He smoothed the papers and looked up at me. He said, “Well, hi.”
“I notice you have some pieces by what’s his name, Paul? Pauling? Now I’m not buying just this moment but I did want to say that I hope you know how good he is. He’s the best guy you’ve got. How come you price him so low?”
“It’s Olivia, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“I saw you once in Mary’s kitchen when I was carrying out a piece,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m Brian O’Donnell.”
“Oh,” I said. I put my shades back on. “Well. Sorry. I just thought I’d throw in a vote for him while I was here.”
“Good idea. How is he?”
“He’s fine.”
“I saw him last week but he said he didn’t have any pieces ready.”
“No, but he will,” I said. “Really, he’s going to have a lot, very soon now. Very different from his other stuff. It’s a transformation. You know his wife left him.”
“Yes.”
“Now I am with him.”
“You are?”
I pulled the belt ends out of my pockets and buckled them. I stuck out my hand and said, “Well, good seeing you.” He stood up and leaned across the desk. His palm was stippled from the back of the clipboard. He held onto my hand even after I had started to pull away. “You’re with Jeremy?” he said.
“Oh yes.”
“You’re — are you—?”
“You must come and see us sometime,” I said.
“Well, all right.”
“Only not right away, of course. He still has a few tag ends to finish up. See you later.”
“Sure thing,” said Mr. O’Donnell.
I slung my purse over my shoulder and left. I could feel him staring after me. Outside it was about ninety degrees, but still I was glad I’d worn my trenchcoat.
I am not as disorganized as I look. I see the patterns, I can put two and two together as well as anyone. And what I’d figured out so far was that if I went on being Jeremy’s link with the outside world, buying his glue and fixing his breakfast, I was going to turn into another Mary. That’s how these things happen: inch by inch. What I had to do was get inside, somehow. Get in his little glass room with him, where it would just be the two of us looking out. Mary never did that, but I was going to. All right, I knew he was old. The first time I saw him he seemed ancient, and peculiar besides. Shaking hands with him was like taking hold of a warm pastry. But that was before I saw him clearly. I saw him clearly as soon as Mary left. I started to feel some pull on me, something in that situation, that artist sitting alone three storeys off the ground, that woman who could leave a man in crumbs just by removing herself from his world. Why, she was his world! Why couldn’t I be? Only better, closer, more understanding. How do you get into a man like that? Where is the secret button?
I said, “Your whatchamacallit is going well, Jeremy.” Though all I could see was that he had finished painting the cubbyholes and started putting bits of junk in them. “It’s quite, it’s really something,” I said.
“But is it unique?”
This wasn’t the first time he had asked me that.
“Would you say it was unique?”
“Well, of course,” I said.
“Is it — you don’t see anybody else in it, do you?”
“Huh?”
“Mary, for example.”
“Mary?” I said. What he had added in so far was a bicycle bell, a square of flowered wallpaper, and a wooden button.
“I keep having the feeling that Mary is coloring things in some way.”
But the color I saw was actual, a sheet of blue glass he was cutting up with a little thing like a pizza wheel. I felt like laughing. Then I got depressed. When was I going to figure out what his work was all about? I had expected it would just come to me — that one day I would walk in the studio door and suddenly understand what he meant. But it hadn’t happened yet.
“As if I were seeing through her eyes,” he said.
“Seeing—?”
“But of course that’s not true. I see for myself.”
“Of course.”
“I see for myself.”
“Sure. All right.”
“There’s no one else in it, there’s not a fragment, there’s not a single other person.”
“All right, Jeremy.”
I stopped going out. I stopped answering the phone. I let mail stack up on the sideboard. Mealtimes Jeremy and I went down to the kitchen together and ate an entire box of chocolates or Miss Vinton’s liverwurst or nothing at all, it didn’t matter. If he was working I lay on the couch in the studio and swung one foot in the air. I looked at the skylight. I knew all the cracks and dead leaves on it. He didn’t work very much, though. I had thought he would go faster than he did. Some days he just doodled on a scrap of paper, or sat in his armchair chewing his fingernails, or walked around and around his piece without ever once looking at it. If I spoke, he wouldn’t answer. I stopped trying. I lay back and watched brown leaves scuttle across the skylight in the wind.
What we did most was watch television in the dining room. Of course that wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing, but I was trying to see things through his eyes, after all. I sat beside him and watched from morning to night. I’d never guessed how caught up you can get in television programs. On the soap operas people’s lives were ruled by some twisted design underlying everything, something we were too ignorant to see. On the panel shows they talked back and forth so courteously, their faces so cool and untextured. Look how they waited for one speaker to stop before another began! Look at the way they chose their tones without a second’s faltering — a cheerful tone after a dark one, a question, a trill of laughter, a note of sudden firmness. All so perfectly orchestrated. How well behaved they were! I turned toward Jeremy and opened my mouth. I wanted to see if I had the same effect when I spoke, but unfortunately I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
In the afternoon there was Sesame Street. I was afraid it would remind him of his children, but it didn’t seem to. He watched it like a child himself. When the numbers zoomed out at him he started and then relaxed. He always hoped today’s number was a high one that took a lot of singing. He laughed in all the funny places, and bounced a little in his seat. Well, they were kind of comical. There was one skit in particular — a thing where a little puppet complains that nothing but a skinned finger has happened to him all day. Then it turns out he skinned his finger running from a dog and the dog was running from a lion who was let loose by a monkey when the fire engine hit the monkey’s cage … well, I don’t remember the exact events but Jeremy certainly did enjoy it. They must have showed it about twenty times over, and every time he sat forward in his seat to peer and nod, and when it was done he would sigh and look down at his knees.