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  She led him to the couch, where he sat down while she remained standing. Then he realized his mistake and jumped up again. “Oh, excuse me,” he said.

  “Mr. Pauling,” said Mary, “I realize that I’m behind on my rent.”

  “Oh. Well, I thought we—”

  “We had a talk about that yesterday. You said you wouldn’t pressure me for it. But I never suspected that there were strings attached.”

  “Strings?” said Jeremy.

  “Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mary looked at him. He had been trying to catch her eye, but now that he had it he seemed unable to face her. He was not used to dealing with angry women. He had never pictured Mary angry at all. He said, “This is so puzzling. I don’t see—”

  “Yesterday,” said Mary, “as soon as it was clear I’d missed paying my rent, you came calling in my room and brought me flowers. Well, I didn’t think anything of it at the time but then later I—and today! You come knocking again! Do you feel that now you have some hold over me? Because all I owe you is money, Mr. Pauling, and I will be happy to borrow elsewhere and pay you this minute and be out of your house tomorrow. Is that clear?”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Jeremy said. He lowered himself to the couch again. Horror curled over him like an icy film, followed by a rush of heat. He felt his face grow pink. “Oh, Mary. Mrs. Tell,” he said. “I never meant to—why, I was just—” Now a picture came to him of exactly how he had looked to Mary Tell the day before. He heard the tentative mumble of his knuckles on her door, he saw his sickly, hopeful smile, beseeching her for everything as he stuck his bouquet under her chin. This was something he was never going to be able to put out of his mind; he knew it. He was going to go over and over it on a thousand sleepless nights, all of them spent alone, for a woman like Mary Tell would never in a million years give a thought to a man like him. He should have guessed that. He felt himself beginning to tremble, the final indignity. “Mr. Pauling?” Mary said.

  “But I’m a good man,” he said. “What I mean to say—why, I never even knew you owed me! I don’t keep track of that money, the others just put it in the cookie jar.”

  “Cookie jar?”

  If he spoke any more she would notice his voice was shaking.

  “In the cookie jar, Mr. Pauling?”

  “The cookie jar in the kitchen. Then I take it out to buy groceries whenever—” He gulped, a sound she must have heard three feet away. She came closer and bent over him, but he kept his head ducked. It was the worst moment he had ever lived through. He didn’t see how it could possibly go on for so long. Couldn’t she leave now? But no, he felt the sofa indenting as she settled down beside him. He saw the edge of her blue skirt, such a calm, soft blue that he felt a flood of pain for those few days when he had loved her and had some hope of her loving him back. “Jeremy,” she said. “I feel just terrible about this. Won’t you say you forgive me? I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m going through a bad time just now and I must have—Jeremy?” She leaned closer and took one of his hands. “Look at me a minute,” she said.

  Why not? It didn’t mean a thing to him any more. He raised his eyes and found the perfect oval of her face level with his. The inner corners of her eyebrows were furrowed with concern. “Won’t you accept my apology?” she said. He had to nod. Then he even smiled, because it had finally dawned on him what was happening: They had been discussing an issue as old-fashioned as Mary Tell herself, and here they were side by side holding hands in this second stage of their courtship.

  Mornings now he woke feeling hopeful, and getting up was easier. He started being careful of his appearance. He began wearing a pen-and-pencil set in his shirt pocket—a sign of competence, he thought. He practiced smiling with his mouth shut, hiding a dark turmoil of bad teeth. In the bathroom mirror the thought of Mary hung like a mist between himself and his reflection. Her long cool fingers reached into his chest. He carried her image downstairs with him, treading gently as if it might break up and scatter like snowflakes in a paperweight. When the other boarders greeted him he sometimes failed to answer, but that had happened before and none of them thought anything of it.

  Then why did his vision of Mary Tell always turn out to be wrong? Oh, not wrong in any concrete way. He had got her nose right, and the set of her head and the shape of her mouth. But when she entered the kitchen, tying an apron around her waist and smiling at Darcy’s chatter, there was some slight difference in her which both disappointed and awed him. Her skin had a denser look and the planes of her face were flatter. Her manner of moving was more purposeful. In his mind she glided; in real life she stepped squarely on her heels. Every night he forgot that and every morning he had to learn it all over again.

