Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“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 three 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.