Jane Urquhart Read online

  When he looked at her now, he could hardly believe that she had once been merely a businesslike voice on the phone, a polite, efficient presence in the gallery where he showed his work. What amazed him most was how all of this formality could be softened by degrees simply by walking side by side down a street, sharing a meal, a conversation, eventually a touch, and now this most intimate of experiences, one impossible to imagine in the past, this lying side by side in the dark, allowing unconsciousness to wash over them, carry them toward the morning. There had been women in the past, of course, and occasionally he had found himself in their beds in the morning, but he had always rolled away, rather than toward them, had been courteous and discreet in what he knew was, and would remain, their territory, and had always felt a flicker of relief when, on the street, he had turned a corner, out of range of their windows.

  Now he was warmed by the knowledge that Mira’s calm face would be the first image that he looked at each morning. Her certainty in the face of his own lack of it. Until her, nothing in him had fully experienced either the anticipation of reunion, or the hollowness of separation. To him it had all been a great surprise, this combination of comfort and tenderness, pleasure and then the shared quiet aftermath of pleasure, and there were still moments when he was mistrustful, suspicious almost, of the ease with which he had walked into the partnership. In the past he had wanted not even the faintest suggestion of reliance to be a part of his character. For him, the implications of dependence teetered – always – on the edge of addiction and so he would often change, though never fully abandon certain social networks in the city. So far nothing and no one had kept him for long, curiosity being the only mood he fully trusted. But, as far as he could tell, for her, his entrance into her life was as natural as the air she softly inhaled and exhaled beside him here in this room that she insisted on calling a bedroom despite the pipes on the ceiling, the stacked cartons used to store clothing, the glow from the computer, the functional futon.

  He recalled the spare rigidity of his parents’ bedroom, the twin white headboards, so disturbingly like tombstones on adjacent plots, the matching polyester spreads, faded by repeated washing, the decorative lampshades and doilies that were his mother’s sad attempt to bring some intimacy and joy into this corner of her life. He remembered quite vividly his mother’s two or three good dresses hanging in the closet and her one pair of party shoes, so out of fashion, so seldom worn, and the stale boozy smell on his father’s jackets overpowering the lighter smell of his mother’s cologne. He also remembered the nights when his father was out late alone and everything – even the furniture – seemed to be anxiously listening for the sound of his key in the lock, nights when his father would return angry, accusatory, smashing everything in his path. By the time Jerome was an adolescent, the sight of his father’s undershirts and shorts in the laundry hamper, or his black rubbers by the front door, had disgusted him. And then there was the inexplicable guilt he had felt after his father’s death, a guilt he could resurrect right here, right now, without ever being able to make any sense of it. Sometimes when Mira questioned him about that part of his past, he would feel the buzz of anger rising in him, and not wanting to go toward that, he would change the subject or make an excuse to leave the room. Occasionally he left the room abruptly, without making excuses.

  She was the last person who deserved his anger. And he did not want to leave her. But he would not let Mira within fifty miles of his childhood, wanted none of it to touch her, to touch them.

  Sylvia jerked nervously into wakefulness but had no difficulty determining where she had been sleeping. The room was dark: the only evidence of morning was a narrow channel of light plunging toward the floor from a space between the curtains, a quantity of dust motes trapped within it. A river alive with molecular activity. She switched on the bedside light, then lay back against the pillows, thinking first, as always, about Andrew, and then allowing her thoughts to turn to Malcolm, who would be, by now, quite desperate with worry. She decided to telephone the clinic, which would not yet be open at this hour. She would speak to an answering machine, tell it that she was fine, and no one, nothing, would demand an explanation for her behavior, a description of her whereabouts. Knowing this, she was able, quite calmly, to make the call, speak the required words. She realized as she did this that she had not undressed the night before, had fallen asleep on top of the bed fully clothed, exhausted.

  In the bath she became agitated about what she would say when she met with Jerome. She had next to no experience with meetings outside of those that, over and over, she and Andrew had so carefully arranged in the preceding years. The plastic flowers and the Formica tabletop of the restaurant where they had sometimes shared a coffee took shape in her mind, and, suddenly filled with anguish, she pulled her legs toward her chest and placed her forehead against her knees. When she had been with him, everything – the trees outside the window, the paper napkins in their shining dispenser, the plastic bread basket on the table – had been charged with the significance of his presence and had therefore been impossible to look at without feeling, and impossible to remember later without suffering. Now she opened her eyes and focused on the chain of silver beads attached to the bathtub plug. She knew that each tiny metallic orb would be filled with reflections almost too small to see and that in each of these miniature reflections there would be replicas of herself – crouching, cowed under an assault of feeling. She thought about the chain until her breathing became more even. Then she rose from the tub, dried herself with the hotel towels, left the bathroom, and began to dress.

