A Map Of Glass Part 3

The young man nodded. "There were empty buildings and a couple of smaller sheds that had collapsed. And one huge anchor near the jetty. But I never saw the wrecks. I was hoping that the ice would clear enough for me to catch sight of one or two, but then..." He placed his elbow on his bent knee and ran his hand through his hair, not looking at her.

What is he seeing in his mind? Sylvia wondered. Certainly not Andrew. He wouldn't want to remember that, wouldn't want to think about it. Jerome's hand was still in his hair, cupping the shape of his skull as if he were attempting to prevent the image of Andrew, or some other image, from entering his mind. As a younger woman Sylvia had been baffleed by the gestures of others. She could never understand, for example, why people raised their hands when they spoke. The sudden lifting of arms and hands in the middle of speech had seemed to her to be aggressive, imposing, a ceremonial display of weapons by warriors preparing for battle. But here, now, this simple gesture seemed to her to suggest frailty, vulnerability, and she found she was moved by it.

When Jerome eventually glanced in her direction, she locked eyes for a moment with him. Then she looked away and continued, "Andrew's great-great-grandfather, the first Woodman to come to Canada in the nineteenth century, settled on the island as a timber merchant," she said. "Before that he had been in Ireland briefly as one of several engineers sent out by the British government to investigate, then to map and file reports on the state of the bogs of Ireland. County Kerry mostly." She ran one hand up and down the sleeve of her cardigan. "According to Andrew," she said, "Joseph Woodman had a complicated relationship with Ireland the people, the landscape."

"A complicated relationship with landscape," Jerome repeated. "How could that be?"

Sylvia looked up now and studied the young man she was talking to, his smooth forehead and long perfect hands, his thoughtful, serious expression. It seemed she had never really seen anyone this young, and she doubted she had ever looked this young herself. "He wanted, or at least Andrew said he wanted, to drain everything: the lakes, the rivers, the streamlets, and every acre of bog. Andrew always said that old Joseph Woodman wanted to squeeze all moisture out of the County of Kerry, as if it were a dishrag. He was convinced, you see, that with proper drainage, fields of wheat could be made to replace the bogs. When he presented his report to the British Crown, his ideas were utterly dismissed. One month later he immigrated to Canada in a full-blown fit of pique, a man still young enough and ambitious enough, Andrew claimed to cause serious damage. Thousands of acres of forests would be floated to his docks on Timber Island, so that the logs could be a.s.sembled into rafts. Then the rafts would be poled downriver to the quays at Quebec, where the timber was loaded onto ships bound for Britain. This went on for years and years, until all of the forests were gone."

"But he couldn't have been the only timber merchant."

"No, no, of course not. But Andrew never forgot that his own family was involved. He could never let go of the picture of a raped landscape. He didn't forget this, at least he didn't forget for a very long time." Sylvia twisted the ring on her left hand. "Forgetting would come later."

Sitting in silence, she wondered if Jerome would ask her a question, would in some way begin to interview her. She would not have liked it if he had.

"Sometimes," he began, "it's best just to let them go, family things. Otherwise... well, what's the point? There's nothing you can do anyway." He was looking at the wall behind and slightly above Sylvia's head. "But this would be a sort of ecological forgetting, another kind of letting go, I suppose..."

Jerome's angle of vision remained unchanged, and Sylvia felt an urge to turn in her chair and follow his gaze. She suppressed this, however, and spoke again. "All those years ago when we first began to meet began to know each other that inherited memory of destruction was still in Andrew's mind," she said. "He spoke to me about it." She paused again, catching just a glimpse of Andrew's face in her memory, the expressive mouth, the sad eyes. "That we should have been alive at the same time," she said to Jerome, "that we should have somehow walked from such distance toward each other, and that he would speak to me about the things that troubled him... all this seemed miraculous to me. I took everything he told me and kept it deep inside me so deep that I could hear him speaking when he was not there. And the truth is, he was most often not with me, not there. We were not able to meet with any kind of frequency, and sometimes there were months when he was traveling, months when we were not able to meet at all."

