Celestial Navigation

8. Spring through Fall, 1971: Olivia

You know how I knew she had left him? I found him smoking a cigarette. I went up to his studio on Friday night to ask where the others were, it felt so weird downstairs. I knocked and stuck my head in, and there he sat on this purple velvet couch holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger and blowing out a long careful funnel of smoke. “Mr. Pauling?” I said. “Jeremy? Where’s everyone gone to?” But then I guessed for myself, right while I was asking. Something about the way he was holding the cigarette. I don’t know why. “Good Lord, she’s left you,” I said. He nodded. I wouldn’t say that he looked upset. Just stunned, sort of. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything, and then he switched the cigarette to a new position between his index and middle fingers and sat there staring at it, and I closed the door again.

Well, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Actually she was a very ordinary woman, not at all what you’d expect of an artist’s wife. The wonder of it is that she ever had the good sense to marry him in the first place. So earthbound, she was. Always nagging and tidying and bringing him her little domestic problems. Knocking on the door: “Jeremy, the storm window man’s here with an estimate and won’t take any signature but yours. Won’t you please come out. Do you have any idea what goes into the running of this house?” If they ever start a men’s liberation movement, I’ll join it in a flash. Though of course it’s taken me a while to see her so clearly, I admit it. At first I was just glad to get a roof over my head, someone watching out for me and making me wear my raincoat. But I left a mother just like her up in Pennsylvania, went through all the bother of running away only to end up here in the same kind of stewpot. It’s lucky I finally got wise. When I think how close I came to going over to her side!

All the same, it was sort of a shock at first to discover she was gone.

I went downstairs to make a peanut butter sandwich. By then the senior citizens were in the kitchen scrounging for supper. The two of them got on my nerves, shuffling around the way they did. They seemed to be weaving a net across the kitchen floor. “Listen,” I said. “Mary’s taken the kids and left.” That shook them up. Mr. Somerset’s mouth sagged open and he forgot to watch the frying pan. Old lady Vinton went on stirring her eggs but I could tell she was surprised. Her spatula went slower and slower. She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “Took to her heels,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Perhaps she’s off visiting,” Miss Vinton said.

“Who would she visit?”

“Well, now, we don’t know the whole story. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“Like what, for instance.”

“I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”

People say that when they mean that life will get back to the way it was before. It never occurs to them that a change might be for the better.

I said, “I think I’ll take Jeremy a peanut butter sandwich.”

“I don’t believe Jeremy eats peanut butter,” Miss Vinton said.

“He’s never had mine, then. I make it myself.”

Mr. Somerset said, “Yes, yes, we all know that.” Mr. Somerset doesn’t like me. His voice when he spoke to me was all cracked and peevish. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you,” he said, “running that blender to death the minute I set my head on my pillow for my afternoon nap.”

I ignored him. I spread peanut butter on a slice of whole wheat bread. “At least I imagine he could use the company,” I said.

“Perhaps he would like to be left alone,” said Miss Vinton.

“That’s for him to tell me, isn’t it?”

“People can’t always say what they feel, Olivia. I imagine he might like to think things through a while, and when he gets hungry he’ll come down and—”

I know her type. Always so virtuous about keeping out of the way, letting others be. It’s an excuse, of course. Aloofness is the easy way out; I believe in plunging right ahead. Slamming the sandwich on a tray and adding an orange (artificially colored, but what could I do?) and marching straight upstairs to Jeremy. Knock-knock. “It’s me, it’s Olivia. You hungry?”

No answer. I went in anyway. He was smoking another cigarette. “Here,” I said, setting the tray down, and then I went over to a half-finished piece and said, “I like it.” I pretended not to notice how deserted it looked. I pretended he was just carrying on with the making of it no matter what, which in my opinion is what he should have been doing. “It’s got a good flow to it,” I said. To tell the truth I didn’t have the vaguest idea what comments were required, but I was going to learn. I have the deepest respect for artists. I said, “When are you planning on finishing it?”

“I don’t think I will ever finish it,” Jeremy said.

“Nonsense.”

He put the cigarette to his mouth again. You could tell he wasn’t used to smoking. The filter tip barely touched his lips, and he sucked in very quickly and let the smoke out without inhaling it. The pack in his lap said “True”—Miss Vinton’s, then. A namby-pamby brand. “Look,” I said, “do you mind if I just stay a while and see how you work?”

