Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  By early afternoon he had completed every last detail of the statue. Still, he didn’t leave the studio. And when Brian came visiting—he heard his voice in the entrance hall—he refused to see him. “Jeremy, Brian’s here,” Mary called.

  Jeremy didn’t answer.

  Then Brian’s boots mounted the stairs, two steps at a time. His great hearty knock sounded on Jeremy’s door. “Hey, in there. You feel like a visitor?”

  Jeremy frowned at the ceiling. He was lying on the couch with his hands clasped across his stomach, trying off and on to think of another piece to work on. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone at all. But while he was framing an answer Brian gave up and went away again, and Jeremy heard his voice and Mary’s and then the slamming of the front door. He rose and padded over to a window. There was Brian crossing the street, weaving his way between cars stopped for a traffic light, arriving on the opposite sidewalk in a sudden burst of speed as if he had just made a daring escape. Jeremy watched after him for as long as he was in sight. It seemed to him that Brian’s walk was lighthearted, nearly dancing; he might have been celebrating his return to freedom.

  At suppertime, when Mary came with another tray, she said, “Why wouldn’t you see Brian?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow I will.”

  “You’re not still angry about what happened at the gallery, are you? Jeremy, I honestly don’t think—”

  “No, it’s just, you see, I’m busy with a new piece,” he told her.

  “Oh, I see.”

  Actually he never went straight from one piece to the next. It was necessary to have a regathering period, an idle space sometimes stretching into weeks. But Mary said, “I hope it’s going well, then,” and she took away his lunch dishes and left him his supper and a mug of hot coffee.

  When she was gone he turned off the light and went back to the couch. By now the studio was in twilight—a linty grayness that he could almost feel on his skin. In spite of the warmth he wrapped himself in an afghan. It seemed to him that his heart had slowed, and his hands and feet were chilled. He stretched out on the couch and went to sleep, and the afghan made him dream of being held prisoner in some confined and airless place.

  Long before dawn he awoke with a start. He spent several seconds wondering where he was. The doubt was more pleasant than disturbing. Even after he had found the answer, he kept trying to push it away again so that he could return to that floating, rootless state. Then he rose and ate supper in the dark—cold vegetables and meatloaf, a bowl of some sticky thick liquid that turned out to be melted ice cream. Every swallow gagged him but he ate the entire meal, and he finished the last of his cold bitter coffee with a feeling of accomplishment. Wasn’t that what life was all about: steadfast endurance? In the dark, where his thoughts seemed more significant than they did in daytime, he decided that this was what made the difference between him and Mary. He saw virtue in acceptance of everything, small and large, while Mary saw virtue in the refusal to accept. She was always ready to do battle against the tiniest infringement. He considered those battles now with fondness; he pictured her tall, energetic figure fending off door-to-door salesmen and overbearing teachers and grade school bullies and household germs, all with the same enthusiasm. It seemed to him that his acceptance and her defiance made up a perfect whole, with neither more right than the other, although up till now he had always assumed that one of them would be proved wrong in the end. He worked through this idea with a feeling of relief. He even thought of going downstairs to wake Mary and tell her about it, but of course she would have no idea what he meant. She never wondered about the same things he did. (Did she wonder about anything?) She would only smile at him with sleepy, half-closed eyes and open the blankets and pull him in to her, her answer to all their problems. He dragged an armchair over to the front window instead, and sat there wrapped in his afghan watching the sky whiten over the city.

  Was it possible that once, in the years before Mary, the house had been this still even in the daytime? He had trouble remembering it. He began pretending that this silence was permanent—that Mary and the children had gone away for some reason and left the house echoing behind them. Then he considered his work. What would he do if he were left all alone with his sheets of metal and blocks of wood? Would he still be successful if Mary were not standing behind him? He began twisting his hands together on his knees; something like anxiety or irritation tightened all his muscles. It was foolish to be asking himself such questions. He had been making his pieces all along, hadn’t he? Long before she came here. He pushed back his armchair and flung scraps of cardboard off his worktable. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of newsprint, already drawing shapes in thin air while he planned his next piece. And when, just at dawn, Mary knocked on his door and asked if he were all right, he had trouble placing her. “What?” he asked, still frowning at his sketchpad.

