Celestial Navigation (31 page)

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.

In the dark his mother’s voice was thinner than a thread, weaving its way through a tangle of other people’s words. “Oh, Jeremy, you were always so … I really and truly don’t …” She spoke with that whispery sigh that meant he had done something wrong—a sigh not of anger but of disappointment. Well, of course. Lying here on his back, watching his mistakes roll across the ceiling, he felt he had done
everything
wrong. “Why, Jeremy?” she used to say (when he spilled his milk, or wrinkled his clothes, or failed to make his bed). “Why are you treating me this way? I’ve been as good to you as I know how to be. Now I see that being good is not enough.” It occurred to him that she had spoken truer words than she knew. Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity,
an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories—clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail—but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft: Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.

On a Saturday morning early in November he went into the older children’s room on the third floor. He braved the tumult that seemed to go on filling the air with noise and movement even this long afterward—circus paintings and laughing dolls and plastic horses and coffee cans overflowing with broken crayons—and he found Abbie’s pink nylon backpack at the bottom of the closet. In the kitchen he made two cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and he put them into the backpack along with an apple, a flashlight, and all the rent money from the cookie jar. He located a city bus map in the
front of the telephone book, and after studying it for a moment he carefully tore out the entire page and folded it over and over and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was ready to go.

Outdoors he was swept by a sudden coolness that he was not prepared for. He was wearing lightweight clothes, and a cotton windbreaker and his gray tweed golf cap. For warmth he kept his arms tightly folded and he walked with short, brisk steps, with the backpack whispering and bouncing behind him. He traveled several blocks, barely hestitating as he came to street crossings. Someone watching very carefully might have seen him swallow, or brace his shoulders, or look a few too many times to the left and right when a traffic light turned green, but otherwise he seemed no different from anyone else. At one corner he stopped and peered up at the street sign a moment, and then he made a turn and kept walking. He was among crowds now. Women sped past carrying dress boxes and string-handled paper bags, looking purposeful. A stroller with two children in it ran over his left foot. At the doorway of the dimestore, teenagers stood around shoving each other and popping their bubble gum and combing their hair and beginning dance steps they never finished. “Excuse me,” Jeremy kept saying. “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me, please.” They didn’t listen. He threaded his way among them, his arms down at his sides now, trying to avoid touching anyone.

The inside of the dimestore smelled of wooden floors and popcorn. It seemed to him that there were far too many people in the aisles. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, but as if he were transparent, no one noticed. He had to make his way to the toy department inch by inch, indirectly. When he finally reached it, he found a girl in a wrinkled smock filing her fingernails behind the counter. “Excuse me, I am going to need six toys,” he told her. She looked up, still filing away. “I need toys to take to my children.”

“Fine with me,” she said.

“Do you have six toys I could take to them?”

She waved the nail file toward the toys, which spilled down not one counter but several and were made up of far too many colors. His eyes began blurring. “Well, I—do you possibly have any suggestions?” he asked her.

“Just look around, is what
I
suggest.”

Rubber, paper, painted tin, plastic in phosphorescent shades of pink and chartreuse. Everything he saw seemed to make him hungry. He felt hollow and weak. “Perhaps—”he said. His hand hovered over a tiny wind-up metal tricycle, ridden by a metal boy, but when he looked up at the salesgirl she only filed a thumbnail and stared past him, refusing even a hint of encouragement. He sighed and moved on. He traveled down the rows of toys and then beyond them, up other aisles, pausing at a rack of coloring books and then again at infants’ wear but still not buying anything. A terrycloth bib bore a painted picture of a baby who reminded him of Rachel, but the words beneath it said “I’m Daddy’s Little Angel” and none of his children had ever called him Daddy. He wondered why not. He wondered if it were too late now for them to begin. But still, he didn’t buy the bib. He imagined that Mary might give him an odd, considering look when she read the words on it, and the thought of that look made him feel foolish.

At the stationery counter he became fascinated by party favors. They hung on hooks, in little cellophane packets—clusters of tiny paper parasols that really opened, plastic cradles no bigger than walnut shells, tin horns with tassels and decks of cards the size of his thumbnail. He hung over them open-mouthed, reverently touching first one packet and then another. “Help you?” a woman said, but he shook his head. He made himself leave the favors and think of children’s things again—masses of balloons in a plastic bag, striped paper hats, then stationery with pictures of little girls in the
upper left-hand corner. Stationery? He wasn’t sure which of his children were literate. He returned to the party favors, and found beneath them a section containing small white spherical packages tied with blue ribbon. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman. “I was wondering what was in these.”

“These here? Surprises.”

“I mean—could you tell me what the surprises
are?”

“Now, if I knew that,” she said, “they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”

“No, I suppose not.”

