“What things?”
He straightened up and looked at me. “Aren’t you here for a lesson?” he said.
I didn’t know what to think. As far as I knew he didn’t even give lessons. I wondered if he were losing his mind. “Wait, now,” I said. “I’m Olivia. Remember?”
Then his whole face got pink and he began fumbling with the hammer. “Oh,” he said. “I’m so — I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“I must have been — you appear to be somewhat the student type, you see.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not at all.”
Then he said, “No one is purely what they seem on the surface.”
It was the first real thing he had ever said to me. Well, all right, it wasn’t much. But it was a beginning.
He gave me a list of supplies to buy for him at an art shop. The shop bowled me over, I’d never been in such a good place before. It was very small and cozy and it smelled of glue and wood and canvas. The old man behind the counter came about to my waist. He said, “Yes? Can I help?”
“I’d like half a dozen cans of spray adhesive,” I read off the list, “and two tubes of liquid solder and five pounds of scrap stained glass.” I had no idea what I was ordering, but it seemed to make sense to the old man. He kept scurrying around, coming back to set things on the counter. “This is for an artist friend of mine,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Maybe you know him. Jeremy Pauling, he had a one-man show at the O’Donnell Gallery.”
“Pauling, yes,” the man said. He started penciling a column of figures onto a sheet of brown wrapping paper. “We often see his wife,” he said.
“You do?”
“I’ll just put this on the account, shall I?”
“Account?”
He stopped adding the figures and looked up at me.
“Oh. Okay,” I said.
I don’t know why I was so surprised. Sears and Roebuck doesn’t carry everything, after all; she’d have had to run errands for him now and then. Still, it sort of spoiled my mood. Especially when the man gave me the package and said, “I hope Mrs. Pauling isn’t sick. She’s such a lovely person.”
Of course, he was only a salesman. Salesmen always have to sound complimentary.
By the time I got home again I was feeling better. I climbed the stairs pretending to be in a movie. Maybe someday there would be a movie made, right in this house. Some Hollywood actress pretending to be me would bring supplies to an actor pretending to be Jeremy. An American Toulouse-Lautrec. What theme music would they choose? I made up something and hummed it as I went. I was only a side character but powerful, a major influence, and the last scene would show me holding his head as he died. Some major transformation in his art would be dated from the time he met me. I tried to imagine what that transformation would be. When I walked into the studio his new piece was the first thing I looked at, but to tell the truth it didn’t seem much different from anything he’d done in the past. Complicated. Involved. Like one of those poems you give up on after the first couple lines, because even though you know it must be good it takes so much work to read it. He had stood his box construction on end and set in boards horizontally and vertically, as if he were making a cabinet with lots of different-sized cubbyholes, and now he was painting the inside of each cubbyhole a different color. Oh, well. Still in the movie, I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I think you’ve hit on something this time.” He shied away and blinked up at me. “Anyway,” I said. “Here’s the stuff I got you.”
When he went through the art supplies he knew exactly what he was doing. For the first time he seemed perfectly sure of himself. He held a sheet of blue glass to the light and squinted at it and then set it in a sort of vertical rack beneath a counter; he shook a can of adhesive next to his ear; he rotated a ten-color ballpoint pen I’d lifted on impulse from a display card on my way out of the shop. I liked the way he held it in both hands, so respectfully, as if he understood it in some deeper way than ordinary people could. Oh, he was really getting to me. “That’s on the house,” I said. He looked over at me. “I mean it’s a present, it’s from me to you.” He set the pen down on a table. Maybe he didn’t like getting presents. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood there a minute, frowning at the pen, before he turned and picked up his brush again. Not very good movie material. They could make this a silent film and never miss a thing. “Tell me, Jeremy,” I said. “Don’t you ever go to bars or cafés or anything?”
“What? Oh, no.”
“Seems to me you’d want to go someplace like that.”
He finished painting a cubbyhole gray. He switched brushes and started on another: yellow. Every little crack covered completely, the brush prodding a knothole over and over with patient, stubborn, whiskery sounds until it was filled in.
“Look, where are all those mad happy artists I’m always hearing about?” I asked him. “Don’t you ever go drinking or anything? Don’t you have any artist friends? Don’t you ever dance with them or get drunk or sing songs?”
His eyes when he looked up were so pale and empty, I thought he would sink into one of those staring spells, but he surprised me. “I believe,” he said, “that the last happy artist was a caveman, coming back from the hunt and dashing off a picture of it on a stone wall.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, what about—”
“Or maybe not,” said Jeremy. “Maybe not, even that far back. Maybe he was lame, not allowed to hunt, and he stayed home with the women and children and drew those pictures to comfort himself.”
“How do you figure that?” I said. “How do you know the caveman didn’t stay home because drawing took so much out of him, he couldn’t hunt?”
It wasn’t for nothing I asked him that. Sometimes it seemed to me that Jeremy got up looking like other men and then faded away as he worked, as if art erased him somehow. As if each piece were another layer scraped off him, when already he was down to the quick. But if he heard me, he didn’t take me seriously. He was off on some track of his own. “I often dream that I’m a caveman,” he said.
“Oh, do you?” I said. I love to talk about dreams.
“It’s always back before men could make fire, you understand. They observed it, yes, but only when lightning struck and forests caught fire by accident and burned themselves out. In my dreams I sit all night watching the treetops, hoping that within my lifetime something will be set on fire for me to see.”
“Maybe it’s a message,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Something supernatural.”
“Oh. Perhaps.”
I said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t you just love talking this way? You never did, before now. I was beginning to wonder about you. Don’t we get along beautifully together?”
“What? Oh. Surely,” Jeremy said.
Then he set the yellow brush down and chose an ivory one, and when he looked up at me a moment later I might as well not have been there, his face was so slack and his eyes so transparent.
I went to O’Donnell’s Gallery, looking for some clue to Jeremy. This was in July, but I wore my white trenchcoat with the belt ends stuck in the pockets because that always makes me feel more in control of things, and I didn’t take my sunglasses off even inside. Galleries tend to make me go to pieces. I told Mary that once, when she asked if I wanted to see Jeremy’s one-man show, and she laughed. She thought I was speaking figuratively. Mary never goes to pieces. I don’t believe she is capable of it.
Now Jeremy’s show was over and I was sorry I had missed it, but there was still plenty of his work around. All lamplit against white walls. Displayed like that, it didn’t appear to have been made by human hands. I found collages of his, a few small early statues, a more recent one standing in the middle of the room. I looked at the recent one first. I was counting on some chink of light to open for me, but it didn’t. What was I supposed to make of this? A man pushing a wheelbarrow, webbed around with strings and pulleys and chains and weights. He was mostly plaster, but you could find nearly every material in the world if you looked long enough. It seemed as if Jeremy had thrown it together in some kind of frenzy. Painted sections faded suddenly into carving, carving into découpage, and down the man’s chest I found words hurriedly etched with some sharp instrument—“A heavy cup of warm …”—trailing off where he ran out of space, as if he had thrown his knife away in some fit of impatience and had reached blindly for what came to him next, a sheet of burlap or a glue bottle or a coil of wire. I didn’t get it. I moved backwards in time, past the smaller pieces, on to the collages. I took off my sunglasses, but that didn’t help. Besides, my neck was beginning to ache. That always happens when I get frustrated. So I gave up, but I did have one last thing to do before I could leave. I went to the owner, who sat in a little office at the rear. He was riffling through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard. Good-looking man with a beard. “Hi,” I said.