  “Are you all right, I said.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He was going to make a statue of Brian rounding the corner—a man half running, glad to be gone. He chose that figure because it seemed the most solitary. No dogs, brooms, tricycles, or children accompanied him. He chose wood because it was slowest and took the most patience. Half the morning was spent selecting pieces from the lumber pile in the corner, lovingly smoothing them, arranging and rearranging them. Cutting and sanding the curve of a single shin took till noon. When Mary knocked with his lunch tray he called, “Just leave it outside, would you please? I’ll get it in a minute.” But in a minute he had forgotten all about it, and it was afternoon before the hollow in his stomach reminded him.

  He ate while standing at the window, looking down into the street. The glare of sunlight on cement came as a shock to his eyes. He had to squint to see his children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk—their chalked game like an aerial view of a city, the tops of their heads gleaming, two stick pigtails flying out behind each little girl. The clothes they wore gave them a motley look. Plaids, ginghams, stripes, flowers, all mixed together. Hannah, spread-eagled on a skateboard, looked like one of those dolls made up of stacked felt discs all different colors: an orange scarf around her neck, a puffy pink quilted jacket, a red cardigan dangling below it and a plaid skirt below that, bare white knees, and the cuffs of blue knee-socks rising above floppy red boots. Their voices seemed too distant, as voices had back when he was a child sick in bed—words floating across some curtain of mist or water. He used to think the change was caused by his being horizontal, but here he was standing upright and still they sounded like people in a dream. They were arguing about whether someone had broken a rule. Jeremy could not figure out the point of this game. As far as he could see it involved hopping down a series of chalked squares. Was the pattern of those squares their own? Was there some hidden, rigid set of regulations that he knew nothing about? He was awed by their ability to decide on their own amusements, to carry on, by themselves, this mysterious tradition handed down by an older generation of children. They lined up efficiently, hopped with purpose, stooped for some sort of glittering marker and tossed it to a new square before stepping smartly aside to await another turn. He had never suspected that children on their own would be so organized.

  In the evening Mary knocked on his door and said, “Jeremy, aren’t you ever coming out?”

  “In a little while, yes,” he said. He blew sawdust off a stick of wood.

  “You’re tying up the children’s bathroom, Jeremy. It’s Abbie’s bath night. Couldn’t you just let her in that long?”

  “In a while.”

  He heard her sigh. He heard her whisper something he couldn’t quite catch. “What?” he said.

  “I said, you won’t forget tomorrow, will you?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “It’s Thursday tomorrow, Jeremy.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “We’re getting—”

  “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  She set the tray outside his door. The familiar clinking of china on tin made him sud
denly hungry, but he didn’t go out to the hall. He waited for her to leave. He stood listening to her footsteps all the way down the stairs, and only then did he go to the door and open it. He didn’t know why he behaved that way. The smell of her on the landing—warm milk and honey sprinkled with cinnamon, a drink that had comforted him all his life—seemed sickly-sweet. He picked the tray up and closed the door and locked it again. Standing just inside the room, holding the tray in one hand, he took bits of food in his fingers and wolfed them down. Behind him the sounds of the household crept up the stairs and seeped through the cracks around the door. He heard laughter and a thread of “Frère Jacques.” Mary and Olivia were calling back and forth to each other between two rooms. Mary’s voice was downward-slanting, definite, while Olivia’s rose in an uncertain way at the end of each sentence. This might be a school for women; the thought had often occurred to him. In the old days he had assumed that what women knew came to them naturally. He had never suspected that they had to be taught. But listen to Mary, to the firmness of her voice, not issuing concrete instructions so much as showing Olivia how to be; listen to Olivia slowly and questioningly taking on her tone. To the little girls, even, cleverly coaxing Rachel to eat her carrots, Edward to try his potty chair—they were all being tutored. Jeremy set his tray down and stood beside the door in silence, eavesdropping, impressed and envious. Were there no such tutors for men? Was it only women who linked the generations so protectively?

