Jane Urquhart Page 12

  “You were going to say something about Mira,” Jerome prompted.

  “She seems so vital, somehow, so” – Sylvia searched for the word – “so awake.”

  “She’s attentive,” said Jerome, “curious. She pays attention to almost everything.” He glanced toward the door as if he expected the girl to walk into the room. “About your hotel,” he added, “Mira would have said it was like a children’s story. In a children’s story anything at all can happen,” he said with surprising conviction. “The most impossible things and” – he looked at Sylvia – “as long as the story is being told, we believe everything. Or at least I always believed everything.”

  “That may be why I loved childhood so much,” Sylvia said, “because of the larger belief, and because…”

  “But your childhood –” Jerome interjected.

  “I was very content, unless I was interfered with, unless I was interrupted, unless someone else stood in my path and blocked my view of my private world. I wonder why they couldn’t understand that, apart from this, I was content?”

  “The world is so full of a number of things,” said Jerome, “I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

  “Yes,” said Sylvia. She reached into the pocket of the coat she had draped over the chair, pulled out the salt shaker, and held it in front of her. She had never done this before, had never let anyone know what she carried with her. “If you hold onto it long enough,” she told him, “it becomes warm in your hands.”

  He leaned forward to look at the shaker, then reached over and lightly touched the top of it.

  “Perhaps it was because I had no friends,” Sylvia continued. “Maybe that’s why they thought I wasn’t happy. All through high school, you see, I kept at a distance. Once or twice a year a boy would try to speak to me, or a girl who was not part of the crowd would attempt to form a friendship. But it was not possible. Either I wanted nothing to do with those who approached me or I watched them constantly, learned the buttons on their coats, the part in their hair, a freckle on an elbow, wanting all the details of their lives. When they began to withdraw, as they always did, it was a relief in a way. I could lose myself in the schoolwork, which was a safe haven, an achievable goal. Teachers, on the whole, approved of me, but I had no friends, until Julia of course.”

  The high-pitched ringing of a cell phone burst into the room, causing Sylvia to jump in her chair as if she had been shaken from a trance. Jerome stood, excused himself, fumbled in his pocket for the phone. Then he turned his back and walked away, speaking quietly.

  “That was just Mira telling me that she’ll be late,” he said when he returned to the couch. “They’re installing a sculpture show at the gallery. Metal trees apparently.” He smiled. “Sounds like there is a complete forest of them.”

  “Forests,” said Sylvia. “The cottage where we met was surrounded by one of the few forests that still contained some old-growth trees, though Andrew never pointed out the oldest, most important ones. And I, I was afraid to ask, frightened of my own ignorance. I was so awkwardly vulnerable, so stupid. People like me are supposed to have next to no attention span. But, in fact, in my case, quite the opposite is true: my attention span is limitless; it’s just a matter of where my focus settles: a buried hotel, a butter press, the salt shaker, the County atlas, the genealogy and then, and then him, him, him. The idea of him, you see, kept its arm around my shoulders, just as my peninsula kept its arm around the lake, protected me, and kept me safely distant from everyone else. The distance, of course, was not new, but the phantom encircling arm was a surprise until it became a habit, until it became like breathing or like pulse.”

  Sylvia began to move the salt shaker around in her lap as if it were a toy and she a child. Then, becoming aware of herself, she stopped, and without looking at her companion, turned and dropped the object back into her coat pocket.

  “He left me after years of infrequent meetings,” she said finally. “He met me in a restaurant on the edge of Picton and told me that we had to stop.” Sylvia was silent for some time, revisiting his serious voice and recalling also how passive she had been. She had never fought and would never fight for anything she wanted simply because she did not know which weapons to carry or how to use them. Instead she had turned inward, away, looked out the window at a bird trembling on a branch. Andrew was saying words such as work, commitment, and distraction, and then something about Malcolm. She was looking at a bird and trying to imagine what kind of avian emergency had caused its terror. She believed that Andrew had discovered the flaw in her, that he now knew about the condition. At the very least, he had sensed something missing, something lacking. No, she could not fight.

