Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

I didn’t answer.

“Olivia?”

She left. I heard her clacking into the kitchen, sighing, clacking out again.

When Jeremy woke up I said, “Why aren’t you working?”

“Working.”

“ I didn’t cause you to stop.”

Something made him raise his eyes, maybe some tone in my voice. I was so hurt. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

“I finished the piece,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, then.”

He didn’t say when he was planning to start another.

It must have been a weekday. Miss Vinton was gone and I couldn’t see Mr. Somerset. The cat was hunched on the drain-board in the kitchen, turning his flat green eyes on and off. I felt sick to my stomach. “I don’t want breakfast,” I told Jeremy. “Let’s go look at your piece.”

He was finishing the little finicky toast rims that Miss Vinton had left in her cereal bowl. “Another time,” he told me.

“I want to see it now.”

“Olivia?”

“Now, Jeremy.”

We climbed the stairs. It was like returning to your childhood home — everything looked smaller and dingier. Clothes were overflowing a hamper in the upstairs hallway and on the windowsill was a vase containing a single brittle flower, stone dead. The closed door of my room seemed pathetic. We went on climbing. I was out of breath and darkness kept swooping in on my eyesight. When we reached the studio I said, “All right,” but all Jeremy did was go straight to his armchair. I had to look at his piece on my own.

Imagine a wooden soft drink crate, only bigger, standing on end. A set of compartments, and in each compartment a different collection of objects. Like an advertisement showing a cross-section of a busy household. Was it the telephone company that used to do those? Yes, Bell Telephone, demonstrating why you need an extension in every room. Or maybe some other utility. Flameless electric heat, maybe. I ought to remember; I certainly pored over them enough as a child. In one room would be Junior with his stamp collection, in another Sis was dressing for a date, in the bathroom Dad was showering and Mother stood over the stove in the kitchen. Only in Jeremy’s piece, there were no people. Only the feeling of people — of full lives suddenly interrupted, belongings still bearing the imprint of their vanished owners. Dark squares upstairs full of toys, paper scraps, a plastic doll bed lying on its side as if some burst of exuberance had flung it there and then passed on, leaving such a vacancy it could make you cry. Downstairs food, wheels, a set of jacks, a square of very bare green carpeting. Other things too fragmented to make out. I had to lean forward and squint, and give up finally, and settle back on my heels and shake my hair off my face.

“Why not just go on and make a dollhouse?” I said.

He rocked in his armchair, staring out the window.

“What do you call it? ‘Ode to the Suburbs’? ‘Hymn to Mary’?”

He kept rocking.

“ ‘In Praise of the Good Life’?”

I went around to the front of his armchair, where he would have to look at me. “Finally I get to where I understand, and then this is the piece you show me,” I said. “But you I don’t understand. Never. Jeremy? Wasn’t I what you needed? Surely you’re not going to say she was. Are you? Was she?”

But even when I stood directly in his line of vision, it didn’t seem that he saw me. His eyes were as flat as that cat’s eyes in the kitchen. He saw beyond me, without even having to try. There was a small trembling smile at the corners of his mouth. Only crazy people smile like that.

All I had to pack were the few things I’d brought in my knapsack — jeans and T-shirts, two of each. I left behind my ice-blue blouse and my shiny white Mexican dress and my white trenchcoat and my gray smock with the shimmery embroidery across the yoke. I packed some fruit and a box of granola. I was starved. I slid into my sandals and went out into the street.

