Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  And then he thought of the drive through the countryside to this small county museum, which had been situated, with the intention of pleasing both, between the two major towns of the surrounding vicinity. The students, nervous and silent in such close quarters with their teacher, had offered little interference to the flow of his consciousness and he had almost become absorbed by the rush of the landscape as it flashed past the windows of the van. A strong wind had confused the angle of fields of tall grass and had set the normally well-organized trees lurching against the sky. Laundry had become desperate splashes of colour in farm-yards. Even the predictable black-and-white of docile cows seemed temporary, as if they might be sent spiralling towards fence wire like so much tumbleweed. The restlessness of this insistent motion, this constant churning hyperactivity, had distracted the drawing master, but he had felt the strong, hard-edged responsibility of the highway to such an extent that even now, when he observed the landscape through the safe, confining frame of the window, he was somehow unable to grasp it. And he turned back towards the interior of the museum.

  Here he sketched, for his own amusement and possibly for the amusement of his children at home, two or three elderly puppets that hung dejectedly from strings attached to flat wooden crosses. Completing, with a few well-executed strokes, the moronic wide-eyed stare of the last one, he cleaned the nib of his pen with a rag that he carried with him for that purpose, and prepared to return to his class. Then his eye was caught by a large white partition set back against the left-hand corner of the room. He walked over to it with a kind of idle curiosity and peered around its edge.

  There, awaiting either repair or display case, and hopelessly stacked together like tumbling hydro towers, were five Victorian wicker wheelchairs. A few had lost, either through over-use or neglect, the acceptable curve of their shape and sagged over their wheels like fat women. One had retained its shape but the woven grid of its back was interrupted by large gaping holes. The small front wheels of another had become permanently locked into a pigeon-toed position through decades of lack of oil. All in all they appeared to be at least as crippled as their absent occupants must have been—as if by some magic process each individual’s handicap had been mysteriously transferred to his chair. The drawing master was fascinated. He had found his subject matter.

  An hour later he had completed five small drawings. They were, as he knew, his best. The crazy twisted personality of each chair distributed itself with ease across the surface of the paper. Expressed in his fine line their abandoned condition became wistfully personal, as sad as forsaken toys in the attic or tricycles in the basement, childless for years. Vacant coffins, open graves, funeral wreaths—they were all there, competing with go-carts and red wagons. The drawing master carefully placed his precious drawings in his jacket pocket. When he arrived home that evening he would mat and frame them and put them under glass. But now he would stroll casually over to his pupils, who had dispersed and were wandering around the room gazing absently into display cases.

  Except for the one young man who seemed still to be involved in the rendering of the dead bird. The drawing master approached him and bent over his shoulder to offer his usual words of quiet criticism—perhaps a few words about light and shade, or something about texture. He drew back, however, astonished. There before him on the paper was a perfectly drawn skeleton of a bird, and surrounding that and sometimes covering it or being covered by it, in a kind of crazy spatial ambiguity, drawn in by the student with the blunt ends of a pocketful of crayons, was the mad, turbulent landscape. It shuddered and heaved and appeared to be germinating from the motionless structure of the bird whose bones the young man had sensed beneath dust and feathers. It needed no glass to protect it, no frame to confine it. And it was as confused and disordered and wonderful as everything the drawing master had chosen to ignore.

  SEVEN CONFESSIONS

  Merry-Go-Round with Approaching Storm

  GLUTTONY

  I was already hungry by the time we entered our room at about four in the afternoon. Even though we had had seven different kinds of cheese, a loaf of very good bread, some regional pâté, and a full bottle of red Burgundy at our picnic lunch, I was definitely hungry. Besides, I could smell activity in the kitchen below, could even hear utensils being moved around. All that stainless steel.

  The room was familiar, one-star, French. Charm verging on kitsch, floating roses on the wallpaper, the inevitable bidet, and a bed, supposed to be a double but with an indentation in the middle, where I imagined hundreds of lonely single men had slept, leaving their permanent mark.

  “Why not women?” he asked when I pointed this out to him.

  “Women don’t go to hotels when they’re lonely,” I said, “at least not alone.”

  Outside, the town was very busy. Diesel fumes hung in the air. Trucks delivered merchandise, waiters rushed from table to table at the café across the street, swarms of motorcycles buzzed like angry bees.

  “They sound like bees,” I said.

  “Who?” he replied.

  I looked at the lace curtains. They were as precise as snow-flakes on either side of the glass and as indistinguishable from each other, except at close range. I knew that when we went for a walk (we always went for a walk), I would be unable to pick out our window from the opposite side of the street. That’s the way it always was. I would try and be wrong, because the curtains always looked the same.