He stopped watching his smoke and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth fell open. I wasn’t expecting so much attention so suddenly. I smoothed my hair back and said, “Of course, if I would distract you in any way—”

But then he suddenly got to his feet, he lurched to his feet, like someone pulled by strings, and set his fingertips to his mouth and stood swaying there. After a moment he turned and ran to the bathroom and I heard him throwing up. It seemed to go on forever. I sat down on the couch and wound a strand of hair around my finger, waiting for him to come back. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. I had all the time in the world.

Once last winter when I was on my way to work I looked across a street and saw Mary walking her kids home from school. She was heading toward a very busy corner where a crossing guard usually stands, but that day for some reason the crossing guard was absent. A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared. At the moment I happened to glance over, Mary was just arriving in their midst. She carried the baby and held Edward by the hand, and her little girls were around her in a circle. Then the light changed. Down she stepped, into the street. Little hands reached out from all directions; strangers’ children clutched at the hem of her coat or the edge of her sleeve or the corner of her purse or even the baby’s one dangling, bootied foot; and if they couldn’t reach her they hung onto the coat of a child who could, and off she sailed with her beautiful white face looming high above them keeping watch on all sides for runaway cars and rough boys on bicycles and any other unexpected dangers. What do you suppose it feels like to be so certain of your role? To have such a clear sense of place? I’d been waiting a long time to learn what my role was. I kept going to different towns, as if what I looked for were a physical object. At night I dreamed eerie dreams. Voices floated in and out, offering solutions and promises and answers, but when I woke up I could never remember what they had said. Every morning I took Jeremy some nuts and fruit for breakfast, and at noon a sandwich, and at suppertime another, and although he didn’t appear to notice me I stood waiting anyway, hoping to be defined.

I went in one day with a bowl of granola and an apple, and I found him nailing boards together into a sort of box. He was working very slowly, and not on the statue he was on before. That surprised me a little. Mary told me once that he always finished everything he started, even if it wasn’t turning out to be what he wanted; he seemed to think pieces came out of him like olives out of a bottle, and he had no choice but to let the first one out before he could get to the second. Well, I don’t know, maybe this particular olive was only a fragment all along. I set his breakfast down and he said, “Oh. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“You will?”

“Just find your things. Where are your things?”

“What things?”

He straightened up and looked at me. “Aren’t you here for a lesson?” he said.

I didn’t know what to think. As far as I knew he didn’t even give lessons. I wondered if he were losing his mind. “Wait, now,” I said. “I’m Olivia. Remember?”

Then his whole face got pink and he began fumbling with the hammer. “Oh,” he said. “I’m so — I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“I must have been — you appear to be somewhat the student type, you see.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not at all.”

Then he said, “No one is purely what they seem on the surface.”

It was the first real thing he had ever said to me. Well, all right, it wasn’t much. But it was a beginning.

He gave me a list of supplies to buy for him at an art shop. The shop bowled me over, I’d never been in such a good place before. It was very small and cozy and it smelled of glue and wood and canvas. The old man behind the counter came about to my waist. He said, “Yes? Can I help?”

“I’d like half a dozen cans of spray adhesive,” I read off the list, “and two tubes of liquid solder and five pounds of scrap stained glass.” I had no idea what I was ordering, but it seemed to make sense to the old man. He kept scurrying around, coming back to set things on the counter. “This is for an artist friend of mine,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Maybe you know him. Jeremy Pauling, he had a one-man show at the O’Donnell Gallery.”

“Pauling, yes,” the man said. He started penciling a column of figures onto a sheet of brown wrapping paper. “We often see his wife,” he said.

“You do?”

“I’ll just put this on the account, shall I?”

“Account?”

He stopped adding the figures and looked up at me.

“Oh. Okay,” I said.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. Sears and Roebuck doesn’t carry everything, after all; she’d have had to run errands for him now and then. Still, it sort of spoiled my mood. Especially when the man gave me the package and said, “I hope Mrs. Pauling isn’t sick. She’s such a lovely person.”

Of course, he was only a salesman. Salesmen always have to sound complimentary.

