Infinite Home (3 page)

E
DWARD
USED
TO
BRING
WOMEN
home only to make them laugh, to watch as the different points of their naked bodies rippled with a punch line in the half-dark, as their ringed hands playfully slapped him to stop. He would calm enough finally to do what they expected, to cup their breasts with hunger and move and keen until they were still. Sometimes he even managed the tenderness afterward, the holding and sighing and postcoital half-sentences, the wiping of sweat and come, the leaving for two glasses of water with the promise to be right back. But then he was onstage again, there in his own bedroom, doing his best to make the girls cackle and stay awake on a mattress growing lumped, and he would remember how it began.

He’d never been able to sleep; neither had his brother. Their parents were not alcoholics or child abusers, nothing so directly antagonistic, but they cultivated in their children a mounting fear of the universe, a suspicion of evil in the familiar that transcended caution and became paranoia. They spent breakfast stabbing at the pages of the newspaper, challenging each other to produce the more horrific news story.
A father, somewhere in Kansas, who killed his wife and children before cutting his own feet off! Drug lords in faraway cities keeping prostitutes in cages and feeding them only dog food or Styrofoam packing peanuts!
Three and four decades later, Edward had a hard time deciphering which of these had been exaggerations; the text of those headlines seemed to pulse at the periphery of his thoughts the moment he walked a darkened street alone, approached a window at home he didn’t recall opening.

They had brought their horrors in closer circles, too, warning Edward and Zachary about the gas station attendants three blocks down—hoodlums, criminals—and the single man up the street with the many cats:
There is something about him I just don’t trust,
his mother had said.

At night, instead of letting all these things sift and combine into a web of nightmares, Edward had crept into his younger brother’s room and lain on the floor, kneaded his fingers into the carpet kept so clean, and invented a place for himself and Zachary to hide. Edward made shadow puppets on the wall: talking heads of their parents bickering about the exact ingredients of the pastry they’d shared; the older girl down the street with the huge breasts and the way she tottered forward. He impersonated their grade school principal, who Edward thought spoke as if concealing a vat of cream cheese at the back of his throat, embellishing the nasal insistence, the sounds of the fat cheeks’ suction on squat teeth while he delivered the overused catchphrase.
Dish-ipline will be dish-tributed
, Edward would say.
Now build me a schity of bagels!

His inability to play the somber lover aside, some of the women returned, insisted on it even, pushed him up against the sandstone of Greenwich Village and offered to hail a taxi. He always had trouble, though, giving them a humor they could confidently claim was inspired by their bond, personal between the two of them. Or not saying anything when they farted in a particularly musical way, even if their eyes said,
Not now, not today
. The ones he didn’t abandon out of sheer negligence, failing to call for days, left him violently, always using terrible names like
bastard
and
narcissist
and making dramatic accusations about the poverty of his heart.

This was the period after the glow of quitting his day job had worn. He’d begun appearing on nighttime television, sitting with an ankle on a knee in one of those interchangeable plush chairs and gesturing with the provided coffee mug actually filled with water. He still preferred the tiny, sweaty crowds, the possible explosions given the night’s chemistry. He brought other comedians and audience members alike back to his apartment in Brooklyn, always paying for cab fares and drugs and drink, thrilled each time by the continuation of the night. Wary of his success, he kept his cheap apartment.

A woman who could spit back and thrive in the unsavory back rooms and at the mostly male after-parties, Helena became a fixture by the mid-nineties. She wore high-waisted linen trousers and pale silk shirts that buttoned up the back in the fall, oversized maroon faux-fur coats in the winter, and her bones formed a collection of angles he grew to need. She worked for little pay as a social worker, touring the homes of destitute families, and talked about them over dinner, their names and misfortunes floating over the candles on the cramped restaurant patios where she and Edward ate.

The night she moved in, she hung small globes of light, placed red porcelain mugs in the cupboards, swept corners it had never occurred to him were dirty. Even when they fought, she exercised perfect timing, and after, while they made up, she held his arms against the sturdy wood bed frame she’d also brought with her, and insisted that the lights stay on.

He liked to maintain that she’d left when his success dwindled, despite so much proof of the contrary, and clutched this in his mind with all other things growing old and ossifying. But then he remembered her soft murmurs on waking at four a.m. to an empty bed, her coming to him on the couch and curling up and expressing fond interest in the decades-old movie keeping him company. The moment when she got up to put the kettle on, the sound of the old drawer unsticking so that she could retrieve a spoon for his sugar. How many times she had fallen back asleep there, in his lap, though the bedroom was a mere ten feet away. The way she accepted his deepening morbidity, listened intently to the story of his mom forbidding him to leave the house for two weeks at the rumor of a nasty flu, of the cleaning tasks she’d assigned her son during the quarantine. How Helena had insisted on washing the sweatpants he’d begun resigning himself to, how the use of fabric softener was evident. How he had cried when she cut off her hair the month before she left him, a child who couldn’t recognize his mother, and how she had held him, even then.