  In the beginning she used to make bacon and eggs for breakfast, but now their diet had changed. She and Darcy filled up on cold cereal. “We always have this,” Darcy said. “I know, honey,” said Mary, and then she told Jeremy, “Yesterday I heard of a job addressing envelopes. Do you think they’d let me do it at home? I’m going to see them today and ask, and if they say yes we’ll never eat cornflakes again.” But that job fell through, and so did the next one and the one after that, and they continued to eat cornflakes while Jeremy sat at the table with them trying to think up topics of conversation. He kept a glass of orange juice in front of him, although he never drank it. (It was impossible to swallow with Mary watching.) He rehearsed a hundred sentences offering help, what little he could manage: “Could I lend you some of the cookie jar money? Well, then, eggs? Just eggs?” But he never said any of them out loud. He was afraid to. Rinsing off their little stack of dishes Mary bustled so, as if she were daring him to feel sorry for her. Then she said, “All right, Miss Slowpoke, ready to go?” and she and Darcy would set off on their walk. Which was another change: in the beginning Mary waited for her friend to call before she went out. Now she went immediately after breakfast, and the few times the telephone rang it was never for her.

  “Going on your walk?” Jeremy would say. “Well now. Have a good time.” They passed through the house calling goodbyes, singing out greetings to Mr. Somerset, letting two doors slam behind them, ringing the air like a bell, and then all of a sudden the house would fall silent and the rooms would seem vacant and dead. The only sound was the creak of an old dry beam somewhere. A distant auto horn. Mr. Somerset’s papery slippers shambling across the dining room floor.

  Jeremy was like a man marooned on an island. Why had that taken him so many years to realize? He was surrounded on four sides by streets so flat and wide that he imagined he could drown in air just walking across them. Yet look, a four-year-old managed it without a thought! Oh, if it weren’t for this handicap he could invite Mary Tell to a movie and then bring her home and kiss her outside her door as he had seen done on TV, and that would be the end of all his planning and worrying. It would be so simple! Instead, here it was August now and he had not taken one step toward kissing her and it began to look as if he never would.

  Then one morning the telephone rang and no one was in the hall to answer it but Jeremy. Even before he picked up the receiver a knot of anxiety had settled low in his stomach. “Hello? Hello?” he said, and was answered by a voice he had not heard in weeks, but he recognized it instantly. “Mary Tell, please,” said the cigarette-ad man.

  “Oh! Well, I’ll see,” Jeremy said.

  Then he went into the dining room and knocked on her door. “Someone wants you on the telephone,” he called.

  She took a minute to appear. She was already dressed, carrying her apron in her hand, and she looked startled. “Someone wants me?” she said. “Who is it?”

  “Why, I believe it’s your friend, the young man.”

  From behind her Darcy said, “Can I talk? If it’s John can I talk?”

  “No, you may not” Mary said. Jeremy had never heard her speak so sharply to Darcy. She said, “Keep her a minute, will you, Jeremy?” and walked of
f to the telephone. “Why can’t I talk?” Darcy asked Jeremy.

  “Oh, well …” said Jeremy. The knot in his stomach had grown larger. He backed into the dining room and sat down on a chair, limply, with his hands on his knees. “How are you today, Darcy?” he asked. Even to himself, his voice sounded foolish. He made himself smile at her. “When are you coming to my studio again? You haven’t been all week.”

  But he was listening, meanwhile, to Mary out in the hall. She said, “No, no, I understand. You don’t have to call ever, John. It’s not as if you’re obligated.”

  “But she always let me talk to him before,” Darcy said.

  “Maybe another day,” said Jeremy. He tried a different smile. Mary said, “Look. I’m fine. No I don’t need money.”

  “Shall we cut out paper dolls?” Jeremy asked Darcy.