  He called the desk and asked about dinner. “Eight o’clock,” he said as he hung up the phone. At that moment, the table in the hotel restaurant presented itself to my imagination; those plates in front of me, two, sometimes three on top of each other, sometimes with flowers painted on them, sometimes with peacocks. And heavy tableware, almost too large for my mouth, so that soup could be finished in three spoonfuls. I tried not to spill. But he didn’t care, left evidence of each course on the table-cloth. Nothing much, but still I noticed and wondered about hotel laundries.

  I opened the door of the large wooden wardrobe, looking for real pillows. We could never sleep with our heads propped on those funny loglike bolsters that the French somehow managed to wrap the bottom sheet around. As I reached up to the top shelf where two square feather pillows were waiting, empty hangers jangled on a wooden pole. This hotel doesn’t care about their hangers, I thought. I had been in other, less trusting establishments where the hangers were made out of stainless steel and could not be removed without a hacksaw. Until then I had never considered stealing a hanger, but when I saw them dangling there, irremovable, I could suddenly imagine myself slinking across a parking lot at two o’clock in the morning, delicate metal objects jingling like wind chimes in my hand. Sirens in the distance.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” he suggested.

  Going somewhere from one of those hotels always meant down. Returning always meant up. So we went down the hall, down the stairs, and down the street. Down, down, into the centre of town. Here, as in most other French towns of any size whatsoever, was a narrow, park-like area situated in the centre of the main boulevard. It was edged by a series of strange trees, pollarded into grotesque shapes. In front of these, facing the traffic, green benches were placed at regular intervals. The ground was covered with a thin layer of gravel from which a workman, dressed in blue, was industriously raking footprints and the outlines of a child’s game. The low sun threw the shadows of iron wastebaskets to such a length that they touched as if reaching hands toward each other.

  Walking through the middle of this towards the end of town, he decided that he liked the trees.

  “I like these trees,” he said, “because they do not look to me at all like trees. They look like the skeletons of umbrellas in the dump. They look like they have had arthritis for a long, long time. They look like spiders with tumours on their elbows.” (By this time he was setting up his tripod.) “They look like what the bone structure of octopi would look like if octopi had bones. I am very, very fond of these trees.”

 
; “I think,” I replied, “that they should leave it all alone.” I meant the trees, the footprints, the child’s game, the waste-baskets’ shadows.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  This kind of question was designed by him to put a stop to any monologue that might have been cooking in my head. He could sense these monologues in advance, knew when they were about to come creeping into a walk, or a meal, or even a drive in the car. The trouble with the monologues, he had told me, was that although they started quietly, they quickly escalated, turning from apparent reverie to obvious accusation. This bored him. He hated my monologues. Put a stop to them, was his motto, before they go too far. Nip them in the bud with unanswerable questions. This time the echoes asked, Why do they do it? Why do they do it? They became fainter and fainter, however, and finally disappeared altogether.

  While he photographed the trees, I sat down on one of the green benches and searched through my cluttered purse for a pen and a piece of scrap paper. I was going to sketch the stone wall on the other side of the street. I had never done this before. I had never sketched anything. But now I wanted to. Not that the wall was worth sketching; it was just that there was absolutely nothing linear about its surface, making it impossible for anyone without skill to render it at all. Now I wanted to try something impossible, something I could work on for a while and then throw away saying, this is impossible. Something where the outcome was certain.

  He had attached a telephoto lens to his camera and had removed it from the tripod. The camera was suspended from a leather strap around his neck and his hands were clasped behind his back. He looked like a soldier at ease. But I knew what he was going to do. He was going to photograph the particularly gnarled parts of the trees where the branches bent in peculiar directions. He had always been very interested in detail. Once he had even shot a series of hotel curtains up close—so that you could see the differences.

  “This is impossible,” I said as he wandered around clicking the camera. Then I crumpled up my piece of scrap paper and threw it in one of the metal wastebaskets.

  “What was that?” he asked absently.

  “A telephone number,” I answered. I wasn’t exactly lying. There was a telephone number on that scrap of paper, on the other side. I had no idea whose.

  The sun got lower. We began walking again towards the end of town.

  “I like this kind of late afternoon light,” he said. “It picks out detail, intensifies colour.”

  I looked down at my shoes which seemed a little intensified, then back at my shadow, which seemed the same, except that it was longer.

  “Not too much detail in a shadow,” I commented.

  “No,” he agreed.

  I began to feel even hungrier than I had in the hotel room and remembered another kind of plate that they sometimes had in restaurants, besides the ones with flowers or the ones with the peacocks. These were usually white and had a picture of the hotel on them along with its name. I was trying to remember whether the picture was sketched in black or grey and finally decided that it was probably black in the original but had turned to grey because people had dragged knives and forks across it year after year. This could happen to any picture on any plate. I’d noticed otherwise normal peacocks with their heads or tails worn away or flowers without petals, but I’d never really thought about it until now.

  “Notice how the light picks out the detail on that wall,” he was saying. “Makes it almost linear. It’s only in this kind of light,” he went on, “that even moss can throw a shadow.” He set up his tripod again, preparing to photograph the shadows of lichen.

