A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [40]
“Even when we were far, far apart,” she told Jerome, “Andrew rolled through my mind like active weather.” She smiled, pleased with her description, then, suddenly embarrassed, straightened her hair with her hand and tugged her skirt farther down over her knees. “And when I wasn’t with him, I was waiting.”
“My mother was like that,” said Jerome, a shadow sliding over his face and a faint trace of anger in his voice. “She was always, always waiting.”
This abrupt confession startled Sylvia somewhat. “What was she waiting for?”
“Change. For my father: for him to change. He didn’t, of course.” Jerome coughed. “No, that’s not quite true,” he added. “He got even worse, became even more impossible.”
Sylvia would not ask about his father’s condition, what it might be. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. Or, at least it doesn’t matter to me.” Jerome got up and walked back to the counter, where a bowl filled with Mira’s oranges sat near the toaster. He picked up one perfect orange and offered it to Sylvia, but she shook her head, so he returned to the couch and began to peel the fruit for himself, slowly, and with what appeared to be great concentration. Sylvia found herself drawn to the vibrancy of the colour as if she had never seen orange before.
“You know,” she said, “Andrew always maintained that all married couples seemed to him to be placed for the purposes of determining scale in a painted landscape. Tiny anonymous figures that Victorians referred to as the ‘argument’ of the picture.” She paused. “He liked the pun, the word argument. Marriage, for him you see, would have been an argument. He told me he couldn’t imagine using the word we all the time in reference to thoughts, or even actions.” They had been curled together on the bed and his mouth had been against the back of her neck when he had spoken about this—she had been able to feel the slight motion of his lips. “But here we are,” he had said later. “Here we are lying on the shoreline of the ancient lake. This whole ridge is like negative space, like a physical memory.” He had explained that braided in the limestone around the Great Lake were the fossils of life forms whose narrow sessions of animation had been silenced forever. Such brief, simple narratives, such unobserved histories, he had said, permanently halted by a wall of ice. Sometimes, he’d said, you could see the direction the animal intended to take. With others—those who were born to a spiral shape for instance—they seemed to have already accepted their fate.
In what season had he spoken those words? What year? She didn’t, she couldn’t remember. Only that she had been lying on her side and that he was curled around her like a shell, his hand circling the wrist of her left arm, their clothing tangled together on a chair near the bed. Flannel and corduroy, silk and linen caught on a lathed armrest or falling over the torn rush webbing of a chair seat woven a hundred years ago in innocence. Corduroy, she had whispered once, removing his old brown jacket. From the French, he had joked. The threads of the king. Then he had run his hands through her hair, had looked at her and said, “Sylvaculture, the encouragement of trees.”
She had told him, once, that in the first half of the nineteenth century there was scarcely a pioneer family in her County that hadn’t lost one or two of their young men to the whims of the Great Lake as boy after boy joined the crews of schooners that carried goods from settlement to settlement along the Canadian shores.