“Are you all right, I said.”
“Oh, yes.”
He was going to make a statue of Brian rounding the corner — a man half running, glad to be gone. He chose that figure because it seemed the most solitary. No dogs, brooms, tricycles, or children accompanied him. He chose wood because it was slowest and took the most patience. Half the morning was spent selecting pieces from the lumber pile in the corner, lovingly smoothing them, arranging and rearranging them. Cutting and sanding the curve of a single shin took till noon. When Mary knocked with his lunch tray he called, “Just leave it outside, would you please? I’ll get it in a minute.” But in a minute he had forgotten all about it, and it was afternoon before the hollow in his stomach reminded him.
He ate while standing at the window, looking down into the street. The glare of sunlight on cement came as a shock to his eyes. He had to squint to see his children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk — their chalked game like an aerial view of a city, the tops of their heads gleaming, two stick pigtails flying out behind each little girl. The clothes they wore gave them a motley look. Plaids, ginghams, stripes, flowers, all mixed together. Hannah, spread-eagled on a skateboard, looked like one of those dolls made up of stacked felt discs all different colors: an orange scarf around her neck, a puffy pink quilted jacket, a red cardigan dangling below it and a plaid skirt below that, bare white knees, and the cuffs of blue knee-socks rising above floppy red boots. Their voices seemed too distant, as voices had back when he was a child sick in bed — words floating across some curtain of mist or water. He used to think the change was caused by his being horizontal, but here he was standing upright and still they sounded like people in a dream. They were arguing about whether someone had broken a rule. Jeremy could not figure out the point of this game. As far as he could see it involved hopping down a series of chalked squares. Was the pattern of those squares their own? Was there some hidden, rigid set of regulations that he knew nothing about? He was awed by their ability to decide on their own amusements, to carry on, by themselves, this mysterious tradition handed down by an older generation of children. They lined up efficiently, hopped with purpose, stooped for some sort of glittering marker and tossed it to a new square before stepping smartly aside to await another turn. He had never suspected that children on their own would be so organized.
In the evening Mary knocked on his door and said, “Jeremy, aren’t you ever coming out?”
“In a little while, yes,” he said. He blew sawdust off a stick of wood.
“You’re tying up the children’s bathroom, Jeremy. It’s Abbie’s bath night. Couldn’t you just let her in that long?”
“In a while.”
He heard her sigh. He heard her whisper something he couldn’t quite catch. “What?” he said.
“I said, you won’t forget tomorrow, will you?”
“Tomorrow.”
“It’s Thursday tomorrow, Jeremy.”
“Oh, yes.”
“We’re getting—”
“Yes, yes, I remember.”
She set the tray outside his door. The familiar clinking of china on tin made him suddenly hungry, but he didn’t go out to the hall. He waited for her to leave. He stood listening to her footsteps all the way down the stairs, and only then did he go to the door and open it. He didn’t know why he behaved that way. The smell of her on the landing — warm milk and honey sprinkled with cinnamon, a drink that had comforted him all his life — seemed sickly-sweet. He picked the tray up and closed the door and locked it again. Standing just inside the room, holding the tray in one hand, he took bits of food in his fingers and wolfed them down. Behind him the sounds of the household crept up the stairs and seeped through the cracks around the door. He heard laughter and a thread of “Frère Jacques.” Mary and Olivia were calling back and forth to each other between two rooms. Mary’s voice was downward-slanting, definite, while Olivia’s rose in an uncertain way at the end of each sentence. This might be a school for women; the thought had often occurred to him. In the old days he had assumed that what women knew came to them naturally. He had never suspected that they had to be taught. But listen to Mary, to the firmness of her voice, not issuing concrete instructions so much as showing Olivia how to be; listen to Olivia slowly and questioningly taking on her tone. To the little girls, even, cleverly coaxing Rachel to eat her carrots, Edward to try his potty chair — they were all being tutored. Jeremy set his tray down and stood beside the door in silence, eavesdropping, impressed and envious. Were there no such tutors for men? Was it only women who linked the generations so protectively?
But when footsteps climbed the stairs again — this time Olivia’s — he scurried back to his work. “Mr. Pauling? Mary sent me with more coffee.” He stayed quiet, a quarter-sheet of sandpaper frozen in one hand. After a while she went away.
By Thursday morning the framework of the statue was completed. Only he could have told what it was yet. There was just a skeleton, tied in odd places with strips from old sheets wherever gluing had seemed preferable to nailing. While he waited for the glue to dry he rummaged about for other materials — coarse fabrics and copper wire and a length of fine screen that he had been saving for something special. He overturned bins and drawers, blinking repeatedly to clear his eyes. (He had not had very much sleep the night before.) Under the sink he found a child’s wool cap and sat down to unravel it, building a pile of crinkly red yarn in his lap. Later he would stiffen the yarn with his spray can, let it stream out from behind his figure’s head. Whoever owned the cap would say, “Jeremy! Is that mine? You told us, Jeremy, you said you’d stop using all our stuff up, remember?” He remembered very well, but when he was in the middle of a piece some sort of feverishness came over him. He took whatever looked right, even the necessities of life. He broke or rearranged them as needed, fumbling in his haste, promising himself that he would replace the objects as soon as his piece was finished and he had the time again. Now he had no time at all. It always seemed likely at this stage that he might drop dead by nightfall, leaving his figure unfinished and his life in bits on the studio floor. What if his piece remained a skeleton forever, bound with rags at the joints and tipping in that precarious way he was planning to change, he knew just how, once he found the proper base for it? No one would ever guess what his plans had been. They would think the skeleton was what he had intended, with all its flaws. Surely, then, if ghosts existed he would have to become one; his restless spirit would be forced to return to haunt what he had left undone.
What he intended for this piece was the light, dissolving feel of Brian running, a splinter in a cold spring wind. He would be wrapped in matte surfaces. His face would be a thin blade of wood, cutting the air in front of him. He would trail curving tin streamers of motion. Tin? He looked for the sheet metal, the shears. It was hard to breathe. This certainty about what he was making had the same physical effect as fear: his chest tightened and his heart seemed to be rising in his throat, and he had a sensation of burning up his body’s stores too rapidly.