Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  When he went through the art supplies he knew exactly what he was doing. For the first time he seemed perfectly sure of himself. He held a sheet of blue glass to the light and squinted at it and then set it in a sort of vertical rack beneath a counter; he shook a can of adhesive next to his ear; he rotated a ten-color ballpoint pen I’d lifted on impulse from a display card on my way out of the shop. I liked the way he held it in both hands, so respectfully, as if he understood it in some deeper way than ordinary people could. Oh, he was really getting to me. “That’s on the house,” I said. He looked over at me. “I mean it’s a present, it’s from me to you.” He set the pen down on a table. Maybe he didn’t like getting presents. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood there a minute, frowning at the pen, before he turned and picked up his brush again. Not very good movie material. They could make this a silent film and never miss a thing. “Tell me, Jeremy,” I said. “Don’t you ever go to bars or cafés or anything?”

  “What? Oh, no.”

  “Seems to me you’d want to go someplace like that.”

  He finished painting a cubbyhole gray. He switched brushes and started on another: yellow. Every little crack covered completely, the brush prodding a knothole over and over with patient, stubborn, whiskery sounds until it was filled in.

  “Look, where are all those mad happy artists I’m always hearing about?” I asked him. “Don’t you ever go drinking or anything? Don’t you have any artist friends? Don’t you ever dance with them or get drunk or sing songs?”

  His eyes when he looked up were so pale and empty, I thought he would sink into one of those staring spells, but he surprised me. “I believe,” he said, “that the last happy artist was a caveman, coming back from the hunt and dashing off a picture of it on a stone wall.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, what about—”

  “Or maybe not,” said Jeremy. “Maybe not, even that far back. Maybe he was lame, not allowed to hunt, and he stayed home with the women and children and drew those pictures to comfort himself.”

  “How do you figure that?” I said. “How do you know the caveman didn’t stay home because drawing took so much out of him, he couldn’t hunt?”

  It wasn’t for nothing I asked him that. Sometimes it seemed to me that Jeremy got up looking like other men and then faded away as he worked, as if art erased him somehow. As if each piece were another layer scraped off him, when already he was down to the quick. But if he heard me, he didn’t take me seriously. He was off on some track of his own. “I often dream that I’m a caveman,” he said.

  “Oh, do you?” I said. I love to talk about dreams.

  “It’s always back before men could make fire, you understand. They observed it, yes, but only when lightning struck and forests caught fire by accident and burned themselves out. In my dreams I sit all night watching the treetops, hoping that within my lifetime something will be set on fire for me to see.”

  “Maybe it’s a message,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Something supernatural.”

  “Oh. Perhaps.”

  I said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t you just love talking this way? You never did, before now. I was beginning to wonder about you. Don’t we get along beautifully together?”

  “What? Oh. Surely,” Jeremy said.

  Then he set the yellow brush down and chose an ivory one, and when he looked up at me a moment later I might as well not have been there, his face was so slack and his eyes so transparent.

  I went to O’Donnell’s Gallery, looking for some clue to Jeremy. This was in July, but I wore my white trenchcoat with the belt ends stuck in the pockets because that always makes me feel more in control of things, and I didn’t take my sunglasses off even inside. Galleries tend to make me go to pieces. I told Mary that once, when she asked if I wanted to see Jeremy’s one-man show, and she laughed. She thought I was speaking figuratively. Mary never goes to pieces. I don’t believe she is capable of it.

  Now Jeremy’s show was over and I was sorry I had missed it, but there was still plenty of his work around. All lamplit against white walls. Displayed like that, it didn’t appear to have been made by human hands. I found collages of his, a few small early statues, a more recent one standing in the middle of the room. I looked at the recent one first. I was counting on some chink of light to open for me, but it didn’t. What was I supposed to make of this? A man pushing a wheelbarrow, webbed around with strings and pulleys and chains and weights. He was mostly plaster, but you could find nearly every material in the world if you looked long enough. It seemed as if Jeremy had thrown it together in some kind of frenzy. Painted sections faded suddenly into carving, carving into découpage, and down the man’s chest I found words hurriedly etched with some sharp instrument—“A heavy cup of warm …”—trailing off where he ran out of space, as if he had thrown his knife away in some fit of impatience and had reached blindly for what came to him next, a sheet of burlap or a glue bottle or a coil of wire. I didn’t get it. I moved backwards in time, past the smaller pieces, on to the collages. I took off my sunglasses, but that didn’t help. Besides, my neck was beginning to ache. That always happens when I get frustrated. So I gave up, but I did have one last thing to do before I could leave. I went to the owner, who sat in a little office at the rear. He was riffling through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard. Good-looking man with a beard. “Hi,” I said.

  He smoothed the papers and looked up at me. He said, “Well, hi.”

  “I notice you have some pieces by what’s his name, Paul? Pauling? Now I’m not buying just this moment but I did want to say that I hope you know how good he is. He’s the best guy you’ve got. How come you price him so low?”

  “It’s Olivia, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “I saw you once in Mary’s kitchen when I was carrying out a piece,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m Brian O’Donnell.”

