A Map Of Glass Part 9

Whether the well had dried up was irrelevant in that the pump that surmounted it had utterly vanished. Three times a day, with sand capsizing like miniature avalanches under his feet, Branwell was forced to trudge with two galvanized pails down to the lake and back again in order to have water for was.h.i.+ng, drinking, and cooking. Not that he cooked much anyway, living mostly as he did now on carrots and potatoes and sometimes an egg or two, all boiled in one pot on the top of one of the Quebec heaters. He had trouble even looking at Marie's beautiful cook stove, The Kitchen Queen, which stood unlit in the kitchen, its decorative features and its copper boiler cold and unpolished. Furthermore, the last time he had opened one of its ovens, Branwell had been appalled by the sight of the tiny dunes that had formed inside it, and the excess sand that descended like a pale brown curtain to the floor.

Word of Marie's death had apparently been pa.s.sed from tavern to inn to tavern, in a westward direction, and had finally reached Baden about a month later. The first letter Branwell received from Ghost had mostly concerned this sad event and was filled with his memories of Marie's kindness, her spirit, and her outstanding cooking. Branwell eagerly opened every letter he received from his friend whose unp.r.o.nounceable first name was printed neatly on the back flap of each envelope as Gzsrzt Shromanov and then translated in brackets ("Ghost"), as if to make clear which of the many men of Branwell's acquaintance who were named Gzsrzt might be writing to him at this time.

The strange thing about Ghost's letters was that they were utterly reflective in nature and referred to events that had already happened rather than those that were about to occur. When Branwell wrote to inquire about this, his friend replied that not only had he never fully trusted the future tense in written rather than spoken English but he believed it was bad luck to commit to writing anything at all pertaining to predictions. Destiny Destiny, he wrote, has always been suspicious of notation. Destiny has never taken kindly to anyone that has kept a written record of its intentions has always been suspicious of notation. Destiny has never taken kindly to anyone that has kept a written record of its intentions. He described instead the fine new Baden tavern and its splendid stamped-tin ceiling that had no cracks in it and was full of decorative swirls. He made reference to the health of Spectre, who was flouris.h.i.+ng, he said, in the company of the various other horses that were temporarily housed in the tavern's stables now that there were enough settlers on the Huron Road and the surrounding concessions that a good quant.i.ty of horses were needed to get people to the places where the railway, mercifully, wasn't. a good quant.i.ty of horses were needed to get people to the places where the railway, mercifully, wasn't.

As all delivery vehicles and the rural post had given up trying to negotiate the dunes months before, Branwell had to stumble through one mile of sand and down two miles of decent road into the town of West Lake in order to purchase supplies and to pick up his mail. The trip was made considerably easier in the winter because the sand was itself buried by drifts, and because of the snowshoes he had purchased, years before, after his visit to Baden. On one such trek, during his second winter as a widower, he made the return voyage with a sack of potatoes, several loaves of rapidly freezing bread, a freshly killed and also rapidly freezing chicken on his toboggan, and two letters in the pocket of his coat. The tops of his ears were frostbitten. There was not much to look forward to beyond fried chicken at the end of this particular journey.

One letter was from Annabelle, who was pa.s.sing on what Maurice had told her about the death of Gilderson: the date, the place of his internment, and other details about the old scoundrel that Branwell forgot as soon as he read them. The other was written in an unfamiliar hand and was postmarked Shakespeare, Ontario. The naming of places in this Dominion, he thought, was becoming increasingly preposterous. Branwell tore open the envelope, tossed it into the fire, and began to read the sentences written by Peter Fryfogel, son of Sebastien and current owner of the elusive Fryfogel Inn. Two charlatans, painters of naked women, had arrived in Baden at the request of an otherwise solid and successful citizen who was building a beautiful mansion right in the center of town. This had reminded Peter that his late father had always wanted murals painted by the good and honest innkeeper, Branwell Woodman, but, if he remembered correctly, circ.u.mstances had prevented Mister Woodman from reaching the inn the one time he had been in the district. Would he once again consider taking up the task this winter when there would likely be few tenants at Mister Woodman's lakeside hotel? Please advise and etc. Branwell read the letter twice, a bit confused that Ghost had predicted nothing about this possible commission in his letters, until he recalled that any reference to the painting of murals at the Fryfogel if in fact this painting took place would have required the written use of the future tense.

Branwell opened the drawer of the desk at which, in the past, he had carried out the business of the hotel, rifled through a quant.i.ty of correspondence and sand, and finally found some paper that was blank except for the printed ill.u.s.tration of the Ballagh Oisin in better days. He unscrewed the top of a pot of ink and sand, dipped his pen, and began to answer in the affermative fully aware, as he did so, that while he was obviously fulfilling Ghost's prediction, he was also writing a letter of farewell to his cherished hotel. Once he began this second journey to the west, he knew he would not be returning. The sand had won; he would abandon the Ballagh Oisin to its fate.

