Celestial Navigation

6. Spring, 1971: Jeremy

“I have something to tell you,” Mary said. “Jeremy? Are you listening?”

He wasn’t. He was making a statue. He stood before a circle of tin children, waist-high; he wrung his hands. Like a man in a well, he heard Mary’s voice only dimly. It was necessary to find red. Where was the right red? But then he detected some urgency in what she said, something different from the Muzak of her discussions of washing machines, report cards, DPT shots. “What?” he said. He struggled up from under layers and layers of thought. There was a dry feeling at the back of his throat, as if he had been buried in cotton. He fixed his eyes on Mary but saw, instead, the exact shade of red he needed — very bright, a little fuzzy. It seemed familiar. He turned away from her and dumped out a carton of scraps. Nothing there. He went across the room nearly at a run, bent-kneed. He flung open shelves and pulled out drawers and turned over a wastebasket There was a red lace heart and a red geometric design from a magazine and a piece of red construction paper that smelled like the inside of his grammar school forty years ago. He held the paper to his nose and closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Now children’s voices came singing through his head, over all those decades:

She’ll be wearing red pajamas when she comes,

(Scratch, scratch)

She’ll be wearing …

Red flannel. He saw it clearly now. He even saw the microscopic dots of lint left from laundering. He plowed through the wastepaper and out of the door, across the hall to the girls’ room. “Jeremy?” said Mary. “What are you doing? You said you wouldn’t use their things any more, you promised!”

“I’ll get them new ones,” Jeremy said.

“New what? What are you looking for? You always say that, Jeremy.”

He paused in the middle of a drawer, up to his elbows in pink and white. “Where are their red pajamas?” he asked.

“What red pajamas?”

“Don’t children wear red pajamas any more?”

“They never had any red pajamas.”

He straightened up from the drawer and went over to the closet. Scattered across the floor were dirty socks, blouses, stuffed animals — you would think that somewhere in here would be a tiny piece of red flannel. He opened the closet door and scanned a rack of dresses, all different sizes and colors. “I have something I want to tell you,” Mary said.

Like a string pulling him, some strong piece of twine pulling him away from the picture in his head. Even before he turned to her the red flannel had dissolved and the circle of children had stopped spinning, dropped their hands, and crumbled away. He opened his mouth to protest but saw, suddenly, how the curve of her cheek fitted so exactly to the curve of Rachel’s head — the latest baby, nestled into her mother’s neck like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Mary’s hair had come undone and was tumbling down her back, lit by the sun in the window. The three faint lines beginning at the corner of each eye were lit as well, radiating as precisely as a cat’s whiskers, giving her a look of constant, gentle puzzlement. “What is it, Mary?” he asked.

“Are you really listening to me?”

“Yes, yes.”

But up came the sound of feet, pounding on the stairs. An interruption to the interruption. Was this how life progressed? If he traced his way back through the chain of interruptions, looking for the first act someone had tugged him from, wouldn’t he find himself ten years in the past? In came Pippi, out of breath. “Mom? Where’s Mom?”

“Why, here she is,” said Jeremy.

“Guess what, Mom?”

Mary’s face took on that change that always happened when her children spoke. She bent her head, her eyes grew instantly opaque with concentration and every muscle seemed tensed to listen. “Some men are bringing in a refrigerator,” Pippi told her.

“A refrigerator?”

“They say Jeremy won it in a contest.”

Mary raised her head and looked at him. “You should have let me know,” she said.

“But I — how could I? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“They say he got a letter,” said Pippi.

“Oh, Jeremy. Are you not opening letters again?”

“Why, I thought I was. I can’t imagine what—”

“They say you have to come down, Mom,” Pippi said.

“All right, I’m coming.”

She descended the steps without hurry, unruffled as ever, behind Pippi’s clattering shoes. Rachel’s face bobbed over her shoulder. Jeremy followed, wiping his hands on his trousers. He felt pulled in too many directions. Pieces of the statue still crowded his mind along with Mary’s listening face, the thunder of furniture moving downstairs, the news she had never managed to tell him. “Um, Mary,” he said, “can’t they take it back again? This house is getting so full. We surely don’t need another refrigerator.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Jeremy, we’ll put it in the basement.”

“We put the last one in the basement.”

“Well? There’s still room. You know how much food this family eats.”

“But it feels so cluttered,” Jeremy said. “Mary, there are so many things in this house. I just feel so—”

They arrived in the downstairs hallway. Two men in leather jackets were rolling an enormous pink refrigerator along a path they had cleared through the parlor, steering their way between rocking chairs and tricycles and hordes of children. “Look!” said Mary. “It’s a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, the kind I’ve always wanted.”

“Kitchen?” said one of the men.

“No — well, yes, why not. Then we’ll send the old one down to the basement. Could you move the old one first?”

“Look, we ain’t moving men.”

“I’ll pay you,” Mary said.

“Five dollars is what we would ask for it.”

Jeremy?

Everyone looked at him. He felt embarrassed, as if he were there under false pretences. He wasn’t the one who handled the money. “Well, actually,” he said, “I don’t believe we want this item.”

“Jeremy!”

“You should’ve told the contest people that,” one man said. “All we do is deliver them, like they ask us to.”

“It appears I must have mislaid the letter. Actually I — we have two refrigerators.”

“What you go and enter the contest for, then?”

“I thought I might win money,” Jeremy said.

“Jeremy, you know we can use another refrigerator,” Mary told him. “Especially for this summer, when watermelons come in. Leave the gentlemen alone, Hannah. And you know the boarders need shelves of their own, they don’t want to get—”

“Do we move it or don’t we, lady?”

“Yes!” said the children, and jumped up and down, and clapped, and made Jeremy’s head ache. Mary said, “Of course you do. Empty the old one, will you, children? Everybody help; just put the food on the counter.” She herded them into the kitchen and Jeremy followed. He would feel awkward left alone with the delivery men. He watched from the doorway while children stacked endless cartons of milk on the drain-board, relayed heads of lettuce to the table, tossed an arc of oranges across the room. “Quite a family you got there,” a delivery man said behind him. Jeremy smiled too widely and ducked his head.

Did anyone guess how his children baffled him? He didn’t understand them. He had trouble talking to them. All he could do was watch: drink them in with such speechless, open-mouthed amazement that he was accused of being off in a daze. Mary watched too, but for different reasons. She was checking for danger and germs and mischief; she was their armed guard. What Jeremy was doing was committing them to memory, preparing for some moment far in the future when he could sit down alone and finally figure them out. He knew the exact curl of Abbie’s eyes when she laughed, the way Hannah rubbed the down on her upper lip when she sucked her thumb, the dimples like parentheses in Rachel’s cheeks. It seemed to him that all of his children were miniature Marys. He could find no physical resemblance to himself. He thought that was natural, for Mary’s pregnancies appeared to be entirely her own undertakings. It was she who discovered and announced them, took her calcium tablets, disappeared behind those closed swinging doors at the hospital to give birth. But then he looked at Darcy — still blond and blue-eyed, nearly as tall as her mother now but with someone else’s frail bones. Her father had not been eclipsed. Her father’s genes must have been as recessive as Jeremy’s, all pale and slight; yet they had won out. How come? He turned a puzzled stare on his own children, brown-headed and dark-eyed. He watched his son Edward, who at two and a half wore faded Levis dangling below the pot of his stomach and little cowboy boots. He had not known they made boots as small as that. He had never had boots when he was a boy; and if he had he would not have known how to walk in them with that jaunty swagger or how to hook his thumbs through the belt loops of his Levi’s. Where had Edward learned? Where had all of them learned to march so fearlessly across the teeming streets, to brave their way through the city schools, and shout and cheer and throw oranges without a trace of self-consciousness?

