Jane Urquhart Read online

  The following day when Sylvia knocked on the steel door and Jerome opened it and beckoned her inside, she was ushered into a space filled with sound and movement. The young man with the orange hair that she had seen when she first approached the alley was seated on the couch playing a guitar while someone else – someone oddly dressed – was executing a series of awkward gestures in the center of the room. The floor beneath the performer’s feet was covered with a coating of sand into which several circular patterns had been incised by a pointed toe. Sylvia, unnerved by this pantomime, felt as if she was intruding on an act of great secrecy, one that by rights should be enacted in utter privacy, and she was suddenly unsure of the permission she had been granted to be in this place.

  Jerome placed his finger on his lips, then opened his palm in a gesture that Sylvia knew was meant both to silence her and to placate her. Then he raised a small movie camera to his face and turned it in the direction of the performer, who bent at the waist and lifted both arms behind his or her back, then crouched near the floor, hands sweeping through sand. After a few uncomfortable moments during which Sylvia was acutely aware of the buzzing noise of the camera, the music stopped, Jerome placed the camera on the counter beside the sink, and Mira removed the veil from her head.

  “Sorry,” the girl said to Sylvia, “we were just finishing up.”

  The sound of clicking buckles. The orange-haired boy was noisily packing up his guitar. He stood, zipped up an old leather jacket, and lifted the tattered black case from the floor. “I’m off then,” he said.

  “Please,” said Sylvia, “not because I –”

  “Nope,” he said. “Don’t worry…got to go to work.” He glanced at her as he walked out the door, but Sylvia could see that there was no recognition in the look. He would not, this time, call her “Mom” in that condescending tone that was an acknowledgement of her age and demeanor. Not here. Not now that she was known by these young people, now that she was inside.

  “That was Geoff,” said Mira after the door had closed. “He works at the music shop down the street, repairing instruments – guitars mostly, some violins.”

  Jerome had moved to the edge of the sand and was now filming the patterns left there by Mira’s dance steps – if that is what they were. Mira was massaging her head, lifting the short, dark hair that had been pasted to her skull by the headgear.

  “A performance piece,” the girl explained, “though, at the moment I’m still working on it. I have no idea where it’s going.”

  “Where might it be going?” asked Sylvia.

  Mira smiled. “I mean, where it will end up. How it will turn out. We had to repeat it a couple of times because of Swimmer. He kept rubbing up against my legs.” She walked toward the door of the place she called the bedroom, opened it, and released the cat. “We had to lock him up in the end.”

  Today Sylvia would talk about how she met Andrew. She had imagined revealing this episode to Jerome the night before, had envisaged herself in the chair, him on the couch, the story a thread between them. Mira had not been in the picture she had seen in her mind and she began to worry about how she would be able to talk with the girl in the room, with the two of them together and the bond that existed between them so visible, so obvious to her.

  Mira, as if sensing this, pulled her scarf and coat from a hook on the wall, then paused and stood still for a moment. “I wish I could stay,” she said, “but I guess I’ll leave you two alone now.”

  “Poor Mira,” said Jerome. “Off to the salt mines.”

  Mira wound the scarf around her neck. “Yes, the salt mines,” she said. “Though in some ways I suspect the real salt mines might be more interesting.”

  “Smithson would have agreed with that,” said Jerome. “He loved mines, loved excavation of any kind, in fact. Even…no, maybe especially, industrial excavation. He wanted to know about everything.”

  Mira opened the door. “I want to know about everything too,” she said, turning to look at Jerome. “I always have.”

  When Mira had gone, Sylvia told Jerome about the tactile maps she made for her friend Julia. “She’s blind,” Sylvia explained, “but touching a map is one of the ways she is able to see. I didn’t think I could do it at first, didn’t think I could translate landscape into texture on a board. But then I know the County so well; I suppose that made it easier.” She shifted in her chair. “I came to love making the maps,” she confessed. “In fact, I am working on one, right now, in the hotel.”

