When Mary knocked he didn’t answer, didn’t even bother keeping still for her. “Jeremy? Jeremy!” He bent tin, with a great hollow clang. Mary went away again.
On his lunch tray there was a note. “This is our wedding day. Do you still want to?” Something gave him a sharp stab of sorrow — the question mark, perhaps. The thought of Mary’s low, even voice asking that question. For the first time that morning he listened to what was going on downstairs, sorting out the separate noises from the steady hum that was present all day long. Someone was playing a Sesame Street record and someone else was running the blender at high speed — Olivia, no doubt, fixing one of her peculiar meals of seed-paste patties or fresh-ground peanut butter. The blender ran at the level of a scream, on and on, spitting when it came upon nuts as yet unbroken. A child was crying, but not very seriously. He could not hear Mary anywhere. What time was it? He looked at the clock on the windowsill but it had run down, long ago. It occurred to him that he had not bathed or shaved or changed clothes in days. He had a musty yellow smell and his teeth seemed to be made of flannel. Well, when he had finished cutting the tin he would take care of all that. He would come downstairs newly washed, freshly dressed, and locate Mary among all those jumbled voices. He pictured himself descending into the noise as he would enter the sea — proceeding steadily with his hands lifted and his mouth set, submerging first his feet and then his legs and then his entire body, last of all his head.
The wool from the cap turned out to be a mistake. Too soft, too temporary. He had unraveled it for nothing. He tossed it into a corner and cut more tin instead, in tiny strips that he curled around a pencil and then stretched out again so that they would crinkle. It was a tricky job; he kept getting cut. Little seams of blood mixed with the paint and the gray rolls of glue on his fingers. Somewhere he had work gloves but he was in too much of a hurry to stop and look for them. The muscles at the back of his neck were stretched thin, and when he stood up with his bundle of tin strips he found that both legs were asleep. Now the strips had to be nailed onto the wooden head, which was the hardest part. First he had to find enough tiny sharp nails in his nail can and then he had to hammer them in absolutely straight or they skidded off the tin. His hands were sore all over, but the soreness was reassuring. He was merely getting used up, that was all. Like the lead of a pencil. Naturally the hands were the first to go.
At twilight Olivia brought his tray up. “Mr. Pauling? Could I come in?”
The thought of food gave him a sick feeling. He ignored her.
Something made working more and more difficult. It took him a while to realize that it was the darkness. The statue was only a glimmer before him. He walked over to the door on crippled, icy feet, but when he had turned the wall switch on the light hurt his eyes so much that he clicked it off again. He made his way to the couch and lay down, with one arm set across his aching forehead. As soon as he was comfortably arranged he felt a lurch like some gear disengaging, a ping! in his ears, and his mind floated free and he slept.
Even in his dreams, he worked. He cut, pasted, hammered, sanded. He had a feeling of pressure to finish, a sense of being pushed. Although he forced himself to ignore the pressure he went on working without let-up, and the closer he came to completing the piece the more he was filled with a sense of joy and light-headedness. When the last nail was hammered in he laughed out loud. He backed off across the studio with his eyes lowered, so that the finished statue could burst upon him all in one instant, and then he looked up to see what he had made.
A room. A corner of a room, a kitchen, to be exact. A counter with a loaf of rye bread and a bread knife on it, and a coppertone clothes dryer spilling out realistic wads of flowered and plaid and gingham clothes and a formica table with chairs set around it — oh, how he must have worked over that table! Its aluminum edge was grooved with three parallel bands; such attention to detail. The chairs were mismatched, a subtle touch. The wooden one alone must have taken him weeks to make, with its bulbous legs and the tie-on ruffled cushion on its seat and the Bugs Bunny decal on its back. He had even included, on the rungs, the scars of a hundred children’s teetering shoes. Was this what he had labored over for so many hours?
He woke feeling dismal and empty and frightened. Sunlight flooded his face, a deep gold light casting long rectangles so that he suspected it must be mid-morning. What he wanted most was a cup of hot coffee, but all he found outside his door was last night’s supper. A wilted salad, a glass of lukewarm milk, some peculiar brownish casserole that he could not identify. He ate it anyway, although it went down his throat in lumps. He swallowed the milk with narrow, dutiful sips and then set his tray outside the door again.
Now he saw that the statue was all wrong. What had he been thinking of, setting on each curl of hair that way? He might have been building a doll, or a department store mannequin. With a screwdriver he began prying the strips off, one by one. His hands hurt so much that he could hardly bend them. The statue’s head showed nail marks down its back, but he was already thinking up ways to cover them.
At noon he checked for lunch, but found none. Later in the afternoon he checked again. There were only the supper dishes, crusty now. He stood on the landing and called, “Mary?” The word echoed back. There was not a sound in the house; only a clear, bell-like silence in which each of his footsteps fell too loudly. He descended the stairs, passing the empty second floor and continuing to where his children would surely be absorbed in a fairytale or some quiet table game. No. No one was there. In the parlor the baby’s playpen was empty and the toys on the floor seemed to be coated with a furry film of stillness. In the dining room the face of the TV was sleek and blank; in the bedroom his and Mary’s bed was made so neatly that it seemed artificial, something from a furniture store display. He had the feeling that no one had slept there for months, if ever. And the kitchen was strangest of all. The counters were absolutely clean and shining, like an advertisement for a linoleum company. No floury measuring cups, no cucumber peels, no stacked-up dirty dishes. The floor gleamed. The table was spotless. The clock ticked briskly and hollowly.
He felt that his sense of time, which was never good, had deserted him. Had he missed something? Had the days carried everyone else on by and left him stranded in some vanished moment? Maybe his family had just gone out to a movie. Maybe they had abandoned him forever. Maybe they had grown up and moved some thirty years before, had children of their own and grown old and died. He couldn’t prove that it wasn’t so.
Then, turning to the refrigerator for food and solace (fumbling at some new kind of double door where he had expected the old single one), he found a note stuck on with a teapot-shaped magnet. “Dear Jeremy, I have taken the children and left you. I borrowed Brian’s cabin at the Quamikut Boatyard. I think it’s best. Love, Mary.”
He took the note off the door and read it over and over. It seemed that the air had gone out of him, so that the words striking his deflated chest jarred all the way through to his backbone. Finally he folded the piece of paper several times and tucked it in his shirt pocket. He headed through the house and back upstairs, fixing the image of his new statue very firmly in his mind like some magnetic star that would guide him through this moment. In the studio he resumed work immediately. He sanded the wooden head smooth again, at first so hard that the friction burned his fingers through the paper but then more slowly and then more slowly still. Like some clumsy, creaking wheel, he ground to a stop. He dropped the sandpaper and stood motionless, one hand upon his statue, staring numbly at the bare walls of the studio.