  “Not right now, Jeremy.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, I’m managing fine. I’m fine. I still have some of what you lent me,” Mary said. And then, “What’s it to you how much is left? It was a loan, you don’t have any business asking that. I’m planning to pay you back. I want to. As soon as I find a job I will.”

  “If I go and shout into the phone John will talk to me,” Darcy said. “He likes me. I know he does.”

  “No, no, Darcy—”

  But she was off, skating on her stocking feet into the hallway with Jeremy at her heels. From this close they could hear Mary’s friend arguing or protesting or explaining, a thin violent squawk. “—for Darcy’s sake,” he said, and Darcy gave a little leap. “Hello John!” she shouted. “Hello John!” Mary held up the flat of her hand, but kept her face turned into the receiver. “All right,” she said. “You win.”

  “Can you hear me, John?”

  “Uh, Darcy,” Jeremy said.

  “All right,” said Mary, “but it’s a loan, and I want you to know that. I don’t want any—Darcy! Look, John, it’s hard to talk right now—”

  Darcy was tugging at her mother’s skirt, and Jeremy was stooped over trying to loosen her fingers. The squawk continued on the telephone, another form of tugging. Mary’s skirt had the same cool, grainy feeling that her hands had had, that time on the couch. Why, after all, she was only a collection of textures. Her muscles slanted over her bones exactly as in his anatomical drawing class; her lips were yet another texture, otherwise no different than her fingers had been or this clutch of skirt in Darcy’s scampering hands. “No, I mean this,” Mary said. “I want you to mail it. Don’t bring it. You are under no—John?”

  She put the receiver down very slowly. “Oh, Mom, I wanted to talk,” Darcy said. Then Jeremy straightened and looked into Mary’s face. Her expression was cheerful and she was even smiling slightly, but tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry—” she said. She started back toward the bedroom, with Jeremy and Darcy stumbling over each other trying to follow. “You must think I make a habit of this,” she said in her doorway. She turned, and Jeremy was so close behind her that before he thought, he had found the strength to lean forward on tiptoe and kiss the corner of her mouth. Then he took a step back, and she looked his way for a moment before her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Thank you, Jeremy,” she said. “You are a very sweet man.”

  She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, giving a little laugh at herself as if they embarrassed her. She shook out her apron and said, “Come along, Miss Chatterbox, let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?” Then they went off toward the kitchen, leaving Jeremy smiling so hard that he could barely see. He thought he might just inflate and float away like a balloon at a birthday party.

  In magazine cartoons, a suitor proposing marriage always knelt on the floor at his sweetheart’s feet. Now, was that an accurate reflection of the way things were done? He suspected not. Nevertheless he kept picturing himself looking up at Mary from a kneeling position, finding her even more frightening at this angle—her sandals the largest part of her, her waist at eye level, the never-before-seen underside of her bosom and the white triangle of skin beneath her jaw. “I don’t have much money,” he should tell her (the speech owed to her father, he believed, but he had no idea who her father was). “I wouldn’t be able to support you in very good style but at least it would be a little easier, I do have my pieces and a little from my mother and sometimes I win a contest and I always seem to have enough for groceries.” He prepared himself for the way the hem of her dress would loom, and for the difficulty of judging her expression from so far beneath it. Yet every night he went to bed with nothing resolved, feeling thin and strained as if this balloon of hope he had become had been kept too fully inflated for too long a time. He dreamed of losing things—unnamed objects in small boxes, the roof of his house, pieces of art that he would never be able to re-create. He woke feeling anxious, and over and over again read the index card tacked to the windowsill beside him.