He had become, in spite of his absences, or perhaps, she thought now, because of his absences, the vital center of her inner world. Her daily life had strutted around her like theatre, like a performance needing neither her partic.i.p.ation nor her attention. Even during painful, disorienting times her father's sudden heart attack and death and, years later, her mother's stroke she could bring the curtain down and permit Andrew's distant light to dominate. Because he had spoken about the wind from the lake, there was no longer anything neutral about the wind from the lake; because they had talked together on the dunes, a child's sandbox glimpsed in a neighbor's yard brought with it the idea of Andrew as palpably as if it were a letter written by his hand. But there were no letters written by his hand; often he didn't communicate with her for weeks, or would make the briefest, the most perfunctory, of calls during the empty hours of the day.

"During these periods of absence, of withdrawal," she told Jerome, "I would believe that he was communicating with me through dreams, or thoughts, or omens, a belief I maintained during this last, this final absence."

"Yes," said Jerome, leaning forward to pick up the cat near his feet. "It's odd how people who die come into your dreams. My father's been gone for more than ten years, and still I have these dreams. About him." He watched as the cat leapt back to the floor. "I never dream about my mother. Never about her, and never about them together."

Sylvia tried to envisage Jerome's parents, the people who had given birth to the earnest young man who sat opposite her. They would have a familiar domestic life, she imagined, not unlike, in some ways, her and Malcolm's, a shared daily s.p.a.ce, but with room for a child, of course. There would be that difference and other differences as well. But all of it, the rooms, the partnership, would be there on a daily basis.

She began to think about the first time she entered the place where for twenty years she and Andrew would meet and part, and meet and part. An old cottage, almost deserted, situated on a wooded hill thirty miles or so down the lakesh.o.r.e from where she lived on property left to Andrew by his father because no one else wanted it. In the summer the cottage smelled of rac.o.o.ns and damp. In the winter the wood stove's fire barely penetrated the cold. It had been winter that first time, and during her walk from the car, deep snow had fallen over the tops of her boots, burning her legs when it melted against the skin. There had been no talk, at least not at first. It had been far too cold to undress, and as they had fumbled through layers of clothing in order to touch, fear had set off its sirens in her brain. But she overcame this, barely knowing what was taking place, only that she could not stop it. She had learned next to nothing that first winter about Andrew's long, angular body, the bones and ligaments and pale, faintly bluish skin that would become so familiar to her. So familiar that, as the years pa.s.sed, she would sometimes confuse it with her own. Unlike the awkward disruption of Malcolm's sad, brief attempts to establish a physical relationship with her, there would come to be nothing foreign or invasive about Andrew's lovemaking, just the comfort, the consolation of full embrace.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 argument. Marriage, for him you see, would have been an argument. He told me he couldn't imagine using the word we 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 sh.o.r.eline of the ancient lake. This whole ridge is like negative s.p.a.ce, 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 un.o.bserved 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. 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 sh.o.r.eline of the ancient lake. This whole ridge is like negative s.p.a.ce, 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 un.o.bserved 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 embarra.s.sment. "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 To Charlie, Xmas 1888, it might read, still existing after the small Charlie had pa.s.sed through adulthood on his journey toward death. To Charlie from his loving Mama 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 partic.i.p.ate.

"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 c.o.c.k 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 cla.s.s, or in church, or even in the playground. Girls' skipping songs and all that. But I was embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sociate 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."

"Yes," said Jerome. "Yes, I like that idea. Geographical allegiances. Allegiances to bodies of water."

The huge wet shroud of a schooner's sail moving in lake water and the drowned nineteenth-century boys surfaced in Sylvia's imagination. "Sometimes human beings are confined by geography," she said, "and sometimes," she added, "they are overwhelmed, destroyed by it."

Jerome told Mira that he was not sure about using the woman's given name, that he had not yet decided how to address her. The woman had used his own first name on occasion, but still he found it difficult to say the word Sylvia Sylvia when she was with him in the room. She was so obviously from another generation, he was tempted to call her Mrs. Bradley. But the intimacy of what she had been telling him made the formality of that seem somewhat absurd. "And yes," he said to Mira, "they were lovers, just as you suspected." when she was with him in the room. She was so obviously from another generation, he was tempted to call her Mrs. Bradley. But the intimacy of what she had been telling him made the formality of that seem somewhat absurd. "And yes," he said to Mira, "they were lovers, just as you suspected."

"I didn't suspect, as you may remember," said Mira. "I knew."

