A Map Of Glass Part 10

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 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 pa.s.sing month you made such progress. And I, I was happy, I was 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 pa.s.sing month you made such progress. And I, I was happy, I was proud proud of the progress you were making." 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 you are here marker on the map she had been working on. She had always used a particular type of small mother-of pearl b.u.t.ton for this, but she had forgotten to pack the b.u.t.ton jar when she left the house. Often the b.u.t.ton was placed in a parking lot, but there was no parking lot at the lighthouse. The end of the lane would have to do. marker on the map she had been working on. She had always used a particular type of small mother-of pearl b.u.t.ton for this, but she had forgotten to pack the b.u.t.ton jar when she left the house. Often the b.u.t.ton 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 t.i.tles to run through her mind. Clinical Gastroenterology Clinical Gastroenterology, Pathological Basis of Disease Pathological Basis of Disease, An Index of Differential Diagnosis An Index of Differential Diagnosis, Medical Mycology Medical Mycology, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, Princ.i.p.als of Surgery Princ.i.p.als 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 pa.s.sing 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.

"Oh," said Malcolm, placing his gloved hands in the pocket of his trench coat. "Oh, so it's that. I suppose you were after the details." He coughed, then took Sylvia's arm and began to lead her back toward the hotel. "Well," he said, turning away from the alley, "at least that's all over now."

"No," she said calmly. "It's not over. I won't leave this unfinished, I just can't do that. I am going back tomorrow. I said I would and I will." She stopped walking. "Alone," she added.

He remained silent, but she could tell the stubbornness, the refusal was gone from him. It's the leaving, Sylvia thought, he knows I can do that now, just walk away. "You'll have to get in touch with the office," she said, "to tell them you won't be there tomorrow. You'll have to get someone else to be on call. I will leave the hotel after lunch. You can pick me up here at this door at five."

"This is all very unsettling," he said, but once they were back in the room he immediately picked up the phone to make the necessary arrangements for his absence. Then he smiled at her in a resigned, fond, and faintly condescending way. I'm doing all this for you, the smile said, I am doing all this because of your condition.

His patience, she decided, was a burden: not for him for him it was second nature but it was a burden for her. She wanted to throw it off, be done with it. She was tired, she suddenly knew, of taking all the responsibility for it.

On Sat.u.r.day mornings Jerome and Mira almost always ate a late breakfast at a nearby cafe where they could order brioche or biscotti and read the weekend papers left behind by previous customers. This was a lingering luxury, ending only when they decided how they would spend the afternoon, whether they would go to a gallery where a friend might be performing or exhibiting, watch a film, or simply explore certain unfamiliar neighborhoods in the city, cameras in hand, seeking new images. They rarely returned to the studio on Sat.u.r.day during the daylight hours, wanting one day in the week where a kind of fluidity would determine their actions. Sometimes a casual group of mutual friends or acquaintances would gather around them, expanding and contracting as they moved from place to place. The appearance of Jerome's work in certain magazines or in the arts pages of newspapers had made him more socially sought-after in such places than he had ever been in the past, and often he and Mira had hardly settled in at a table when they would be joined by other young people dressed in the customary dark clothing.

He was not entirely at ease with this. Not being much of a talker, he was never quite sure of what would be expected of him by way of conversation and was grateful for Mira's poise, her curiosity and genuine interest in people: in what they were thinking, doing, how the small dramas of their lives were unfolding. He generally left the talking to her, but listened, nevertheless, intrigued by the way Mira hid or revealed her cleverness, deferred or brought her thoughts forward into the path of the talk. But he frequently felt ungainly, awkward, as if his legs were too long to fit comfortably under the table, his voice either too loud or too soft.

Today, however, they had arrived at the cafe early enough that no one they knew had, as yet, emerged from the badly heated studios or cheap apartments they called home, and he and Mira were able to sit near a window, talking quietly.

"Look," Mira was saying, "you can see the top of Sylvia's hotel from here. We could call her, you know, or drop by."

Jerome did not respond.

"She doesn't know anyone else in the city," Mira said. "What is she going to do all day?"

"The map, remember," Jerome answered.

Mira was gazing out the window, looking with concern at a couple of half-grown stray kittens who were gnawing on a discarded hamburger bun lying on the sidewalk.

