Infinite Home (16 page)

A
FTER
TWO
MONTHS
of cloistered nights spent almost exclusively in her bed, surrounded by the encroaching assortment of archaic coin banks and cardigans embroidered with glass beads and shell-colored moth-eaten lampshades, Thomas prepared himself to broach the issue. It was, he decided, a matter of phrasing.

Do you ever get out of the house?
was obvious on top of insensitive, he thought, but something that merely circled—
Do you prefer to stay home?
—was the kind of inquiry she would cleverly deflect. Her intelligence, unlike her sanity or income or background, was never in question.

In the end, he framed it as an announcement, took her face in his hand late at night in the dark and gave the words with guilt, as though returning something long borrowed to its rightful owner. “You never leave your apartment.”

“That’s true,” Adeleine replied. “And you’ve got scars up and down your arms, ones I assume not placed there by the grace of God, or any accident except yourself.”

Thomas had expected her to crumble at his examination, and the surprise of her competent reversal made him laugh.

“There’s plenty,” she said coldly, as if stabbing at a contract on a long, polished table, “that we haven’t discussed. Did you think I didn’t notice?” Instead of turning away, like he’d witnessed so often, Adeleine leaned over to switch on the golden light, then placed her excessively ringed hands on his shoulders.

“What would you like to tell me”—she ran her fingers down the scars—“about these?”

Her confidence had arrived without notice, and Thomas found the narrative he expected upended: she forged ahead on some mountain, beckoned him to hurry towards the view while he struggled with the bulk of what he’d carried.

“I haven’t,” he said, filled with quiet fear, “since you.”

Adeleine remained above him, wiping at his eyes without fanfare, pulling the blanket closer around them. “Would it help,” she said, “if I told you about me?”

—

T
HEY WATCHED
the streetlamps going off, the doors on the street opening, the precision of morning sharpening the colors of leaves and fire hydrants. She explained to him about the perfectly placed pillows of psychoanalysts’ couches, and pills of different colors meant to regulate a spiked range of crippling emotions: they had told her she was bipolar but not about the specific horrors that made up a life swinging between the two extremes. Not about the manic afternoons in which she would change her clothing sixteen times, or the sheer cliff of the other side of her condition, the slide into bed and the passing of hours there only indicated by the light’s shift from gold to blue to black.

He wanted to know about before, the years preceding the saturation of lithium and various benzodiazepines, and she told him: about the tactical mechanics of waking up amid the belongings of someone months gone and in all likelihood deceased, and how afterward the Internet was filled with the pages he’d abandoned, the snapshots he’d taken of comical typos on deli signs, images of him laughing on stoops with a bottle of wine in one hand. The dissonance between the two, the manifold evidence of his life and the unrelenting fact of his absence, had become untenable to sift through anymore. Thirteen months after, finally gone from their apartment and in her own, armed with or destroyed by the new diagnosis, she still found herself looking for him whenever she left the house, and it was about that time, she told Thomas, that she began on her own kind of vanishing. It was then she began to pile up her nest of glittering curios and nonperishables, her angora sweaters and sundresses meant for extremes in weather she wouldn’t see again, and about that time she stopped leaving.

A memory came to him, teasing at some understanding: his grandfather dying in a mustard armchair, his mother whispering to her sisters, “He’s not eating, he won’t eat
,
” as though it were a political stance the old man had assumed with sudden conviction. In Adeleine’s bed, remembering this, Thomas knew, then tried to un-know: that trying to lead her outside, talking to her of spring, was like his mother crouched by her father, a fork in her hand, convinced that if only she could sneak in a little food through the clamped line of his mouth, the slow drift of his eyes would sharpen. She had stayed there days on end, failing to discern his total inability, speaking to him of the herbed meat loaves she had brought, the tangy quiches and rhubarb pies.