  But when footsteps climbed the stairs again—this time Olivia’s—he scurried back to his work. “Mr. Pauling? Mary sent me with more coffee.” He stayed quiet, a quarter-sheet of sandpaper frozen in one hand. After a while she went away.

  By Thursday morning the framework of the statue was completed. Only he could have told what it was yet. There was just a skeleton, tied in odd places with strips from old sheets wherever gluing had seemed preferable to nailing. While he waited for the glue to dry he rummaged about for other materials—coarse fabrics and copper wire and a length of fine screen that he had been saving for something special. He overturned bins and drawers, blinking repeatedly to clear his eyes. (He had not had very much sleep the night before.) Under the sink he found a child’s wool cap and sat down to unravel it, building a pile of crinkly red yarn in his lap. Later he would stiffen the yarn with his spray can, let it stream out from behind his figure’s head. Whoever owned the cap would say, “Jeremy! Is that mine? You told us, Jeremy, you said you’d stop using all our stuff up, remember?” He remembered very well, but when he was in the middle of a piece some sort of feverishness came over him. He took whatever looked right, even the necessities of life. He broke or rearranged them as needed, fumbling in his haste, promising himself that he would replace the objects as soon as his piece was finished and he had the time again. Now he had no time at all. It always seemed likely at this stage that he might drop dead by nightfall, leaving his figure unfinished and his life in bits on the studio floor. What if his piece remained a skeleton forever, bound with rags at the joints and tipping in that precarious way he was planning to change, he knew just how, once he found the proper base for it? No one would ever guess what his plans had been. They would think the skeleton was what he had intended, with all its flaws. Surely, then, if ghosts existed he would have to become one; his restless spirit would be forced to return to haunt what he had left undone.

  What he intended for this piece was the light, dissolving feel of Brian running, a splinter in a cold spring wind. He would be wrapped in matte surfaces. His face would be a thin blade of wood, cutting the air in front of him. He would trail curving tin streamers of motion. Tin? He looked for the sheet metal, the shears. It was hard to breathe. This certainty about what he was making had the same physical effect as fear: his chest tightened and his heart seemed to be rising in his throat, and he had a sensation of burning up his body’s stores too rapidly.

  When Mary knocked he didn’t answer, didn’t even bother keeping still for her. “Jeremy? Jeremy!” He bent tin, with a great hollow clang. Mary went away again.

  On his lunch tray there was a note. “This is our wedding day. Do you still want to?” Something gave him a sharp stab of sorrow—the question mark, perhaps. The thought of Mary’s low, even voice asking that question. For the first time that morning he listened to what was going on downstairs, sorting out the separate noises from the steady hum that was present all day long. Someone was playing a Sesame Street record and someone else was running the blender at high speed—Olivia, no doubt, fixing one of her peculiar meals of seed-paste patties or fresh-ground peanut butter. The blender ran at the level of a scream, on and on, spitting when it came upon nuts as yet unbroken. A child was crying, but not very seriously. He could not hear Mary anywhere. What time was it? He looked at the clock on the windowsill but it had run down, long ago. It occurred to him that he had not bathed or shaved or changed clothes in days. He had a musty yellow smell and his teeth seemed to be made of flannel. Well, when he had finished cutting the tin he would take care of all that. He would come downstairs newly washed, freshly dressed, and locate Mary among all those jumbled voices. He pictured himself descending into the noise as he would enter the sea—proceeding steadily with his hands lifted and his mouth set, submerging first his feet and then his legs and then his entire body, last of all his head.