Sometimes he said, “Don’t you think we should see to their last names?”

“They have last names,” said Mary. “Yours. It’s on their birth certificates.”

“Yes, but if anyone were to check or anything. If they asked for proof.”

“Why should they do that?”

“Yes, well.”

He had the feeling that the children were some new type of boarder, just louder and more troublesome. They were not entirely of this house, they were visitors from the outside world. When he was most deeply absorbed in his work, children came seeping up the stairs like the rising waters of a flood, and their noise — strange clangs and hoots and the unbearable pitch of their quarrels — would soak into him slowly, at first unnoticed, then so exasperating that he would fling down his scissors and throw open the door and stand there trembling. “Why are you doing this to me?” he would ask. “Why must you make this noise? Why do you keep, why do you—” Their faces would all be turned up to him. There was something pathetic and yet irritating about their fallen socks, their patched jeans, the damp gray underpants drooping beneath some little one’s dress. They were utterly silent. Silence brought Mary more quickly than any shriek could. She was there in an instant, running up the stairs already asking, “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Mary, I was just trying to do some work here—”

“Yes, all right. Come on, children, Jeremy’s working.”

“It’s just that they keep making so much noise, you see.”

“You can play in the kitchen,” Mary told them. “I know what. Shall we make cookies?”

There was no way to win. He felt depressed at the way she herded them down the stairs, shielding them from him with her back; he felt lonely and guilty now that the third floor was silent again. How could he have scolded them like that? He knew them so little, couldn’t he have let them stay a while? He looked around the hall and saw the traces they had left behind — one roller skate, a homemade doll, a chalky handprint on the newel post. At his feet was a paper covered with purple writing: HANNAH 4 YR OLD I AM HANNAH. A fire engine with a key in its back wound itself down, its little red light blinking more and more slowly and the sound of its engine growing weaker.

Now a child tossed him an orange and he caught it by accident, astonishing himself so much that he dropped it again. He fell in with a parade that followed the old refrigerator down to the basement, which was dark and dank and smelled of mildew. The basement walls were lined with case lots of Mary’s household goods. There was an entire cabinet of sneakers, waiting to be grown into. Another of toilet paper. A barrel of detergent big enough to hold two children. Was this necessary? He felt that she was pointing something out to him: her role as supplier, feeder, caretaker. “See how I give? And how I keep on giving — these are my reserves. I will always have more, you don’t even have to ask. I will be waiting with a new shirt for you the minute the elbows wear through in the old one.” A delivery man knocked over a stack of flowerpots, bought on sale in preparation for spring. Somebody stepped on a cat. “Damn it all,” said the other man, “will you please get those kids of yours out of here? Will you get them out? They ain’t giving us room to step.”

The children vanished, but their giggles lurked in all the corners. The men went upstairs to bring in the new refrigerator and Mary followed, giving instructions. Jeremy came last. He felt old and tired. By the time he reached the kitchen, puffing and wiping his forehead, the refrigerator was already moving into place. It stuck out too far into the middle of the room and it blocked four inches of doorway. “Isn’t it too big?” said Jeremy. “Mary, I feel so — it seems so crowded here.”

But Mary said, “You’ll get used to it.”

Then she turned and smiled, and in front of everyone she threw her arms around him and said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t be a grump. Isn’t it nice that you keep winning us things? Aren’t you glad you’re so lucky?”

With people watching he couldn’t hug her back, but he smiled so widely that it seemed his face was melting.

He and Mary went to the gallery to see his one-man show — just the two of them, in Miss Vinton’s car. Mary drove. She wore a hat, also Miss Vinton’s, the first Jeremy had ever seen her in. Jeremy wore his golf cap. He was feeling a little sick. He held tight to the edge of the seat every time they turned a corner, and he kept swallowing. “How are you, Jeremy?” Mary said.

“Oh, fine, fine.”

“It isn’t far now.”

She had been to the gallery before. She had been visiting it for years, checking on how his pieces were arranged every time Brian took in a new batch. But Jeremy had never set foot in it, and only the importance of this occasion — an entire show devoted only to him, already bringing in more money and comment than he had ever imagined — made it impossible for him to refuse to go. Not that he hadn’t tried. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s my own work. What’s the use of looking again?” But they left him no escape. Mary and Brian and the others had set things up among them. Miss Vinton lent her car; the boarder Olivia babysat. Mary said, “We’ll go on a weekday when the place is not packed,” and Brian said, “No one will know you, Jeremy. And you might even learn something! It’s been years since you last saw some of your pieces.” That was the argument that won Jeremy over. He thought of all the work he had produced — objects he had looked at for so long that he couldn’t see them anymore, things that had worn him out and sickened him until he handed them to Brian merely to get rid of them, to free himself to go on to something new. What would they look like now?

So here he was, in Miss Vinton’s dusty-smelling car on this clear cold afternoon in April, gazing around him at what appeared to be some sort of bomb damage in the middle of Baltimore. Whole blocks were leveled; nothing but rubble remained. Beyond were caved-in tenements showing yellowed wallpaper, tangles of pipe, crumbled understructures of something like chicken wire. “Mary? What seems to be the trouble here?” Jeremy asked. Mary only gave the scene a glance. “Oh, they’re rebuilding,” she said, and drove on. Jeremy shrank back further in his corner of the car.

He and she looked at different things. They might have been taking two separate rides. “There’s an interesting place,” she said. “It’s a shop for hippies; they sell tie-dyed denim that would make wonderful curtains for the children’s rooms.” And later, “That’s a new office building without any windows, but they say you don’t notice that once you’re inside.” Sometimes she explained things to him that he had known for years. Did she imagine he was deaf and blind? “Look, there’s a girl with a bush. Isn’t it amazing? They call it ‘natural.’ ” He had been seeing girls with bushes for years, in magazines and TV commercials and on the sidewalk before the bay window. He had probably seen more from that window than Mary saw on all her trips to stores and schools and obstetricians. He had observed the world steadily swelling and involuting, developing new twists and whorls and clusters like some complicated cell mass — first inch by inch, then faster, so that now it seemed that after the briefest holing-up in his studio he could come back to find everything changed: people stranger, cars more vicious-looking, even the quality of light altered in some indefinable way. But he had kept up with things. He knew what was going on in the world. Mary underestimated him.