"Don't even think about it," Jerome said to her. "One cat is enough."

"Okay," she said, turning back to him, "let's go home. I think we should finish reading before tomorrow. And anyway," she said, looking around the half-empty cafe, and then at the partially eaten pastry on her plate, "I'm finished. I've had enough."

Something echoed in Jerome as Mira spoke. It was his mother's voice, speaking these exact words I'm finished. I've had enough late at night, when his father had not been home for two days. She had been talking to herself, or perhaps to her husband whose inebriation wouldn't have permitted him to hear her even if he had been in the room and not in a bar G.o.d knows where. The despair in her voice had both frightened and infuriated Jerome; he had wanted to shake her, he had wanted her to forget about his father and his troubles because despite what she was saying, whatever announcement she thought she was making, he knew she hadn't had enough. His father would return, beg for her forgiveness and receive it, and the whole cycle would begin again, maybe in a matter of weeks, maybe not for a month. He was fifteen years old the night he heard his mother speak these words, believed he hated his father and, in a curious way, also his mother, hated their weaknesses. He wanted them out of his life, out of each other's lives, or failing that he wanted them to go back to the life they had lived while they had all still been in the north.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Mira, leaning forward to shake his arm gently. "Where have you gone?"

"Nothing," said Jerome. "Nowhere." But he knew exactly where he had gone: back to the disappeared world of his childhood, the place he couldn't stop revisiting. Quite often, in recent months, when he had been attempting to complete some ordinary task, he would visualize the long dark avenue of an airshaft he had peered down as a child. Never permitted to enter the mine itself, he had found the shaft housed in a small unlocked building just beyond the perimeter of the site. Terror-stricken and fascinated, he would slip through the door and gaze into a depth of blackness, experience the warm draft on the skin of his face, the pull of the underworld.

His father would have engineered that shaft, all other ventilation shafts, as well as the shaft that was the route to the underground. The tunnels that followed the threads of gold that branched like a central nervous system through the solid yet vulnerable rock would have been designed by him as well.

Those were the good years, years when alcohol was a companion, an equal, not a master. Everyone was young; the northern Ontario settlement was a wilderness adventure, the mine a miracle unfolding so far from the rules of ordinary life that no rigid social order was born in its wake. Uneducated immigrant miners and laborers mixed with the collection of necessary professionals a.s.sembled by the company. Bosses strolled through the underground labyrinth with the men. A pipefitter might become G.o.dfather to the son of an accountant. The doctor might serve as best man at the wedding of a sump-pump operator. Legendary parties celebrated such weddings and christenings (the dog sled delivering the whiskey driven by the mine manager himself) or bloomed on nights when there might be nothing more to celebrate than a record freezing temperature or the fact that the mail had finally got through after a blizzard.

And in the midst of all this there was Jerome's handsome, laughing father, architect of the underground: a singer, a dancer, the last man still dancing at dawn.

Jerome had but the faintest of memories concerning this period, but his mother had resurrected fragments of the narrative after his father's death. The time his father had insisted that all the girls at the brothel attend the manager's Christmas party, the time he had arranged for three famous rock bands to be flown in by a squadron of bush planes, the time he had offered to be Santa Claus at the school and had been so exhausted by the previous evening's revelry he had fallen asleep under the Christmas tree. This was the carefree, madcap side of booze, a sort of good-natured jig on the part of the Grim Reaper performed in advance of sharpening up the sickle. It had infuriated Jerome that his mother took such obvious pleasure in recounting these episodes, as if his father's intoxication was a life-enhancing achievement rather than the hot destructive windstorm that he remembered devouring everything in its path. But he loved her, and was also grateful, therefore, for these brief sessions when she was free of pain. He had kept his expression neutral, smiled or laughed on cue. He had pretended to listen with eagerness.

"What's wrong wrong with you today?" Mira was asking. "You've barely spoken since we got up." with you today?" Mira was asking. "You've barely spoken since we got up."

"Nothing's wrong," Jerome said. He began to fish in his pocket for money to pay the bill. These coffee bars, he thought, these pretentious places. "Let's go back," he said to Mira. "If you want to finish reading those notebooks, then we'll finish reading those notebooks."

