A Map Of Glass Part 4

"Andrew and I first encountered one another on the only busy street in the County," she began when she could no longer remain separate from the idea of him. "The only thoroughfare that sustained anything that resembled what a city person might think of as traffic." She described the town of Picton, its sidewalks, walls, and old windows, and as she did so, each square inch of that town's surfaces presented itself in her mind, as if she were walking, right then, on one of the familiar streets. As always, she took quite a lot of pleasure from doing this, this long walk back to the subject of Andrew.

"I was carrying on a conversation with myself, or revisiting a scene from my childhood, or perhaps I was bringing something I'd seen a pebble on a path, the grain of a fenceboard back into being in my mind. I was walking down this busy street in the center of a town two or three times larger than the town in which I live, but in my mind I was, as I so often was, somewhere else, following the thread of a story that had nothing to do with the street, the errand I was performing. This ability to be absent was really the only unique skill I had managed to master, though I could clean a house, cook a pa.s.sable meal, drive a car, partic.i.p.ate in a prescribed set of ordinary social activities."

"Sounds like what we all do," said Jerome. "I spend half my life daydreaming."

She couldn't recall the season because seasons were only important to her when they brought about discomfort and distraction in the form of extreme heat or cold. She'd been aware of neither of these states so it must have been autumn or spring, an un.o.btrusive climate that would not have caused her to apply or remove a layer of clothing, to unfurl an umbrella, to turn her face from the wind, or to watch her step on a slippery surface. "I would have seemed, to anyone watching, a thin, unremarkable, young woman," she said, "dressed conservatively, going about my daily tasks, likely about to enter a drugstore or a stationery shop, preoccupied perhaps.

"I had, I suppose, stepped from the curb without looking, without thinking. I almost believed at the time that everything that surrounded me appeared because I was walking through it, and when I had moved on, it withdrew until I had need of it again. I counted on this neutrality; it was the key to my freedom, my singularity, and, as I would later come to understand, it was my charm against sorrow."

Though she was not looking at him, Sylvia could sense Jerome's clear, focused gaze.

"He came toward me from somewhere just behind my peripheral vision so that my first impression was that I was being a.s.saulted, my arms pinned to my side, my feet lifted off the ground, that and the blue blur and slight wind of the car that swept by inches in front of my knees. Then I looked down, saw the wool sleeves tweed, I think one atop the other across my sweater, the slightly freckled wrists, and felt the elbows his or mine digging into my ribs. I didn't make a sound. Neither did he, at first. Then he spoke some sentences that included the words might have been killed might have been killed." Back on the curb they had faced each other and he had laughed. She had thanked him, said that he had saved her life. She was shaken, not by the proximity of death, but by the accident of this sudden, purposeful embrace.

"'A conditioned response,' he told me when I thanked him for rescuing me. Then he looked at me more closely. 'I've seen you before. You're the doctor's wife,' he said, 'from Blennerville.' When the light turned green, he nodded toward the other side of the street. 'All clear now,' he said. I began dutifully to cross, my face burning as if I had been slapped out of a shock or out of hysteria though, in the course of my entire life, I had been visited by no emotion powerful enough to cause such a response. I stopped on the opposite side, turned back, and watched him walk away. He was a tall, awkward man, with a slight stoop and light brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, though I had been able to tell by his face that he was still fairly young."

A conditioned response, a conditioned response. She remembered that the phrase had kept repeating itself at the center of her mind as she watched him climb the four steps of the County Archives. She saw the shadowed carving of the stone mullions around the arched windows of that building, the reflections in the gla.s.s, petunias in the flowerbeds beside the steps, and, even from that distance, the curve of his shoulders, the worn heels of his shoes. She remembered that the phrase had kept repeating itself at the center of her mind as she watched him climb the four steps of the County Archives. She saw the shadowed carving of the stone mullions around the arched windows of that building, the reflections in the gla.s.s, petunias in the flowerbeds beside the steps, and, even from that distance, the curve of his shoulders, the worn heels of his shoes.