By the time I got home again I was feeling better. I climbed the stairs pretending to be in a movie. Maybe someday there would be a movie made, right in this house. Some Hollywood actress pretending to be me would bring supplies to an actor pretending to be Jeremy. An American Toulouse-Lautrec. What theme music would they choose? I made up something and hummed it as I went. I was only a side character but powerful, a major influence, and the last scene would show me holding his head as he died. Some major transformation in his art would be dated from the time he met me. I tried to imagine what that transformation would be. When I walked into the studio his new piece was the first thing I looked at, but to tell the truth it didn’t seem much different from anything he’d done in the past. Complicated. Involved. Like one of those poems you give up on after the first couple lines, because even though you know it must be good it takes so much work to read it. He had stood his box construction on end and set in boards horizontally and vertically, as if he were making a cabinet with lots of different-sized cubbyholes, and now he was painting the inside of each cubbyhole a different color. Oh, well. Still in the movie, I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I think you’ve hit on something this time.” He shied away and blinked up at me. “Anyway,” I said. “Here’s the stuff I got you.”

When he went through the art supplies he knew exactly what he was doing. For the first time he seemed perfectly sure of himself. He held a sheet of blue glass to the light and squinted at it and then set it in a sort of vertical rack beneath a counter; he shook a can of adhesive next to his ear; he rotated a ten-color ballpoint pen I’d lifted on impulse from a display card on my way out of the shop. I liked the way he held it in both hands, so respectfully, as if he understood it in some deeper way than ordinary people could. Oh, he was really getting to me. “That’s on the house,” I said. He looked over at me. “I mean it’s a present, it’s from me to you.” He set the pen down on a table. Maybe he didn’t like getting presents. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood there a minute, frowning at the pen, before he turned and picked up his brush again. Not very good movie material. They could make this a silent film and never miss a thing. “Tell me, Jeremy,” I said. “Don’t you ever go to bars or cafés or anything?”

“What? Oh, no.”

“Seems to me you’d want to go someplace like that.”

He finished painting a cubbyhole gray. He switched brushes and started on another: yellow. Every little crack covered completely, the brush prodding a knothole over and over with patient, stubborn, whiskery sounds until it was filled in.

“Look, where are all those mad happy artists I’m always hearing about?” I asked him. “Don’t you ever go drinking or anything? Don’t you have any artist friends? Don’t you ever dance with them or get drunk or sing songs?”

His eyes when he looked up were so pale and empty, I thought he would sink into one of those staring spells, but he surprised me. “I believe,” he said, “that the last happy artist was a caveman, coming back from the hunt and dashing off a picture of it on a stone wall.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, what about—”

“Or maybe not,” said Jeremy. “Maybe not, even that far back. Maybe he was lame, not allowed to hunt, and he stayed home with the women and children and drew those pictures to comfort himself.”

“How do you figure that?” I said. “How do you know the caveman didn’t stay home because drawing took so much out of him, he couldn’t hunt?”

It wasn’t for nothing I asked him that. Sometimes it seemed to me that Jeremy got up looking like other men and then faded away as he worked, as if art erased him somehow. As if each piece were another layer scraped off him, when already he was down to the quick. But if he heard me, he didn’t take me seriously. He was off on some track of his own. “I often dream that I’m a caveman,” he said.

“Oh, do you?” I said. I love to talk about dreams.

“It’s always back before men could make fire, you understand. They observed it, yes, but only when lightning struck and forests caught fire by accident and burned themselves out. In my dreams I sit all night watching the treetops, hoping that within my lifetime something will be set on fire for me to see.”

“Maybe it’s a message,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Something supernatural.”

“Oh. Perhaps.”

I said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t you just love talking this way? You never did, before now. I was beginning to wonder about you. Don’t we get along beautifully together?”

“What? Oh. Surely,” Jeremy said.

Then he set the yellow brush down and chose an ivory one, and when he looked up at me a moment later I might as well not have been there, his face was so slack and his eyes so transparent.

I went to O’Donnell’s Gallery, looking for some clue to Jeremy. This was in July, but I wore my white trenchcoat with the belt ends stuck in the pockets because that always makes me feel more in control of things, and I didn’t take my sunglasses off even inside. Galleries tend to make me go to pieces. I told Mary that once, when she asked if I wanted to see Jeremy’s one-man show, and she laughed. She thought I was speaking figuratively. Mary never goes to pieces. I don’t believe she is capable of it.

