Celestial Navigation (22 page)

“Oh, that’s just lately. I wrote her a letter.”

“You did?”

“Just a note, really. I wanted to find out how she was getting along.”

“I see,” Jeremy said.

“I was very close to her, you see. She was always very kind to me. And the other day I was thinking, ‘It’s Gloria’s birthday right about now. Couldn’t I send her a card to tell her I still think of her?’ ”

She still thought of her. When was that? At what point in her cheerful, bustling day, behind that tranquil face, did her thoughts turn to her old life? Really, he didn’t know anything about her. She might be thinking about her husband constantly; she might be full of discontent; she might be planning some new love affair far away from him. He suddenly remembered a night last week when she had been braiding Pippi’s hair in front of the television. Some celebrities were appearing on a panel show, among them a movie hero with deep, shadowed eyes. “Why does everyone think that man is so attractive?” Mary asked. Jeremy had been filling out contest blanks, ignoring the program. “What man?” he asked. “That one on the left,” she said, “that tall attractive man beside the blonde.” Jeremy looked up then, puzzled, but Mary had not heard her own words and she merely snapped a rubber band on Pippi’s braid and gave her a pat. “Off you go now. Bedtime.” But it wasn’t until now that he thought to
wonder: Was she longing for something more? When she read those romantic novels she liked, with the distraught pretty girls on the covers, was she wishing that she too had a man who would carry her up castle stairs or defend her with his sword or even, perhaps, frighten her a little with his dark, mysterious gaze?

As if she had guessed at all the cracks of uncertainty running through him, she turned to look at him over the baby’s head. In the dark her face seemed like a piece of felt. The baby made sucking noises in her sleep, lying on Mary’s arm as limp as a beanbag. Only Jeremy felt some brittle crumbling sensation inside him that kept him sitting upright.

“Jeremy? I guess maybe we could be married now,” Mary said.

“Well, if you wanted to.”

“Do you?”

“I do if you do,” he said.

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“We’ll have to do it in secret, then,” she said. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, Jeremy. For real, this time.”

“Oh, certainly. Anything you say.”

“But I’ll make all the arrangements. Would you like to get married this Thursday? Olivia’s home on Thursdays, she can babysit.”

“All right,” he said.

The crumbling sensation went on. Bits of him kept breaking away and falling, but Mary didn’t seem to notice.

All through the next day, while he sat in his studio filing down the metal edges of a statue, he kept thinking about this mother-in-law whom Mary still remembered after so many years. He saw her as fat, blowsy, good-natured—an
open-hearted woman who could give Mary some indefinable quality that he was not up to. He pictured her holding Mary’s letter in enormous, motherly hands. He tried to imagine what Mary would have written. It was polite, it was almost obligatory, to ask a woman about the welfare of her son. “How is Guy doing? I think of him often.” Oh, he could almost see those words in Mary’s round, looped handwriting. “I live with someone else now but Gladys (or Dolores or whatever her name was), it’s not the same at all, he’s so wishy-washy and spends so much time in his studio, and at first he wanted to make love too often and now he doesn’t want to hardly ever.” Jeremy winced and dropped a bolt and picked it up again. He imagined the mother-in-law’s answer. “Guy has a divorce since he gave up hope but you could come back any time, any time at all, Mary. Things have never been the same here since you left.”

He knew that was what she would say. Things would never be the same
any
place that Mary left.

At noon one of the children climbed the stairs to tell him lunch was ready, but he called through the door that he was too busy to come. In actual fact he was finishing the ring-around-the-rosy statue. He was working slowly, as he always did near the end of a piece, putting in small touches with long pauses for deliberation. He could easily have stopped for lunch. It was just that the thought of going downstairs made him feel so tired, somehow. All that noise! That tumult of emotion, rising in billows around him as he tried to swallow his food! Even from here he could hear the clatter of silverware, the children’s endless contests for their mother’s attention and the sudden clamor over some domestic accident—as if, overturned, those peanut butter glasses painted with nursery rhyme characters had spilled forth shouts and laughter and scoldings instead of milk. Above it all Mary’s voice rode, like a ship on waves. He could not understand how she managed
this, speaking at such a low and steady pitch. He himself was drowned out, every time. “Children? Oh, children,” he would say, “couldn’t you please—” Now Mary laughed, a rich soft laugh that carried effortlessly to every corner of the house. A few minutes later he heard her climbing the stairs. Dishes rattled gently on a tray. “Jeremy,” she called, “I’ve brought your lunch up.”

“Come in,” he said, but she couldn’t; he had absent-mindedly locked the door. First the knob turned and then she knocked. He had to put down his file and get off his stool and let her in—a task that seemed larger than it was, like having to rearrange every cell of his body within some thick dark sac of concentration. “Egg salad,” she said. He stared at her dimly. She carried the tray in past him and began laying his lunch out on the table in front of the statue—a glass of milk, a salad bowl, a sandwich on a plate. Every time she set a dish down she had to move something of his out of the way. A glue bucket was pushed aside, a paintbrush was laid across the top of it (not where it belonged). A horseshoe magnet clanged to the floor. “Sorry,” Mary said cheerfully. He felt that a long tail of noise and energy was pluming out behind her, brushing objects in his room as she turned. Although he had been thinking of her all morning, this seemed to be a different Mary from the one in his thoughts—clearer, sharper, more brightly colored. She changed the air in his studio, stirring up the center of it and making the corners look darker and dustier. The room appeared to be hers now. When she stepped back to look at the statue, he had the feeling that that was hers too. He imagined how efficiently
she
would make a statue: fitting it together in no time, without a wasted motion or a single revision, relying upon some rich lode of intuition that he did not possess. When she was done she would give the statue a loving smack on the rump, as if it were a child sent out to play
after she had tied its shoelaces. “Very nice,” she said now. “I like it.”

She turned and kissed him. She wound her arms around his neck. He said, “I should get back to work, Mary.”

But then when she was gone the other Mary returned, the silent floating one of his thoughts, and the image of her writing to her mother-in-law continued to pain him so much that he sat on his stool bent over and clutching his chest, like a man suffering a heart attack.

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.