A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [121]
“Julia couldn’t tell you where I was, not because she was unable, but because she didn’t know,” she said. “Still, if she had known she likely wouldn’t have told you anyway.”
“No,” said Malcolm after a few silent moments. “No, probably not.”
They stepped into the elevator, the arrival of which had been announced by a startling bell. “You see,” Sylvia continued, “like you, Julia is not a believer … with this difference … she doesn’t believe in the condition … my condition … she doesn’t believe in it at all.”
She looked at her husband’s profile, to see how he was responding to this information. He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and his head lowered. She was almost certain that there was no expression at all on his face, not even an expression of disagreement or disapproval. It was as if he hadn’t heard the words she had said, or perhaps had heard but didn’t believe in them.
Later that evening, when she walked into the bathroom to prepare for the night, she saw that evidence of her husband was everywhere: his toothbrush, his travel case, his razor, his brush and comb.
Such familiar objects.
Lying on the bed after undressing, she willed herself to consider Malcolm, who lay, as always, with his back to her, sleeping in the almost purposeful way of a physician whose rest is often interrupted. The room was merely pulsing now in the faint city light that the curtains could not entirely extinguish: things were better. She began mentally to go through the shelves in her husband’s study, book by book, recalling how the different colours of the spines had pleased her once she had become accustomed to the newer volumes placed here and there among the older texts left behind by her father. As a kind of lullaby, she allowed a list of titles to run through her mind. Clinical Gastroenterology, Pathological Basis of Disease, An Index of Differential Diagnosis, Medical Mycology, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, Principals of Surgery. She went to sleep comforted by the thought that someone, anyone, had taken the trouble to attend to a tragic alteration of the body, as if he had wanted to draw a map of its regions, then explore its territories.
After dinner she and Malcolm had walked into the alley and she had showed him the door she visited each day. “He is so young,” she had told him. “Only a boy in many ways.”
She watched Malcolm as he took in the graffiti, the name Conceptual Fragments. Though he had said nothing, she sensed his distrust of such things. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “Who are these people? What do they have to do with you?”
They were standing by the drainpipe that Sylvia had examined when she first reached the city. It looked darker somehow, and small icicles had formed, like teeth, around its mouth in the evening cold. The sound of a streetcar and laughter from a group of people passing on the sidewalk had become more than noise, seemed to have taken on a physical presence. “He found him, Malcolm, he found Andrew,” Sylvia said at last. “Jerome, the young man who lives here … he found Andrew’s body in the ice.” Sylvia glanced toward the door and lifted one hand almost as if she were going to touch it, then let her arm drop. “I think he was the right person, the right person to find him,” she whispered, speaking to herself now, knowing that what she said was true.
“Oh,” said Malcolm, placing his gloved hands in the pocket of his trench coat. “Oh, so it’s that. I suppose you were after the details.” He coughed, then took Sylvia’s arm and began to lead her back toward the hotel. “Well,” he said, turning away from the alley, “at least that’s all over now.”
“No,” she said calmly. “It’s not over. I won’t leave this unfinished, I just can’t do that. I am going back tomorrow. I said I would and I will.” She stopped walking. “Alone,” she added.
He remained silent, but she could tell the stubbornness, the refusal was gone from him. It’s the leaving, Sylvia thought, he knows I can do that now, just walk away. “You’ll have to get in touch with the office,” she said, “to tell them you