Infinite Home (7 page)

A
DELEINE TREMBLE
D UNDER THE TEST
she had given herself: if she could blend in on the subway, she’d decided, she could forgive herself her retreat, believe that someday she might return to the world of intersections and green park benches and strangers’ elbows. A man opened the door between cars, appeared with a waxen cup and delivered a mumbled speech about poverty and diabetes and spare change for food, and when he flourished it in her direction, she closed her eyes and thought of the clean white sheets on her bed, the red alarm clock that shook like a cartoon, her alphabetized records, the predictable drip of the cold water tap in the bathroom. When she opened her eyes to the world again, he had disappeared into the next car, and she looked around at the other passengers for clues on how to behave: they stared into nothing or electronic screens that cast icy glows upward, making small, swift gestures with their thumbs and forefingers. Five minutes of relative peace followed, but then a crowd of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in windbreakers and sweatpants boarded, turned on music that screeched and throbbed. As the train tore into lower Manhattan, they defied space with backflips, they looped their knees around the metal rails and reached for one another through the air, they swam down the aisles requesting donations, they chanted in unison. Their energy felt to her like a practiced assault, a technique designed to extract a confession. Tightening her crossed arms, pressing her polished opal nails into her skin until the sensation blotted all else, she curled down into the softness of her knees and remained in that created dark until her stop arrived.

At the station, she made it a few feet into the light above and stopped at the head of the stairwell, where people diverged around her like cars avoiding a spill. At the tail of the rush, a man with a damp face and a burdened suitcase came upon her and stopped.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you need help finding something?”

“I know where I’m supposed to go,” she said, turning a severe bun in his direction. Three bobby pins had slipped halfway out of position, threatening to destroy the form, and the skin of her nape was patched red.

“I don’t need any help getting home,” she said.

I
N THE DAYS AFTER T
HE STROKE
, delirious and sleep-sodden as he was, Thomas hadn’t always been sure that Edith’s voice was actually there, outside his door, muttering in circles about her small offerings. Stacked on the worn sandy carpet that ran the length of the hall, the things she had left confirmed it: plates of cheddar mashed potatoes and roasted chicken and dark greens, just cooked, the steam finding a way through the tinfoil; recent
New Yorker
s and puckered crime novels taken from her own shelf; six-packs of soda water; his mail; a lily in a cracked ceramic mug; a scarf knit into a loop, the signature merchandise of a stormy-faced vendor who was always outside their subway station.

He would be on the couch, chasing a nap despite having been awake only two hours, and hear the clearing of her throat, the sound in two parts.

“Okay,” she would say, with the voice of someone speaking to a colleague about a routine procedure, an issue with the copy machine or a slight change in schedule. “I’m leaving a few things here. Something for eating and something for reading and something else just because. They’re just out the door to your left. I know you probably have silverware but I put some in there because what the hell. All these things are only if you want. The vegetables are a little swampy. Can’t ever seem to avoid that hellish feature. It’s food. It’s definitely food. All right, I’m headed back to my pensioner’s grotto now.”

After a week of that, her odd discursions often the only points of amusement in his otherwise black days, he heard the shuffle of her approach and startled her by opening the door. It was he who should have been embarrassed, he thought, he who had not bothered to crawl even briefly from his depressive hole and leave a note of thanks, but as she entered, she kept her sight fixed on the tray she had brought, reddening like someone allergic.

“Well, I know I’ve been a busybody,” she said, her eyes scanning the room for a place to set the platter down.

“Anywhere is fine. Here, on the counter. You haven’t at all. You’ve been some kind of magic post-catastrophe elf. And
I
haven’t paid rent.” He gestured for her to sit at the bare kitchen table, and she gripped her hands on its edge to lower her stooped frame into a chair. Her hair was carefully curled, the stiff white reminiscent of a subaquatic reef formation, and her wedding ring sat bright but noticeably off-center on her diminished finger.

“Elves are meant to be a little quieter, probably.”

“It’s true I could hear you bustling out there.”

He laughed for the first time since his injury, and it surprised his voice, which strained at the exertion. She had the kind of older face that hinted at its young features, as though it were a hologram that could be tilted, the murky slate of the eyes restored to their former inquiring blue, the wattle of the neck tightened to reveal the stark line of the jaw.

