Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Children?” I said. “You got as far as talking about children?”

“Carol did, I said.”

“You said she couldn’t have any children.”

“Oh, well, she’s talking now about going to a doctor for some tests. Wants me to get tested too.”

“What would they test you for?”

“To see if it’s me that can’t have them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s hardly ever the man.”

“Fifty per cent of the time it is.”

I stared at him.

“Why, sure,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I’m not going, don’t worry,” he told me. He laid his hand over mine. “You’ll see, in a week she’ll move out again.”

“But — what about now? I mean, how are you arranging it? Where is she sleeping?”

“Mary. Look. There’s nothing to get upset about. I’m here with you eating lunch, aren’t I? I won’t let you down. Whatever happens, I think of you as my responsibility. Believe me.”

“Responsibility,” I said.

“I’ve been through a lot for your sake, Mary. I’m jeopardizing my divorce, I’ve given up motorcycle rallies—”

“Well! Are you sure I’m worth the sacrifice?”

“Be reasonable, will you?”

Reasonableness was why I left with him. He was so reasonable and cool; life with him would be so different. I said, “Tell me something. Why did you ask me to come away with you?”

“Now, Mary—”

“No, I mean it. Why didn’t you wait till you were divorced, if you were so reasonable?”

“Well, you know why. I said we might wait and you said no, we’d better do it now or not at all. You didn’t even stop to pack a bag. Once you’d made up your mind you wanted to get going, you said. You weren’t the kind to—”

“Oh, never mind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear what kind I was. I didn’t want to learn any more, ever, about how I appeared in other people’s eyes.

We took Darcy back to the boarding house because she was cross and sleepy. After I put her to bed we came out and sat in the parlor — I in an easy chair, John perched on its arm. He kept stroking the inside of my wrist. “Don’t,” I told him.

“This isn’t like you, Mary,” he said.

“It isn’t like me to go out with someone whose wife is waiting at home either.”

“In time,” he said, “this will all be over. It will seem like nothing. You’ll look back on it and laugh.”

“Well, it may be over someday, and it might seem like nothing,” I told him, “but I will never look back on it and laugh. I don’t feel as if I will ever laugh again.” Then I looked at his face and saw the boredom and irritation drawn across it like a curtain, removed as soon as he found my eyes on him. His mouth was tugged permanently downward by two acid lines at the corners; that much of his expression he could not remove. Think, I told myself, of the clean cut of him, the precision, the logic and decisiveness. Isn’t that why you’re here with him? His forefinger chafed my wrist like sandpaper, as if my skin were peeled back and he were stroking raw nerves. I stood up suddenly, pretending to have heard some sound from Darcy, and I went into the bedroom. Darcy was fast asleep. She lay sprawled across our bed, her mouth slightly open, her hairline damp with sweat. I heard John come up behind me and I felt his hand on my hip. “She’s asleep,” he told me.

“She’s tired out.”

“We’re all alone,” he said.

“No, we’re not. I’m sure Mr. Pauling is up in his studio.”

“Come with me to the couch.”

“Are you crazy?”

I moved his hand away but he stayed close behind me. “What do we care about Mr. Pauling?” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “I wish you would leave now. Will you go on home to your wife, please?”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He stood there a moment longer but I wouldn’t even turn to look at him. I wanted him gone. I wanted to pick Darcy up and sit with her in a rocking chair, just the two of us, shut away from everyone. Yet when he did go (stepping too lightly, as if I were asleep as well), I was angry at him for leaving. I felt abandoned as soon as I heard the front door shut. I sat down on the bed; I took one of Darcy’s stockinged feet and held it tight for comfort, while the tears spilled over and came streaming down my face.

A long time later Mr. Pauling came by with a carpet sweeper and a dirty gray dust rag. I heard the sweeper’s wheels roll through my doorway and then stop short. “Oh,” Mr. Pauling said, “I’m sorry, I thought—”

“That’s all right.”

“I thought you were still — but I’ll come back another—”

“No, please. Go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”

I stood up, digging in my pocket for a handkerchief. Mr. Pauling remained in the doorway. When I sidled past him I could smell the Ivory soap on his white, white skin. I kept my eyes down, hiding the tears, so that all I saw of him was his pale plump chest above a fishnet undershirt. “Please, is there anything at all I could do to help?” he asked me.

That one single piece of kindness shattered me. “Oh, Mr. Pauling,” I said, and I took a step closer and bent to lay my face upon his shoulder. I don’t know why. I felt the shock hit him — a short breath inward, the handle of the sweeper clanging against the door and then dropping to the carpet with a thud. He kept both his arms behind him, like someone under surprise attack. Already I was sorry I had scared him so. I thought, Good Lord, I wonder what I will take into my head to do next. I had started trying to smile, to be ready to draw back and face him and apologize, when I felt one of his hands rise up and pat my arm. Little soft pats with the fingers tight together. Little warm breaths stirring a wisp of my hair. “Oh there, oh please,” he said, “please don’t cry, Mrs. Tell.” I shifted my face into the crook of his neck. I put my arms around his waist, which felt soft and had too much give to it. “I just can’t stand to see you cry,” he said. His voice wavered, as if he might start crying himself. Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke.

These are some of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded: using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances. Some days he woke to find the weather sunny and his health adequate and his work progressing beautifully; yet there would be a nagging hole of uneasiness deep inside him, some flaw in the center of his well-being, steadily corroding around the edges and widening until he could not manage to lift his head from the pillow. Then he would have to go over every possibility. Was it something he had to do? Somewhere to go? Someone to see? Until the answer came: oh yes! today he had to call the gas company about the oven. A two-minute chore, nothing to worry about. He knew that. He knew . Yet he lay on his bed feeling flattened and defeated, and it seemed to him that life was a series of hurdles that he had been tripping over for decades, with the end nowhere in sight.

On the Fourth of July, in a magazine article about famous Americans, he read that a man could develop character by doing one thing he disliked every day of his life. Did that mean that all these hurdles might have some value? Jeremy copied the quotation on an index card and tacked it to the windowsill beside his bed. It was his hope that the card would remove half of every pain by pointing out its purpose, like a mother telling her child, “This is good for you. Believe me.” But in fact all it did was depress him, for it made him conscious of the number of times each day that he had to steel himself for something. Why, nine tenths of his life consisted of doing things he disliked! Even getting up in the morning! He had already overcome a dread before he was even dressed! If that quotation was right, shouldn’t he have the strongest character imaginable? Yet he didn’t. He had become aware lately that other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.