A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “Who?” asked Ghost.

  “Who?” echoed Lingelbach, once again pretending to be absorbed in sponging down the bar. When Branwell answered with nothing but a sigh, the owner of the establishment added philosophically, “No matter, whoever they were, they would have had to pay for room and board.”

  Maintenance, thought Branwell, is so central to human life, it’s a wonder the very enormity of it didn’t cause hopeless exhaustion in those who thought about it. Maintenance and money. There was a price to pay for sleeping at night and a price to pay for waking up in the morning. There was a price to pay for shaving your face and cutting your hair, for the clothes on your back and the food that you ate. And there was an even bigger price to pay, as far as he could tell, for having experienced happiness. I’ve lost everything, he concluded.

  “You haven’t lost me,” said Ghost, reading his mind.

  When he wasn’t eating or drinking, Branwell spent his remaining few days at the tavern lying on his back. As his friend had predicted several years before, paint did indeed drip into his eyes as well as into his moustache and onto his face. But there was one comfort, and that comfort had to do with weather. Branwell painted nothing but scenes relating to summer: a still millpond at twilight, a farmhouse with buggy tracks visible on a road leading to its door, a few sunny water scenes punctuated by the curve of a sail, several waterfalls.

  “I see another waterfall,” said Ghost enthusiastically as he watched from below, “a much larger waterfall that will be painted by you in the future. I see Niagara.” And then, in his new self-appointed role as supervisor, “So you can use turquoise … so show me something else! I see other colours! I see flowers. Paint some flowers every second square!”

  The aesthetes from across the road took a break from their trompe l’oeil efforts to inspect, scoffed at Branwell’s little landscapes, and went away. The blacksmith arrived, announced that tin was not a real metal, that it would rust in a decade, and that therefore all of this painting was a waste of time, and then he too went away. Branwell lay on his back for several afternoons, a brush in his hand and unsolicited memories of his childhood in his mind. He remembered an iceboat moving across Back Bay, snow falling on a young oak tree in the yard, a girl arriving at the wrong door in late winter. All this while he continued to paint a warm season, flower by flower.

  After a few days of intimate engagement with the tin ceiling, having slept late because there was no wind rattling the sashes of the window, Branwell was awakened by a spear of sunshine touching his face. He lay quite still, waiting for the wind to pick up, waiting for the light to soften as snow entered it. But the spear remained crisply defined on his pillow and the sharp, ferrous smell of water was in the air. When he opened the curtains he was delighted to see that the icicles hanging from the eaves above the window were releasing glistening drops of water from their tips, but even more exciting, the entire village was chiming with a sound he had never before heard in this district—that of sleigh bells.

  He was packed and downstairs in a minute and was standing halfway up the stepladder placing tubes of paint and brushes back into the wooden box when Ghost entered the room. “January thaw in February,” he said. “Better get out of here before Lingelbach gets back from the store. You’re not going to finish the ceiling.”

  This seemed self-evident to Branwell, but he told Ghost that he would get back to it after he finished the commission at Fryfogel’s.

  “Doubt that,” Ghost replied. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you for a couple of years.”

  “Why not come out to the inn? It’s only a few miles.”

  “The current Fryfogel thinks fortune telling is un-Christian and, for some reason, Spectre doesn’t like his horses … maybe they are too pure. Besides, a January thaw in February is always short-lived. Don’t forget about Niagara Falls, though. I see it painted overtop a fireplace in a room upstairs on the brookside of the inn. And a mountain scene would be good too, there being no mountains in this district. Paint a moonlit mountain scene in another room.”

  And so, time, it seems, will always apply its patina to human effort, and paintings completed on walls are destined to be altered, damaged, or erased. Stains blossom, cracks appear, and the men of maintenance arrive with trowels and plaster. Electricity and central heating are invented and installed. Meadows and rivers, mountains and night skies are stripped away, concealed, or scraped off. Walls are broken into, the pipes of indoor plumbing are forced into the structure, then begin to decay or burst suddenly in the midst of a deep freeze. Further surgery is required. Each decade insists on its own particular changes.

  A few years after Branwell had put the finishing touches on his Niagara and his Moonlit Night, the Fryfogel, having already undergone the hardship of trying to compete with something as relentless as a railroad, would begin to experience difficulties of a different nature. Peter Fryfogel would die and be buried next to his father in the small family plot to the west of the inn. There would be disputes among various heirs about ownership, and a series of “cautions” would be instated against the property. Eventually, parts of the inn would be leased to spinster sisters trying to make a living by serving home-cooked meals to motorists on what was now a paved highway between Guelph and Goderich. A cairn would be erected nearby to mark and memorialize the blazing of the Huron Trail, now more than a hundred years old. Halfway through the twentieth century, the provincial government would decide to widen the highway and would expropriate much of the front yard. A decade after that there would be an attempt to reopen the building as a hotel, but that attempt would amount to very little, the private company involved would decide to sell the property to the County Historical Society. Various pieces of the adjoining farm property would be subdivided and sold. Heritage easements would be applied for by the Historical Society and would be approved. A drunk driver would lose control of his car and mow down the tombstones in the family plot. Governments at all levels would become more interested in business than in history, and money to keep the inn standing would be in short supply. Squirrels would invade the attic and chew holes through the roof, rats would enter the cellar kitchens, fifth- and sixth-generation pigeons would roost under the eaves, but even so the inn, now entirely emptied of both people and furniture, would continue to stand, its small paned windows rattling each time a tractor trailer roared past its beautifully proportioned Georgian front door.

