The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [27]
– Let me tell you a garden story, said Avery, a bedtime story.
Jean closed her eyes.
– Each spring, said Avery, when my father was a boy, he waited for the sparrows to return to that garden in Cambridgeshire. By March he was brimming with impatience. Day after day, he faithfully threw the tea crumbs into the ivy. Finally, one morning, the wall began to sing.
Avery had already imagined, in those first months with Jean, what the chance to grow old with her would mean: not regret at how her body would change, but the private knowledge of all she'd been. Sometimes, his ache so keen, Avery felt that only in old age would he finally have full possession of her youthful flesh. It would be his secret, forged in all the nights next to each other.
In the flat on Clarendon, when Avery couldn't sleep, Jean whispered to him while he stroked her arm. She recited a list of all the native Ontario plants she could think of: hair grass, arrow leaved aster, the heath aster, swamp aster, long-leaved bluets, foxglove, side-oats grama, the compass plant whose leaves always align on the north-south axis. The sand dropseed, turtlehead, great St. John's wort, sneezeweed, balsam ragwort, fox sedge, umbrella sedge, the little bluestem … and then sleep grew farther away still and he began to touch her with purpose.
The desert heat would not leave Jean; above the yellow sand the air was a shimmering liquid, a palpable transparency; by early morning forty-five degrees Celsius in the shade. Even during the frigid night Jean felt her bones baking, even when the surface of her skin was cool.
On the deck of the houseboat she stood in her clothes and poured night river water through her hair. For a few ecstatic moments the chill reached her brain and she felt her skeleton cold as metal. But the effect seemed to last only as long as she was under the water.
To comfort her, Avery told Jean about thermophiles.
– They're a single-cell bacteria that thrive in heat – in temperatures of one-hundred-and-ten-degrees-Celsius – in thermal vents heated by magma, liquid rock. They squirm with pleasure and swim gleefully in baths boiled by bubbling lava, gorge themselves on sulfuric acid and molten iron. They set up house in the heart of volcanoes and in flues of steam spewing from the ocean floor. When you're hot, you must not think of cool things, such as Emperor penguins or the McMurdo Ice Shelf – it just doesn't work, it makes you feel hotter. Instead, think of thermophiles!
– I feel better already …
Among the few books Jean and Avery brought to the desert – aside from reference texts and field guides – were Jean's choice of Elizabeth David's cookery book, Mediterranean Food, and Avery's, of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Expedition.
There was sense to reading, high on a hill in the ancient ocean of the desert at dusk, where whales with feet once swam, about the small Kon-Tiki floating in the expanse of the Pacific, “where the nearest solid was the moon.” To prove that the ocean, a highway of predictable currents, might have connected prehistoric peoples rather than kept them apart, Heyerdahl constructed the raft, following in every detail the design on a petroglyph. Heyerdahl's vessel, at a fast clip, crossed the ocean in a hundred days. During a storm, the crew in its fragile craft climbed mountains and valleys of water, “uncertain where we were, for the sky was overclouded and the horizon one single chaos of rollers.” Avery read aloud as the desert colours flamed hotter, radiant, and the air grew cold. “When night had fallen, and the stars were twinkling in the dark tropical sky, the phosphorescence flashed around us … and single glowing plankton resembled round live coals so vividly that we involuntarily drew in our bare legs …”
Jean soon learned how chronic Avery's insomnia; no matter the depth of his physical exhaustion, the mathematical possibilities of error continued to combine and recombine in his head. So she began to read to him, first about the fruit-bearing trees of the desert – which proved too interesting to put