I saw that other people were forever rushing somewhere, and nine tenths of what they did would have to be redone the next day. Cleaning, bathing, making conversation. I thought about it a long time, but I didn’t mention it to Jeremy. I didn’t need to. Half of the idea I caught from him, by osmosis; the other half I concluded for myself and passed back to him just as silently. He quit shaving. His whiskers grew out half an inch and stopped. How much time he could have saved all these years, if he had known they would do that! We quit going upstairs. His studio vanished; so did my bedroom. Look at stairs, we thought, silently, together: what a perfect example of pointlessness. They go up and down, both. If you go up you must come down. You undo everything and start over. After The Star-Spangled Banner we fell asleep in our chairs, or out in the living room, or in the downstairs bedroom, side by side on top of the spread. I followed him everywhere but without asking a thing, an un-Mary sharing a pool of chilliness. I taught him to sleep late. Waking, finding me beside him, he would struggle up. “Be still,” I said, and he lay down again and stared, as I did, at the towering white ceiling while noon approached and rolled over us and rumbled away again. Now I was an artist too. In my mind I colored the ceiling with the jagged lightning bolts you see when you squinch your eyes tight; so did Jeremy. We did it together. No strings snagged us to the rest of the world. “Good Lord in heaven!” Mr. Somerset said, shuffling up, stopping in the bedroom doorway. “Look here! What do you two think you’re up to here?” I didn’t answer. Jeremy didn’t hear. Jeremy was farther along, he was nearly out of touch altogether, but I was catching up with him as fast as I possibly could.
I wouldn’t eat, but Jeremy did. He devoured all the food that belonged to Miss Vinton: a loaf of bread, a quart jar of mayonnaise, a pack of wieners. Watching him eat made me feel stuffed. I saw that my fingers were getting knobby and my jeans were loose, but I felt so fat. He stopped chewing and looked over at me. I closed my eyes. He went on eating.
Once he said, “My mother died and so did both my sisters.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Also my father.”
“Your father.”
“Then her. Everybody left me.”
“I haven’t left.”
“Everybody outside me left.”
That was the way he let me know how he felt about me.
I was lying on the bed listening to the pigeons tearing at the ivy on the outside wall. It must be fall. Berries on the ivy. Jeremy was asleep beside me, he had been sleeping for hours while I kept watch. Then Miss Vinton came. She was wearing navy. Such a harsh color. She stood in the doorway a minute, and then she walked into the room and bent over me. She took hold of me by the chin and turned my face to her. “Olivia,” she said.
I just looked at her.
“Olivia, do you hear me?”
Now Jeremy sighed and muttered. He was dreaming of horses, flocks of wild horses in muddy colors.
“I want you to listen, Olivia. You must pull yourself together. Do you hear me?”
The older you get the more you censor what comes into your head. Big blank spaces grow where you have snipped things out. You get like Miss Vinton and Mr. Somerset; you speak very slowly, spanning all those gaps. “I want … you to take … a good look at yourself, Olivia.”
I just went on looking at her.
“Answer.”
Her hand was like a vise on my chin, like grownups forcing you to confess. “What do you want me to say?” I asked, but I kept my voice flat, to show I wasn’t scared of her. Her hand loosened a little.
“I choose you to speak to because I think you’re more in touch than he is. Surely you must see what you’re doing to yourself. Have you bathed lately? Look at your hair, your lovely long hair! You’re skin and bones, you don’t seem healthy. There’s something funny about your eyes. What is that you’re wearing?”
I wish they would break for commercials in real life.
“I can’t stand watching you harm yourself, Olivia. And you’re making Jeremy all the worse, you know that, don’t you?”
A lie. See, I wanted to tell her, how faithful I am when all others desert him? The last believer left in the church. I’m making him worse?
“I think you are losing your mind, Olivia.”
The vise on my chin again.
“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” I said, “but it’s nothing I can’t bounce back from.”
“Do it, then. Bounce.”
“You don’t believe I can.”
“Oh yes. I believe it. That’s why I’m telling you to do it.”
“I don’t see any reason to,” I said, and then I wrenched free of her hand and turned away from her.
“How about Jeremy, then? Olivia?”
“How about him.”
“He hasn’t worked in weeks. You’ve let him get too removed. Doesn’t that bother you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Olivia?”
She left. I heard her clacking into the kitchen, sighing, clacking out again.
When Jeremy woke up I said, “Why aren’t you working?”
“Working.”
“I didn’t cause you to stop.”
Something made him raise his eyes, maybe some tone in my voice. I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand what had happened.
“I finished the piece,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, then.”
He didn’t say when he was planning to start another.
It must have been a weekday. Miss Vinton was gone and I couldn’t see Mr. Somerset. The cat was hunched on the drain-board in the kitchen, turning his flat green eyes on and off. I felt sick to my stomach. “I don’t want breakfast,” I told Jeremy. “Let’s go look at your piece.”
He was finishing the little finicky toast rims that Miss Vinton had left in her cereal bowl. “Another time,” he told me.
“I want to see it now.”
“Olivia?”
“Now, Jeremy.”
We climbed the stairs. It was like returning to your childhood home — everything looked smaller and dingier. Clothes were overflowing a hamper in the upstairs hallway and on the windowsill was a vase containing a single brittle flower, stone dead. The closed door of my room seemed pathetic. We went on climbing. I was out of breath and darkness kept swooping in on my eyesight. When we reached the studio I said, “All right,” but all Jeremy did was go straight to his armchair. I had to look at his piece on my own.
Imagine a wooden soft drink crate, only bigger, standing on end. A set of compartments, and in each compartment a different collection of objects. Like an advertisement showing a cross-section of a busy household. Was it the telephone company that used to do those? Yes, Bell Telephone, demonstrating why you need an extension in every room. Or maybe some other utility. Flameless electric heat, maybe. I ought to remember; I certainly pored over them enough as a child. In one room would be Junior with his stamp collection, in another Sis was dressing for a date, in the bathroom Dad was showering and Mother stood over the stove in the kitchen. Only in Jeremy’s piece, there were no people. Only the feeling of people — of full lives suddenly interrupted, belongings still bearing the imprint of their vanished owners. Dark squares upstairs full of toys, paper scraps, a plastic doll bed lying on its side as if some burst of exuberance had flung it there and then passed on, leaving such a vacancy it could make you cry. Downstairs food, wheels, a set of jacks, a square of very bare green carpeting. Other things too fragmented to make out. I had to lean forward and squint, and give up finally, and settle back on my heels and shake my hair off my face.