The gallery was a narrow white building with an awning that extended across the sidewalk. It sat on a quiet street among other buildings very much like it, out of sight of the bomb damage. “Well, at least it’s not too big,” Jeremy said, but as he stood on the sidewalk waiting for Mary to put a coin in the parking meter he had the feeling that this gallery outclassed him somehow. Certainly, if he had been a mere passerby, he would have been intimidated by that great glassy door with its gold grillwork. He would never have gone in on his own. “Mary,” he said, “are you sure that this is a proper time for us to come?”

“I told you, Jeremy. People are never here on weekdays.”

“Why do they keep it open, then?”

She didn’t seem to have an answer for that.

In the foyer, lit by a yellow light, was a piece that Jeremy remembered from three or four years ago: an old man going through a wire trashbasket. The man himself was made of dull brown wrapping paper, crushed and reflattened. The basket was a network of all the glittery things he had been able to lay his hands on — small skewers for trussing poultry, a knitting needle, a child’s gilt barrette, a pair of Abbie’s school scissors with “Lefty” on the blade. Within the basket was a cluster of bright colors formed from postage stamps and cigarette packs and an old bandanna handkerchief that Mr. Somerset had left lying on the couch one day. “Haven’t they done it nicely?” Mary asked him. “I told Brian, it’s the perfect keynote for the show. I’m glad they set it up at the beginning this way.”

“Yes, yes,” said Jeremy. But he was uncomfortable. He had never seen his work in such a setting before, among thick red carpets and hushed sounds and golden light. From some hiding place in the back of his mind a picture leapt forth of the model for this piece — an old man he had seen from the bay window, rummaging in the trashbasket one cold November day. He remembered the dry grayness of the man’s skin, nothing like this warm brown wrapping paper, and the claw-like fingers and silently moving lips. None of it was caught in his piece. He sighed. “Jeremy?” Mary said. “Aren’t you happy with it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and moved on.

Past the hallway, behind the wall where the old man was displayed, stretched a larger room flooded with light and carpeted also in soft deep red. Five or six people were moving around it, stopping before each piece. He noticed the people before anything else. All but one were women, and they were whispering together about his work. His. He felt like rushing up and flinging his arms out, shielding what he had made. Two fat ladies stood in front of one of his old collages, one that was still two-dimensional; a girl made her way too quickly down a row of his statues. His smallest statue, the first he had ever made, sat on a wooden column: a woman hanging out washing. A curve of tin among stiff white billows that he had formed by spraying canvas with clear plastic. He remembered conceiving the idea and then wondering how he could set it in a frame. It had taken him weeks to think of making it a statue. He had worked fearfully; he had felt presumptuous, using up so much vertical space. But now a tag beside it read “From the Collection of Mrs. Herbert Lee Cooke”—one of the richest women in Baltimore. She had bought the statue the first day it was shown. And there were tags or “Sold” stickers beside most of the other pieces as well — each statue taller and more solid than the one before it. He wandered among them, dazed, holding his golf cap and chewing the tip of his index finger. He had never realized that he had produced quite this many things. Why, some people might consider him an actual artist, by profession. Was that possible? He pictured all those hours spent alone in his room, patiently fitting together tiny scraps, feverishly hunting up the proper textures, pounding in a row of thumbtacks until the back of his neck ached — all that drudgery. It wasn’t the way he pictured the life of an artist.

Brian appeared beside him and set a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Hi,” he said. He wore a double-breasted suit that made him appear untrustworthy. Jeremy was used to seeing him in sweaters and corduroy trousers. His beard was trimmed too neatly. “Well, Jeremy,” he said. “What do you think of your show?”

All the visitors looked up, their faces startled and avid. Brian’s voice had carried everywhere. “We’ve got them set up well, wouldn’t you say?” he asked. He smelled of some bitter spicy aftershave. He smiled not at Jeremy but at one of the statues, ignoring the visitors as if it were accidental that they had overheard.

Jeremy freed himself from Brian’s arm. “You said, but you said — you told me there wouldn’t be people here.”

“Well, Jeremy, it is relatively—”

“You broke your word.”

“Oh, now—”

“I want to go home, Mary,” Jeremy said. He turned to find her and saw, behind her worried face, all the spectators looking pleased. Of course, they seemed to be saying, this is what we expected all along. Brian told us. Had he, in fact, told them something? Did Jeremy have some kind of reputation? He pulled his golf cap on with shaky fingers; he turned on his heel, making Mary run to catch up with him. Yet immediately he sensed that he had done something else they expected. There was nothing he could do they would not expect. He stumbled across miles of deep treacherous carpet, trapped still in their image of him. His breath came rustily. He flailed one hand behind him and encountered Mary’s strong fingers. Then she had caught up with him and was hugging his arm close to her side and helping him through the glass door. “Never you mind,” she whispered. “It’s all right, Jeremy.” Out on the sidewalk she raised her other hand to cup his face and she kissed him on the cheek. “There now,” she said. But she only troubled him more. Was it expected of him also that he would stand here being kissed like a child? He wiped away the damp equal-sign left by her lips, and he pulled his coat more tightly around him and trudged off toward the car.

They had no medical student now. Buddy had married and moved to an apartment, and before a successor could be found Mary came home one day with a girl hitch-hiker she had picked up while driving Miss Vinton’s car. A hippie named Olivia. Her hair was like spun glass, colorless and straight, long enough to sit on. She was so thin she seemed translucent and she wore jeans studded with silvery stars and a shimmering white trenchcoat. When she held out a hand to Jeremy, her fingers felt like ice. “I found this child thumbing rides,” Mary told him. “Can you imagine? Why, you must be no older than Darcy!”

“I’m eighteen,” said Olivia.

Mary said, “I don’t care, any age is too young,” and she went off to find the girl some food. Olivia trailed her, the way one of Mary’s children might. She had a watery, boneless way of walking. From the dining room, where Jeremy sat with a cup of tea, he could hear her questions: “What is this for? What are you doing now? Is it all right if I have one of these crackers?” Later Mary told him that she had persuaded Olivia to stay in the south front bedroom. “What?” said Jeremy. He mentally placed the house on a map, set down a star for the compass points, found south. “But that’s the students’ room! We have always had students there!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it mattered,” Mary said.

“Well, no, of course it doesn’t matter. It’s just that—”

“I worry so, seeing a child out in the streets that way,” Mary said.

It seemed to him that every year she was becoming more motherly. She had six children now and she was six times more motherly than when she had had only one. Was it a quality that grew by such mathematical progressions?