"Well, the truth was he had broken into my calm like a burglar then and, like a burglar, had gone casually on his way. But what had he stolen, apart from my detachment. My heart? No, that would come later. The poor man. He had no idea what he had done."

"Well, what had he done?" said Jerome. "Other than save you from a speeding car? That seems like a good thing to me."

"No," said Sylvia. "You don't understand. I have an odd mind. There are times when I can't move it around, can't take it to a new subject of concentration. It sticks...it sticks to things, things that I've come to understand other people have little, sometimes no interest in at all."

"You're not alone in that," said Jerome. "Once, I thought about old, decaying fences for an entire year. And then, there are other times when I think about absolutely nothing...nothing at all. I hate it when someone asks what's going on in my mind. Often, quite often in fact, it's a blank slate."

"A blank slate," Sylvia repeated and looked around the room. "But my own strangeness, I think, is that perhaps I have lived too long in the same place, too long in the same house, thinking about sofas no one sits on, cupboards no one opens filled with silver and china and linen no one ever uses. Any more. There are also Bibles no one reads and ancient photo alb.u.ms no one ever looks at, old letters no one ever glances at. Except for me, of course, except for me. It is as if I were an extinct species mysteriously catapulted into the beginning of the twenty-first century out of a childhood where boys stood on the burning deck when all but they had fled and captains lashed their daughters to the masts of sinking ships."

"'The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled,'" Jerome said quietly. He turned to Sylvia. "I haven't a clue how I came to know that."

"Could you have learned it at school?"

"Doubtful."

"They don't memorize poems in school any more, then." Sylvia had been particularly good at memory work. When called upon, however, she had been unable to rise to her feet, unable to recite the required lines.

"Not in the school I went to," said Jerome.

"In the beginning, at least, we seemed so alike, Andrew and I, so much a part of the same vanishing species with our pioneer ancestors and a shared focus that drifted to the past. He often stood on burning decks of one kind or another when all but he had fled. And I...I seemed to be constantly lashed to the mast by those who had, for my own safety or was it for theirs? tied me there."

Jerome, Sylvia noted now, had leaned back against the arm of the couch and had lit a cigarette. "Don't tell Mira," he said. "She thinks I've quit." Smoke rose from his hand, then twisted in the air above him. "Well, at least you know something about your past. Not much of that in my life. In fact I know next to nothing about my family's past."

"Oh yes," said Sylvia. "I know about the past, all about the past. I can list from memory the entire genealogy of my father's family and have been able to do so since I was six, seven years old: also, the townships of my County, backwards and forwards, in rapid succession." She smiled, remembering. "I can tell you the names of all the constellations and I can relate their exact distance from Earth. I can tell you where each Georgian house in the County is situated and I can describe what it looked like when it was in its prime what was cultivated in its flower beds and vegetable gardens, whether the clapboard was painted, where the original log house was placed, when the magnificent barns were built, the full name of the earliest settler and that of his wife, and how many of his children died during the first winter, and where they are buried.

"I can describe each line on Andrew's face, the one brown eye that is fractionally larger than the other, the dip of his temples and the smooth, moist creases of his eyelids. The way his hair changed from light brownish grey to white before my own eyes, how when it is brushed back the growth pattern of this hair reveals an uneven widow's peak. I can describe this the way a child describes a set of facts given to him in school, but now there are times when I can't visualize anything at all about Andrew's face."

His hands had been soft, not the hands of a laborer. There had been a place on his leg where the thigh muscle eased like a beach onto the hard bone of the knee. There was a particular vein that stood out on his forehead, and a small oval-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. Sylvia knew all this and yet, when she closed her eyes, she could not see him.

"But, you met him again...somehow, somewhere."