  With each change of ownership—and sometimes even without a change of ownership—a new layer of patterned wallpaper would be slapped over both the mural of Niagara Falls in the upper room on the brookside and the mountain scene across the hall. Finally, the fractured wall paintings would be covered by no fewer than ten layers of paper flowers and paste and the landscapes would be forgotten altogether. And, in the end, a tenant suffering from the effects of a particularly cold winter would punch a stovepipe hole into the wall above the fireplace in the upper west room, little knowing, as he did so, that he had completely destroyed Branwell Woodman’s carefully rendered moon.

  A Map of Glass

  ————

  She stepped into the elevator with her husband and decided not to speak. She would not answer questions, she would not offer explanations. This was a tactic she had used often in the past, a predictable symptom—something she knew would reassure rather than alarm Malcolm. When the steel doors opened to her floor and she walked down the corridor by his side, she continued to keep the silence. Although, if asked, she would not have been able to say who was in the custody of whom, she felt as if they were a jailor and prisoner approaching a cell. When they reached the correct number, she placed the key in the lock, opened the door, and walked into the room with Malcolm following close behind. “Why did you do this?” he asked. There was bewilderment, not aggression, in what he said. She knew he didn’t expect an answer.

  Without looking at him, Sylvia quickly undressed and slid into the bed, rolling onto her side and closing her eyes.

  She knew
that he was standing at the end of the bed looking at her, knew that this would go on for some time. Finally, however, she heard him open the bag he had brought with him, and then the sound of him undressing and preparing for sleep. “Tomorrow,” she heard him say as he lay down, leaving, as always, a respectful amount of space between them. She was kept awake for a while by the worry that, now that Malcolm had come, she might not be able to retrieve the green notebooks or gain one more day with Jerome. She wanted to give him the sheets of paper on which she had been writing these past few nights—a parting gift. And she wanted, even for just one more afternoon, to say the name Andrew aloud. How could she abandon that pleasure, that pain? The bright afterimages from the night street unsettled her as well, remaining on the edge of her consciousness like small flickering insects floating near the bed, as if they wished to attach themselves to her body, her mind.

  When she woke the following morning she decided to relent somewhat, spoke when she was spoken to, and allowed Malcolm to guide her downstairs to a restaurant she had not even known was a part of the hotel.

  “We’ll leave after breakfast,” he said, once they were seated at a table.

  “Not yet,” she said, “wait one more day.”

  “All right then,” he replied, indulging her as he always did once she began to speak after a bout of silence, “we’ll be on vacation. We’ve never been on vacation before and I don’t have to be back until tomorrow.” He raised a gleaming white napkin to his mouth, then folded it once and placed it again on his lap. “There are good museums in this city. You are at home in museums.”

  “Yes,” said Sylvia, knowing that she was being granted a deferral, “yes, I am at home in museums.”

  Jerome had begun to read aloud from the notebooks soon after Mira had returned from work. He had been a bit unnerved by his own curiosity, his eagerness to discover what Andrew Woodman had written, and was surprised as well by his desire to say aloud the words that were written on the page so that Mira could hear them. She had been distracted at first: searching for food in the refrigerator, washing an apple at the sink, leafing through the envelopes and flyers that had come in the mail. Then, for several minutes, she had walked back and forth eating the fruit as he read. When he looked up, he could see her looking closely at the skin of the apple, trying to avoid biting into a bruise. Gradually, though, he could feel her becoming focused, attentive. In the end she sat down at the edge of the couch and placed her legs over his lap. He rested his arms on her thighs and turned the pages, one by one.

  Later that night they ate a spaghetti dinner by the light of a candle stuck into a Chianti bottle—an artifact, Jerome told Mira, that Robert Smithson would have been familiar with in the 1960s. Everyone had them, he said, all the beatniks, and then the hippies. There are probably photographs, he said jokingly, of the major figures of those times posing with or near their Chianti candleholders: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Jim Dine, Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jack Kerouac. Those were the days, he explained, when the major figures in the arts had been as concerned about their personas as they were about their art so they would have had themselves photographed in any number of bohemian situations. That’s all gone now, he continued. Ego no longer has a role to play.

  “I thought you said that the art object itself was finished.” Mira leaned forward to pour herself another glass of wine. Some of the red liquid splashed onto the table near her sleeve, but she seemed not to notice. Jerome could tell that, after the first glass, she had become a bit wobbly, a term she used to describe the effect of alcohol on her system. He looked at the beautiful curve of her mouth in the candlelight, her smooth brow. He watched her face change as a thought developed in her mind. “It’s odd, don’t you think,” she eventually said, “that even though now there is no one there at all, a hundred years ago people were making objects on that island—watercolours, ships, rafts. What happened to everything?”

