A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  How wonderful the snow was; every change of direction, each whim, even the compulsion of hunger was marked on its surface, like memory, for a brief season. He told Mira all of this when he called her, but forgot to mention the green tea and how it made him think of her.

  That night Jerome was awakened by the noise of a tin can bouncing slowly down the stairs, followed by a dull, steady thumping. When he opened the door to the stairs, he found he was looking directly into the green eyes of a large orange cat whose fur was matted with burrs and whose expression was hostile. The animal hunched its back and exhaled a long hiss in Jerome’s direction, then strolled calmly into the vast space of the loft and disappeared. Too filled with sleep to fully believe in this apparition, Jerome staggered back to the cot and did not open his eyes until morning when, sensing that he was being watched, he turned his head and again met the animal’s angry green eyes. “Hello, puss,” he said and was greeted with a low growl. He reached out a hand and the cat promptly attempted to bite him, despite the fact that it clearly had no intention of leaving his bedside and did not pay any attention to Jerome when he rose from the cot and dressed himself. Neither did it refuse the bowl of milk that Jerome offered while he was putting together his own breakfast.

  Jerome pulled his cellphone from his pocket and called Mira again. “I’m drinking your tea,” he told her, “and thinking of you.”

  “Good.”

  “And there’s a cat that’s come into the loft. Dirty orange. It’s feral, I think, growls a lot.”

  “A cat on a deserted island?” said Mira, her tone almost skeptical.

  “Summer people left him here, I suppose, so he’s likely to have been on his own for less than a year. He would have some memory of being tame.”

  “And also a memory of being abandoned.”

  Jerome was silent.

  “The lion,” Mira said suddenly. “Saint Jerome in the wild with his lion.”

  Along with a tiny plaster figure of Krishna, Mira had tucked into his pack a small poster of Joachim Patinir’s sixteenth-century Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, an image she always insisted Jerome take with him when he disappeared into what she called “the wild,” which, to her mind, was located anywhere beyond the city limits. Brought up as a Hindu, she was fascinated by the Christian saints and their stories that were, for her, as distant and compellingly exotic as the various Hindu gods and warriors were to him. When they began to get to know each other, she had been delighted to discover that his mother and father had given him the name of a famous saint, though he assured her that religion would have been the last thing on his parents’ mind.

  After studying the image for a while, they had eventually come to understand that the several tiny lions in the vivid blue-and-green Patinir landscape they were so fond of—each lion engaged in a particular activity: chasing wolves, curled at the saint’s feet, chumming around with a donkey, or standing in a field filled with sheep—represented only one lion and that the painting was episodic in nature, depicting a number of events from the saint’s life. In the far distance the lion could be seen either conversing with, or preparing to attack, a gathering of people. Mira believed the lion was conversing. Jerome always insisted he was attacking. Mira had asked how he could be so certain that the lion was a male since it was so small it was difficult to tell. Jerome said the lion would not have been permitted to live in the monastery with Saint Jerome had he not been a male of the species. Mira had loved that phrase, a male of the species, and had begun to use it herself shortly after this discussion, often in reference to Jerome himself. “Because you are a male of the species …,” she would begin.

  Jerome laughed now and looked at the cat. “This animal is as fierce as a lion, anyway.”

  “Tame him,” said Mira, “and bring him back to the city.”

  Jerome had not given Mira a clear indication of when he would return to the city. He would not be pinned down in that way, wanting to retain both flexibility and control. “I don’t think there is much chance of that,” he said.

  “No chance of bringing him back to the city?”

  “No,” he said, “not that, exactly. I just don’t think he’s going to co-operate when it comes to taming. Looks like he’s been on the loose for a while. He won’t give himself over so easily to trust, I think. He might feel that he needs to protect himself.”