How did it get so cold? All the leaves were down. The wind blew straight through my shirt and I had to hug the knapsack against my chest to keep warm. What I had planned was to walk out a ways and then hitch a ride on some larger street. I was thinking of going south. I didn’t want any two-block errand-runners picking me up. But it was so cold that I started right in thumbing where I was, walking backwards down a line of parked cars. People whizzed past staring sideways, as if they didn’t know what to make of me. Then the traffic light at the end of the block turned red and the cars started coming slower, preparing for the stop. I saw a Cadillac with tinted windows, one lady driving it all alone. A plump cheerful lady wearing a hat. I thought surely she would stop for me. I held my thumb higher, so that the cold air prickled all the little hairs on my arm. I looked straight at her through the windshield as she rolled closer. Please, lady! I’m only eighteen and a girl to boot, and it seems much brighter and colder out here than I had expected. I didn’t know the sky would be so wide today. Won’t you please give me a lift? But the car rolled past. I was so sure she would stop I had already turned, ready to reach for the door handle. She didn’t even look at me. Just slid on by, leaving me standing there with my mouth open and my teeth chattering and my heart about to break. Now, why couldn’t she have let me in? She had so much space! She seemed so nice! Her car looked so warm! Would it have hurt her any just to reach across and give me a smile and open the door? Why did she leave without taking me along?

First he tried making a woman seated at a sewing machine, but the curve of her back kept coming out wrong and after a while he gave up. Then a child with a cat, but he lost interest halfway through. Then a girl braiding her hair, which he finished because he made himself, but he knew it wasn’t right. Lines came out knotty, angles awkward, flat planes lumpy and uneven. He kept ripping things out and then neglecting to replace them, sitting instead on a stool beside the piece while his hands went on working at useless tasks, at picking a cuticle or creasing the material of his trousers. Why couldn’t I have been a musician, he wondered, and played what other people have already written down? Why not a writer, just giving new twists to words I already know? Yet Miss Vinton, bringing him cocoa, smiled at the statue of the girl and said, “Why, it’s Darcy!” He was only modeling the people he had seen in real life, wasn’t he? No. There was no way to sum people up; he was making new ones. An imaginary family. He stroked the imaginary Darcy’s hand with a touch like a feather. Then he shook his head. “Sorry,” Miss Vinton said. “I thought — here, I brought some cocoa. I won’t keep you from your work.” She went out on tiptoe, protecting his concentration. All she saw of him was the seamless exterior — Sculptor at Work. She never guessed at the cracks inside, the stray thoughts, tangents of memory, hours of idleness, days spent leafing through old magazines or practicing square knots on a length of red twine or humming under his breath while he tapped his fingers on the windowsill and stared down at the people in the street. A morning of half sleep on the couch in the corner, five minutes changing the slant of the statue’s eyes, an afternoon playing with a tube of Christmas glitter powder.

He had heard that suffering made great art, but in his case all it made was parched, measly, stunted lumps far below his usual standard.

In his sleep he worked so hard that sheer exhaustion woke him up. He dreamed of cutting scraps of moonlight, strips of rain-spangled air, long threads of wind. Arranging them took such effort that he could feel his brain knotting. It seemed that he was aiming for some single solution, as in a mathematical problem. “Is this it? Is this it?” No answer. No click in his head to tell him he was finally right. He awoke feeling strained and damp, hoping that morning had arrived, but it hadn’t. He always found himself in an opaque darkness, behind drawn shades and closed curtains, swaddled in grayish bedclothes. His life, he thought, was eye-shaped — the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass Mary and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room. The silence hummed, and sometimes voices leaped out of it and startled him. He knew they were not real. They were accidental, something like the cells formed by molecules colliding and combining. He heard his sister Laura praising a friend’s needlework, Pippi talking to a lady-bug, a long-forgotten medical student requesting a new study lamp — all those separate eras weaving themselves together in his head. Mary asked if he needed new pajamas. Had her voice really been that young, once upon a time? Why, when they first met she must have been barely twenty-two. He had never thought much about that before. To him she had always been calm and stately, ageless, classical. Only now he remembered her flashing laughter and the pounding of her feet up the stairs and the whimsical, pigtailed paper dolls she used to make for Darcy. Her easy tears, her tempers with the children and the sudden way those tempers would disappear in swift, impulsive hugs that reminded him of reunions after journeys. How had he managed to overlook all that? He had loved her for the wrong qualities, the ones that were least important or that perhaps she did not even possess. He had ignored the ones that mattered. “How’s your supply of socks?” she asked him. Behind her words he heard sparks and ripples, maybe even laughter, maybe directed at the absurdity of the subject they were discussing.