A
S
A
CHILD
, Paulie had liked to wake his parents with song and, once his hands were able to manipulate the large carton, glasses of orange juice. He called his mother Lovebird and his father Mr. Sheep, after his other favorite soft but crusty-looking thing. They had adored the intensity of his glances and taken to calling him The King for the way he trounced around the house, assigning all objects an enthusiastic nomenclature. His teeth, so pointed, so white, always showing. And the singing: a song for the dishwasher, the morning, the cat, the routine appearance of the mail through the metal slot in the living room, the shifting colors of a laundry cycle.

Of course there were signs, of course there were, but Lydia and Seymour rarely had time to finish their conversation in the mornings, she brushing her teeth while sitting on the master bathroom toilet with her nightie bunched around her hips, preparing herself for the task of waking and guiding two children in picking clothing and eating breakfast, and Seymour at the sink splashing cold water in his eyes and clearing his throat. He was a good husband, that evident always, and he kissed her good-bye no matter what, and sometimes arrived to the office ten minutes late on account of hearing her troubling or wonder-filled dream. In any case: they loved Paulie, loved the dramatic curvature in his chest, loved his upturned eyes. They loved his inability to grasp the ambitions of villains in the films that flickered across his tiny body where he lay on the carpet.

With the beginning of school, it changed, and they could no longer misbrand his behavior as idiosyncratic. Lydia remembered it sharply for the rest of her life: How well it began, how she exhaled with relief when Paulie ran up to his kindergarten teacher—a woman who must have been trying to look like Ms. Santa Claus, a rope of white hair down her thick torso and wire glasses that clung to the tip of a diminutive nose—and introduced himself. How impressed the woman had been when Paulie spoke: “Hello there, I’m here to learn and laugh, if you don’t mind, my darling!” But within two weeks the phone call. Paulie had come out of the bathroom with his pants down several times and politely requested the teacher’s help; he could not participate in an activity wherein she asked the students to draw simple shapes. Lydia had begun to protest, but Ms. Susanne had interrupted gently: “I’m not saying he refused to, Ms. Fontaine, or that he tried but his coordination was below average. I’m saying that he looked at his pen and paper and he looked at the blocks in front of him and he looked at the other children and he plainly
could not
.”

Lydia did not tell Seymour for a full two days. When he came home from work, he was tired and slow, and quite often the only thing that visibly cheered him was Paulie. Paulie balancing on his leg; Paulie offering impersonations of a humpback whale, a jet plane, a Christmas tree. So when she finally did it was unplanned, it just came out, while she was sitting on the closed toilet watching him shave, in sobs that attempted words and reverted to sounds. Once he’d comforted her enough to understand what she was saying, he called in sick and tucked Lydia into bed; he promised that when he returned, they would figure it out, and he took Claudia to school.

He let Lydia sleep most of the day, and in all the time she was out she hardly changed positions under the great white comforter. Through the morning and afternoon he watched Paulie, held his hands and then his feet, listened as his son told him a story about an elephant searching for a tree large enough to shade his mother during the summer. “Where did you hear that story,” Seymour asked, though he already suspected the answer. “From my daydreams, of course!”

E
DITH
AND
D
ECLAN
had always prided themselves on their taste in people. Their renters, mostly blue-collar and from somewhere else originally, paid on time and stopped to say hello to each other in the hall; they held doors, gave away laughter freely and sat out in the overgrown back garden in the summer together, sharing sun tea and simple sandwiches. For a full decade, theirs was the most-attended Fourth of July party in the surrounding blocks. Declan would weave among the tenants and their friends, a lit sparkler attached to his thin silk tie, spilling whiskey into glasses without asking, butchering patriotic adages with his thick Irish accent in a way that left his guests cackling.

Declan made himself available to his tenants, and so did Edith, although after he died she began widening the scope of her generosity, drawing leases to those she found unusual, or hurt, or in visible need of asylum. She knew what he would have said, how he would have bit down on his smoke and brought a palm over his cheek—that it wasn’t her job to mother the world, no matter what regrets she had about their own children. But he was gone and that was his fault, she reminded herself frequently, for living hard on his body like he had. He could have quit the cigarettes, could have downed a few more vegetables, could have ended a few nights without landing in the bed like a felled pine.

For a year she rented to an out-of-work opera singer with hollowed-out cheeks who was always late with the rent but put on a suit every morning and practiced his scales. A single mother of twins famed for her colossal Afro and her abilities as a wrist wrestler, who often accepted Edith’s offer to babysit while in her apartment she held raucous tournaments attended by bearded men in loud prints. A substitute teacher with a quivering Adam’s apple and a stutter and a little beagle that forever ran ahead of him. A balding snake collector always clad in Hawaiian shirts, who claimed no one else would rent to him, and who cooed into his many cages like a proud father. An Ecuadorean widower who worked construction and came home almost unrecognizably dusty and who nervously patted the front pocket where he kept his wife’s photo. A retired Barnum and Bailey performer who had asked Edith if, for the sake of old times, he could hang a tightwire across the backyard. She had obliged him, and spent a number of spring evenings with a shadow plaid blanket around her shoulders, clapping as his toes gripped the line and he blushed with remembering, as he brought one gnarled foot in front of the other and hovered four inches above the long untended flower beds, perfectly still, waiting for a strong breeze to pass.