A Map of Glass (7 page)

She remembered that when she was very young, before she had learned how to read, a story had been brought to her awareness in an unexpected way. On the bottom shelf of a bookcase in one of the downstairs parlors she had discovered a gift that had been abandoned years before by a child long dead: an album with a variety of large animal decals. The child in question (
To Mamie
was printed on the flyleaf) had evidently quickly lost interest in this volume as only three or four of the decals had been pasted into the book. The rest were still loose, tucked between the last page and the back cover. There were birds and horses and kittens and dogs dressed disturbingly in an assortment of human costumes, animals masquerading as sailors, police officers, scholars, bakers, but all exhibiting an innocent, unthreatening lack of expression. Then, inserted between the pages at the very middle of the book was a collection of large, square decals, depicting vibrantly colored scenes, birds perched on branches and among grasses and flowers of streamside foliage.

She had begun to turn the pages of the book. Oh the berries and the feathers and the flowers – pure delight – and yet, and yet something was terribly wrong. The first decal portrayed a beautiful robin, his wings limp, falling back toward the earth because an arrow had pierced his side, producing one bright bead of blood. On the shaft of the arrow, looking intently at the bird, was a large fly. In the next scene a fish rose from the stream with a saucer in his mouth, and into the saucer streamed the robin’s blood. Off in the distance, a small sparrow was flying away, while at the end of a garden path sat a beetle sewing a white garment.

Then there was an owl standing with his spade near the large rectangular hole he had dug into the dark soft earth of the riverbank. A rook wearing spectacles on his beak and a pale flowing robe over his black feathers read from a long scroll of paper while a lark gazed steadily at an open book that rested on a pedestal. The next scene depicted a strange and upsetting bird she did not recognize with a brown, oblong box strapped to his back. This was followed by a chicken and a wren carrying the box down a distant, winding road. The last was a decal Sylvia had looked at only once, for the normally expressionless faces of the birds were now filled with grief. An extraordinary dove in the foreground hung her head and allowed her tears to fall into the cavity the owl had created.

Until those paper decals resting inside a child’s album, those birds, that riverbank, Sylvia had remained uninterested in the stories her parents had tried to tell her, not understanding the idea of sequence, believing all living things were as attached to their singularity as she was to hers. She had looked at picturebooks, of course – mostly those that concerned animals – but the images in those books had seemed to her to be self-contained, static: a horse in a field, a spider on a web – nothing that suggested one scene related to another. Now, quite suddenly, she had come to understand that the blood dripping from the robin’s neck and the flight of the departing sparrow were connected, and that from this blood, this flight, came both spontaneous events and planned ceremonies, though she wouldn’t have known the words for such things at the time. And she had understood as well, that from such a chain of images, from action and reaction, there came the depth of feeling that was portrayed on the final illustration. A suggestion of this feeling seemed to be moving out from the page and into her own mind in the same way that, in winter, something her parents called electricity sparked from her sweater onto her skin when she was dressing.

Years later, as a young adult, she had come across the poem: the words that interpreted those images that she had so carefully examined, then shunned. One verse stayed with her always.

J
erome leaned against the door frame, the large orange cat in his arms. Mira was bent over the sink washing her face. He knew she had not registered his proximity, was not aware of his gaze. How lovely the back of her neck was; how lovely, and how vulnerable. And this ordinary, daily gesture, this lifting of a drenched cloth up to the face with both hands, the water falling like rain through the slim, brown fingers, how oddly it suggested weeping, mimicked grief. When she was finished she looked at herself in the mirror, staring it would seem into her own eyes as if to find the answer to a question there, while the liquid chugged slowly down the old drain. What did she see? he wondered. Beauty, or some minor imperfection he had never glimpsed? He thought that he was likely in love with her, but he also knew that at moments like this she could almost be unknown to him. She turned finally, met his gaze, then approached and punched him gently on the shoulder as she walked out of the bathroom. “You’re just like Swimmer,” she said, “so quiet I hardly know you’re there.”

That night before going to sleep, Jerome looked at Mira’s profile, the black fringe of lashes, the jewel in her nose, blue now in the light from the computer screen. It was never, he thought, fully dark in this room. He rolled over on his back and examined the ceiling. “This woman,” he said, “she seems so… troubled… not shell-shocked exactly, but wounded somehow.”

“She lost her lover, Jerome, no wonder she’s wounded.” Mira ran her hand over her eyes, trying to fight sleep.

“How do you know they were lovers? And anyway, it’s something else I’m picking up, or at least something more.” He smiled at Mira and touched her arm, knowing she would object to the suggestion that there could be something more than love. “I think that she is afraid… afraid of almost everything.”

“But not too afraid to come here,” said Mira.

“It wasn’t easy, though. It was hard for her. I could see that.”

“Yes, I could see that too. But they were lovers, Jerome. Believe me.”

After Mira had fallen asleep, Jerome continued to think about the woman who had arrived so unexpectedly at his door, of her sudden intrusion into his life. He felt a certain sympathy toward her now, but it was laced with anxiety. An image of the frozen man came into his mind. The upper part of the body had been leaning forward, the motionless arms and open hands resting on the surface of the iceberg while the hips and legs remained encased. There had been frost in the hair and on the eyebrows and lashes and a sad, puzzled expression on the face. How could he possibly tell the woman about that? As usual lately, he had no idea what was going to be expected of him, no idea what to expect of himself.

