A Map of Glass (39 page)

“So it was you who found the Alzheimer’s patient, the one in the ice,” he said to Jerome. “They often get lost like that and come to a bad end. It’s always a tragedy… but what can anyone do?”

Jerome remained silent.

“I’ve often wondered if they think they know where they are going when they wander off, if they have a destination in mind, and then forget all about their original intention. But by that stage it’s almost impossible to determine what is in their minds. Must have been a shock for you to find him like that.”

“Yes,” said Jerome, “I was out there alone… but fortunately I had my cell phone with me. I went –” He stopped speaking. Why was he revealing this pointless information? He didn’t like the direction the conversation was going but did not know how to introduce another subject.

“I suppose she… I suppose Sylvia told you that she knew him, this… Andrew…” Malcolm paused, trying to come up with the last name.

“Andrew Woodman,” said Jerome. “His name was Andrew Woodman.”

“That’s right, Andrew Woodman. I suppose she told you she was his lover, had been his lover for some time.”

“I don’t think we should talk about this,” said Jerome, his eyes narrowing. “Whatever Sylvia said, she said it to me… in private.”

“Well, he wasn’t,” said Malcolm, “he wasn’t her lover. He would never have known her, never have met her. She read about him, about the discovery of his body, last year at the same time that she read about you. It happened like this once before: she collided with someone on the street, and he was her lover too, though she claims it was the same man – one lover encountered several times.”

Jerome turned away from Malcolm, then looked at him suspiciously from the corner of his eyes. He totally distrusted this man, believed he could sense the anger brimming in him, though his manner was friendly, polite. From the next room he could hear the sound of Mira’s voice, and he wished that she were here with him.

“It’s the condition,” Malcolm continued. “It sometimes manifests itself this way in a kind of hallucinogenic imagination. It’s quite rare, but it does happen. It’s a sort of inversion of the way the symptoms usually appear. Sylvia is particularly interesting for this reason. And she is, has always been, such a reader, she has trouble, you see, separating reality from what happens in books. We avoid films for this reason.” He smiled. “Not that there are many films to avoid where we live.”

Jerome was aware that his heart had begun to pound disturbingly. More than anything he wanted to be apart from this man, away from the things he was telling him. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, indicating the chair. Sylvia’s chair, he thought.

“No, no… thank you. We’ll have to be going. It takes a couple of hours to get back to the County. And we’ll be wanting to get back early. Sylvia will be quite tired” – Malcolm looked around the studio with what Jerome believed was disapproval – “after all this.”

During the silence that followed, Malcolm walked around the room inspecting the various images tacked on the wall. He stopped when he came to the reproduction of the Flemish painting. “Is this one of yours?” he asked.

Jerome did not move from the place where he was standing. “No,” he said, “that’s a poster of a Patinir,
Saint Jerome in the Wilderness
, sixteenth century, couldn’t possibly be mine.” There was a hint of contempt in his voice. This man knows nothing, he thought, and then, for just a moment, he remembered Branwell’s distant blue landscapes.

“I know so little about art,” said Malcolm, as if sensing the route Jerome’s mind had taken, “but what with Sylvia and my practice I haven’t the time to explore much of anything else.”

Surely this man in the flawless trench coat, the expensive silk scarf, the ridiculous toe rubbers didn’t expect sympathy. The very notion that this might be the case set Jerome’s teeth on edge; he had no time at all for sympathy-seekers. He recalled his father’s whining, his pleading, his uncanny ability to make his mother really believe that everything – the drink, the disappearing money, the unexplained absences, the sudden bouts of abuse – was her fault and, by association, by the mere fact that he was her son, his fault as well. His mother had trained him early on, so early on he had no memory of the training, to step carefully around his father in certain moods and at certain levels of inebriation. As a young child he had feared all this. As a teenager he had hated it. Now, suddenly, he remembered his father baiting his mother across a table filled with the dinner she had cooked to please him, and how, unable to bear one more minute of it, he had sprung to his feet prepared if necessary to beat the weakness and cruelty out of him. But his mother had intervened, had taken his father’s side, and, by the time Jerome had exploded out of the apartment, his mother was holding the sobbing broken man his father had become in her arms, apologizing for her son. “Your son,” was the way his father had always put it when registering a complaint, overlooking, it seemed to Jerome, the fact that he was his son as well.