Walking toward the studio Jerome fought off the dark image of the air shaft and attempted to enter the moment, to be a man in the company of a young woman on a Sat.u.r.day morning in an interesting part of town. But he knew this wasn't working. Mira was looking at him intently by the time they entered the alley, a number of unspoken questions were in the air, and he could feel resentment rising in him. He wanted to hold on to the privacy of his mood. Her intuition, and her concern about this, was an intrusion.

Still, once they were inside, and before he had arranged himself on the couch again with Mira, he had begun to soften.

"Let me read it this time," he said to her.

Mira opened the book to the spot where she had placed the piece of wool the night before. Then she handed it to Jerome. He scanned a few lines, then said, "She will probably go, once we've read the journals. She only asked for a few days, after all." The feeling he experienced when saying these words was tinged with something he couldn't identify. Anxiety. Sadness. Fatigue. Maybe guilt. For a moment he wondered who was leaving whom.

"Summer after summer," he began, "beyond the bright windows of the Ballagh Oisin..."

Jerome put the notebook on the table and looked at Mira. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what to do about her. I might be about to let her down, somehow."

Mira moved closer to him. He could feel the slight expansion and contraction of her ribs, the rhythm of her breath. "It will be okay." she said. "For now just keep reading."

Jerome leaned forward, picked up the notebook. "Summer after summer," he began again.

Andrew always said there were people who were emplaced." Sylvia was standing now, speaking to Jerome's back while he was busy at the counter making tea. The green notebooks lay on the crate that served as a coffee table but, as yet, Jerome had made no reference to them. Walking that morning from the hotel to the alley, she had been lit with antic.i.p.ation, hungry for Jerome's reaction to Andrew's words. But once she had entered the studio, she found she couldn't bring herself to ask the question, to expose the hook in her mind.

"It seems that those who are emplaced are made that way by generations of their people remaining in the same location," she continued, "eating food grown from the same plot of earth, burying their dead nearby, pa.s.sing useful objects down from father to son, mother to daughter. He said that I was like that to such a degree I was almost like an anthropological discovery. Or perhaps an archeological discovery; something, more or less preserved, more or less intact. I was so emplaced, you see, that it was an adventure almost an act of heroism for me to leave the County, travel thirty miles to his hill. Without him... without the lure of him... I never would have done it."

Swimmer had jumped up on the crate and draped himself in a casual manner over the notebooks.

"He also told me that there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it. Even if it is just a trace all but invisible it is there for those willing to look hard enough. He said this elsewhere, of course, not just to me, said it in lectures and wrote it in his books before he retired and became silent and all but forgotten. But what about his own trace?" Sylvia asked suddenly, a hint of anger in her voice. "When he disappeared no one looked for him, looked hard enough, long enough. We knew it would come to this, they likely thought, a huge final disappearance at the end of a series of lesser disappearances."

"Maybe they did look for him," said Jerome, "maybe they just didn't know where to look. Perhaps you were the only person who knew where he might have gone."

"And yet I didn't know," said Sylvia. "I didn't know where he had gone. But he was walking toward the past, I think. Does that make any sense to you?"

"It makes sense to me now. I... both of us read what he wrote." Jerome handed Sylvia a steaming mug. "Because I'd been out there on the island surrounded by the remnants of what had existed in the past, it was astonis.h.i.+ng for me to have it all reconstructed, to have it come to life, or come back to life." Jerome stood in the middle of the room while the slim ribbon of steam from his own mug rose toward his shoulder. "And I was a bit surprised." He sat on the end of the sofa nearest to Sylvia's chair and placed his tea on the table. "I was surprised by the humor. I would have thought him to be more consistently serious."

"He was was serious," said Sylvia, "but he loved humor, loved laughter. I always thought that Andrew would remember forever how I laughed when I was with him, I, who so rarely laughed. But perhaps to him I was a woman who laughed often, one who was light-hearted, easy to know." serious," said Sylvia, "but he loved humor, loved laughter. I always thought that Andrew would remember forever how I laughed when I was with him, I, who so rarely laughed. But perhaps to him I was a woman who laughed often, one who was light-hearted, easy to know."

