Celestial Navigation (11 page)

“No, I mean it. Why didn’t you wait till you were divorced, if you were so reasonable?”

“Well,
you
know why. I said we might wait and you said no, we’d better do it now or not at all. You didn’t even stop to pack a bag. Once you’d made up your mind you wanted to get going, you said. You weren’t the kind to—”

“Oh, never mind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear what kind I was. I didn’t want to learn any more, ever, about how I appeared in other people’s eyes.

We took Darcy back to the boarding house because she was cross and sleepy. After I put her to bed we came out and sat in the parlor—I in an easy chair, John perched on its arm. He kept stroking the inside of my wrist. “Don’t,” I told him.

“This isn’t like you, Mary,” he said.

“It isn’t like me to go out with someone whose wife is waiting at home either.”

“In time,” he said, “this will all be over. It will seem like nothing. You’ll look back on it and laugh.”

“Well, it may be over someday, and it might seem like nothing,” I told him, “but I will never look back on it and laugh. I don’t feel as if I will ever laugh again.” Then I looked at his face and saw the boredom and irritation drawn across it like a curtain, removed as soon as he found my eyes on him. His mouth was tugged permanently downward by two acid lines at the corners; that much of his expression he could not remove. Think, I told myself, of the clean cut of him, the precision, the logic and decisiveness. Isn’t that why you’re here with him? His forefinger chafed my wrist like sandpaper, as if my skin were peeled back and he were stroking raw nerves. I stood up suddenly, pretending to have heard some sound from Darcy, and I went into the bedroom. Darcy was fast asleep. She lay sprawled across our bed, her mouth slightly open, her hairline damp with sweat. I heard John come up behind me and I felt his hand on my hip. “She’s asleep,” he told me.

“She’s tired out.”

“We’re all alone,” he said.

“No, we’re not. I’m sure Mr. Pauling is up in his studio.”

“Come with me to the couch.”

“Are you crazy?”

I moved his hand away but he stayed close behind me. “What do we care about Mr. Pauling?” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “I wish you would leave now. Will you go on home to your wife, please?”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He stood there a moment longer but I wouldn’t even turn to look at him. I wanted him gone. I wanted to pick Darcy
up and sit with her in a rocking chair, just the two of us, shut away from everyone. Yet when he did go (stepping too lightly, as if I were asleep as well), I was angry at him for leaving. I felt abandoned as soon as I heard the front door shut. I sat down on the bed; I took one of Darcy’s stockinged feet and held it tight for comfort, while the tears spilled over and came streaming down my face.

A long time later Mr. Pauling came by with a carpet sweeper and a dirty gray dust rag. I heard the sweeper’s wheels roll through my doorway and then stop short. “Oh,” Mr. Pauling said, “I’m sorry, I thought—”

“That’s all right.”

“I thought you were still—but I’ll come back another—”

“No, please. Go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”

I stood up, digging in my pocket for a handkerchief. Mr. Pauling remained in the doorway. When I sidled past him I could smell the Ivory soap on his white, white skin. I kept my eyes down, hiding the tears, so that all I saw of him was his pale plump chest above a fishnet undershirt. “Please, is there anything at all I could do to help?” he asked me.

That one single piece of kindness shattered me. “Oh, Mr. Pauling,” I said, and I took a step closer and bent to lay my face upon his shoulder. I don’t know why. I felt the shock hit him—a short breath inward, the handle of the sweeper clanging against the door and then dropping to the carpet with a thud. He kept both his arms behind him, like someone under surprise attack. Already I was sorry I had scared him so. I thought, Good Lord, I wonder what I will take into my head to do next. I had started trying to smile, to be ready to draw back and face him and apologize, when I felt one of his hands rise up and pat my arm. Little soft pats with the fingers tight together. Little warm breaths stirring a wisp of my hair. “Oh there, oh please,” he said,
“please
don’t cry,
Mrs. Tell.” I shifted my face into the crook of his neck. I put my arms around his waist, which felt soft and had too much give to it. “I just can’t stand to see you cry,” he said. His voice wavered, as if he might start crying himself. Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke.

These are some of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded: using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances. Some days he woke to find the weather sunny and his health adequate and his work progressing beautifully; yet there would be a nagging hole of uneasiness deep inside him, some flaw in the center of his well-being, steadily corroding around the edges and widening until he could not manage to lift his head from the pillow. Then he would have to go over every possibility. Was it something he had to do? Somewhere to go? Someone to see? Until the answer came: oh yes! today he had to call the gas company about the oven. A two-minute chore, nothing to worry about. He knew that. He
knew
. Yet he lay on his bed feeling flattened and defeated, and it seemed to him
that life was a series of hurdles that he had been tripping over for decades, with the end nowhere in sight.

On the Fourth of July, in a magazine article about famous Americans, he read that a man could develop character by doing one thing he disliked every day of his life. Did that mean that all these hurdles might have some value? Jeremy copied the quotation on an index card and tacked it to the windowsill beside his bed. It was his hope that the card would remove half of every pain by pointing out its purpose, like a mother telling her child, “This is good for you. Believe me.” But in fact all it did was depress him, for it made him conscious of the number of times each day that he had to steel himself for something. Why, nine tenths of his life consisted of doing things he disliked! Even getting up in the morning! He had already overcome a dread before he was even dressed! If that quotation was right, shouldn’t he have the strongest character imaginable? Yet he didn’t. He had become aware lately that other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.