Jerome ignored this clarification and changed the subject. "She told me that no one so far had really determined if that island belonged to the lake or the river. The French said it was a river island, the English maintained it belonged to the lake... and so on." He pondered this. "I thought about that too," he said. "When I was there. I'd like to go back in summer and look at the geography... the geology. Maybe," he said, "we could answer the question."

This was the first time he had made reference to the possibility of returning and, quite suddenly, he became aware that, if this were to take place, he would not want to be on his own. He could see himself standing on the sh.o.r.e, alone with the new knowledge of the woman's grief and, almost before the picture had fully taken shape, he turned his mind away from it.

"She also talked about a poem from her childhood, c.o.c.k Robin, of all things," he said.

"c.o.c.k Robin?" Mira did not look up from her knitting. She was making a "swaddle" for the rusted galvanized pail she had found in the alley the previous weekend, a pail that, once it was covered, she would use as a prop in her next performance piece. The wool she was using was pink mohair, and particles of it clung to her dark sweater along with cat hair from Swimmer, who had recently spent some time in her arms. It was often only in the evenings now that she had time for such things, the gallery taking up many of the daylight hours. Just recently she had been told that she would be working on Sunday afternoons.

Jerome sat up straight, became more attentive and formal as he always did when it became clear to him that there was something he could explain to her. He was struck, suddenly, by the familiar pleasure he felt when he knew there was something, even a kindergarten poem, that he could unravel for her. It gave him an edge, a brief flush of superiority. "Robin" he told her, "the bird. From a nursery rhyme."

Jerome watched as the girl bent to unwind a skein of wool from a large pink shape rather like candy floss that rested near her left foot. Sometimes all he wanted to do was sit across the room and look at her. He, who had always been so p.r.o.ne to activity, so dependent on plans, so restless and so easily bored, now found himself becalmed, happy to float in the vicinity of a knitting girl. Her beautiful arms, the tilt of her head. Over and over he was surprised by such things.

"'Who killed c.o.c.k Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I I killed c.o.c.k Robin,'" he quoted. And all at once he wondered how it was that the rhyme had been implanted in his own memory since he had never seen it in a book. Had his tired mother recited it to him? It seemed unlikely. How, then, had this bird-filled children's dirge entered his family's suburban world of freeways and strip malls and cement apartment buildings on the edges of the city? A world conducive to neither birds nor children. The memory of his bicycle came again into his mind, the sight of it rusting in dirty snow on the winter balcony of their apartment, then twisted and broken in a drift ten stories below. He had stopped riding it once they began to live in the apartment too humiliated by the journey in the elevator with the bicycle resting uselessly against his hip, too shy of the inevitable adult who would enter the elevator and ask, as if it were not utterly obvious, if he intended to go for a ride. killed c.o.c.k Robin,'" he quoted. And all at once he wondered how it was that the rhyme had been implanted in his own memory since he had never seen it in a book. Had his tired mother recited it to him? It seemed unlikely. How, then, had this bird-filled children's dirge entered his family's suburban world of freeways and strip malls and cement apartment buildings on the edges of the city? A world conducive to neither birds nor children. The memory of his bicycle came again into his mind, the sight of it rusting in dirty snow on the winter balcony of their apartment, then twisted and broken in a drift ten stories below. He had stopped riding it once they began to live in the apartment too humiliated by the journey in the elevator with the bicycle resting uselessly against his hip, too shy of the inevitable adult who would enter the elevator and ask, as if it were not utterly obvious, if he intended to go for a ride.

Mira looked up from her work and gazed at the cat, who was ambling toward her like a sleepwalker. "There were many rhymes, many stories when I was growing up, stories about animals who wouldn't be able to survive in this climate. Some of the animals in the stories were G.o.ds Ganesh, for example so I believed that all tropical animals were deities and that's why I figured I didn't see them hanging around the neighborhood."

"It would be wonderful, though, to find Ganesh strolling through the streets of this city," Jerome said.

"How about Saint Jerome's lion? He has certainly taken to the streets... particularly in the alley in the vicinity of garbage pails."

"Just like an autumn bee." Jerome stood now and moved to the back of Mira's chair, then placed his hands on her shoulders, allowing his fingers to rest in the twin hollows between the muscles of her upper back and her collar bones. He bent toward her ear. "I think that in your previous life you were most likely a bee," he whispered. "Or was it a wasp?"