Now Jeremy’s show was over and I was sorry I had missed it, but there was still plenty of his work around. All lamplit against white walls. Displayed like that, it didn’t appear to have been made by human hands. I found collages of his, a few small early statues, a more recent one standing in the middle of the room. I looked at the recent one first. I was counting on some chink of light to open for me, but it didn’t. What was I supposed to make of this? A man pushing a wheelbarrow, webbed around with strings and pulleys and chains and weights. He was mostly plaster, but you could find nearly every material in the world if you looked long enough. It seemed as if Jeremy had thrown it together in some kind of frenzy. Painted sections faded suddenly into carving, carving into découpage, and down the man’s chest I found words hurriedly etched with some sharp instrument—“A heavy cup of warm …”—trailing off where he ran out of space, as if he had thrown his knife away in some fit of impatience and had reached blindly for what came to him next, a sheet of burlap or a glue bottle or a coil of wire. I didn’t get it. I moved backwards in time, past the smaller pieces, on to the collages. I took off my sunglasses, but that didn’t help. Besides, my neck was beginning to ache. That always happens when I get frustrated. So I gave up, but I did have one last thing to do before I could leave. I went to the owner, who sat in a little office at the rear. He was riffling through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard. Good-looking man with a beard. “Hi,” I said.

He smoothed the papers and looked up at me. He said, “Well, hi.”

“I notice you have some pieces by what’s his name, Paul? Pauling? Now I’m not buying just this moment but I did want to say that I hope you know how good he is. He’s the best guy you’ve got. How come you price him so low?”

“It’s Olivia, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“I saw you once in Mary’s kitchen when I was carrying out a piece,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m Brian O’Donnell.”

“Oh,” I said. I put my shades back on. “Well. Sorry. I just thought I’d throw in a vote for him while I was here.”

“Good idea. How is he?”

“He’s fine.”

“I saw him last week but he said he didn’t have any pieces ready.”

“No, but he will,” I said. “Really, he’s going to have a lot, very soon now. Very different from his other stuff. It’s a transformation. You know his wife left him.”

“Yes.”

“Now I am with him.”

“You are?”

I pulled the belt ends out of my pockets and buckled them. I stuck out my hand and said, “Well, good seeing you.” He stood up and leaned across the desk. His palm was stippled from the back of the clipboard. He held onto my hand even after I had started to pull away. “You’re with Jeremy?” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“You’re — are you—?”

“You must come and see us sometime,” I said.

“Well, all right.”

“Only not right away, of course. He still has a few tag ends to finish up. See you later.”

“Sure thing,” said Mr. O’Donnell.

I slung my purse over my shoulder and left. I could feel him staring after me. Outside it was about ninety degrees, but still I was glad I’d worn my trenchcoat.

I am not as disorganized as I look. I see the patterns, I can put two and two together as well as anyone. And what I’d figured out so far was that if I went on being Jeremy’s link with the outside world, buying his glue and fixing his breakfast, I was going to turn into another Mary. That’s how these things happen: inch by inch. What I had to do was get inside, somehow. Get in his little glass room with him, where it would just be the two of us looking out. Mary never did that, but I was going to. All right, I knew he was old. The first time I saw him he seemed ancient, and peculiar besides. Shaking hands with him was like taking hold of a warm pastry. But that was before I saw him clearly. I saw him clearly as soon as Mary left. I started to feel some pull on me, something in that situation, that artist sitting alone three storeys off the ground, that woman who could leave a man in crumbs just by removing herself from his world. Why, she was his world! Why couldn’t I be? Only better, closer, more understanding. How do you get into a man like that? Where is the secret button?

I said, “Your whatchamacallit is going well, Jeremy.” Though all I could see was that he had finished painting the cubbyholes and started putting bits of junk in them. “It’s quite, it’s really something,” I said.

“But is it unique?”

This wasn’t the first time he had asked me that.

“Would you say it was unique?”

“Well, of course,” I said.

“Is it — you don’t see anybody else in it, do you?”

“Huh?”

“Mary, for example.”

“Mary?” I said. What he had added in so far was a bicycle bell, a square of flowered wallpaper, and a wooden button.

“I keep having the feeling that Mary is coloring things in some way.”

But the color I saw was actual, a sheet of blue glass he was cutting up with a little thing like a pizza wheel. I felt like laughing. Then I got depressed. When was I going to figure out what his work was all about? I had expected it would just come to me — that one day I would walk in the studio door and suddenly understand what he meant. But it hadn’t happened yet.

“As if I were seeing through her eyes,” he said.

“Seeing—?”

“But of course that’s not true. I see for myself.”

“Of course.”

“I see for myself.”