  The cat kept his distance but followed Jerome everywhere. When he was working, the animal either sat on a tall bank of snow watching his efforts with what appeared to be mild disdain, or it coasted back and forth inside the areas Jerome was excavating with its head high in the air and an ominous growl in its throat any time Jerome came too near. These dugouts, as Jerome thought of them, were assuming the shape of a ship’s deck. Sometimes, after he had drawn the outline of such a dugout on the surface of the snow, the cat lay down in the middle of the area he was hoping to excavate and refused to budge, spitting and lashing its tail when Jerome attempted gently to remove it with the shovel. Once, when Jerome became angry, he dug under the cat and tossed it along with a load of snow onto a nearby bank, where the animal scrambled to a seated position and remained in place, scowling. Two or three times a day, without warning, the cat would dash off toward the copse at the east end of the island. It always returned, however, and Jerome was once interrupted in the midst of photographing an excavation by the sound of crunching coming from one of the dugouts behind him where the cat was crouched over the rapidly disappearing body of a bird. Later, while photographing the remains, Jerome determined by the tattered remnants of red and black plumage that the bird had likely been a robin, the harbinger of spring.

  By now the ice, both in the river and in the lake, was beginning to completely break up: the water was rising and the floes that were passing the shore of the island looked like parade floats featuring non-representational sculpture. Late one afternoon when the light was particularly intense, Jerome photographed several of these ice forms with a colour film. Then, with the cat in tow, he walked back to the loft on the path he and the animal had tramped into the snow. On the stairs the cat was so constantly underfoot Jerome began to feel as if his ankles were being bound in a blur of orange wool. Because of the soundless fluidity of the animal’s movements, Jerome had decided to call it Swimmer.

  “Swimmer,” he said now, “are you hungry?” and as he spoke he realized that he had begun to talk to the animal some time ago, that he had explained his work to it, scolded it, and occasionally used terms of endearment. “So this is what solitude does to you,” he said to the animal when it reappeared, “you begin talking to unfriendly cats.”

  Swimmer growled in reply, and ran away from him.

  That night, it started to snow and Swimmer sat looking almost picturesque near the large window, watching the flakes descend through the beams of the one outdoor light in the yard. Jerome had given him—he had decided that a cat this large must be a neutered male—a portion of the tinned tuna fish he had had for supper and this seemed to have put the cat in a more placid mood. Jerome himself was far from placid and angrily paced the loft floor, glancing now and then with irritation at the snow, worrying about the accumulation in what he now called his Nine Revelations of Navigation. He feared that, unless he scraped the interiors out with a shovel, it would take him hours by hand to bring the bottom of each shape back to what it had been earlier in the day. But, having never before broken the surface of the earth in his work, he would do his best to avoid the disturbance a shovel might cause to what he believed was the purity of scattered twigs and blackened leaves.

  Eventually he stopped pacing and turned his attentions to the cat. What a mangy, rough-looking beast! Weren’t cats supposed to clean themselves up? An idea struck him. He searched for and found his own comb, put on his leather gloves, and warily approached the cat, who, though suspicious and growling, did not turn around. Gently but firmly seizing him around the middle, he wrapped a towel around the cat’s legs. Then positioning his knee against Swimmer�
��s side so that he could free one hand, he began to drag the comb through the matted fur. The cat yowled, swung his head back and forth, and made every effort to bite the offending, gloved hands, but finally he gave up and submitted to the grooming.

  It wasn’t long before Jerome discovered the wound near the tail. Swimmer hissed and yowled more loudly when the comb neared the lesion and Jerome turned some greyish-yellow fur aside to explore the problem. The torn flesh was clearly infected and not in any way helped by the abundance of dirty fur that covered it. He let go of the animal and went to search for the antiseptic and a pair of scissors he had noticed in a kitchen drawer. After retrieving them, it took some time to locate the cat again, but at last Jerome discovered him crouching behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. He closed the door and ran some warm water onto a clean washcloth. Then he cornered the beast once again, cut away the fur near the infected spot with the scissors, and began tentatively to bathe the exposed skin. When, despite Swimmer’s continuous growling, it was clear he would tolerate these ministrations, Jerome applied the antiseptic. When he was finished, Swimmer walked slowly across the room, lay down, and went to sleep.

