A Map of Glass (12 page)

It wasn’t until months after their first meeting – when the summer heat began – that they had seen each other whole. They had been relatively young then and Sylvia had been amazed by the fact of their flesh – hers as much as his, as she had never paid any attention before to her own nakedness, though she said nothing at all about this. He had pulled back and had looked at her for what seemed to be a long, long, time, one hand moving over her breasts and stomach. Then he had lifted her legs and groaned as he entered her.

Always, afterwards, they would remain silent for some time, as if making a focused journey over a dangerous and beautiful terrain, a journey requiring rapt attention and great care. And then when they began to talk, they spoke about the land: her County, the objects in her house, and the stories of his ancestors on the island where the lake became the river. They did not then, and would never, speak of love. Only about geography, the townscapes she had just hours before left behind, the house she would return to, and the tapestry of fields and fences that tumbled away from the place where they lay.

“Even when we were far, far apart,” she told Jerome, “Andrew rolled through my mind like active weather.” She smiled, pleased with her description, then, suddenly embarrassed, straightened her hair with her hand and tugged her skirt farther down over her knees. “And when I wasn’t with him, I was waiting.”

“My mother was like that,” said Jerome, a shadow sliding over his face and a faint trace of anger in his voice. “She was always, always waiting.”

This abrupt confession startled Sylvia somewhat. “What was she waiting for?”

“Change. For my father: for him to change. He didn’t, of course.” Jerome coughed. “No, that’s not quite true,” he added. “He got even worse, became even more impossible.”

Sylvia would not ask about his father’s condition, what it might be. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. Or, at least it doesn’t matter to me.” Jerome got up and walked back to the counter, where a bowl filled with Mira’s oranges sat near the toaster. He picked up one perfect orange and offered it to Sylvia, but she shook her head, so he returned to the couch and began to peel the fruit for himself, slowly, and with what appeared to be great concentration. Sylvia found herself drawn to the vibrancy of the color as if she had never seen orange before.

“You know,” she said, “Andrew always maintained that all married couples seemed to him to be placed for the purposes of determining scale in a painted landscape. Tiny anonymous figures that Victorians referred to as the ‘argument’ of the picture.” She paused. “He liked the pun, the word
argument
. Marriage, for him you see, would have been an argument. He told me he couldn’t imagine using the word
we
all the time in reference to thoughts, or even actions.” They had been curled together on the bed and his mouth had been against the back of her neck when he had spoken about this – she had been able to feel the slight motion of his lips. “But here we are,” he had said later. “Here we are lying on the shoreline of the ancient lake. This whole ridge is like negative space, like a physical memory.” He had explained that braided in the limestone around the Great Lake were the fossils of life forms whose narrow sessions of animation had been silenced forever. Such brief, simple narratives, such unobserved histories, he had said, permanently halted by a wall of ice. Sometimes, he’d said, you could see the direction the animal intended to take. With others – those who were born to a spiral shape for instance – they seemed to have already accepted their fate.

In what season had he spoken those words? What year? She didn’t, she couldn’t remember. Only that she had been lying on her side and that he was curled around her like a shell, his hand circling the wrist of her left arm, their clothing tangled together on a chair near the bed. Flannel and corduroy, silk and linen caught on a lathed armrest or falling over the torn rush webbing of a chair seat woven a hundred years ago in innocence. Corduroy, she had whispered once, removing his old brown jacket. From the French, he had joked. The threads of the king. Then he had run his hands through her hair, had looked at her and said, “Sylvaculture, the encouragement of trees.”

She had told him, once, that in the first half of the nineteenth century there was scarcely a pioneer family in her County that hadn’t lost one or two of their young men to the whims of the Great Lake as boy after boy joined the crews of schooners that carried goods from settlement to settlement along the Canadian shores. Often these tragedies took place within sight of home, as the peninsula itself was the most dangerous feature of the lake. Storms gestated there, lake currents became confused, and then there were the limestone outcroppings set like teeth across the eastern and southern edge of the land. The scattered fragments of the wreck, the light brown sails draped like huge shrouds on the surface of the water, or tangled by rigging and filled with sand; yards and yards of fabric lolling in the froth.