Jerome became aware that Malcolm had begun to speak again. “She confessed her imaginary life to me after she read the item in the paper, after she had read about you,” he paused, cleared his throat, “and about him. She couldn’t stop herself from speaking, actually, couldn’t help but confess; she was that distraught. Just because it didn’t happen does not mean that it does not, at certain times, seem real to her…” For the first time Malcolm showed some emotion, there was a tremor in his voice. “She has suffered a great deal.”

“Yes,” said Jerome. He was standing as far away as possible from the man, his arms crossed protectively over his lower ribs, his head down. Not since he had been a teenager had he shown such visible signs of sullenness, and he was peripherally aware of this and oddly embarrassed by it. Sensitivity, he thought, yes, his father had also been able to manifest sensitivity when it suited him, when he had something to gain from it. Any sign of male adult tears caused Jerome to close down completely; he had no faith in these displays. Only Mira’s tears could move him, but even then, even with her, he could feel his guts clenching once the tears began. He could feel himself wanting to escape.

He decided to speak. “It seems to me,” he said coldly, “that you are suggesting that she, that Sylvia, is telling lies.”

“Oh no,” Malcolm raised one hand in protest, “she believes, sometimes, that these episodes really took place. But it’s impossible.” He reddened slightly. “You must understand,” he said, “she has no real physical,
we
have no real physical life. It’s simply not possible, not with the condition. I accepted that when I married her.” He looked at Jerome as if gauging whether to go further.

Jerome was damned if he was going to continue this conversation, going to ask about their physical life, or demand that this doctor explain the ridiculous condition he had been making reference to.

“I love her, you see,” the doctor continued, “and that includes accepting everything she is. Everything that is wrong with her.”

“I don’t think there is anything wrong with her,” said Jerome. “I just don’t believe that. None of this is her fault.” He turned and walked into the other room, where he found Mira bent over a stuffed plastic bag and Sylvia sitting on the futon, her lap filled with colorful ribbons and scraps.

Both women looked up when he entered, Mira with a length of sparkling rickrack hanging from one small delicate hand as if she had been caught in the act of inventing lightning.

They were about to depart. Malcolm stood by the door clasping the fabric-filled plastic bag as if it were a large belly that he had miraculously grown in the last few minutes. Jerome was still refusing to look at him.

Sylvia was bending over the handbag into which she had placed the journals. She was looking for something, a frown of concentration in the center of her forehead. Swimmer, unnoticed by her, was threading in and out between her legs. “Oh, here it is,” said Sylvia, pulling out a thick envelope.

Jerome approached her then, took her arm, and walked her to the opposite side of the room where the drawings she had noticed were pinned on the wall. He had added two or three to the set since then and on a bench beneath these were some of the photographs he had taken on the island – developed just that morning before Sylvia’s arrival. “You haven’t seen these ones yet,” he said. “This is what the floor of the island looked like,” he told her, “up close, under all that snow.”

“What’s this?” she asked, peering closely, then pointing to the feathers and the blood.

“Just a bird. Swimmer ate most of it.” Cock Robin entered his mind. “Swimmer killed him, not a sparrow.”

Sylvia smiled, and as she smiled Jerome leaned closer to her and whispered, “Don’t go back with him. Stay here, stay anywhere, but don’t go back. He’s got it… he’s got
you
all wrong.”

“Does he?” asked Sylvia.

“He doesn’t believe you. He thinks you are inventing everything.”

“Oh, that,” said Sylvia, smiling again. “Yes, it’s just like that. Nothing harmful really, just the way it is.”

“You could stay in the city,” Jerome persisted. “If money is a problem you could probably get paid for making those maps.”

“Not very much,” said Sylvia, still smiling. “It’s mostly volunteer work. No, no I have to go back.”

