A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [114]
When she woke the following morning she decided to relent somewhat, spoke when she was spoken to, and allowed Malcolm to guide her downstairs to a restaurant she had not even known was a part of the hotel.
“We’ll leave after breakfast,” he said, once they were seated at a table.
“Not yet,” she said, “wait one more day.”
“All right then,” he replied, indulging her as he always did once she began to speak after a bout of silence, “we’ll be on vacation. We’ve never been on vacation before and I don’t have to be back until tomorrow.” He raised a gleaming white napkin to his mouth, then folded it once and placed it again on his lap. “There are good museums in this city. You are at home in museums.”
“Yes,” said Sylvia, knowing that she was being granted a deferral, “yes, I am at home in museums.”
Jerome had begun to read aloud from the notebooks soon after Mira had returned from work. He had been a bit unnerved by his own curiosity, his eagerness to discover what Andrew Woodman had written, and was surprised as well by his desire to say aloud the words that were written on the page so that Mira could hear them. She had been distracted at first: searching for food in the refrigerator, washing an apple at the sink, leafing through the envelopes and flyers that had come in the mail. Then, for several minutes, she had walked back and forth eating the fruit as he read. When he looked up, he could see her looking closely at the skin of the apple, trying to avoid biting into a bruise. Gradually, though, he could feel her becoming focused, attentive. In the end she sat down at the edge of the couch and placed her legs over his lap. He rested his arms on her thighs and turned the pages, one by one.
Later that night they ate a spaghetti dinner by the light of a candle stuck into a Chianti bottle—an artifact, Jerome told Mira, that Robert Smithson would have been familiar with in the 1960s. Everyone had them, he said, all the beatniks, and then the hippies. There are probably photographs, he said jokingly, of the major figures of those times posing with or near their Chianti candleholders: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Jim Dine, Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jack Kerouac. Those were the days, he explained, when the major figures in the arts had been as concerned about their personas as they were about their art so they would have had themselves photographed in any number of bohemian situations. That’s all gone now, he continued. Ego no longer has a role to play.
“I thought you said that the art object itself was finished.” Mira leaned forward to pour herself another glass of wine. Some of the red liquid splashed onto the table near her sleeve, but she seemed not to notice. Jerome could tell that, after the first glass, she had become a bit wobbly, a term she used to describe the effect of alcohol on her system. He looked at the beautiful curve of her mouth in the candlelight, her smooth brow. He watched her face change as a thought developed in her mind. “It’s odd, don’t you think,” she eventually said, “that even though now there is no one there at all, a hundred years ago people were making objects on that island—watercolours, ships, rafts. What happened to everything?”
“Lots of it just floated away, I guess. Sylvia told me that sometimes several rafts were chained together so as to get more timber to Quebec.” Jerome began to mop up the wine with his paper napkin. “I’ve always liked the notion of sequentiality.” He turned, tossed the napkin across the room, smiled when it landed in the sink, then picked up a fork and curled some of the noodles into the bowl of a spoon, a way of eating that Mira had found quite amusing the first time he demonstrated it to her.
“Is sequentiality a word? I don’t think it is.” Mira turned her head to one side and partly closed her eyes as she often did when she was questioning something. “Perhaps we should look it up,” she added.
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of floats,” said Jerome, ignoring