It was one o’clock in the morning, and he was exhausted. There would be no more talking tonight. He raised his body slightly, twisted his torso, and extended his arm to turn off the light. Mira rolled toward him, placed one knee between his legs, then bent her head under his chin, her face against his chest. They would sleep in this position, barely moving all night long. “Krishna,” Mira whispered. It was a joke they shared about Krishna, how he had been so beautiful that all the milkmaids had fallen in love with him. Jerome knew he was not the most beautiful person in this relationship, in this bed, and he was far from godlike. If anything, he resembled more a tattered, starved saint: thin, almost defeated, trudging back from the wilderness.
In midafternoon Sylvia was staring at a miniature bronze figure, not three inches high. A bending saint, she thought, a saint bent under the weight of his sorrow. Sleeping Apostle, the card next to the object read, but Sylvia knew that the small man was not sleeping. The attitude his tiny body had taken spoke of a hard awakening followed by a collapse into sorrowful reflection. His head was cradled in his arms, his knees were drawn up to his chest; anguish was evident everywhere—even in the folds of his clothing. He was Andrew the last time she had seen him: Andrew huddled in a corner of the room. Andrew shrinking. Andrew unreachable.
She was at home in the museum, at home with this.
She had not been at home in the first museum they had visited, a large stone building that one approached by climbing an imposing staircase in front of which hovered crowds of children and various men with carts selling balloons, hot dogs, candy floss. Inside, she found herself frightened by the geological exhibit that included a huge mechanized globe that opened to reveal the construction of the Earth’s centre—the construction of the underworld, she thought—and dark, narrow, claustrophobic passages lined by not quite real rocks. Later there were the bones of dinosaurs, suits of armour, weapons, shields, wrapped mummies, and several improbable dioramas depicting life in certain ages: stone, bronze, Aboriginal, pioneer. Her own age, or at least the age that had encased her life, seemed never to have been inhabited, and was illustrated here by a series of roped-off rooms containing too much furniture. A Victorian Parlour, a sign in front of such a room read. Do not enter. Do not touch.
Her husband had peered intently at each exhibit and had fished for his glasses in order to read the typed explanations that hung in glass frames on the adjacent walls, but she knew he was just trying to humour her. These attempts to feign absorption in that which he believed might interest her were something she was well used to. Like an adult in the company of a child at a puppet show, he was mainly intrigued by her response to whatever it was he was showing her. He monitored her slightest shifts of mood and attention and, as a result, it did not take him long to sense her distrust of the place he had chosen. She was thinking about the smallness, the innocence of her own museum, its pioneer tools and Native arrowheads, its one “special” exhibition of labels from the County’s now defunct canning factory. Julia, she remembered, had once asked her for a map of the museum, but she had talked her through it instead. “First case,” she had said, “pine highchair, wood stove, patchwork quilt, hand iron, empire sofa.” Julia had nodded; she had lived with all of this. Even the canning labels had been easy to explain: “three tomatoes, two peaches, an ear of corn.” What had been more difficult had been answering Julia’s questions about why one would put such labels in a museum. “Because they are finished,” she had finally said, “because we are through with them.”
Now in the second museum, the large gallery of art, Sylvia found that she wanted to move closer and closer to the smallest objects. When she came to the apostle, she wanted to reach behind the glass and unfold the delicate figure, to open the tiny arms. She wanted to lift the chin, examine the face.
Several minutes passed, then Malcolm touched her arm, as she knew he had learned to do years ago when he sensed she was starting to disappear. The touch was brief, his hand remaining in place just long enough to get her attention.
“You’ve had enough,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”
Sylvia did not answer but pulled away from the object and followed her husband as he walked through room after room toward the entrance that would now be the exit. She was both mildly relieved and faintly put off by the way he so easily took stock of her levels of energy, as if he carried with him at all times a device for measuring the temperature of her moods. As she emerged into the light and descended the stone stairs she was aware of two things: the sound of Malcolm’s footsteps beside her and the dependency descending like a familiar cloak over her spirit. There was warmth in the cloak, but it felt wrong for this season. She knew that from now on there would be moments when she would want to remove it from her shoulders.
