A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [122]
“This is all very unsettling,” he said, but once they were back in the room he immediately picked up the phone to make the necessary arrangements for his absence. Then he smiled at her in a resigned, fond, and faintly condescending way. I’m doing all this for you, the smile said, I am doing all this because of your condition.
His patience, she decided, was a burden: not for him—for him it was second nature—but it was a burden for her. She wanted to throw it off, be done with it. She was tired, she suddenly knew, of taking all the responsibility for it.
On Saturday mornings Jerome and Mira almost always ate a late breakfast at a nearby café where they could order brioche or biscotti and read the weekend papers left behind by previous customers. This was a lingering luxury, ending only when they decided how they would spend the afternoon, whether they would go to a gallery where a friend might be performing or exhibiting, watch a film, or simply explore certain unfamiliar neighbourhoods in the city, cameras in hand, seeking new images. They rarely returned to the studio on Saturday during the daylight hours, wanting one day in the week where a kind of fluidity would determine their actions. Sometimes a casual group of mutual friends or acquaintances would gather around them, expanding and contracting as they moved from place to place. The appearance of Jerome’s work in certain magazines or in the arts pages of newspapers had made him more socially sought-after in such places than he had ever been in the past, and often he and Mira had hardly settled in at a table when they would be joined by other young people dressed in the customary dark clothing.
He was not entirely at ease with this. Not being much of a talker, he was never quite sure of what would be expected of him by way of conversation and was grateful for Mira’s poise, her curiosity and genuine interest in people: in what they were thinking, doing, how the small dramas of their lives were unfolding. He generally left the talking to her, but listened, nevertheless, intrigued by the way Mira hid or revealed her cleverness, deferred or brought her thoughts forward into the path of the talk. But he frequently felt ungainly, awkward, as if his legs were too long to fit comfortably under the table, his voice either too loud or too soft.
Today, however, they had arrived at the café early enough that no one they knew had, as yet, emerged from the badly heated studios or cheap apartments they called home, and he and Mira were able to sit near a window, talking quietly.
“Look,” Mira was saying, “you can see the top of Sylvia’s hotel from here. We could call her, you know, or drop by.”
Jerome did not respond.
“She doesn’t know anyone else in the city,” Mira said. “ What is she going to do all day?”
“The map, remember,” Jerome answered.
Mira was gazing out the window, looking with concern at a couple of half-grown stray kittens who were gnawing on a discarded hamburger bun lying on the sidewalk.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jerome said to her. “One cat is enough.”
“Okay,” she said, turning back to him, “let’s go home. I think we should finish reading before tomorrow. And anyway,” she said, looking around the half-empty café, and then at the partially eaten pastry on her plate, “I’m finished. I’ve had enough.”
Something echoed in Jerome as Mira spoke. It was his mother’s voice, speaking these exact words—I’m finished. I’ve had enough—late at night, when his father had not been home for two days. She had been talking to herself, or perhaps to her husband whose inebriation wouldn’t have permitted him to hear her even if he had been in the room and not in a bar God knows where. The despair in her voice had both frightened and infuriated Jerome; he had wanted to shake her, he had wanted her to forget about his father and his troubles because despite what she was saying, whatever announcement she thought she was