“Sure. All right.”

“There’s no one else in it, there’s not a fragment, there’s not a single other person.”

“All right, Jeremy.”

I stopped going out. I stopped answering the phone. I let mail stack up on the sideboard. Mealtimes Jeremy and I went down to the kitchen together and ate an entire box of chocolates or Miss Vinton’s liverwurst or nothing at all, it didn’t matter. If he was working I lay on the couch in the studio and swung one foot in the air. I looked at the skylight. I knew all the cracks and dead leaves on it. He didn’t work very much, though. I had thought he would go faster than he did. Some days he just doodled on a scrap of paper, or sat in his armchair chewing his fingernails, or walked around and around his piece without ever once looking at it. If I spoke, he wouldn’t answer. I stopped trying. I lay back and watched brown leaves scuttle across the skylight in the wind.

What we did most was watch television in the dining room. Of course that wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing, but I was trying to see things through his eyes, after all. I sat beside him and watched from morning to night. I’d never guessed how caught up you can get in television programs. On the soap operas people’s lives were ruled by some twisted design underlying everything, something we were too ignorant to see. On the panel shows they talked back and forth so courteously, their faces so cool and untextured. Look how they waited for one speaker to stop before another began! Look at the way they chose their tones without a second’s faltering — a cheerful tone after a dark one, a question, a trill of laughter, a note of sudden firmness. All so perfectly orchestrated. How well behaved they were! I turned toward Jeremy and opened my mouth. I wanted to see if I had the same effect when I spoke, but unfortunately I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway.

In the afternoon there was Sesame Street. I was afraid it would remind him of his children, but it didn’t seem to. He watched it like a child himself. When the numbers zoomed out at him he started and then relaxed. He always hoped today’s number was a high one that took a lot of singing. He laughed in all the funny places, and bounced a little in his seat. Well, they were kind of comical. There was one skit in particular — a thing where a little puppet complains that nothing but a skinned finger has happened to him all day. Then it turns out he skinned his finger running from a dog and the dog was running from a lion who was let loose by a monkey when the fire engine hit the monkey’s cage … well, I don’t remember the exact events but Jeremy certainly did enjoy it. They must have showed it about twenty times over, and every time he sat forward in his seat to peer and nod, and when it was done he would sigh and look down at his knees.

In the evening there were the adventures, a lot of chases and escapes. Jeremy watched everything but the shows where innocent men were suspected of some crime. Then he would say, “No, no, that’s no good”—he didn’t like feeling anxious for people. He would ask me to locate a comedy, or some medical show where the only deaths were preordained. When the commercials came on, the senior citizens used the time to go get a sweater or a bite to eat but Jeremy and I sat still. These things can grow on you after a while. You admire the actors’ faces. You get fond of the background music. That funny little chewing gum dance. The Coca-Cola song where everybody seems to like each other.

When bedtime came Jeremy went without saying good night. I might as well not have been there. First he would blink and then rub his eyes and then he would wander off, sort of aimlessly, and a little while later I would hear the water running in the downstairs bathroom. Then I would go to bed myself. I didn’t sleep well. I lay curled on my side for hours, listening to the house settle down and grow quiet as if it were folding itself up, huddling inward away from the world outside. Or if I slept I might suddenly awake, at two or three or four in the morning. I sat up strangled in bedclothes, much too hot, dry-throated. It was September now and some nights the steam heat came on. The radiators warming up smelled dusty and bitter; the house seemed like an old person, all rattling bones and coughs and stale breaths.

Other painters have blue periods and rose periods, but Jeremy didn’t. His changes were in depth, not color. A flat period, a raised period. A three-dimensional period. What comes after three-dimensional? Four-dimensional. “You’re making a time machine,” I said to him.

“Hmm?”

“That explains all those weird thingummies you’re sticking in.”

“Weird? I don’t understand why you say that.”

But there he went, gluing a plastic banana from Pippi’s toy grocery store into the lower right-hand cubbyhole. Next a curly-handled baby’s feeding spoon. Poor Rachel. Objects sat jumbled in every cubicle, most of them metallic. The whole thing had the makeshift look of some mad inventor’s scale model. Is it any wonder I thought of time machines?

“Time must be the explanation for everything,” I told him. “Time loops. Little tangles in time that get knotted off from the main cord. You, for instance,” I said, and he looked up. “Do you know why you make your pieces? You’re in a time loop.”

“I am?”

