Celestial Navigation (28 page)

Well, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Actually she was a very ordinary woman, not at all what you’d expect of an artist’s
wife. The wonder of it is that she ever had the good sense to marry him in the first place. So
earthbound
, she was. Always nagging and tidying and bringing him her little domestic problems. Knocking on the door:
“Jeremy
, the storm window man’s here with an estimate and won’t take any signature but yours.
Won’t
you please come out. Do you have any idea what goes into the running of this house?” If they ever start a men’s liberation movement, I’ll join it in a flash. Though of course it’s taken me a while to see her so clearly, I admit it. At first I was just glad to get a roof over my head, someone watching out for me and making me wear my raincoat. But I left a mother just like her up in Pennsylvania, went through all the bother of running away only to end up here in the same kind of stewpot. It’s lucky I finally got wise. When I think how close I came to going over to her side!

All the same, it was sort of a shock at first to discover she was gone.

I went downstairs to make a peanut butter sandwich. By then the senior citizens were in the kitchen scrounging for supper. The two of them got on my nerves, shuffling around the way they did. They seemed to be weaving a net across the kitchen floor. “Listen,” I said. “Mary’s taken the kids and left.”
That
shook them up. Mr. Somerset’s mouth sagged open and he forgot to watch the frying pan. Old lady Vinton went on stirring her eggs but I could tell she was surprised. Her spatula went slower and slower. She kept her eyes on what she was doing. “Took to her heels,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Perhaps she’s off visiting,” Miss Vinton said.

“Who would she visit?”

“Well, now, we don’t know the whole story. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“Like what, for instance.”

“I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”

People say that when they mean that life will get back to the way it was before. It never occurs to them that a change might be for the better.

I said, “I think I’ll take Jeremy a peanut butter sandwich.”

“I don’t believe Jeremy eats peanut butter,” Miss Vinton said.

“He’s never had mine, then. I make it myself.”

Mr. Somerset said, “Yes, yes, we all know that.” Mr. Somerset doesn’t like me. His voice when he spoke to me was all cracked and peevish. “Don’t think I haven’t heard you,” he said, “running that blender to death the minute I set my head on my pillow for my afternoon nap.”

I ignored him. I spread peanut butter on a slice of whole wheat bread. “At
least
I imagine he could use the company,” I said.

“Perhaps he would like to be left alone,” said Miss Vinton.

“That’s for him to tell me, isn’t it?”

“People can’t always say what they feel, Olivia. I imagine he might like to think things through a while, and when he gets hungry he’ll come down and—”

I know her type. Always so virtuous about keeping out of the way, letting others be. It’s an excuse, of course. Aloofness is the easy way out; I believe in plunging right ahead. Slamming the sandwich on a tray and adding an orange (artificially colored, but what could I do?) and marching straight upstairs to Jeremy. Knock-knock. “It’s me, it’s Olivia. You hungry?”

No answer. I went in anyway. He was smoking another cigarette. “Here,” I said, setting the tray down, and then I went over to a half-finished piece and said, “I like it.” I pretended not to notice how deserted it looked. I pretended he was just carrying on with the making of it no matter what, which in my opinion is what he should have been doing. “It’s got a good flow to it,” I said. To tell the truth I didn’t have the vaguest idea what comments were required, but I was going to
learn. I have the deepest respect for artists. I said, “When are you planning on finishing it?”

“I don’t think I will ever finish it,” Jeremy said.

“Nonsense.”

He put the cigarette to his mouth again. You could tell he wasn’t used to smoking. The filter tip barely touched his lips, and he sucked in very quickly and let the smoke out without inhaling it. The pack in his lap said “True”—Miss Vinton’s, then. A namby-pamby brand. “Look,” I said, “do you mind if I just stay a while and see how you work?”

He stopped watching his smoke and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth fell open. I wasn’t expecting so much attention so suddenly. I smoothed my hair back and said, “Of course, if I would
distract
you in any way—”

But then he suddenly got to his feet, he
lurched
to his feet, like someone pulled by strings, and set his fingertips to his mouth and stood swaying there. After a moment he turned and ran to the bathroom and I heard him throwing up. It seemed to go on forever. I sat down on the couch and wound a strand of hair around my finger, waiting for him to come back. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. I had all the time in the world.

Once last winter when I was on my way to work I looked across a street and saw Mary walking her kids home from school. She was heading toward a very busy corner where a crossing guard usually stands, but that day for some reason the crossing guard was absent. A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared. At the moment I happened to glance over, Mary was just arriving in their midst. She carried the baby and held Edward by the hand, and her little girls were around her in a circle. Then the light changed. Down she stepped, into the street. Little hands reached out from all directions; strangers’ children clutched at the hem of
her coat or the edge of her sleeve or the corner of her purse or even the baby’s one dangling, bootied foot; and if they couldn’t reach her they hung onto the coat of a child who could, and off she sailed with her beautiful white face looming high above them keeping watch on all sides for runaway cars and rough boys on bicycles and any other unexpected dangers. What do you suppose it feels like to be so certain of your role? To have such a clear sense of place? I’d been waiting a long time to learn what
my
role was. I kept going to different towns, as if what I looked for were a physical object. At night I dreamed eerie dreams. Voices floated in and out, offering solutions and promises and answers, but when I woke up I could never remember what they had said. Every morning I took Jeremy some nuts and fruit for breakfast, and at noon a sandwich, and at suppertime another, and although he didn’t appear to notice me I stood waiting anyway, hoping to be defined.