Last month, going to Dowd’s grocery store for milk, they had been approached by a teenaged boy asking for money for a meal. “Why, you poor soul!” said Mary. “Haven’t you eaten?” It was six in the evening; all her own children had been fed an hour ago. “Wait here,” she said. “They sell sandwiches at Dowd’s.” “Well, money is what I rather—” the boy said. “Don’t go away,” said Mary. “Stay with him, Jeremy.” She went alone into the store. The point of her kerchief fluttered behind her, her family-sized handbag swung at her side, her unstockinged legs flashed white in the twilight and her scuffed oxfords beat out a businesslike rhythm. The eternal mother, scandalized, indignant, interfering, setting everyone straight. “Money is what I rather have,” the boy told Jeremy. Jeremy only nodded and swallowed. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Then Mary returned with a sandwich in waxed paper and a cellophane tray of oranges and a carton of milk. “You eat every bit of this, you hear?” she said. “Look,” the boy told her, “you didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Look, what I could really use is—”

But she had pressed the food into his hands and turned to go into the store again. “Don’t gulp it, now,” she said. “Not on an empty stomach.”

“Well. Thank you, ma’am.”

Then he and Jeremy had stood looking at each other, bemused, unsmiling, across the knobs and angles of Mary’s gifts.

At night, colors and shapes crowded his mind, elbowed each other aside, quarreled the way his children did: “Let me speak! No, let me speak!” He traced outlines in the dark with his index finger. He pressed his thumbs against his lids to erase images that disturbed him — cones rising in a tower, the base of one resting on the point of another in a particularly jarring way; yellow and blue appearing together, a combination he could not tolerate. Meanwhile Mary slept soundly beside him, and her breaths were so soft and even that they might have been no more than the sound of his own blood in his ears.

Were women always stronger than men? Mary was stronger, even when she slept. Her sleeping was proof that she was stronger. In Jeremy’s insomnia there was something fretful and nervous; he felt the presence of thoughts he would rather not look at, nameless fears and dreads. Yet Mary, who could name exactly what she feared and whose worries came complete to the last detail — Was Abbie’s tonsillectomy really necessary, when anesthesia could backfire and kill you? Should Edward have had a tetanus shot for that cat bite? — lay peacefully on her back with her palms up, her fingers only loosely curled, open to everything. She didn’t even believe in God. (Jeremy said he didn’t either — how could he, knowing how carelessly objects are tossed off and forgotten by their creators? — but he was haunted by a fear of hell and Mary was not.) Mary was more vulnerable than any man, the deepest pieces of herself were in those children and every day they scattered in sixty different directions and faced a thousand untold perils; yet she sailed through the night without so much as a prayer. There was no way he could ever hope to match her.

He sank back through time until he encountered the faded, powdery face of his mother — a woman who had prayed all day every day, every breath a prayer. (“I don’t have to say my prayers at bedtime, Jeremy, I’ve been saying them since I got up this morning. I said them all last night in my sleep. It’s you I pray for.”) He saw her pouring tea at his tenth birthday party, which he and she had celebrated all alone in the parlor. “Just us would be more fun,” she said, and of course she was right, because his classmates disliked him and if they spoke to him at all they called him Germy. “We don’t need those other children,” she said. She smiled at him over the teapot, with the corners of her mouth trembling slightly the way they always did, making her look uncertain of the smile, uncertain of what she said, uncertain that there was anything less than God Himself that she might have confidence in. The smile grew pale and then transparent. The teapot vanished. He saw her from even longer ago than the birthday party, some distant point in time when hats were covered with starched cloth roses and her limp, watery dress was the height of elegance — the dress that looked exactly like her, its tracery of flowers so faint you could almost wonder if she had put it on inside out. She was taking him to the dentist. She stood in front of a receptionist whose hair seemed to be coated with black shoe polish. “I don’t care what you thought,” the receptionist said, “the appointment was for an hour ago and you’ve missed it. You kept the doctor waiting. He had to go on to another patient.”

“Well, perhaps there was a misunderstanding. Because I couldn’t have made it for an hour ago, you see, Jeremy would still have been in school then. Perhaps we—”

“Are you questioning my word?”

“Please, oh please—”

In front of all those people — a waiting room full of watching people on needlepoint chairs. The receptionist bent her head to the letter she was writing, putting an end to the conversation. Her fountain pen dug angrily into the page and sparks of black ink flew out. “Come, Jeremy,” his mother said finally. Then she gave a little trembling sigh and took his hand to turn him around, to lead him out of the room. On the sidewalk she said, “Don’t feel bad, darling, we’ll get you another appointment.” She patted his cheek, where a muscle was jumping. “We mustn’t waste our lives feeling cross with such people.” But it wasn’t the receptionist he was angry at; it was his mother. Why had she waited there so foolishly, the center of attention, twisting her ridiculous little taffeta evening bag around and around in her hands? Why had she pleaded that way? He imagined the receptionist leaping up suddenly, overturning her chair behind her and stabbing his mother with that sputtery fountain pen. “Take that, you worm! Die!” His mother would only cower lower, and keep that tentative smile on her face. She would crumble into the floor, ground down to powder by the receptionist’s heels, not even raising her arms to protect herself. He felt flooded suddenly with grief and horror and a deep, anguished love. “Jeremy, darling,” his mother said, “shall we go home and have a cup of cocoa?” And he said, “All right, Mama,” but it hurt to speak, even; he had clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles ached.

That was long ago. It was all in the past. He was through with that.

He turned his pillow to the cooler side, lowering his head again very gently so that he would not wake Mary. He began reconstructing his favorite night game. In this game he possessed a sauntering, slap-happy courage that no one else suspected. He was given to acting on impulse. Driving down a city street one day on an errand (never mind that he didn’t know how to drive, and had no car; he would work that out later), he was suddenly taken with the urge to leave town. He would speed along for block after block, at first just toying with the idea and then giving himself over to it as the buoyant feeling of freedom swelled in his chest. All the traffic lights were green and all roads led directly out of Baltimore, without so much as another car to slow him down. The sky was dull and sunless, the best weather for his eyes. He could travel for hours without squinting or straining. He would stop when he got tired. Maybe never. If he ever settled down again it would be in a small, bare, whitewashed cubicle, possibly in a desert. He would change his name — a one-syllable first name, a one-syllable last name. Something crisp. His art would change as well. That would happen automatically. If he changed his name his work would be totally different. He would be childless, wifeless, friendless — all alone, like that silent golden period between his mother’s death and Mary’s arrival. Only this time, of course, he would know enough to appreciate it. Back then, he hadn’t. He had felt then that his life was running out too quickly, and that he should have something more to show for it. Was that what caused all major events in the world? He had felt compelled to take desperate steps before it was too late, but now it seemed that life would stretch on forever and grow more tangled and noisy every day. There had been no need for such a plunge.

He had waited for love like a man awaiting salvation. The secret, the hidden key. Was it love that failed Jeremy, or was it Jeremy who failed love? Was there anything to hope for after love?

