A Map of Glass (37 page)

Jerome bent down and snatched the cards from the floor, as if he were a gambler sweeping up a suit of cards. “Did he have to drink so much that you could smell it coming from his pores day and night?” he said. “Did he have to take us down with him?”

“Yes,” said Sylvia. “He probably had to do all of that.”

“Did he have to kill my mother? The whole thing, the drinking, the humiliation, the crummy apartments, his sordid death, all of it killed her… and not quickly either… it killed her by degrees. She didn’t last two years after he was gone.”

“No,” said Sylvia uncertainly. “He didn’t have to do that. But she, she likely had to die for him.”

Jerome stood, postcards in hand, looking directly at Sylvia, and she willed herself to look back. The air was thick with anticipation, as if anything at all might happen and she was momentarily aware of the risks two people took simply by being alone together in a room. Murder, love, collision, caress, were they not all part of the same family?

Jerome turned away. “I’ll take these back now,” he said, looking at the postcards in his hand. “I’ll put these away.”

When Jerome returned to the room, his expression was neutral, removed. He sat on the couch and folded his arms over his chest. “My childhood,” he said. “I don’t know why I brought it up. It’s all over anyway. It’s finished. I shouldn’t have bothered you with any of it.”

“Please,” Sylvia said, leaning forward. “I wasn’t bothered. I’m glad you told me.” She smiled. “Now I will be able to remember that I knew you,” she added, then looked away, feeling almost shy. “How little, in the final analysis, we really know about another person.”

Jerome raised his eyebrows at this and nodded. “But, still,” he said, reconsidering, “after reading Andrew’s journals, I think maybe landscape – place – makes people more knowable. Or it did, in the past. It seems there’s not much of that left now. Everyone’s moving, and the landscape, well, the landscape is disappearing.”

“Have I mentioned that the old cottage was approached by way of a grove of trees?” Sylvia asked. “These were planted a century ago to line the driveway that swung up toward the marvelous entranceway of Maurice Woodman’s old house. Andrew and I would have to walk past the lightning-struck burnt foundations of that house in order to meet.”

In the early days, she’d often had to walk though a herd of staring cows as she moved along the edge of the hill. There was always a soft wind, an echo of the breezes that would have touched the shore of the prehistoric lake, and she had always stopped to look at the view, which included the village below, rolling farmland and woodlots to the west, the charmed surface of the lake in all directions, and the arm of her peninsular County bending around the waters at the eastern horizon. Then, after passing through the dying orchard, and walking farther, she would begin to sense a shift in the land underfoot, as she moved past the scattered fieldstones, and in some spots the vestiges of the walls and crumbling mortar that were the last remains of the foundation of the great burnt house, the grassy basins of its cellars and kitchens. Andrew had done some digging in these basins and had come across a few ceramic marbles, ones he believed that his own father, T.J. Woodman, must have played with as a boy, and a porcelain cup and saucer, miraculously undamaged. But most exciting to her were the large, smooth, oddly shaped pieces of melted glass, which he had come across, evidence that the rumor about the glass ballroom floor was true.

“It was
true
?” exclaimed Jerome when she told him all this. “The artist Robert Smithson would have been fascinated by that. I keep thinking all the time about a piece he made. It was titled
Map of Glass
, I’ve never known if he meant a map of the properties of glass, or if was referring to a glass map, which would then be, of course, breakable. But even he… I don’t think even he would have thought about melted glass. A ballroom with a glass floor, on fire and then
melting
. That’s just wonderful!”

Sylvia laughed at Jerome’s reaction. “Andrew told me that lightning striking sand can cause glass to form spontaneously. I never knew that, did you?”

“No,” said Jerome. “No, I never knew that.”

“Once, toward the end of that last summer, Andrew said that he wanted me to think about the great cities of Earth, to think about them not being there any more, about them never having been there at all: the forests of Manhattan Island, the untouched riverbanks of the Seine or the Thames, the clear water moving through reeds near the shore, the unspoiled valleys that existed before agriculture, then architecture, then industry changed them.”