“Never my strong suit. Never a suit at all, in fact. Not even hanging in my closet.”

He carried them over one by one, the teapot, the mugs, a jar of almonds, and Edith knew not to offer her help, not to watch as he arranged the things on the table. She drank the still-warm tea gratefully, as though she hadn’t prepared it herself, thanking him, looking around and complimenting the large wooden blocks he used as coffee tables, the bright teal of the couch, a series of octagonal shelves he had mounted on the longest wall. She didn’t mention the vestiges of his work, which infested the sizable corner of his space where a tarp lay to protect the floor.

And then she barked out the question, the one nobody else had posed alongside the stilted condolences they’d e-mailed. She offered it without the upward lilt at the end, like an appraisal of something obvious, a foul smell or a probable rain.

“And how are you.”

“I’m shit,” he said. It was a relief to say so.

“Can’t say I expected anything else. You were handed some misadventure. Is this retribution for some former crime of yours? A nun you robbed?”

He smiled modestly, as though afforded a compliment, grateful under the generous cover of her humor.

“At nun-point,” they said, nearly at the same time, their embarrassment about the weak pun turning to delight in the coincidence.

“About the rent,” she said. “You shouldn’t—”

He put his hand up, let the unkempt line of his amber hair fall over his eyes.

“I should,” he said. “And I will. I’ll get you a check—”

“But how are you going to—”

She stopped, immediately aware her brash tongue had taken her for the wrong turn, and communicated her apology by tapping a hand to her mouth and cringing.

“That’s okay, Edith. It’s a good question. I’m okay for a few months, and then I don’t know. My gallerist wants to put together some . . . memorial show, it seems like to me, although of course no one will call it that. The things I had finished and a number I hadn’t.”

“Then I’ll buy some. I don’t have anything on my walls but twenty years ago.”

“I hope that won’t be necessary. Maybe I can give you one.”

In the way that it sometimes does for people whose rapport has advanced very quickly, the open speech had dried up, as if to reflect on how recently theirs had been a cordial but transactional relationship. They assessed each other in the silence, making eye contact then letting it break.

“Well,” she said. “I could bring you some lunch tomorrow. Will you be here?”

He was. She did. For weeks it became his only routine, and he had showered for it, cracked windows here and there, swept.

—

“W
HY DON
’
T YOU
CALL
IT
A Living Question
,” he’d said, over coffee with his gallerist, a woman whose hair was always mounted asymmetrically and who typed intermittently on her smartphone as she spoke to him, ostensibly taking notes.

“Oh, that’s good,” she’d answered, not detecting the dark humor in his voice, spitting a little through the signature gap in her front teeth.

“No, Ivy, it’s—
I’m
the—”

“Of course this is all up to you. But I was thinking we could mount them from finished to un-, so we’re sort of watching the progress in reversal, almost a record of decay.” Her voice was rich with her own regard for it. Thomas tried to cover the disgust he felt appearing on his face with a hand over his mouth and a series of discerning nods.

Chased by absurd nightmares of poverty in which debt collectors followed him in Groucho Marx masks, Thomas had agreed to meet Ivy for the sake of his practical future, but the thought of his unfinished pieces on display, the naked lines in pencil, made all the pulse points in his body raise up and hammer.

In the weeks that followed he agreed to almost everything she suggested, curatorial statements and promotional photos and times and dates. He made clear that he would not be in attendance at the opening, and she didn’t protest, his absence being something she believed might sell. Several anticipatory write-ups appeared, which she forwarded to him, and which remained unread.

The night that people in ironic jumpsuits and vintage fur coats gathered in oblique lighting before his paintings, he was perched on tiptoe in Edith’s bathtub, making marks in pencil on the wall above it. Thomas had kept one for her: six by four feet, a pictorial rendering of continental drift. Over several years, in fertile browns and cold blues and sylvan greens, he had translated the formation of the Appalachians, the dwindling of seaways, the birth of glaciers, the rise of submerged islands. He had worked at it as though it were a marriage, fighting with it and watching it change, and he was glad to appoint it here, let it alone.