The baby started crying, working up to it with sharp little noises that broke into Jeremy’s thoughts. Mary rose from the bed and stumbled over to the crib, maybe still asleep, already murmuring words of comfort. “There now, Rachel. There now, Rachel.” She picked the baby up and Jeremy felt the jolt of the mattress as she returned to bed. “It’s that tooth, I believe,” she said. She spoke without looking at him, taking it for granted that he would be lying awake. She propped her pillow on the headboard, sat back against it and undid the buttons of her nightgown. When Jeremy looked over he found the baby’s shadow blended into Mary’s, and all that emerged clearly was one moonlit breast. “Where is Edward’s old teething ring?” Mary asked him. “I’ll have to find it in the morning.”

The baby gulped softly. Jeremy laid a hand over his eyes.

“The drugstore has something you can rub on their gums but I don’t believe it really works,” Mary said.

Once, one of the few times she had ever referred to her life before she met him, she told him that when Darcy was born she had worried about feeding her. “I thought I wouldn’t have enough milk,” she said. Then she laughed; nursing came as naturally as breathing now, and he had often seen her walking around the house or even cooking with a baby glued to her breast. He tried to imagine her worrying over Darcy. He constructed a scene in which she might worry again — in which she would come to him, on the edge of tears, asking him what he thought was wrong. “Never mind, you’re just tired,” he would tell her. “You must leave things up to me for a while.” He would arrange cushions around her, bring her tea, shepherd the older children to the other end of the house. “Quiet now, leave your mother alone. She needs her rest.” He would form around her a nest of love and safety, and later when he tiptoed in to check on her she would ask him, “What would I do without you?” He had been picturing that for years now. He had ordered a book before Abbie was born, a book for prospective fathers; he had read and memorized all the forms of support that he might offer her. Lighten her load, the book told him. Try to help out as much as you can, shoulder all the burdens that distract her, be prepared for unreasonable tears. None of that advice had come in handy. Mary made her own nest. She sat beside him now relaxed and warm, and the baby gave soft mmm’s of satisfaction on the tail of every swallow.

Then Mary said, “This thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about—”

The baby stopped nursing and protested, giving away some tension in Mary. Jeremy opened his eyes. He had been aware all day of this news hanging over his head. He even thought he knew what it was. “You’re pregnant,” he said.

“What?”

“I thought—”

“You know I can’t get pregnant when I’m nursing.”

“I was afraid that might not have worked this time,” he said.

“You were afraid?”

He kept quiet. He didn’t know how to take it back.

“Jeremy?” Mary said, but then she let it rest. “Well,” she said, “I seem to be divorced, Jeremy.”

For a moment he thought she meant divorced from him, and his heart gave a lurch. Just for that one little imaginary game he had played? He hadn’t meant anything by it. But they weren’t even married! What was she talking about?

“Guy has divorced me.”

He had asked her, once, what her husband’s name was. It was the least of what he wanted to know, but he had never dared bring up the real questions and he had thought that maybe, having started with his name, she might go on to tell him more. She hadn’t. “Guy Tell,” she said. “Guy Alan Tell.” After that, nothing. Not even chance clues — not even mention of a trip on which her husband, incidentally, had accompanied her, or reports of some adventure in which he happened to be included. That single fact, “Guy Tell,” had become embedded in him, and he had layered it over with a thousand attempts at forgetfulness, with a literal squinching shut of his eyes whenever any thought of her husband recurred. Now her saying the name stunned him. It was as if she had suddenly entered into some hidden fantasy of his — named, out loud, a product of his most private imagination. “What?” he said. She seemed to understand that she didn’t need to repeat it. She waited, calmly.

“You’re divorced?” he said.

He sat up. He noticed how the air waves seemed to shiver, recoiling from a shocking word: divorce. Such a hard, ugly sound. Nothing like this warm-breasted shadow beside him. “Who was — how did you find out?” he said.

“The lawyer wrote me. They got my address from Gloria.”

“From—? I don’t quite see.”

“From his mother.”

“Ah,” he said. This secret husband had had a mother, then. Also a father, and perhaps a grandmother who knitted him winter scarves. He had friends who called out greetings on the streets, he paid visits to people, he no doubt drove a car and made purchases and worked in some place of employment. He had once lain beside this very same woman, perhaps waiting for her to finish nursing the baby before he reached out for her with absolute, cool confidence. A lump of something like clay, thick and soft, rose up in Jeremy’s throat.

“He divorced me on grounds of desertion,” Mary said. “That’s allowed when he hasn’t known my whereabouts for so long.”

“Well—” said Jeremy. He coughed. “I mean — how did she know your whereabouts? His mother.”

“Oh, that’s just lately. I wrote her a letter.”

“You did?”

“Just a note, really. I wanted to find out how she was getting along.”

“I see,” Jeremy said.

“I was very close to her, you see. She was always very kind to me. And the other day I was thinking, ‘It’s Gloria’s birthday right about now. Couldn’t I send her a card to tell her I still think of her?’ ”

She still thought of her. When was that? At what point in her cheerful, bustling day, behind that tranquil face, did her thoughts turn to her old life? Really, he didn’t know anything about her. She might be thinking about her husband constantly; she might be full of discontent; she might be planning some new love affair far away from him. He suddenly remembered a night last week when she had been braiding Pippi’s hair in front of the television. Some celebrities were appearing on a panel show, among them a movie hero with deep, shadowed eyes. “Why does everyone think that man is so attractive?” Mary asked. Jeremy had been filling out contest blanks, ignoring the program. “What man?” he asked. “That one on the left,” she said, “that tall attractive man beside the blonde.” Jeremy looked up then, puzzled, but Mary had not heard her own words and she merely snapped a rubber band on Pippi’s braid and gave her a pat. “Off you go now. Bedtime.” But it wasn’t until now that he thought to wonder: Was she longing for something more? When she read those romantic novels she liked, with the distraught pretty girls on the covers, was she wishing that she too had a man who would carry her up castle stairs or defend her with his sword or even, perhaps, frighten her a little with his dark, mysterious gaze?

As if she had guessed at all the cracks of uncertainty running through him, she turned to look at him over the baby’s head. In the dark her face seemed like a piece of felt. The baby made sucking noises in her sleep, lying on Mary’s arm as limp as a beanbag. Only Jeremy felt some brittle crumbling sensation inside him that kept him sitting upright.

“Jeremy? I guess maybe we could be married now,” Mary said.

“Well, if you wanted to.”

“Do you?”

“I do if you do,” he said.

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“We’ll have to do it in secret, then,” she said. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, Jeremy. For real, this time.”

“Oh, certainly. Anything you say.”

“But I’ll make all the arrangements. Would you like to get married this Thursday? Olivia’s home on Thursdays, she can babysit.”

“All right,” he said.

The crumbling sensation went on. Bits of him kept breaking away and falling, but Mary didn’t seem to notice.

