Jane Urquhart Read online

  “I’d like to be able to talk to you,” Sylvia said again.

  “I am involved with my work all day long,” Jerome began, reasonably. “And then at night Mira and I sometimes go out, do things. It’s not that I’m not interested in what you have to say, but I just don’t see what I can do, how I can help. And, anyway, I’m not much good at listening.” He smiled at the girl. “Mira can vouch for that.”

  Mira bristled slightly. “That’s not what I said, Jerome, I said that you weren’t much good at talking. There’s a difference.”

  The fluorescent light emitted a kind of soft, grinding roar, as if someone in a distant part of the building were using a drill or a sander. Sylvia glanced around the room, searching for an advocate. “I had hoped,” she said.

  “I just don’t know,” said Jerome.

  Mira had her knees pulled up under her chin, and her arms wrapped around her legs. “Why not let her come back, Jerome? You’re not up to much at the moment. You haven’t got a specific project, or at least not anything I’ve heard about.”

  “You found him,” Sylvia said quietly. “You can’t have forgotten that.” She rose from the chair, then bent to lift the suitcase. “And because of that you brought him back to me.”

  Jerome was standing with his hands in his pockets now, but his spine was straighter and his expression less ambiguous than before. He looked as though he might be about to take a stand, to bargain. “I just don’t know about the time,” he said with a certain amount of assurance. “I need to concentrate, and I’m not sure that this is what I am supposed to be thinking about.”

  As she had many times in the past, Sylvia wondered how it was that other people were so easily able to control what they thought about, how they purposefully moved their minds from one subject to another.

  “Could you come back in a couple of days?” asked Jerome suddenly.

  Sylvia felt a combination of hope and panic stirring somewhere near her heart. A couple of days. She remembered the kind of bargaining for time that she had been forced to engage in with Andrew on phones and at the thresholds of departure, the faint air of irritation – or was it pity? – that would enter his voice or his expression when she asked for something sooner or something more. She was well acquainted with bargaining. She looked down before speaking. “Please,” she said, “please let me start before then.”

  Jerome glanced toward Mira. “All right,” he said. “Tomorrow. But not until the afternoon. I’m not fit for company in the morning.”

  A wave of relief passed over her. “I’ll be here at two,” she said, pushing on the metal bar that opened the door to the outside. She glanced back at the girl. “Which way is the hotel?”

  “Turn left at the end of the alley. Then left again, and two blocks south.”

  She was about to say thank you but found herself in the dimness of the late afternoon on the opposite side of the door.

  Sylvia had never experienced the bought neutrality of rented rooms and so had no idea what would be expected of her when, with a pounding heart, she approached the desk at the end of a lobby decorated with potted plastic plants, glass tables, and a few oversized black leather chairs. She managed to ask for a room but the demand, in return, for a credit card was even more unnerving. She decided to produce the partner card Malcolm had given her for household items, realizing that using it might prove to be the key to her whereabouts. “We keep the details on file while you are here,” the clerk told her, “but you can pay with cash if you wish when you leave.”

  “In five days,” she said. She might need a full week. She could bargain later.

  Once inside the room she took stock of her surroundings, wanting to learn the objects with which she would live. Thankfully, there was not much to know: stuccoed walls painted off-white, a coffee maker with a small collection of tea and coffee supplies beside it, a television hidden behind the doors of a cupboard, a desk on which rested a leather folder containing information about the hotel, writing paper, a pen, and a few envelopes. Three chairs, a bed, two bedside tables, a telephone. In the bathroom were towels, washcloths, some tiny plastic bottles that she discovered were filled with shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizing cream. Tub, toilet, washbasin. Back in the room, she unpacked the album, the two green notebooks, and the hardcover book, and put away her clothes, but left the mapping materials in the suitcase. Then she walked across the floor to the opposite end of the room. Lined drapes covered a window that looked out to a brick wall. So, there would be no view to contend with and for this she was grateful: she knew she couldn’t digest the panorama quickly enough for her to be comfortable with it. She opened the folder on the desk to the section entitled “Room Service.” Sylvia knew about room service. When Malcolm had been away at medical conventions, the arrival of room service at the door of his room had sometimes interrupted the early-morning call he always made to her, to find out how she was managing alone. She managed well alone in the house with which she was so familiar, everything in it measured and learned years ago.

