Celestial Navigation (23 page)

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 suddenly 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.

He felt that his sense of time, which was never good, had deserted him. Had he missed something? Had the days carried everyone else on by and left him stranded in some vanished moment? Maybe his family had just gone out to a movie. Maybe they had abandoned him forever. Maybe they had grown up and moved some thirty years before, had children of their own and grown old and died. He couldn’t prove that it wasn’t so.

Then, turning to the refrigerator for food and solace (fumbling at some new kind of double door where he had expected the old single one), he found a note stuck on with a teapot-shaped magnet. “Dear Jeremy, I have taken the children and left you. I borrowed Brian’s cabin at the Quamikut Boatyard. I think it’s best. Love, Mary.”

He took the note off the door and read it over and over. It seemed that the air had gone out of him, so that the words
striking his deflated chest jarred all the way through to his backbone. Finally he folded the piece of paper several times and tucked it in his shirt pocket. He headed through the house and back upstairs, fixing the image of his new statue very firmly in his mind like some magnetic star that would guide him through this moment. In the studio he resumed work immediately. He sanded the wooden head smooth again, at first so hard that the friction burned his fingers through the paper but then more slowly and then more slowly still. Like some clumsy, creaking wheel, he ground to a stop. He dropped the sandpaper and stood motionless, one hand upon his statue, staring numbly at the bare walls of the studio.

Deserted, he was like an old man who sees the last of the guests to the door and returns, stretching, and yawning, to an empty room. Now I am alone again, he says. Finally. We can get down to what I have been waiting to do.

What is it I have been waiting to do?

First it was like a picnic. I mean that I planned it with the same kind of bottled-up, excited energy. I lay awake all Thursday night making mental lists of what I would need for the children—just the essentials. We were finally getting down to the essentials again. I calculated the earliest time I could telephone Brian in the morning, and I decided on seven. Which was too early, as it turned out. I have forgotten the pattern of life without children. Brian answered sounding hoarse and sleepy, and he didn’t seem to be thinking well. I said, “Brian, do you still have that house by the river?”