  The next morning, a warm front moved in, melting both the previous evening’s precipitation and some of the old snow on which it had fallen, and Jerome was pleased to find that his markers were even more prominent than they had been the day before. The blackened maple leaves, twigs, and flattened weeds appeared to have been pasted to the floor of the excavations by the melt, and a rising mist once again softened the atmosphere. Jerome had brought his sketchbook with him, as well as several graphite pencils and a folding stool, for today he intended to draw the details of what he had exposed. He smiled when he thought of some of his contemporaries who felt that the making of drawings was a stale, traditional way of exploring landscape, for this type of rendering of the details of the physical world gave him great pleasure. He had almost finished the third drawing when he heard an unfamiliar sound, that of the cat’s loud, sorrowful, and repetitive meowing coming from somewhere close to the edge of the lake. Realizing that this was the first time Swimmer had used this noise so common to cats, and sensing some urgency, some insistence in the tone, Jerome stood, placed the sketchbook and pencils on the stool, and walked toward the tall brittle grasses near the shore.

  It took Jerome’s mind some time to interpret the visual information being transmitted. Some of the smaller icebergs had moved closer to the island during the night and were now lined up like docked rowboats near the shore. He once again marvelled at their mysterious, irregular shapes, but this time there was something more. During their journey down streams and rivers, the icebergs had picked up and incorporated into their structures twigs and branches, as if consciously creating their own skeletons. Jerome was intrigued by this, and was about to pull the camera from his pocket when he noticed a large mass of ice that contained within it a blurred bundle of cloth that seemed both enclosed in the ice and emerging from it. Wondering if the ice had somehow managed to trap a patchwork quilt or a collection of rags, he moved closer, camera in hand, hoping for an interesting shot. The slab of ice bumped against the shore and shifted slightly. It was then that Jerome saw the outstretched hands, the bent head, the frozen wisps of grey hair, and he heard his own voice announcing the discovery. “A man!” he shouted to the air, to the nearby cat, to himself. “A man!” he shouted again. Then he spoke the word dead, just before he turned away and vomited into the snow.

  One year later, in a small town thirty miles down the lakeshore, a woman woke early. There was no sound coming from the street below. Darkness was still pressed against her bedroom windows.

  Her husband was sleeping and did not stir as she slid from the bed, crossed the room, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where she had laid out her clothes the night before: the dark wool suit and grey silk shirt, the string of small pearls, the black tights, white underwear, and conventional cream-coloured slip, the sombre costume that she believed would ensure that no one would look at her, or look at her for very long. She took no special precautions as she washed and dressed, running the taps and opening the drawers as she would have on any other morning. Malcolm had been out on a night call and had not returned until 3 a.m. He would be sleeping deeply and would not waken for at least two more hours. By then she would be on the train, part of the journey completed.

  She stood for some time in front of the open medicine cabinet in the bathroom, gazing at the plastic containers that held her various pills. Then she closed the door and stared at her own face in the mirror. Her fair hair, some of it grey now, was pulled back, and her face, she was relieved to see, was composed, her grey eyes were clear. She could not say whether it was an attractive face that looked back at her. Someone had once told her she was lovely and not, in some ways, that long ago, but she knew that her features, her expression had altered since.

