“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.