Infinite Home (14 page)

B
ECAUSE
HE
HAD
A
DIFFICULT
TIME
looking right at him, or acknowledging the way Paulie made him feel, which was happy and panicked both, Edward started filming. Capturing Paulie in a frame, no less keeping him there, was a task Edward met with varying dedication. So often the footage took the pattern of Paulie on-screen, his bright and tiny teeth exposed and shining, his body forever batting like a moth to keep up with his wilderness of thoughts, and then the picture instantly as empty of him as it had been full. In one of Edward’s first attempts, Paulie discussed Canada geese.

He’s sitting on his kitchen counter, dangerously close to the plastic vase of fresh flowers Claudia places there each Monday, wearing a turquoise zip-up sweatshirt with the strings pulled taut so that the hood forms a circle of tension around his cheeks and chin. (“Like an Eskimo,” he says earlier in the tape, when Edward asks about it, “with a new style.”)

“They fall in love only one time, Eddy. These guys and gals are for keeps with their feelings. Once they know, they know. But if one of them goes away, and by that I mean dies, Ed, the other says, no way can I abide this”—here Paulie spreads his arms to indicate the wingspan of lone eternity that lies ahead, and the camera zooms out to reveal it—“and instead of staying with the gaggle, which is what their friend group is called, Ed, the sad goose flies alone for the rest of his life. He stops grooming so his feathers get to looking like monsters, he moves over all kinds of trees and lakes without ever getting to say, again, ‘Hey, do you see that? Do you see how green that is?’”

Paulie lets the strings of his sweatshirt go slack; his face opens while he considers the gravity of this, and the camera hovers on his eyes and lips again. Then the great hole of his mouth flaps open and in a flash he’s gone—“
What is that bug?”
yelled from just off-screen—and replaced by a peeling patch of paint. The camera, exhausted, remains in place while exclamations continue. There is, inevitably, a bang, a silence. Edward’s sigh fills the sonic space. The film cuts.

Over weeks and then months, the cache of recorded bits of life accrued
.
Paulie in full color, making his way down their street in the first hints of spring, backpack so high it almost meets his head, stopping to crouch at chalky, budless flowerboxes and yelling,
“Hey in there, unborn motherfuckers!”
and the sound of Edward’s sniggering at his influence on Paulie’s vocabulary. Paulie in a quiet moment on the stoop, leafing through
Popular Science
with eyes wide: “Ed, do you think you could really trust something that reproduced with itself?” Paulie prone on Edward’s visibly lumpy red cotton couch, asleep, one arm dangling off as though to exhibit his watch, the arms of which forever circle a miniature Aldrin and Armstrong taking a giant leap for mankind. Paulie on his thirty-third birthday, wearing a conic and glittering hat as well as the tie Claudia has fashioned him from streamers, standing at his keyboard, triumphant, hammering away.

Late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, Edward let these play back, sometimes stopped to edit, trim a life down to its brightest core. Other nights he turned off all other sources of light, the standing lamp and the screen of his phone and the microwave display, and just watched.

B
EFORE
T
HOMAS
HAD
HEARD
HER
CRYING
, he’d heard her singing. He hadn’t mentioned it when she had first begun taking him in, reaching across his chest and squeezing as they slept, but sometimes when she spoke to him it recalled the strain of her voice, through the wall, reaching a note, of the guitar rising to meet it. Only two or three sung words had ever reached his apartment from hers, few enough that they could have come from the street, or a film played at a low volume somewhere in the building.

He was curious, wanted to hear her, but there were so many other unanswered questions—Who had she been before this? What had driven her to a life so compacted?—and so he had not asked her about the sounds, which trembled high and faded slowly. Dustless old guitars, steel strings taut on smooth wood, leaned here and there around her apartment, and he looked at them with something akin to lust, knowing they’d interacted so closely with the pulsing of her throat and the pursing of her mouth.