  She would have to summon this room service – she hadn’t eaten since the morning. Placing the order was another anxiety that would have to be dealt with, but she felt, somehow, she could manage if she did this right away with hunger gnawing at her stomach. She lifted the receiver, pushed a button beside the words Room Service, and talked to the woman who answered. When the meal arrived, fifteen long minutes later, the girl carrying it seemed flustered, overheated, and, to Sylvia’s relief, not much interested in her. “Just leave the tray outside the door when you’re finished,” the girl said as she left the room. Sylvia consumed the meal quickly, without thinking about the patterns on the plates, the shape of the cutlery.

  The cutlery she used each day in her house was engraved with the flowing initials of long-dead ancestors, and the plates were ringed with flowers, the names of which she had insisted on knowing as a child. In the center of some plates, entire landscapes had been painted, the odd shepherdess too, or a herd of cows. At first as a very young child she hadn’t liked these scenes, the animals, the people, and often wouldn’t eat if she knew such things were hidden under the food. Gradually, after she had seen them over and over again, she came to be quite fond of them.

  Here in the hotel, when she had eaten everything she could, she stood up and went over to the bed, removed the coverlet and lay down, remembering how hungry she had always been when she was with Andrew, even toward the end when the food he brought was often impossible – a bunch of not very new radishes, taken, she assumed, from his home refrigerator along with a tub of sour cream and a breadstick or two – and then at what would turn out to be their very last meeting when she had asked if there was anything to eat, he had backed away, had looked at her with suspicion, and had asked her exactly what she meant by the question. She had approached him then with the kind of comforting sounds that, in the past, she would have reserved for herself when she lay huddled, alone in a room, and had led him back to the bed where she opened his shirt and placed her ear above the frantic hammering of his heart, one hand on the side of his face, wanting to bring him to a state of rest, a state of calm, wanting to pull his grey head toward her own chest, so that he could weep and ask, out loud, where he was. So she could answer, “With me, love. Where you should be, with me.”

  Sometimes in those final weeks, because it had seemed that the only way to bring him back into the room was to escort him toward the sensations of his own body, she’d had to find new ways of giving him pleasure. And even in the midst of this, even when his response was charged with heat or laced with desperation, she would feel him begin to forget her as if the act in which they were engaged were unprecedented and terrifying. There were few words between them by then, and no laughter. His silences were huge, mythical almost, and, to her mind, full of portent. Everything about him, even when they were inches apart, suggested disappearance. When she said that she loved him, he appeared to be confused by the phrase, then embarrassed, then fearful – a man locke
d in a room with a stranger who was being inappropriately intimate. She loved him harder then for everything they had said and done together. For all the years they had been together, then apart, and then together once more. For everything she knew they were, again, going to lose.

  She rose from the bed and moved over to the small desk where she had eaten her meal. She lifted the tray and, after opening the door, slid the object onto the carpeted floor of the hallway, glad to be rid of the clutter it contained. Walking around the room, she touched and then named aloud each piece of furniture several times. “Bed,” she said, “table, table, lamp one, lamp two, chair, another chair.” When she became tired of doing this she approached the bed, folded back the blanket, and lay slowly down on her back with her arms by her sides. Andrew’s voice came into her mind, his gentle voice, the long sentences, the pause of punctuation. Then his broken voice, the quick frightened breath, his awful weeping. She closed her eyes and willed herself back to the bubblelike world of her childhood, a world whose skin had not yet been pierced, broken by the shock of connection, of feeling.

  She remembered that when she was very young, before she had learned how to read, a story had been brought to her awareness in an unexpected way. On the bottom shelf of a bookcase in one of the downstairs parlors she had discovered a gift that had been abandoned years before by a child long dead: an album with a variety of large animal decals. The child in question (To Mamie was printed on the flyleaf) had evidently quickly lost interest in this volume as only three or four of the decals had been pasted into the book. The rest were still loose, tucked between the last page and the back cover. There were birds and horses and kittens and dogs dressed disturbingly in an assortment of human costumes, animals masquerading as sailors, police officers, scholars, bakers, but all exhibiting an innocent, unthreatening lack of expression. Then, inserted between the pages at the very middle of the book was a collection of large, square decals, depicting vibrantly colored scenes, birds perched on branches and among grasses and flowers of streamside foliage.