For almost a year he had longed for a new site, a new project to capture his interest. He was still reluctant to develop the films from his time at the island – as if he believed the dead man he had found might appear in the wavering images that swam into focus in the darkroom – so he could not say how he was spending his time in the studio while Mira was at work. He had tacked a few drawings on the wall, he had shot several rolls of film, he had done some reading, but not much else. Long walks through the streets and alleyways of his neighborhood had yielded only a new admiration for the miniature front gardens of the Italian and Portuguese immigrants who had settled in this part of the city, and the suspicion that on their small piece of ground in front of their houses, these people were working on projects more creative and useful than anything he had undertaken so far. He had photographed the gardens in the lushness of late summer, and then again during their decline in the fall, and had thought that he might somehow reproduce them – or at least the idea of them – in shadow boxes, but nothing tangible had come from any of this. It put him in mind of his father, how, once, during the last chaotic weeks of his life, he had inexplicably made a brief attempt to grow parsley in a pot near the door to the balcony of their apartment, and how the plant had withered from lack of water after his death. Anyway, they were Mira’s gardens really, she being the one who first insisted that he look at them, whereas every other image he had worked with had been his own discovery. Lately there had been no real discoveries. And yet, the daylight hours had passed quickly enough while he waited for the sound of her key in the door. Just last week he became aware that the sound of a key entering a lock could be anticipated with pleasure, rather than the dread he remembered from certain nights in his childhood. He lay on his back now and listened to Mira’s even breathing, then turned on his side and placed one hand on the bone of her hip. How small she was, how small, and how strong, and how rooted she was in the changing world.

She had taken a different path than he had into the world of art and, being the Canadian-born daughter of first-generation immigrants with high hopes for the future of their children, her choice, in some ways, had involved more personal risk. She had told him that in the beginning she had followed the practical, educational route suggested by her parents, and had never allowed even the thought of disappointing them enter her mind. But somehow she had stumbled into a fine arts class at her university, a class taught by a young woman interested in using fabrics and thread, costumes and performance as an expression of high art. Mira had been more intrigued by all this than she had thought she would be when the nature of the class first made itself known to her. (Jerome hadn’t told Mira his own opinion about this form of expression.) At the time he met her, she had been making soft protective coverings for a variety of solid objects: toasters, books, bicycle pumps, even, eventually, and much to her parents’ bafflement as she always delighted in telling him, for her father’s lawn mower. At first she had called her works “cosies,” having taken the idea from the gorgeously embroidered covering for a teapot that her mother had brought to the New World when she left Delhi. But later, when Mira’s fascination with all things Christian had taken hold, she changed the name of her creation to “swaddles,” a tip of the hat to the swaddling clothes she was told had wrapped the Baby Jesus in his manger. “I like the word. The sound of it,” she had told Jerome when he had gently suggested that the whole notion seemed a bit bizarre. She had exhibited some of these in the gallery where she now worked part-time, the same gallery where she had first met Jerome. In the three years or so since they had been together, however, she had moved toward performance work, using the fabric either to cover herself or to create changing patterns on the floor, and Jerome could see she was really coming into her own.

When he looked at her now, he could hardly believe that she had once been merely a businesslike voice on the phone, a polite, efficient presence in the gallery where he showed his work. What amazed him most was how all of this formality could be softened by degrees simply by walking side by side down a street, sharing a meal, a conversation, eventually a touch, and now this most intimate of experiences, one impossible to imagine in the past, this lying side by side in the dark, allowing unconsciousness to wash over them, carry them toward the morning. There had been women in the past, of course, and occasionally he had found himself in their beds in the morning, but he had always rolled away, rather than toward them, had been courteous and discreet in what he knew was, and would remain, their territory, and had always felt a flicker of relief when, on the street, he had turned a corner, out of range of their windows.

Now he was warmed by the knowledge that Mira’s calm face would be the first image that he looked at each morning. Her certainty in the face of his own lack of it. Until her, nothing in him had fully experienced either the anticipation of reunion, or the hollowness of separation. To him it had all been a great surprise, this combination of comfort and tenderness, pleasure and then the shared quiet aftermath of pleasure, and there were still moments when he was mistrustful, suspicious almost, of the ease with which he had walked into the partnership. In the past he had wanted not even the faintest suggestion of reliance to be a part of his character. For him, the implications of dependence teetered – always – on the edge of addiction and so he would often change, though never fully abandon certain social networks in the city. So far nothing and no one had kept him for long, curiosity being the only mood he fully trusted. But, as far as he could tell, for her, his entrance into her life was as natural as the air she softly inhaled and exhaled beside him here in this room that she insisted on calling a bedroom despite the pipes on the ceiling, the stacked cartons used to store clothing, the glow from the computer, the functional futon.

He recalled the spare rigidity of his parents’ bedroom, the twin white headboards, so disturbingly like tombstones on adjacent plots, the matching polyester spreads, faded by repeated washing, the decorative lampshades and doilies that were his mother’s sad attempt to bring some intimacy and joy into this corner of her life. He remembered quite vividly his mother’s two or three good dresses hanging in the closet and her one pair of party shoes, so out of fashion, so seldom worn, and the stale boozy smell on his father’s jackets overpowering the lighter smell of his mother’s cologne. He also remembered the nights when his father was out late alone and everything – even the furniture – seemed to be anxiously listening for the sound of his key in the lock, nights when his father would return angry, accusatory, smashing everything in his path. By the time Jerome was an adolescent, the sight of his father’s undershirts and shorts in the laundry hamper, or his black rubbers by the front door, had disgusted him. And then there was the inexplicable guilt he had felt after his father’s death, a guilt he could resurrect right here, right now, without ever being able to make any sense of it. Sometimes when Mira questioned him about that part of his past, he would feel the buzz of anger rising in him, and not wanting to go toward that, he would change the subject or make an excuse to leave the room. Occasionally he left the room abruptly, without making excuses.