  She went over to the desk and, with Julia in mind, sat down, opened the folder, and took out the pen and two sheets of hotel stationery. I’ll send the map to you as soon as I can, she wrote. You won’t be able to get out to the point for a while anyway… too wet. She thought for a moment. Others would have to read this letter to Julia, as always. She made a one-inch fold at the top of the letter, tore the paper along the seam, discarded the printed hotel address in the wastebasket under the desk, and resumed writing. I’ve gone on a little trip, myself, she wrote, thanks to you. Then remembering the worn, echoing floorboards of the farmhouse where Julia and her aging parents lived, she added, Where I am there is carpet everywhere except in the bathrooms. I have the materials with me, however, and intend to work on the map. I’ll use something else (haven’t decided what… any suggestions?) for the water this time because it’s quite exposed out there. The lighthouse is on the end of a point so the water can be quite rough. And the air smells different as well, or at least it will smell different by the time you get there later in the spring.

  Sylvia could not finish the letter. All that she would have to talk about later in the day was gathered like humid weather in her mind. This intensity of focus was not new but saying what was on her mind was something she had shied away from most of her life. She had almost confessed, however, to Julia, she’d felt so desperate the first time she had lost Andrew. But in the end she had lacked the courage. All that she had permitted herself to tell her friend was that she knew a man whose profession allowed him to explore not only geological phenomena but also the traces of human activity that were left behind on the textured surface of the earth. Julia had been delighted by this. “I understand that,” she told Sylvia. “The whole world is a kind of Braille, if you consider things from that perspective.”

  “I’m a curious person,” Julia had once said as they sat facing each other on either side of the kitchen table at the farm. “I want to know exactly what you look like.”

  Sylvia hadn’t replied, but hadn’t stood to leave either as she might have had she been elsewhere.

  “I’ll never learn your face because I know you don’t like to be touched.” Julia was smiling as she said this.

  “How do you know I don’t like to be touched?” Sylvia had been somewhat taken aback, though Julia’s smile had told her that the remark was not an accusation. On the wooden table between them lay the
tactile landscape Julia had wanted: a view across Barley Bay from the wharf at Cutnersville; that and a tactile of the route from the bus station to the end of the wharf. It had only been recently that Julia had explained that, in spite of her blindness, she was interested in views, in vistas. “Panoramas,” she had said, motioning Sylvia to follow her into the parlor where she ran her hand across the glass that covered a narrow framed picture of cows grazing near a river. She not only wanted to know how to get to a place, she had explained, she wanted to be able to see what was in the vicinity.

  “I know by the sound of your footsteps coming up the stairs,” Julia said, “and by the way you place your teacup in the saucer. By the way you remain stiff, motionless in your chair. I know that you are one of those people who don’t like physical contact. You’re shocked,” she continued, laughing. “You had no idea how much of yourself you give away.”

  Julia had been the only person whom Sylvia had made an effort to visit, until Andrew. At first she had driven out to the farm at Malcolm’s suggestion, to deliver the maps that he had encouraged her to make, maps that described the things in the physical world that Julia couldn’t see. Later, she made the trip simply because Julia interested her and because she had felt so comfortable in the company of someone who was unable to look at her. These had been her first purely social encounters and she was surprised by how much she enjoyed them.

  “The problem,” she had begun uncertainly, “is just that I can’t ever classify touch, can’t seem to understand degrees of contact. All accidents, all injuries, involve contact, impact, don’t they? What is the difference, really, between touch and collision?”

  “But, of course, there’s a difference,” Julia had said.

  “I know that, but often it doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  Julia’s hands had moved across the surface of the pine table as if testing the familiarity of the grain. Her irises were soft, opaque, as beautiful and distant as planets. “There is being touched, and then there is touching, and attached to both of these things there is intention.”

  “But how do you know for sure what is intended?” As a child Sylvia had been certain that her mother’s few attempts at embraces had been meant to restrain her, to cause her to stop doing something, or to move her in a direction other than the one she had wanted to take. “I like,” Sylvia began, “to count on things being the same way they were the last time I saw them. Sometimes I think that the world is just too crowded, too full of people rearranging things, touching each other, making changes.”

  “It’s like that for the newly sighted,” Julia said quietly, then added, “or so I’ve heard. They are sometimes unable to cope with the profuseness of whatever is out there in the perceived world. Many of them apparently want to go back… back to blindness.” She paused, thinking. “Perhaps there is something comforting about being able to choose a view rather than having it thrust upon you, to choose a view and then to touch a map. Maybe I’m more fortunate than I know.”