“You’re cut off from the main cord. That’s how you see clearly enough; you have more distance. Maybe this statue is a sort of notation, like what archeologists jot down when they’re on a dig. You’re just visiting. But are you aware of it?”

I didn’t expect him to take me up on that, but he did. Not to the point, exactly, but, “I’ve often thought,” he said, “if I went back, you know, back in time somehow, I would never be able to show anyone how to make a radio.”

“Why would you want to?” I asked him.

“What I mean is that the twentieth century has been wasted on me, don’t you see.”

“Of course. It’s not your time.”

“I wish it were,” Jeremy said.

“No, Jeremy! Don’t you get what I’m saying? If you weren’t off in a time loop you wouldn’t be making pieces the way you do.”

“I still wish,” Jeremy said.

Then he sat down on the floor and began peeling dried glue from his fingers, like a surgeon stripping off his rubber gloves. Usually that meant he had finished work for the day. His schedule was so peculiar — three hours walking around and around the piece giving it quick shy glances, then ten minutes’ work and down he would go in this sodden heap on the floor. I slid off the couch and squatted in front of him. “Ghosts, now,” I told him. “I’ve just figured out what they are. Do you know?”

“No.”

“They’re people from the past, our ancestors, come to visit us in a time machine. Well, of course! Maybe they’re here by accident. Maybe they don’t even know what’s happened to them. They wander in. ‘Good heavens,’ they say, what’s going on? How’d I get here?’ Then they step back into their time loop, try another period. That’s why they keep fading away like they do. I bet you’ve haunted a lot of places, Jeremy.”

“I feel so hungry,” Jeremy said.

“Martians, take Martians. How come we think they’re from another planet? They’re from our planet, Jeremy, twenty centuries in the future. Wearing helmets against our outdated atmosphere and looking a little different on account of evolution. Our descendants, come back to do a little historical research.”

“Well, perhaps,” said Jeremy. “You may be right.” He gathered glue peelings into a little heap on the floor. He said, “Do you know how to make waffles?”

“No.” I took the glue peels from him and rolled them around in my hand. I had so much I wanted to say to him, and it wasn’t very often he would let me get face to face like this. “Have you ever had something just vanish, with no explanation? And you never found it again?”

“Oh yes.”

“Maybe your descendants took it.”

“They did?”

“The Martians, so-called. Maybe it’s their weakness, sticky fingers. Some of our belongings, you know, will be priceless antiques someday, and of course the Martians know exactly which ones. Know what we should do when we find something missing like that? Buy about twenty more. Like an investment. Why, right now I’ve lost my belt with the fringe. I’ve looked everywhere for it. In the fortieth century they may not even wear belts. Shouldn’t I buy a whole stack and save them up?”

“I’m so hungry, Olivia,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but wait, I want to ask you something.”

“I don’t believe we had any breakfast.”

“Listen. Which are you, Jeremy? A descendant, or an ancestor. Do you know?”

“What?”

“Do you know what time you’re from? Do you? Think, Jeremy. I want to find this out.”

But all Jeremy said was, “I wish you could learn how to make waffles.”

Then I slammed my hand down on his, which was resting on his knee, and he started and drew back. But instead of removing his hand he left it there, and after a long motionless minute he said in a faraway voice, “How cool you are.”

I thought he must be trying to sound hip.

He slid his hand away. Still leaning back, he reached out and touched the end of a strand of my hair with one fingertip. “You’re so cold,” he said.

Then I understood. It seemed I understood all about him now. “I am always cold,” I told him. “Never warm. Mary was warm.”

“You’re not,” he said.

We stared at each other, not smiling at all.

He liked me in the colors of ice, pale blues and grays and whites, everything smooth, preferably shiny. He never said so, but I knew. He never had to say anything at all any more. Sometimes we went days without speaking or looking at each other, and we never touched, even accidentally. We just moved about side by side, in step. We sat in identical dusty green chairs in the dining room, watching housewives win electrical appliances. When they won they screamed and hugged the emcee and took his face hard between their hands to kiss him on the lips. “I used to win things,” Jeremy said. One woman jumped up and down and landed wrong on her spike heels and twisted her ankle. Jeremy and I watched without changing our expressions, like two goldfish looking out of a goldfish bowl.

