A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [58]
Sylvia opened the curtains and looked at the concrete wall stained a mustard yellow by the muted, artificial light that gathered democratically in all the corners of the city at night. I, said the lark, if it’s not in the dark. At this instant she found in herself the desire to walk in the city at night, the desire to be of the moment, time-bound. She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. She decided she could be absent from the hotel for exactly one hour.
She buttoned up her coat, switched off the lights, left the room.
Once she was on the street, Sylvia stood for a while in front of a shop window behind which a variety of television sets was displayed, each relaying the same image of a well-dressed man energetically speaking and moving his hands. She was interested in his gestures, in the way his forehead wrinkled then smoothed again and how his shoulders moved up and down. He was like Malcolm during the period when he was teaching her the art of expression and she was forced, now, to suppress an impulse to copy his actions.
The next window was filled with medical supplies: basins, pumps, walkers, wheelchairs—clean, shining—patiently anticipating a whole range of infirmities. Mannequins absorbed her in subsequent windows, their stillness and that of their clothing. No wind to move fabric, no weather at all to respond to. She liked that. The damp cement sidewalk glittered faintly beneath her boots, which were now at home on that surface. Behind her, brightly lit traffic rolled on patched pavement. No one paid any attention to her, and she knew then that the city had opened its indifferent arms to her, that she could move or stand entirely still, respond, or refrain from responding, and a strange calmness came over her. The feeling was not foreign, not new to her, but here in the city she did not recognize it for the contentment that it was. It was not happiness; she had experienced that particular exhausting state of alert only three or four times, always in the company of Andrew. Now in the midst of the kind of constantly altering stimuli she had believed she could never incorporate into her life she knew only something she had always known: that this kind of tranquility could never be brought to her in the hands of others.
When she returned to the hotel and walked into the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye, then glanced toward the black leather chairs that, after the first day, Sylvia had always ignored. She recognized the trench coat first, the hat resting on a knee the coat covered, then, as the figure rose to his feet, the face, and the weary, tolerant expression on the face. Her husband spoke her name, then, “Syl,” he said quietly while moving toward her, taking her arm, “Syl, I’ve come to take you home.”
The Bog Commissioners
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Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River. Scattered islands with odd names appear at this point, islands that are premonitions of the famous Thousand Islands downstream where there is no longer any question about the water one looks at being that of the river. But one hundred and fifty years ago there was much discussion among the residents of my great-great-grandfather’s Timber Island empire as to whether the surrounding