A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [25]
He recalled the spare rigidity of his parents’ bedroom, the twin white headboards, so disturbingly like tombstones on adjacent plots, the matching polyester spreads, faded by repeated washing, the decorative lampshades and doilies that were his mother’s sad attempt to bring some intimacy and joy into this corner of her life. He remembered quite vividly his mother’s two or three good dresses hanging in the closet and her one pair of party shoes, so out of fashion, so seldom worn, and the stale boozy smell on his father’s jackets overpowering the lighter smell of his mother’s cologne. He also remembered the nights when his father was out late alone and everything—even the furniture—seemed to be anxiously listening for the sound of his key in the lock, nights when his father would return angry, accusatory, smashing everything in his path. By the time Jerome was an adolescent, the sight of his father’s undershirts and shorts in the laundry hamper, or his black rubbers by the front door, had disgusted him. And then there was the inexplicable guilt he had felt after his father’s death, a guilt he could resurrect right here, right now, without ever being able to make any sense of it. Sometimes when Mira questioned him about that part of his past, he would feel the buzz of anger rising in him, and not wanting to go toward that, he would change the subject or make an excuse to leave the room. Occasionally he left the room abruptly, without making excuses.
She was the last person who deserved his anger. And he did not want to leave her. But he would not let Mira within fifty miles of his childhood, wanted none of it to touch her, to touch them.
Sylvia jerked nervously into wakefulness but had no difficulty determining where she had been sleeping. The room was dark: the only evidence of morning was a narrow channel of light plunging toward the floor from a space between the curtains, a quantity of dust motes trapped within it. A river alive with molecular activity. She switched on the bedside light, then lay back against the pillows, thinking first, as always, about Andrew, and then allowing her thoughts to turn to Malcolm, who would be, by now, quite desperate with worry. She decided to telephone the clinic, which would not yet be open at this hour. She would speak to an answering machine, tell it that she was fine, and no one, nothing, would demand an explanation for her behaviour, a description of her whereabouts. Knowing this, she was able, quite calmly, to make the call, speak the required words. She realized as she did this that she had not undressed the night before, had fallen asleep on top of the bed fully clothed, exhausted.
In the bath she became agitated about what she would say when she met with Jerome. She had next to no experience with meetings outside of those that, over and over, she and Andrew had so carefully arranged in the preceding years. The plastic flowers and the Formica tabletop of the restaurant where they had sometimes shared a coffee took shape in her mind, and, suddenly filled with anguish, she pulled her legs toward her chest and placed her forehead against her knees. When she had been with him, everything—the trees outside the window, the paper napkins in their shining dispenser, the plastic bread basket on the table—had been charged with the significance of his presence and had therefore been impossible to look at without feeling, and impossible to remember later without suffering. Now she opened her eyes and focused