A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [9]
How wonderful the snow was; every change of direction, each whim, even the compulsion of hunger was marked on its surface, like memory, for a brief season. He told Mira all of this when he called her, but forgot to mention the green tea and how it made him think of her.
That night Jerome was awakened by the noise of a tin can bouncing slowly down the stairs, followed by a dull, steady thumping. When he opened the door to the stairs, he found he was looking directly into the green eyes of a large orange cat whose fur was matted with burrs and whose expression was hostile. The animal hunched its back and exhaled a long hiss in Jerome’s direction, then strolled calmly into the vast space of the loft and disappeared. Too filled with sleep to fully believe in this apparition, Jerome staggered back to the cot and did not open his eyes until morning when, sensing that he was being watched, he turned his head and again met the animal’s angry green eyes. “Hello, puss,” he said and was greeted with a low growl. He reached out a hand and the cat promptly attempted to bite him, despite the fact that it clearly had no intention of leaving his bedside and did not pay any attention to Jerome when he rose from the cot and dressed himself. Neither did it refuse the bowl of milk that Jerome offered while he was putting together his own breakfast.
Jerome pulled his cellphone from his pocket and called Mira again. “I’m drinking your tea,” he told her, “and thinking of you.”
“Good.”
“And there’s a cat that’s come into the loft. Dirty orange. It’s feral, I think, growls a lot.”
“A cat on a deserted island?” said Mira, her tone almost skeptical.
“Summer people left him here, I suppose, so he’s likely to have been on his own for less than a year. He would have some memory of being tame.”
“And also a memory of being abandoned.”
Jerome was silent.
“The lion,” Mira said suddenly. “Saint Jerome in the wild with his lion.”
Along with a tiny plaster figure of Krishna, Mira had tucked into his pack a small poster of Joachim Patinir’s sixteenth-century Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, an image she always insisted Jerome take with him when he disappeared into what she called “the wild,” which, to her mind, was located anywhere beyond the city limits. Brought up as a Hindu, she was fascinated by the Christian saints and their stories that were, for her, as distant and compellingly exotic as the various Hindu gods and warriors were to him. When they began to get to know each other, she had been delighted to discover that his mother and father had given him the name of a famous saint, though he assured her that religion would have been the last thing on his parents’ mind.
After studying the image for a while, they had eventually come to understand that the several tiny lions in the vivid blue-and-green Patinir landscape they were so fond of—each lion engaged in a particular activity: chasing wolves, curled at the saint’s feet, chumming around with a donkey, or standing in a field filled with sheep—represented only one lion and that the painting was episodic in nature, depicting a number of events from the saint’s life. In the far distance the lion could be seen either conversing with, or preparing to attack, a gathering of people. Mira believed the lion was conversing. Jerome always insisted he was attacking. Mira had asked how he could be so certain that the lion was a male since it was so small it was difficult to tell. Jerome said the lion would not have been permitted to live in the monastery with Saint Jerome had he not been a male of the species. Mira had loved that phrase, a male of the species, and had begun to use it herself shortly after this discussion, often in reference to Jerome himself. “Because you are a male of the species …,” she would begin.
Jerome