“Going on your walk?” Jeremy would say. “Well now. Have a good time.” They passed through the house calling goodbyes, singing out greetings to Mr. Somerset, letting two doors slam behind them, ringing the air like a bell, and then all of a sudden the house would fall silent and the rooms would seem vacant and dead. The only sound was the creak of an old dry beam somewhere. A distant auto horn. Mr. Somerset’s papery slippers shambling across the dining room floor.
Jeremy was like a man marooned on an island. Why had that taken him so many years to realize? He was surrounded on four sides by streets so flat and wide that he imagined he could drown in air just walking across them. Yet look, a four-year-old managed it without a thought! Oh, if it weren’t for this handicap he could invite Mary Tell to a movie and then bring her home and kiss her outside her door as he had seen done on TV, and that would be the end of all his planning and worrying. It would be so simple! Instead, here it was August now and he had not taken one step toward kissing her and it began to look as if he never would.
Then one morning the telephone rang and no one was in the hall to answer it but Jeremy. Even before he picked up the receiver a knot of anxiety had settled low in his stomach. “Hello? Hello?” he said, and was answered by a voice he had not heard in weeks, but he recognized it instantly. “Mary Tell, please,” said the cigarette-ad man.
“Oh! Well, I’ll see,” Jeremy said.
Then he went into the dining room and knocked on her door. “Someone wants you on the telephone,” he called.
She took a minute to appear. She was already dressed, carrying her apron in her hand, and she looked startled. “Someone wants me?” she said. “Who is it?”
“Why, I believe it’s your friend, the young man.”
From behind her Darcy said, “Can I talk? If it’s John can I talk?”
“No, you may not” Mary said. Jeremy had never heard her speak so sharply to Darcy. She said, “Keep her a minute, will you, Jeremy?” and walked off to the telephone. “Why can’t I talk?” Darcy asked Jeremy.
“Oh, well …” said Jeremy. The knot in his stomach had grown larger. He backed into the dining room and sat down on a chair, limply, with his hands on his knees. “How are you today, Darcy?” he asked. Even to himself, his voice sounded foolish. He made himself smile at her. “When are you coming to my studio again? You haven’t been all week.”
But he was listening, meanwhile, to Mary out in the hall. She said, “No, no, I understand. You don’t have to call ever, John. It’s not as if you’re obligated.”
“But she always let me talk to him before,” Darcy said.
“Maybe another day,” said Jeremy. He tried a different smile. Mary said, “Look. I’m fine. No I don’t need money.”
“Shall we cut out paper dolls?” Jeremy asked Darcy.
“Not right now, Jeremy.”
“You don’t owe me anything, I’m managing fine. I’m fine. I still have some of what you lent me,” Mary said. And then, “What’s it to you how much is left? It was a loan, you don’t have any business asking that. I’m planning to pay you back. I want to. As soon as I find a job I will.”
“If I go and shout into the phone John will talk to me,” Darcy said. “He likes me. I know he does.”
“No, no, Darcy—”
But she was off, skating on her stocking feet into the hallway with Jeremy at her heels. From this close they could hear Mary’s friend arguing or protesting or explaining, a thin violent squawk. “—for Darcy’s sake,” he said, and Darcy gave a little leap. “Hello John!” she shouted. “Hello John!” Mary held up the flat of her hand, but kept her face turned into the receiver. “All right,” she said. “You win.”
“Can you hear me, John?”
“Uh, Darcy,” Jeremy said.
“All right,” said Mary, “but it’s a loan, and I want you to know that. I don’t want any — Darcy! Look, John, it’s hard to talk right now—”
Darcy was tugging at her mother’s skirt, and Jeremy was stooped over trying to loosen her fingers. The squawk continued on the telephone, another form of tugging. Mary’s skirt had the same cool, grainy feeling that her hands had had, that time on the couch. Why, after all, she was only a collection of textures. Her muscles slanted over her bones exactly as in his anatomical drawing class; her lips were yet another texture, otherwise no different than her fingers had been or this clutch of skirt in Darcy’s scampering hands. “No, I mean this,” Mary said. “I want you to mail it. Don’t bring it. You are under no — John?”
She put the receiver down very slowly. “Oh, Mom, I wanted to talk,” Darcy said. Then Jeremy straightened and looked into Mary’s face. Her expression was cheerful and she was even smiling slightly, but tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry—” she said. She started back toward the bedroom, with Jeremy and Darcy stumbling over each other trying to follow. “You must think I make a habit of this,” she said in her doorway. She turned, and Jeremy was so close behind her that before he thought, he had found the strength to lean forward on tiptoe and kiss the corner of her mouth. Then he took a step back, and she looked his way for a moment before her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Thank you, Jeremy,” she said. “You are a very sweet man.”
She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, giving a little laugh at herself as if they embarrassed her. She shook out her apron and said, “Come along, Miss Chatterbox, let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?” Then they went off toward the kitchen, leaving Jeremy smiling so hard that he could barely see. He thought he might just inflate and float away like a balloon at a birthday party.
In magazine cartoons, a suitor proposing marriage always knelt on the floor at his sweetheart’s feet. Now, was that an accurate reflection of the way things were done? He suspected not. Nevertheless he kept picturing himself looking up at Mary from a kneeling position, finding her even more frightening at this angle — her sandals the largest part of her, her waist at eye level, the never-before-seen underside of her bosom and the white triangle of skin beneath her jaw. “I don’t have much money,” he should tell her (the speech owed to her father, he believed, but he had no idea who her father was). “I wouldn’t be able to support you in very good style but at least it would be a little easier, I do have my pieces and a little from my mother and sometimes I win a contest and I always seem to have enough for groceries.” He prepared himself for the way the hem of her dress would loom, and for the difficulty of judging her expression from so far beneath it. Yet every night he went to bed with nothing resolved, feeling thin and strained as if this balloon of hope he had become had been kept too fully inflated for too long a time. He dreamed of losing things — unnamed objects in small boxes, the roof of his house, pieces of art that he would never be able to re-create. He woke feeling anxious, and over and over again read the index card tacked to the windowsill beside him.