I saw that other people were forever rushing somewhere, and nine tenths of what they did would have to be redone the next day. Cleaning, bathing, making conversation. I thought about it a long time, but I didn’t mention it to Jeremy. I didn’t need to. Half of the idea I caught from him, by osmosis; the other half I concluded for myself and passed back to him just as silently. He quit shaving. His whiskers grew out half an inch and stopped. How much time he could have saved all these years, if he had known they would do that! We quit going upstairs. His studio vanished; so did my bedroom. Look at stairs, we thought, silently, together: what a perfect example of pointlessness. They go up and down, both. If you go up you must come down. You undo everything and start over. After The Star-Spangled Banner we fell asleep in our chairs, or out in the living room, or in the downstairs bedroom, side by side on top of the spread. I followed him everywhere but without asking a thing, an un-Mary sharing a pool of chilliness. I taught him to sleep late. Waking, finding me beside him, he would struggle up. “Be still,” I said, and he lay down again and stared, as I did, at the towering white ceiling while noon approached and rolled over us and rumbled away again. Now I was an artist too. In my mind I colored the ceiling with the jagged lightning bolts you see when you squinch your eyes tight; so did Jeremy. We did it together. No strings snagged us to the rest of the world. “Good Lord in heaven!” Mr. Somerset said, shuffling up, stopping in the bedroom doorway. “Look here! What do you two think you’re up to here?” I didn’t answer. Jeremy didn’t hear. Jeremy was farther along, he was nearly out of touch altogether, but I was catching up with him as fast as I possibly could.

I wouldn’t eat, but Jeremy did. He devoured all the food that belonged to Miss Vinton: a loaf of bread, a quart jar of mayonnaise, a pack of wieners. Watching him eat made me feel stuffed. I saw that my fingers were getting knobby and my jeans were loose, but I felt so fat. He stopped chewing and looked over at me. I closed my eyes. He went on eating.

Once he said, “My mother died and so did both my sisters.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Also my father.”

“Your father.”

“Then her. Everybody left me.”

“I haven’t left.”

“Everybody outside me left.”

That was the way he let me know how he felt about me.

I was lying on the bed listening to the pigeons tearing at the ivy on the outside wall. It must be fall. Berries on the ivy. Jeremy was asleep beside me, he had been sleeping for hours while I kept watch. Then Miss Vinton came. She was wearing navy. Such a harsh color. She stood in the doorway a minute, and then she walked into the room and bent over me. She took hold of me by the chin and turned my face to her. “Olivia,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“Olivia, do you hear me?”

Now Jeremy sighed and muttered. He was dreaming of horses, flocks of wild horses in muddy colors.

“I want you to listen, Olivia. You must pull yourself together. Do you hear me?”

The older you get the more you censor what comes into your head. Big blank spaces grow where you have snipped things out. You get like Miss Vinton and Mr. Somerset; you speak very slowly, spanning all those gaps. “I want … you to take … a good look at yourself, Olivia.”

I just went on looking at her.

“Answer.”

Her hand was like a vise on my chin, like grownups forcing you to confess. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, but I kept my voice flat, to show I wasn’t scared of her. Her hand loosened a little.

“I choose you to speak to because I think you’re more in touch than he is. Surely you must see what you’re doing to yourself. Have you bathed lately? Look at your hair, your lovely long hair! You’re skin and bones, you don’t seem healthy. There’s something funny about your eyes. What is that you’re wearing?”

I wish they would break for commercials in real life.

“I can’t stand watching you harm yourself, Olivia. And you’re making Jeremy all the worse, you know that, don’t you?”

A lie. See, I wanted to tell her, how faithful I am when all others desert him? The last believer left in the church. I’m making him worse?

“I think you are losing your mind, Olivia.”

The vise on my chin again.

“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” I said, “but it’s nothing I can’t bounce back from.”

“Do it, then. Bounce.”

“You don’t believe I can.”

“Oh yes. I believe it. That’s why I’m telling you to do it.”

“I don’t see any reason to,” I said, and then I wrenched free of her hand and turned away from her.

“How about Jeremy, then? Olivia?”

“How about him.”

“He hasn’t worked in weeks. You’ve let him get too removed. Doesn’t that bother you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Olivia?”

She left. I heard her clacking into the kitchen, sighing, clacking out again.

When Jeremy woke up I said, “Why aren’t you working?”

“Working.”

“I didn’t cause you to stop.”

Something made him raise his eyes, maybe some tone in my voice. I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

“I finished the piece,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, then.”