  Sylvia had watched as Julia sat back and relaxed in her chair. How wonderful she had looked right then, sitting beside the kitchen window, her blond hair and translucent skin and eyes making her seem ageless despite her forty-some years. She had been the first person Sylvia had wanted to spend time with, the first person, apart from Malcolm, with whom she had felt safe.

  When Sylvia stood at the door that day preparing to leave, Julia had lifted one of her pale arms and had asked Sylvia to touch it. “Put your hand there,” she had said, “just above my wrist.” Sylvia hesitated. Then she placed her palm on the milk-white skin. “See how naturally your fingers curl around the shape?” Julia continued. “Human beings were made to touch one another.”

  Sylvia was surprised by the smoothness and warmth of her friend’s arm. But then everything about Julia was soft, pliable. As she walked away from the farmhouse she thought about how Julia navigated through life. There were the maps, of course, and the cane, the tools she used for unfamiliar places. But the way she moved around the furniture, the obstacles in the rooms of her house, was so fluid, so filled with grace it was as if the structure of her body were made of some other substance altogether, something more forgiving than bone.

  Malcolm had taught Sylvia about conversation. The introduction of a new piece of information usually requires that a question be asked, he had explained, even if the information comes about as a result of a previous question. This was an idea that the then much younger Sylvia had found to be absurd in theory and exhausting in practice. She had never let go of her fear of questioning but tried, anyway, to follow Malcolm’s advice when they were in social situations. Later, when she had been with Julia, or Andrew, she had learned about the pleasure of conversation, the comfort of listening and being listened to, and in time she’d been able, quite naturally, to choose one path or another into long episodes of talk. There must have been questions, but she couldn’t recall them, only how easily the pattern of speech and silence had fallen into place between them, until that pattern had begun to alter, break apart, become unrecognizable.

  Now in midafternoon, with a series of frantic city images still present in her mind, she stood again in the alley at the industrial door of Jerome’s studio wondering what they would say to each other. Jerome answered immediately when she knocked, opened the door wide, and then, without speaking, moved to one side to allow Sylvia in. As she stepped over the threshold, the large orange cat escaped into the alley.

  “Swimmer!” Jerome called after the departing animal. “Oh well, we’ll hear him when he comes back.”

  “I’m sorry, should I have tried to stop him?”

  “No, no. He doesn’t know the city all that well, but he’s learning. He’ll survive. He’s used to the outdoors. I found him on the island, just before…”

  “Just before you found Andrew.”

  “Yes,” Jerome stood stiffly near the couch for a moment or two. Then he motioned to the chair Sylvia had occupied the previous day, “Maybe we should sit down.”

  Sylvia sat, then shrugged off her coat and let it fall over the back of the chair. Melting slush from the street pooled on the cement floor around her fur-topped boots. Only one bank of fluorescent lights was on today and through a window a wealth of sunlight was streaming. “Much warmer today,” she said. This was one of the many climate-related remarks that Malcolm had suggested she use when he was trying to teach her the skills of social interaction. She had learned many things about weather during this period, had developed a fascination for it in fact, watching reports on the television and reading books about meteorology until her insistence that it should become the focus of any conversation had led to Malcolm’s banning of the subject altogether. She smiled, remembering this, seeing the humor in it now.

  “Yes,” said Jerome, settling himself onto the old couch, “warmer.”

  The space between them became silent. Sylvia was aware of a vacancy. “Your girlfriend?” she asked.

  “She’s at the gallery. An art gallery, where she works.” Jerome paused. “Her name is Mira,” he offered.

  “Yes, she told me. Mira,” Sylvia repeated the name. “Almost like mirror,” she added.

  “Almost. I hadn’t thought of that.” Jerome leaned against the back of the couch, placed one ankle on his bent knee. Then suddenly he was on his feet again. “Are you comfortable?” he asked. “Warm enough? These old rads… but there is a thermostat. I can turn it up if you like.”

  His nervousness made Sylvia aware of the tension developing in her own body. “No, no,” she said, “this is fine.”

  Jerome sat down again and looked at her with what could have been either pity or curiosity.

  “I sometimes can’t recall his face,” Sylvia said. She hesitated for a moment, then continued, “When I knew about you, I thought that –”

  “Don’t forget that I didn’t know him,” Jerome interjected. “I want to help but, because I didn’t know him, I’m not sure what –”

  “You… you came
across him accidentally and so… so did I, and I’ve come to believe that without these accidents there really is nothing, nothing to life at all.” How could it be that something unexpected, what she had in the past feared, had been what introduced her to Andrew? All this year, after his death, when she had been reading and rereading everything he had written in his notebooks, she knew she was attempting to make the accidental solid. Much of what he had told her was recorded there, but there was more. Was it Andrew’s reconstruction that had filled in the gaps, or had his memory already grown so thin that imaginary events began to appear on the page? It had been impossible for Sylvia to find the solidity she sought.