Free Trompe l'Oeil by Nancy Reisman

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.

REPRODUCTIONS
    The Magdalen with Two Flames (c.1638–43)
    METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
    The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (c.1640)
    LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
    The Repentent Magdalen (c.1635–40)
    NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
    Georges de la Tour
    Maybe La Tour was right: one view of her is not enough. Repeatedly, he painted her, always in candlelight. A young woman, her long dark hair falling over her shoulder and down her back, into shadow. She is beautiful; she is always beautiful, and always alone, seated beside a table, sideways to the viewer, always partly hidden. She wears a white blouse, a red skirt. Near her again and again in varied arrangement: a book, a skull too large to be a child’s, a single candle. In The Magdalen with Two Flames , an ornate mirror reflects and doubles the candlelight; in other views, a cross lies on the table.
    The Magdalen with Two Flames is perhaps the most elegant: she sits straight-backed, her white blouse covering her shoulders (though her pale neck and upper chest are visible), the skirt covering her legs to the floor. In her lap, the skull, on which her hands lie folded together. Her head is turned away—her gaze, like ours, apparently drawn to the flame reflected in the tabletop mirror.
    La Tour’s most tender version: The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame . Here her posture—like the Fetti Magdalen’s—suggests her private grief. The right side of her face is revealed in candlelight, her gaze directed at the flame. The blouse here is off the shoulder, her skin pale, her dark hair falling and falling into shadow. Light glazes her left forearm and her left hand, on which she rests her chin and cheek. It’s that hand against her cheek, and the details of her face—the dark iris touched by light, the curve of her lip (red enough to echo the ruby skirt) that reveal her vulnerability. Bare feet, bare calves; a ball of light spills onto her left knee. In her lap, the skull gapes toward you, although her right hand rests on its crown, gently, almost comfortingly. In her solitude, a delicate melancholy; a sudden sound, or a shift in light, would break the mood. If she knows we are hovering in the shadows beyond, she’s managed to claim privacy—as if only our invisibility keeps the moment aloft.
    Shadow almost fills the final Repentant Magdalen , the candle’s flame obscured, silhouetting a skull on top of the book. The woman has moved to the right of the table and now she’s in profile, leaning on her right hand, her left hand resting on the skull. She contemplates a second skull set in a frame not unlike a mirror’s. The shadows seem to mute even the darknessof her hair, and only her upper body is visible. Light settles on her blouse, on the billow of sleeve around her planted right elbow, so that her arm and the sleeve form the shape of a tulip bulb, or of a lowered trumpet horn. Her mouth is covered by her hand and the falling shadows. A palpable gravity; a palpable tenderness. She has receded even farther from the viewing eye and, in the story, from the world; and so you move closer, peering through the shadow. The paradox of capturing privacy: perhaps La Tour wished to shield her entirely, yet could not resist the image.
    Wait long enough and your eyes might adjust to the darkness.

SARA
    As if Nora herself were an egg, or a water balloon; as if her body were rigged for disaster, her family grew rabidly solicitous. Had