Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Strings?” said Jeremy.

“Isn’t that what this is all about?”

“I don’t understand.”

Mary looked at him. He had been trying to catch her eye, but now that he had it he seemed unable to face her. He was not used to dealing with angry women. He had never pictured Mary angry at all. He said, “This is so puzzling. I don’t see—”

“Yesterday,” said Mary, “as soon as it was clear I’d missed paying my rent, you came calling in my room and brought me flowers. Well, I didn’t think anything of it at the time but then later I — and today! You come knocking again! Do you feel that now you have some hold over me? Because all I owe you is money , Mr. Pauling, and I will be happy to borrow elsewhere and pay you this minute and be out of your house tomorrow. Is that clear?”

“Oh, my goodness,” Jeremy said. He lowered himself to the couch again. Horror curled over him like an icy film, followed by a rush of heat. He felt his face grow pink. “Oh, Mary. Mrs. Tell,” he said. “I never meant to — why, I was just—” Now a picture came to him of exactly how he had looked to Mary Tell the day before. He heard the tentative mumble of his knuckles on her door, he saw his sickly, hopeful smile, beseeching her for everything as he stuck his bouquet under her chin. This was something he was never going to be able to put out of his mind; he knew it. He was going to go over and over it on a thousand sleepless nights, all of them spent alone, for a woman like Mary Tell would never in a million years give a thought to a man like him. He should have guessed that. He felt himself beginning to tremble, the final indignity. “Mr. Pauling?” Mary said.

“But I’m a good man,” he said. “What I mean to say — why, I never even knew you owed me! I don’t keep track of that money, the others just put it in the cookie jar.”

“Cookie jar?”

If he spoke any more she would notice his voice was shaking.

“In the cookie jar, Mr. Pauling?”

“The cookie jar in the kitchen. Then I take it out to buy groceries whenever—” He gulped, a sound she must have heard three feet away. She came closer and bent over him, but he kept his head ducked. It was the worst moment he had ever lived through. He didn’t see how it could possibly go on for so long. Couldn’t she leave now? But no, he felt the sofa indenting as she settled down beside him. He saw the edge of her blue skirt, such a calm, soft blue that he felt a flood of pain for those few days when he had loved her and had some hope of her loving him back. “Jeremy,” she said. “I feel just terrible about this. Won’t you say you forgive me? I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m going through a bad time just now and I must have — Jeremy?” She leaned closer and took one of his hands. “Look at me a minute,” she said.

Why not? It didn’t mean a thing to him any more. He raised his eyes and found the perfect oval of her face level with his. The inner corners of her eyebrows were furrowed with concern. “Won’t you accept my apology?” she said. He had to nod. Then he even smiled, because it had finally dawned on him what was happening: They had been discussing an issue as old-fashioned as Mary Tell herself, and here they were side by side holding hands in this second stage of their courtship.

Mornings now he woke feeling hopeful, and getting up was easier. He started being careful of his appearance. He began wearing a pen-and-pencil set in his shirt pocket — a sign of competence, he thought. He practiced smiling with his mouth shut, hiding a dark turmoil of bad teeth. In the bathroom mirror the thought of Mary hung like a mist between himself and his reflection. Her long cool fingers reached into his chest. He carried her image downstairs with him, treading gently as if it might break up and scatter like snowflakes in a paperweight. When the other boarders greeted him he sometimes failed to answer, but that had happened before and none of them thought anything of it.

Then why did his vision of Mary Tell always turn out to be wrong? Oh, not wrong in any concrete way. He had got her nose right, and the set of her head and the shape of her mouth. But when she entered the kitchen, tying an apron around her waist and smiling at Darcy’s chatter, there was some slight difference in her which both disappointed and awed him. Her skin had a denser look and the planes of her face were flatter. Her manner of moving was more purposeful. In his mind she glided; in real life she stepped squarely on her heels. Every night he forgot that and every morning he had to learn it all over again.

In the beginning she used to make bacon and eggs for breakfast, but now their diet had changed. She and Darcy filled up on cold cereal. “We always have this,” Darcy said. “I know, honey,” said Mary, and then she told Jeremy, “Yesterday I heard of a job addressing envelopes. Do you think they’d let me do it at home? I’m going to see them today and ask, and if they say yes we’ll never eat cornflakes again.” But that job fell through, and so did the next one and the one after that, and they continued to eat cornflakes while Jeremy sat at the table with them trying to think up topics of conversation. He kept a glass of orange juice in front of him, although he never drank it. (It was impossible to swallow with Mary watching.) He rehearsed a hundred sentences offering help, what little he could manage: “Could I lend you some of the cookie jar money? Well, then, eggs? Just eggs?” But he never said any of them out loud. He was afraid to. Rinsing off their little stack of dishes Mary bustled so, as if she were daring him to feel sorry for her. Then she said, “All right, Miss Slowpoke, ready to go?” and she and Darcy would set off on their walk. Which was another change: in the beginning Mary waited for her friend to call before she went out. Now she went immediately after breakfast, and the few times the telephone rang it was never for her.

“Going on your walk?” Jeremy would say. “Well now. Have a good time.” They passed through the house calling goodbyes, singing out greetings to Mr. Somerset, letting two doors slam behind them, ringing the air like a bell, and then all of a sudden the house would fall silent and the rooms would seem vacant and dead. The only sound was the creak of an old dry beam somewhere. A distant auto horn. Mr. Somerset’s papery slippers shambling across the dining room floor.

Jeremy was like a man marooned on an island. Why had that taken him so many years to realize? He was surrounded on four sides by streets so flat and wide that he imagined he could drown in air just walking across them. Yet look, a four-year-old managed it without a thought! Oh, if it weren’t for this handicap he could invite Mary Tell to a movie and then bring her home and kiss her outside her door as he had seen done on TV, and that would be the end of all his planning and worrying. It would be so simple! Instead, here it was August now and he had not taken one step toward kissing her and it began to look as if he never would.

Then one morning the telephone rang and no one was in the hall to answer it but Jeremy. Even before he picked up the receiver a knot of anxiety had settled low in his stomach. “Hello? Hello?” he said, and was answered by a voice he had not heard in weeks, but he recognized it instantly. “Mary Tell, please,” said the cigarette-ad man.

“Oh! Well, I’ll see,” Jeremy said.

Then he went into the dining room and knocked on her door. “Someone wants you on the telephone,” he called.

She took a minute to appear. She was already dressed, carrying her apron in her hand, and she looked startled. “Someone wants me?” she said. “Who is it?”

“Why, I believe it’s your friend, the young man.”