If he tried to conquer the very worst of his dreads—set out on a walk, for instance, ignoring the strings that stretched so painfully between home and the center of his back—his legs first became extremely heavy, so that every movement was a great aching effort, and then his heart started pounding and his breath grew shallow and he felt nauseated. If he succeeded, in spite of everything, in finishing what he had set out to do, he had no feeling of accomplishment but only a trembling weakness, like someone recently brushed by danger, and an echo of the nausea and a deep sense of despair. He took no steps forward. It was never easier the second time. Yet all through July, the hottest and most difficult month of
the year, he kept attempting things he would not have considered a few weeks ago. He went at them like a blind man, smiling fixedly ahead of him, sweating and grim-faced, pretending not to notice that inwardly, nothing changed at all. He drew from wells of strength that he did not even own. And the reason, of course, was Mary Tell.

Did she know how much courage went into his daily good morning? How even to meet her eyes meant a suicidal leap into unknown waters? “Good, good morning, Mrs. Tell,” he said. Mary Tell smiled, serene and gracious, never guessing. He held tight to the doorframe and kept his knees locked so that she would not see how they trembled. Face to face with her, he felt that he was somehow growing smaller. He had to keep tilting his chin up. And why did he have this sensation of transparency? Mary Tell’s smile encompassed the room—the dusty furniture, the wax fruit on the sideboard, and Jeremy Pauling, all equally, none given precedence. Her eyes were very long and deep. The fact that there was no sparkle to them gave her a self-contained look. It was impossible that she would ever need anyone, especially not Jeremy.

Yet at night, as he lay in bed, he went over and over that moment when she had put her arms around him. She had needed him then, hadn’t she? Like an old-time heroine in one of the Victorian novels his mother used to read to him, she had come in desperation, with no one else to turn to—and out of shock he had responded only scantily and too late. He tied his top sheet into knots, wishing the moment back so that he could do the right things. He tried to recall the smallest details. He took apart each of her movements, each pressure of her fingers upon his ribcage, each stirring of breath against his throat. He turned over all possible meanings and sub-meanings. He wondered if he had made some magical gesture that caused her to think of him in a time of trouble,
and what gesture was it? what trouble was it? What made women cry in modern times, in real life?

But most of all, he wondered if it might ever happen again.

Flat on his back in the dark, sleepless after his inactive days, he spent hours constructing reasons for her to turn to him. He imagined fires and floods. He invented a sudden fever for her little girl. Mary Tell would panic and come pound on his door, carrying an antique silver candlestick. He would be a rock of strength for her. He would go for the doctor without a thought, no matter how many blocks from home it took him. He would keep watch beside the sickbed, a straight line of confidence for her to lean against. Her hair would just brush his cheek. What color was her hair? What color were her eyes? Away from her, he never could remember. He saw her in black-and-white, like a steel engraving, with fine cross-hatching shading her face and some vague rich cloak tumbling from her shoulders. Her clearest feature was her forehead—a pale oval. In the novels his mother read to him, a wide ivory brow stood for purity and tranquillity.

Oh, if only he had a horse to carry her away on!

Mrs. Jarrett said, “That poor Mrs. Tell, she doesn’t get out much. Her friend hardly comes at all any more, have you noticed?”

Jeremy, watching television with the boarders, revived Mary Tell from a swoon and held a glass of brandy to her lips. He didn’t answer.

“I had been hoping he was
more
than a friend,” Mrs. Jarrett said.

“Who is this we’re speaking of?” asked Miss Vinton.

“The gentleman Mrs. Tell was seeing. Remember? Now he hardly comes at all. Have you noticed him lately, Mr. Pauling?”

Jeremy said, “Well …”

After a while they gave up waiting for the rest of his answer.

Nowadays his collages filled him with impatience. He became conscious of the way his eyes tightened and ached when he looked at them too long. He started wishing for more texture, things standing out for themselves. He had an urge to make something solid. Not a sculpture, exactly. He shied away from anything that loomed so. But maybe if he stacked his scraps, let them rise in layers until they formed a standing shape. He pictured irregular cones, their edges ridged like stone formations on canyon floors. He imagined the zipping sound a fingernail would make running down their sides. But when he tried stacking his scraps they turned into pads, mounded and sloping. He took them away again. He went to stand by the window, but his impatience grew and extended even to his physical position: his moon face gazing out from behind the tiny clouded panes, his hands limp by his sides, fingers curled, his feet so still and purposeless, pointing nowhere in particular.

How did people set about courtships? All he had to go on were those novels. When he thought of courting Mary Tell he imagined taking her for a drive in a shiny black carriage. Or dancing across a polished ballroom—and he didn’t even know which arm went around his partner’s waist. Yet it seemed as if some edginess were pushing him forward, compelling him to take steps he would never ordinarily think of. He pictured a high cliff he was running toward with his arms outflung, longing for the fall, not even braced to defend himself against the moment of impact. Then maybe the edginess would leave him, and he could relax again.

He returned to the collage. He slid colors ceaselessly across the paper, like a man consulting a Ouija board. Imaginary
voices murmured in his ear. Scraps of conversation floated past. He was used to that when he was working. Some phrases had recurred for most of his life, although they had no significance for him. “At least he is a
gentle
man,” one voice was sure to say. He had no idea why. Of
course
he was a gentle man. Yet the voice had kept insisting, year after year. Now that he was trying to concentrate, pushing away the thought of courting Mary Tell in an opera box, he absently spoke the words in a whisper. “At least he is a—” Then he caught himself and straightened his shoulders. Other voices crowded in. “If in any case and notwithstanding the present circumstances—” “I don’t know how to, don’t know how to, don’t know how to—” “If in any case—”