All through the next day, while he sat in his studio filing down the metal edges of a statue, he kept thinking about this mother-in-law whom Mary still remembered after so many years. He saw her as fat, blowsy, good-natured — an open-hearted woman who could give Mary some indefinable quality that he was not up to. He pictured her holding Mary’s letter in enormous, motherly hands. He tried to imagine what Mary would have written. It was polite, it was almost obligatory, to ask a woman about the welfare of her son. “How is Guy doing? I think of him often.” Oh, he could almost see those words in Mary’s round, looped handwriting. “I live with someone else now but Gladys (or Dolores or whatever her name was), it’s not the same at all, he’s so wishy-washy and spends so much time in his studio, and at first he wanted to make love too often and now he doesn’t want to hardly ever.” Jeremy winced and dropped a bolt and picked it up again. He imagined the mother-in-law’s answer. “Guy has a divorce since he gave up hope but you could come back any time, any time at all, Mary. Things have never been the same here since you left.”

He knew that was what she would say. Things would never be the same any place that Mary left.

At noon one of the children climbed the stairs to tell him lunch was ready, but he called through the door that he was too busy to come. In actual fact he was finishing the ring-around-the-rosy statue. He was working slowly, as he always did near the end of a piece, putting in small touches with long pauses for deliberation. He could easily have stopped for lunch. It was just that the thought of going downstairs made him feel so tired, somehow. All that noise! That tumult of emotion, rising in billows around him as he tried to swallow his food! Even from here he could hear the clatter of silverware, the children’s endless contests for their mother’s attention and the sudden clamor over some domestic accident — as if, overturned, those peanut butter glasses painted with nursery rhyme characters had spilled forth shouts and laughter and scoldings instead of milk. Above it all Mary’s voice rode, like a ship on waves. He could not understand how she managed this, speaking at such a low and steady pitch. He himself was drowned out, every time. “Children? Oh, children,” he would say, “couldn’t you please—” Now Mary laughed, a rich soft laugh that carried effortlessly to every corner of the house. A few minutes later he heard her climbing the stairs. Dishes rattled gently on a tray. “Jeremy,” she called, “I’ve brought your lunch up.”

“Come in,” he said, but she couldn’t; he had absent-mindedly locked the door. First the knob turned and then she knocked. He had to put down his file and get off his stool and let her in — a task that seemed larger than it was, like having to rearrange every cell of his body within some thick dark sac of concentration. “Egg salad,” she said. He stared at her dimly. She carried the tray in past him and began laying his lunch out on the table in front of the statue — a glass of milk, a salad bowl, a sandwich on a plate. Every time she set a dish down she had to move something of his out of the way. A glue bucket was pushed aside, a paintbrush was laid across the top of it (not where it belonged). A horseshoe magnet clanged to the floor. “Sorry,” Mary said cheerfully. He felt that a long tail of noise and energy was pluming out behind her, brushing objects in his room as she turned. Although he had been thinking of her all morning, this seemed to be a different Mary from the one in his thoughts — clearer, sharper, more brightly colored. She changed the air in his studio, stirring up the center of it and making the corners look darker and dustier. The room appeared to be hers now. When she stepped back to look at the statue, he had the feeling that that was hers too. He imagined how efficiently she would make a statue: fitting it together in no time, without a wasted motion or a single revision, relying upon some rich lode of intuition that he did not possess. When she was done she would give the statue a loving smack on the rump, as if it were a child sent out to play after she had tied its shoelaces. “Very nice,” she said now. “I like it.”

She turned and kissed him. She wound her arms around his neck. He said, “I should get back to work, Mary.”

But then when she was gone the other Mary returned, the silent floating one of his thoughts, and the image of her writing to her mother-in-law continued to pain him so much that he sat on his stool bent over and clutching his chest, like a man suffering a heart attack.

By early afternoon he had completed every last detail of the statue. Still, he didn’t leave the studio. And when Brian came visiting — he heard his voice in the entrance hall — he refused to see him. “Jeremy, Brian’s here,” Mary called.

Jeremy didn’t answer.

Then Brian’s boots mounted the stairs, two steps at a time. His great hearty knock sounded on Jeremy’s door. “Hey, in there. You feel like a visitor?”

Jeremy frowned at the ceiling. He was lying on the couch with his hands clasped across his stomach, trying off and on to think of another piece to work on. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone at all. But while he was framing an answer Brian gave up and went away again, and Jeremy heard his voice and Mary’s and then the slamming of the front door. He rose and padded over to a window. There was Brian crossing the street, weaving his way between cars stopped for a traffic light, arriving on the opposite sidewalk in a sudden burst of speed as if he had just made a daring escape. Jeremy watched after him for as long as he was in sight. It seemed to him that Brian’s walk was lighthearted, nearly dancing; he might have been celebrating his return to freedom.

At suppertime, when Mary came with another tray, she said, “Why wouldn’t you see Brian?”

“Perhaps tomorrow I will.”

“You’re not still angry about what happened at the gallery, are you? Jeremy, I honestly don’t think—”

“No, it’s just, you see, I’m busy with a new piece,” he told her.

“Oh, I see.”

Actually he never went straight from one piece to the next. It was necessary to have a regathering period, an idle space sometimes stretching into weeks. But Mary said, “I hope it’s going well, then,” and she took away his lunch dishes and left him his supper and a mug of hot coffee.

When she was gone he turned off the light and went back to the couch. By now the studio was in twilight — a linty grayness that he could almost feel on his skin. In spite of the warmth he wrapped himself in an afghan. It seemed to him that his heart had slowed, and his hands and feet were chilled. He stretched out on the couch and went to sleep, and the afghan made him dream of being held prisoner in some confined and airless place.

Long before dawn he awoke with a start. He spent several seconds wondering where he was. The doubt was more pleasant than disturbing. Even after he had found the answer, he kept trying to push it away again so that he could return to that floating, rootless state. Then he rose and ate supper in the dark — cold vegetables and meatloaf, a bowl of some sticky thick liquid that turned out to be melted ice cream. Every swallow gagged him but he ate the entire meal, and he finished the last of his cold bitter coffee with a feeling of accomplishment. Wasn’t that what life was all about: steadfast endurance? In the dark, where his thoughts seemed more significant than they did in daytime, he decided that this was what made the difference between him and Mary. He saw virtue in acceptance of everything, small and large, while Mary saw virtue in the refusal to accept. She was always ready to do battle against the tiniest infringement. He considered those battles now with fondness; he pictured her tall, energetic figure fending off door-to-door salesmen and overbearing teachers and grade school bullies and household germs, all with the same enthusiasm. It seemed to him that his acceptance and her defiance made up a perfect whole, with neither more right than the other, although up till now he had always assumed that one of them would be proved wrong in the end. He worked through this idea with a feeling of relief. He even thought of going downstairs to wake Mary and tell her about it, but of course she would have no idea what he meant. She never wondered about the same things he did. (Did she wonder about anything?) She would only smile at him with sleepy, half-closed eyes and open the blankets and pull him in to her, her answer to all their problems. He dragged an armchair over to the front window instead, and sat there wrapped in his afghan watching the sky whiten over the city.