“It’s always difficult,” Jerome said, “two people and all the things between them. That’s one thing even I know is true.”

Sylvia folded her hands on her lap, looked toward the window, then said quietly, “In time, everything that should have been joy between Andrew and me became too painful. And when for a period of time we stopped, stopped meeting, stopped talking, I spent endless afternoons driving through the landscapes he had described to me. I wept, and when I was finished with weeping I believed something had gone dead inside me. But, as I was to discover later, there is a difference, a difference between death and dormancy. We had stopped, but we would start again, seven years later, impossible though that may seem.” Her voice began to falter. “When you are reacquainted with love in middle age,” she murmured as if speaking to herself, “it is more critical, almost an emergency. You can see the end of it. The conclusion is always with you in the room.” The empty, unheated cottage appeared in Sylvia’s mind, the smell of the cold, the scent of absence. She closed her eyes, willing the image to disappear.

Slowly, slowly her attention returned to Jerome, who was sitting stiffly on the edge of the couch, with the partly peeled orange in his hands and his elbows on his knees as if he were poised for flight. The late-afternoon sun had come in through the window and a pale ribbon of light cut through the air between them. It occurred to Sylvia that perhaps she had gone too far, had revealed too much of her grief, which had been with her so constantly it now no longer seemed to her like unusual pain, seemed more like breathing or sleep or walking. Of course Jerome could never understand this and would instinctively resist entering that dark world. If she continued in this vein she would lose this young man, he would want to remove himself. In fact, even now, she sensed his wanting to be elsewhere. “Should we talk about something else for a while?” she asked and, when he didn’t answer, “What were your favorite things when you were a child?”

“Forts,” he answered with surprising suddenness, leaning forward to drop an orange peel onto the table. “Tree forts, mostly.” He paused, thought a moment, looking around the room. “For a while, until quite recently, really, I made structures in my studio that were like tree houses.” Then he looked chagrined, as if he knew she wouldn’t or couldn’t comprehend, or as if he wanted to change the subject in order to avoid having to explain. “Those old buildings on the island, they had been houses I think, but they were falling down and covered with ivy and moss. I thought I might be able to recreate them in another way.”

Sylvia had not yet been able to grasp the ideas behind Jerome’s art, but she was struck once again by the awareness that she wished the conversation to continue. “But those forts, or the houses on the island, how could you build them in a room?” she heard herself ask. Whenever she was reading, it had seemed absolutely right to her that the mark at the end of a question was shaped like a hook designed to snare someone intent on just passing by. Here, however, such a sentence seemed almost natural, and she could tell that the young man had relaxed now that the subject of their talk had shifted.

Jerome leaned back against the couch and folded his arms. “I don’t know,” he said, “I had done a lot of work based on man-made structures in the past – huts and the like. I was fascinated, on the island, by the idea of built things going back to nature, you know, at least the beginnings of nature… germination. But I couldn’t figure out a way to get that to work in a gallery space. Nothing would grow fast enough for me to get the point across.” He laughed. “Maybe fertilizer would have been helpful.”

“Those would have been the workers’ cottages, I suppose.” Sylvia remembered Andrew saying that there had been a row of laborers’ dwellings on the island’s one street, and then, of course, there was the big house at the top. She was silent for a moment or two, lost in the act of removing small woollen balls from the sleeve of her cardigan. “They would be houses for the men who worked in the shipyards. Those who manned the rafts came and went… and only in the months when the river was open and there was no ice.”