  “Oh,” I said. I put my shades back on. “Well. Sorry. I just thought I’d throw in a vote for him while I was here.”

  “Good idea. How is he?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “I saw him last week but he said he didn’t have any pieces ready.”

  “No, but he will,” I said. “Really, he’s going to have a lot, very soon now. Very different from his other stuff. It’s a transformation. You know his wife left him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now I am with him.”

  “You are?”

  I pulled the belt ends out of my pockets and buckled them. I stuck out my hand and said, “Well, good seeing you.” He stood up and leaned across the desk. His palm was stippled from the back of the clipboard. He held onto my hand even after I had started to pull away. “You’re with Jeremy?” he said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “You’re—are you—?”

  “You must come and see us sometime,” I said.

  “Well, all right.”

  “Only not right away, of course. He still has a few tag ends to finish up. See you later.”

  “Sure thing,” said Mr. O’Donnell.

  I slung my purse over my shoulder and left. I could feel him staring after me. Outside it was about ninety degrees, but still I was glad I’d worn my trenchcoat.

  I am not as disorganized as I look. I see the patterns, I can put two and two together as well as anyone. And what I’d figured out so far was that if I went on being Jeremy’s link with the outside world, buying his glue and fixing his breakfast, I was going to turn into another Mary. That’s how these things happen: inch by inch. What I had to do was get inside, somehow. Get in his little glass room with him, where it would just be the two of us looking out. Mary never did that, but I was going to. All right, I knew he was old. The first time I saw him he seemed ancient, and peculiar besides. Shaking hands with him was like taking hold of a warm pastry. But that was before I saw him clearly. I saw him clearly as soon as Mary left. I started to feel some pull on me, something in that situation, that artist sitting alone t
hree storeys off the ground, that woman who could leave a man in crumbs just by removing herself from his world. Why, she was his world! Why couldn’t I be? Only better, closer, more understanding. How do you get into a man like that? Where is the secret button?

  I said, “Your whatchamacallit is going well, Jeremy.” Though all I could see was that he had finished painting the cubbyholes and started putting bits of junk in them. “It’s quite, it’s really something,” I said.

  “But is it unique?”

  This wasn’t the first time he had asked me that.

  “Would you say it was unique?”

  “Well, of course,” I said.

  “Is it—you don’t see anybody else in it, do you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Mary, for example.”

  “Mary?” I said. What he had added in so far was a bicycle bell, a square of flowered wallpaper, and a wooden button.

  “I keep having the feeling that Mary is coloring things in some way.”

  But the color I saw was actual, a sheet of blue glass he was cutting up with a little thing like a pizza wheel. I felt like laughing. Then I got depressed. When was I going to figure out what his work was all about? I had expected it would just come to me—that one day I would walk in the studio door and suddenly understand what he meant. But it hadn’t happened yet.

  “As if I were seeing through her eyes,” he said.

  “Seeing—?”

  “But of course that’s not true. I see for myself.”

  “Of course.”

  “I see for myself.”

  “Sure. All right.”

  “There’s no one else in it, there’s not a fragment, there’s not a single other person.”

  “All right, Jeremy.”

  I stopped going out. I stopped answering the phone. I let mail stack up on the sideboard. Mealtimes Jeremy and I went down to the kitchen together and ate an entire box of chocolates or Miss Vinton’s liverwurst or nothing at all, it didn’t matter. If he was working I lay on the couch in the studio and swung one foot in the air. I looked at the skylight. I knew all the cracks and dead leaves on it. He didn’t work very much, though. I had thought he would go faster than he did. Some days he just doodled on a scrap of paper, or sat in his armchair chewing his fingernails, or walked around and around his piece without ever once looking at it. If I spoke, he wouldn’t answer. I stopped trying. I lay back and watched brown leaves scuttle across the skylight in the wind.

  What we did most was watch television in the dining room. Of course that wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing, but I was trying to see things through his eyes, after all. I sat beside him and watched from morning to night. I’d never guessed how caught up you can get in television programs. On the soap operas people’s lives were ruled by some twisted design underlying everything, something we were too ignorant to see. On the panel shows they talked back and forth so courteously, their faces so cool and untextured. Look how they waited for one speaker to stop before another began! Look at the way they chose their tones without a second’s faltering—a cheerful tone after a dark one, a question, a trill of laughter, a note of sudden firmness. All so perfectly orchestrated. How well behaved they were! I turned toward Jeremy and opened my mouth. I wanted to see if I had the same effect when I spoke, but unfortunately I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway.

  In the afternoon there was Sesame Street. I was afraid it would remind him of his children, but it didn’t seem to. He watched it like a child himself. When the numbers zoomed out at him he started and then relaxed. He always hoped today’s number was a high one that took a lot of singing. He laughed in all the funny places, and bounced a little in his seat. Well, they were kind of comical. There was one skit in particular—a thing where a little puppet complains that nothing but a skinned finger has happened to him all day. Then it turns out he skinned his finger running from a dog and the dog was running from a lion who was let loose by a monkey when the fire engine hit the monkey’s cage … well, I don’t remember the exact events but Jeremy certainly did enjoy it. They must have showed it about twenty times over, and every time he sat forward in his seat to peer and nod, and when it was done he would sigh and look down at his knees.

