A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [116]
Jerome looked into the distance for a while, then turned to Mira. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad there isn’t some way of making a time-released film of an abandoned building decaying and then germinating, day by day, over the period of, say, a hundred years. It’s strange, now that I think of it, how much attention is always given to construction when decay is really more pervasive, more inevitable.”
“Decay and change,” said Mira. “People moving from place to place, leaving things behind.”
Jerome had in mind a photo of his parents and himself, one taken formally in a photographer’s studio when he had been about four years old. His parents had been young, smiling, quite beautiful really. There had been no trace of what was to come. There was always the sense that no matter how perfect the moment, change is always hovering just outside the frame. People will remove their arms from the shoulders of their companions. The group will break up, go their separate ways.
It was one o’clock in the morning, and he was exhausted. There would be no more talking tonight. He raised his body slightly, twisted his torso, and extended his arm to turn off the light. Mira rolled toward him, placed one knee between his legs, then bent her head under his chin, her face against his chest. They would sleep in this position, barely moving all night long. “Krishna,” Mira whispered. It was a joke they shared about Krishna, how he had been so beautiful that all the milkmaids had fallen in love with him. Jerome knew he was not the most beautiful person in this relationship, in this bed, and he was far from godlike. If anything, he resembled more a tattered, starved saint: thin, almost defeated, trudging back from the wilderness.
In midafternoon Sylvia was staring at a miniature bronze figure, not three inches high. A bending saint, she thought, a saint bent under the weight of his sorrow. Sleeping Apostle, the card next to the object read, but Sylvia knew that the small man was not sleeping. The attitude his tiny body had taken spoke of a hard awakening followed by a collapse into sorrowful reflection. His head was cradled in his arms, his knees were drawn up to his chest; anguish was evident everywhere—even in the folds of his clothing. He was Andrew the last time she had seen him: Andrew huddled in a corner of the room. Andrew shrinking. Andrew unreachable.
She was at home in the museum, at home with this.
She had not been at home in the first museum they had visited, a large stone building that one approached by climbing an imposing staircase in front of which hovered crowds of children and various men with carts selling balloons, hot dogs, candy floss. Inside, she found herself frightened by the geological exhibit that included a huge mechanized globe that opened to reveal the construction of the Earth’s centre—the construction of the underworld, she thought—and dark, narrow, claustrophobic passages lined by not quite real rocks. Later there were the bones of dinosaurs, suits of armour, weapons, shields, wrapped mummies, and several improbable dioramas depicting life in certain ages: stone, bronze, Aboriginal, pioneer. Her own age, or at least the age that had encased her life, seemed never to have been inhabited, and was illustrated here by a series of roped-off rooms containing too much furniture. A Victorian Parlour, a sign in front of such a room read. Do not enter. Do not touch.
Her husband had peered intently at each exhibit and had fished for his glasses in order to read the typed explanations that hung in glass frames on the adjacent walls, but she knew he was just trying to humour her. These attempts to feign absorption in that which he believed might interest her were something she was well used to. Like an adult in the company of a child at a puppet show, he was mainly intrigued by her response to whatever it was he was showing her. He monitored her slightest shifts of mood and attention and,