Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  Here is his pupil, Lisa McCauley, climbing the stairs to his studio. Jeremy climbs behind her. He has descended to answer her ring, opened the door, greeted her, without once being aware of what he is doing. He has forgotten how he came to be here. All that is on his mind is a circle of blue paper he left upstairs on his drawing table. Is it too bright? Too smooth? No, the problem lies in its shape. A circle; difficult to work with. He will have to cut it into angles.

  “It’s spring,” says Lisa McCauley.

  Then the flash, which stops him dead. He stands on the stairs with his mouth open and watches Lisa McCauley’s nyloned legs shimmering ahead of him. If he turned the sound of nylon into sight it would make a silver zipper with very fine teeth opening the blackness behind his eyelids. If he touched the gold ankle chain that glints beneath one stocking it would have a gritty feeling; he would keep trying to smooth its echo off his fingertips for a long time afterward. The realness of her is staggering. He could choke on the fine strands of her bones. Her voice seems to displace the air around her, parting it keenly and then slightly flattening itself to separate the halves: “I didn’t mean to be late I thought for once I would be on time I said to myself when I got up this morning I—”

  The flash fades. Darkness descends in particles around his head. He stands in silence, staring down at the dust from the banister that has coated his fingers, until Lisa McCauley nudges him into motion again and he sets another foot upon another step.

  “Purple is my favorite color,” Lisa McCauley said. “I’ve decided to do this entire picture without it, just as an exercise.” She cocked her head, shaking long blond hair off her shoulders. “Mr. Pauling? Are you with me?”

  “Um—”

  “I said, I’ve decided to do without purple.”

  “Isn’t that purple you’re using now?”

  It’s magenta.

  “Ah.”

  He sat on the stool beside the easel, holding the blue circle. His thumb slid back and forth over its surface. In a minute he planned to cut it into angles, but for now something else was expected of him. What was it?

  “Don’t you have any comments?” Lisa said.

  She was painting a sad clown. White tears ran in exactly vertical lines down his magenta cheeks. The pain of looking at such an object caused Jeremy’s eyes to keep sliding away, veering toward the buckles on Lisa’s shoes, although he was conscious of her watching him and waiting for an answer. “What do you think?” she asked him.

  Jeremy said, “Well, now.”

  Her shoes were very shiny but the gilt was flaking off the buckles. Specks of gilt like dandruff were sprinkled across her toes.

  When Jeremy was seven he made a drawing of his mother’s parlor. Long slashes for walls and ceiling, curves for furniture, a single scribbled rose denoting the wallpaper pattern. And then, on the baseboard, a tiny electrical socket, its right angles crisp and precise, its screws neatly bisected by microscopic slits. It was his sister Laura’s favorite picture. She kept it for years, and laughed every time she looked at it, but he had never meant it to be a joke. That was the way his vision functioned: only in detail. Piece by piece. He had tried looking at the whole of things but it never worked out. He tried now, widening his eyes to take in the chilly white air below the skylight and the bare yellow plaster and splintery floors. The angles of the walls raced toward each other and collided. Gigantic hollow space loomed over him, echoing. The brightness made his lids ache.

  “I hate to have to tell you this,” Lisa said, “but I don’t think I’m going to be coming here again.”

  Jeremy said nothing.

  “Mr. Pauling?”

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  “Did you hear what I just told you?”

  “You weren’t, you’re not—”

  “My aunt’s taking me to Europe, I won’t be coming to lessons any more.”

  “Oh yes, I see.”

  “We’ll make a tour of all the museums. Well, that’s what I really need, isn’t it? Studying the old masters? Learning their technique and brush strokes and use of color—”

  She was swirling a slash of magenta unnecessarily on her palette, avoiding his eyes. Telling him she meant no offense. Jeremy had not taught her anything at all about technique and brush stroke. Line was where his interest lay. He had given up all painting years ago, didn’t even own a set of oils, or if he did they had surely dried up by now in the back of some cabinet. When Lisa’s blobs of color slipped out of her control he could only watch blankly, with his mind on something else. It was possible that he had never offered her a single comment. What difference would it have made, anyway?

  Now she was glancing at the time, slipping off her spotless Scandinavian smock and carefully folding it. “We’ll start off in Paris,” she said. “Have you ever been there?”

  “Paris. No.”

