A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  That night before going to sleep, Jerome looked at Mira’s profile, the black fringe of lashes, the jewel in her nose, blue now in the light from the computer screen. It was never, he thought, fully dark in this room. He rolled over on his back and examined the ceiling. “This woman,” he said, “she seems so … troubled … not shell-shocked exactly, but wounded somehow.”

  “She lost her lover, Jerome, no wonder she’s wounded.” Mira ran her hand over her eyes, trying to fight sleep.

  “How do you know they were lovers? And anyway, it’s something else I’m picking up, or at least something more.” He smiled at Mira and touched her arm, knowing she would object to the suggestion that there could be something more than love. “I think that she is afraid … afraid of almost everything.”

  “But not too afraid to come here,” said Mira.

  “It wasn’t easy, though. It was hard for her. I could see that.”

  “Yes, I could see that too. But they were lovers, Jerome. Believe me.”

  After Mira had fallen asleep, Jerome continued to think about the woman who had arrived so unexpectedly at his door, of her sudden intrusion into his life. He felt a certain sympathy toward her now, but it was laced with anxiety. An image of the frozen man came into his mind. The upper part of the body had been leaning forward, the motionless arms and open hands resting on the surface of the iceberg while the hips and legs remained encased. There had been frost in the hair and on the eyebrows and lashes and a sad, puzzled expression on the face. How could he possibly tell the woman about that? As usual lately, he had no idea what was going to be expected of him, no idea what to expect of himself.

  For almost a year he had longed for a new site, a new project to capture his interest. He was still reluctant to develop the films from his time at the island—as if he believed the dead man he had found might appear in the wavering images that swam into focus in the darkroom—so he could not say how he was spending his time in the studio while Mira was at work. He had tacked a few drawings on the wall, he had shot several rolls of film, he had done some reading, but not much else. Long walks through the streets and alleyways of his neighbourhood had yielded only a new admiration for the miniature front gardens of the Italian and Portuguese immigrants who had settled in this part of the city, and the suspicion that on their small piece of ground in front of their houses, these people were working on projects more creative and useful than anything he had undertaken so far. He had photographed the gardens in the lushness of late summer, and then again during their decline in the fall, and had thought that he might somehow reproduce them—or at least the idea of them—in shadow boxes, but nothing tangible had come from any of this. It put him in mind of his father, how, once, during the last chaotic weeks of his life, he had inexplicably made a brief attempt to grow parsley in a pot near the door to the balcony of their apartment, and how the plant had withered from lack of water after his death. Anyway, they were Mira’s gardens really, she being the one who first insisted that he look at them, whereas every other image he had worked with had been his own discovery. Lately there had been no real discoveries. And yet, the daylight hours had passed quickly enough while he waited for the sound of her key in the door. Just last week he became aware that the sound of a key entering a lock could be anticipated with pleasure, rather than the dread he remembered from certain nights in his childhood. He lay on his back now and listened to Mira’s even breathing, then turned on his side and placed one hand on the bone of her hip. How small she was, how small, and how strong, and how rooted she was in the changing world.

  She had taken a different path than he had into the world of art and, being the Canadian-born daughter of first-generation immigrants with high hopes for the future of their children, her choice, in some ways, had involved more personal risk. She had told him that in the beginning she had followed the practical, educational route suggested by her parents, and had never allowed even the thought of disappointing them enter her mind. But somehow she had stumbled into a fine arts class at her university, a class taught by a young woman interested in using fabrics and thread, costumes and performance as an expression of high art. Mira had been more intrigued by all this than she had thought she would be when the nature of the class first made itself known to her. (Jerome hadn’t told Mira his own opinion about this form of expression.) At the time he met her, she had been making soft protective coverings for a variety of solid objects: toasters, books, bicycle pumps, even, eventually, and much to her parents’ bafflement as she always delighted in telling him, for her father’s lawn mower. At first she had called her works “cosies,” having taken the idea from the gorgeously embroidered covering for a teapot that her mother had brought to the New World when she left Delhi. But later, when Mira’s fascination with all things Christian had taken hold, she changed the name of her creation to “swaddles,” a tip of the hat to the swaddling clothes she was told had wrapped the Baby Jesus in his manger. “I like the word. The sound of it,” she had told Jerome when he had gently suggested that the whole notion seemed a bit bizarre. She had exhibited some of these in the gallery where she now worked part-time, the same gallery where she had first met Jerome. In the three years or so since they had been together, however, she had moved toward performance work, using the fabric either to cover herself or to create changing patterns on the floor, and Jerome could see she was really coming into her own.

  When he looked at her now, he could hardly believe that she had once been merely a businesslike voice on the phone, a polite, efficient presence in the gallery where he showed his work. What amazed him most was how all of this formality could be softened by degrees simply by walking side by side down a street, sharing a meal, a conversation, eventually a touch, and now this most intimate of experiences, one impossible to imagine in the past, this lying side by side in the dark, allowing unconsciousness to wash over them, carry them toward the morning. There had been women in the past, of course, and occasionally he had found himself in their beds in the morning, but he had always rolled away, rather than toward them, had been courteous and discreet in what he knew was, and would remain, their territory, and had always felt a flicker of relief when, on the street, he had turned a corner, out of range of their windows.