  “Lots of it just floated away, I guess. Sylvia told me that sometimes several rafts were chained together so as to get more timber to Quebec.” Jerome began to mop up the wine with his paper napkin. “I’ve always liked the notion of sequentiality.” He turned, tossed the napkin across the room, smiled when it landed in the sink, then picked up a fork and curled some of the noodles into the bowl of a spoon, a way of eating that Mira had found quite amusing the first time he demonstrated it to her.

  “Is sequentiality a word? I don’t think it is.” Mira turned her head to one side and partly closed her eyes as she often did when she was questioning something. “Perhaps we should look it up,” she added.

  “I’ve always been interested in the idea of floats,” said Jerome, ignoring her reference to vocabulary. “You know, the kind you see in a parade. I love the idea of placing some kind of construction on a platform and hauling it down the street. Then the art would pass by the viewer, you see, instead of the other way around. You could do the same thing with rafts, but maybe the rafts themselves would be so visually exciting that nothing else would be needed. Sylvia told me the logs were tied together with withes: birch saplings crushed by a roller then twisted into a kind of cord. Even the materials used to construct the rafts were trees. The whole thing was about trees … well, dead trees.” While he was speaking he thought about the broken shards of ice that had approached the island. He remembered how excited he had been when he thought a quilt had been trapped in one of them. Why, he wondered now, why had he been unable at first to see what was really there?

  “Mmm,” said Mira, “trees.” She was fiercely urban, wasn’t interested in trees in the wild unless they had somehow to do with Jerome, with one of his “pieces.” Jerome was secretly delighted by the way certain subjects intrigued her simply because they pertained specifically to him—though it was unlikely that he would ever admit this. She once told him she would never tire of his maleness, the pale colour of his skin, the peculiar ways in which his mind worked.

  The cat, who had become thoroughly spoiled, had leapt up on the table. Mira stopped eating long enough to return the animal to the floor.

  “When you do that,” said Jerome, “it’s as if you are pouring him onto the floor, it’s as if he were a great big jug or as if he were water being poured from a great big jug.”

  “He is a great big jug, aren’t you, Swimmer?” Mira bent down to caress the animal’s head.

  After finishing the meal, they stood side by side at the industrial-looking sink, their hips touching, their hands busy washing and drying the few dishes they had used. Jerome had flung a tea towel over his left shoulder, a tea towel that he would forget about until it became time for bed. Even a night when he and Mira simply went to sleep was a night to look forward to: the warmth, and the shape of her body beside him, her face just barely discernible when he woke in the dark. She slept so deeply it was as if she were somehow working at it, as if she were a small steady engine purring beside him all night long.

  “You know,” he said to Mira, “I have come to like Sylvia. I wasn’t sure … didn’t quite know what to make of her at first.”

  “I think she is a bit like an avatar for you,” Mira paused. “A sacred visitor disguised as someone else.”

  “Yes, sort of like that.” He remembered Mira telling him about avatars in the past. But he couldn’t be certain of what she had said, and didn’t want to ask.

  Later, when Jerome joined Mira in bed, he found her with one of the notebooks open, reading ahead: her legs were stretched out straight beneath the duvet and her elbows were resting on the bones of her hips while her hands held one of the green journals. He was very fond of the expression of almost puzzled absorption she always assumed when she was reading; it made her again seem mysterious, distant, a string of thoughts and images running through her head. It seemed to him that there was a kind of trust in the act of privately reading in another’s presence, the same kind of trust that must exist in order for two people to sleep together night after night in the same bed. Part of that trust was tha
t the other person would not break into the experience. But this time he wanted inclusion.

  He settled down beside her.

  “Lots about rafts,” she told him.

  “Read it to me then.”

  Mira flipped back four or five pages and began to read aloud. The rafts, a long river, a small boy, the dark facade of an old orphanage were escorted by her voice into the room. Jerome saw all these things while sleep attempted to rise up to meet him. Eventually Mira crept out from under the duvet, pulled a skein from the bag that held her knitting supplies, broke off six inches of red wool with her teeth, then placed it on the page and closed the notebook. “I can’t help remembering what you said about this place … how the buildings were deserted, falling down.”

  Jerome looked into the distance for a while, then turned to Mira. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad there isn’t some way of making a time-released film of an abandoned building decaying and then germinating, day by day, over the period of, say, a hundred years. It’s strange, now that I think of it, how much attention is always given to construction when decay is really more pervasive, more inevitable.”

  “Decay and change,” said Mira. “People moving from place to place, leaving things behind.”

  Jerome had in mind a photo of his parents and himself, one taken formally in a photographer’s studio when he had been about four years old. His parents had been young, smiling, quite beautiful really. There had been no trace of what was to come. There was always the sense that no matter how perfect the moment, change is always hovering just outside the frame. People will remove their arms from the shoulders of their companions. The group will break up, go their separate ways.