A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “No, I’m fine,” said Sylvia. “I’ve had lunch.” The restaurant had been one geared toward sandwiches; the variety of contents displayed behind the glass counter had almost driven her back out to the street until she realized she could simply mimic the choices of the customer who preceded her. Sylvia was beginning to appreciate the neutrality of the city, the fact that its inhabitants had absolutely no interest in her. Perhaps her life would have been easier to manage had she always been a stranger.

  “Okay then.” Jerome walked quietly over to the couch and slowly sat down, as if he felt that any sudden movement might be too disruptive, might startle her.

  He believes I am a problem, thought Sylvia, much like everyone else. She found this oddly unsettling, as if she had wanted to impress this young man and had failed somehow. Still, she had come this far and was not going to retreat into silence. She placed her handbag on the floor by her feet, removed her coat, and began to speak.

  “My father was a doctor and I married my father’s partner, a man called Malcolm Bradley. I married a kind man who came into my father’s life as a locum. Malcolm, who wanted to look after me.”

  She smiled after she said this, and Jerome smiled as well, out of politeness probably, for where was the joke? What she had said should not have been spoken lightly, she realized. Sometimes in recent years when she had stood in the evenings unnoticed at the doorway of Malcolm’s office, watching him turn the pages of the books that might or might not have described her condition, her heart nearly broke in the face of his need to believe in the purity of diagnosis. He was so innocent at these moments, this man who felt that everything deserved what he called “the dignity of a scientific explanation.” Had he taken her character through the several stages of the scientific method, spent months making observations, before carefully, deliberately, drawing his conclusion? Had he in fact married his conclusion?

  “ ‘She will have a good life,’ he assured my parents, ‘a good life with me. I understand her.’ “

  Sylvia sat very still, fearing that Jerome might ask what was wrong with her. It was the inquiry she dreaded more than anything, this question. When it was clear that he was not going to do so, she relaxed and said, “Did they tell you that Andrew Woodman was a landscape geographer?” she asked.

  “No,” said Jerome, sitting back against the couch, “I think I read about that … afterwards, in the newspaper.” He cleared his throat. “And you told me as well.”

  “Did I? He claimed that everywhere he went he found evidence of the behaviour of his forebears: rail fences, limestone foundations, lilac bushes blooming on otherwise abandoned farmsteads, an arcade of trees leading to a house that is no longer there.” She looked down. Her hands lying in her lap looked to her like two dead birds “All that sad refuse, Andrew used to say. And that island, of course … your island … abandoned by those ancestors a century before. He recorded everything that was left behind there, each sunken wreck, the remains of pilings, iron pulleys, cables, broken axles. You must have seen remnants … something?”

  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 baffled 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 assembled 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 travelling, 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 centre of her inner world. Her daily life had strutted around her like theatre, like a performance needing neither her participation 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 lake; because they had talked together on the dunes, a child’s sandbox glimpsed in a neighbour’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 space, 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 lakeshore 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 racoons 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 passed, 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 breasts and stomach. Then he had lifted her legs and groaned as he entered her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sylvia folded her hands on her lap, looked toward the window, then said quietly, “In time, everything that should have been joy between Andrew and me became too painful. And when for a period of time we stopped, stopped meeting, stopped talking, I spent endless afternoons drivi
ng 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 favourite 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.”