  She had begun to turn the pages of the book. Oh the berries and the feathers and the flowers – pure delight – and yet, and yet something was terribly wrong. The first decal portrayed a beautiful robin, his wings limp, falling back toward the earth because an arrow had pierced his side, producing one bright bead of blood. On the shaft of the arrow, looking intently at the bird, was a large fly. In the next scene a fish rose from the stream with a saucer in his mouth, and into the saucer streamed the robin’s blood. Off in the distance, a small sparrow was flying away, while at the end of a garden path sat a beetle sewing a white garment.

  Then there was an owl standing with his spade near the large rectangular hole he had dug into the dark soft earth of the riverbank. A rook wearing spectacles on his beak and a pale flowing robe over his black feathers read from a long scroll of paper while a lark gazed steadily at an open book that rested on a pedestal. The next scene depicted a strange and upsetting bird she did not recognize with a brown, oblong box strapped to his back. This was followed by a chicken and a wren carrying the box down a distant, winding road. The last was a decal Sylvia had looked at only once, for the normally expressionless faces of the birds were now filled with grief. An extraordinary dove in the foreground hung her head and allowed her tears to fall into the cavity the owl had created.

  Until those paper decals resting inside a child’s album, those birds, that riverbank, Sylvia had remained uninterested in the stories her parents had tried to tell her, not understanding the idea of sequence, believing all living things were as attached to their singularity as she was to hers. She had looked at picturebooks, of course – mostly those that concerned animals – but the images in those books had seemed to her to be self-contained, static: a horse in a field, a spider on a web – nothing that suggested one scene related to another. Now, quite suddenly, she had come to understand that the blood dripping from the robin’s neck and the flight of the departing sparrow were connected, and that from this blood, this flight, came both spontaneous events and planned ceremonies, though she wouldn’t have known the words for such things at the time. And she had understood as well, that from such a chain of images, from action and reaction, there came the depth of feeling that was portrayed on the final illustration. A suggestion of this feeling seemed to be moving out from the page and into her own mind in the same way that, in winter, something her parents called electricity sparked from her sweater onto her skin when she was dressing.

  Years later, as a young adult, she had come across the poem: the words that interpreted those images that she had so carefully examined, then shunned. One verse stayed with her always.

  Who’ll be the chief mourner? I, said the Dove, I’ll mourn for my love I’ll be the chief mourner.

  Jerome leaned against the door frame, the large orange cat in his arms. Mira was bent over the sink washing her face. He knew she had not registered his proximity, was not aware of his gaze. How lovely the back of her neck was; how lovely, and how vulnerable. And this ordinary, daily gesture, this lifting of a drenched cloth up to the face with both hands, the water falling like rain through the slim, brown fingers, how oddly it suggested weeping, mimicked grief. When she was finished she looked at herself in the mirror, staring it would seem into her own eyes as if to find the answer to a question there, while the liquid chugged slowly down the old drain. What did she see? he wondered. Beauty, or some minor imperfection he had never glimpsed? He thought that he was likely in love with her, but he also knew that at moments like this she could almost be unknown to him. She turned finally, met his gaze, then approached and punched him gently on the shoulder as she walked out of the bathroom. “You’re just like Swimmer,” she said, “so quiet I hardly know you’re there.”

  That night before going to sleep, Jerome looked at Mira’s profile, the black fringe of lashes, the jewel in her nose, blue now in the light from the computer screen. It was never, he thought, fully dark in this room. He rolled over on his back and examined the ceiling. “This woman,” he said, “she seems so… troubled… not shell-shocked exactly, but wounded somehow.”

  “She lost her lover, Jerome, no wonder she’s wounded.” Mira ran her hand over her eyes, trying to fight sleep.