In fact, Branwell would would return, but this would not happen for several years, and it would happen only once. As a much older and much crankier man, Branwell would insist that his son, Maurice "Badger" Woodman as he liked to be called, with whom Branwell had been living unhappily for some years, accompany him in the cabriolet on a journey back to Tremble Point. "I want you to see this," he would say, having secretly never fully stopped blaming his son for the greed, for the barley, for the sand, for the death of his wife, and knowing full well that whatever it was they were going to view would not be an improvement on what he had left behind on this February day. When they arrived at the spot, they would have to climb a dune in order to enter the hotel by the door that had led to the upper veranda. They would crunch along the sandy second-story hall as far as the central staircase, which Branwell would begin to descend, stopping on the fourth step down. The sand would have almost entirely filled the first floor by then; only the turquoise skies of Branwell's murals would be visible. Branwell would think then of all that was buried: sofas, tables, chairs, umbrella stands, mirrors, door stoppers, Marie's copper pots, the cook stove, and he would turn to his son, who remained blinking at the top of the stairs. Shaking his cane at him he would shout, "You are a creator of deserts!" On the way back to the cabriolet, descending the dunes, Maurice, the now influential politician, dressed in his waistcoat and top hat, would become caught in a slide and would fall directly on his backside. return, but this would not happen for several years, and it would happen only once. As a much older and much crankier man, Branwell would insist that his son, Maurice "Badger" Woodman as he liked to be called, with whom Branwell had been living unhappily for some years, accompany him in the cabriolet on a journey back to Tremble Point. "I want you to see this," he would say, having secretly never fully stopped blaming his son for the greed, for the barley, for the sand, for the death of his wife, and knowing full well that whatever it was they were going to view would not be an improvement on what he had left behind on this February day. When they arrived at the spot, they would have to climb a dune in order to enter the hotel by the door that had led to the upper veranda. They would crunch along the sandy second-story hall as far as the central staircase, which Branwell would begin to descend, stopping on the fourth step down. The sand would have almost entirely filled the first floor by then; only the turquoise skies of Branwell's murals would be visible. Branwell would think then of all that was buried: sofas, tables, chairs, umbrella stands, mirrors, door stoppers, Marie's copper pots, the cook stove, and he would turn to his son, who remained blinking at the top of the stairs. Shaking his cane at him he would shout, "You are a creator of deserts!" On the way back to the cabriolet, descending the dunes, Maurice, the now influential politician, dressed in his waistcoat and top hat, would become caught in a slide and would fall directly on his backside.

But now, during his last few days at the hotel, Branwell became involved in a frenzy of essentially useless activities. He touched up certain areas of the murals that had become chipped and cracked over the years, he cleaned out the closets, and shook sand out of the bedclothes stored in the linen wardrobe. He puttied several loose window panes, oiled hinges that had become tight and difficult, took the carpets outside and beat them, and, as a last gesture to Marie, he polished up the Kitchen Queen. Then, after packing a few items of clothing in a leather valise and putting all of his paints and brushes into a wooden box, he placed these two pieces of luggage on top of a drift just beyond the porch. When he re-entered the hall, he looked for some time at the panoramas he had painted. Then he turned away from the fantasy of his landscapes and swept a quant.i.ty of sand and himself out the front door, leaving the broom standing upright in the snow like a scarecrow, or a kind of sentinel, guarding the empty hotel.

The new Baden Tavern was made of brick, not logs, its windows were surrounded by decorative molding, and there was a large wood-burning furnace in its deep cellar. These architectural details would be the only differences, as far as Branwell could tell, that would enable him to separate his current stay in the district from the one he had endured ten years before. Each day, he pulled aside the burlap curtains in his room and stared, as he had in the past, into a sea of swirling white. Each evening he fell asleep to the sound of howling winds tearing around the s...o...b..und village, and each night he was awakened intermittently by the moan of train whistles. Kelterborn was gone; Lingelbach, the present owner, was so like Kelterborn, both in his taciturn manner and in his physical appearance, that he hardly qualified as a noteworthy change.