"Yes," she said, "I saw him again, but not until I became interested in the buried hotel, the hotel that sleeps, quietly, under the dunes. I was working part-time as a volunteer at the village museum by then, ama.s.sing my own peculiar collection and demonstrating that I could be successful in turning my obsessions to good use." She sat back in her chair and described the village museum, her odd choices for the collection: a rendering of a family tomb made from human hair, a painting of a dog mourning the recently drowned body of a young child, c.u.mbersome pieces of machinery that resembled instruments of torture, stuffed and boxed birds and animals, and all those ominous-looking porcelain dolls that she honestly believed had survived for a century or so because no child really wanted to touch them. There were certain hats, as well, hats that appeared to her to be mistakes of creation, as if some G.o.d hadn't been able to decide whether He wanted to make a reptile or a bird or a clump of turf.

Jerome laughed. "I think I would like to see those hats."

"Andrew had heard about the museum's efforts to try to preserve the dunes," Sylvia continued, "to prevent a cement company from carting away more and more truckloads of sand. He just came by to see if there were any old photographs in the collection, or any information at all about the hotel that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and I, I of all people, I took him out to the dunes. We drove the fifteen miles out to the very tip of the County." She remembered the tension in the car, the sand shifting under their feet, his hand moving toward her hair, and the almost unbearable silence on the way back.

"So there really was a hotel buried by sand?"

Sylvia smiled. "You didn't believe me," she said.

Jerome did not answer. He leaned forward to crush the half-finished cigarette into an empty cat food tin on the table in front of him.

"Malcolm taught me to drive...another miracle, much celebrated by him. He taught me how to drive and, once he was certain that I had mastered this skill, he bought me a small car and set me free to explore the roads and architecture of the County. The roads were easy to negotiate, and had been well known by me ever since I had memorized the County atlas when I was a child. The shops were more difficult because once I entered them I would be forced to engage in conversation, and this alone would heighten my awareness of the oddness of situations where people had no foreknowledge of my condition. It was in such a shop, however a shop near the dunes where an old man had told me about the hotel. He had played in the attic of this building as a child, or at least he claimed to have done this, at a time when the rest of the hotel was already buried by sand. By the time he was a young man only the roof was visible, and then, not much later, the building disappeared forever."

As she said this Sylvia remembered listening to the old man speak. She had been examining a b.u.t.ter press where a pattern of oak leaves and acorns had been carved into a block of pine about four inches square. The shop was dark and full of cobwebs, and had in a previous life been a milk house or stable. Dusty windows, grey light. She had picked up the object and paid for it while the old man scrabbled through a collection of paper bags in which he was going to wrap it. And all the time he had been talking, Sylvia had been seeing the faded, stained wallpaper of the rooms in which the old man had played, the sun coming through broken mullions, the sand surrounding it.

"I went home that day with one b.u.t.ter press, two bags of groceries, and knowledge of the very thing that though of course I did not know this would lead me to Andrew. The hotel, then, became my sole preoccupation for several months of that year. At dinner I told Malcolm stories connected with it, stories about the old man as a child playing there until he could no longer squeeze through the windows because of the rising sand. Stories about how the owner of the hotel awoke one morning to find sand in the corner of his lavish garden, a small pile that became noticeably larger each day until the flowers wilted and the gra.s.s died and the guests began to discover sand in the corners of their rooms, on their plates at dinnertime, and constantly under their feet as they walked down the long, planked halls."

"I can almost see," said Jerome, a hint of surprise in his voice, "everything you say. Everything you're talking about."

Sylvia was thinking that much of what she had said about the hotel had been, in some way, triggered by Mira's performance, and that here in this room she had for the first time actually seen sand covering a floor. "Mira...," she began, then stopped. She was about to say something about Mira's piece but thought better of it. Malcolm, instructing her in the finer points of social interaction, had told her to try, as much as possible, to stick to topics that she knew something about. Then he had laughed, remembering her tendency to lecture, to repeat, her tendency to get stuck on the topics that she knew far too much about.

"You were going to say something about Mira," Jerome prompted.

"She seems so vital, somehow, so" Sylvia searched for the word "so awake."

"She's attentive," said Jerome, "curious. She pays attention to almost everything." He glanced toward the door as if he expected the girl to walk into the room. "About your hotel," he added, "Mira would have said it was like a children's story. In a children's story anything at all can happen," he said with surprising conviction. "The most impossible things and" he looked at Sylvia "as long as the story is being told, we believe everything. Or at least I always believed everything."

