Free The Ivory Swing by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

sprawling cities that heave untidily with history and event and garbage strikes and miraculous chance encounters.
    I will grieve for you of course, I will grieve for the shattered unity of the four of us, Just as unremittingly as I now grieve for metropolitan ferment. I’ll write every day, I’ll send telegrams, I’ll entice you to Montreal. But just the same, I swear I’ll go. I’m really going to leave. Yours regretfully …
    She put Annie’s letter into an envelope and tore up the one to David. She thought of Mary Magdalene shutting her ears to the tavern music. She thought of Radha hopelessly knotted into Krishna, going nowhere on her ivory swing, forever vacillating between untenable poles. She thought of that long-gone day on the Toronto subway that day of momentous choice …
    It was the rush-hour embrace and collision of bodies on the Yonge Street line, the hour of armpits and strap-hanging and suffocation. Loving it, Juliet let the sway of the carriage press her against David’s body, wondering wickedly: Is it possible to disconcert him physically? Or is he pure as a choirboy, impervious?
    Several months before they had met by chance in a gallery of fine arts. Juliet had been pacing from room to room, unseeing, because it was a day following one of those nights when Jeremy had not returned to the apartment, not even for breakfast. Not that this was something she had any right to be upset about. It was not a question of infidelity. They were not — as Jeremy put it — trying for permanence. They were merely celebrants of the present moment, they were open and free, and these things (these absences for which no one was accountable) were of no consequence. Except that in their wake Juliet suffered from something like vertigo, some sickening loss of balance, something anachronistic and primitive and shameful that one would no more admit to than announce a belief in the Flat Earth Society.
    On her sixth circuit of the gallery — filling in the abyss of a lunch hour with movement so that she would not call Jeremy at his office — she saw that the absorbed young man in the Indus Valley Artefacts room was still standing as though in a trance before one of the glass cases. The man himself, she thought, was certainly the room’s most interesting objet d’art. Rodin’s Thinker standing up, perhaps. No. A far more striking blend of the ascetic and the sensual, something from the Quattrocento in Florence: St John in the wilderness, stuffing himself with wild honey; or St Sebastian waiting passionately for the arrows as for lovers.
    It’s his stillness that attracts, she thought, tilting her head to one side in appraisal. And his eyes: intense as lasers, liquid as dark honey. Yes, she had seen his kind on the walls of the Uffizi: all those Portraits of a Young Man , by Gozzoli and Fra Lippi.
    He must have sensed her scrutiny because he turned, embarrassed, and murmured apologetically: “I’m sorry. I’m blocking your view. Selfish of me.”
    â€œNo, please! Not at all.”
    But she was curious to know what had held him in such absorption. It was a bronze figurine of a dancing girl, less than six inches high, her body gaunt as spring twigs, her breasts like not-yet-ripened crab apples.
    â€œWhat is so special about her?” Juliet asked. “I mean, she’s graceful, but a trifle anorexic, don’t you think?”
    The man who had floated down from an Uffizi canvas winced.
    â€œShe was cast in bronze early in the second millennium BC,” he said reverently. “Close to four thousand years between the artist and us, and here we stand inches away from her. I call that” — he searched for a word — “a sacrament of history.”
    She raised her eyebrows in wry amazement. Is he real? she wondered.
    â€œLook at her face,” he said.
    She looked and hazarded: “It’s sort of Negroid. Flanged nostrils and