  In the evening there were the adventures, a lot of chases and escapes. Jeremy watched everything but the shows where innocent men were suspected of some crime. Then he would say, “No, no, that’s no good”—he didn’t like feeling anxious for people. He would ask me to locate a comedy, or some medical show where the only deaths were preordained. When the commercials came on, the senior citizens used the time to go get a sweater or a bite to eat but Jeremy and I sat still. These things can grow on you after a while. You admire the actors’ faces. You get fond of the background music. That funny little chewing gum dance. The Coca-Cola song where everybody seems to like each other.

  When bedtime came Jeremy went without saying good night. I might as well not have been there. First he would blink and then rub his eyes and then he would wander off, sort of aimlessly, and a little while later I would hear the water running in the downstairs bathroom. Then I would go to bed myself. I didn’t sleep well. I lay curled on my side for hours, listening to the house settle down and grow quiet as if it were folding itself up, huddling inward away from the world outside. Or if I slept I might suddenly awake, at two or three or four in the morning. I sat up strangled in bedclothes, much too hot, dry-throated. It was September now and some nights the steam heat came on. The radiators warming up smelled dusty and bitter; the house seemed like an old person, all rattling bones and coughs and stale breaths.

  Other painters have blue periods and rose periods, but Jeremy didn’t. His changes were in depth, not color. A flat period, a raised period. A three-dimensional period. What comes after three-dimensional? Four-dimensional. “You’re making a time machine,” I said to him.

  “Hmm?”

  “That explains all those weird thingummies you’re sticking in.”

  “Weird? I don’t understand why you say that.”

  But there he went, gluing a plastic banana from Pippi’s toy grocery store into the lower right-hand cubbyhole. Next a curly-handled baby’s feeding spoon. Poor Rachel. Objects sat jumbled in every cubicle, most of them metallic. The whole thing had the makeshift look of some mad inventor’s scale model. Is it any wonder I thought of time machines?

  “Time must be the explanation for everything,” I told him. “Time loops. Little tangles in time that get knotted off from the main cord. You, for instance,” I said, and he looked up. “Do you know why you make your pieces? You’re in a time loop.”

  “I am?”

  “You’re cut off from the main cord. That’s how you see clearly enough; you have more distance. Maybe this statue is a sort of notation, like what archeologists jot down when they’re on a dig. You’re just visiting. But are you aware of it?”

  I didn’t expect him to take me up on that, but he did. Not to the point, exactly, but, “I’ve often thought,” he said, “if I went back, you know, back in time somehow, I would never be able to show anyone how to make a radio.”

  “Why would you want to?” I asked him.

  “What I mean is that the twentieth century has been wasted on me, don’t you see.”

  “Of course. It’s not your time.”

  “I wish it were,” Jeremy said.

  “No, Jeremy! Don’t you get what I’m saying? If you weren’t off in a time loop you wouldn’t be making pieces the way you do.”

  “I still wish,” Jeremy said.

  Then he sat down on the floor and began peeling dried glue from his fingers, like a surgeon stripping off his rubber gloves. Usually that meant he had finished work for the day. His schedule was so peculiar—three hours walking around and around the piece giving it quick shy glances, then ten minutes’ work and down he would go in this sodden heap on the floor. I slid off the couch and squatted in front of him. “Ghosts, now,” I told him. “I’ve just figu
red out what they are. Do you know?”

  “No.”

  “They’re people from the past, our ancestors, come to visit us in a time machine. Well, of course! Maybe they’re here by accident. Maybe they don’t even know what’s happened to them. They wander in. ‘Good heavens,’ they say, what’s going on? How’d I get here?’ Then they step back into their time loop, try another period. That’s why they keep fading away like they do. I bet you’ve haunted a lot of places, Jeremy.”

  “I feel so hungry,” Jeremy said.

  “Martians, take Martians. How come we think they’re from another planet? They’re from our planet, Jeremy, twenty centuries in the future. Wearing helmets against our outdated atmosphere and looking a little different on account of evolution. Our descendants, come back to do a little historical research.”

  “Well, perhaps,” said Jeremy. “You may be right.” He gathered glue peelings into a little heap on the floor. He said, “Do you know how to make waffles?”

  “No.” I took the glue peels from him and rolled them around in my hand. I had so much I wanted to say to him, and it wasn’t very often he would let me get face to face like this. “Have you ever had something just vanish, with no explanation? And you never found it again?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Maybe your descendants took it.”

  “They did?”

  “The Martians, so-called. Maybe it’s their weakness, sticky fingers. Some of our belongings, you know, will be priceless antiques someday, and of course the Martians know exactly which ones. Know what we should do when we find something missing like that? Buy about twenty more. Like an investment. Why, right now I’ve lost my belt with the fringe. I’ve looked everywhere for it. In the fortieth century they may not even wear belts. Shouldn’t I buy a whole stack and save them up?”