T
HE
NOTICES
, affixed with double-sided tape at all four corners, were smoothed and aligned so precisely that they nearly eradicated the tenants’ memories of the doors without them. It was Claudia, who had been unofficially living with Paulie for two months and four days, who saw them first. She slid down the door and remained there, leaning against it, unable to enter and tell her brother that she no longer knew what to do, that Edith had been the only landlord who hadn’t grown alarmed by the possible liabilities of Paulie living in a place alone. That the best solution she had designed, so far, had been to sleep on his couch and wake with pillow lines on her face and try to do her best at work and entirely avoid the question of her husband, who had stated in too many ways tacit and then not that the care of her frenetic and disabled brother had not featured in their vows.

In these hamstrung moments, she remembered how their mother had looked when she thought no one was watching, how she had peered out the window, a dishcloth hanging from her slack hand, her mouth parted as if to speak out to another life, as if to say,
I could pack very quickly, I could be ready to go very soon.

Upstairs, Thomas used the arch of his back to push his door open. He barely managed to hold the items he carried: a voice recorder, a fifth of Scotch, and four tiny oranges. The latter items were meant as gifts to persuade Adeleine into letting him use the first, and they sat tenuously, the clementines lolling in his palm and the sweating glass wedged between his forearm and chest. The fruit was first to hit the floor, their waxed skins revolving on the dusty wood as he read of his imminent eviction.

He felt sure he could not enter the only space she had and inform her that soon it would cease to be hers, and so he didn’t; he placed the recorder and the Macallan on the floor, slid his fingers under the paper until it popped off: his door, then hers. It crossed his mind that by removing this piece of information in a minor way, he would need to excise it on a larger scale. He had two months. The thought settled and adjusted itself, scanning possible solutions, the question buzzing at his joints as he moved around his apartment, setting out ingredients for the simple meal that would fill him.

O
VERNIGHT
IT
HAD
TURNED
to thick summer. The smells were large—chalky baked soil, barbecue smoke, discarded plastics, rush hour excess—and they squabbled and rivaled for dominance. Thomas and Claudia and Edward sat on the stoop together in light clothing, looking for the youthful feeling the setting and season had once suggested to them, as though soon they might jump in a taxi and pay the driver and meet someone singular and change their life in one night, as though any of them could sustain that kind of mobility and reinvention. Edith’s son had temporarily flown back to whichever place he came from, and it afforded them a short window in which to discuss things, develop a plan if there was one to be had. Thomas was the only one intent on action. Because he sat there full of thoughts of Adeleine and Edith and their need, his convictions were stronger than any that would have developed on behalf of his own well-being.

“Really, I could just move,” Edward said in a clipped voice. “We all could.”

Claudia released the sigh that had been growing, lowered her shoulders, and dragged a palm down her face.

“Right now,” she offered lowly, “right now I can’t—” She didn’t finish the sentence, and it remained unclear what it was she couldn’t do, but the hazy answer seemed to arrange itself in the clotted air between them: possibly anything.

Thomas wondered which angle to dance around first: his somewhat-reciprocated love for an unstable person who had cultivated a little false universe on the top floor, the deconstruction of which would mean a swift blow to her sanity, or his belief that the old woman with a bittersweet fever in her brain shouldn’t lose her last years to a son who didn’t care about how she lived them.

He chose the second, hoping that the people who shared the decaying staircase possessed the decency he suspected. He mentioned Owen and the loveless way he looked at Edith, reminded them of the open-door policy she kept for her tenants, how she had welcomed all of them for a bit of conversation or understanding silence, depending on what their lives were lacking. Did they remember that six-day blizzard, how on the fourth day she’d been the only one with groceries left and brought them all downstairs for dinner? Hadn’t they all relaxed in the circle of her generosity, the jingle of bells she’d hung on the door, the forgiving wave of her hand when rent was late?

“Listen,” interrupted Edward. “I’m not going to sit here and say that the old lady deserves to die in some home, playing nonsensical checkers with incontinent zombies. Or that her son’s a fantastic guy for rooting for her bucket to kick so he can put in granite countertops and make a cool several million. Clearly the man has a Laundromat for a soul. But I don’t see what we can possibly do besides put our little tchotchkes in little box-kes.”

Claudia, who had been hiding her red face in her dry hands, laughed loudly, and Thomas watched as any control he had over the conversation faded like the sounds of ambulances passing nearby, the urgency that turned to a whine before disappearing.