Since she had checked in a few days earlier, Sylvia had turned on neither the television at the far side of the room nor the radio beside the bed. She had been marginally aware of red lights—pulsing on the one hand or deliberately announcing the passage of time on the other—which seemed to insist that something should be done, that the status of the objects they were attached to should be changed in some way or another. But the newness of her rented space had been entertainment enough for her: the framed serigraph of haystacks and distant water that called to mind Tremble Bay near where the Ballagh Oisin had been situated, the reflecting surfaces of furniture dusted by an unseen stranger when she was elsewhere, the pile of the carpet forced upright each day by a vacuum cleaner that she neither heard nor saw, the way each trace of her own occupancy had been silently removed from the bathroom—damp washcloths and wrinkled towels replaced by their pristine doubles, the wastebasket emptied. Each time she opened the door she would stand listening to the low, thrumming noise of the hidden machine that heated or cooled the room—a constant purr that bled into the sound of the city traffic beyond the walls. Were it not for Julia’s map, lying each evening on the desk just as she had left it, she would have barely been able to believe that she had spent the previous night sleeping in the smooth bed or had bathed that morning in the gleaming tub.
All of this contributed to her increasing belief that consciousness began again in the evening, that the dark, not the light, was the new beginning, the awakening, after hours of day-lit dream. It was like an empty canvas on which the same painting could be rendered over and over again. Her grief, especially, seemed to have been washed and ironed during the day so that it could be presented to her again each evening, clean and fresh, the colour of it slick with newness, arresting, impossible to ignore.
And now her husband, walking into this new space with her, silent, perhaps secretly angry, his trench coat open, his gloves in one of his hands, a small encased umbrella in the other. He pulled the hotel parking stub from his pocket. “Too late to go back today,” he said in a flat tone she could not interpret. “We’ll head out after breakfast, first thing tomorrow morning.” He stepped toward the window, pulled aside the curtain, looked briefly at the brick wall. “Not much of a view, I didn’t notice that last night. Or this morning, for that matter.”
“No,” said Sylvia.
He turned back toward the room and began to move in Sylvia’s direction but stopped when he saw Julia’s map on the table. “You’ve been working on a tactile,” he said. “I didn’t notice that either. But that’s good. At least that’s something. I can’t remember, did you tell me what this one is?”
“No,” said Sylvia. “No, I didn’t tell you.”
Still standing near the door, she knew the deferral was over. Suddenly she didn’t know how to move into the room, how to become comfortable with the curtains, the furniture. She stood near the closet, running one hand across her hair, her other hand moving up and down the opposite arm under her coat, pulling up the sleeve of the wool cardigan she was wearing.
Malcolm took off his own coat and dropped it, along with his scarf, on one of the beds. “I wonder,” he said, “if maybe there aren’t some other things you haven’t
told me, Syl. This running away, for example, this disappearing act, perhaps you could tell me what this is all about.”
When she didn’t answer, Malcolm crossed the room and quite gently removed her coat, hung it in the closet, and then retrieved his own coat from the bed. He had some trouble with the hangers, but eventually both garments hung side by side like two people waiting in one of the queues Sylvia had seen at streetcar stops since she had been in the city. She lifted one arm and moved her fingers over the soft, skin-coloured fabric of her husband’s trench coat, forcing herself to think about the naming of colours. Julia had once told her that there was a theory that the Greeks and Romans were “blind to blue,” that although the colour was everywhere around them they couldn’t see it at all. She then asked her to describe the difference between azure and cerulean, and Sylvia had remained speechless, realizing that the task was impossible. Perhaps, Julia had continued, perhaps colour could somehow be transposed into touch. Were there not, for example, warm and cold colours? Blue, Sylvia had said, might be smooth, like skin touching skin. But it’s a cold colour, Julia had reminded her, laughing.
