Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

Now a child tossed him an orange and he caught it by accident, astonishing himself so much that he dropped it again. He fell in with a parade that followed the old refrigerator down to the basement, which was dark and dank and smelled of mildew. The basement walls were lined with case lots of Mary’s household goods. There was an entire cabinet of sneakers, waiting to be grown into. Another of toilet paper. A barrel of detergent big enough to hold two children. Was this necessary? He felt that she was pointing something out to him: her role as supplier, feeder, caretaker. “See how I give? And how I keep on giving — these are my reserves. I will always have more, you don’t even have to ask. I will be waiting with a new shirt for you the minute the elbows wear through in the old one.” A delivery man knocked over a stack of flowerpots, bought on sale in preparation for spring. Somebody stepped on a cat. “Damn it all,” said the other man, “will you please get those kids of yours out of here? Will you get them out? They ain’t giving us room to step.”

The children vanished, but their giggles lurked in all the corners. The men went upstairs to bring in the new refrigerator and Mary followed, giving instructions. Jeremy came last. He felt old and tired. By the time he reached the kitchen, puffing and wiping his forehead, the refrigerator was already moving into place. It stuck out too far into the middle of the room and it blocked four inches of doorway. “Isn’t it too big?” said Jeremy. “Mary, I feel so — it seems so crowded here.”

But Mary said, “You’ll get used to it.”

Then she turned and smiled, and in front of everyone she threw her arms around him and said, “Oh, Jeremy, don’t be a grump. Isn’t it nice that you keep winning us things? Aren’t you glad you’re so lucky?”

With people watching he couldn’t hug her back, but he smiled so widely that it seemed his face was melting.

He and Mary went to the gallery to see his one-man show — just the two of them, in Miss Vinton’s car. Mary drove. She wore a hat, also Miss Vinton’s, the first Jeremy had ever seen her in. Jeremy wore his golf cap. He was feeling a little sick. He held tight to the edge of the seat every time they turned a corner, and he kept swallowing. “How are you, Jeremy?” Mary said.

“Oh, fine, fine.”

“It isn’t far now.”

She had been to the gallery before. She had been visiting it for years, checking on how his pieces were arranged every time Brian took in a new batch. But Jeremy had never set foot in it, and only the importance of this occasion — an entire show devoted only to him, already bringing in more money and comment than he had ever imagined — made it impossible for him to refuse to go. Not that he hadn’t tried. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s my own work. What’s the use of looking again?” But they left him no escape. Mary and Brian and the others had set things up among them. Miss Vinton lent her car; the boarder Olivia babysat. Mary said, “We’ll go on a weekday when the place is not packed,” and Brian said, “No one will know you, Jeremy. And you might even learn something! It’s been years since you last saw some of your pieces.” That was the argument that won Jeremy over. He thought of all the work he had produced — objects he had looked at for so long that he couldn’t see them anymore, things that had worn him out and sickened him until he handed them to Brian merely to get rid of them, to free himself to go on to something new. What would they look like now?

So here he was, in Miss Vinton’s dusty-smelling car on this clear cold afternoon in April, gazing around him at what appeared to be some sort of bomb damage in the middle of Baltimore. Whole blocks were leveled; nothing but rubble remained. Beyond were caved-in tenements showing yellowed wallpaper, tangles of pipe, crumbled understructures of something like chicken wire. “Mary? What seems to be the trouble here?” Jeremy asked. Mary only gave the scene a glance. “Oh, they’re rebuilding,” she said, and drove on. Jeremy shrank back further in his corner of the car.