Was it possible that once, in the years before Mary, the house had been this still even in the daytime? He had trouble remembering it. He began pretending that this silence was permanent — that Mary and the children had gone away for some reason and left the house echoing behind them. Then he considered his work. What would he do if he were left all alone with his sheets of metal and blocks of wood? Would he still be successful if Mary were not standing behind him? He began twisting his hands together on his knees; something like anxiety or irritation tightened all his muscles. It was foolish to be asking himself such questions. He had been making his pieces all along, hadn’t he? Long before she came here. He pushed back his armchair and flung scraps of cardboard off his worktable. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of newsprint, already drawing shapes in thin air while he planned his next piece. And when, just at dawn, Mary knocked on his door and asked if he were all right, he had trouble placing her. “What?” he asked, still frowning at his sketchpad.

“Are you all right, I said.”

“Oh, yes.”

He was going to make a statue of Brian rounding the corner — a man half running, glad to be gone. He chose that figure because it seemed the most solitary. No dogs, brooms, tricycles, or children accompanied him. He chose wood because it was slowest and took the most patience. Half the morning was spent selecting pieces from the lumber pile in the corner, lovingly smoothing them, arranging and rearranging them. Cutting and sanding the curve of a single shin took till noon. When Mary knocked with his lunch tray he called, “Just leave it outside, would you please? I’ll get it in a minute.” But in a minute he had forgotten all about it, and it was afternoon before the hollow in his stomach reminded him.

He ate while standing at the window, looking down into the street. The glare of sunlight on cement came as a shock to his eyes. He had to squint to see his children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk — their chalked game like an aerial view of a city, the tops of their heads gleaming, two stick pigtails flying out behind each little girl. The clothes they wore gave them a motley look. Plaids, ginghams, stripes, flowers, all mixed together. Hannah, spread-eagled on a skateboard, looked like one of those dolls made up of stacked felt discs all different colors: an orange scarf around her neck, a puffy pink quilted jacket, a red cardigan dangling below it and a plaid skirt below that, bare white knees, and the cuffs of blue knee-socks rising above floppy red boots. Their voices seemed too distant, as voices had back when he was a child sick in bed — words floating across some curtain of mist or water. He used to think the change was caused by his being horizontal, but here he was standing upright and still they sounded like people in a dream. They were arguing about whether someone had broken a rule. Jeremy could not figure out the point of this game. As far as he could see it involved hopping down a series of chalked squares. Was the pattern of those squares their own? Was there some hidden, rigid set of regulations that he knew nothing about? He was awed by their ability to decide on their own amusements, to carry on, by themselves, this mysterious tradition handed down by an older generation of children. They lined up efficiently, hopped with purpose, stooped for some sort of glittering marker and tossed it to a new square before stepping smartly aside to await another turn. He had never suspected that children on their own would be so organized.

In the evening Mary knocked on his door and said, “Jeremy, aren’t you ever coming out?”

“In a little while, yes,” he said. He blew sawdust off a stick of wood.

“You’re tying up the children’s bathroom, Jeremy. It’s Abbie’s bath night. Couldn’t you just let her in that long?”

“In a while.”

He heard her sigh. He heard her whisper something he couldn’t quite catch. “What?” he said.

“I said, you won’t forget tomorrow, will you?”

“Tomorrow.”

“It’s Thursday tomorrow, Jeremy.”

“Oh, yes.”

“We’re getting—”

“Yes, yes, I remember.”

She set the tray outside his door. The familiar clinking of china on tin made him suddenly hungry, but he didn’t go out to the hall. He waited for her to leave. He stood listening to her footsteps all the way down the stairs, and only then did he go to the door and open it. He didn’t know why he behaved that way. The smell of her on the landing — warm milk and honey sprinkled with cinnamon, a drink that had comforted him all his life — seemed sickly-sweet. He picked the tray up and closed the door and locked it again. Standing just inside the room, holding the tray in one hand, he took bits of food in his fingers and wolfed them down. Behind him the sounds of the household crept up the stairs and seeped through the cracks around the door. He heard laughter and a thread of “Frère Jacques.” Mary and Olivia were calling back and forth to each other between two rooms. Mary’s voice was downward-slanting, definite, while Olivia’s rose in an uncertain way at the end of each sentence. This might be a school for women; the thought had often occurred to him. In the old days he had assumed that what women knew came to them naturally. He had never suspected that they had to be taught. But listen to Mary, to the firmness of her voice, not issuing concrete instructions so much as showing Olivia how to be; listen to Olivia slowly and questioningly taking on her tone. To the little girls, even, cleverly coaxing Rachel to eat her carrots, Edward to try his potty chair — they were all being tutored. Jeremy set his tray down and stood beside the door in silence, eavesdropping, impressed and envious. Were there no such tutors for men? Was it only women who linked the generations so protectively?

But when footsteps climbed the stairs again — this time Olivia’s — he scurried back to his work. “Mr. Pauling? Mary sent me with more coffee.” He stayed quiet, a quarter-sheet of sandpaper frozen in one hand. After a while she went away.

By Thursday morning the framework of the statue was completed. Only he could have told what it was yet. There was just a skeleton, tied in odd places with strips from old sheets wherever gluing had seemed preferable to nailing. While he waited for the glue to dry he rummaged about for other materials — coarse fabrics and copper wire and a length of fine screen that he had been saving for something special. He overturned bins and drawers, blinking repeatedly to clear his eyes. (He had not had very much sleep the night before.) Under the sink he found a child’s wool cap and sat down to unravel it, building a pile of crinkly red yarn in his lap. Later he would stiffen the yarn with his spray can, let it stream out from behind his figure’s head. Whoever owned the cap would say, “Jeremy! Is that mine? You told us, Jeremy, you said you’d stop using all our stuff up, remember?” He remembered very well, but when he was in the middle of a piece some sort of feverishness came over him. He took whatever looked right, even the necessities of life. He broke or rearranged them as needed, fumbling in his haste, promising himself that he would replace the objects as soon as his piece was finished and he had the time again. Now he had no time at all. It always seemed likely at this stage that he might drop dead by nightfall, leaving his figure unfinished and his life in bits on the studio floor. What if his piece remained a skeleton forever, bound with rags at the joints and tipping in that precarious way he was planning to change, he knew just how, once he found the proper base for it? No one would ever guess what his plans had been. They would think the skeleton was what he had intended, with all its flaws. Surely, then, if ghosts existed he would have to become one; his restless spirit would be forced to return to haunt what he had left undone.

What he intended for this piece was the light, dissolving feel of Brian running, a splinter in a cold spring wind. He would be wrapped in matte surfaces. His face would be a thin blade of wood, cutting the air in front of him. He would trail curving tin streamers of motion. Tin? He looked for the sheet metal, the shears. It was hard to breathe. This certainty about what he was making had the same physical effect as fear: his chest tightened and his heart seemed to be rising in his throat, and he had a sensation of burning up his body’s stores too rapidly.