They had been looking through the windows of the cabin into the forest as he spoke and occasionally deer would drift by, soft and brownish grey, between the tall trunks of the trees. Andrew once pointed out that the earth colors of their coats echoed a patch of yellow dried grass, or a pale grey log, brown bark, or the rust of fallen pine needles.

As he had told her this, every part of her was touched by his voice. There had been the warmth of his skin against hers, and the delivery of syllables all through the sunny afternoons. Later when the rains came, the sound of water falling through the holes in the roof into the pans they had placed here and there on the floor was like punctuation marking the cadence of his speech.

“You, Jerome, may never know what it is to enter another kind of partnership, what is given to you in such circumstances. Somehow, neither person leaves a footprint, casts a shadow. We remained utterly unrecorded, unmarked.”

You
, she remembered Andrew once saying, playfully bumping his shoulder against hers,
all the time you come to this place, climb this hill, simply because I am here. I don’t want to leave you
, she had said.
But you have to
, he had replied.
You have to leave me so that you can come back again.

He had begun to seem older, softer in body and in spirit, vague in some ways, and therefore kinder. His moods were no longer as swift and sharp in their arrivals and departures, and his love for her – if that’s what it was – carried with it no unsettling urgency. Yes, he was kinder, and she, for her part, felt a depth of tenderness for him that at times almost overwhelmed her. It was like a long silken banner or a column of smoke drifting in a warm wind, this tenderness she felt, something hovering above them that changed the air. The months would pass, autumn would arrive, and things would become confused, painful between them as he began to become lost. Once, as she walked away she turned to wave and she saw him framed by the open cottage door. There he was, standing quite still on the stoop, as exposed as she had been all those years ago when they had met on the edge of traffic. He raised one arm: a gesture of welcome and warning and farewell. The sun had come out in late afternoon and the surroundings were starkly lit. His eyes were almost closed. He was wincing in the face of the glare.

“There was warmth,” Sylvia said, “and the sense that while we held each other we were, in turn, being held by the rocks and trees we could see from the windows and the creeks and springs we could sometimes hear running through the valley. And then there was the view from the edge of the hill, a view of distant water and far shores, and a few villages positioned like toys around the bay.”

For just a moment it occurred to her that she might actually have died, that she and Andrew might have somehow died together and that all this recounting of facts and legends to Jerome – combined with her life in the hotel – was the fabric of an afterlife that would go on and on like this, day after day, for eternity. Then she remembered Malcolm and how he had now entered this afterlife.

She placed the mug of tea Jerome had given her on the floor. “By early autumn he had begun to say odd things, things I knew he had never said before; at least he had never said them before to me. He began to speak about people I didn’t know as if I knew them. Sometimes he was quite passionately angry with some person or another and he would pour his heart out about this without explaining who the person was, or even what the situation was that caused the anger. I would listen; I would listen without questions because I couldn’t bear to interrupt in any way this miraculous openness: I was so eager for any kind of information that might deepen my knowledge of him. As the autumn progressed, though, the anger was starting to spread, and by November it was beginning to include me. But then it would vanish as soon as it arrived. He would simply stop in midsentence and embrace me. Once or twice he wept at that moment. And,” Sylvia paused here, unsure whether to mention this, but wanting to articulate it so that it would be real, a fact, “often, during those last months, often he wept when we made love.”

Jerome was staring at the wall, embarrassed likely. To him she would have been always a much older woman, one with few rights in the territory of sexual love. She must remember that.

“It wasn’t until then,” Sylvia told him, “that I fully realized that not only had the inside of the cottage deteriorated but the gate that I remembered at the top of the lane was gone altogether and the cows were gone as well. What had been pasture was now scrub bush, almost impassable except for one narrow, winding path. The surviving orchard trees were choked and twisted and the view was visible only in certain empty spots. I barely knew where I was. I couldn’t recall the wind that was tossing the trees; my memories of this forest had to do with seasonal color, never with motion.” Bright green of spring, the bruised white of winter, she thought, wondering where the line had come from. In the past, she had believed the trees had been entirely still, a stage set, frozen in time.

