“I meant it seriously, I asked you to marry me,” Jeremy said.
“But you both say no, you couldn’t eat a thing, you don’t want a … ”
She stopped walking. She turned and stared at him across a silence that grew painful, while Jeremy waited with his head down. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said finally. “Why, thank you, Jeremy. But you see, I can’t get married.”
“You can’t?”
“My husband won’t give me a divorce.”
“Oh, I see,” Jeremy said.
“But it was sweet of you to ask, and I want you to know how flattered I am.”
“That’s all right,” Jeremy said.
He stood there a minute more, and then they both began walking again. Up ahead, Darcy leaped and skipped and twirled. Her hair made him think of something metallic falling through the air, catching the sunlight and ducking it and catching it once more. He fixed his eyes on it and stumbled along. When they were within sight of home he lifted his cracker without thinking and took a bite. Mary was right; it helped. His head cleared. His stomach righted itself. He felt cinnamon flowering out of his mouth, taking away the tinny taste, leaving his breath as pure as a child’s. Like a child he let himself be led home while all his attention was directed toward the cracker. Crunching sounds filled his head and tiny sharp crumbs sprinkled his shirt front. He felt limp and exhausted, and something like relief was turning his bones so watery that he could have lain down right there and gone to sleep on the sidewalk.
• • •
Now he no longer came downstairs while Mary was making breakfast. He lay in bed late and rose by degrees, often sitting against his pillow for as much as an hour and staring vacantly out his window. The index card lost its tack and fell behind his bed; he let it lie. He sat in a sagging position, smoothing his sheet over and over across his chest, and if he wanted a change of scenery he raised his eyes from the screened lower portion of the window, which was open, to the closed upper portion where two sets of cloudy panes dulled the morning sunlight. Maybe someday he would wash them. The floors had a frame of dirt spreading out from the baseboards, thinning only where his traffic pattern had worn the dust away. There were little chips of paper everywhere, some so old that they seemed to have become embedded in the wood. If the light was right he could look out toward his studio and find a long glinting red hair snagged on one of the floorboards. It had belonged to a student from two years ago, whose name he had forgotten. He neither swept the hair away nor made any special effort to keep it. It was just there, something he registered in the mornings without considering the possibility that there was anything he might do about it.
When he had finally struggled out of bed there was the bathroom to face — a chilly place even in summer, with all its fixtures crazed and rust-stained and the swinging naked lightbulb pointing out every pore of his skin in the watery mirror. He shaved for hours. He cut one small path across his cheek and then stood looking into his own eyes until it occurred to him to lift his razor again. Even before the mirror he did not bother rearranging his expression. His muscles sagged and the soft skin of his throat pouched outward. He noticed, and disliked what he saw, but only in the detached way that he might dislike a painting or some scene that he witnessed on the street. Then when he was tired of shaving he left, often without rinsing off the last traces of soap, so that his skin felt itchy and dry. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and put on his crocheted slippers and shuffled into his studio, where he sat on a stool for a long time looking at his latest piece. Too many browns. Not enough distinctions. More and more now he was adding in actual objects — thumbtacks and washers and bits of string and wood, separating the blur of colored papers. Brian hadn’t seen these yet. Jeremy didn’t care whether he saw them or not. He pulled off a piece of twine that was in the wrong corner, leaving a worm of dried white paste behind. He dropped it to the floor and then noticed, beside one leg of his stool, the tin top off a box of cough lozenges, and by the time he had figured where to paste that he had forgotten about dressing. He snipped things apart and fitted things together. He rummaged through the clutter in a bureau drawer, meanwhile holding his bathrobe together by its frayed sash. Till Mrs. Jarrett’s clopping heels mounted laboriously to the second floor and she called up to the third, “Mr. Pauling? I don’t see your dishes here, have you not had breakfast? We’re getting worried about you. Please come.” If he were too absorbed he merely shuffled his feet on the floor, showing he hadn’t died in his sleep. Other times he sighed and laid his scissors down and went to his bedroom for clothes. Most of his clothes seemed to be falling apart nowadays. He kept having to throw away shirts with long rips and trousers with the zippers broken and shorts with the elastic gone, but he didn’t bother sending to Sears for more. He tossed them in the wastebasket almost gladly. Later he would listen with a sense of satisfaction while the garbage men came clanging trashcans and bore his belongings away with them. It felt good to be done with things. He thought of the New Year’s Eves he had sat up for — the relief that came from putting away another year and brushing off his hands and knowing that there were twelve months less to get through. Or of all his life — the hundreds of memories he had closed the files on, the years assigned to him that he had dutifully endured, waiting to reach the bottom of the pile.
His breakfast was other people’s lunch. Mrs. Jarrett ate in the dining room with everything just right, dishes set on one of his mother’s linen placemats and a matching napkin in her lap. Mr. Somerset wolfed a lacy fried egg straight from the skillet. Miss Vinton, home from the bookstore on her lunch hour, read publishers’ brochures while she ate health bread at the kitchen table. “There’s a new Klee in, Mr. Pauling,” she might say, without looking up. “I put it on the sideboard.”
“Oh, why, thank you, Miss Vinton.”
He ate whatever took the least trouble — a box of day-old doughnuts or a can of cold soup. After every mouthful he wiped his hands carefully on the knees of his trousers before turning a page of the Klee. It would have to go back with Miss Vinton, spic and span, before her boss noticed it was missing. The cover of the book was a glossy white, promising him something new and untouched and wonderful. At the beginning there was a long jumble of words, a résumé of Paul Klee’s life, which Jeremy skipped. What did he care about that? He plunged into the pictures; he drank them up, he felt how dry and porous he was, thirsty for things to look at. At every page he wanted to pause and spend hours, even when he had seen the pictures before in other books, but he felt a pull also to turn to the next one quickly so that he would be sure to finish in time. Sometimes he said, “Miss Vinton, I wonder if I might—?” “Oh, why surely, Mr. Pauling,” she said, refolding the bread wrapper. “I can always take it back tomorrow. Mr. Mack won’t notice.” She had never once hurried him or shown any concern over his handling of the books, although Jeremy knew that Mr. Mack was unreasonably strict about such things. And for all of August, when Jeremy’s life seemed duller and sadder than he had ever noticed before, she managed to bring a new book for him almost every day, as if she guessed that he needed comfort. Klee, a collection of impressionists, Miro, Renoir. A book of American primitives whose dollhouse landscapes and lack of perspective filled him with a kind of homesickness. If only he could just step inside them! If only he lived in a place where a man could go any distance and yet never grow smaller! Miss Vinton brought him Braque, a man he disliked. He sat through her lunch hour testing the anxiety that each picture called forth in him, the discomfort caused by some clumsiness in the shapes. Years before, when he was in high school, an art teacher explaining cubism had made Jeremy’s class copy one of Braque’s paintings line for line. Jeremy had felt sick all the while he was doing it. It seemed that he might melt away to nothing, letting himself get absorbed into another man’s picture that way. Now he found the picture again — a still life involving a musical instrument — and stared at it until he couldn’t stand it any more and had to turn the page. “Would you care to keep it till tomorrow?” asked Miss Vinton, rising to rinse her dishes. “You seem to like him.”