Infinite Home (17 page)

P
AULIE WAS IN
F
ORT
G
R
EENE
P
ARK
and there were fireflies and he thought possibly they were the same ones that had winked at his mother in Connecticut and brought her outside on so many sunsets. He wondered if maybe each time they lit up they were remembering other places they’d been. Like,
fwoosh
, light, and here is the meadow that swelled around a little house left behind:
fwoosh
, and a real broad garden where the flowers reach out however they please just like the people sitting around growing into the grass:
fwoosh
, and the lake where reeds grew up tall and lived half their life underwater and half out.

Paulie knew the word
bioluminescence
and wished he could use it more, that it showed up in recipes, on the checks Claudia scrawled for his rent each month, on the change-of-service signs in the subway.
How are you doing today? Bioluminescent!
He would say this all the time if his body made light you could see. He would blink and blink for Claudia, he would summon all his bioluminescent friends and surround her.

For years Paulie had been begging her to take him to see a natural phenomenon in Elkmont, Tennessee, which he knew from maps was in an area called the Smoky Mountains, which he definitely liked the sound of. Thousands of male fireflies lit up all at once and did a kind of dance for the females, who hid near the ground and flirted with little flashes, and it went on a while, all of them listening to each other, filling the sky with light all at once. It happened only once a year, and in two places in the entire world, and Paulie suspected if he got to see it his whole life would open. But he knew that Claudia became quiet and wet-faced at night, saw in the morning how she slept until the last minute she could. He tried not to mention it.

T
HE
INFORMATION
SAT
with Thomas like a poor meal hardening in the stomach, resisting digestion, as he lay tensed on the couch in his apartment. He couldn’t determine whether his impulse to find Edith’s lost daughter in California was more rooted in his wish to save others or in his desire to see himself as capable, the kind of man who followed an idea down, clearing obstacles to make a path for it. Even with the full agency of his body, Thomas had never known himself to be a man of action. He had spent parties in low armchairs, allowed the conversation to drift to him, charmed people with the opinions he shared minimally and stoically, poured his time into canvases that he manipulated exactly as he wished, and cared little for the work of human relationships. The women he had fallen in with were always those slinking around corners to find him, prodding at his reticence, showing up late at his door without asking. He had given up on his parents, their silent TV dinners and failing bodies and shared misery, discarded an active connection to them as one might some faulty appliance.

A sharp, acrid sentiment bloomed in Thomas. His understanding of himself—that he’d grown cowardly since the stroke, had forsaken some former virility and honor—appeared, finally and absolutely, as a lie he’d told himself for comfort. Knowing this felt like watching the sand at his feet escaping and returning to the ocean, feeling the divots grow deeper and his balance melt, understanding that soon he’d need to move. He looked around his apartment now, at the few things lying around—two mugs left unwashed; a failing row of potted herbs; a box of childhood photos his mother had sent, which he’d never unpacked—and wondered what kind of life they indicated.

He got up and moved to the kitchen table, where his laptop sat open, displaying articles he’d only half read: an economist’s half-baked ideas about what the on-demand consumption of pop culture meant for minor artists, a biographical entry about a middling starlet, the obituary of a childhood acquaintance who had drowned. He brought the computer screen to full brightness and began his search for an airplane ticket, and the immediacy of it, the options rippling open in new windows, moved through him like a chill.

O
N
THE
AIRPL
ANE
Thomas brushed thoughts of Adeleine away like mosquitoes in a high-ceilinged room, their buzzing becoming softer but never vanishing. He looked out at the modest oval of sky and considered Edith, who’d been so kind in the months after the stroke, who had brought him meals without any mawkish sympathy and hadn’t stared while he taught himself how to use his body in a different way. Later, she had taken grocery bags from his unsteady grip without discussion while he unlocked the front door or checked his mail, and when he blushed had told him, “Thomas, helping you with what you need isn’t embarrassing for me, so it shouldn’t be embarrassing for you.”