  Now he was warmed by the knowledge that Mira’s calm face would be the first image that he looked at each morning. Her certainty in the face of his own lack of it. Until her, nothing in him had fully experienced either the anticipation of reunion, or the hollowness of separation. To him it had all been a great surprise, this combination of comfort and tenderness, pleasure and then the shared quiet aftermath of pleasure, and there were still moments when he was mistrustful, suspicious almost, of the ease with which he had walked into the partnership. In the past he had wanted not even the faintest suggestion of reliance to be a part of his character. For him, the implications of dependence teetered—always—on the edge of addiction and so he would often change, though never fully abandon certain social networks in the city. So far nothing and no one had kept him for long, curiosity being the only mood he fully trusted. But, as far as he could tell, for her, his entrance into her life was as natural as the air she softly inhaled and exhaled beside him here in this room that she insisted on calling a bedroom despite the pipes on the ceiling, the stacked cartons used to store clothing, the glow from the computer, the functional futon.

  He recalled the spare rigidity of his parents’ bedroom, the twin white headboards, so disturbingly like tombstones on adjacent plots, the matching polyester spreads, faded by repeated washing, the decorative lampshades and doilies that were his mother’s sad attempt to bring some intimacy and joy into this corner of her life. He remembered quite vividly his mother’s two or three good dresses hanging in the closet and her one pair of party shoes, so out of fashion, so seldom worn, and the stale boozy smell on his father’s jackets overpowering the lighter smell of his mother’s cologne. He also remembered the nights when his father was out late alone and everything—ev
en the furniture—seemed to be anxiously listening for the sound of his key in the lock, nights when his father would return angry, accusatory, smashing everything in his path. By the time Jerome was an adolescent, the sight of his father’s undershirts and shorts in the laundry hamper, or his black rubbers by the front door, had disgusted him. And then there was the inexplicable guilt he had felt after his father’s death, a guilt he could resurrect right here, right now, without ever being able to make any sense of it. Sometimes when Mira questioned him about that part of his past, he would feel the buzz of anger rising in him, and not wanting to go toward that, he would change the subject or make an excuse to leave the room. Occasionally he left the room abruptly, without making excuses.

  She was the last person who deserved his anger. And he did not want to leave her. But he would not let Mira within fifty miles of his childhood, wanted none of it to touch her, to touch them.

  Sylvia jerked nervously into wakefulness but had no difficulty determining where she had been sleeping. The room was dark: the only evidence of morning was a narrow channel of light plunging toward the floor from a space between the curtains, a quantity of dust motes trapped within it. A river alive with molecular activity. She switched on the bedside light, then lay back against the pillows, thinking first, as always, about Andrew, and then allowing her thoughts to turn to Malcolm, who would be, by now, quite desperate with worry. She decided to telephone the clinic, which would not yet be open at this hour. She would speak to an answering machine, tell it that she was fine, and no one, nothing, would demand an explanation for her behaviour, a description of her whereabouts. Knowing this, she was able, quite calmly, to make the call, speak the required words. She realized as she did this that she had not undressed the night before, had fallen asleep on top of the bed fully clothed, exhausted.

  In the bath she became agitated about what she would say when she met with Jerome. She had next to no experience with meetings outside of those that, over and over, she and Andrew had so carefully arranged in the preceding years. The plastic flowers and the Formica tabletop of the restaurant where they had sometimes shared a coffee took shape in her mind, and, suddenly filled with anguish, she pulled her legs toward her chest and placed her forehead against her knees. When she had been with him, everything—the trees outside the window, the paper napkins in their shining dispenser, the plastic bread basket on the table—had been charged with the significance of his presence and had therefore been impossible to look at without feeling, and impossible to remember later without suffering. Now she opened her eyes and focused on the chain of silver beads attached to the bathtub plug. She knew that each tiny metallic orb would be filled with reflections almost too small to see and that in each of these miniature reflections there would be replicas of herself—crouching, cowed under an assault of feeling. She thought about the chain until her breathing became more even. Then she rose from the tub, dried herself with the hotel towels, left the bathroom, and began to dress.

  She went over to the desk and, with Julia in mind, sat down, opened the folder, and took out the pen and two sheets of hotel stationery. I’ll send the map to you as soon as I can, she wrote. You won’t be able to get out to the point for a while anyway … too wet. She thought for a moment. Others would have to read this letter to Julia, as always. She made a one-inch fold at the top of the letter, tore the paper along the seam, discarded the printed hotel address in the wastebasket under the desk, and resumed writing. I’ve gone on a little trip, myself, she wrote, thanks to you. Then remembering the worn, echoing floorboards of the farmhouse where Julia and her aging parents lived, she added, Where I am there is carpet everywhere except in the bathrooms. I have the materials with me, however, and intend to work on the map. I’ll use something else (haven’t decided what … any suggestions?) for the water this time because it’s quite exposed out there. The lighthouse is on the end of a point so the water can be quite rough. And the air smells different as well, or at least it will smell different by the time you get there later in the spring.

