Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Arriving one November morning, she had taken off her coat, had laid it over the back of a wicker chair that was grey with dust. The room had been cool and there was a faint smell of mice beneath the stronger smell of wood smoke. Aftermath was the word that crept into her mind; the windows were foggy, clouds of dust had gathered under the furniture. Cobwebs swung from the beams. This was the territory of aftermath.

  Annabelle’s painting was askew on the wall. She had walked across the room to straighten it.

  “Annabelle’s painting,” she had said.

  He hadn’t replied, had moved instead – just as he always had in the past – slowly across the room toward her.

  “In the beginning there was this difference between us, Jerome: I believed that anything that I permitted to happen to me would go on happening… forever. He, being fully engaged with human life, believed, I think, that when something stopped happening, it was over. Not that it wouldn’t happen again, just that this particular session was over, and that there would be something else taking place, something else that was equally worthy of his attention. His view of life was sequential, symphonic. But I could tell this view had changed.”

  Near the very end before he had stopped talking altogether, Andrew had spoken about nothing but furniture. These were the only nouns that appeared to interest him. At first Sylvia had thought he was speaking metaphorically, something he had often done in the past. “Look at the… table,” he would say, when they stood near the window, surveying the view of the lake, “look at the mirror.” A table laid out before them. A mirror of the sky. It made some sense to her. She didn’t question it, or him, or the fact that he was not saying the lake was like a mirror, like a table under the sky.

  “How did you lose him?” Jerome was asking.

  Sylvia sat entirely still, her face averted. “How can I describe those last meetings to you, Jerome? I who had spent years attempting to interpret his most fractional gesture, his most subtle shift of mood, would find him tremendously altered: unshaven, unbathed, sometimes, even after I’d arrived still expecting me, sometimes not, but in either case, utterly unprepared. Once, as I stepped though the door, he said, ‘Can I help you?’ with a kind of cold courtesy, as if I were a salesperson or a pamphleteer. At times he would look at me with longing for minutes at a stretch, then turn away as if in disgust, or he would swiftly take himself to the opposite corner of the room where he would all but growl at me in anger, refuting every sentence that I spoke. Each phrase began with the negative. ‘Don’t talk to me about the trees,’ he would say. ‘You know nothing about the trees.’ Or, ‘It’s not your lake, don’t speak of it.’ Often he said, ‘We can’t go on with this.’ His tone would fill me with fear, but the reference to ‘this’ could cause temporary relief. ‘This’ was the word that made reference to our connection, our communion. ‘This’ meant that we weren’t finished. Not yet.

  “I would remind him of the stories he had told me, attempt to bring the lovely talk back into the room, but he would deny that he had ever told me such stories – ‘You have invented those,’ he would say – and would refer instead to problems he was having with people I had never heard of. They had stolen his wallet, his life, his soul. They had abandoned him in alleyways or on park benches, cast him adrift in a leaking vessel, denied him food and water.

  “He would pace like an animal around the room, then peer at me with great suspicion. ‘I am willing,’ he would say, ‘to resolve this here, now, but… What?’ he would plead. ‘What is it?’

  “‘Tell me about Annabelle,’ I would say, ‘about Branwell.’ I wanted the family history or, failing that, his descriptions of geological formations, his descriptions of strata.

  “‘We will stop,’ he said. ‘We will stop.’

  “Then he would cross the room, bury his face in my neck, pull back and show me his face, torn by grief.” Sylvia hesitated, almost unable to continue. “That was when I knew that emotionally he had fully entered me, and that from then on his grief would be my grief, his story my story, his enormous waves of feeling, my feeling. I had felt almost nothing until him, and now I would continue to carry all of the rage and terror and anguish that he would leave behind, that he would forget. And shortly after I understood this, he asked the terrible questions. ‘Could you tell me your name, your date of birth? Could you tell me who you are, what you are doing here?’”

  She had known then that her horses were finally and wholly smashed, that all the objects in the house that had held her had crumbled into dust. No words were possible then. No words at all.

  “Sometimes, early on,” she told Jerome, “during our first long season, Andrew and I would meet accidentally on a street corner or in a shop. He was still mapping the County then, recording abandoned houses, or those that had evolved into ugly attempts at modernization. Often he was searching for things that had completely disappeared: a burial ground connected to an early settler, a scuttled ship, a hotel eclipsed by a moving dune of sand. These quests would bring him into Picton, to the registry office or the library with its haphazard archive, and once or twice a year, we would encounter each other without preparation, without warning.

  “Always, I reacted to his appearance with panic, believing that I was the casualty of some terrible mistake, that I was wreckage. And yet somehow I would be able to speak, to exchange greetings, and to my later sorrow, to behave the way Malcolm had taught me to behave with all the other strangers whose paths intersected my days and evenings, in spite of my terror, my sense that everything had gone wrong, was lost, irretrievable, that there was only unfamiliarity and fear. For days afterwards I would be certain that this encounter, this distance and awkwardness, was the truth, and I would be certain that this was all we were to each other: exchanged civilities in the vicinity of traffic, indifferent, removed, suspicious of each gesture. There was no sweet secret, no complicity between us; nothing belonged to us – not the present, not even the past. He became a man walking away from me. He became a man I had never known. That November, remembering those times, it seemed as if they had been a terrible premonition of how things would end between us, with this difference: I became a woman he could not remember. A woman he had never known.”