Arriving one November morning, she had taken off her coat, had laid it over the back of a wicker chair that was grey with dust. The room had been cool and there was a faint smell of mice beneath the stronger smell of wood smoke.
Aftermath
was the word that crept into her mind; the windows were foggy, clouds of dust had gathered under the furniture. Cobwebs swung from the beams. This was the territory of aftermath.

Annabelle’s painting was askew on the wall. She had walked across the room to straighten it.

“Annabelle’s painting,” she had said.

He hadn’t replied, had moved instead – just as he always had in the past – slowly across the room toward her.

“In the beginning there was this difference between us, Jerome: I believed that anything that I permitted to happen to me would go on happening… forever. He, being fully engaged with human life, believed, I think, that when something stopped happening, it was over. Not that it wouldn’t happen again, just that this particular session was over, and that there would be something else taking place, something else that was equally worthy of his attention. His view of life was sequential, symphonic. But I could tell this view had changed.”

Near the very end before he had stopped talking altogether, Andrew had spoken about nothing but furniture. These were the only nouns that appeared to interest him. At first Sylvia had thought he was speaking metaphorically, something he had often done in the past. “Look at the… table,” he would say, when they stood near the window, surveying the view of the lake, “look at the mirror.” A table laid out before them. A mirror of the sky. It made some sense to her. She didn’t question it, or him, or the fact that he was not saying the lake was like a mirror, like a table under the sky.

“How did you lose him?” Jerome was asking.

Sylvia sat entirely still, her face averted. “How can I describe those last meetings to you, Jerome? I who had spent years attempting to interpret his most fractional gesture, his most subtle shift of mood, would find him tremendously altered: unshaven, unbathed, sometimes, even after I’d arrived still expecting me, sometimes not, but in either case, utterly unprepared. Once, as I stepped though the door, he said, ‘Can I help you?’ with a kind of cold courtesy, as if I were a salesperson or a pamphleteer. At times he would look at me with longing for minutes at a stretch, then turn away as if in disgust, or he would swiftly take himself to the opposite corner of the room where he would all but growl at me in anger, refuting every sentence that I spoke. Each phrase began with the negative. ‘Don’t talk to me about the trees,’ he would say. ‘You know nothing about the trees.’ Or, ‘It’s not your lake, don’t speak of it.’ Often he said, ‘We can’t go on with this.’ His tone would fill me with fear, but the reference to ‘this’ could cause temporary relief. ‘This’ was the word that made reference to our connection, our communion. ‘This’ meant that we weren’t finished. Not yet.

“I would remind him of the stories he had told me, attempt to bring the lovely talk back into the room, but he would deny that he had ever told me such stories – ‘You have invented those,’ he would say – and would refer instead to problems he was having with people I had never heard of. They had stolen his wallet, his life, his soul. They had abandoned him in alleyways or on park benches, cast him adrift in a leaking vessel, denied him food and water.

“He would pace like an animal around the room, then peer at me with great suspicion. ‘I am willing,’ he would say, ‘to resolve this here, now, but… What?’ he would plead. ‘What is it?’

“‘Tell me about Annabelle,’ I would say, ‘about Branwell.’ I wanted the family history or, failing that, his descriptions of geological formations, his descriptions of strata.

“‘We will stop,’ he said. ‘We will stop.’

“Then he would cross the room, bury his face in my neck, pull back and show me his face, torn by grief.” Sylvia hesitated, almost unable to continue. “That was when I knew that emotionally he had fully entered me, and that from then on his grief would be my grief, his story my story, his enormous waves of feeling, my feeling. I had felt almost nothing until him, and now I would continue to carry all of the rage and terror and anguish that he would leave behind, that he would forget. And shortly after I understood this, he asked the terrible questions. ‘Could you tell me your name, your date of birth? Could you tell me who you are, what you are doing here?’”