Jerome was intrigued by the fact that Mira was fascinated by bees and had once even taken a course in beekeeping. She liked their color, their shape, their commitment to labor. Most of all, she was impressed by the way they enthusiastically constructed the hives she referred to as "paper houses." Unlike any other woman Jerome had known, Mira would announce the presence of a bee with joy rather than with terror. There was something oddly beelike about her, Jerome had concluded; she was so industrious, so alert she almost buzzed, and often when she was near him, walking through the galleries, shopping at the market, her presence felt focused, airborne, as if she were hovering above flowers. He was tremendously attracted to her at such moments, when she was absorbed by some task or when her attention shifted to things in the material world. There was an admirable adaptability about her, a generosity toward the beginnings of things. Thinking of this, he studied her busy hands, the frown of concentration on her downcast face. A part of her was gone from him, and yet she was still tantalizingly within reach.

She stopped knitting, rested her head on the back of the chair, and looked up at him, the wool a pink pool on her lap. It occurred to Jerome that he had no idea whether people knitted in India, a country, he now realized, that was difficult to a.s.sociate with wool, but he didn't want to ask her, show his ignorance, and anyway he was more interested in her smooth shoulders, her beautiful arms. He was aware that even after three years of intimacy there was always a moment or two when she hesitated, but he also knew that these moments pa.s.sed. She would respond once he was able to touch her, to touch her and to use the word love love. Then her arms would lift, encircle his neck.

"Probably," she said, "probably I was was a bee. And if so I would have liked peonies best." a bee. And if so I would have liked peonies best."

He thought of how she would stand entirely still, mesmerized by the small front gardens in their neighborhood. Once or twice she had remained long enough that an owner had emerged from inside the house to ask if she needed a.s.sistance. Jerome had never seen anyone examine all of the external world with such care. Sometimes she became so absorbed by one thing or another he felt she had completely forgotten he was there. How was it possible, he wondered, that with all the other concerns and interests that fought for s.p.a.ce in her mind, work and art and the whole complicated network of family and friends that she attended to, at the end of each day she calmly took the decision to return to the place where he was waiting in order to share his evening meal, his bed? Equally mysterious to him was the fact that he himself was always there when she arrived.

"Please?" he said now.

There it was, that moment of hesitation. Then she stood, placed the wool on the kitchen counter, turned, lowered her eyes, and took his hand.

[image]

The man behind the desk always looked up when Sylvia entered but never said anything. She too remained silent, her key, which had been recently removed from her handbag, dangling in her gloved hand, the salt shaker clinking slightly against the loose change in her coat pocket as she crossed the tile floor.

It had been three days since her train had departed from Belleville Station, three days since she had mailed the car keys back to Malcolm, three days since she had left the message on the answering machine at his office. Soon Malcolm would discover where she was and would come to fetch her home. Sometimes, here in the hotel when she closed her eyes just before sleep, she saw him in his study, focused on the texts that might give him a description of this new, this inexplicable dance of disappearance she had undertaken. The protective side of him touched her in an odd way at such moments, and she wondered if what she was feeling might be what someone else might call pity. It was, however, a feeling that she experienced only in relation to his faithful attachment to her disability, if that is what it was, a disability. That and the fact that he had chosen to come so completely into the physical s.p.a.ces that made up her ancestral history. Her father's desk, her great-grandmother's china. The antique marriage bed that would have been, on more than one occasion, a deathbed: all the details that made up what she thought of as her known and knowable place had been fully accepted by him, incorporated into his life's work. Her in her natural habitat. His life's work.

Andrew had believed that the cells of humans, like those of birds and animals, were programmed to recognize the smells and sights and sounds of their natural habitat. Even if he had not been born in Italy, for example, a New Yorker whose grandparents had been Tuscan might experience a sense of familiarity with, say, the hills around Arezzo when first stepping onto the soil of that region. "In a particular kind of light in certain landscapes," he had told her, "all you can see are ruins, all you can feel is the past, your own ancestry or that of someone else." She understood this, although in her case, until Andrew opened the door of the world for her, the physicality of the past was mostly brought toward her by objects stored like relics inside her family home.