  “That’s the place to go, Aunt Dorrie says.”

  She squatted to replace the tubes of paint in the new raw wooden box they had come in. She tucked in her uncleaned brush, and then stood up and surveyed the studio to see what she was forgetting. Jeremy stayed where he was. He had been through this before. Sooner or later all his students left. They went to college, or got married, or moved to New York City, or found another teacher. Sometimes a student only stayed for one lesson. Sometimes they didn’t even bother telling him—just failed to show up, kept him waiting idly on his stool until it occurred to him, halfway through the morning, that things were not going the way they were supposed to be. He pictured himself as a statue in a fountain, sitting eternally motionless while people came and threw their hopeful pennies in and left again.

  “I can’t take the painting, it will get all over my clothes,” Lisa said.

  “The—”

  “The painting. What’ll I do? Shall I leave it here?”

  “Oh, fine. That will be all right.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going, then. I certainly do thank you. I know I’m not a professional yet or anything and I appreciate how you’ve tried to help me.”

  “You’re very welcome,” Jeremy said. “And also—and I’ve enjoyed getting to know you personally, too.”

  “When I get back,” said Lisa, “if I get back, and if I’m not married yet or anything, then maybe one of those snotty art schools will accept me this time. I mean, I know this trip will improve me, don’t you think? They can’t just keep turning me down forever, can they?”

  She held out her hand, a small tight cluster of fingers. Jeremy stared at it. He was noticing how thick the air seemed. It was pressing against his temples, flattening his eyeballs. Moving would be like swimming through egg whites.

  “Well, bye,” Lisa said.

  Moments later, pulled upward by the fading sound of her high heels, Jeremy rose from the stool. He blinked at the slamming of the front door. The memory of some obligation forced his hand out straight in front of him, and he closed it on nothing and looked at it a moment before he let it drop back to his side.

  His boarders were comforting, familiar voices milling around him, automatically allowing for the space he took up as he stood in the center of the kitchen. “Has anyone noticed my bread?” said Mrs. Jarrett. “I’ve looked all over for it. I was keeping it in the icebox to guard against mold.” Yet the open refrigerator seemed to contain nothing but mold, row upon row of leftovers in tiny bottles growing green fur, hardened cubes of cheese, doll-sized cans and jars bought for single people’s suppers and never finished. “Last week,” said Mrs. Jarrett, “I sterilized the sink with household bleach and washed all the dishes myself but now look. I wonder if it might be possible to afford a cleaning lady?” Jeremy said nothing. His eyes seemed fastened to Miss Vinton’s lavender cardigan, a restful color. Then when Miss Vinton moved over to the table he scratched his head, searched for some answer he knew he should have given. Nothing came to him.

  Mr. Somerset was standing at the stove with a rolled-up copy of Male magazine under one arm. He lit the flame below a ski
llet full of white grease; he flicked out a drowned cockroach with the corner of his spatula and began laying down strips of bacon, but he seemed to be talking about toast. “Know what I’ve got? Tea-and-toast syndrome. Howard will have heard of it. Went in and said, ‘Doc, I just don’t know what to tell you, seems like nowadays it’s all I can do to get out of the bed in the morning.’ Tea-and-toast syndrome, he tells me. Common among us older folk. Eat more protein. Now I have to have meat at every meal, not easy for a man of my income, and liver twice a week, which I detest. On top of which food don’t taste like it once did, you know. It’s these additives.”

  “It’s age,” said Mrs. Jarrett.

  “It’s additives.”

  “It’s age. Your taste buds are drying up, Mr. Somerset.”

  “And with everything else I got to put up with, it turns out it’s no longer possible to get the kind of rest I need in this house. We all know why. I just wish Howard was here and I could give him a piece of my mind. Last night he come in at twelve-thirty. Late even for him. My sleeping is a fragile business, not something you can play around with in such a way. He sleeps like a log. He was up at six, whistling in the bathroom. While he’s shaving he names over the parts of the anatomy. Tells the mirror all the minor bones of the foot. I just want to say one thing, Jeremy: this is an older person’s house. Know what I mean? We got no business boarding medical students.”

  Jeremy watched the bacon crinkling in slow motion. He saw wisps of gray smoke rise toward the ceiling, blurring the kitchen. How long had he been here? Was it for lunch or for supper? Had he eaten yet?

