He knew that was what she would say. Things would never be the same any place that Mary left.
At noon one of the children climbed the stairs to tell him lunch was ready, but he called through the door that he was too busy to come. In actual fact he was finishing the ring-around-the-rosy statue. He was working slowly, as he always did near the end of a piece, putting in small touches with long pauses for deliberation. He could easily have stopped for lunch. It was just that the thought of going downstairs made him feel so tired, somehow. All that noise! That tumult of emotion, rising in billows around him as he tried to swallow his food! Even from here he could hear the clatter of silverware, the children’s endless contests for their mother’s attention and the sudden clamor over some domestic accident — as if, overturned, those peanut butter glasses painted with nursery rhyme characters had spilled forth shouts and laughter and scoldings instead of milk. Above it all Mary’s voice rode, like a ship on waves. He could not understand how she managed this, speaking at such a low and steady pitch. He himself was drowned out, every time. “Children? Oh, children,” he would say, “couldn’t you please—” Now Mary laughed, a rich soft laugh that carried effortlessly to every corner of the house. A few minutes later he heard her climbing the stairs. Dishes rattled gently on a tray. “Jeremy,” she called, “I’ve brought your lunch up.”
“Come in,” he said, but she couldn’t; he had absent-mindedly locked the door. First the knob turned and then she knocked. He had to put down his file and get off his stool and let her in — a task that seemed larger than it was, like having to rearrange every cell of his body within some thick dark sac of concentration. “Egg salad,” she said. He stared at her dimly. She carried the tray in past him and began laying his lunch out on the table in front of the statue — a glass of milk, a salad bowl, a sandwich on a plate. Every time she set a dish down she had to move something of his out of the way. A glue bucket was pushed aside, a paintbrush was laid across the top of it (not where it belonged). A horseshoe magnet clanged to the floor. “Sorry,” Mary said cheerfully. He felt that a long tail of noise and energy was pluming out behind her, brushing objects in his room as she turned. Although he had been thinking of her all morning, this seemed to be a different Mary from the one in his thoughts — clearer, sharper, more brightly colored. She changed the air in his studio, stirring up the center of it and making the corners look darker and dustier. The room appeared to be hers now. When she stepped back to look at the statue, he had the feeling that that was hers too. He imagined how efficiently she would make a statue: fitting it together in no time, without a wasted motion or a single revision, relying upon some rich lode of intuition that he did not possess. When she was done she would give the statue a loving smack on the rump, as if it were a child sent out to play after she had tied its shoelaces. “Very nice,” she said now. “I like it.”
She turned and kissed him. She wound her arms around his neck. He said, “I should get back to work, Mary.”
But then when she was gone the other Mary returned, the silent floating one of his thoughts, and the image of her writing to her mother-in-law continued to pain him so much that he sat on his stool bent over and clutching his chest, like a man suffering a heart attack.
By early afternoon he had completed every last detail of the statue. Still, he didn’t leave the studio. And when Brian came visiting — he heard his voice in the entrance hall — he refused to see him. “Jeremy, Brian’s here,” Mary called.
Jeremy didn’t answer.
Then Brian’s boots mounted the stairs, two steps at a time. His great hearty knock sounded on Jeremy’s door. “Hey, in there. You feel like a visitor?”
Jeremy frowned at the ceiling. He was lying on the couch with his hands clasped across his stomach, trying off and on to think of another piece to work on. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone at all. But while he was framing an answer Brian gave up and went away again, and Jeremy heard his voice and Mary’s and then the slamming of the front door. He rose and padded over to a window. There was Brian crossing the street, weaving his way between cars stopped for a traffic light, arriving on the opposite sidewalk in a sudden burst of speed as if he had just made a daring escape. Jeremy watched after him for as long as he was in sight. It seemed to him that Brian’s walk was lighthearted, nearly dancing; he might have been celebrating his return to freedom.
At suppertime, when Mary came with another tray, she said, “Why wouldn’t you see Brian?”
“Perhaps tomorrow I will.”
“You’re not still angry about what happened at the gallery, are you? Jeremy, I honestly don’t think—”
“No, it’s just, you see, I’m busy with a new piece,” he told her.
“Oh, I see.”
Actually he never went straight from one piece to the next. It was necessary to have a regathering period, an idle space sometimes stretching into weeks. But Mary said, “I hope it’s going well, then,” and she took away his lunch dishes and left him his supper and a mug of hot coffee.
When she was gone he turned off the light and went back to the couch. By now the studio was in twilight — a linty grayness that he could almost feel on his skin. In spite of the warmth he wrapped himself in an afghan. It seemed to him that his heart had slowed, and his hands and feet were chilled. He stretched out on the couch and went to sleep, and the afghan made him dream of being held prisoner in some confined and airless place.
Long before dawn he awoke with a start. He spent several seconds wondering where he was. The doubt was more pleasant than disturbing. Even after he had found the answer, he kept trying to push it away again so that he could return to that floating, rootless state. Then he rose and ate supper in the dark — cold vegetables and meatloaf, a bowl of some sticky thick liquid that turned out to be melted ice cream. Every swallow gagged him but he ate the entire meal, and he finished the last of his cold bitter coffee with a feeling of accomplishment. Wasn’t that what life was all about: steadfast endurance? In the dark, where his thoughts seemed more significant than they did in daytime, he decided that this was what made the difference between him and Mary. He saw virtue in acceptance of everything, small and large, while Mary saw virtue in the refusal to accept. She was always ready to do battle against the tiniest infringement. He considered those battles now with fondness; he pictured her tall, energetic figure fending off door-to-door salesmen and overbearing teachers and grade school bullies and household germs, all with the same enthusiasm. It seemed to him that his acceptance and her defiance made up a perfect whole, with neither more right than the other, although up till now he had always assumed that one of them would be proved wrong in the end. He worked through this idea with a feeling of relief. He even thought of going downstairs to wake Mary and tell her about it, but of course she would have no idea what he meant. She never wondered about the same things he did. (Did she wonder about anything?) She would only smile at him with sleepy, half-closed eyes and open the blankets and pull him in to her, her answer to all their problems. He dragged an armchair over to the front window instead, and sat there wrapped in his afghan watching the sky whiten over the city.
Was it possible that once, in the years before Mary, the house had been this still even in the daytime? He had trouble remembering it. He began pretending that this silence was permanent — that Mary and the children had gone away for some reason and left the house echoing behind them. Then he considered his work. What would he do if he were left all alone with his sheets of metal and blocks of wood? Would he still be successful if Mary were not standing behind him? He began twisting his hands together on his knees; something like anxiety or irritation tightened all his muscles. It was foolish to be asking himself such questions. He had been making his pieces all along, hadn’t he? Long before she came here. He pushed back his armchair and flung scraps of cardboard off his worktable. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of newsprint, already drawing shapes in thin air while he planned his next piece. And when, just at dawn, Mary knocked on his door and asked if he were all right, he had trouble placing her. “What?” he asked, still frowning at his sketchpad.