The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [58]
– I had a glimpse of what you're saying, said Jean, in Ashkeit.
At the mention of Ashkeit, Jean felt Avery surrender.
– I want to study architecture, said Avery. I feel like an apprentice who spends decades learning to draw a human arm or a hand before he is allowed to pick up a brush. You must learn to draw bones and muscle before the flesh can be real. The engineering is essential … But I want so much to pick up a brush.
My father was so pleased that I wanted to be an engineer, like his own father. It was as if it hadn't mattered that he'd been away all those years when I was a child.
– Well, said Jean slowly, you will still be an engineer … but an engineer with a brush.
Avery leaned back, his feet still on the floor. Jean saw the bones of his face, saw how his clothes pooled around him, saw the exhaustion that had penetrated him so deeply it was almost a smell. He held out his thin strong arm, muscle and tendon, and she lay down too, like him, across the bed.
She thought she would never be used to her luck, of lying beside him, this … scrupulous … broad leafed … Avery-est Escher.
She heard the Bucyruses whining across the sand; a voice shouting in Greek, an answer, perhaps without understanding, in Italian. The whimpering voice of a child from a houseboat down the river: “J'ai soif …” The floodlights filtered down from the deck, a faint glow. The great desert factory never stopped.
– When he died, I sat looking into my father's face, said Avery. I held his hands. My mother lay with her face against his, and the side of him where she lay was warm. At first there was such a feeling of palpable peace in the room, a lightness so totally unexpected. And then, after a while, looking at his body that had not outwardly changed and yet was utterly changed, the simulacrum seemed to me blasphemous, a violation.
Avery looked at Jean. Her hair fell across her bare arms, a splash of shadow. At what moment had the transubstantiation occurred – at what moment during their years together had this woman, this Jean Shaw, become Jean Escher? He knew it had nothing to do with marriage, not even with sex, but somehow had to do with all this talking, this talking they achieved together.
– I want to build the room where I wish I'd been born, said Avery.
Jean felt the heat of Avery's arm beneath her back, a wire of heat.
– Perhaps it's not your father who hurts you so much, said Jean.
– My mother never wanted to let me into her workroom when I was a child, but sometimes I sneaked in – and I was always sorry afterwards. But it can't be my mother who's haunting me.
By the time Jean found a way to reply – the living haunt us in ways the dead cannot – the broad leafed Avery Escher was asleep.
It was still cold and dark below deck, but Avery knew the men would already be talking around the fires and that he must soon get up. Jean, awake too, stretched beside him and drew the blanket up to her chin.
Avery leaned over her.
– Jean, what I said about sadness … what I mean is that a building and the space it possesses should help us be alive, it should allow for the heeding of things; I don't know even how to talk about it, what words to use; just that some places make certain things possible or even likely – not to go so far as to say a place can create behaviour, but it is complicit somehow. Is there a difference between making events possible and creating them? Does a certain kind of bridge create its suicides? I know that when I am in a great building I feel a mortal sadness, and it is so specific that when I leave the building – the church, the hall, the house – and walk back