  “You’re making art yourself when you do that,” he said, “taking what you see in your own County and reproducing it on a flat space.”

  Sylvia rejected the suggestion but found that she was somewhat flattered nonetheless.

  “Andrew and I first encountered one another on the only busy street in the County,” she began when she could no longer remain separate from the idea of him. “The only thoroughfare that sustained anything that resembled what a city person might think of as traffic.” She described the town of Picton, its sidewalks, walls, and old windows, and as she did so, each square inch of that town’s surfaces presented itself in her mind, as if she were walking, right then, on one of the familiar streets. As always, she took quite a lot of pleasure from doing this, this long walk back to the subject of Andrew.

  “I was carrying on a conversation with myself, or revisiting a scene from my childhood, or perhaps I was bringing something I’d seen – a pebble on a path, the grain of a fenceboard – back into being in my mind. I was walking down this busy street in the center of a town two or three times larger than the town in which I live, but in my mind I was, as I so often was, somewhere else, following the thread of a story that had nothing to do with the street, the errand I was performing. This ability to be absent was really the only unique skill I had managed to master, though I could clean a house, cook a passable meal, drive a car, participate in a prescribed set of ordinary social activities.”

  “Sounds like what we all do,” said Jerome. “I spend half my life daydreaming.”

  She couldn’t recall the season because seasons were only important to her when they brought about discomfort and distraction in the form of extreme heat or cold. She’d been aware of neither of these states so it must have been autumn or spring, an unobtrusive climate that would not have caused her to apply or remove a layer of clothing, to unfurl an umbrella, to turn her face from the wind, or to watch her step on a slippery surface. “I would have seemed, to anyone watching, a thin, unremarkable, young woman,” she said, “dressed conservatively, going about my daily tasks, likely about to enter a drugstore or a stationery shop, preoccupied perhaps.

  “I had, I suppose, stepped from the curb without looking, without thinking. I almost believed at the time that everything that surrounded me appeared because I was walking through it, and when I had moved on, it withdrew until I had need of it again. I counted on this neutrality; it was the key to my freedom, my singularity, and, as I would later come to understand, it was my charm against sorrow.”

  Though she was not looking at him, Sylvia could sense Jerome’s clear, focused gaze.

  “He came toward me from somewhere just behind my peripheral vision so that my first impression was that I was being assaulted, my arms pinned to my side, my feet lifted off the ground, that and the blue blur and slight wind of the car that swept by inches in front of my knees. Then I looked down, saw the wool sleeves – tweed, I think – one atop the other across my sweater, the slightly freckled wrists, and felt the elbows – his or mine – digging into my ribs. I didn’t make a sound. Neither did he, at first. Then he spoke some sentences that included the words might have been killed.” Back on the curb they had faced each other and he had laughed. She had thanked him, said that he had saved her life. She was shaken, not by the proximity of death, but by the accident of this sudden, purposeful embrace.

  “‘A conditioned response,’ he told me when I thanked him for rescuing me. Then he looked at me more closely. ‘I’ve seen you be
fore. You’re the doctor’s wife,’ he said, ‘from Blennerville.’ When the light turned green, he nodded toward the other side of the street. ‘All clear now,’ he said. I began dutifully to cross, my face burning as if I had been slapped out of a shock or out of hysteria though, in the course of my entire life, I had been visited by no emotion powerful enough to cause such a response. I stopped on the opposite side, turned back, and watched him walk away. He was a tall, awkward man, with a slight stoop and light brown hair, greying slightly at the sides, though I had been able to tell by his face that he was still fairly young.”

  A conditioned response, a conditioned response. She remembered that the phrase had kept repeating itself at the center of her mind as she watched him climb the four steps of the County Archives. She saw the shadowed carving of the stone mullions around the arched windows of that building, the reflections in the glass, petunias in the flowerbeds beside the steps, and, even from that distance, the curve of his shoulders, the worn heels of his shoes.