She sighed and spoke up with ironic brightness. “Paulie doesn’t own much but a set of coasters shaped like bugs and a couple cookies, anyway. Won’t be hard to pack.”

Edward snorted and brought his hands together, brushed them in two opposing up-down motions, the gesture that signified
Our work here is done
. The crags of his face, the sharp hook of his nose and the protrusion of his brow, were softened with the remaining light. Claudia leaned her head on his forearm and sniffed.

“We could fight him,” said Thomas. “We could—” He felt the acidic tension in his body dissolve. The defeat felt like the ten minutes after swimming, the leaking of warm water from the ears and the adjusting of limbs to a different way of moving.

Edward announced that he needed a beer. He got up and Claudia followed. Thomas watched them make their way down the street until they turned, wondered at how quickly he had failed to sway them. There was no one else on the street, no sounds save the ticking of the watch he still wore as though he were a man who didn’t let hours pass like the endless parade of cars on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

I
T
HAD
BEEN
EASY
for Thomas to overlook the resemblance: only three photos of Declan as a young man gripped Edith’s walls, obscured by hanging plants that fell down from the ceiling in curls.

One showed their wedding, Edith shy on grand stone steps and Declan leaning in as though to prop her up, and another a tinseled Christmas, the grinning father supervising his son’s solemn assembly of a train track. The third photo, skewed somehow, showed the building freshly painted, the sky diluted, and Declan. Settled on the stoop, his slacks high on his waist and his white shirt crisp and his hair combed back, his cigarette between left thumb and forefinger like he learned in the war, his eyes met the camera as if in a brief nod of acknowledgment, decent but curt, eager to get back to a thought.

Thomas’s jaw, he saw now, was shaped like Declan’s, the soft lines leading to a broad dimple; his lashes similarly long and feminine; their eyes the same scratched brown, like a worn belt. They both carried all their strength in the shoulders, pursed their lips slightly instead of smiling with their teeth.

He could feel the tips of the plants brushing his shoulder blades as he lingered by the photos, as he waited for her while she fussed with something in the kitchen. She had denied his offers of help several times, and the apartment filled with sounds of cabinets opening and closing and her outbursts, spit from her mouth like cherry pits—“Curses!” and “I’ll be!” and “Jiminy Christmas!” Finally, she emerged with a dull silver tray, on which sat two jagged pieces of chocolate-dipped biscuits, four unevenly cut slices of cheese, one bruised apple, and two cups of iced coffee adorned with faded blue curly straws.

She had insisted on feeding him. He had arrived, for the third time that week, with a brown-bagged selection of art supplies, and he had promised himself that this time he would pin down a sustained conversation: about her will, her son, and possibly her daughter. Each time he had tried, he’d instead fallen quiet at the sweet cyan and maroon watercolored circles she was fond of making, and only reached out to pat the pale back of her neck. On the last occasion he had laid out brushes and acrylics and the paper to receive them, and Edith had painted a hammock suspended from a telephone wire on which four little birds sat singing to one another. Behind them, a pink sky relinquished its blush as it moved towards the edge of the page.

“What’s this?” Thomas had said.

She had seemed surprised at the question, then shocked that she knew the answer. She had pulled at the bunches of her slacks and looked out the window.

“That’s what it’s like when you think of your whole life. You’re fairly high up, and the lines get crossed and there are lots of little voices chirping, and you’re hanging from that and you try to find sleep.”

Today he could tell immediately: it was one of her off days. She was wearing too many colors, and spoke as if she’d just been dropped off on this planet, in this apartment.

“These things are delicious,” she exclaimed, waving the biscuits as though trying to keep the attention of a baby.

“And I like those too!” She pointed at the hanging plants that she herself had raised from tiny seeds.

“They’re beautiful, Edith,” Thomas said. He wanted her to know about her effort, to remind her about the little chair she stood on to water them, to present the proof of time she’d spent and cancel her forgetting. “You should be so proud at how they’ve grown. They need much more than light.”