"That may be why I loved childhood so much," Sylvia said, "because of the larger belief, and because..."

"But your childhood " Jerome interjected.

"I was very content, unless I was interfered with, unless I was interrupted, unless someone else stood in my path and blocked my view of my private world. I wonder why they couldn't understand that, apart from this, I was content?"

"The world is so full of a number of things," said Jerome, "I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

"Yes," said Sylvia. She reached into the pocket of the coat she had draped over the chair, pulled out the salt shaker, and held it in front of her. She had never done this before, had never let anyone know what she carried with her. "If you hold onto it long enough," she told him, "it becomes warm in your hands."

He leaned forward to look at the shaker, then reached over and lightly touched the top of it.

"Perhaps it was because I had no friends," Sylvia continued. "Maybe that's why they thought I wasn't happy. All through high school, you see, I kept at a distance. Once or twice a year a boy would try to speak to me, or a girl who was not part of the crowd would attempt to form a friendship. But it was not possible. Either I wanted nothing to do with those who approached me or I watched them constantly, learned the b.u.t.tons on their coats, the part in their hair, a freckle on an elbow, wanting all the details of their lives. When they began to withdraw, as they always did, it was a relief in a way. I could lose myself in the schoolwork, which was a safe haven, an achievable goal. Teachers, on the whole, approved of me, but I had no friends, until Julia of course."

The high-pitched ringing of a cell phone burst into the room, causing Sylvia to jump in her chair as if she had been shaken from a trance. Jerome stood, excused himself, fumbled in his pocket for the phone. Then he turned his back and walked away, speaking quietly.

"That was just Mira telling me that she'll be late," he said when he returned to the couch. "They're installing a sculpture show at the gallery. Metal trees apparently." He smiled. "Sounds like there is a complete forest of them."

"Forests," said Sylvia. "The cottage where we met was surrounded by one of the few forests that still contained some old-growth trees, though Andrew never pointed out the oldest, most important ones. And I, I was afraid to ask, frightened of my own ignorance. I was so awkwardly vulnerable, so stupid. People like me are supposed to have next to no attention span. But, in fact, in my case, quite the opposite is true: my attention span is limitless; it's just a matter of where my focus settles: a buried hotel, a b.u.t.ter press, the salt shaker, the County atlas, the genealogy and then, and then him, him, him. The idea of him, you see, kept its arm around my shoulders, just as my peninsula kept its arm around the lake, protected me, and kept me safely distant from everyone else. The distance, of course, was not new, but the phantom encircling arm was a surprise until it became a habit, until it became like breathing or like pulse."

Sylvia began to move the salt shaker around in her lap as if it were a toy and she a child. Then, becoming aware of herself, she stopped, and without looking at her companion, turned and dropped the object back into her coat pocket.

"He left me after years of infrequent meetings," she said finally. "He met me in a restaurant on the edge of Picton and told me that we had to stop." Sylvia was silent for some time, revisiting his serious voice and recalling also how pa.s.sive she had been. She had never fought and would never fight for anything she wanted simply because she did not know which weapons to carry or how to use them. Instead she had turned inward, away, looked out the window at a bird trembling on a branch. Andrew was saying words such as work work, commitment commitment, and distraction distraction, and then something about Malcolm. She was looking at a bird and trying to imagine what kind of avian emergency had caused its terror. She believed that Andrew had discovered the flaw in her, that he now knew about the condition. At the very least, he had sensed something missing, something lacking. No, she could not fight.

So this was the heart-torn present, she remembered thinking at the time. This is the collision with pain. She told Jerome that after Andrew had gone from her life, there was a period during which she became convinced that almost everything was poisoned: the colossal dark chambers of rotting barns, the ghosts of vanished forests, polluted water flowing under roads through culverts, sand dunes comprising smashed sh.e.l.ls and the bones of deformed fish pushing inland from the lake. "So this was my known, my benign world," she said. "Everything was in a state of decay." All of the ancestry she had so carefully learned was under the altered ground, bones turning to powder. There was nothing beautiful about the traces of human endeavor, despite what Andrew believed, all was unraveling as quickly as it was knit. Her own strained face when she examined it in the mirror was a collection of dead cells. The love they had made was barren, had resulted in no quickening, no quickening at all except this newborn capacity of hers to see things the way they really were, that and the ability to feel pain.

