
In the days immediately after telling Finn he needed to move on without her, she was elated, brimming with nobility and sacrifice.
And then the sun disappeared, and the gray invaded the city, her house, her corporeal being.
She imagined her insides as completely leached of color, and, looking at herself in the mirror of the bathroom at the museum, she saw she was fading on the outside, too.
The bathroom door swung open and in came Honey Finnegan. “Oh, hello!” Honey said. “I was wondering where you disappeared to.”
“I’m right here.” Nina took a lipstick out of her purse and applied the color to her lips, but it only made her look worse.
She had the fleeting notion, standing next to Finn’s lawful wife, that sex with Finn was a magic elixir her body couldn’t do without.
It certainly felt that way. And it certainly looked that way.
“I’ll see you upstairs, Honey,” she said to the bathroom stall where she could tell Honey was layering the toilet seat with paper.
Upstairs, she caught up with the class in front of a Monet, one of the museum’s prized paintings.
The museum’s docent was an overly enthusiastic woman in her sixties wearing a sensible shirtwaist dress and flats.
She explained how Monet had painted Waterloo Bridge in London multiple times during the winter of 1901.
How lucky, the docent trilled, that one of them landed at MAG so anyone in Rochester could come see it for themselves.
This one, she said, is called Waterloo Bridge: Veiled Sun.
Of course it was. Not even the paintings in Rochester were allowed full sun.
“You can line up in pairs and get a bit closer,” the docent said.
She pointed at the piece of tape on the floor marking the point beyond where visitors’ feet should not transgress.
Bridie and Fern and Nina were last to approach the painting, Nina behind them.
Bridie leaned in and as she did her toes went past the tape.
“Not too close!” the docent snapped.
“Sorry, sorry,” Bridie said, cheeks turning scarlet. “The colors are so pretty.”
Nina put a hand on Bridie’s shoulder. “You’re good. I wish I could touch it, too.”
“Okay.” The docent clapped her hands and motioned the girls out of the room. “Moving right along.”
Nina stayed behind. Monet wasn’t her favorite.
All those water lilies. But this painting drew her in.
Imagine seeing this bridge at night—the rain, the shadows, the warm lights of Big Ben in the distance.
She could almost hear the rumble of the London taxis and the rush of pedestrians on the bridge.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Honey appeared beside her.
“Yes. Have you been to London?”
“Years and years ago. Before Fern was born. We left Dune with my mother and Finn and I took a few weeks in Europe. London, Paris, Rome, Venice.”
“Sounds magical.”
“It was,” Honey said. “Of course you couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere. And the food was quite rich. Don’t get me started on the toilet paper!”
Nina stared at her and forced a laugh. “I guess you were happy to get back to the good ole USA.”
“I was.” Honey nodded, oblivious to Nina’s sarcasm. “I’m going to find the girls. You coming?”
“In a minute.” She stood by herself and looked back at the painting.
She’d love to go to London. Or to France to see Monet’s garden.
Or anywhere in Europe. Or anywhere that wasn’t the Finger Lakes.
She was in the room alone now, so she crept even closer to the painting than Fern had.
She tried to understand how someone could do what Monet did, how a bunch of brushstrokes could become this seductive image.
What did it feel like to make something so alive and satisfying by squeezing tubes of color onto a paint palette?
“Our children are nearly adults,” Finn had repeatedly argued.
“They will be out of the house so soon. This will be a tiny blip in the story of their lives, and you know what else?” God, he was so sure, so confident.
“When they’re older, they’ll understand.
They’ll get why we did what we had to do.
” Sometimes his arguments made sense. She hadn’t told him about Sam and the night with Garret.
Finn would only see Sam’s behavior as an advantage to exploit.
He would go scorched earth. She couldn’t do it to the girls.
How could Honey, a person who didn’t seem interested in anything extraordinary or beautiful, belong to Finn?
How was it possible for her to go through the rest of her life, ceding the love of her life to a woman so vacuous and unappreciative?
Well, someone else would get him. Finn would eventually find someone else.
She thought about how little she’d traveled, how much of the world she hadn’t seen, and tried to imagine doing it with Sam once the girls were gone and was overcome with regret and sadness.
She thought about Finn and his nameless, faceless younger new wife taking the kind of grand vacations he’d promised Nina.
Hawaii. Japan. Rome. Athens. She thought about sitting home while he escorted the second Mrs. Finnegan into an elegant restaurant in Paris.
She thought about what Finn had said the first day at the lake: “This is going to be trouble.”
When she and Finn had met briefly last week, he’d made an undeniable argument. “You think we’ve stopped, but we are never going to stop, and we will get caught, which will be much worse than taking this thing into our own hands.”
She hadn’t replied, but his words had wormed their way into her head and reverberated constantly.
He was right. She knew, deep down, that the same thing that had happened in June, in early August, in late August, for most of September, and again in October was barreling toward her again.
A phone call. A furtive meeting. A release.
And yet.
Still alone in the room with Veiled Sun, she slid her feet past the tape on the floor.
She extended the tip of one finger out in front of her and let it hover right above the painting, right above the brushstrokes put there by Monet’s hand so long ago.
She let her finger get closer and closer to the canvas, until she could feel the edge of one of the white crests of the Thames, the one right above Monet’s signature.
She pressed lightly. Then harder. She heard footsteps in the corridor and quickly stepped back, feeling intoxicated and fearless.
Touching the painting had felt fine. Better than fine. It had felt incredible.