A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [55]
By the time Sylvia had passed through the glass doors that lead to the lobby of the hotel, she had mentally turned seven or eight pages of the first notebook. She saw the shape that the paragraphs made on the lined paper, the different colours of ink Andrew had used, the places where he had angrily stricken imperfect phrases from the record. All this—every flaw, each hesitation, his changes of mind and mood, his humour, his diagrams of interiors, his efforts to depict emotion—would be evident now to someone other than herself. “The last raft of the season was being constructed in the small harbour,” she whispered to herself, and then, “continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond.”
Just after the elevator doors closed she spoke the sentence “They walked with the horse out of the darkness of the stable and into the vivid autumn light.” Often in the past six months she had risen at two or three in the morning, had descended the stairs, and had read and reread the journals with such concentration that when she paused to look at the kitchen clock, two or three hours would have passed. Several hours of exhausted sleep would most times follow this, so that when she awoke late in the morning she would be unsure if the world she had entered on the page hadn’t been one built by a dream. And then, the following day, when she was alone, Sylvia would say certain sentences aloud, knowing that by doing so she could evoke a scene quite different from the one in which she stood or walked, could make her own kitchen disappear, for instance, and cause the shadow of a barn door on sandy ground, the glint of lake, leaves twisting in a breeze appear in its place.
Jerome was stretched out on the futon, but he was not asleep. In the semi-darkness of the early evening he was listening to Mira describe the three vows that a monk must take upon becoming part of a religious community. Lately she had been reading Thomas Merton.
Was his namesake, Saint Jerome, a Benedictine? he wanted to know. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. They had been dressing to go to a party in another area of the city but had found themselves making love instead. It was quite early in the evening: the intention to leave the studio was still with them, but it was fading fast.
“No” she told him, “Saint Benedict was the famous Benedictine. He founded the Benedictine order.” She was curled on her side, facing him, with both small arms wrapped around his larger one. He could feel her lips moving near his shoulder, the way her torso shook in a soft explosion of silent laughter. So this had nothing to do with him, these were not vows that she secretly hoped he would take.
“There is the vow of stability,” she was saying. “That means that you must stop, once you have entered a community, you must stop imagining that there is a monastery somewhere else that would be better than the one you are living in, stop thinking that you would be happier in another place. You must enter fully and completely each day of the life you have chosen, or the one that has been assigned to you.” She paused. Jerome said nothing, but he knew she could sense his attention in the dark. “Then there is the vow of the Convergence of Life.”
“Wait,” he said, “that last vow. Smithson said in an interview that one pebble moving six inches over the period of four million years was enough for him, enough to keep him interested.”
“He would have made a good Hindu.”
“Not sure … probably a meat eater. The other vow?”
Mira had rolled away from him now onto her left side, and he adjusted himself so that he could put one arm over her waist, their thighs touching, his kneecaps pressing slightly into the smooth hollows of her bent legs. “The next vow,” she corrected, “the Convergence of Life. I think it might mean that, while you remain stable, you must also accept that the world will change around you, and that you should remain open to and aware