  What kind of light do they have in hotel restaurants, I wondered. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a shadow there. And yet they were filled with waiters, tables, chairs, clients; perpendicular forms quite capable of making shadows. Still, I’d never noticed any. And the food, as far as I could remember, never cast a shadow on the china. I turned so that mine was in front of me, so that it bent when it reached the wall. Then I turned again so that I could see the very end of town and my shadow was behind me once again.

  At the end of the town something was blinking and flashing. At first, because I thought it was an accident, I began to anticipate sirens. But then, as I looked harder, shading the sun from my eyes, I discovered that it was simply a merry-go-round. Part of neither a carnival nor a fair; it was all by itself, occupying a vacant lot, just after the architecture stopped and just before the flat expanse of fields began. The lights were to attract attention, to make it seem more important than it was, and to cause people as far away as myself to notice it.

  “When you’re finished,” I said, “let’s go down there, down to the merry-go-round.”

  “Is there one?” he asked, changing lenses again. “Why don’t you go down there? And then, by the time you come back up here I’ll be finished.” He focused on the moss. “This light, you see, is absolutely perfect here right now.”

  I walked right across the area that the blue workman had been raking, leaving my footprints there. Soon I could distinguish the music that was being played while the merry-go-round went round and round. It was American rock and roll recorded by a French group who obviously didn’t understand the lyrics but who liked the melody anyway. Won’t you come out, won’t you come out tonight, they sang. As I got closer I could see that several of the horses were unoccupied, as were two miniature chariots. A group of three or four children stood off to one side eating pink candy floss and waiting for the next ride so that they could climb on board. Their mothers gossiped in another group a few feet away. Directly behind them a brightly painted truck was parked, evidence that this was not a permanent merry-go-round, but one that would, more than likely, move on to another town the following morning.

  The day the merry-go-round came to town, I said aloud to myself as I watched the magenta, fuchsia and lime-green lights flash on and off under a bright blue sky. The phrase, I decided, sounded like the beginning of a children’s story about skipping school or running away from home. One with gypsies and caravans and babies being born in trunks, where one day you’re at a plain brown desk and the next you’re walking a tightrope. I would have told him all this if he had been there with me. But he might have stopped me. It might have been the beginning of another accusing monologue.

  There I was, right at the end of town, standing in front of a tacky little merry-go-round that was singing it will be all right if you just come out tonight in a thick French accent, Dayglo horses going up and down, round and round. I watched and listened until the perfect light abruptly disappeared behind a totally unexpected bank of black, black clouds which had moved, like a dangerous monologue, over the rim of the horizon.

  When I turned to walk back up the boulevard I had something else to say out loud to myself. Merry-go-round, I whispered, with approaching storm.

  I was beginning to feel faint with hunger.

  Surprisingly, the plates in the restaurant had nothing on them at all except food. Still, as you finished each course you could see the tiny etched lines that had been made, over the years, by people moving knives and forks. We had leek soup, followed by escargots and were now working our way through veau à la crème. The pangs in my stomach had subsided and the wine was making me want to talk.

  “It would have made a good photo,” I said, “that merry-go-round with that horrible black cloud behind it. And if only you could have got the music too, it would have been terrific.”

  “The trouble is,” he said, “the merry-go-round would have just looked like a merry-go-round with a big black cloud behind it; it wouldn’t have looked like anything else.”

  “No,” I agreed, “I guess it wouldn’t.”

  The pastry cart arrived. We each chose something different so that we could compare and contrast. The light sugary texture was a shock to the palate after the richness of the veal.

  Suddenly every single light went out, all over the restaurant.

  “It’s only the storm,” he exp
lained from somewhere on the other side of the table.

  I just went on eating. Eating and eating in the dark.

  Bossu

  LUST

  When he was a child his mother must have warmed his flesh in flannel, pressed his mouth to her breast. At that time his skin might have spread smoothly enough over his frame to camouflage his deformity. And because he had not yet learned to walk, he would be unaware that the burden of it would be his to carry, like permanent baggage, forever. Since then, no one could have touched this enormous, bent man who passes, every day, on the street beyond my windows. The surface of his body has been free of contact. Neither handshake nor embrace has visited the crooked landscape of its vast geography. His sweat and his heat have always been his own.

  I have chosen my exile in a foreign village; a place where, knowing little of the language, I’m unable to eavesdrop on the lives of my neighbours. I have brought my anonymity here. He stumbles into my self-absorption, collides with my neutrality. And never knows it. Passing me, passing me by.

  At night, when the villagers turn their lights out, an absolute darkness fills the air. The atmosphere becomes so thick I want to claw my way through it towards some sparkling surface. So I often move out to the stars at night, let them buzz in my brain until I grow dizzy, my lungs filled with black air and I stagger up the stone stairs to my bed. There I can close my eyes and bring the constellations back to me, allowing my bloodstream to fill with glitter.