  “How do you know they were lovers? And anyway, it’s something else I’m picking up, or at least something more.” He smiled at Mira and touched her arm, knowing she would object to the suggestion that there could be something more than love. “I think that she is afraid… afraid of almost everything.”

  “But not too afraid to come here,” said Mira.

  “It wasn’t easy, though. It was hard for her. I could see that.”

  “Yes, I could see that too. But they were lovers, Jerome. Believe me.”

  After Mira had fallen asleep, Jerome continued to think about the woman who had arrived so unexpectedly at his door, of her sudden intrusion into his life. He felt a certain sympathy toward her now, but it was laced with anxiety. An image of the frozen man came into his mind. The upper part of the body had been leaning forward, the motionless arms and open hands resting on the surface of the iceberg while the hips and legs remained encased. There had been frost in the hair and on the eyebrows and lashes and a sad, puzzled expression on the face. How could he possibly tell the woman about that? As usual lately, he had no idea what was going to be expected of him, no idea what to expect of himself.

  For almost a year he had longed for a new site, a new project to capture his interest. He was still reluctant to develop the films from his time at the island – as if he believed the dead man he had found might appear in the wavering images that swam into focus in the darkroom – so he could not say how he was spending his time in the studio while Mira was at work. He had tacked a few drawings on the wall, he had shot several rolls of film, he had done some reading, but not much else. Long walks through the streets and alleyways of his neighborhood had yielded only a new admiration for the miniature front gardens of the Italian and Port
uguese immigrants who had settled in this part of the city, and the suspicion that on their small piece of ground in front of their houses, these people were working on projects more creative and useful than anything he had undertaken so far. He had photographed the gardens in the lushness of late summer, and then again during their decline in the fall, and had thought that he might somehow reproduce them – or at least the idea of them – in shadow boxes, but nothing tangible had come from any of this. It put him in mind of his father, how, once, during the last chaotic weeks of his life, he had inexplicably made a brief attempt to grow parsley in a pot near the door to the balcony of their apartment, and how the plant had withered from lack of water after his death. Anyway, they were Mira’s gardens really, she being the one who first insisted that he look at them, whereas every other image he had worked with had been his own discovery. Lately there had been no real discoveries. And yet, the daylight hours had passed quickly enough while he waited for the sound of her key in the door. Just last week he became aware that the sound of a key entering a lock could be anticipated with pleasure, rather than the dread he remembered from certain nights in his childhood. He lay on his back now and listened to Mira’s even breathing, then turned on his side and placed one hand on the bone of her hip. How small she was, how small, and how strong, and how rooted she was in the changing world.

  She had taken a different path than he had into the world of art and, being the Canadian-born daughter of first-generation immigrants with high hopes for the future of their children, her choice, in some ways, had involved more personal risk. She had told him that in the beginning she had followed the practical, educational route suggested by her parents, and had never allowed even the thought of disappointing them enter her mind. But somehow she had stumbled into a fine arts class at her university, a class taught by a young woman interested in using fabrics and thread, costumes and performance as an expression of high art. Mira had been more intrigued by all this than she had thought she would be when the nature of the class first made itself known to her. (Jerome hadn’t told Mira his own opinion about this form of expression.) At the time he met her, she had been making soft protective coverings for a variety of solid objects: toasters, books, bicycle pumps, even, eventually, and much to her parents’ bafflement as she always delighted in telling him, for her father’s lawn mower. At first she had called her works “cosies,” having taken the idea from the gorgeously embroidered covering for a teapot that her mother had brought to the New World when she left Delhi. But later, when Mira’s fascination with all things Christian had taken hold, she changed the name of her creation to “swaddles,” a tip of the hat to the swaddling clothes she was told had wrapped the Baby Jesus in his manger. “I like the word. The sound of it,” she had told Jerome when he had gently suggested that the whole notion seemed a bit bizarre. She had exhibited some of these in the gallery where she now worked part-time, the same gallery where she had first met Jerome. In the three years or so since they had been together, however, she had moved toward performance work, using the fabric either to cover herself or to create changing patterns on the floor, and Jerome could see she was really coming into her own.