  Mrs. Jarrett’s plump, ringed hand appeared, bearing a plate. “Have a piece of strawberry shortcake, Jeremy,” she said. “Though it’s only store-bought.” She held the plate out on her fingertips and smiled, fixed in time by a sudden flash of light, imprinted in negative upon his eyelids.

  Here is Mrs. Jarrett, all beads and elegance. How gently the planes of her face meet, each meeting prepared for by those little powdery pouches! How perfectly her hair is crimped, how neatly her flowered hat sits upon it! She wears hats everywhere, maybe even to bed. She keeps her cheerfulness even here, even crossing this stained and sticky floor that tries to suck the patent leather pumps off her feet. Mr. Somerset turns a strip of bacon and sighs. Miss Vinton runs the faucet over a tower of jelly glasses in the sink. Mrs. Jarrett says, “A meal is not a meal without dessert at the end,” and Jeremy takes the plate, leaving her graciously curving hands up-ended between them. “Why, thank you,” he says. “Thank you for offering it to me. I would just like to say—” before the light dies away again and the numbness unrolls itself like a window-shade and he is left holding some cold heavy foreign object that his eyes refuse to focus upon.

  He was showing his mother’s bedroom to some strangers who must have rung the doorbell, although he could not remember answering it. A man, a very tall woman, and a little girl. “It’s not big enough for a family, I don’t believe,” he said.

  “You just said that,” said the man. “We just went through that.”

  “John,” said the woman. She turned to Jeremy. He sensed the motion even though he was looking at his mother’s lace curtains. She said, “Mr. Harris is just a friend. This room would be for me and my daughter.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Is there a downstairs bathroom?”

  He couldn’t seem to fix his mind to her words.

  “Mr. Pauling?”

  His sisters had cleaned out his mother’s room, but they had not managed to remove her smell. It hung over everything, sweet and damp and dusty. Even the sunlight filtering through the curtains had something of her in it. She had always been translucent, filmy, matte-surfaced like the meshy patterns of light fluttering on the old flowered carpet. There was a lack of body to her that had made him anxious, even as a child, and at any sign of weakness or illness in her his anxiety grew so strong it changed to irritation. (“Jeremy!” she had cried, climbing the stairs, and she laid a veined and trembling hand to her chest while Jeremy climbed on with his heart pounding, terrified and resentful, pretending not to notice. When she fell, there was a soft sound like old clothes dropping. She had not had the weight to roll back down the stairs; she remained where she landed, in a crumpled heap. Jeremy went into the studio and over to the window, where he stood sweating and shaking for a very long time. He chipped at the windowsill with a fingernail, flaking off paint. Then he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, returned to the stairs, and sat down beside her to lift her by the shoulders.)

  “There is plenty of closet space,” the woman said. “Come look, John.”

  “You look, Mary. Just tell me if you like it.”

  Hangers slid down a length of pipe. The child followed her mother, clutching a handful of her skirt. Jeremy was fond of children, and he would have liked to look at this one but she kept on standing too close to her mother. The mother was very beautiful; not someone he wanted to raise his eyes to. Beautiful women made him uneasy. He received his impressions of her from sidelong glances—brown hair worn in a bun, oval face, scoop-necked dress—and the image that he formed was like an illustration in an old-fashioned novel. The man was square-jawed and handsome, a cigarette ad. Only men like that are comfortable with beautiful women.

  “Do you supply the linen?” she asked.

  He thought of some nineteenth-century linen closet—ivory sheets in stacks, balls of hand-milled soap, a bunch of lavender dangling from a nail.

  “Mr. Pauling? Do you supply the linen?”

  “Linen. Yes.”

  “Well, I suppose we should take it,” she said.

  She was going through a pocketbook of some kind. Jeremy was staring at the nightstand. He saw a photograph of his father, laughing widely from a narrow silver frame. He saw his father lounging on the front stoop, slinging out majestic orders to the scary black men who worked for him. A hand nudged his arm. Crumpled dollar bills were passed to him one by one, as if they were the last of some treasure. He looked down, trying to think what was expected of him. “But the room,” he said.

  Everyone seemed to be waiting for his words, even the smallest person at the left-hand corner of his eye.

  “It’s not big enough for a family, I don’t believe,” he said.

