A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [132]
“ ‘We will stop,’ he said. ‘We will stop.’
“Then he would cross the room, bury his face in my neck, pull back and show me his face, torn by grief.” Sylvia hesitated, almost unable to continue. “That was when I knew that emotionally he had fully entered me, and that from then on his grief would be my grief, his story my story, his enormous waves of feeling, my feeling. I had felt almost nothing until him, and now I would continue to carry all of the rage and terror and anguish that he would leave behind, that he would forget. And shortly after I understood this, he asked the terrible questions. ‘Could you tell me your name, your date of birth? Could you tell me who you are, what you are doing here?’ “
She had known then that her horses were finally and wholly smashed, that all the objects in the house that had held her had crumbled into dust. No words were possible then. No words at all.
“Sometimes, early on,” she told Jerome, “during our first long season, Andrew and I would meet accidentally on a street corner or in a shop. He was still mapping the County then, recording abandoned houses, or those that had evolved into ugly attempts at modernization. Often he was searching for things that had completely disappeared: a burial ground connected to an early settler, a scuttled ship, a hotel eclipsed by a moving dune of sand. These quests would bring him into Picton, to the registry office or the library with its haphazard archive, and once or twice a year, we would encounter each other without preparation, without warning.
“Always, I reacted to his appearance with panic, believing that I was the casualty of some terrible mistake, that I was wreckage. And yet somehow I would be able to speak, to exchange greetings, and to my later sorrow, to behave the way Malcolm had taught me to behave with all the other strangers whose paths intersected my days and evenings, in spite of my terror, my sense that everything had gone wrong, was lost, irretrievable, that there was only unfamiliarity and fear. For days afterwards I would be certain that this encounter, this distance and awkwardness, was the truth, and I would be certain that this was all we were to each other: exchanged civilities in the vicinity of traffic, indifferent, removed, suspicious of each gesture. There was no sweet secret, no complicity between us; nothing belonged to us—not the present, not even the past. He became a man walking away from me. He became a man I had never known. That November, remembering those times, it seemed as if they had been a terrible premonition of how things would end between us, with this difference: I became a woman he could not remember. A woman he had never known.”
Sylvia was sitting upright in her chair as she said this. Jerome was looking at the wall. “That’s terrifying,” he said.
“Yes, I became afraid, afraid that we didn’t exist.” She paused. “That perhaps we had never existed. And then last year, in early December, I drove along the lake through one of the season’s first heavy snowfalls in order to get to the hill, to get to him. By the time I arrived the weather was so bad I could barely see; it was as if the landscape itself were being eliminated. I remember thinking as I struggled through the wind along the edge of the hill that this was the first time I had been unable to look at the view before walking into the interior, before entering his embrace, though I was, by then, certain of neither the interior nor the embrace. I had been taking all the responsibility for some time, making all the appointments for our rendezvous, moving through the relationship in the way that, in recent months, I had learned to move, trying to ignore his lack of participation. I was carrying a bag of food in my arms because I knew there would be no food. I was carrying several things in my mind, things I wanted to say to him to try to bring him back to me, because I knew by then that he was going, because I feared, by then, that he was gone. As I walked past the foundations, I saw