  So this was the heart-torn present, she remembered thinking at the time. This is the collision with pain. She told Jerome that after Andrew had gone from her life, there was a period during which she became convinced that almost everything was poisoned: the colossal dark chambers of rotting barns, the ghosts of vanished forests, polluted water flowing under roads through culverts, sand dunes comprising smashed shells and the bones of deformed fish pushing inland from the lake. “So this was my known, my benign world,” she said. “Everything was in a state of decay.” All of the ancestry she had so carefully learned was under the altered ground, bones turning to powder. There was nothing beautiful about the traces of human endeavor, despite what Andrew believed, all was unraveling as quickly as it was knit. Her own strained face when she examined it in the mirror was a collection of dead cells. The love they had made was barren, had resulted in no quickening, no quickening at all except this newborn capacity of hers to see things the way they really were, that and the ability to feel pain.

  “I was grateful for that,” she said aloud. “I still am grateful for that.”

  In the silence that followed, the orange cat strolled majestically, almost theatrically, across the room, tail high in the air. For several moments he became the center of attention, as if he had planned it that way.

  “What was it,” asked Jerome, “what was it you were grateful for?”

  “I don’t think I’d ever really felt anything before…before him.” Sylvia said. She paused. “And then there were the stories he told about his family, his ancestors.” She leaned over and reached into the bag at her feet, running her fingers for a moment over the smooth leather of one of the journals. “They were like a gift, really, those stories, a gift from him to me.”

  Jerome nodded. “That’s a lovely thought.”

  “You know,” she said suddenly, “there was a picture on the wall of the cottage where we met. It was painted by Andrew’s great-aunt Annabelle and, as Andrew pointed out, it depicted a panorama she could not possibly have seen, one that may have been a compilation of everything she had learned how to draw, how to paint I guess, perhaps partially copied from the kind of steel engravings you see in nineteenth-century books. Some of it came, of course, from the various ships that would have been – at all hours of the day – part of her view at Timber Island. In the upper background of the picture perched on the edge of an improbable-looking escarpment was a castle in a state of ruin. Below this – engulfed by a magnificent fire – was a beached schooner in front of which, for reasons impossible to explain, a man leads two horses and a cart into the waves.”

  This was the scene she had stared at while Andrew slept after their lovemaking, while Andrew slept and late-afternoon light entered the cottage. Her first landscape after love. Afterwards she would step outside the door of the cottage, walk past the foundations of the house that had once stood on the hill, and, before climbing into the car, would look into the far distance. The long arm of the peninsula where she lived would be visible, and the pale blemishes at the southern end of it which were the dunes. Sometimes she could see the small white finger of a lighthouse on the lakeshore. And then, under the surface of the lake, she would sense the presence of wrecked schooners – some of them launched a hundred and fifty years ago at Timber Island.

/>   Sylvia removed the two journals. She turned to Jerome. “Perhaps,” she said quietly, “you might be interested in these.”

  Jerome looked at the notebooks in Sylvia’s slightly trembling hands. “What are they?” he asked.

  “A record,” Sylvia said, “a story. Everything that Andrew wrote about Timber Island, the story of his family. But, you may not be interested, you may not have time, or…” She hesitated, was worried suddenly that the stories that had engaged her, the sentences that had so affected her, might not be understood by this young man, might not be understandable.

  Jerome reached forward to accept the notebooks from her.

  Once, she had included Timber Island on a map she had made for Julia when her friend was going to visit the famous Thousand Islands scattered throughout the river downstream from Kingston, the same islands that the Woodman timber rafts would have sailed by on their journey to Quebec. Technically Timber Island need not have been on the map at all, but it had given her private pleasure to include it. “This is where the river begins,” she had said to her friend, drawing her hand toward the spot on the map, “right here where this small island is situated.” She had made Timber Island from a piece of fabric quite different than that which she used for the vast anthology of islands downriver in the same way that she had used cotton for the lake and then linen for the river. “Will I be near this small island?” Julia had asked, and when Sylvia had replied in the negative Julia had added “then you must have put it here for some other reason altogether. Maybe someday you will tell me why.”

