A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [118]
And now her husband, walking into this new space with her, silent, perhaps secretly angry, his trench coat open, his gloves in one of his hands, a small encased umbrella in the other. He pulled the hotel parking stub from his pocket. “Too late to go back today,” he said in a flat tone she could not interpret. “We’ll head out after breakfast, first thing tomorrow morning.” He stepped toward the window, pulled aside the curtain, looked briefly at the brick wall. “Not much of a view, I didn’t notice that last night. Or this morning, for that matter.”
“No,” said Sylvia.
He turned back toward the room and began to move in Sylvia’s direction but stopped when he saw Julia’s map on the table. “You’ve been working on a tactile,” he said. “I didn’t notice that either. But that’s good. At least that’s something. I can’t remember, did you tell me what this one is?”
“No,” said Sylvia. “No, I didn’t tell you.”
Still standing near the door, she knew the deferral was over. Suddenly she didn’t know how to move into the room, how to become comfortable with the curtains, the furniture. She stood near the closet, running one hand across her hair, her other hand moving up and down the opposite arm under her coat, pulling up the sleeve of the wool cardigan she was wearing.
Malcolm took off his own coat and dropped it, along with his scarf, on one of the beds. “I wonder,” he said, “if maybe there aren’t some other things you haven’t told me, Syl. This running away, for example, this disappearing act, perhaps you could tell me what this is all about.”
When she didn’t answer, Malcolm crossed the room and quite gently removed her coat, hung it in the closet, and then retrieved his own coat from the bed. He had some trouble with the hangers, but eventually both garments hung side by side like two people waiting in one of the queues Sylvia had seen at streetcar stops since she had been in the city. She lifted one arm and moved her fingers over the soft, skin-coloured fabric of her husband’s trench coat, forcing herself to think about the naming of colours. Julia had once told her that there was a theory that the Greeks and Romans were “blind to blue,” that although the colour was everywhere around them they couldn’t see it at all. She then asked her to describe the difference between azure and cerulean, and Sylvia had remained speechless, realizing that the task was impossible. Perhaps, Julia had continued, perhaps colour could somehow be transposed into touch. Were there not, for example, warm and cold colours? Blue, Sylvia had said, might be smooth, like skin touching skin. But it’s a cold colour, Julia had reminded her, laughing.
“I thought you said you would never want to go to the city on your own,” Malcolm was saying. He was sitting in the chair beside the desk now, turning a postcard of the hotel around and around in his hands. He was looking directly at her with an expression on his face she did not recognize. She wondered if he felt fear, if her act of truancy had shaken his trust in the predictability of the condition. “C’mon, Syl,” he said softly, “at least come in and sit down.”
She walked as far as the bed and sat down, keeping her back straight, her attitude formal.
“Good,” said Malcolm, “that’s more like it.”
More like what? a much younger Sylvia had often wondered whenever an adult spoke these words. More like the past, she thought now. Something about perching on the edge of the bed made Sylvia feel like a child, not like the child she had been necessarily, but more like the anxious girl she had once seen in a reproduction of a painting by Edvard Munch. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said, looking at her hands clasped in her lap. “The train wasn’t so bad. I slept most of the way.”
She recalled the uniformed man staggering down the aisle, shouting the name of the city. It was odd to think that she hadn’t known Jerome then, and now she had revealed the most intimate sides of her secret self to him and had given him access also to the pages of Andrew’s past, the last evidence of his