Turned confident by thoughts of his newfound generosity, he had made the mistake of reaching out to his parents to tell them of his plans. He was interrupting a sports game—he was, infallibly, calling in the middle of the competitive event to end all competitive events—and his father had grunted and handed the phone off to his mother. He heard, in the interim, the fumbled transfer of the phone, her surprise at the contact from her faraway son, but she’d called him “honey,” asked how he was doing. He had perched on his locked suitcase and spoken without interruption, bubbling with the wild enthusiasm of a child with money to spend however he pleased.

“I’m just the person to help them,” he offered in summation. “It just sort of . . .
aligned
in a way that rang out.” He knew he sounded like someone who waved around tarot cards and looked to crystals for guidance, but the prospect of such concrete usefulness had left him upbeat and serene.

“Dear,” his mother said, “if you need another place to live . . . isn’t it easy online, now? You just put in your specific, uh . . .”—a pause as a cheering stadium filtered through and washed over his parents—“you just enter a price range and an area.”

“That’s not—”

“. . .”

“Thomas, we’ve got—this game is about to—”

“That’s okay, Mom. I’ve got a plane to catch.”

“Take care.”

—

T
HE CONVERSA
TION CAME BACK
to him like an infection, worse and larger in its return—the distance between them amplified, the futility of his belated attempt to connect obvious—and he tried again to focus his head on the possibility of Jenny. He removed the photos he had taken from Edith’s box and saw, again, a child with a long braid who turned from the camera, her face always directed away: towards a window, a hot dog stand, the flat and gray Atlantic Ocean. Then a teenager wading into a subculture: as the dates scrawled in cursive on the backs of the pictures progressed, Jenny appeared in looser clothing, sitting on the opposite end of the couch as Declan and looking up with eyelids painted blue; on the edge of her unmade bed, surrounded by dried flowers in mason jars and carved wooden incense holders and pinned up photos of people yowling into microphones. On the back of the last, in which Jenny stood on the stoop of the building with a hand gripping a suitcase, looking directly into the camera as though daring it to capture her accurately, Edith had scrawled
San Francisco or Bust
.

Thomas was rereading the final report from the private investigator Edith and Declan had hired, dated more than thirty-five years prior, when the pleasant ding of the seatbelt sign sounded and the flight attendant chirped of impending descent into San Francisco. The brittle paper revealed nothing more in Thomas’s fifth or sixth review: The man had found several people who had known Jenny casually, and one who’d slept with her once, but none had any idea where she’d gone. The document closed with a quote from one of those interviewed:

She was around a lot, sure, but I couldn’t tell you who she was close to, really. We shared drugs but not much else . . . that girl was either out of her mind high and dancing all over everything or curled up in a corner or on the fucking move . . . I would see her walking all around the city. She never talked about any kind of past—I didn’t know where she came from—and I don’t think she had any eye on the future.

E
D
WARD
HAD
SET
OUT
cardboard boxes preemptively, to tiptoe around the idea of leaving, so that when the time came to pack he could rise to the occasion without much effort. Meanwhile, he stepped around the empty cubes and cursed, sometimes sent them wheeling with his foot and felt satisfied watching their failed attempts at flight. He had bawled at the thought of moving and run his hand over doorways and faucets, remembering the person he’d been, nearly twenty years before, when he’d first signed the lease.

In those days, he’d spent most of his time in a T-shirt on which he’d drawn, in Sharpie, an empty pizza box. He’d moved in with little furniture and found two orange school chairs on the street, their nubbled plastic coating marred with profane carvings. He had sat on one and rested his feet on the other while he wrote his jokes, blissfully happy, happily alone.

For the first time in his recent memory, Edward was working on something, and the boxes around him, empty but designed for transitions, seemed to urge him forward. He had spent the first day trying to assemble a title for his memoirs and emerged with several possibilities:
Friends and Enemas
;
Not Funny: A Life.
The prospect of summing up his years had left him largely in thought-driven repose on the couch, periodically taking breaks from doodling tits to stand barefoot by the open fridge and shovel cold pieces of turkey into his mouth. He knew nothing about writing save the hustle and brevity of the screenplay, but his checking account held enough to pay the rent on possibly a bathroom somewhere in New York City, or to purchase a bus ticket to the Midwestern town where his brother sold life insurance, and so he had decided perhaps it was time to write and sell a book.