  She stared at the notebooks resting now on the crate that Jerome used for a coffee table. How odd, Sylvia thought, to see them here, in this place, a place that neither she nor Andrew could have ever imagined.

  Later, as she walked out of the alley and down the street toward the hotel, her anxiety lifted somewhat. She could not lose the writing, really: she could recall, almost exactly, every word Andrew had used. In the beginning, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would want the young man who found him to read Andrew’s words. But later, after the idea of the trip to the city had taken hold of her, she had become aware of the hope that this would happen. It was the body, she supposed, the physical fact of Andrew’s anatomy, so carefully learned by her, and now presented to this young person in such a shocking, unforgettable way that made this, to her mind, something she needed to do. She wanted Jerome to know Andrew, the man he had been.

  As this thought entered her, she was rocked by a wave of grief so intense it caused her to stop walking, to stand quite still on the sidewalk, with a river of strangers passing swiftly on either side of her.

  Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow, she thought, allowing the sentence to unfurl in her mind, so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River.

  By the time Sylvia had passed through the glass doors that lead to the lobby of the hotel, she had mentally turned seven or eight pages of the first notebook. She saw the shape that the paragraphs made on the lined paper, the different colors of ink Andrew had used, the places where he had angrily stricken imperfect phrases from the record. All this – every flaw, each hesitation, his changes of mind and mood, his humor, his diagrams of interiors, his efforts to depict emotion – would be evident now to someone other than herself. “The last raft of the season was being constructed in the small harbor,” she whispered to herself, and then, “ continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond.”

  Just after the elevator doors closed she spoke the sentence “They walked with the horse out of the darkness of the stable and into the vivid autumn light.” Often in the past six months she had risen at two or three in the morning, had descended the stairs, and had read and reread the journals with such concentration that when she paused to look at the kitchen clock, two or three hours would have passed. Several hours of exhausted sleep would most times follow this, so that when she awoke late in the morning she would be unsure if the world she had entered on the page hadn’t been one built by a dream. And then, the following day, when she was alone, Sylvia would say certain sentences aloud, knowing that by doing so she could evoke a scene quite different than the one in which she stood or walked, could make her own kitchen disappear, for instance, and cause the shadow of a barn door on sandy ground, the glint of lake, leaves twisting in a breeze appear in its place.

  Jerome was stretched out on the futon, but he was not asleep. In the semi-darkness of the early evening he was listening to Mira describe the three vows that a monk must take upon becoming part of a religious community. Lately she had been reading Thomas Merton.

  Was his namesake, Saint Jerome, a Benedictine? he wanted to know. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. They had been dressing to go to a party in another area of the city but had found themselves making love instead. It was quite early in the evening: the intention to leave the studio was still with them, but it was fading fast.

  “No” she told him, “Saint Benedict was the famous Benedictine. He founded the Benedictine order.” She was curled on her side, facing him, with both small arms wrapped around his larger one. He could feel her lips moving near his shoulder, the way her torso shook in a soft explosion of silent laughter. So this had nothing to do with him, these were not vows that she secretly hoped he would take.

  “There is the vow of stability,” she was saying. “That means that you must stop, once you have entered a community, you must stop imagining that there is a monastery somewhere else that would be better than the one you are living in, stop thinking that you would be happier in another place. You must enter fully and completely each day of the life you have chosen, or the one that has been assigned to you.” She paused. Jerome said nothing, but he knew she could sense his attention in the dark. “Then there is the vow of the Convergence of Life.”

  “Wait,” he said, “that last vow. Smithson said in an interview that one pebble moving six inches over the period of four million years was enough for him, enough to keep him interested.”