  In his imagination this proposal always took place outdoors somewhere, although of course that would be too public. Could he be thinking of a park? The nearest park was several blocks from home. He pushed away the outdoor images and in the mornings, while he sat with his orange juice and she poured cornflakes, he tried to think of some natural way to lead in to what was on his mind. He couldn’t. Mary talked about her daughter and the weather and library books, nothing more personal. “Now Darcy is shooting out of all her clothes. I’ve never seen a child grow the way she does. I thought as soon as I got a job I would buy some material and borrow Mrs. Jarrett’s sewing machine, but sewing has never been my strong point and I’m not at all sure that I—” How could he bring love into a conversation like that? She gave him no openings. He sometimes thought that she might be sending him some silent warning, telling him not to ask even the simplest things that occurred to him: Where do you come from? Why are you here? Who was your husband? What are your plans?

  “At home Darcy used to beg for cornflakes,” Mary said once. “I’ve never seen a child so contrary.”

  “Where was that?” Jeremy asked her.

  “What?”

  “Where was your home?”

  “Oh, well—and now she wants bacon and eggs, wouldn’t you know? I believe she just thinks up these things to devil me.”

  Jeremy didn’t press her. He contented himself with the surface that she presented to the world, and it was only inside him that the questions continued. What happened to your husband? Why did you cry with that man John? What is his significance?

  Will you marry me?

  Now each morning that he failed to propose he saw them to the door, tagging after them in the hope that somewhere along the way—in the dining room, the hall, the vestibule—he might gather his courage. He took to going out on the steps and waving after them. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Turning back afterward was worse than being left in the kitchen. He always felt oppressed by the sudden dark coolness as he stepped inside. He started accompanying them farther—to the second house, to the third. Maybe, given time, he could follow Mary all the way off his island. Gradually: wasn’t that the key? Oh, if there were any god he believed in, it was gradualness! If people would only let him go at things his own way, step by step, never requiring these sudden leaps that seem to happen in the outside world! But every day he was overtaken by some magnetic force that seemed to affect only him. It dragged him back with a tug at his spine; it caused him to slow and then to halt, damp with exhaustion. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Mary and Darcy waved and grew smaller. They separated cheerfully at the approach of total strangers, they talked aloud without fear of being heard, they crossed the wide street against the light. Dogs with enormous grinning mouths sniffed at Mary’s skirt and she never even noticed. Oh, he had undertaken too much. He could never keep up with a woman like that. He turned and trudged homeward, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk and muttering words of encouragement to himself, and before he started the day’s work he had to lie on the couch in his studio a while catching his breath and trying to still t
he twitching of his leg muscles.

  It seemed to him that his sisters were always calling him on the telephone nowadays. “What are you doing, Jeremy, why haven’t we heard from you? Are you getting out more? Are you eating right?” They no longer phoned only on Sundays but occasionally on weekday evenings as well, on Saturdays and in the middle of lunch. Then one morning they called so early that he was still in the kitchen with Mary and Darcy. “Jeremy, honey, this is Laura,” he heard, and although he had always felt close to Laura he was conscious now of a sudden impatience tightening his fingers on the receiver. In the kitchen Darcy said something and Mary laughed. There was no telling what he was missing. “Is there something—what seems to be the matter?” he asked her.

  “Matter? I was just worried about you, dear. You haven’t answered our last letter.”

  “But I don’t believe I received any letter this week,” he told her. Then, too late, he remembered the flowered envelope that he had absently stuck in his shirt pocket on the way upstairs the other day. It was probably in the bathroom hamper. “He says he didn’t get any letter,” Laura told Amanda. To Jeremy she said, “Honestly, they can fly to Europe but they can’t get a simple note from Richmond to Baltimore. Well, I knew there was some explanation. Now here is Amanda to say a few words. Amanda?”

  “How do you seem to be getting along, Jeremy,” Amanda’s voice said very close to his ear.

  “Oh, fine, thank you.”

  “I told Laura there was no need to call but she said she had a funny feeling, she gets them more and more these days. Any fool should know you can’t trust the U.S. mail.”

  Jeremy stood up straighter. It always occurred to him, when talking on the telephone, that to people at the other end of the line he was invisible. Except for the thin thread of his voice he did not even exist. “Jeremy!” Amanda said sharply, and he said, “Yes, I’m here”—reassuring both himself and her.