"I was grateful for that," she said aloud. "I still am grateful for that."

In the silence that followed, the orange cat strolled majestically, almost theatrically, across the room, tail high in the air. For several moments he became the center of attention, as if he had planned it that way.

"What was it," asked Jerome, "what was it you were grateful for?"

"I don't think I'd ever really felt anything before...before him." Sylvia said. She paused. "And then there were the stories he told about his family, his ancestors." She leaned over and reached into the bag at her feet, running her fingers for a moment over the smooth leather of one of the journals. "They were like a gift, really, those stories, a gift from him to me."

Jerome nodded. "That's a lovely thought."

"You know," she said suddenly, "there was a picture on the wall of the cottage where we met. It was painted by Andrew's great-aunt Annabelle and, as Andrew pointed out, it depicted a panorama she could not possibly have seen, one that may have been a compilation of everything she had learned how to draw, how to paint I guess, perhaps partially copied from the kind of steel engravings you see in nineteenth-century books. Some of it came, of course, from the various ships that would have been at all hours of the day part of her view at Timber Island. In the upper background of the picture perched on the edge of an improbable-looking escarpment was a castle in a state of ruin. Below this engulfed by a magnificent fire was a beached schooner in front of which, for reasons impossible to explain, a man leads two horses and a cart into the waves."

This was the scene she had stared at while Andrew slept after their lovemaking, while Andrew slept and late-afternoon light entered the cottage. Her first landscape after love. Afterwards she would step outside the door of the cottage, walk past the foundations of the house that had once stood on the hill, and, before climbing into the car, would look into the far distance. The long arm of the peninsula where she lived would be visible, and the pale blemishes at the southern end of it which were the dunes. Sometimes she could see the small white finger of a lighthouse on the lakesh.o.r.e. And then, under the surface of the lake, she would sense the presence of wrecked schooners some of them launched a hundred and fifty years ago at Timber Island.

Sylvia removed the two journals. She turned to Jerome. "Perhaps," she said quietly, "you might be interested in these."

Jerome looked at the notebooks in Sylvia's slightly trembling hands. "What are they?" he asked.

"A record," Sylvia said, "a story. Everything that Andrew wrote about Timber Island, the story of his family. But, you may not be interested, you may not have time, or..." She hesitated, was worried suddenly that the stories that had engaged her, the sentences that had so affected her, might not be understood by this young man, might not be understandable.

Jerome reached forward to accept the notebooks from her.

Once, she had included Timber Island on a map she had made for Julia when her friend was going to visit the famous Thousand Islands scattered throughout the river downstream from Kingston, the same islands that the Woodman timber rafts would have sailed by on their journey to Quebec. Technically Timber Island need not have been on the map at all, but it had given her private pleasure to include it. "This is where the river begins," she had said to her friend, drawing her hand toward the spot on the map, "right here where this small island is situated." She had made Timber Island from a piece of fabric quite different than that which she used for the vast anthology of islands downriver in the same way that she had used cotton for the lake and then linen for the river. "Will I be near this small island?" Julia had asked, and when Sylvia had replied in the negative Julia had added "then you must have put it here for some other reason altogether. Maybe someday you will tell me why."

She stared at the notebooks resting now on the crate that Jerome used for a coffee table. How odd, Sylvia thought, to see them here, in this place, a place that neither she nor Andrew could have ever imagined.