After seeing her play and sing at Edith’s party, he’d begun to feel greedy. He wanted to experience that sound alone, watch her long fingers curl and move up and down the neck, to hear her voice without the interruptions of drunk people. So when he found the bulging notebook wedged between the thick novels on her nightstand, the careful lists in her inconsistent handwriting, he was hungrier than usual, less gentle, more insistent.

“Adeleine,” he called to her where she stood in the kitchen, boiling water in a faded tin kettle and soaping some mugs. “What is this?”

If she was angry at the invasion of privacy, she didn’t let on, save the way she tugged gently at her left ear. “Oh,” she said. “Just songs.” He urged her to go on, appearing behind her, gesturing in tight circles with his index and middle fingers, smiling slightly to relax her. She sighed and settled on a high kitchen stool covered in dark green, beaten leather.

“They’re songs about the things I’ve found. I try to give each of them a story.”

His eyes scanned some of the titles on the page.

Rolodex (red)

Photo (three children, one lawn chair, 1962)

Jar of Marbles (19)

Circus Music box (chimpanzee and bicycle)

Beneath them were lyrics in her tight, variously spiked hand, many words crossed out.

“Are you trying to tell me you’ve written songs for all the objects in your house?”

“Not quite all of them.”

And then, as though in defense of some weaker life form: “They deserve it.”

Thomas sensed her resistance spreading and tried to remove the judgment from his voice. He wanted to find the noble aspect of her motivation, to justify it as she had. Where had she found them, he asked. Did she mean to repurpose them, or tell their original stories, or try to imagine the people who had owned them?

She dismissed him curtly, crossed one knee over the other and glanced somewhere over his left shoulder. “It’s intimate.”

He wondered in blazing silence whether cradling her in her volatile sleep, pushing his tongue between her legs, holding down her hips while she came, did not quite meet that classification. He felt that the elasticity he’d afforded their relationship—to unfold without the usual expectations of reciprocity and honesty, to continue only under her exacting requirements in her cluttered apartment—had been a mistake. He angrily promised himself to stop giving her so much, but he still couldn’t get up to leave.

In what he would come to understand as her concerted generosity, sometime after midnight she roused Thomas from her bed. It was late enough that little light came in from the street, and he could barely make out the strap of her guitar across her chest, the angle of her arms holding up objects that sent several teetering shadows. She brought light to the dusky mauve lampshade on her lace-covered side table and placed the items on the bed, kept her eyes low.

“Pick,” she said.

Still fuzzy from the dream he’d just been having—Adeleine in a taupe cotton shift and rubber boots, backlit by pink sky, pointing at something far up in a tree, another in a series of fantasies he’d had of her outside—he selected an ivory comb. Her breathing was arrhythmic when she began, and her fingers flew between the strings quickly, like insects to sources of sugar. The song concerned the rituals of daily presentation, the careful grooming for an empty job that paid too little. She started into the next without being asked, briefly indicating the object before she began: a Polaroid showing the spectral spaces on a painted wall where framed photos had once hung, a broom leaning against a wall. The words she had composed in honor of it were quiet and kind, and they wondered: will the house remember us when we’re gone?

When she stopped he removed the instrument from between them, caught her flushed face in his hands, mashed his nose against hers. As their eyelashes met briefly, he saw that she was proud, and he tried to determine if what he felt about her was pride. He wished he could see her behind the wheel of some long and gleaming American car, could watch the circle of leather spin under her hands as they made wide, elegant turns. He fell asleep teasing that want, following it to the image of Adeleine at some peeling picnic table, setting cheeses and apricots on little napkins, placing her hands at its edges and swinging her legs in, settling down on the bench and calling to him, insistent, eager.

T
HE
THIN
STRUCTURE
of the building ensured that no sound was contained by the apartment that produced it: the three floors gave and received heavy-footed trips to the refrigerator and unsnoozed alarm clocks and the burst-and-whoosh of bath faucets and late-night infomercials in a reliable cycle. Living with the proof of other people’s lone domestic movements had become a kind of comfort for the tenants, a telephone that didn’t require they speak into it, a letter that didn’t ask for a reply. Several bleak sunsets and seasonally ambiguous days into March, just after four in the morning, the sound of Edith in the stairwell bounced up and down, with increasing depth and urgency, until they all decided to meet it.