“I thought you said you would never want to go to the city on your own,” Malcolm was saying. He was sitting in the chair beside the desk now, turning a postcard of the hotel around and around in his hands. He was looking directly at her with an expression on his face she did not recognize. She wondered if he felt fear, if her act of truancy had shaken his trust in the predictability of the condition. “C’mon, Syl,” he said softly, “at least come in and sit down.”
She walked as far as the bed and sat down, keeping her back straight, her attitude formal.
“Good,” said Malcolm, “that’s more like it.”
More like what? a much younger Sylvia had often wondered whenever an adult spoke these words. More like the past, she thought now. Something about perching on the edge of the bed made Sylvia feel like a child, not like the child she had been necessarily, but more like the anxious girl she had once seen in a reproduction of a painting by Edvard Munch. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said, looking at her hands clasped in her lap. “The train wasn’t so bad. I slept most of the way.”
She recalled the uniformed man staggering down the aisle, shouting the name of the city. It was odd to think that she hadn’t known Jerome then, and now she had revealed the most intimate sides of her secret self to him and had given him access also to the pages of Andrew’s past, the last evidence of his living hand.
Malcolm was speaking again. “It wasn’t about him,” he was saying, “was it? This inexplicable behaviour wasn’t about him, I hope, because, if it was, I should know.” Malcolm cleared his throat and began to tap the corner of the postcard rhythmically on the glass surface of the desk. “I thought we were all finished with that,” he said.
“We are all finished with that,” said Sylvia. “All finished.”
Malcolm shook his head, then placed the postcard flat on the desk. “Oh, Syl,” he said quietly.
Sylvia gazed at her husband. He looked smaller than he had in the past, diminished, as if he had discarded certain parts of himself in the few days she had been absent from his life. She recalled how certain, how strong he had been the night he had found her staring and rigid at the kitchen table, the newspaper article about Andrew in her hand. “These things happen,” he had told her, after he had read the piece, “these tragedies.”
“Tragedies,” she had repeated. And then she said it. “I loved this man.”
“No,” he had said. “No, that can’t be right. You are confused,” he had said. “You’ve never been able to know anyone. You wouldn’t have been able to …”
“I was able. He didn’t know, you see. He didn’t know about me.”
Malcolm had become very silent, had slowly pulled up a chair beside the one in which she was sitting. She had not looked at him, but had been able to hear the sound of his breathing.
“You’ll forget all about this,” he had said finally. “We won’t speak of it, and with time you’ll start to forget.”
“He forgot,” she had answered. “Andrew forgot.”
“We won’t speak of it,” Malcolm repeated, gently lifting the paper from her hands.
“You didn’t ever believe me,” Sylvia said now, “when I tried to tell you. Everything went wrong because you hadn’t heard, you didn’t believe …”
“Syl,” Malcolm said quite sharply, “listen to me, listen to me now.” He spun the swivel chair suddenly in her direction. “We’ve been over and over this. You know that, Syl, everything, everything was fine. With each passing month you made such progress. And I, I was happy, I was proud of the progress you were making.”
Progress, she thought, pride. She stared at the mirror that faced the end of the bed in this disinterested interior and watched her mouth tremble. When the feeling was at its most critical she stood, picked up a chair, turned it to the wall, sat down, and began to concentrate on the texture of the plaster that had been slapped on the surface in such a casual manner it suggested interiors so foreign that she could not name them. Spanish, perhaps, or Italian, maybe Irish. The stippled effect looked not unlike the bubbling ridges of cold white mountains on one of the tactile maps she had made for Julia, a map of a polar region. She would think about Julia now, instead, how she had liked the idea of the cold, the ice—something in the landscape she could feel. There were scrapes and dents on this wall, a mark here and there that had not been removed by the dust cloth of the anonymous cleaner. Someone might have risen to their feet with such velocity that the chair he had been sitting in struck the wall. Someone else had likely swung a suitcase into the room with such recklessness, a tiny plaster hill had been knocked from the surface as he did so. In the past she would have objected to even this insignificant example of change. In the past the sameness of any room would have been what calmed her. But now she found herself consoled instead by the thought of Julia and by this evidence of human spontaneity. How had she been so utterly altered?