Later, as she walked out of the alley and down the street toward the hotel, her anxiety lifted somewhat. She could not lose the writing, really: she could recall, almost exactly, every word Andrew had used. In the beginning, it hadn't occurred to her that she would want the young man who found him to read Andrew's words. But later, after the idea of the trip to the city had taken hold of her, she had become aware of the hope that this would happen. It was the body, she supposed, the physical fact of Andrew's anatomy, so carefully learned by her, and now presented to this young person in such a shocking, unforgettable way that made this, to her mind, something she needed to do. She wanted Jerome to know Andrew, the man he had been.

As this thought entered her, she was rocked by a wave of grief so intense it caused her to stop walking, to stand quite still on the sidewalk, with a river of strangers pa.s.sing swiftly on either side of her.

Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow, she thought, allowing the sentence to unfurl in her mind, so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River.

By the time Sylvia had pa.s.sed through the gla.s.s doors that lead to the lobby of the hotel, she had mentally turned seven or eight pages of the first notebook. She saw the shape that the paragraphs made on the lined paper, the different colors of ink Andrew had used, the places where he had angrily stricken imperfect phrases from the record. All this every flaw, each hesitation, his changes of mind and mood, his humor, his diagrams of interiors, his efforts to depict emotion would be evident now to someone other than herself. "The last raft of the season was being constructed in the small harbor," she whispered to herself, and then, "continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond."

Just after the elevator doors closed she spoke the sentence "They walked with the horse out of the darkness of the stable and into the vivid autumn light." Often in the past six months she had risen at two or three in the morning, had descended the stairs, and had read and reread the journals with such concentration that when she paused to look at the kitchen clock, two or three hours would have pa.s.sed. Several hours of exhausted sleep would most times follow this, so that when she awoke late in the morning she would be unsure if the world she had entered on the page hadn't been one built by a dream. And then, the following day, when she was alone, Sylvia would say certain sentences aloud, knowing that by doing so she could evoke a scene quite different than the one in which she stood or walked, could make her own kitchen disappear, for instance, and cause the shadow of a barn door on sandy ground, the glint of lake, leaves twisting in a breeze appear in its place.

Jerome was stretched out on the futon, but he was not asleep. In the semi-darkness of the early evening he was listening to Mira describe the three vows that a monk must take upon becoming part of a religious community. Lately she had been reading Thomas Merton.

Was his namesake, Saint Jerome, a Benedictine? he wanted to know. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. They had been dressing to go to a party in another area of the city but had found themselves making love instead. It was quite early in the evening: the intention to leave the studio was still with them, but it was fading fast.

"No" she told him, "Saint Benedict was the famous Benedictine. He founded the Benedictine order." She was curled on her side, facing him, with both small arms wrapped around his larger one. He could feel her lips moving near his shoulder, the way her torso shook in a soft explosion of silent laughter. So this had nothing to do with him, these were not vows that she secretly hoped he would take.

"There is the vow of stability," she was saying. "That means that you must stop, once you have entered a community, you must stop imagining that there is a monastery somewhere else that would be better than the one you are living in, stop thinking that you would be happier in another place. You must enter fully and completely each day of the life you have chosen, or the one that has been a.s.signed to you." She paused. Jerome said nothing, but he knew she could sense his attention in the dark. "Then there is the vow of the Convergence of Life."

"Wait," he said, "that last vow. Smithson said in an interview that one pebble moving six inches over the period of four million years was enough for him, enough to keep him interested."

"He would have made a good Hindu."

"Not sure...probably a meat eater. The other vow?"

Mira had rolled away from him now onto her left side, and he adjusted himself so that he could put one arm over her waist, their thighs touching, his kneecaps pressing slightly into the smooth hollows of her bent legs. "The next vow," she corrected, "the Convergence of Life. I think it might mean that, while you remain stable, you must also accept that the world will change around you, and that you should remain open to and aware of those changes, though it also suggests that your life will converge with G.o.d's, or something along those lines."

Jerome remembered Sylvia's suggestion that the relentless stability of her surroundings might have somehow caused her mysterious condition, that and what she said about being trapped, imprisoned by geography. "Aren't those two vows contradictory?" he asked.

"A bit. But I've thought about that and they seem to work together somehow. The first vow has to do with what can be controlled you can control yourself the second is about accepting what you can't control."

