The Glass Ocean(61)

            But these tricks, a form of vandalism against his own work, do not satisfy my father’s restlessness for very long, nor in the end do they even amuse him, leaving as they do, like something sour at the back of his throat that he can neither spit out nor swallow, the thought—And nobody noticed! Nobody noticed this, either! It is an invitation to a cynicism that has been, up until now, foreign to his nature; and indeed he cannot stop himself from painting in enamel capillaries to make his glass eyes look more real, and experimenting with methods for making them look wet, while at the same time, surreptitiously, he continues to implant in each prosthesis the cancellation of that realism in the form of my mother’s initials, CGD’O, formed of the very tiniest granules of colored glass that he can manipulate, hidden in the webbed core of the iris. From this time forward all his work in glass will embody not just the thing but also its contradiction, the acknowledgment of the frustrated artificer that nature has defeated him once again. It ain’t real. And everybody knows it. CGD’O.

            Now he’s started. If only in a small way.

            • • •

            It amuses me to imagine my mother’s initials, stealthily placed in the glass eye of a farmer from Thirsk, or a tailor from Thornaby-on-Tees, or in one lost by accident at sea by a fisherman pursuing mackerel somewhere east of Spurn Head. No doubt my father was amused, too. It is difficult to know whether this series of degradations of his own work by use of her name was an homage or a joke, a self-abnegation or something else entirely, an expression, perhaps, of the anger he must feel, but will not voice, when, on return to the Birdcage, he finds her caressing yet one more thoughtful lagniappe from his rival, the ubiquitous Thomas Argument.

            He must be angry. How can it be otherwise? It would be unnatural were my father, coming home after twelve hours with William Cloverdale, Glassmaker, not to grow angry at finding my mother by the hearth, in hushed colloquy with Argument, their two heads bent closely together, hers golden, graceful, his dark, awkward, vaguely oblong, her soft laughter ceasing as my father enters the room.

            Oh, Leo! Look what Mr. Argument has brought me this time!

            • • •

            Angry. Yes, it would be natural for my father to be angry—at himself more than at her, perhaps. Because he cannot make it stop.

            Argument at this point has virtually ceased speaking to my father, as if the bonds of employment, now severed, were all that ever held civility in place. If they pass on the stairs, as sometimes happens, Argument ducking and stooping in cramped quarters, my father forced to press himself against the banister between an elephant’s foot and a shuddering stack of collector’s trays containing butterflies pinned to cork so as to let the interloper pass, Argument does not even acknowledge that my father is there. To him my father is an indistinct ghost that lurks in the turning of that stair, or a specimen indistinguishable from all the other rubbish collected by Felix Girard (for to Thomas Argument, with his mania for the made, Girard’s collections from nature, his preserved flesh—despite being Clotilde’s beloved patrimony, her memories—are indeed all rubbish, although he hasn’t told her that he thinks so—at least, not yet).

            If Argument and my father meet while my mother is present, then Argument nods—a terse, stiff, barely detectable motion of chin above shirt collar, nothing friendly in it, as if to say, Yes, it’s me. I’m here again. At times it seems to convey, in a specific, slight jutting forward of the lower jaw, the pugnacious corollary: What are you going to do about it?

            That’s all.

            What little he does, clearly, he does for her sake. If he meets my father alone in the street—as sometimes happens on Church Street, there at the junction of their mutual glassworld—he cuts my father completely.

            My mother seems to see nothing wrong with this, or else maybe she simply doesn’t see it, because she is too remote—too remote to see, too remote to respond. She is like a glacier, retreating, trailing behind her, as she goes, a brilliant, unnavigable train of ice. She observes my father as if from a great distance, even if it is just the distance across a pillow. The pillow might as well be the Mongolian steppe, she might see very tiny camels striding across it, attempting—and failing—to bridge the gap that has grown between them.