  “Well, the truth was he had broken into my calm like a burglar then and, like a burglar, had gone casually on his way. But what had he stolen, apart from my detachment. My heart? No, that would come later. The poor man. He had no idea what he had done.”

  “Well, what had he done?” said Jerome. “Other than save you from a speeding car? That seems like a good thing to me.”

  “No,” said Sylvia. “You don’t understand. I have an odd mind. There are times when I can’t move it around, can’t take it to a new subject of concentration. It sticks…it sticks to things, things that I’ve come to understand other people have little, sometimes no interest in at all.”

  “You’re not alone in that,” said Jerome. “Once, I thought about old, decaying fences for an entire year. And then, there are other times when I think about absolutely nothing…nothing at all. I hate it when someone asks what’s going on in my mind. Often, quite often in fact, it’s a blank slate.”

  “A blank slate,” Sylvia repeated and looked around the room. “But my own strangeness, I think, is that perhaps I have lived too long in the same place, too long in the same house, thinking about sofas no one sits on, cupboards no one opens filled with silver and china and linen no one ever uses. Any more. There are also Bibles no one reads and ancient photo albums no one ever looks at, old letters no one ever glances at. Except for me, of course, except for me. It is as if I were an extinct species mysteriously catapulted into the beginning of the twenty-first century out of a childhood where boys stood on the burning deck when all but they had fled and captains lashed their daughters to the masts of sinking ships.”

  “‘The boy stood on the burning deck when all but he had fled,’” Jerome said quietly. He turned to Sylvia. “I haven’t a clue how I came to know that.”

  “Could you have learned it at school?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “They don’t memorize poems in school any more, then.” Sylvia had been particularly good at memory work. When called upon, however, she had been unable to rise to her feet, unable to recite the required lines.

  “Not in the school I went to,” said Jerome.

  “In the beginning, at least, we seemed so alike, Andrew and I, so much a part of the same vanishing species with our pioneer ancestors and a shared focus that drifted to the past. He often stood on burning decks of one kind or another when all but he had fled. And I…I seemed to be constantly lashed to the mast by those who had, for my own safety – or was it for theirs? – tied me there.”

  Jerome, Sylvia noted now, had leaned back against the arm of the couch and had lit a cigarette. “Don’t tell Mira,” he said. “She thinks I’ve quit.” Smoke rose from his hand, then twisted in the air above him. “Well, at least you know something about your past. Not much of that in my life. In fact I know next to nothing about my family’s past.”

  “Oh yes,” said Sylvia. “I know about the past, all about the past. I can list from memory the entire genealogy of my father’s family and have been able to do so since I was six, seven years old: also, the townships of my County, backwards and forwards, in rapid succession.” She smiled, remembering. “I can tell you the names of all the constellations and I can relate their exact distance from Earth. I can tell you where each Georgian house in the County is situated and I can describe what it looked like when it was in its prime – what was cultivated in its flower beds and vegetable gardens, whether the clapboard was painted, where the original log house was placed, when the magnificent barns were built, the full name of the earliest settler and that of his wife, and how many of his children died during the first winter, and where they are buried.

  “I can describe each line on Andrew’s face, the one brown eye that is fractionally larger than the other, the dip of his temples and the smooth, moist creases of his eyelids. The way his hair changed from light brownish grey to white before my own eyes, how when it is brushed back the growth pattern of this hair reveals an uneven widow’s peak. I can describe this the way a child describes a set of facts given to him in school, but now there are times when I can’t visualize anything at all about Andrew’s face.”

  His hands had been soft, not the hands of a laborer. There had been a place on his leg where the thigh muscle eased like a beach onto the hard bone of the knee. There was a particular vein that stood out on his forehead, and a small oval-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. Sylvia knew all this and yet, when she closed her eyes, she could not see him.

