Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page B

was all. Just tired and chilled. The next morning I rose as bright as a penny and I handled all the arrangements, every detail. But that one night I must have been at a low point and I lay on my back in the dark, long after Laura was asleep, going over all the objects I had ever lost while some hard bleak pain settled on my chest and weighed me down.

2

Spring, 1961: Jeremy
    Jeremy Pauling saw life in a series of flashes, startling moments so brief that they could arrest a motion in mid-air. Like photographs, they were handed to him at unexpected times, introduced by a neutral voice: Here is where you are now. Take a look. Between flashes, he sank into darkness. He drifted in a daze, studying what he had seen. Wondering if he
had
seen it. Forgetting, finally, what it was that he was wondering about, and floating off into numbness again.
    Here is his pupil, Lisa McCauley, climbing the stairs to his studio. Jeremy climbs behind her. He has descended to answer her ring, opened the door, greeted her, without once being aware of what he is doing. He has forgotten how he came to be here. All that is on his mind is a circle of blue paper he left upstairs on his drawing table. Is it too bright? Too smooth? No, the problem lies in its shape. A circle; difficult to work with. He will have to cut it into angles.
    “It’s spring,” says Lisa McCauley.
    Then the flash, which stops him dead. He stands on the stairs with his mouth open and watches Lisa McCauley’s nyloned legs shimmering ahead of him. If he turned the sound of nylon into sight it would make a silver zipper with very fine teeth opening the blackness behind his eyelids. If he touched the gold ankle chain that glints beneath one stocking it would have a gritty feeling; he would keep trying to smooth its echo off his fingertips for a long time afterward. The realness of her is staggering. He could choke on the fine strands of her bones. Her voice seems to displace the air around her, parting it keenly and then slightly flattening itself to separate the halves: “I didn’t mean to be late I thought for once I would be on time I said to myself when I got up this morning I—”
    The flash fades. Darkness descends in particles around his head. He stands in silence, staring down at the dust from the banister that has coated his fingers, until Lisa McCauley nudges him into motion again and he sets another foot upon another step.
    “Purple is my favorite color,” Lisa McCauley said. “I’ve decided to do this entire picture without it, just as an exercise.” She cocked her head, shaking long blond hair off her shoulders. “Mr. Pauling? Are you with me?”
    “Um—”
    “I said, I’ve decided to do without purple.”
    “Isn’t that purple you’re using now?”
    It’s magenta.
    “Ah.”
    He sat on the stool beside the easel, holding the blue circle. His thumb slid back and forth over its surface. In a minute he planned to cut it into angles, but for now something else was expected of him. What was it?
    “Don’t you have any comments?” Lisa said.
    She was painting a sad clown. White tears ran in exactly vertical lines down his magenta cheeks. The pain of looking at such an object caused Jeremy’s eyes to keep sliding away, veering toward the buckles on Lisa’s shoes, although he was conscious of her watching him and waiting for an answer. “What do you think?” she asked him.
    Jeremy said, “Well, now.”
    Her shoes were very shiny but the gilt was flaking off the buckles. Specks of gilt like dandruff were sprinkled across her toes.
    When Jeremy was seven he made a drawing of his mother’s parlor. Long slashes for walls and ceiling, curves for furniture, a single scribbled rose denoting the wallpaper pattern. And then, on the baseboard, a tiny electrical socket, its right angles crisp and precise, its screws neatly bisected by microscopic slits. It was his sister Laura’s favorite picture. She kept it for years, and laughed every time she looked at it, but