Well, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Actually she was a very ordinary woman, not at all what you’d expect of an artist’s wife. The wonder of it is that she ever had the good sense to marry him in the first place. So earthbound, she was. Always nagging and tidying and bringing him her little domestic problems. Knocking on the door: “Jeremy, the storm window man’s here with an estimate and won’t take any signature but yours. Won’t you please come out. Do you have any idea what goes into the running of this house?” If they ever start a men’s liberation movement, I’ll join it in a flash. Though of course it’s taken me a while to see her so clearly, I admit it. At first I was just glad to get a roof over my head, someone watching out for me and making me wear my raincoat. But I left a mother just like her up in Pennsylvania, went through all the bother of running away only to end up here in the same kind of stewpot. It’s lucky I finally got wise. When I think how close I came to going over to her side!
All the same, it was sort of a shock at first to discover she was gone.
I went downstairs to make a peanut butter sandwich. By then the senior citizens were in the kitchen scrounging for supper. The two of them got on my nerves, shuffling around the way they did. They seemed to be weaving a net across the kitchen floor. “Listen,” I said. “Mary’s taken the kids and left.” That shook them up. Mr. Somerset’s mouth sagged open and he forgot to watch the frying pan. Old lady Vinton went on stirring her eggs but I could tell she was surprised. Her spatula went slower and slower. She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “Took to her heels,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”
“Perhaps she’s off visiting,” Miss Vinton said.
“Who would she visit?”
“Well, now, we don’t know the whole story. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“Like what, for instance.”
“I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”
People say that when they mean that life will get back to the way it was before. It never occurs to them that a change might be for the better.
I said, “I think I’ll take Jeremy a peanut butter sandwich.”
“I don’t believe Jeremy eats peanut butter,” Miss Vinton said.
“He’s never had mine, then. I make it myself.”
Mr. Somerset said, “Yes, yes, we all know that.” Mr. Somerset doesn’t like me. His voice when he spoke to me was all cracked and peevish. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you,” he said, “running that blender to death the minute I set my head on my pillow for my afternoon nap.”
I ignored him. I spread peanut butter on a slice of whole wheat bread. “At least I imagine he could use the company,” I said.
“Perhaps he would like to be left alone,” said Miss Vinton.
“That’s for him to tell me, isn’t it?”
“People can’t always say what they feel, Olivia. I imagine he might like to think things through a while, and when he gets hungry he’ll come down and—”
I know her type. Always so virtuous about keeping out of the way, letting others be. It’s an excuse, of course. Aloofness is the easy way out; I believe in plunging right ahead. Slamming the sandwich on a tray and adding an orange (artificially colored, but what could I do?) and marching straight upstairs to Jeremy. Knock-knock. “It’s me, it’s Olivia. You hungry?”
No answer. I went in anyway. He was smoking another cigarette. “Here,” I said, setting the tray down, and then I went over to a half-finished piece and said, “I like it.” I pretended not to notice how deserted it looked. I pretended he was just carrying on with the making of it no matter what, which in my opinion is what he should have been doing. “It’s got a good flow to it,” I said. To tell the truth I didn’t have the vaguest idea what comments were required, but I was going to learn. I have the deepest respect for artists. I said, “When are you planning on finishing it?”
“I don’t think I will ever finish it,” Jeremy said.
“Nonsense.”
He put the cigarette to his mouth again. You could tell he wasn’t used to smoking. The filter tip barely touched his lips, and he sucked in very quickly and let the smoke out without inhaling it. The pack in his lap said “True”—Miss Vinton’s, then. A namby-pamby brand. “Look,” I said, “do you mind if I just stay a while and see how you work?”
He stopped watching his smoke and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth fell open. I wasn’t expecting so much attention so suddenly. I smoothed my hair back and said, “Of course, if I would distract you in any way—”
But then he suddenly got to his feet, he lurched to his feet, like someone pulled by strings, and set his fingertips to his mouth and stood swaying there. After a moment he turned and ran to the bathroom and I heard him throwing up. It seemed to go on forever. I sat down on the couch and wound a strand of hair around my finger, waiting for him to come back. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. I had all the time in the world.
Once last winter when I was on my way to work I looked across a street and saw Mary walking her kids home from school. She was heading toward a very busy corner where a crossing guard usually stands, but that day for some reason the crossing guard was absent. A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared. At the moment I happened to glance over, Mary was just arriving in their midst. She carried the baby and held Edward by the hand, and her little girls were around her in a circle. Then the light changed. Down she stepped, into the street. Little hands reached out from all directions; strangers’ children clutched at the hem of her coat or the edge of her sleeve or the corner of her purse or even the baby’s one dangling, bootied foot; and if they couldn’t reach her they hung onto the coat of a child who could, and off she sailed with her beautiful white face looming high above them keeping watch on all sides for runaway cars and rough boys on bicycles and any other unexpected dangers. What do you suppose it feels like to be so certain of your role? To have such a clear sense of place? I’d been waiting a long time to learn what my role was. I kept going to different towns, as if what I looked for were a physical object. At night I dreamed eerie dreams. Voices floated in and out, offering solutions and promises and answers, but when I woke up I could never remember what they had said. Every morning I took Jeremy some nuts and fruit for breakfast, and at noon a sandwich, and at suppertime another, and although he didn’t appear to notice me I stood waiting anyway, hoping to be defined.
I went in one day with a bowl of granola and an apple, and I found him nailing boards together into a sort of box. He was working very slowly, and not on the statue he was on before. That surprised me a little. Mary told me once that he always finished everything he started, even if it wasn’t turning out to be what he wanted; he seemed to think pieces came out of him like olives out of a bottle, and he had no choice but to let the first one out before he could get to the second. Well, I don’t know, maybe this particular olive was only a fragment all along. I set his breakfast down and he said, “Oh. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“You will?”
“Just find your things. Where are your things?”