Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler Page A

sunlight, talking over our plans. John said that someone had seen us together in a restaurant and told his wife. “I believe it’s made her jealous,” he said. “You know how she is.” (Although I didn’t know, at all.) “She wants to have her cake and keep another piece waiting in the tin. As soon as she heard she came right over to the house all dressed up, sweet as sugar, asking questions.”
    “There’s no law against your taking someone out to supper,” I said.
    “That’s what I told her.”
    “She
goes out with other people. All the time, you said.”
    “Let’s not talk about her, shall we?” he said. “It’s too nice a day.”
    I feel that way when he talks about Guy, too. I don’t like seeing Guy through someone else’s eyes. Then his leather jacket and tooled boots start seeming ridiculous, and I am aware how his grammar must sound to outsiders and I feel hurt for him and protective. It’s
me
that’s being insulted as well—six years of my life are tied up with Guy. I changed the subject. I said, “How come you brought your camera?”
    “I’m planning to take some pictures of Darcy.”
    On the days when John can’t visit I start hating him, even though I know it’s not his fault; but when I see him again he does something like this, thinking up an outing and photographing Darcy, and then I remember why I came away with him in the first place.
Guy
would never do anything like that. Oh, Guy took her picture, of course—with a camera he got for trading off some motorcycle parts—but he always wanted her dressed up first in those pink organdy frills he liked and he would arrange her hair in artificial-looking curls and seat her on the best piece of furniture. He called her his princess. His doll baby. Darcy is no doll baby. She thinks about everything—I
see
her thinking—and if there is a mess around she will get into it and she is never still for a second. I don’t believe Guy even knew all that about her. The only time he paid her any notice was when his friends came by and he would show her off like a souped-up car, setting her someplace high and prinking out her skirt just so. “Ain’t she a doll baby? You ever seen anything cuter?” Now John goes down on his knees in the sand, fixing his lens on Darcy, who is sugared overwith sand like a doughnut, one of her playsuit straps dangling into a bucket. “Keep still,” I tell her, but he says, “No, no, let her be.” He holds up a light meter, fiddles with mysterious buttons. By profession he is a photographer. He owns a small studio that is still just getting off the ground, which is why it takes so much of his time. Before studying photography he went to college. He is calm and well-ordered and he considers every question from all sides. As far removed from Guy as a man can get. What would have happened if I’d met John before Guy?
    I met John when he was shopping for motorcycles. He had just become interested in them. He ran into Guy at some rally outside Baltimore and the following week he came all the way to Partha, looking to see what Guy had in stock. I should explain that by then Guy was managing the filling station, but he had more or less branched out into motorcycles. We lived on the first floor of the house next door, and between the house and the station was a shed that Guy kept filled with spare parts and any used bikes his friends were trying to sell or trade. When John came by I was out in the yard hanging clothes. “Like you to meet a friend of mine,” Guy said. “John Harris. He’s thinking of buying him a cycle.”
Thinking
is right. He was the most well-thought-out man I’d ever seen. For four solid weeks he tested different models, read up on them, asked questions, went off to different dealers, returned to Guy to see if he had anything new. And when he finally did buy it wasn’t from Guy at all, but some man in Baltimore. By then he and Guy were friends, though. Not what you would call
close
friends;