He felt the hum of his telephone in his pocket and silenced it without a look. It was Ivy, texting to say that some tech celebrity, the founder of a location-based dating app, had purchased a triptych of his paintings. The sale could support him for a year, two if he was careful.

When he had finished he called to Edith in the kitchen, where she was cursing to herself and filling the building with the smell of a roast, carrots in brown sugar and butter. In another life, one he had enjoyed until just recently, he would have refused to hang it there, would have warned her that the steam from her long baths would warp it. Instead, he offered her the strength of his forearm as she climbed over the porcelain lip, and they raised the wooden frame of the canvas together, making small adjustments as they searched for the nails he had driven, commenting on the angle, tugging at it until it was straight, and flush, and bright.

Later, he would come to wonder. As she lay in the bath, her mind going, did she consider what hung there? And was it the thing that called her back, to her cluttered papers, to her life’s quiet routine; or was it the thing that lied to her, muddling chronology and nibbling at private truths, and led her, with a gentle hand, away?

P
AULIE
TRIED
not to give in to the feeling but some facts rendered him melancholy no matter what kinds of songs he’d been playing or if the clouds were forming pointy faces or if he’d run into any ugly dogs that day.

For as long as his memory went, Paulie had loved children. When his mother’s sister had a baby and brought it over and it started crying, Paulie was the only one who could get it to stop: he’d made up a song about the ocean, about how waves only leave so they can come back larger. The choking sobbing had stopped, the starfish hands reached up to grab Paulie’s nose, the eyes formed invisible lines right to his, and he had known right away how much he wanted this, to be the center and the protection of another’s life.

For his tenth birthday he asked for a baby doll, a blue-eyed boy in washable velour, and named it Oscar and tried to never lose sight of him. He slept with him in his bed and sometimes his breath grew constricted, so nervous did he feel that he might fall asleep and roll over onto him. He learned how to sleep like a pencil. He brought Oscar along on trips in the car and pointed out the trees whose names he knew, white pine and dogwood and redbud. He made sure his socks and soft blue cap and clean cotton pants went into the wash frequently. He stayed up in bed explaining the things that had puzzled him once, where all the household garbage went and who decided when to open the post office and what made heat lightning and how sex must feel.

Oscar’s silence and slumped way of sitting grew tedious, but Paulie valued the feeling of worth that came from putting the world in order for someone else, from folding the tiny sweaters. When he was fourteen, his true capacity for love filled with the arrival of Eleanor, a neighborhood beauty imported from the mysterious wilds of North Carolina who spoke slowly, wore old-fashioned saddle shoes, and had a cocoa-colored birthmark shaped like a bow tie on her nose. After a long week spent skulking around the street they shared, singing the romantic songs he knew on the edge of her lawn, he confessed his affliction to Seymour, asked how one went about asking a girl to be the mother of his children.

“Do I go up to her and say, let’s combine bodies forever?”

“I think that might scare her, Paul. People generally like to think of their bodies as just theirs.”

“Okay, how about—”

He thought his father was joking when he told him. Seymour said the probability of passing it on was about fifty percent, that the limits of his condition made parenthood impossible. Paulie, stunned, protested. “But you’ve always said I was an exception to a lousy rule. But I can look at a person and know what kind of story they need, you said. But I can light a room like that’s my job on the planet, you said!”

He had cried with dedication, the tears leaking down onto his teal hoodie and matching sweatpants. He saw in front of him the visions he’d always cherished—himself as father, tucking a lock of hair behind an ear at bedtime, teaching his son about which fish glow in the dark, sitting with him at the piano every day after school—and tried to reach them but couldn’t. His gut felt like fire spreading through a forest. “It hurts me, and I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” Seymour kept saying. “Then don’t,” Paulie said. “Then why would you?”

Wants could remain possible, Paulie still believed, so long as you didn’t speak them aloud.

He remembered, then, the synchronized sacrifice of all childhood things. How the boys and girls from his street suddenly sprouted longer limbs and adult shadows, how they dropped their baseball mitts and water balloons and Halloween masks and turned away. His father held him, and Paulie tightened his shoulders against the embrace as he saw the unbearable length of it, the life in which he would always be a child.