  Sylvia was sitting upright in her chair as she said this. Jerome was looking at the wall. “That’s terrifying,” he said.

  “Yes, I became afraid, afraid that we didn’t exist.” She paused. “That perhaps we had never existed. And then last year, in early December, I drove along the lake through one of the season’s first heavy snowfalls in order to get to the hill, to get to him. By the time I arrived the weather was so bad I could barely see; it was as if the landscape itself were being eliminated. I remember thinking as I struggled through the wind along the edge of the hill that this was the first time I had been unable to look at the view before walking into the interior, before entering his embrace, though I was, by then, certain of neither the interior nor the embrace. I had been taking all the responsibility for some time, making all the appointments for our rendezvous, moving through the relationship in the way that, in recent months, I had learned to move, trying to ignore his lack of participation. I was carrying a bag of food in my arms because I knew there would be no food. I was carrying several things in my mind, things I wanted to say to him to try to bring him back to me, because I knew by then that he was going, because I feared, by then, that he was gone. As I walked past the foundations, I saw that the indentations that marked the ancient cellars and kitchens were filling up with snow, as if the last vestiges of the old house were finally being folded into the white landscape. The door of the cottage was ajar. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. I could find not a trace of him – not a trace of us – anywhere.” Sylvia stopped, lowered her head.

  “But still I waited, as I had always waited. I sat on the chair with the torn rush seat and remembered our clothing tossed there by arms much younger than the ones that lay, useless, in my lap. I ran the ancestral stories over and over
in my mind. And then I saw Annabelle’s scrapbook lying beside two green leather journals on the table. I opened the velvet cover and read the captions Annabelle had written to describe the fragments she had pasted in it. A piece of parchment from a map of the bogs, lace from the collar of the first good dress Marie had been given as a child, a ticket to the Louvre museum found in Branwell’s desk drawer, the last rose of summer 1899, that fateful match that had lit Gilderson’s pipe, lake-bleached splinters stolen from the hull of several timber carriers, bark from the recently felled cedar tree the men always erected in the middle of a raft for good luck, the sole of a shoe washed up at Wreck Bay – probably belonging to a drowned sailor – and still he did not come. Yes, these were the things I looked at while the knowledge of his permanent absence grew in me, and the light in the cottage grew darker, and the light in the sky grew dimmer.

  “I closed the scrapbook and slipped it into the bag I had brought with me. Then I opened one of the journals and saw his handwriting. It was the ink on the page that made me want to take them with me, that last trace of his moving hand. Outside, the storm had moved to another part of the province, or had sailed over the lake to the country on the other side. The air had cleared and there was still a trace of a red sunset in the western sky, though not a whisper of it on the grey winter lake. As it had the first time that I had climbed that hill so many years before, deep snow slipped over the tops of my boots and scalded my legs as I walked toward the car. The storm had left a piercing wind in its wake and the newly fallen snow was beginning to arrange itself into a series of drifts. My footprints couldn’t have lasted longer than a half-hour. Had Andrew come the following day there would be nothing to tell him about my approach, my retreat. But I knew he would never again walk through the orchard, enter the cottage, light the stove. I knew he was gone.”

  For the first time, Sylvia rose from her chair and began to walk back and forth across the room as she spoke. Jerome watched her move from place to place. “How might we have appeared, I wonder, to someone observing us from off stage: a man, a woman, alone together in a broken-down cottage?” There would be the glances, smiles, the long silences, and the sessions of speech that would pass between them, the unconscious gestures: he leaning toward her, she touching his wrist, placing her hand on the side of his face. They would curl together on the bed, for hours at a time, sleeping. They would often touch, sometimes casually, sometimes passionately. They would approach each other, withdraw, and eventually separate, permitting concession roads, fields of grain, entire townships, a body of water to come between them. Strings of migrating birds would emerge, like dark sentences, in the sky, as the season changed, the years passed, and the lake altered under varying degrees of light. And finally, finally, they would forget; forget, or be themselves forgotten.

  By now Sylvia was standing in the part of the room where Mira so often worked on her performance pieces. There was still a small amount of sand on the floor, and each time she stepped forward or back it crunched softly under her feet.

  “I often ask myself what river, what lake or stream the ice came from. I am for some reason anxious for this piece of the puzzle though it makes, I know, absolutely no difference to the outcome or even to the explanation. I’ve had the maps out, you see.” Sylvia, standing entirely still, was visualizing every bend in the shoreline, each creek that fell into the Great Lake, lakes rising like rosary beads from the tangled string of a northern tributary, the whole watershed. “I want to know how long the journey was,” she said to Jerome. “I want to be able to mark the point of entry, the port of embarkation. I want to be able to add some information to the long, sad message of Andrew’s silence.”