Whenever she entered the hotel room, she would remove the two green leather journals from her handbag, place them on the desk, then, using the hotel stationery, she would write for an hour or so. Today, however, pulling back to look at the sheet of paper in front of her, she found she was slightly startled by the appearance of her own handwriting, which was tight and dark on the page, and which was coming in and out of focus before her eyes. Knowing she was tired, she rose and walked over to the pristine bed and, without removing the coverlet, she lay down.

Soon she began to go through the inventory of the house she had left behind, an inventory she had made in early childhood and had never forgotten. Even here, even during these uncertain days, it was a comfort to her. Mentally opening the door with the key she had learned to use when she was seven, she walked into the front hall, past the umbrella stand, with its diamond-shaped mirror, and the walnut table whose bird's-eye maple drawers were filled with flowered calling cards engraved a century ago with the names of neighbors, neighbors whose years of birth and death had since grown indistinct under the rain that had washed over their marble grave markers. On the wall above the table hung a print of the Niagara River rendered downstream from the famous cataract. There is a print of that river on the wall of my house, she would say when Andrew told her, once, that he was going there to record the remnants of a trolley line abandoned since the 1920s. It is a print I know well, she told him as if this knowledge of lines on a piece of paper could connect her more closely with him and his life without her. But she did know it well; each tree, the rocks, and the small, solitary human figure staring into the current, the cliffs on each side.

The hall led into the dining room (the domain of horses) if one walked straight ahead, or into her father's office (now Malcolm's study) if one turned to the right, or off to the realm of the vast double parlor if one turned to the left. What huge, multidimensional worlds those parlors had seemed to her when she was a child, and sometimes later as well; Africa and Asia couldn't have been larger, more filled with changing light and shades of color, with the sudden rumble of a furnace hidden beneath the boards of oaken floors polished to such a degree the furniture was reflected in them like architecture placed at the edge of vast golden lakes. There were the carpets and the confusing, mesmerizing patterns of the carpets, the different paws and hooves of chair legs lurking near the fringed edges of the carpets. The two round mirrors with the child, and then the girl, and now the mature woman in them, always with the same carved eagle on the frame hovering over her head, benignly some days, and on others hunting, about to unfurl its talons, wanting to carry off her brain.

Sylvia, lying now on the bed in a modern, urban hotel room, ran all these things through her memory. She knew the contents of the drawers: twelve knives, eleven soup spoons, twelve forks, one serving fork, or fourteen folded linen napkins, and the small, silver tongs with tiny hands fashioned like maple leaves. The napkin rings with the names of previous children of the family etched into them in flowing script; Ronnie, Teddy, Addie, the names old-fashioned, tender in the use of the diminutive. Platters depicting the wildflowers of England or France dwelt inside a c.u.mbersome mahogany sideboard beside a set of plates depicting the rivers and mountains and pavilions and bridges of the Orient in shades of blue, and one large dish that must have been much loved by Addie and Ronnie, a plate with a fully decorated Victorian Christmas tree painted on its surface, toys like those now occupying the attic placed under its boughs. And everywhere, in all the rooms of the house, stood the china figurines, the horses and the Creation piece, of course, but shepherdesses as well, and hors.e.m.e.n and dancers and soldiers whose relationships had kept Sylvia busy with gossip when she was little and at certain times before Andrew as an adult.

Sometimes, however, she had been p.r.o.ne to exhaustion. When she had been unable to give weight or order to the variety of sounds and sights and smells that were near her, she had been convinced that each impression she received was insisting on its own importance. Like a series of ego-driven guests, the fold of a sheet, the sound of a dripping tap, the click of a closing door, her shoes huddled together in the closet all demanded equal attention. It was at these times that she would begin to shut down, to disappear. She was surprised to realize now that it had been Jerome, not her, who had seemed occasionally to be absent while they had been talking, and she wondered whether it had been her, or something else, perhaps some fear she was unaware of, that had caused him to drift and then come back again. Did he have a collection of objects from his childhood he could go to at such times? She thought not, knowing by now that such peculiarities of character were certain to be hers alone.

She got up and went over to the closet and took the salt shaker out of her coat pocket. Then she crossed the room and placed it on the desk beside the journals. How intimate she had been all her life with things like this. As she again allowed the objects in her house to appear, one after another, in her imagination, here in this room in the city, she did not question whether she had left them behind. There was their world and her world and the times of day when both worlds intersected. Sometimes, as now, as dusk entered the city that was not her home, the intersection took place simply in a state of recall. But there were other times when she could lift the ceramic figures from the furniture that sheltered or displayed them, lift them up to the light, and then hold them for a few comforting moments in her hands.