“What are you thinking about?” asked Malcolm. She could sense that he was drawing nearer.
“The wall,” she answered. “I’m thinking about the wall.”
He was standing behind her now, his hand on the back of the chair, near her shoulder blade. “C’mon,” he said, his hand touching the wool of her sweater, not reaching her skin, “let’s go downstairs. Let’s get something to eat. Forget the newspaper, at least for now. We’ll go over all of that again, later, when you are feeling better.”
The wall was approaching and withdrawing as if it were peering at Sylvia, then turning away with distaste. But gradually her head cleared, her vision became less blurred. She rose to her feet, turned, and faced her husband. “Why do you think I’ll be feeling better?” she said. “How can you know that?”
For the first time there was real irritation in his voice. “What do you think all of this has been like for me? I was frantic with worry. If one more day had gone by, if they hadn’t traced your card, I would have had to go to the police and then where would we have been?”
“I don’t know, Malcolm, where we would have been. I never know, do I, where we have been, where we are now. Perhaps you should tell me, perhaps you should explain it all to me.” Abruptly, she remembered that she had not yet put the you are here marker on the map she had been working on. She had always used a particular type of small mother-of pearl button for this, but she had forgotten to pack the button jar when she left the house. Often the button was placed in a parking lot, but there was no parking lot at the lighthouse. The end of the lane would have to do.
“You can’t seriously believe that I shouldn’t have been worried,” Malcolm was saying. He had moved away from her now and stood at a distance where he could see her face. “You’ve never been away overnight on your own. You barely know the people in the next town, never mind in the city. You were missing. I would have had to report you as a missing person.”
“A good description,” she said to him, �
�a very good description of me, don’t you think? Haven’t I always been a missing person?”
Malcolm’s expression darkened. Sylvia knew that she had hurt him, that soon he would begin to defend himself. “Remember this,” he said. “I’m only trying to look after you, the way I’ve always looked after you. I don’t understand this tone in your voice. I don’t understand what you think you are doing. You have no one but me to care for you.”
“I have some friends here,” Sylvia interrupted. “I have a friend here.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Who are these friends? How can I possibly believe in them? You don’t make friends … you’ve never been able to —”
“There’s Julia.”
“Yes, Julia,” Malcolm said vaguely. “But when I called her she wasn’t able tell me where you were. You were in distress, quite possibly in danger, but Julia wasn’t in a position to help me find you.”
Sylvia turned away from the wall, rose from the chair, and walked across the room to where her suitcase rested on a luggage rack. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, let’s get something to eat.” She opened her suitcase, unzipped a small quilted case, and lifted a string of pearls toward her throat. As if by instinct, Malcolm moved behind her and closed the clasp at the back of her neck, again without touching her skin. These were her mother’s pearls, her grandmother’s pearls. Perhaps they had belonged to her great-great-grandmother.
“We’ll talk about this later, when you feel better,” Malcolm said again. After putting on his jacket and before opening the door, he turned in Sylvia’s direction. “I was convinced that we had it all sorted, Syl,” he said, “convinced that you finally knew the difference between what goes on here,” he moved his fingers toward the top of her hair, careful not to touch her head, “and what goes on out there,” he swept his hand through the air that existed between them.
Sylvia had no answer for this, knowing that what he referred to was his reality and as such had nothing to do with her. His “out there” would be so much different from hers. “How do you know for certain,” Julia had once asked her, “that what you see is what other sighted people see?”
A Map of Glass Page 26