I went in one day with a bowl of granola and an apple, and I found him nailing boards together into a sort of box. He was working very slowly, and not on the statue he was on before. That surprised me a little. Mary told me once that he always finished everything he started, even if it wasn’t turning out to be what he wanted; he seemed to think pieces came out of him like olives out of a bottle, and he had no choice but to let the first one out before he could get to the second. Well, I don’t know, maybe this particular olive was only a fragment all along. I set his breakfast down and he said, “Oh. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“You will?”

“Just find your things. Where are your things?”

“What things?”

He straightened up and looked at me. “Aren’t you here for a lesson?” he said.

I didn’t know what to think. As far as I knew he didn’t even
give
lessons. I wondered if he were losing his mind. “Wait, now,” I said. “I’m Olivia. Remember?”

Then his whole face got pink and he began fumbling with the hammer. “Oh,” he said. “I’m so—I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“I must have been—you appear to be somewhat the student type, you see.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not at all.”

Then he said, “No one is purely what they seem on the surface.”

It was the first real thing he had ever said to me. Well, all right, it wasn’t much. But it was a beginning.

He gave me a list of supplies to buy for him at an art shop. The shop bowled me over, I’d never been in such a good place before. It was very small and cozy and it smelled of glue and wood and canvas. The old man behind the counter came about to my waist. He said, “Yes? Can I help?”

“I’d like half a dozen cans of spray adhesive,” I read off the list, “and two tubes of liquid solder and five pounds of scrap stained glass.” I had no idea what I was ordering, but it seemed to make sense to the old man. He kept scurrying around, coming back to set things on the counter. “This is for an artist friend of mine,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Maybe you know him. Jeremy Pauling, he had a one-man show at the O’Donnell Gallery.”

“Pauling, yes,” the man said. He started penciling a column of figures onto a sheet of brown wrapping paper. “We often see his wife,” he said.

“You do?”

“I’ll just put this on the account, shall I?”

“Account?”

He stopped adding the figures and looked up at me.

“Oh. Okay,” I said.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. Sears and Roebuck doesn’t carry
everything
, after all; she’d have had to run errands for him now and then. Still, it sort of spoiled my mood. Especially when the man gave me the package and said, “I hope Mrs. Pauling isn’t sick. She’s
such
a lovely person.”

Of course, he was only a salesman. Salesmen always have to sound complimentary.

By the time I got home again I was feeling better. I climbed the stairs pretending to be in a movie. Maybe someday there
would
be a movie made, right in this house. Some Hollywood actress pretending to be me would bring supplies to an actor pretending to be Jeremy. An American Toulouse-Lautrec. What theme music would they choose? I made up something and hummed it as I went. I was only a side character but powerful, a major influence, and the last scene would show me holding his head as he died. Some major transformation in his art would be dated from the time he met me. I tried to imagine what that transformation would be. When I walked into the studio his new piece was the first thing I looked at, but to tell the truth it didn’t seem much different from anything he’d done in the past. Complicated. Involved. Like one of those poems you give up on after the first couple lines, because even though you know it must be good it takes so much work to read it. He had stood his box construction on end and set in boards horizontally and vertically, as if he were making a cabinet with lots of different-sized cubbyholes, and now he was painting the inside of each cubbyhole a different color. Oh, well. Still in the movie, I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I think you’ve hit on something this time.” He shied away and blinked up at me. “Anyway,” I said. “Here’s the stuff I got you.”

When he went through the art supplies he knew exactly what he was doing. For the first time he seemed perfectly sure of himself. He held a sheet of blue glass to the light and squinted at it and then set it in a sort of vertical rack beneath a counter; he shook a can of adhesive next to his ear; he rotated a ten-color ballpoint pen I’d lifted on impulse from a display card on my way out of the shop. I liked the way he held it in both hands, so respectfully, as if he understood it in some deeper way than ordinary people could. Oh, he was really getting to me. “That’s on the house,” I said. He looked over at me. “I mean it’s a present, it’s from me to you.” He set the pen down on a table. Maybe he didn’t like getting presents. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood there a minute, frowning at the pen, before he turned and picked up his brush again. Not very good movie material. They could make this a silent film and never miss a thing. “Tell me, Jeremy,” I said. “Don’t you ever go to bars or cafés or anything?”

“What? Oh, no.”

“Seems to me you’d want to go
someplace
like that.”

He finished painting a cubbyhole gray. He switched brushes and started on another: yellow. Every little crack covered completely, the brush prodding a knothole over and over with patient, stubborn, whiskery sounds until it was filled in.

“Look, where are all those mad happy artists I’m always hearing about?” I asked him. “Don’t you ever go drinking or anything? Don’t you have any artist friends? Don’t you ever dance with them or get drunk or sing songs?”

His eyes when he looked up were so pale and empty, I thought he would sink into one of those staring spells, but he surprised me. “I believe,” he said, “that the last happy artist was a caveman, coming back from the hunt and dashing off a picture of it on a stone wall.”

“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.