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 color 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 hand, 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-colored fabric of her husband’s trench coat, forcing herself to think about the naming of colors. Julia had once told her that there was a theory that the Greeks and Romans were “blind to blue,” that although the color 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 color could somehow be transposed into touch. Were there not, for example, warm and cold colors? Blue, Sylvia had said, might be smooth, like skin touching skin. But it’s a cold color, 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 behavior 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 they 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 they 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 than hers. “How do you know for certain,” Julia had once asked her, “that what you see is what other sighted people see?” “I don’t know for certain,” Sylvia had answered. “I never have.”
As they walked down the hotel corridor, however, she touched her husband’s arm, wanting him to know, by this gesture, that there was no malice in the words she was going to say. He had taught her this, how to touch someone softly, when trying to make a point. It had not been easy for her, this reaching toward others, but she had learned to do it.
“Julia couldn’t tell you where I was, not because she was unable, but because she didn’t know,” she said. “Still, if she had known she likely wouldn’t have told you anyway.”
“No,” said Malcolm after a few silent moments. “No, probably not.”
They stepped into the elevator, the arrival of which had been announced by a startling bell. “You see,” Sylvia continued, “like you, Julia is not a believer… with this differenceerence… she doesn’t believe in the condition… my condition… she doesn’t believe in it at all.”
She looked at her husband’s profile, to see how he was responding to this information. He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and his head lowered. She was almost certain that there was no expression at all on his face, not even an expression of disagreement or disapproval. It was as if he hadn’t heard the words she had said, or perhaps had heard but didn’t believe in them.
Later that evening, when she walked into the bathroom to prepare for the night, she saw that evidence of her husband was everywhere: his toothbrush, his travel case, his razor, his brush and comb.
Such familiar objects.
Lying on the bed after undressing, she willed herself to consider Malcolm, who lay, as always, with his back to her, sleeping in
the almost purposeful way of a physician whose rest is often interrupted. The room was merely pulsing now in the faint city light that the curtains could not entirely extinguish: things were better. She began mentally to go through the shelves in her husband’s study, book by book, recalling how the different colors of the spines had pleased her once she had become accustomed to the newer volumes placed here and there among the older texts left behind by her father. As a kind of lullaby, she allowed a list of titles to run through her mind. Clinical Gastroenterology, Pathological Basis of Disease, An Index of Differential Diagnosis, Medical Mycology, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, Principals of Surgery. She went to sleep comforted by the thought that someone, anyone, had taken the trouble to attend to a tragic alteration of the body, as if they had wanted to draw a map of its regions, then explore its territories.
After dinner she and Malcolm had walked into the alley and she had showed him the door she visited each day. “He is so young,” she had told him. “Only a boy in many ways.”
She watched Malcolm as he took in the graffiti, the name Conceptual Fragments. Though he had said nothing, she sensed his distrust of such things. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “Who are these people? What do they have to do with you?”
They were standing by the drainpipe that Sylvia had examined when she first reached the city. It looked darker somehow, and small icicles had formed, like teeth, around its mouth in the evening cold. The sound of a streetcar and laughter from a group of people passing on the sidewalk had become more than noise, seemed to have taken on a physical presence. “He found him, Malcolm, he found Andrew,” Sylvia said at last. “Jerome, the young man who lives here… he found Andrew’s body in the ice.” Sylvia glanced toward the door and lifted one hand almost as if she were going to touch it, then let her arm drop. “I think he was the right person, the right person to find him,” she whispered, speaking to herself now, knowing that what she said was true.
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