  Sylvia could not finish the letter. All that she would have to talk about later in the day was gathered like humid weather in her mind. This intensity of focus was not new but saying what was on her mind was something she had shied away from most of her life. She had almost confessed, however, to Julia, she’d felt so desperate the first time she had lost Andrew. But in the end she had lacked the courage. All that she had permitted herself to tell her friend was that she knew a man whose profession allowed him to explore not only geological phenomena but also the traces of human activity that were left behind on the textured surface of the earth. Julia had been delighted by this. “I understand that,” she told Sylvia. “The whole world is a kind of Braille, if you consider things from that perspective.”

  “I’m a curious person,” Julia had once said as they sat facing each other on either side of the kitchen table at the farm. “I want to know exactly what you look like.”

  Sylvia hadn’t replied, but hadn’t stood to leave either as she might have had she been elsewhere.

  “I’ll never learn your face because I know you don’t like to be touched.” Julia was smiling as she said this.

  “How do you know I don’t like to be touched?” Sylvia had been somewhat taken aback, though Julia’s smile had told her that the remark was not an accusation. On the wooden table between them lay the tactile landscape Julia had wanted: a view across Barley Bay from the wharf at Cutnersville; that and a tactile of the route from the bus station to the end of the wharf. It had only been recently that Julia had explained that, in spite of her blindness, she was interested in views, in vistas. “Panoramas,” she had said, motioning Sylvia to follow her into the parlour where she ran her hand across the glass that covered a narrow framed picture of cows grazing near a river. She not only wanted to know how to get to a place, she had explained, she wanted to be able to see what was in the vicinity.

  “I know by the sound of your footsteps coming up the stairs,” Julia said, “and by the way you place your teacup in the saucer. By the way you remain stiff, motionless in your chair. I know that you are one of those people who don’t like physical contact. You’re shocked,” she continued, laughing. “You had no idea how much of yourself you give away.”

  Julia had been the only person whom Sylvia had made an effort to visit, until Andrew. At first she had driven out to the farm at Malcolm’s suggestion, to deliver the maps that he had encouraged her to make, maps that described the things in the physical world that Julia couldn’t see. Later, she made the trip simply because Julia interested her and because she had felt so comfortable in the company of someone who was unable to look at her. These had been her first purely social encounters and she was surprised by how much she enjoyed them.

  “The problem,” she had begun uncertainly, “is just that I can’t ever classify touch, can’t seem to understand degrees of contact. All accidents, all injuries, involve contact, impact, don’t they? What is the difference, really, between touch and collision?”

  “But, of course, there’s a difference,” Julia had said.

  “I know that, but often it doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  Julia’s hands had moved across the surface of the pine table as if testing the familiarity of the grain. Her irises were soft, opaque, as beautiful and distant as planets. “There is being touched, and then there is touching, and attached to both of these things there is intention.”

  “But how do you know for sure what is intended?” As a child Sylvia had been certain that her mother’s few attempts at embraces had been meant to restrain her, to cause her to stop doing something, or to move her in a direction other than the one she had wanted to take. “I like,” Sylvia began, “to count on things being the same way they were the last time I saw them. Sometimes I think that the world is just too crowded, too full of people rearranging things, touching each other, making changes.”

  “It’s like that for the newly sighted,” Julia said quietl
y, then added, “or so I’ve heard. They are sometimes unable to cope with the profuseness of whatever is out there in the perceived world. Many of them apparently want to go back … back to blindness.” She paused, thinking. “Perhaps there is something comforting about being able to choose a view rather than having it thrust upon you, to choose a view and then to touch a map. Maybe I’m more fortunate than I know.”

  Sylvia had watched as Julia sat back and relaxed in her chair. How wonderful she had looked right then, sitting beside the kitchen window, her blond hair and translucent skin and eyes making her seem ageless despite her forty-some years. She had been the first person Sylvia had wanted to spend time with, the first person, apart from Malcolm, with whom she had felt safe.

  When Sylvia stood at the door that day preparing to leave, Julia had lifted one of her pale arms and had asked Sylvia to touch it. “Put your hand there,” she had said, “just above my wrist.” Sylvia hesitated. Then she placed her palm on the milk-white skin. “See how naturally your fingers curl around the shape?” Julia continued. “Human beings were made to touch one another.”

  Sylvia was surprised by the smoothness and warmth of her friend’s arm. But then everything about Julia was soft, pliable. As she walked away from the farmhouse she thought about how Julia navigated through life. There were the maps, of course, and the cane, the tools she used for unfamiliar places. But the way she moved around the furniture, the obstacles in the rooms of her house, was so fluid, so filled with grace it was as if the structure of her body were made of some other substance altogether, something more forgiving than bone.