He heard the lilt of his sentences and the sweetness in his tone, as though he were speaking to a worried child, and felt sick. He missed the woman who so calmly separated his life into pieces he could understand, and he needed her instruction.

“Edith,” he said. “Can we talk about Owen?”

Her lips grew hard and she sucked at her teeth. She hurled the stale cookie in her hand at the table.

“I don’t want to talk about him anymore!”

“Edith, I only want to help you—do you—is he—”

Strings of saliva dangled across her lips, over her bared teeth. He could smell her breath—like tea bags left out for days, the sweat of poor sleep—from where he sat.

“Declan! I’ve said it too many times! The boy doesn’t care for us and he’s got no interest in us caring for him. And that is that!”

Thomas didn’t think about what it meant not to correct her, only swallowed and took her hand and hoped the words might come out in a way that she could hear.

“Edith, I need to know what you want to do about the building. Your property. I have to hear you say it. Do you want Owen taking it over?”

“Declan,” she hissed. She clutched at the edge of her table, its dirtied lace tablecloth brown next to the bright moony white of her knuckles. “How many times. How many times did I say. Nothing of mine will go to him. It’s Jenny’s. It’s my sweet Jenny’s. It’s in the will and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Thomas felt his resolution gathering, all parts towards a desperate act, remembered the dead man in the photograph and quietly begged his forgiveness.
It’s for her own good
, he tried to explain to Declan across years, and laced his hand into hers.

“Dear,” he said. “Where is the will?”

—

E
DITH NAPPED
while Thomas searched, lay facedown on top of the covers as he took apart the many years she had packed away methodically. He had kissed her forehead, damp from summer humidity, and brought a thin cotton sheet over her slowly vanishing body. She dreamt like a dog, kicking often.

On the hunt, in and out of boxes he found on shelves in the highest points of the apartment, he stumbled across various mementos that confirmed the great tenderness he held for her: a photo of her and Declan in one of those two-person horse costumes, the colors warm and soft like baking things rising.

They each wear a cowboy hat and a Western shirt, and stuffed cloth legs dangle beneath their torsos, comically short. Edith, at the head, wears the suspenders that hold up the mare’s comic snout and mane with pride and has a thumb slipped under each strap; she is just about to laugh. Declan, behind her, holds a can of beer in each hand and winks. The people around them, in Halloween costumes much milder and more comfortable, look on at their glow, the obvious volume of affection, with jealousy and apprehension.

Behind this, Thomas found a photo of them applying glue to strips of wallpaper with a solemnity meant for churches. He continued to move through the stack, his thumb light on the upper corner as he flicked, and stopped again on a photo of Edith holding a giggling baby up to the husky afternoon light on an unmade bed. It was the same room, he knew, where she lay now, managing ragged breaths.

When he found it, a stack of duplicates in a beige vinyl box, he passed his fingers through his hair in some wish to appear presentable. The words
Last Will and Testament
, formal and exclusive, kept him still a moment longer. He fought hesitation with the remembered moments of Owen and Edith, his sharp angles and the flashes of his gold watch as he grabbed at her elbow, then the image of Adeleine, looking out at him through the crack of her door, her eyes wild as though she were being chased by her end. The conjured images lent his fingers some electricity, assisted them in separating a leaf from the pile.

His tongue made a soft sound against the roof of his mouth as he surveyed it, a whole lifetime of days laid out in plans for divestment, as if the physical things weren’t tied to memories or moments, as if they had never quite approved of their human ownership and the bonds attached to them. Her clothes to the Salvation Army, her novels to a literacy foundation, her kitchen things to a homeless shelter.

When his eye reached the page that concerned the property, he saw that she had been correct, had not in her confusion of decades forgotten the legacy she meant to bestow. The address that had housed the last decade of his life was meant to go to Jennifer Whalen of San Francisco, and the date of the document was more than ten years prior, shortly after Declan’s collapse. A vision came to him, of Edith alone for the first time in fifty years, adjusting her hat in the foyer of some lawyer’s office, ready to regulate the details of her own demise, and the heat left his body. He had never so badly wanted to protect someone, and never felt so thoroughly incapable.