A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [125]
“He was serious,” said Sylvia, “but he loved humour, loved laughter. I always thought that Andrew would remember forever how I laughed when I was with him, I, who so rarely laughed. But perhaps to him I was a woman who laughed often, one who was light-hearted, easy to know.”
Jerome smiled. “We liked the story,” he said, “but somehow it made me think that everything in the world is just a mirage, just a suggestion, gone before it’s graspable. I think I already knew that, some part of me already knew that, the part that avoids”—Jerome searched for the word—“stasis, stability, that emplacement you just spoke of. Stability seems to me, sometimes, to be just another way of saying the end.”
“Stability was what I always wanted,” said Sylvia, “More than you know.”
“Perhaps. But you … you lost someone. And I’m worried.” He cleared his throat. “I worry about that.” He paused. “About you.”
“Oh, don’t,” said Sylvia quietly. “You’re so young. And all of this … it’s well …” For the first time it occurred to her that she might have troubled this young man. “You’ll forget this,” she said.
“No. No, I won’t.” Jerome looked solemn for a moment, then glanced at Sylvia and smiled. “I won’t want to forget. Not the story. Not the things we’ve talked about.” He moved over to the couch and slowly sat down. “And the truth is, I want to know, I guess I always wanted to know what happened to him. And now I want to know about you. You keep saying you lost him twice.”
“Yes, twice.” Sylvia sat in the chair and placed her mug on the table. “It is a miraculous truth,” she said to Jerome, “that the same man who introduced me to sorrow by walking away from me would also be the man who, years later, would introduce me to redemption simply by turning around and walking back. It was like a resurrection, really … or so I thought.”
Sylvia glanced at Jerome. One half of his face was lit by sun from the window. His eyelashes cast a faint shadow on his cheek.
“The side porch of the house where I live was glassed in long ago,” she said, “probably at the end of the nineteenth century. In the intervening years it has been used first as a sunroom and then as a mudroom for the wet shoes and galoshes belonging to my father’s winter patients. There is something called a health clinic now, where my husband and another doctor share an office and examination rooms, so there are no longer any galoshes, no longer any patients, only me, alone each day, wandering through the rooms.
“I had begun to use the glassed-in porch to grow geraniums, the only plant with which I have had any success whatsoever.” She laughed. “They remain blooming, despite my lack of botanical skill, for three seasons out there. In the winter, of course, they are brought indoors—though Malcolm is put off by what he calls their musty scent. I, however, believe that the plants have no smell at all. I enter and vacate the house through the glassed-in porch, walking past this unnoticed odour whenever I go out, and whenever I return from wherever it is that I have gone.”
She had always liked the way that the aging parts of a geranium plant could be so easily, so gently detached from the rest of the plant. No cutting, no snapping: they gave themselves with grace to the experience of being discarded, to the idea that the plant on which they flourished would contain not a hint that they had once been part of its physical composition. She remembered that on the spring morning when she heard the phone ringing deep in the centre of the house she had left the sunroom with a geranium leaf still between the thumb and forefinger of