“Vikings were pushed out into the icy sea on rafts when they died,” offered Jerome. He paused and his face reddened with embarrassment. “Oh sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s all right,” said Sylvia, not looking up from her sleeve, “it’s with me all the time, his death, the knowledge of it is always with me. It is impossible for anyone, anything to remind me of it.” She was quiet for a moment. “It is a comfort to be able to say that aloud.” Suddenly her gaze shifted to the left and rested on a very old chair, minus one leg, tilting in a corner near Jerome and the couch. “Did you know,” she said, “that in this light you can see the imprint of the stenciling on the back of that chair? Under all that paint! Andrew would have loved that, would have called it evidence of the chair’s history. My friend Julia too. She likes to be able to trace what has happened to things. She told me once that she could feel the difference between new and old knife cuts on a breadboard.”

Jerome looked at the chair. “I’ve never noticed that before,” he said. “A history written in paint, pentimento on a chair back.”

“It seems to me now,” Sylvia said slowly, “that during my own childhood, everything around me was connected to history: a knowable and therefore a safe history. Surely there must have been new toys, new clothes but, if there were, they meant so little to me that I can’t remember these gifts. What I recall instead were the Christmas and birthday gifts given to children long dead; gifts given to my father and his sister, to his father and his father’s father, for everything had been so carefully organized and preserved in the house – stored away in the spare room or in the attic – that it was all quite easily retrievable.”

She had been fairly ambivalent about the dolls, which had been grouped together like a fragile wide-eyed congregation at one end of the large attic. They were still there, but she had covered them some time ago, with sheeting. The cars and tractors and toy trains that had belonged to boy children had interested her more, the fact that they were in no way attempting to be human, were content instead to pretend to be the large machines they were drawn from. Sometimes she had found a faded Christmas tag stuck to one or another of these objects.
To Charlie, Xmas 1888
, it might read, still existing after the small Charlie had passed through adulthood on his journey toward death.
To Charlie from his loving Mama
. When she was older, she came to realize that the tag wouldn’t have remained attached to the toy were it not for the way that other children – children not like her – were so easily diverted from the things that surrounded them by the episodic nature of their small, vibrant lives. The world had probably handed them an invitation, and, unlike her, they had been able – joyfully – to accept the offer to participate.

“When I was small,” she said, “I distrusted the human face and all the changes of expression that the human face invariably brought with it. Animals were somehow less threatening, though I suppose it is possible to read a change of mood or disposition in the face of an animal, particularly if one looks directly into its eyes.”

Both Sylvia and Jerome turned toward Swimmer as if to test this theory. The cat, who was sitting on a high table with his back to them, and who was staring out of the window, remained totally unaware of their attention.

“I came to love the poem called ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,’” Sylvia said.

“I don’t remember many picturebooks from my childhood,” said Jerome. “Not too many poems either. My mother tried to teach me a few songs, though, told me that what she remembered most about being small was that she seemed always to be singing – you know, in class, or in church, or even in the playground. Girls’ skipping songs and all that. But I was embarrassed by singing. I don’t remember any of those songs now.”

Sylvia recalled the imaginary music she had so dreaded during her own childhood. “Your mother’s girlhood must have been lovely if it was filled with singing,” she said to Jerome. “Serene almost… and happy. My husband’s youth was like that as well, but I can’t imagine that Andrew’s was, though he never talked about that. I knew so little about him, really, his parents, his schooldays.”

The expression on the young man’s face tightened. “Serenity and joy are not things I would associate with my mother.” He looked at the floor for a moment or two, then glanced at his wrist.

“Is it time for me to go?” Sylvia asked, then reddened. It occurred to her that she had not said these words since she had been with Andrew.

“No, no, it’s fine, not yet,” said Jerome. He had begun to fiddle with his watch. “It’s old, this watch… belonged to my father. I should probably get a new one.” He rearranged his sleeve, looked up. “You know, I had a tendency to forget about time altogether when I was out there alone on the island. I just worked all day and went back to the sail loft when I felt I had done enough or when the light began to dim. It was quite wonderful, the sail loft.”

“The men who worked with the sails were mostly French, I think.” Sylvia tilted her head to one side, remembering. “Andrew told me that the island was divided – quite amicably – but divided nevertheless between French and English notions of how things should be. Not just because of language: it had a lot to do with waterways. The English knew the lake, you see, and the French, the French would be more familiar with the river.”