Grant me the serenity, Jerome remembered, to accept things I can't change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference to accept things I can't change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. His father, returning from a meeting, had told Jerome about this. At the time this directive had seemed to the fourteen-year-old boy to be a miraculous solution to the chaos of a family made miserable by his father's binges. He had allowed himself to become certain, as he had been so many times in the past, that his father would stop drinking forever, that sanity and predictability would visit their household even though, by then, he had forgotten if he ever knew what sanity and predictability looked like, what form they took, how they would feel. But, in the end, the prayer was of little use anyway. Within weeks his father had entered the prolonged bout of inebriation that would be his last. Jerome could recall the horror; the older man weeping, or shouting in anger, his own terror when he was wakened in the night by the sounds of retching in the bathroom, the terrible accusations, the furious silences. "What was the third vow?" he asked.

"Oh, that," she said, and he could again feel the tremor of her laughter, "is the vow of chast.i.ty."

"Too late for that now."

"Yes," she agreed, "far too late."

His father had used those words. "It's too late," he had shouted when Jerome's mother had begged him to stop. "It's far too late to stop." Jerome, wakened by the argument, had stood trembling with rage in a pair of old flannelette pajamas that, in the past year, had tightened around his chest and thighs in the same way that the apartment, his parents' drama, and all the cheap furniture of their lives had tightened around him. His father had turned to him then and had said in a voice suddenly calm and cold, "It's too late for you too, pal. Don't think that you are immune. Don't think for a second that you are exempt, you judgmental little s.h.i.t."

There had been nothing left to break in the room, nothing that didn't already bear the mark of his father's anger, nothing of his own, so Jerome had wrenched open the gla.s.s door and had gone out onto the freezing balcony in his bare feet. He had dug with his hands though layers of snow, then had pulled the frozen, rusted bicycle from the corner where it lay and, only peripherally aware of his father's attempts to restrain him, had tried to smash up this final piece of evidence of his childhood with his fists.

As he thought about this, an image of his mother's ashen face and wide eyes came into his mind, but he willed himself away from the memory, turned instead back to the girl and placed his forehead against the warm skin on her back. He could tell by the small, involuntary twitches that pa.s.sed through her body that Mira was asleep, and soon he began to drift into a dream where it was his father, not Andrew Woodman, that he found trapped in the ice near the docks of Timber Island, trapped but still alive. On his ravaged features was an expression of such tenderness that Jerome reached forward to touch the frost-covered face. But when his fingers made contact with his father's cheek, the whole head fragmented, collapsing into a confusion of thin transparent pieces on a flat surface, and suddenly he was looking at Smithson's Map of Broken Gla.s.s Map of Broken Gla.s.s. Each shard reflected something he remembered about his father: a signet ring, a belt buckle, a dark green package of cigarettes, an eye, a cufflink, the back of his hand, and Jerome knew his father was broken, smashed. The toe of a shoe, a plaid sleeve, the seam of a pair of pants, an Adam's apple. In the dream this was satisfying rather than distressing. In the dream it seemed that this alteration in his father was what he had wanted all along. And yet, when he awoke in the dark, he was weeping.

[image]

That evening, after adding a few more sentences to the sheet of paper on the desk, Sylvia worked on the map of the route to the lighthouse, an occupation that she hoped would both soothe her and permit her partly to overlook the fact that Andrew's journals his thoughts, his memories, his imaginings were no longer close at hand. Jerome might even now be reading the words, the way she had read them night after night while Malcolm slept and rain or snow fell through the ocher path cast into the yard by the kitchen light. When she returned to bed those early mornings just before dawn, she would close her eyes and envision a world made up of islands, a world dependent on flotation. Andrew had written that on each island there had been a spot called Signal Point and that when significant messages needed to be sent quickly down the lake or up the river a fire would be lit on the sh.o.r.e of one island after another, a sort of telegraph of flame. Marriages and deaths were often announced this way, particularly during late fall and early spring, times when the ice was too dangerous for navigation yet not strong enough to support a horse.

