“Do you supply the linen?” she asked.
He thought of some nineteenth-century linen closet — ivory sheets in stacks, balls of hand-milled soap, a bunch of lavender dangling from a nail.
“Mr. Pauling? Do you supply the linen?”
“Linen. Yes.”
“Well, I suppose we should take it,” she said.
She was going through a pocketbook of some kind. Jeremy was staring at the nightstand. He saw a photograph of his father, laughing widely from a narrow silver frame. He saw his father lounging on the front stoop, slinging out majestic orders to the scary black men who worked for him. A hand nudged his arm. Crumpled dollar bills were passed to him one by one, as if they were the last of some treasure. He looked down, trying to think what was expected of him. “But the room,” he said.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for his words, even the smallest person at the left-hand corner of his eye.
“It’s not big enough for a family, I don’t believe,” he said.
The man made an impatient gesture, turning sharply on one heel. The woman said, “But you don’t mind just me and the child here, do you?”
“Child?” he said. He looked back at his father’s photograph. He tried to think what his father’s voice had sounded like, but it took a long time for him to remember and when he looked up again he found that the strangers had disappeared.
Here is the endpaper from a library book that Mrs. Jarrett carelessly left on the dining room table. It is covered with an intricate multicolored design that caught his eye at once; one edge is a little crooked where he hurriedly snipped it out of the binding with kitchen shears. Will she notice? He paces his studio with it, his crocheted slippers snagging on splinters in the floorboards. The paper crackles in his fingers. With his eyes he traces maroons and blues and browns, a watery yellow, a touch of orange, all flooded with a slow radiance that is soaking into him. Flames and pinnacles and jagged leaves and white rapids swerving around a spear-shaped rock. Feathers of some rich and exotic bird. He sees the bird climbing toward the sun; he watches sunlight coat the wings and gild the head. Downstairs, voices drone on and a radio plays and a clock strikes. Upstairs, Jeremy feels a shimmering joy lighting every crevice of his mind, and he smiles and opens up to it and melts away, leaving no trace.
Now Jeremy sat in his mother’s rocking chair, rocking gently in a corner of the dining room. The back of the chair was covered with some sort of quilted material ruffled around the edges, and the ruffle kept making a scrunching sound against his shoulders. To his left was a floor lamp with a pleated shade, a picture of Mount Vernon Place engraved on its ridges. It shed the only light in the room. The rest of the boarders sat in darkness, with their faces flickering blue from the television set in the opposite corner. A very old set, a solid piece of furniture with a tiny screen. On it, a hero in a Stetson hat inched his way from window to window and peered out from behind a cocked revolver. “You can tell there’s enemies outside,” said Mr. Somerset, “else they wouldn’t bother showing you the birdsongs and frog croaks. Want to make a bet on it?”
Mr. Somerset sat at the table with the remains of his supper, a picked-over plate and a shot glass oily from the bourbon it had held. Beside him was Miss Vinton, her neck ropy from craning nearsightedly toward the set; the new boarder, casting glances at her bedroom door from time to time in case her child awoke; Howard, dressed to go out, resting on the small of his back. Mrs. Jarrett was in the other rocker. Her hands worked rapidly in the darkness — knitting, probably, but Jeremy seemed unable to look to either side tonight and he only had an impression of empty movement, as if she were spinning something webbed and soft out of the darkness itself. He was conscious of particles of dark floating between people, some deep substance in which they all swam, intent upon keeping their heads free, their chins straining upward.
A branch crackled outdoors and the hero raised his gun. Every muscle snapped to attention. His face tightened, his eyes swept the sunlit forest. Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.
On Jeremy’s lap was a clutter of papers in a khaki-colored file — the reason his lamp was on. He was going to try to make some money. The file contained boxtops, coupons, occupant ads, soup can labels, pages torn from magazines, blanks from the grocery store bulletin board. “Can you name our new hybrid rose? Prizes! Prizes! Just tell us why you prefer our brand of bleach. Nothing to buy. Are you already a winner?” Jeremy was almost always a winner. It was one of his peculiarities — a talent you were either born with or you weren’t, his mother used to say, and wasn’t it lucky he had found something he could do at home this way? Yet he had never felt lucky, and he never seemed to win what they really needed. Always tenth prize: a hair dryer, a comb-and-brush set, a movie camera guaranteed to do justice to his speediest action shots. The basement was stocked with a year’s supply of cat food. (Jeremy had no cats.) He was the owner of a sewing machine whose value was less than the ten-year service contract he had had to purchase for it. Didn’t anyone offer cash any more? The gas bill was due, the telephone company had sent their second notice, and if he didn’t pay the newspaper soon they would discontinue his classified ad and there would be no more students. On the hall desk was a sheaf of canceled checks from the mail order houses which had supplied his mother with her novelty salt and pepper shakers, her patented corn removers, her Bavarian weather forecaster, her wipe-clean doilies and plastic closet organizers and those miraculous plants that required neither soil nor water; and all anyone wanted to give him was snow tires and ladies’ shavers. “Grand Prize! A Trip to Hawaii for Two!!” What did he want with Hawaii? Who did they suppose would go with him?
He gazed down at the blanks, his hands loose on the arms of the rocker, his knees spread. Muddy waters seemed to be clouding his thoughts. When he moved finally to pick up a coupon, its torn edge depressed him, and he dropped it again and went on rocking.
On the television screen, a shot rang out. “Hot dog!” said Mr. Somerset. He sat sharply forward, but the searching face of the hero was replaced immediately by a full-grown German shepherd bounding toward a bowl of premium-quality beef bits. “Shoot,” said Mr. Somerset. “Wouldn’t you know?”
Jeremy set the file of papers on the floor, rose and moved off to the hall telephone. Then he paused, with his hand upon the receiver. What was he doing here? The telephone rang, an irritated sound, so that he knew it had rung before. He picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“Mary Tell, please,” said a man.
Jeremy waited, thinking hard.
“Are you there? I want Mary Tell. Your new boarder.”
“Oh yes.” He recognized the voice now. The cigarette ad man, sounding as crisp as he looked. He laid the receiver down and returned to the dining room, where he lowered himself carefully into the rocker. For a moment he studied his knees, frowning. Then Mrs. Jarrett said, “Was that the phone?”
He looked up. “The phone, yes,” he said. “For Mrs. Tell.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Mary Tell. She rose and moved out of the room. Her shoes were some special kind that made no sound, or maybe he was just forgetting to listen.