He didn’t say when he was planning to start another.

It must have been a weekday. Miss Vinton was gone and I couldn’t see Mr. Somerset. The cat was hunched on the drain-board in the kitchen, turning his flat green eyes on and off. I felt sick to my stomach. “I don’t want breakfast,” I told Jeremy. “Let’s go look at your piece.”

He was finishing the little finicky toast rims that Miss Vinton had left in her cereal bowl. “Another time,” he told me.

“I want to see it now.”

“Olivia?”

“Now, Jeremy.”

We climbed the stairs. It was like returning to your childhood home — everything looked smaller and dingier. Clothes were overflowing a hamper in the upstairs hallway and on the windowsill was a vase containing a single brittle flower, stone dead. The closed door of my room seemed pathetic. We went on climbing. I was out of breath and darkness kept swooping in on my eyesight. When we reached the studio I said, “All right,” but all Jeremy did was go straight to his armchair. I had to look at his piece on my own.

Imagine a wooden soft drink crate, only bigger, standing on end. A set of compartments, and in each compartment a different collection of objects. Like an advertisement showing a cross-section of a busy household. Was it the telephone company that used to do those? Yes, Bell Telephone, demonstrating why you need an extension in every room. Or maybe some other utility. Flameless electric heat, maybe. I ought to remember; I certainly pored over them enough as a child. In one room would be Junior with his stamp collection, in another Sis was dressing for a date, in the bathroom Dad was showering and Mother stood over the stove in the kitchen. Only in Jeremy’s piece, there were no people. Only the feeling of people — of full lives suddenly interrupted, belongings still bearing the imprint of their vanished owners. Dark squares upstairs full of toys, paper scraps, a plastic doll bed lying on its side as if some burst of exuberance had flung it there and then passed on, leaving such a vacancy it could make you cry. Downstairs food, wheels, a set of jacks, a square of very bare green carpeting. Other things too fragmented to make out. I had to lean forward and squint, and give up finally, and settle back on my heels and shake my hair off my face.

“Why not just go on and make a dollhouse?” I said.

He rocked in his armchair, staring out the window.

“What do you call it? ‘Ode to the Suburbs’? ‘Hymn to Mary’?”

He kept rocking.

“ ‘In Praise of the Good Life’?”

I went around to the front of his armchair, where he would have to look at me. “Finally I get to where I understand, and then this is the piece you show me,” I said. “But you I don’t understand. Never. Jeremy? Wasn’t I what you needed? Surely you’re not going to say she was. Are you? Was she?”

But even when I stood directly in his line of vision, it didn’t seem that he saw me. His eyes were as flat as that cat’s eyes in the kitchen. He saw beyond me, without even having to try. There was a small trembling smile at the corners of his mouth. Only crazy people smile like that.

All I had to pack were the few things I’d brought in my knapsack — jeans and T-shirts, two of each. I left behind my ice-blue blouse and my shiny white Mexican dress and my white trenchcoat and my gray smock with the shimmery embroidery across the yoke. I packed some fruit and a box of granola. I was starved. I slid into my sandals and went out into the street.

How did it get so cold? All the leaves were down. The wind blew straight through my shirt and I had to hug the knapsack against my chest to keep warm. What I had planned was to walk out a ways and then hitch a ride on some larger street. I was thinking of going south. I didn’t want any two-block errand-runners picking me up. But it was so cold that I started right in thumbing where I was, walking backwards down a line of parked cars. People whizzed past staring sideways, as if they didn’t know what to make of me. Then the traffic light at the end of the block turned red and the cars started coming slower, preparing for the stop. I saw a Cadillac with tinted windows, one lady driving it all alone. A plump cheerful lady wearing a hat. I thought surely she would stop for me. I held my thumb higher, so that the cold air prickled all the little hairs on my arm. I looked straight at her through the windshield as she rolled closer. Please, lady! I’m only eighteen and a girl to boot, and it seems much brighter and colder out here than I had expected. I didn’t know the sky would be so wide today. Won’t you please give me a lift? But the car rolled past. I was so sure she would stop I had already turned, ready to reach for the door handle. She didn’t even look at me. Just slid on by, leaving me standing there with my mouth open and my teeth chattering and my heart about to break. Now, why couldn’t she have let me in? She had so much space! She seemed so nice! Her car looked so warm! Would it have hurt her any just to reach across and give me a smile and open the door? Why did she leave without taking me along?