They were sold in packs of three. He could buy two packs and they would come out even. Also he thought it would be exciting to have gifts that were so mysterious. Who knew what might be hidden inside? Perhaps occasionally they filled a package with a real treasure, something worth far more than the price. As soon as he thought of that, choosing became difficult. He didn’t want to make any mistakes. He picked up a pack and then dropped it, picked another, burrowed deep down to find the bottom-most one. From time to time he looked up at the woman and gave her a small friendly smile, but she never smiled back at him. Still, he felt he was making the right decision. When he had paid for them he took off his backpack to put the surprise balls inside, and the smooth way they fit between his cheese sandwiches gave him a feeling of competence. He had chosen well, unerringly, with all his instincts working for him. He was still smiling when he left the store.

Now he pulled the bus map from his pocket and checked it one last time, although he had already memorized where he should go. It was very important to find the corner where his particular bus stopped. If he forgot, or had misread something, he could be lost for days. He might never get home again. Perhaps he should not have attempted this. But the surprise balls rustled crisply in his pack, and the map pointed
out his bus stop very clearly, and if he went home now he knew that he would despise himself forever, he would spend the rest of his life chewing the bitter knowledge that he hadn’t a single spark of courage in him. He set out toward the bus stop, walking more slowly now and holding the map in front of him, blindly folding and unfolding it.

At the corner he wanted he found four people already waiting, which was encouraging. They stood below a blue sign bearing the number of his bus. He checked the number against the map, thought for a moment, and then checked it again. Everything was in order. He smiled at the other people. They looked around him, through him, above him. There was a woman in elastic stockings, a teenaged boy, a soldier, and a younger boy with his hands in his pockets. For some reason their skin appeared to be all the same shade of rough, dry pink and their hair straggled down in identical brown wisps, although they stood separate from each other and were obviously not related. Jeremy felt chilled by them. He thought of his sculptures, in which people like these so often appeared—standard representatives of what Brian called simple humanity, but any time Jeremy went out he was forced to see that humanity was far more complex and untidy and depressing than it ever was in his pieces. The old ladies were rude and sniveling, the men lacked solidity somehow, and the children seemed to carry a threat of violence. Jeremy spent the rest of his wait standing sideways to them—not confronting them but not facing totally away, either, for fear of giving offense—and like them he kept his eyes fixed on an empty spot in the distance.

When finally the bus came, it seemed almost as familiar as home. He climbed into a smell he had remembered without realizing it from thirty years in the past, from the days when he rode to art school or went shopping for clothes with his mother. The air was warm and slightly stuffy. Although
he had to ask the driver what the price of a ticket was nowadays, he noticed that the seats still braced his spine at the same unnatural angle, and the doors still pleated themselves open and shut, and the back of the driver’s neck still gave the impression of kindliness and reliability. Jeremy relaxed and looked out the window. He held Abbie’s pack on his lap now, so that he could sit more comfortably, and as he rode along he kept stroking the slippery pink nylon as he had once stroked the satin binding on his blanket, long ago in childhood, waiting to be borne off to sleep.

Two ladies behind him were discussing someone’s drinking problem. The soldier was whistling. A husband and wife were arguing over a woman named LaRue and up front a tiny black lady was talking to the bus driver. “You ought to seen him when they told him,” she said. “He jumped up and shouted, ‘Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun?’ Planning on shooting his self. Later he wanted to jump into the grave. They had to hold him back by the elbows.”

“Is that right,” the driver said. “Well, I expect he felt mighty close to her.” Jeremy nodded over and over, impressed by the strangeness of what he heard and by the driver’s easy acceptance of it.

Now the landscape outside his window was more open and barren, and the streets were less crowded. He was not sure that he had ever been here before. The scrubby trees far at the edge of the horizon had a desolate look, but in his present mood, when he was so proud of this trip and so hopeful at the thought of seeing Mary again, even desolation gave him the feeling of happiness swelling and unfolding inside him. He thought of things that had not occurred to him for years, some of them sad. He thought of his grandmother Amory, whom he had loved very much, and of the gilt-framed picture that hung in her parlor. A crowd of people in a faded forest. “See that forest?” his grandmother said. “Every bit of it is real. It is made of dried plants, the pines are dried ferns and
the flowers are dried violets.” “How about the people?” Jeremy had asked, not thinking. “Are they dried too?” He thought of Mrs. Jarrett, his mother’s old boarder. Why, he had never properly mourned Mrs. Jarrett’s passing! Grief flashed through him like a sharp white light. How elegant she had been, with her plumed hats and her white gloves! How hard she must have worked to keep up her appearance! He looked around him at the inside of the bus, at the people nodding and agreeing with each other and the soldier whistling his tripping little tune. Then down at his hands, cupping Abbie’s pink backpack. Even his hands seemed dear and sad, and gave him cause for joy.