  “He would have made a good Hindu.”

  “Not sure…probably a meat eater. The other vow?”

  Mira had rolled away from him now onto her left side, and he adjusted himself so that he could put one arm over her waist, their thighs touching, his kneecaps pressing slightly into the smooth hollows of her bent legs. “The next vow,” she corrected, “the Convergence of Life. I think it might mean that, while you remain stable, you must also accept that the world will change around you, and that you should remain open to and aware of those changes, though it also suggests that your life will converge with God’s, or something along those lines.”

  Jerome remembered Sylvia’s suggestion that the relentless stability of her surroundings might have somehow caused her mysterious condition, that and what she said about being trapped, imprisoned by geography. “Aren’t those two vows contradictory?” he asked.

  “A bit. But I’ve thought about that and they seem to work together somehow. The first vow has to do with what can be controlled – you can control yourself – the second is about accepting what you can’t control.”

  Grant me the serenity, Jerome remembered, to accept things I can’t change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. His father, returning from a meeting, had told Jerome about this. At the time this directive had seemed to the fourteen-year-old boy to be a miraculous solution to the chaos of a family made miserable by his father’s binges. He had allowed himself to become certain, as he had been so many times in the past, that his father would stop drinking forever, that sanity and predictability would visit their household even though, by then, he had forgotten – if he ever knew – what sanity and predictability looked like, what form they took, how they would feel. But, in the end, the prayer was of little use anyway. Within weeks his father had entered the prolonged bout of inebriation that would be his last. Jerome could recall the horror; the older man weeping, or shouting
in anger, his own terror when he was wakened in the night by the sounds of retching in the bathroom, the terrible accusations, the furious silences. “What was the third vow?” he asked.

  “Oh, that,” she said, and he could again feel the tremor of her laughter, “is the vow of chastity.”

  “Too late for that now.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “far too late.”

  His father had used those words. “It’s too late,” he had shouted when Jerome’s mother had begged him to stop. “It’s far too late to stop.” Jerome, wakened by the argument, had stood trembling with rage in a pair of old flannelette pajamas that, in the past year, had tightened around his chest and thighs in the same way that the apartment, his parents’ drama, and all the cheap furniture of their lives had tightened around him. His father had turned to him then and had said in a voice suddenly calm and cold, “It’s too late for you too, pal. Don’t think that you are immune. Don’t think for a second that you are exempt, you judgmental little shit.”

  There had been nothing left to break in the room, nothing that didn’t already bear the mark of his father’s anger, nothing of his own, so Jerome had wrenched open the glass door and had gone out onto the freezing balcony in his bare feet. He had dug with his hands though layers of snow, then had pulled the frozen, rusted bicycle from the corner where it lay and, only peripherally aware of his father’s attempts to restrain him, had tried to smash up this final piece of evidence of his childhood with his fists.

  As he thought about this, an image of his mother’s ashen face and wide eyes came into his mind, but he willed himself away from the memory, turned instead back to the girl and placed his forehead against the warm skin on her back. He could tell by the small, involuntary twitches that passed through her body that Mira was asleep, and soon he began to drift into a dream where it was his father, not Andrew Woodman, that he found trapped in the ice near the docks of Timber Island, trapped but still alive. On his ravaged features was an expression of such tenderness that Jerome reached forward to touch the frost-covered face. But when his fingers made contact with his father’s cheek, the whole head fragmented, collapsing into a confusion of thin transparent pieces on a flat surface, and suddenly he was looking at Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass. Each shard reflected something he remembered about his father: a signet ring, a belt buckle, a dark green package of cigarettes, an eye, a cufflink, the back of his hand, and Jerome knew his father was broken, smashed. The toe of a shoe, a plaid sleeve, the seam of a pair of pants, an Adam’s apple. In the dream this was satisfying rather than distressing. In the dream it seemed that this alteration in his father was what he had wanted all along. And yet, when he awoke in the dark, he was weeping.