There had been no such fires lit for her. The answer to the final question, the source of her grief, had been presented to her in an impersonal way on a flimsy sheet of newsprint destined for the recycling box.

"It presents in a very odd way," Malcolm had often said, referring to some disease or another, and she remembered thinking that diseases were almost always in the present, in the now, unless they were cured, or unless they were in remission waiting to recur. Her own incurable love had been like that; it had shocked her with its insistence on the present, and with its persistence, how it had presented itself, and continued along with the grief to present itself to her each morning when she woke. It had always been and continued to be one of her few connections to the present tense.

When she was busy with a map, however, she fully entered the landscape she was translating to touch, was able to see in her mind the rough edges of the road, the gra.s.s growing in the center, potholes here and there, sumac bending just beyond the verge. She cut a piece of pine veneer, now, into three octagonal shapes, each slightly smaller than the last, and pasted them one atop the other in a spot near the lake where the lighthouse would be situated, then knowing that Julia would want to walk beside the water, she decided that she must find some way to let her friend know that the beach was filled with small, smooth stones.

Landscapes are unreliable, Sylvia thought, as she rummaged through her fabric bag, looking for something to define stoniness. Landscapes are subject to change. But sh.o.r.elines are even less stable, sh.o.r.elines are constantly changing.

When designing a map, there was always the problem of the periphery. A person blind from birth is one dependent on intimacy, Sylvia had thought, the reach of one arm defining for them the extent of the known world. When she spoke about this to Julia, however, her friend had disagreed, had reminded Sylvia that she could identify and name distant sounds and could smell things animals, various crops, a wind that has pa.s.sed over the Great Lake, the approach of a storm from very far away. Sitting in a kitchen she knew when the apples were ripe in an orchard that would not have been visible from that kitchen. So what does a location mean to you, Sylvia had asked, how much of a place do you want to know?

"More than you," Julia had replied, "I want to know it all. I want much, much more than you can possibly fit on a map. Just give me the center and I will move out from there, in the spirit if not in the flesh. Soon I'll know all of the County by heart."

Thinking of this, Sylvia put on her coat and began to walk back and forth across the room. Each aspect of the County her own territory had been named, filled, emptied, ploughed and planted long ago; all harvests belonged to the dead who insisted on their ent.i.tlement. "I cut the trees, built the mills, sawed the boards, made the roads, fenced the fields, raised the barns," they had told her in the dark of her childhood bedroom. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. "I drew up the deeds, made the laws, drafted the plans, invented the history, prescribed the curriculum," the dead whispered. "I drew up the deeds, made the laws, drafted the plans, invented the history, prescribed the curriculum," the dead whispered. I, said the rook, with my little book. I, said the rook, with my little book. They beat out a telegraph in her blood, one that read, "I fought the wars, buried the dead, carved the tombstones." They beat out a telegraph in her blood, one that read, "I fought the wars, buried the dead, carved the tombstones." I, said the fish, with my little dish, And I caught the blood. I, said the fish, with my little dish, And I caught the blood.

Sylvia opened the curtains and looked at the concrete wall stained a mustard yellow by the muted, artificial light that gathered democratically in all the corners of the city at night. I, said the lark, if it's not in the dark. I, said the lark, if it's not in the dark. At this instant she found in herself the desire to walk in the city at night, the desire to be of the moment, time-bound. She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. She decided she could be absent from the hotel for exactly one hour. At this instant she found in herself the desire to walk in the city at night, the desire to be of the moment, time-bound. She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. She decided she could be absent from the hotel for exactly one hour.

She b.u.t.toned up her coat, switched off the lights, left the room.

Once she was on the street, Sylvia stood for a while in front of a shop window behind which a variety of television sets was displayed, each relaying the same image of a well-dressed man energetically speaking and moving his hands. She was interested in his gestures, in the way his forehead wrinkled then smoothed again and how his shoulders moved up and down. He was like Malcolm during the period when he was teaching her the art of expression and she was forced, now, to suppress an impulse to copy his actions.