Infinite Home (8 page)

E
DITH WAS IN
G
RAND
C
ENTRA
L
S
TATION
and did not know why or how or even when. She wished for hats, a sea of them, cashmere gloves and polite nods, leather suitcases of browns and greens with sturdy locks. Fine pocketbooks where the tickets paid for lived until you pulled them out to show the conductor proudly, there on the train, where everything fit into roomy compartments above and below, where the world was stacked neatly.

But where were they, the fine pressed brims and tie clips and stockings with the clean black line down the back of the leg? No matter how long she closed her eyes, each time she opened them the people did not belong. Little girls crossed the floor in baseball caps, and under scrolling electronic screens grown women in clingy whites bickered. They all carried beach bags and neon-colored towels and not one of them stood up straight, not one of them was someone she could imagine knowing.

Where was Declan? Had he gone to buy the tickets? Was it already the season for the cabin and the red-and-white-checked tablecloth and chicken salad and watermelon? Edith scanned the little vendor windows, their gratings’ gilded curlicues familiar, the counters still marble. That, at least. But his shape was nowhere, and the shoes on her feet had two strange straps that did not buckle, that just stayed somehow. Her elbows had pasty folds and the skin on her hands looked as if it would tear. Not one of them was someone she could imagine knowing!

And then she was or had been yelling “Declan,” but she had stopped because he always said if they lost each other in an urban sea to root herself just like a tree. She looked through the glass at the moving dark tunnel and knew many truths about her life at once: that Jenny practicing spelling on the kitchen table while she steamed spinach was what she liked best, that when she sat upright in her wooden school desk she could feel the sixteen-year-old boy behind her thinking of undoing the button at the back of her neck, that she liked math for its clear-cut authority and always found test days reassuring. That her father liked to braid her hair when the chores were done and the chairs were on the porch with their familiar groan and the smell of biscuits drifted outside. That when she was particularly well behaved her mother would place her on her lap, let Edith steer the big round leather wheel and look through the windshield at the people lining up for the matinee under the marquee the town got together to pay for.

But then there was a new set of competing facts: This train moving fast. The woman next to her, with a cloth over her breast, nursing a baby of indeterminable gender. And the sounds that must be coming from her body, words that didn’t come together in the way she needed them to,
where
and
stop
and
Declan
and
Jenny
and
Declan
and
stop.
The mother of the baby had vanished and there were several faces around her asking, asking, asking, and Edith said,
“
You fucking people, I don’t know any of you fucking people, not one.” Later, in the back of a police car, made frightened by the cage that divided front and back, she practiced a small form of weeping, determined to keep any more of herself from them. When they pulled up at the brownstone she and Declan had bought to fill with their life and future, they insisted on walking her in. She flinched at the policeman’s light touch on her elbow, thanked God and heaven none of her tenants were descending the stairs. When she went to retrieve her keys, she saw that the hands that couldn’t be hers were reluctant as abused animals, and the broad-shouldered policeman moved to place the brass in the lock and she hissed,
“
I don’t need your help
.”
Finally in her chair, the scalloped velvet worn in the seat and arms, she rocked a little, but the motion didn’t soothe. She waited to recognize the place around her, the room growing dark as a well, her life crouching somewhere nearby, hiding from her.

A
DELEINE RARELY CONSIDERED
the ventures at which she had failed in the days when she was able to leave the house, and instead threw herself into the task at hand every day, grateful for any paycheck.

She had met the woman by the 59th Street entrance to the park, by the swan pond and the stone bridge that arched over the passing reflections of families, the New York Adeleine felt she could still love. Settled on a bench in the fading autumn light, which appeared to stir its colors in protest of evening advancing, Adeleine had wished for the winter, which would forgive her, cradle all her could-nots. The woman at the other end of the painted green planks snuck glances periodically before finally remarking on the rarity of Adeleine’s hat, dark blue felt with a netted veil that hung over her face and fluttered like a hesitant wing when she sighed.

“I used to have one just like that,” said the woman. “In fact, my father was a milliner. One of the largest in New York.”

“That must have been wonderful,” said Adeleine, “watching someone you love make beautiful things with his hands. I often think if I’d had more of that, I’d be someone else.”