He and she looked at different things. They might have been taking two separate rides. “There’s an interesting place,” she said. “It’s a shop for hippies; they sell tie-dyed denim that would make wonderful curtains for the children’s rooms.” And later, “That’s a new office building without any windows, but they say you don’t notice that once you’re inside.” Sometimes she explained things to him that he had known for years. Did she imagine he was deaf and blind? “Look, there’s a girl with a bush. Isn’t it amazing? They call it ‘natural.’ ” He had been seeing girls with bushes for years, in magazines and TV commercials and on the sidewalk before the bay window. He had probably seen more from that window than Mary saw on all her trips to stores and schools and obstetricians. He had observed the world steadily swelling and involuting, developing new twists and whorls and clusters like some complicated cell mass — first inch by inch, then faster, so that now it seemed that after the briefest holing-up in his studio he could come back to find everything changed: people stranger, cars more vicious-looking, even the quality of light altered in some indefinable way. But he had kept up with things. He knew what was going on in the world. Mary underestimated him.

The gallery was a narrow white building with an awning that extended across the sidewalk. It sat on a quiet street among other buildings very much like it, out of sight of the bomb damage. “Well, at least it’s not too big,” Jeremy said, but as he stood on the sidewalk waiting for Mary to put a coin in the parking meter he had the feeling that this gallery outclassed him somehow. Certainly, if he had been a mere passerby, he would have been intimidated by that great glassy door with its gold grillwork. He would never have gone in on his own. “Mary,” he said, “are you sure that this is a proper time for us to come?”

“I told you, Jeremy. People are never here on weekdays.”

“Why do they keep it open, then?”

She didn’t seem to have an answer for that.

In the foyer, lit by a yellow light, was a piece that Jeremy remembered from three or four years ago: an old man going through a wire trashbasket. The man himself was made of dull brown wrapping paper, crushed and reflattened. The basket was a network of all the glittery things he had been able to lay his hands on — small skewers for trussing poultry, a knitting needle, a child’s gilt barrette, a pair of Abbie’s school scissors with “Lefty” on the blade. Within the basket was a cluster of bright colors formed from postage stamps and cigarette packs and an old bandanna handkerchief that Mr. Somerset had left lying on the couch one day. “Haven’t they done it nicely?” Mary asked him. “I told Brian, it’s the perfect keynote for the show. I’m glad they set it up at the beginning this way.”

“Yes, yes,” said Jeremy. But he was uncomfortable. He had never seen his work in such a setting before, among thick red carpets and hushed sounds and golden light. From some hiding place in the back of his mind a picture leapt forth of the model for this piece — an old man he had seen from the bay window, rummaging in the trashbasket one cold November day. He remembered the dry grayness of the man’s skin, nothing like this warm brown wrapping paper, and the claw-like fingers and silently moving lips. None of it was caught in his piece. He sighed. “Jeremy?” Mary said. “Aren’t you happy with it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and moved on.

Past the hallway, behind the wall where the old man was displayed, stretched a larger room flooded with light and carpeted also in soft deep red. Five or six people were moving around it, stopping before each piece. He noticed the people before anything else. All but one were women, and they were whispering together about his work. His. He felt like rushing up and flinging his arms out, shielding what he had made. Two fat ladies stood in front of one of his old collages, one that was still two-dimensional; a girl made her way too quickly down a row of his statues. His smallest statue, the first he had ever made, sat on a wooden column: a woman hanging out washing. A curve of tin among stiff white billows that he had formed by spraying canvas with clear plastic. He remembered conceiving the idea and then wondering how he could set it in a frame. It had taken him weeks to think of making it a statue. He had worked fearfully; he had felt presumptuous, using up so much vertical space. But now a tag beside it read “From the Collection of Mrs. Herbert Lee Cooke”—one of the richest women in Baltimore. She had bought the statue the first day it was shown. And there were tags or “Sold” stickers beside most of the other pieces as well — each statue taller and more solid than the one before it. He wandered among them, dazed, holding his golf cap and chewing the tip of his index finger. He had never realized that he had produced quite this many things. Why, some people might consider him an actual artist, by profession. Was that possible? He pictured all those hours spent alone in his room, patiently fitting together tiny scraps, feverishly hunting up the proper textures, pounding in a row of thumbtacks until the back of his neck ached — all that drudgery. It wasn’t the way he pictured the life of an artist.