  “But, you met him again…somehow, somewhere.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I saw him again, but not until I became interested in the buried hotel, the hotel that sleeps, quietly, under the dunes. I was working part-time as a volunteer at the village museum by then, amassing my own peculiar collection and demonstrating that I could be successful in turning my obsessions to good use.” She sat back in her chair and described the village museum, her odd choices for the collection: a rendering of a family tomb made from human hair, a painting of a dog mourning the recently drowned body of a young child, cumbersome pieces of machinery that resembled instruments of torture, stuffed and boxed birds and animals, and all those ominous-looking porcelain dolls that she honestly believed had survived for a century or so because no child really wanted to touch them. There were certain hats, as well, hats that appeared to her to be mistakes of creation, as if some God hadn’t been able to decide whether He wanted to make a reptile or a bird or a clump of turf.

  Jerome laughed. “I think I would like to see those hats.”

  “Andrew had heard about the museum’s efforts to try to preserve the dunes,” Sylvia continued, “to prevent a cement company from carting away more and more truckloads of sand. He just came by to see if there were any old photographs in the collection, or any information at all about the hotel that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and I, I of all people, I took him out to the dunes. We drove the fifteen miles out to the very tip of the County.” She remembered the tension in the car, the sand shifting under their feet, his hand moving toward her hair, and the almost unbearable silence on the way back.

  “So there really was a hotel buried by sand?”

  Sylvia smiled. “You didn’t believe me,” she said.

  Jerome did not answer. He leaned forward to crush the half-finished cigarette into an empty cat food tin on the table in front of him.

  “Malcolm taught me to drive…another miracle, much celebrated by him. He taught me how to drive and, once he was certain that I had mastered this skill, he bought me a small car and set me free to explore the roads and architecture of the County. The roads were easy to negotiate, and had been well known by me ever since I had memorized the County atlas when I was a child. The shops were more difficult because once I entered them I would be forced to engage in conversation, and this alone would heighten my awareness of the oddness of situations where people had no foreknowledge of my condition. It was in such a shop, however – a shop near the dunes – where an old man had told me about the hotel. He
had played in the attic of this building as a child, or at least he claimed to have done this, at a time when the rest of the hotel was already buried by sand. By the time he was a young man only the roof was visible, and then, not much later, the building disappeared forever.”

  As she said this Sylvia remembered listening to the old man speak. She had been examining a butter press where a pattern of oak leaves and acorns had been carved into a block of pine about four inches square. The shop was dark and full of cobwebs, and had in a previous life been a milk house or stable. Dusty windows, grey light. She had picked up the object and paid for it while the old man scrabbled through a collection of paper bags in which he was going to wrap it. And all the time he had been talking, Sylvia had been seeing the faded, stained wallpaper of the rooms in which the old man had played, the sun coming through broken mullions, the sand surrounding it.

  “I went home that day with one butter press, two bags of groceries, and knowledge of the very thing that – though of course I did not know this – would lead me to Andrew. The hotel, then, became my sole preoccupation for several months of that year. At dinner I told Malcolm stories connected with it, stories about the old man as a child playing there until he could no longer squeeze through the windows because of the rising sand. Stories about how the owner of the hotel awoke one morning to find sand in the corner of his lavish garden, a small pile that became noticeably larger each day until the flowers wilted and the grass died and the guests began to discover sand in the corners of their rooms, on their plates at dinnertime, and constantly under their feet as they walked down the long, planked halls.”

  “I can almost see,” said Jerome, a hint of surprise in his voice, “everything you say. Everything you’re talking about.”

  Sylvia was thinking that much of what she had said about the hotel had been, in some way, triggered by Mira’s performance, and that here in this room she had for the first time actually seen sand covering a floor. “Mira…,” she began, then stopped. She was about to say something about Mira’s piece but thought better of it. Malcolm, instructing her in the finer points of social interaction, had told her to try, as much as possible, to stick to topics that she knew something about. Then he had laughed, remembering her tendency to lecture, to repeat, her tendency to get stuck on the topics that she knew far too much about.