Ghost, however, who had wandered all over the towns.h.i.+ps, insisted that there were were changes. More than one track, a proliferation of new farms, villages like New Hamburg to the east and, now that the Irish had arrived in droves, places called Dublin and St. Columban were appearing to the west. "My father would have been beside himself," Branwell told his friend, all the while thinking as he had in the past, Why these European names? Almost everyone had horses and buggies now, Ghost explained, and several blacksmith shops had opened as a result. The gorgeous mansion going up across the street was said to have ten marble fireplaces, all made in Italy, and the two painters Fryfogel Junior had referred to were, indeed, painting naked ladies on the walls, "ladies so real you almost thought you could touch them." He paused here, closed his eyes for a few moments, then said that he didn't see Branwell painting naked ladies in the future, more's the pity. "General stores in every village," Ghost said, "and churches everywhere. An undertaker. A tombstone maker." changes. More than one track, a proliferation of new farms, villages like New Hamburg to the east and, now that the Irish had arrived in droves, places called Dublin and St. Columban were appearing to the west. "My father would have been beside himself," Branwell told his friend, all the while thinking as he had in the past, Why these European names? Almost everyone had horses and buggies now, Ghost explained, and several blacksmith shops had opened as a result. The gorgeous mansion going up across the street was said to have ten marble fireplaces, all made in Italy, and the two painters Fryfogel Junior had referred to were, indeed, painting naked ladies on the walls, "ladies so real you almost thought you could touch them." He paused here, closed his eyes for a few moments, then said that he didn't see Branwell painting naked ladies in the future, more's the pity. "General stores in every village," Ghost said, "and churches everywhere. An undertaker. A tombstone maker."

"I imagine I'll have to take all this on faith, though," Branwell said. "I've never been able to see anything but the inside of a tavern, a different tavern, yes, but still a tavern much like all the others."

Ghost pointed heavenward, explaining that none of the other taverns had tin ceilings like this one. "Not a crack in it and there never will be a crack in it. Even if the tavern fell down there would not be a crack in that ceiling."

Branwell looked at the ceiling, the ceiling Ghost was so fond of. The decorative swirls were confined to borders that surrounded flat square panels like an embossed baroque frame. He wondered briefly about the machine that would be required to make such a thing as a ceiling. Must the tin be heated or was it soft enough to be pushed into the shape required? Nonetheless, to his eye, there was a monotony about the resulting effect, exaggerated by the rather dirty pale yellow paint that covered it, or perhaps it was white paint, discolored by the pipe smoke that, he was beginning to discover, filled the barroom day and night.

Ghost asked about Branwell's financial situation, which, admittedly, was shaky at best but which he hoped would improve once he got out to Fryfogel's.

Lingelbach, who was pretending to be absorbed by the task of wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, moved closer to the side of the room where Branwell sat with Ghost. "Road's disappeared," he offered.

Again? thought Branwell. What was it about him that made particles of almost everything want to acc.u.mulate wherever he went? What else could possibly happen to him? He half-expected a plague of sawdust, or of iron filings to appear in his future. He wouldn't have been surprised if brimstone began to descend from the sky. Lingelbach was speaking again. "You'll have to pay me," he was saying to Branwell. "There's the room, the board. You'll have to pay me one way or another."

On the fourth day of the storm Branwell descended the stairs at the tavern to be confronted by a strange scaffolding made up of two tall stepladders placed about six feet apart with a couple of wide pine boards resting between them. Ghost, who had clearly been supervising the placement of this scaffold, took Branwell by the arm. "I see pictures on this ceiling," he said, "and," he nodded his head in the direction of the bar, "so does Lingelbach. We both see you painting these pictures, starting this morning."

Branwell had no desire to paint a ceiling. He was tired, sad, and slightly disoriented by being in the company of others after his solitary life in the hotel. He thought about snow falling on the roof of his old home and wondered how the s.h.i.+ngles would hold up if this storm were to travel eastward. Looking at the scaffolding, he said, "I'm not Michelangelo, you know, I'm not Tiepolo."

"Who?" asked Ghost.

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

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

"You haven't lost me," said Ghost, reading his mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Doubt that," Ghost replied. "I don't think I'll be seeing you for a couple of years."

"Why not come out to the inn? It's only a few miles."

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

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

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

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

A Map of Gla.s.s [image]

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

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

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

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

"We'll leave after breakfast," he said, once they were seated at a table.

"Not yet," she said, "wait one more day."

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

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

[image]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He settled down beside her.

"Lots about rafts," she told him.

"Read it to me then."

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

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

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

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

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 relations.h.i.+p, in this bed, and he was far from G.o.dlike. If anything, he resembled more a tattered, starved saint: thin, almost defeated, trudging back from the wilderness.

[image]

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 Sleeping Apostle, the card next to the object read, but Sylvia knew that the small man was not sleeping. The att.i.tude 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 center the construction of the underworld, she thought and dark, narrow, claustrophobic pa.s.sages lined by not quite real rocks. Later there were the bones of dinosaurs, suits of armor, weapons, s.h.i.+elds, 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 ill.u.s.trated here by a series of roped-off rooms containing too much furniture. A Victorian Parlor A Victorian Parlor, a sign in front of such a room read. Do not enter. Do not touch. Do not enter. Do not touch.

Her husband had peered intently at each exhibit and had fished for his gla.s.ses in order to read the typed explanations that hung in gla.s.s frames on the adjacent walls, but she knew he was just trying to humor 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 gla.s.s and unfold the delicate figure, to open the tiny arms. She wanted to lift the chin, examine the face.

Several minutes pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tude 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 gla.s.s 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."