Read Online A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart - Free Book Online Page B

class first made itself known to her. (Jerome hadn’t told Mira his own opinion about this form of expression.) At the time he met her, she had been making soft protective coverings for a variety of solid objects: toasters, books, bicycle pumps, even, eventually, and much to her parents’ bafflement as she always delighted in telling him, for her father’s lawn mower. At first she had called her works “cosies,” having taken the idea from the gorgeously embroidered covering for a teapot that her mother had brought to the New World when she left Delhi. But later, when Mira’s fascination with all things Christian had taken hold, she changed the name of her creation to “swaddles,” a tip of the hat to the swaddling clothes she was told had wrapped the Baby Jesus in his manger. “I like the word. The sound of it,” she had told Jerome when he had gently suggested that the whole notion seemed a bit bizarre. She had exhibited some of these in the gallery where she now worked part-time, the same gallery where she had first met Jerome. In the three years or so since they had been together, however, she had moved toward performance work, using the fabric either to cover herself or to create changing patterns on the floor, and Jerome could see she was really coming into her own.
    When he looked at her now, he could hardly believe that she had once been merely a businesslike voice on the phone, a polite, efficient presence in the gallery where he showed his work. What amazed him most was how all of this formality could be softened by degrees simply by walking side by side down a street, sharing a meal, a conversation, eventually a touch, and now this most intimate of experiences, one impossible to imagine in the past, this lying side by side in the dark, allowing unconsciousness to wash over them, carry them toward the morning. There had been women in the past, of course, and occasionally he had found himself in their beds in the morning, but he had always rolled away, rather than toward them, had been courteous and discreet in what he knew was, and would remain, their territory, and had always felt a flicker of relief when, on the street, he had turned a corner, out of range of their windows.
    Now he was warmed by the knowledge that Mira’s calm face would be the first image that he looked at each morning. Her certainty in the face of his own lack of it. Until her, nothing in him had fully experienced either the anticipation of reunion, or the hollowness of separation. To him it had all been a great surprise, this combination of comfort and tenderness, pleasure and then the shared quiet aftermath of pleasure, and there were still moments when he was mistrustful, suspicious almost, of the ease with which he had walked into the partnership. In the past he had wanted not even the faintest suggestion of reliance to be a part of his character. For him, the implications of dependence teetered – always – on the edge of addiction and so he would often change, though never fully abandon certain social networks in the city. So far nothing and no one had kept him for long, curiosity being the only mood he fully trusted. But, as far as he could tell, for her, his entrance into her life was as natural as the air she softly inhaled and exhaled beside him here in this room that she insisted on calling a bedroom despite the pipes on the ceiling, the stacked cartons used to store clothing, the glow from the computer, the functional futon.
    He recalled the spare rigidity of his parents’ bedroom, the twin white headboards, so disturbingly like tombstones on adjacent plots, the matching polyester spreads, faded by repeated washing, the decorative lampshades and doilies that were his mother’s sad attempt to bring some intimacy and joy into this corner of her life. He remembered quite vividly his mother’s two or three good dresses hanging in the closet and her one pair of party shoes, so out of fashion, so seldom worn, and the stale