When Mary knocked he didn’t answer, didn’t even bother keeping still for her. “Jeremy? Jeremy!” He bent tin, with a great hollow clang. Mary went away again.

On his lunch tray there was a note. “This is our wedding day. Do you still want to?” Something gave him a sharp stab of sorrow — the question mark, perhaps. The thought of Mary’s low, even voice asking that question. For the first time that morning he listened to what was going on downstairs, sorting out the separate noises from the steady hum that was present all day long. Someone was playing a Sesame Street record and someone else was running the blender at high speed — Olivia, no doubt, fixing one of her peculiar meals of seed-paste patties or fresh-ground peanut butter. The blender ran at the level of a scream, on and on, spitting when it came upon nuts as yet unbroken. A child was crying, but not very seriously. He could not hear Mary anywhere. What time was it? He looked at the clock on the windowsill but it had run down, long ago. It occurred to him that he had not bathed or shaved or changed clothes in days. He had a musty yellow smell and his teeth seemed to be made of flannel. Well, when he had finished cutting the tin he would take care of all that. He would come downstairs newly washed, freshly dressed, and locate Mary among all those jumbled voices. He pictured himself descending into the noise as he would enter the sea — proceeding steadily with his hands lifted and his mouth set, submerging first his feet and then his legs and then his entire body, last of all his head.

The wool from the cap turned out to be a mistake. Too soft, too temporary. He had unraveled it for nothing. He tossed it into a corner and cut more tin instead, in tiny strips that he curled around a pencil and then stretched out again so that they would crinkle. It was a tricky job; he kept getting cut. Little seams of blood mixed with the paint and the gray rolls of glue on his fingers. Somewhere he had work gloves but he was in too much of a hurry to stop and look for them. The muscles at the back of his neck were stretched thin, and when he stood up with his bundle of tin strips he found that both legs were asleep. Now the strips had to be nailed onto the wooden head, which was the hardest part. First he had to find enough tiny sharp nails in his nail can and then he had to hammer them in absolutely straight or they skidded off the tin. His hands were sore all over, but the soreness was reassuring. He was merely getting used up, that was all. Like the lead of a pencil. Naturally the hands were the first to go.

At twilight Olivia brought his tray up. “Mr. Pauling? Could I come in?”

The thought of food gave him a sick feeling. He ignored her.

Something made working more and more difficult. It took him a while to realize that it was the darkness. The statue was only a glimmer before him. He walked over to the door on crippled, icy feet, but when he had turned the wall switch on the light hurt his eyes so much that he clicked it off again. He made his way to the couch and lay down, with one arm set across his aching forehead. As soon as he was comfortably arranged he felt a lurch like some gear disengaging, a ping! in his ears, and his mind floated free and he slept.

Even in his dreams, he worked. He cut, pasted, hammered, sanded. He had a feeling of pressure to finish, a sense of being pushed. Although he forced himself to ignore the pressure he went on working without let-up, and the closer he came to completing the piece the more he was filled with a sense of joy and light-headedness. When the last nail was hammered in he laughed out loud. He backed off across the studio with his eyes lowered, so that the finished statue could burst upon him all in one instant, and then he looked up to see what he had made.

A room. A corner of a room, a kitchen, to be exact. A counter with a loaf of rye bread and a bread knife on it, and a coppertone clothes dryer spilling out realistic wads of flowered and plaid and gingham clothes and a formica table with chairs set around it — oh, how he must have worked over that table! Its aluminum edge was grooved with three parallel bands; such attention to detail. The chairs were mismatched, a subtle touch. The wooden one alone must have taken him weeks to make, with its bulbous legs and the tie-on ruffled cushion on its seat and the Bugs Bunny decal on its back. He had even included, on the rungs, the scars of a hundred children’s teetering shoes. Was this what he had labored over for so many hours?

He woke feeling dismal and empty and frightened. Sunlight flooded his face, a deep gold light casting long rectangles so that he suspected it must be mid-morning. What he wanted most was a cup of hot coffee, but all he found outside his door was last night’s supper. A wilted salad, a glass of lukewarm milk, some peculiar brownish casserole that he could not identify. He ate it anyway, although it went down his throat in lumps. He swallowed the milk with narrow, dutiful sips and then set his tray outside the door again.

Now he saw that the statue was all wrong. What had he been thinking of, setting on each curl of hair that way? He might have been building a doll, or a department store mannequin. With a screwdriver he began prying the strips off, one by one. His hands hurt so much that he could hardly bend them. The statue’s head showed nail marks down its back, but he was already thinking up ways to cover them.

At noon he checked for lunch, but found none. Later in the afternoon he checked again. There were only the supper dishes, crusty now. He stood on the landing and called, “Mary?” The word echoed back. There was not a sound in the house; only a clear, bell-like silence in which each of his footsteps fell too loudly. He descended the stairs, passing the empty second floor and continuing to where his children would surely be absorbed in a fairytale or some quiet table game. No. No one was there. In the parlor the baby’s playpen was empty and the toys on the floor seemed to be coated with a furry film of stillness. In the dining room the face of the TV was sleek and blank; in the bedroom his and Mary’s bed was made so neatly that it seemed artificial, something from a furniture store display. He had the feeling that no one had slept there for months, if ever. And the kitchen was strangest of all. The counters were absolutely clean and shining, like an advertisement for a linoleum company. No floury measuring cups, no cucumber peels, no stacked-up dirty dishes. The floor gleamed. The table was spotless. The clock ticked briskly and hollowly.

He felt that his sense of time, which was never good, had deserted him. Had he missed something? Had the days carried everyone else on by and left him stranded in some vanished moment? Maybe his family had just gone out to a movie. Maybe they had abandoned him forever. Maybe they had grown up and moved some thirty years before, had children of their own and grown old and died. He couldn’t prove that it wasn’t so.

Then, turning to the refrigerator for food and solace (fumbling at some new kind of double door where he had expected the old single one), he found a note stuck on with a teapot-shaped magnet. “Dear Jeremy, I have taken the children and left you. I borrowed Brian’s cabin at the Quamikut Boatyard. I think it’s best. Love, Mary.”

He took the note off the door and read it over and over. It seemed that the air had gone out of him, so that the words striking his deflated chest jarred all the way through to his backbone. Finally he folded the piece of paper several times and tucked it in his shirt pocket. He headed through the house and back upstairs, fixing the image of his new statue very firmly in his mind like some magnetic star that would guide him through this moment. In the studio he resumed work immediately. He sanded the wooden head smooth again, at first so hard that the friction burned his fingers through the paper but then more slowly and then more slowly still. Like some clumsy, creaking wheel, he ground to a stop. He dropped the sandpaper and stood motionless, one hand upon his statue, staring numbly at the bare walls of the studio.

Deserted, he was like an old man who sees the last of the guests to the door and returns, stretching, and yawning, to an empty room. Now I am alone again, he says. Finally. We can get down to what I have been waiting to do.

What is it I have been waiting to do?