The old woman spoke in sentences that seemed fixed, repeated and perfected over time, and said her name was Miriam and fussed often with the ring on her wedding finger. As their shadows grew longer, couples rose from the grass behind them and retreated to the nearby subway, and the birds in the chilled muck began to return to each other. Miriam seemed enlivened by what she saw as Adeleine’s willingness to listen—a tendency to nod excessively that actually indicated social discomfort—and unfolded her personal history in various directions, unable to decide which aspect held the greatest importance: the friends she’d lost to swift diseases, how money had made her husband sad, why she had stayed when the New York she understood began shifting identities at an accelerated clip. Looking out at the man-made swamp and the geese idling there, Adeleine felt some maternal urge to place a warm hand on Miriam’s neck, or just to call the old woman by her name.

By the end of an hour and a drop of three degrees, the arrangement was settled. Adeleine would receive a generous rate by the page, as well as an ample initial fee, to transcribe the journals Miriam had begun keeping at age ten, as well as the twenty-four shoe boxes of letters and postcards. They would speak on the telephone when necessary to discuss the project’s evolution. Miriam told Adeleine her new job was to make sense of Miriam’s life—she couldn’t herself, not ever or anymore.

“Something to speak for me when I can’t,” she said.

And so it went that Adeleine spent her days even more consumed by old things and transferred memories. She would see later it was this chance proposition, this agreement formed in a park in autumn, that allowed her to fully retire into her third-floor island, the place she had built to ask very little of her.

T
HE FIRST TIME
the doctor had informed him of the term for the precursors to his migraines, the prohibitive clouds of sound and color, Thomas couldn’t help but sneer. “An aura?!” he’d said. “Think of it like a warning sign or a stoplight,” the physician had said. “It’s your cue to grab some aspirin and have a seat.”

Eventually Thomas grew to like the auras, thought of them as a unique part of his life, a bittersweet drug his body sometimes produced. He had learned to enjoy the sensations that came before the pain: light stretched and brightened playfully as his hearing hummed and sharpened, and his body felt lifted, excused from duty. Then darkness crowded and bubbled at the edges of his vision, and he knew to lie back and let the monster have its way. Over time he came to recognize the signs so clearly that he would put down his paintbrush or stub of charcoal or pencil without frustration. He liked to move to a space that was free of clutter, shove open a window and lie flat, and enjoy the corporeal deviations, try to filter questions through them. Sometimes during the pre-migraine oddities he chanced on the direction he needed to finish a work, or saw a vivid smear of the precise color for which he’d been looking.

Because of the reverence he had cultivated for these shifts in perception, the afternoon that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life did not alarm him as it should have. The aura lasted longer than it typically did—hadn’t the doctor said no more than twenty minutes? But having worked all morning, having endured a particularly soul-hollowing conversation with his mother, he took the excuse for incapacity gladly. When he’d felt it coming, he had managed to draw the linen curtains, stretch out on the couch, and place a pillow under his head. The March sky through the window, he would remember, was a covering of gray on a growing blue.

Later he couldn’t remember: was it one hour or two before he’d succumbed to panic, began to miss the light as it would appear naturally, to fear that he would never see it again. How much time until he had tried to make a call but couldn’t recognize the symbols on his touch screen, and curled his knees into his ribs and began praying for the migraine to hit. His pleas were absent of God; he was petitioning himself, scouring his mind for the corrective mechanism. But the headache didn’t come until dark, and when it did it took hold with the swift efficiency of a team of movers: whole parts of his body emptied in minutes.

He had eventually managed the three emergency digits, had heard himself report that one side of his face and half his torso and left arm were not responsive, heard himself describe his symptoms with the clinical acuity he’d developed as a strange child studying the habits of backyard birds. While he waited, he looked around his apartment politely, like an uncomfortable guest early for dinner.

The medical term for the type of stroke he’d had, he’d learn later, was a migrainous infarction, something signaled by changes in sensorium that persisted too long. He arrived home from the hospital, bit off the patient bracelet with his canine teeth, and didn’t speak for eight days.