“Why?” asked Jerome. “
Why
?” In the background he could hear Mira laughing at something Malcolm had said. Little did she know, he thought. Everything in him now wanted to protect this woman.

“Because people do what they have to.”

“Just tell me one thing,” said Jerome, his eyes burning, “just one thing then.”

“Yes?”

“Was there ever a condition?”

“Oh Jerome,” said Sylvia softly, sadly, “there is always, always a condition.” She turned slowly away from him and walked across the room to join her husband at the door.

Just before stepping over the threshold, Sylvia handed the envelope she had been holding to Jerome. “The answer to what happened to Branwell and Ghost is in this envelope. Or, at least the way I imagine it. It’s not long, but still a kind of final chapter, I suppose.”

They drove out of the city with excruciating slowness in the thick of rush hour, silence a third but strangely benign presence in the car. Once, when they were halted by gridlock on a major thoroughfare, Malcolm pointed out a garbage truck inching down the opposite side of the street, stopping every twenty feet or so to pick up trash. “What the hell are they doing collecting garbage at this time of the day?” he asked with irritation, not expecting an answer.

Sylvia glanced over her shoulder to look at something as ordinary as a garbage truck, even though her thoughts were still with Andrew, still with the way she had been able to reconstruct his mouth just a few minutes before, the curve of his brows, and how this reconstruction had felt smooth and inevitable, like recalling with pleasure piano music or an old poem one had memorized in one’s childhood. She was about to let her mind slide back into Andrew’s embrace when something caught her eye. A young man, holding onto a steel bar with one hand, rode on the back of the truck, and each time the vehicle stopped he swung easily down to the pavement, picked up a plastic bag with the sweep of an arm, then tossed this bag over his head into the bin, the motion so fluid and filled with such grace, it was as perfect as a dance. Sylvia was able to watch this young man, this repeated gesture, for three or four minutes until the truck moved beyond her peripheral vision. The thought struck her that if she and Andrew had had a son early on, he would have been about that age. By twisting in her seat she might have been able to see more of the dance, but the traffic had begun to move again, the light had changed.

“Youth,” she thought as she was driven away, “how beautiful.”

M
ira was holding onto Jerome as he wept, shaking in her arms like the child he had never permitted himself to be. Her own eyes were filled with tears, but she would not let herself go fully into his sorrow. This was his territory, his arena; he had opened the door to show her, but he did not want her to enter these dark spaces and she knew this and loved him harder for it.

After Sylvia had left, he had kicked a cardboard box across the room and punched his fist through the temporary wall that marked the bedroom space. “I want her to get
away
!” he had yelled at an amazed Mira. “I want her to be finally free of it!” Mira, her eyes wide and mouth partly open, had remained standing as if she would be glued forever to the time when a young man she thought she had known had punched the wall.

“She wasn’t your mother, Jerome,” she had said quietly.

“You know
nothing
about my mother,” he had shouted, and then, once he had seen and fully registered her shocked expression, he had added more softly, “but, goddamn it, she was another chance.”

He had told Mira then about the nights he had spent listening to his father roam the apartment like an angry nocturnal beast, the sounds of bottles breaking, his father collapsing on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, the smell of urine and vomit. He told her about the long absences, the lost jobs, the threats, the promises, certain humiliating appearances at school functions. He told her about his mother’s withdrawal, how eventually by the time he was eleven or twelve he couldn’t reach her even when she was in the room sitting by his side.

“There was never any past for her,” he said. “It was all eaten away by my father’s addiction, which was so huge a part of her life that everything else paled in comparison. She never told me about the farm where she grew up, she never told me who her people were, where they had immigrated from, why we were sort of Catholics, why she had called me Jerome. There were some old dishes around for a while that she said had belonged to her grandmother, but he destroyed them… he destroyed them on purpose. I think he broke them to smash up her past, to shatter anything that didn’t relate specifically to him. There were no photo albums, no pictures of anything at all.”

He told her about looking down from the balcony at the twisted and wrecked shape of his bicycle in the dirty snow, and then that same shape in the dead spring grass, each day after school, until one day when he looked it was gone. It was after he spoke about the bicycle that he had begun to weep.