Jerome smiled. "We liked the story," he said, "but somehow it made me think that everything in the world is just a mirage, just a suggestion, gone before it's graspable. I think I already knew that, some part of me already knew that, the part that avoids" Jerome searched for the word "stasis, stability, that emplacement you just spoke of. Stability seems to me, sometimes, to be just another way of saying the end."

"Stability was what I always wanted," said Sylvia, "More than you know."

"Perhaps. But you... you lost someone. And I'm worried." He cleared his throat. "I worry about that." He paused. "About you."

"Oh, don't," said Sylvia quietly. "You're so young. And all of this... it's well..." For the first time it occurred to her that she might have troubled this young man. "You'll forget this," she said.

"No. No, I won't." Jerome looked solemn for a moment, then glanced at Sylvia and smiled. "I won't want to forget. Not the story. Not the things we've talked about." He moved over to the couch and slowly sat down. "And the truth is, I want to know, I guess I always wanted to know what happened to him. And now I want to know about you. You keep saying you lost him twice."

"Yes, twice." Sylvia sat in the chair and placed her mug on the table. "It is a miraculous truth," she said to Jerome, "that the same man who introduced me to sorrow by walking away from me would also be the man who, years later, would introduce me to redemption simply by turning around and walking back. It was like a resurrection, really... or so I thought."

Sylvia glanced at Jerome. One half of his face was lit by sun from the window. His eyelashes cast a faint shadow on his cheek.

"The side porch of the house where I live was gla.s.sed in long ago," she said, "probably at the end of the nineteenth century. In the intervening years it has been used first as a sunroom and then as a mudroom for the wet shoes and galoshes belonging to my father's winter patients. There is something called a health clinic now, where my husband and another doctor share an office and examination rooms, so there are no longer any galoshes, no longer any patients, only me, alone each day, wandering through the rooms.

"I had begun to use the gla.s.sed-in porch to grow geraniums, the only plant with which I have had any success whatsoever." She laughed. "They remain blooming, despite my lack of botanical skill, for three seasons out there. In the winter, of course, they are brought indoors though Malcolm is put off by what he calls their musty scent. I, however, believe that the plants have no smell at all. I enter and vacate the house through the gla.s.sed-in porch, walking past this unnoticed odor whenever I go out, and whenever I return from wherever it is that I have gone."

She had always liked the way that the aging parts of a geranium plant could be so easily, so gently detached from the rest of the plant. No cutting, no snapping: they gave themselves with grace to the experience of being discarded, to the idea that the plant on which they flourished would contain not a hint that they had once been part of its physical composition. She remembered that on the spring morning when she heard the phone ringing deep in the center of the house she had left the sunroom with a geranium leaf still between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and had begun to walk through the indoor rooms, past all the family furniture, toward the sound.

In the silence that followed the conversation, she had turned away from the wall that held the phone and stared out the north window at the lilac bush in the middle of the yard. The tree was about to bloom and she could recall thinking, How strange it was that the tight, stiff skeletons of the previous year's blossoms were still on the branch and that they had looked similar to those that were about to flower. The few remaining dead leaves had a dusty grey hue, as if they were not leaves at all but rather old bits of faded cloth left unprotected in an attic. She recalled the dust that had covered the plastic flowers, on the table, long ago, the last time she had seen Andrew. She recalled some of the words he had said: stop stop... this this... can't can't. How had she been able to walk past the memory of words such as these?

"A single phone call," she told Jerome now, "and Andrew and I began to meet again after years of silence, even though as the great-great-grandson of the Timber Island empire he should have been aware that to do so was to attempt to bring the timber raft back to the island, to sail backwards and with great difficulty upstream." She paused, her head to one side. "Were we wrong in our desire? I have no answer for that question. But once we began seeing each other again, I believe we both knew we would have to see it through that place where we would be carried separately back downstream so far apart we would be unable to wave, to shout."

"Why?" asked Jerome, "Why would it have to be like that?"

"Time," said Sylvia. "Seven years had gone by. When I went to meet him at the cottage I came to realize that no one had been near the place for a long, long time. In the past, you see, the table would have been littered with papers covered by his handwriting and on the floor near the desk there would have been small, irregular towers of journals and books. There had been time. There had been change."

"Yes," said Jerome. "There would have been..."