  The man made an impatient gesture, turning sharply on one heel. The woman said, “But you don’t mind just me and the child here, do you?”

  “Child?” he said. He looked back at his father’s photograph. He tried to think what his father’s voice had sounded like, but it took a long time for him to remember and when he looked up again he found that the strangers had disappeared.

  Here is the endpaper from a library book that Mrs. Jarrett carelessly left on the dining room table. It is covered with an intricate multicolored design that caught his eye at once; one edge is a little crooked where he hurriedly snipped it out of the binding with kitchen shears. Will she notice? He paces his studio with it, his crocheted slippers snagging on splinters in the floorboards. The paper crackles in his fingers. With his eyes he traces maroons and blues and browns, a watery yellow, a touch of orange, all flooded with a slow radiance that is soaking into him. Flames and pinnacles and jagged leaves and white rapids swerving around a spear-shaped rock. Feathers of some rich and exotic bird. He sees the bird climbing toward the sun; he watches sunlight coat the wings and gild the head. Downstairs, voices drone on and a radio plays and a clock strikes. Upstairs, Jeremy feels a shimmering joy lighting every crevice of his mind, and he smiles and opens up to it and melts away, leaving no trace.

  Now Jeremy sat in his mother’s rocking chair, rocking gently in a corner of the dining room. The back of the chair was covered with some sort of quilted material ruffled around the edges, and the ruffle kept making a scrunching sound against his shoulders. To his left was a floor lamp with a pleated shade, a picture of Mount Vernon Place engraved on its ridges. It shed the only light in the room. The rest of the boarders sat in darkness, with their face
s flickering blue from the television set in the opposite corner. A very old set, a solid piece of furniture with a tiny screen. On it, a hero in a Stetson hat inched his way from window to window and peered out from behind a cocked revolver. “You can tell there’s enemies outside,” said Mr. Somerset, “else they wouldn’t bother showing you the birdsongs and frog croaks. Want to make a bet on it?”

  Mr. Somerset sat at the table with the remains of his supper, a picked-over plate and a shot glass oily from the bourbon it had held. Beside him was Miss Vinton, her neck ropy from craning nearsightedly toward the set; the new boarder, casting glances at her bedroom door from time to time in case her child awoke; Howard, dressed to go out, resting on the small of his back. Mrs. Jarrett was in the other rocker. Her hands worked rapidly in the darkness—knitting, probably, but Jeremy seemed unable to look to either side tonight and he only had an impression of empty movement, as if she were spinning something webbed and soft out of the darkness itself. He was conscious of particles of dark floating between people, some deep substance in which they all swam, intent upon keeping their heads free, their chins straining upward.

  A branch crackled outdoors and the hero raised his gun. Every muscle snapped to attention. His face tightened, his eyes swept the sunlit forest. Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

  On Jeremy’s lap was a clutter of papers in a khaki-colored file—the reason his lamp was on. He was going to try to make some money. The file contained boxtops, coupons, occupant ads, soup can labels, pages torn from magazines, blanks from the grocery store bulletin board. “Can you name our new hybrid rose? Prizes! Prizes! Just tell us why you prefer our brand of bleach. Nothing to buy. Are you already a winner?” Jeremy was almost always a winner. It was one of his peculiarities—a talent you were either born with or you weren’t, his mother used to say, and wasn’t it lucky he had found something he could do at home this way? Yet he had never felt lucky, and he never seemed to win what they really needed. Always tenth prize: a hair dryer, a comb-and-brush set, a movie camera guaranteed to do justice to his speediest action shots. The basement was stocked with a year’s supply of cat food. (Jeremy had no cats.) He was the owner of a sewing machine whose value was less than the ten-year service contract he had had to purchase for it. Didn’t anyone offer cash any more? The gas bill was due, the telephone company had sent their second notice, and if he didn’t pay the newspaper soon they would discontinue his classified ad and there would be no more students. On the hall desk was a sheaf of canceled checks from the mail order houses which had supplied his mother with her novelty salt and pepper shakers, her patented corn removers, her Bavarian weather forecaster, her wipe-clean doilies and plastic closet organizers and those miraculous plants that required neither soil nor water; and all anyone wanted to give him was snow tires and ladies’ shavers. “Grand Prize! A Trip to Hawaii for Two!!” What did he want with Hawaii? Who did they suppose would go with him?