Paulie emerged first, in a blue terry cloth union suit with one back button undone, carrying the lamp shaped like a crescent moon with a cherubic face smiling from the center. He joined her where she sat, exactly halfway between the second and third floors, and plugged the light into the nearby outlet. Still waking from a dream of a doomed romance between a Labrador and a Roman candle—the dog catching the sparks in its mouth and yowling—Paulie did not ask her why she was crying, just laced his right hand’s fingers in hers. Claudia, with her sixth sense concerning his whereabouts, appeared shortly after, having awoken to find him gone. She settled on the stair below them and admired the way her curly-haired brother took naturally to the care of others, considered in her half-sleep how strange it was that she and her parents had spent exasperated lifetimes asking Paulie to conform to the rest of the world.

“I don’t want to go,” Edith said. “I want to go home.” Her voice sounded like the decline of a music box, gasping but still percussive. Edward, who had lain awake eavesdropping for a good ten minutes before joining them, lingered with a palm on his doorframe, caught in a role familiar to him. He was saddened by the proof of someone else’s pain and embarrassed by the open acknowledgment of it: he had perfected the art of devising clever ways to describe his inadequacies but felt like an unwelcome guest around those who wanted to dissect their own. That night, he knew it was wrong to remain there listening, so he washed his face and clenched his body and ascended the stairs.

He stood over the three of them, feeling too large for an event so delicate; Claudia, sensing his discomfort, tugged the sleeve of his sweatshirt and urged him downward. Edith’s sobs had paused but her shaking continued, and Paulie, in a gesture Edward could recognize as noble, continued to wipe at her face with his sleeve.

Thomas and Adeleine came last, floated down the stairs clasping hands, still groggy from the rich sleep of people new to sharing a bed. Dressed in cotton pajama sets in different shades of blue and blinking rhythmically, they appeared somehow synthetic, like projections of slides or photorealist paintings. From where they sat above her, Thomas made circles on Edith’s back with the palm of his hand, and Adeleine began to braid the scant fluff of white hair behind her ears. Edward wondered when everyone had agreed upon such silence, and with a jerk like a quarter horse outside a bodega suddenly brought to motion, he narrowed his eyes and put a hand on the very tip of Edith’s left foot. Edith’s body continued to buck, though in incrementally smaller movements, and Paulie began to speak. He tried to whisper, to suit the hush of shame they all felt at their inability to reach her, but delicacy of volume was a skill he had never mastered.

“I think we all need to give our friend Edith something she can take back to bed with her,” he said. “We are all going to say one thing we like about Edith. I’ll start.
I
like how she lets these monster sounds out. Okay, Eddy, you go.”

Edward had closed his eyes in the hope of disappearing, or encouraging Paulie’s swift span of attention to move past him. His sweating feet caught the low light and glistened.

“Maybe you should hold my moon for help.”

Edward opened his eyes and saw the glowing thing coming quickly, almost violently, towards his face. He received it as though it were covered in mold and held it with four tensed fingertips. “Oh god. Okay. One thing I like about Edith is that . . . is that she hasn’t raised the rent in fourteen years.”

Claudia gave a swift but robust pinch of Edward’s ear and began. As she spoke, she focused her gaze on her brother. “I like how Edith appreciates all different kinds of people.”

“I like the way Edith respects time,” said Adeleine. “And also privacy.”

Paulie nodded with violent enthusiasm, sending a bounce through his hair. Thomas fixed his vision on Edward’s awkward cradling of the lamp.

“The more I know of Edith, the more I like,” he said, and bent and kissed the wilted skin of her cheek, which blanched, then tensed. Her closed eyes opened and she looked repeatedly from one face to another, blinking like a late-night traveler under the fluorescent lights of a gas station. “I’m so glad,” Edith said, “you could make it.” She brought up her hand and rotated it with some wonder. “It’s so nice of you to come.”