—

G
IVEN HIS INABILITY
or unwillingness to work on anything new—the first being his own belief and the latter the suspicion of his crueler acquaintances—Thomas took to things he found beautiful in only the purest sense. For the first time in his life, he appreciated photographs of mountains, saturated paintings of cornfields. He liked to tell friends who called that he had misplaced his taste somewhere, that they could forward any and all snapshots of rainbows and glaciers his way. His growing fascination with Adeleine followed from this naturally.

She seemed made of words often paired together, and observing her helped Thomas to understand the hackneyed couplings: creamy skin, shining eyes, flowing hair. He hadn’t truly noticed her in the year and a half she’d been across the hall; perhaps he had found her perfection boring. The women who had stomped across his life before had always been jagged in their appearance and furtive in their intent: a sculptor who wore gray exclusively and brought him back to a charcoal-painted apartment twice a week for silent, brutal sex; a jilted pregnant woman with coarse eyebrows who only wanted to be held and fed; several who drank too much and stood by his canvases nodding before becoming bellicose and picking circular fights.

Adeleine was different: symmetrical and soft and glossy to an extent that didn’t seem naturally occurring, with cheeks that glowed like peaches in commercials and eyes as violet as industrial fireworks.

Even after he realized the extent of her beauty, Thomas had no interest in talking to her. He only wanted to watch, to fully appreciate the precision of her making. It helped that she never spoke or looked at him as she put out a bag of trash or opened the door for a deliveryman.

When her nighttime weeping began, he was blindsided by his vision having grown complex and animate and tried to will the noises away
.
The stroke had left him cold, and sometimes slowed reactions to other people’s pain, but the sounds coming from her body were without rhythm, impossible to become accustomed to and ignore, and he quickly felt moved to mollify them.

The first time he knocked, he heard the strangled stifle of a sob and the hurried footsteps to switch off the light. He burned with embarrassment at a rejection so obvious, but the next night found him at her door again, listening. He did not bring his knuckles to the wood, only crouched and slipped a note under the door:
I thought you could use a drink.—Apt. 3A.
When he checked a half hour later, the mug of bourbon and lemon and honey had disappeared. In bed that night, he thought of her lips on the porcelain, and his skin grew tight, his pectorals and hamstrings newly awake, tensing under her image. He arranged his dead hand on his abdomen, then slid his other under the elastic band of his boxers and moved it forcefully, repeatedly, until every part of him ceased to complain.

What followed was like some archaic dance, one that required mastery not only of the steps but also the nuanced system of nods and glances that marked its transitions. After ten days, Thomas realized with mild panic that he’d sacrificed all of his cups, the university mugs and the gifted beer stein and the ridged water glasses. He hadn’t left her with any instructions as to their return, of course, and she hadn’t offered any communication beyond the simple receipt of his nightly gifts. He thought about it with pain throughout the day until the ritual hour passed. After several hours of sleep, he woke with an urgent feeling and drank several bowls of water in the kitchen, surprised by how the act of sleeping had induced such a thirst. He looked out at the unlit room as a thief might, scanning for value and an unhindered escape.

—

T
WO NIGHTS LATER
, the knock came.

“The little bell’s been going off and I’ve been salivating, but the Russian scientist in charge has forgotten me,” she said. Her eyes remained somewhere to his left, and it was unclear whether she was seeking his laughter.

The mass of her heavy hair was pinned up and swirled above her face, and her chin jutted from a crisp lilac linen that buttoned all the way to the neck. Though he hadn’t considered what her voice might sound like, the reality of it, scratched and thick-throated, still seemed incorrect. It was that of a tollbooth operator, worn in by rote speech, eroded by fumes. The door of her apartment remained open behind her, and one of her hands clung to its knob as she straddled the hall.

“I—I ran out of glasses,” Thomas answered. He emphasized
glasses
as though discussing something irreplaceable and watched with resounding discomfort as her fine face flushed, her body retreated homeward by an inch, then two. He heard the measured voice of some nature-channel narration and tried to push it away, but the black humor nagged at him
: meeting the rare creature out in the open, should he play dead, or offer his food, or wave his arms and yell?

“You can—” she began, gesturing towards her apartment’s rose glow. “Bring?” He understood, with a thrill, that the exchange made her nervous, and he nodded as though they’d done this before and knew their parts, and went to retrieve the bottle. The smell of all her things, fusty and smoky and dense, had already reached him.