  The previous morning, after Malcolm had left for the clinic, she had filled an old suitcase with stockings, one blue skirt and cardigan, underwear, a few cosmetics, two well-used green leather notebooks, a plastic bag containing squares of felt, scraps of fabric and wool, one antique album, and a worn hardcover book. Then she had lifted the bag from the bed where she had packed it and had placed it in the unused cupboard of the spare room. The interior of the case was pink and had elasticized compartments under the satin-lined lid where, at one time or another, some long-dead woman must have kept hairbrushes and clothes brushes, and perhaps a bottle filled with liquid detergent for washing silk stockings. That woman may very well have been her own mother, but she couldn’t be certain because as far as she knew her mother had never been a traveller. The people who lived in this rural County stayed home. Year after year, generation after generation. The geography of the County discouraged travel; trains no longer visited any of the pleasant towns of the peninsula where she had lived her entire life. She would have to drive for almost an hour to reach Belleville, the larger mainland town where she would catch the train that would take her to the city. The word city had hissed in her mind all week long, first as an idea, then as a possibility, and, finally, now as a certain destination.

  After washing and dressing she went into the spare room, removed the suitcase from the cupboard, and carried it with her down the unlit back stairs and into the kitchen where she placed it on the table. On a desk facing the large kitchen window was the tactile map she had been making for her friend Julia, its rhinestones, tinsel, and bits of folded aluminium foil glistening under the single lamp she lit. Placed carefully beside it were the several diagrams and drawings she had made of the location Julia next wanted to visit: an abandoned lighthouse on a seldom-used road at the very tip of the County. She glanced at the map, then looked through the window into the yard, which was partially illuminated by the kitchen lamp. It was the middle of a cold April and only recently had the thaw begun in earnest. At this moment everything beyond the kitchen windows appeared to be weeping; droplets were clinging to her clothesline and shining on branches, and icicles that had disengaged themselves from the eaves were embedded like spears in the remaining heavy snow near the foundations of this house in which she had lived all her life. This is the anniversary of sorrow, she thought—everything moist, transitory, draining away, everything disappearing.

  Her friend Julia, who had also lived all her life in one house, said that she could smell the beginnings of the spring melt on her farm long before those who were sighted were aware of its arrival. She could also smell the approach of storms on cloudless summer days and the presence of deer hidden deep in the cedar bush behind the barn. How she admired this in Julia, this sensory prescience; that and the calm that always filled her corner of the room like a soft light.

  It was Julia who had sensed her grief, Julia who had suggested that she make the journey to the city. In the year since the newspaper article had appeared, she had mentioned it to her friend only twice, her voice as neutral as milk, the need to state the terrible fact of it perfect
ly disguised. The first time, Julia simply shook her head as she often did when presented with sad news items concerning strangers. The next time, however, in the midst of the retelling, Julia had suddenly straightened in her chair and had moved her hand across the space between them. “There’s something here, Sylvia,” she had said. “Something deep and private and important. I think you should meet this young man.”

  Sylvia had said nothing more, but in the silence that followed Julia’s statement the idea of taking her story to the city had been planted.

  She opened her suitcase again and placed the map, the sketches, two rectangular plastic containers—one filled with an assortment of threads, textured papers, and several ordnance survey maps, the other with string, twine, sequins, and rhinestones—into the interior. Then, once again, she quietly closed the lid, using her thumbs to ease the fasteners into place. She would take the materials with her and continue to work on the map. In this way she would keep the connection to Julia.

  As she put on her outer clothing she wondered if she should leave a note and decided, finally, that she would. She took a pen from her purse and wrote the sentence I have engagement on the back of a grocery bill. The question that came into her mind at this point was one of placement. Where did people leave such messages: near the phone, under a magnet on the refrigerator, on the hall table? The kitchen, she concluded, would be no place to leave such a scrap of paper, to leave such a formal declaration, and so, after lifting the salt shaker from the table and dropping it into one of her pockets, she moved down the hall and went into her husband’s study, his library. Selecting two volumes that dealt with medical syndromes, she placed one on top of the other in the centre of the desk, then glanced at the note on the top. “I have engagement,” she smiled, testing the phrase. She reached for her husband’s pen and added the article an to the sentence. Then underneath this she wrote, Don’t bother calling Julia, she has no idea where I am.