He was struggling to nail down words, already exhausted, when he heard the sounds in the hallway. He could tell from the approaching steps—the arrhythmic stabs of high heels worn by someone better suited for all-weather hiking boots—that it was Claudia, and when she knocked he rose from the empty screen, arranged his face as one pleasantly overwhelmed by too many erudite thoughts before opening the door.

Claudia settled her substantial frame horizontally onto Edward’s couch. They had drunk with each other until three in the morning the night before, and he had found himself talking again, in excess, about his late mother, and she had described what it meant to be the sister of Paulie.

“Because honestly,” she had said, gesturing on the crooked back patio of a local bar, a long-thriving dive where the money was always damp and the chairs slightly broken, “why should someone who does the most convincing impression of a Christmas tree, who calls me Rosebud right after I’ve lost my temper and wants to tell me he loves me through the bathroom door even while I’m shitting the worst shit that’s ever been shat—why should that person ever have to be alone?”

At that Edward had snorted into his meaty fingers and chucked her under the chin and cheered his fifth bitter ale at her; they had laughed all over the bar, out the doors, and all the way home. He remembered this fondly as he looked at her now, slumped in the work clothes that clung in unseemly shapes to her body. Two people in the bar had asked whether they were brother and sister, and it was true that they shared a stockiness, as well as deep-set brown eyes and a way of tipping up the chin to smile. Today in his apartment, the afternoon made her hangover visible: the side zipper of her skirt a few inches undone, the bun on her head dramatically crooked.

“I have to talk to him, right?”

“Who.”

“My
husband
.”

“Claudia,” said Edward, “did he give you a ring or a life sentence in a marriage-shaped prison? You know, Hitler had a gentle side, too. He
painted
.”

“He wants me to put Paulie in some kind of assisted living community. He won’t let him come live with us. My reaction thus far has been to ignore the issue entirely and sleep on Paulie’s couch which has, as you may know, three pillows shaped like daisies.”

With one hand Edward rearranged Claudia’s legs so that he could share the couch, then sat and sighed. “Not once,” he reasoned, “have you given me any indication that this guy is someone whose bullshit is worth sticking around for. Why stay?”

Claudia’s face was pressed between two cushions that muffled her speech. Her words moved through them slowly, traveling in thick surges to convey their message.

“He wasn’t always—he was softer. And, you know, our parents are gone and he—he wanted to be family.”

The admission set her whole body rippling. Her fingers worked the rounded edges of the throw pillow, searching for a steadier hold, and her lungs emptied themselves into the worn material. Edward lifted his hand as if to catch a fly; the motion’s inappropriate briskness struck him, and he remembered the slowness required by solace, lowered his palm to Claudia’s back and saw with shock that he had begun to rub it.

As Claudia’s bellows changed from uneven gasps to steady sobs, as though sliding from verse to chorus, he knew or learned to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, to go to the sink for water and offer it without speaking
.
It was a strange moment to realize how glad he was she’d forgiven him for a blunder he’d made the night before, fueled by a surplus of stout and the thrill of making a woman laugh. In their hallway she had begun a search of her purse, first shaking it near her head to detect the jangle of keys, then emptying it item by item. Finally she had held them up, the grin on her face like that of a Labrador with a retrieved ball, and hiccuped, and thanked him for listening.

“No,” he had said. “Thank
you
,” and reached out to touch her nose in a way that was meant to be avuncular, and folded her into a hug. The embrace, made sluggish with beer, had lasted longer than it should have, and Edward had made a miscalculation. His right hand shot up under her shirt, only the first knuckles making it beneath the taut underwire of her bra and becoming trapped there, wiggling a little, unsure whether to tunnel ahead or turn back. While he clumsily deliberated, Claudia squinted at the ceiling as though retrieving some once-memorized fact.

“I don’t think—” she said.

“What is
completely inappropriate
?” Edward asked, feigning the earnestness of a
Jeopardy
contestant, then the heartening, fatherly reply of Alex Trebek. “You are
correct
!”

“I’ll see too yamorrow,” she had said, laughing, waving off the gaffe. “You, tomorrow.” From across the hall each had heard the other’s clumsy preparations for sleep, faucets going off at full strength and hands slapping at the walls to kill the light.