  The wool from the cap turned out to be a mistake. Too soft, too temporary. He had unraveled it for nothing. He tossed it into a corner and cut more tin instead, in tiny strips that he curled around a pencil and then stretched out again so that they would crinkle. It was a tricky job; he kept getting cut. Little seams of blood mixed with the paint and the gray rolls of glue on his fingers. Somewhere he had work gloves but he was in too much of a hurry to stop and look for them. The muscles at the back of his neck were stretched thin, and when he stood up with his bundle of tin strips he found that both legs were asleep. Now the strips had to be nailed onto the wooden head, which was the hardest part. First he had to find enough tiny sharp nails in his nail can and then he had to hammer them in absolutely straight or they skidded off the tin. His hands were sore all over, but the soreness was reassuring. He was merely getting used up, that was all. Like the lead of a pencil. Naturally the hands were the first to go.

  At twilight Olivia brought his tray up. “Mr. Pauling? Could I come in?”

  The thought of food gave him a sick feeling. He ignored her.

  Something made working more and more difficult. It took him a while to realize that it was the darkness. The statue was only a glimmer before him. He walked over to the door on crippled, icy feet, but when he had turned the wall switch on the light hurt his eyes so much that he clicked it off again. He made his way to the couch and lay down, with one arm set across his aching forehead. As soon as he was comfortably arranged he felt a lurch like some gear disengaging, a ping! in his ears, and his mind floated free and he slept.

  Even in his dreams, he worked. He cut, pasted, hammered, sanded. He had a feeling of pressure to finish, a sense of being pushed. Although he forced himself to ignore the pressure he went on working without let-up, and the closer he came to completing the piece the more he was filled with a sense of joy and light-headedness. When the last nail was hammered in he laughed out loud. He backed off across the studio with his eyes lowered, so that the finished statue could burst upon him all in one instant, and then he looked up to see what he had made.

  A room. A corner of a room, a kitchen, to be exact. A counter with a loaf of rye bread and a bread knife on it, and a coppertone clothes dryer spilling out realistic wads of flowered and plaid and gingham clothes and a formica table with chairs set around it—oh, how he must have worked over that table! Its aluminum edge was grooved with three parallel bands; such attention to detail. The chairs were mismatched, a subtle touch. The wooden one alone must have taken him weeks to make, with its bulbous legs and the tie-on ruffled cushion on its seat and the Bugs Bunny decal on its back. He had even included, on the rungs, the scars of a
hundred children’s teetering shoes. Was this what he had labored over for so many hours?

  He woke feeling dismal and empty and frightened. Sunlight flooded his face, a deep gold light casting long rectangles so that he suspected it must be mid-morning. What he wanted most was a cup of hot coffee, but all he found outside his door was last night’s supper. A wilted salad, a glass of lukewarm milk, some peculiar brownish casserole that he could not identify. He ate it anyway, although it went down his throat in lumps. He swallowed the milk with narrow, dutiful sips and then set his tray outside the door again.

  Now he saw that the statue was all wrong. What had he been thinking of, setting on each curl of hair that way? He might have been building a doll, or a department store mannequin. With a screwdriver he began prying the strips off, one by one. His hands hurt so much that he could hardly bend them. The statue’s head showed nail marks down its back, but he was already thinking up ways to cover them.

  At noon he checked for lunch, but found none. Later in the afternoon he checked again. There were only the supper dishes, crusty now. He stood on the landing and called, “Mary?” The word echoed back. There was not a sound in the house; only a clear, bell-like silence in which each of his footsteps fell too loudly. He descended the stairs, passing the empty second floor and continuing to where his children would surely be absorbed in a fairytale or some quiet table game. No. No one was there. In the parlor the baby’s playpen was empty and the toys on the floor seemed to be coated with a furry film of stillness. In the dining room the face of the TV was sleek and blank; in the bedroom his and Mary’s bed was made so neatly that it seemed artificial, something from a furniture store display. He had the feeling that no one had slept there for months, if ever. And the kitchen was strangest of all. The counters were absolutely clean and shining, like an advertisement for a linoleum company. No floury measuring cups, no cucumber peels, no stacked-up dirty dishes. The floor gleamed. The table was spotless. The clock ticked briskly and hollowly.