The following day when Sylvia knocked on the steel door and Jerome opened it and beckoned her inside, she was ushered into a s.p.a.ce filled with sound and movement. The young man with the orange hair that she had seen when she first approached the alley was seated on the couch playing a guitar while someone else someone oddly dressed was executing a series of awkward gestures in the center of the room. The floor beneath the performer's feet was covered with a coating of sand into which several circular patterns had been incised by a pointed toe. Sylvia, unnerved by this pantomime, felt as if she was intruding on an act of great secrecy, one that by rights should be enacted in utter privacy, and she was suddenly unsure of the permission she had been granted to be in this place.

Jerome placed his finger on his lips, then opened his palm in a gesture that Sylvia knew was meant both to silence her and to placate her. Then he raised a small movie camera to his face and turned it in the direction of the performer, who bent at the waist and lifted both arms behind his or her back, then crouched near the floor, hands sweeping through sand. After a few uncomfortable moments during which Sylvia was acutely aware of the buzzing noise of the camera, the music stopped, Jerome placed the camera on the counter beside the sink, and Mira removed the veil from her head.

"Sorry," the girl said to Sylvia, "we were just finishing up."

The sound of clicking buckles. The orange-haired boy was noisily packing up his guitar. He stood, zipped up an old leather jacket, and lifted the tattered black case from the floor. "I'm off then," he said.

"Please," said Sylvia, "not because I "

"Nope," he said. "Don't worry...got to go to work." He glanced at her as he walked out the door, but Sylvia could see that there was no recognition in the look. He would not, this time, call her "Mom" in that condescending tone that was an acknowledgement of her age and demeanor. Not here. Not now that she was known by these young people, now that she was inside.

"That was Geoff," said Mira after the door had closed. "He works at the music shop down the street, repairing instruments guitars mostly, some violins."

Jerome had moved to the edge of the sand and was now filming the patterns left there by Mira's dance steps if that is what they were. Mira was ma.s.saging her head, lifting the short, dark hair that had been pasted to her skull by the headgear.

"A performance piece," the girl explained, "though, at the moment I'm still working on it. I have no idea where it's going."

"Where might it be going?" asked Sylvia.

Mira smiled. "I mean, where it will end up. How it will turn out. We had to repeat it a couple of times because of Swimmer. He kept rubbing up against my legs." She walked toward the door of the place she called the bedroom, opened it, and released the cat. "We had to lock him up in the end."

Today Sylvia would talk about how she met Andrew. She had imagined revealing this episode to Jerome the night before, had envisaged herself in the chair, him on the couch, the story a thread between them. Mira had not been in the picture she had seen in her mind and she began to worry about how she would be able to talk with the girl in the room, with the two of them together and the bond that existed between them so visible, so obvious to her.

Mira, as if sensing this, pulled her scarf and coat from a hook on the wall, then paused and stood still for a moment. "I wish I could stay," she said, "but I guess I'll leave you two alone now."

"Poor Mira," said Jerome. "Off to the salt mines."

Mira wound the scarf around her neck. "Yes, the salt mines," she said. "Though in some ways I suspect the real salt mines might be more interesting."

"Smithson would have agreed with that," said Jerome. "He loved mines, loved excavation of any kind, in fact. Even...no, maybe especially, industrial excavation. He wanted to know about everything."

Mira opened the door. "I want to know about everything too," she said, turning to look at Jerome. "I always have."

When Mira had gone, Sylvia told Jerome about the tactile maps she made for her friend Julia. "She's blind," Sylvia explained, "but touching a map is one of the ways she is able to see. I didn't think I could do it at first, didn't think I could translate landscape into texture on a board. But then I know the County so well; I suppose that made it easier." She shifted in her chair. "I came to love making the maps," she confessed. "In fact, I am working on one, right now, in the hotel."

"You're making art yourself when you do that," he said, "taking what you see in your own County and reproducing it on a flat s.p.a.ce."

Sylvia rejected the suggestion but found that she was somewhat flattered nonetheless.