  “Poor Jerome, I thought, reading your name, learning your age, and the fact that the sail loft had been given to you as a studio in which to make your art. Poor young Jerome. He would have dropped the brush, or pencil, or whatever was in his hand and he would have descended the stairs of the sail loft, then he would have moved out through the soggy late-spring snow and down to the dock.

  “The ice would have been dark blue with a grey tinge… am I correct? It would have been feathered at its edges with snow, a frosty, almost decorative edge receding a little because of the water that would be nuzzling it like an animal. The figure frozen in it would appear to be halted forever in the attitude of one who is about to rise from a bed or from the grave, a figure interrupted forever in the midst of an act of resurrection. The arms would have been outstretched, I think, as if about to receive a blessing, a vision, the stigmata, or perhaps simply a lover.”

  Sylvia paused and looked away from Jerome, toward the wall. “Simply a lover,” she repeated.

  “I had seen him like this, you see,” she continued, still not looking at Jerome. “I had seen him in morning, in afternoon light, partly rising from a bed with his arms outstretched, his lower torso buried in white bedclothes, his expression benign, tender, as I walked toward him, his entire self exposed. I had seen all this in him, and he had seen all this in me, and yet each time there would come the moment when we dressed, gathered together the few belongings that we had brought with us, and prepared to leave.”

  Sylvia, as if finishing a performance, walked back to her chair.

  “Not ever, not even at his weakest moment, did he ask me to stay, although once I remember, once he said, ‘Don’t go yet, not quite yet.’” Her voice began to break. “I will always, always keep that memory.”

  Jerome had moved swiftly, soundlessly, from the couch and was sitting on the table directly in front of Sylvia. Here he was able to lean toward her, to be within reaching distance. He took both her hands in his and held on to them.

  An hour later, Sylvia and Jerome were standing side by side in front of a drafting table slowly, deliberately, going through the photos Jerome had taken on the island. “I finally began to develop them,” he told her, “just this week.” He moved one photo to the front of the table. “In the mornings,” he added, “before you arrived.”

  Just after Jerome had shown Sylvia some of the “Dugouts” that would be used for his Nine Revelations of Navigation, and after he had found in himself the courage to point out the place where he had found the body, they heard the front door open and a few seconds later Malcolm and Mira entered the studio. “I was just putting the key in the lock when he walked up behind me,” Mira said. She looked serious, worried. “He says he’s your husband.”

  “Yes,” said Sylvia, “he is.” She stood to one side and stepped back so that she could see all the photos that were laid out on the table, and so that Jerome could point to them and tell Mira what they were. There was a calmness in her now that she realized was in opposition to the tension that had entered the room with Malcolm. “His name is Malcolm. And Malcolm, this is Mira and” – she turned toward the young man – “Jerome.”

  Jerome turned slowly, a photo of a milkweed pod still in his hand. Then he carefully put the picture down and, without making eye contact, walked across the room to extend his hand, a hand that Sylvia now knew well, having held it and then watched it move from one black-and-white landscape to another. Malcolm shook hands and then said that Sylvia had told him that this was an art studio. He looked around the room, clearly searching for paintings.

  “The art is different than you might think,” Sylvia told him. “Jerome takes photos and makes things out of doors.” She gestured toward the collection on the table, then looked at Mira, who was removing a grey pea jacket and hanging it on a nail beside the door. “Mira does a kind of dance… a mysterious performance.”

  “This is the island,” Jerome said to Mira, who had moved toward the table. “This is what I was doing on the island.”

  The girl bent over to look at the pictures more carefully. “Yes,” she said, “yes… this is good.”

  Once they entered the living space, as Mira called it, Sylvia and Mira sat on the couch while Malcolm continued to stand near the door. Jerome walked over to the crate, lifted the journals, placed th
em in Sylvia’s hands. “Don’t forget these,” he said.

  “We loved them,” said Mira, placing her hand on Sylvia’s sleeve, “those stories. But what happened to Branwell… and Ghost?”

  “What stories?” asked Malcolm before Sylvia could answer.

  “Just some notes,” said Sylvia, “that I found somewhere. That’s all… all it is. I read them at night, when you were on call or when you were sleeping so you didn’t… well… you didn’t know about it.” She saw her husband flinch when she said this. “I don’t mean that I was keeping it from you, exactly, no, I wasn’t doing that. It was just something that was private, known only to me.”

  “And now known to these two strangers,” said Malcolm.

  “Not strangers. Not now.”

  “No, I suppose not.” He glanced at Jerome, who, like himself, had remained standing. “I hope this wasn’t too disturbing for you.”

  “Disturbing?” said Jerome. “No, it wasn’t disturbing.”

  “It was fine,” said Mira. “It was good. It was all just talking… and interesting.” Her hand was still on the older woman’s arm. “What are you going to do, what do you want to do now?”

  “I’ll go back, I suppose,” said Sylvia. She raised one hand and touched the top of Mira’s head. “You have such wonderful hair.”

  Mira stood, took Sylvia’s hand, and helped her rise from the couch. “Come into the bedroom,” she said. “I’ll show you the new fabric that I bought. And I have some borders, just some scraps really, that would be good, I think, for those tactile maps you make.”