He cocked his head.
“I mean, the general dining room is just suggested, more or less, but then special attention is paid to the high chair with its legs that go in and out and are kind of, say, carved.”
“Lathed,” Robin said.
“Yes, lathed, and Robby’s stuffed rabbit is lying underneath it.”
“I know the picture you’re talking about,” Robin said, but he still had his eyebrows knotted.
“I’d show them that and I’d say, ‘What would be special in your house? Wouldn’t you like me to paint it?’ And I’m thinking it would mean more to them if I was the one to pick it. If I was to read their house, like reading their horoscopes or their palms, and I was to say, ‘Here is your house’s soul. Its defining feature. Its essence.’？”
“Okay,” Robin said. His forehead cleared. He nodded. “Yeah, sure, honey. You should go ahead and do that.”
Then he picked up his fork and started mixing the mustard in with his sausage links.
“It would mean more time at the studio, I’m sorry to say,” Mercy said.
“Well, you’ve got plenty of that.”
“I might even have to spend the night, now and then.”
“Have to what?” he said. He set his fork down.
This was the hard part.
“Well, you know,” she said. “I’d get going on a project, get all involved and caught up in it…”
“Huh,” he said.
“So I figured if I kept a blanket handy in my studio, I could curl up on the daybed and grab myself forty winks instead of walking home alone in the dark.”
There was a silence, if you didn’t count Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night.”
“Mercy,” Robin said. “Are you leaving me?”
“Oh, no!” she said, and she reached across the table to set a hand on his wrist. She said, “No, dear one, I would never leave you! How could you think that?”
“But you’re telling me you don’t want to sleep with me anymore.”
“I just meant, like, now and then. Like if, let’s say I had a deadline of some sort.”
He didn’t speak. His lips were slightly parted and he was searching her face; he looked stricken. It filled her with pity. She tightened her hold on his wrist and said, “Dearest one. You’re my husband! How could I possibly leave you?”
“But no one’s going to set you a deadline for just a painting,” he said.
All at once she didn’t pity him so much. She let go of his wrist. She said, “Paintings can have deadlines.”
“This is just your way of walking out on me.”
“No, it’s my way of getting a little…independence,” she said.
“You want to be independent?” he asked. He pronounced the word at a distance, somehow, as if he found it distasteful.
“Robin. Listen. Remember Alice’s wedding, when she was making out the guest list? And she said to me, she said, ‘Kevin’s dad’s new wife doesn’t seem to have a whole lot on the ball, so could you take charge of her at the reception and talk housewife to her, please?’？”
“Okay…”
“Like I didn’t have a whole lot on the ball, either! You know?”
“She didn’t mean—”
“She’d invited all the other teachers and her headmistress, even, so thank goodness I’d be around, she was saying, because I was just a housewife.”
“It’s only a word,” Robin told her. “It’s not an insult. I am just a plumber; so what? We all get put in other people’s pigeonholes. It’s shorthand, is all it is.”
“It’s shorthand for ‘a nobody.’ You know?”
But she should stop saying “you know,” because the point was that he didn’t know; he didn’t have any idea.
He said, “I couldn’t bear it if you left me, Mercy.”
“I’m not going to leave you. I promise.”
“It sure sounds to me like you are,” he said.
“Doo-be-doo-be-doo,” Frank Sinatra sang.
Silly man.
* * *
—
For the next little bit, then, Mercy continued sleeping at home. She got up in the mornings and made Robin’s breakfast; she tidied and bustled around until he went to work. （Oh, leave! Just leave! she told him in her mind. How long can it take to just go?） Then, the instant he was out of the house, she was off to her studio. She didn’t have much to carry anymore. All the essentials were there now, and even those seemed excessive, because she’d envisioned her future life as taking place in an empty room. It was almost disturbing to find that a certain amount of clutter was creeping in by necessity: the teakettle on the hot plate, the dishcloth draped over the sink rim.