"I was tremendously nervous and began to talk and talk. I told him about the museum, about how now that the last of the old families were leaving the County, we were receiving so many donations that we were likely going to have to rent warehouse s.p.a.ce. As it was, the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building was filling up with parasols and baby buggies and high b.u.t.ton boots and silver tea sets and crochet work and coal oil lamps and strange pioneer tools: planers, clamps, lathes, all the things Gilderson's s.h.i.+ps would have brought into the County. He was looking at me closely as I spoke and I became self-conscious, unable to finish the sentences I was so earnestly beginning.

"'This is what makes me happy,' he said. 'This is making me happy.' is making me happy.'

"I should have asked, What What is making you happy? Us being here again together? The fact that I will be cataloguing objects? You not working? Looking into my face? But instead I turned away, began to gaze through the window at the struggle a tree seemed to be having with the wind. And he walked away, then turned back, and took my hand. Just the slightest pressure, the most casual touch his sleeve brus.h.i.+ng my arm as he pa.s.sed me in the room would cause a kind of sorrow to fall over me like rain, and then I would put my arms around him and everything in me would open." is making you happy? Us being here again together? The fact that I will be cataloguing objects? You not working? Looking into my face? But instead I turned away, began to gaze through the window at the struggle a tree seemed to be having with the wind. And he walked away, then turned back, and took my hand. Just the slightest pressure, the most casual touch his sleeve brus.h.i.+ng my arm as he pa.s.sed me in the room would cause a kind of sorrow to fall over me like rain, and then I would put my arms around him and everything in me would open."

How silent Andrew had been during this reunion, though he had said her name while they were making love.

"He embraced me with such a sense of ease," she said to Jerome, "such an air of familiarity that, in a way, time evaporated. Neither one of us said the word change change, as people so often do in such situations. Change seemed to be irrelevant to us. What was relevant was the buried past, the dark painted hallways of the hotel under the dunes, the wrecks that littered the floor of the Great Lakes, what I had learned about the sagging timbers, the aged grey-colored straw of the increasingly abandoned barns in my County. His ancestors. Mine.

"But in the months that followed, I should have reached across the dead blossoms of the previous season and touched his older face. I should have spoken his name. I should have at least said, Where have you been, where have you been, my love? I should have asked, Why, why did you leave me? I should have asked, Why, why did you leave the young woman that I was then? And why have you summoned the older woman that I am now, and why has she so spontaneously responded to the summons? But I couldn't do it. I received not the slightest hint of permission to ask these questions. Not from him. Not from myself."

What had made her again take such journeys away from her backyard and kitchen, away from the familiar patterns of her dishes, the sheets and towels that normally touched her body, away from the easy cadence of a shared daily life toward tension and deceit and a growing knowledge of inevitable bereavement? She had called it love, of course, but perhaps that was just her way of disguising something deeper, something darker, a desire to put everything solid and respectable at risk. Andrew had always been less reflective, and therefore, she supposed, more honest... more honest in that he resisted any attempts at interpretation, refused to name their connection at all.

"No," she said suddenly. "I believe... I am certain that I loved him, or at least I loved the version of him that I was given. I loved that fragment of him that I was given. Only now and then did we speak of our connection and then almost always contentiously. When I felt him drifting far from my sh.o.r.e, as I sometimes did, I would want some kind of declaration, some sort of explanation. He always resisted this, often with cruelty. But there was a great deal of tenderness as well. Yes, there was tenderness. And when we spoke about history, about the past, about the generations of his family, and about mine, about lost landscapes and vanished architecture, there was... I still believe this... quite a lot of joy."

Sylvia was remembering the rasping texture of Andrew's unshaven face against the palm of her hand, or grazing the skin on her stomach, the heels of his hands pus.h.i.+ng into the muscles of the small of her back. Had he known even her name the last time they had clung together like that? Were his expressions of pa.s.sion a request for response or were they cries of alarm at an act he did not recognize and would not remember, an act of love lost forever the minute it ended or perhaps even while it was happening? For the first time she attempted to struggle away from the anguish thoughts such as these carried in their dark arms. She wanted to come back into this room, back to the young man to whom she had been speaking, wanted to greet even the offensive tubes of artificial light that flickered over his head. But when she looked up, Jerome was gone.