Infinite Home (9 page)

S
HORTLY AFTER
their father Seymour’s hair had grown so white and downy that Paulie took to calling him Sir Dandelion, he’d suffered a coronary during an early-morning walk, binoculars around his neck and a grocery list in his pocket. Claudia had selected an oak-stained casket for the viewing and baked gingerbread cookies for the reception; she had picked up her three-quarter-length black dress from the dry cleaner and twisted her hair into an unmoving knot at the back of her neck; she had thanked people for coming and accepted their condolences; she had repainted the stairwells and appointed a real estate broker; she had met with Seymour’s lawyer and accountant and wept in each of their antiseptic bathrooms; and, imagining that the death of her father would install in her some compassionate wisdom if only she waited a few weeks, she had left the question of Paulie for very last.

Though she and Seymour had discussed a number of assisted living communities in which well-trained aides and social workers would see that Paulie lived his fullest life—and Paulie had even visited some of these places with his father and enjoyed chatting with the staff and residents, as well as testing the bounce of the mattresses and the texture of the food—when it came down to signing the last of the forms, Claudia could not put pen to paper. Having witnessed both of her parents reduced to dismayingly small boxes of ashes, remembering Paulie’s insistence upon singing at both services and how tightly he’d gripped her hand, Claudia had decided to take her younger brother’s life into hers as closely as she could.

Made anxious by suburban Connecticut dusk the day after the wake, she had prepared an excess of stew, something with the potential to feed many more people than their family of two. When he had stopped slurping, she raised the question.

“Paul? Where is it you think you’d most like to live now?”

“Dad and I visited some places—”

“Could you imagine yourself living there, though?”

“They were real clean, with chefs. I could imagine so much, Claude. I could imagine it is an okay place to be. I could also imagine walking for a long time until you found exactly the place you wanted. There are so many homes, I think, and you could spend the wrong kind of life following them.”

Various aging aunts who phoned had clucked their tongues and expressed concern, emphasizing repeatedly that no one could judge her for placing Paulie under the care he needed. But she had helped her brother pack his things—the long-beloved crescent moon lamp, with a cherubic face and a half-smile; the quilt their mother had embroidered over the course of a year, with a panel for the forest, the ocean, the desert, and the town—and she urged him to imagine the fun they might have in New York.

“We’ll have picnics on Sundays when the weather’s nice, and clap at the men who play mariachi on the subway, and go to museums of sound and art and transportation and history and police and science. You’ll have your very own apartment, right near mine, and we’ll paint it whatever colors you like.” Her breathing had become uneven, as though her safety was the one being discussed offhandedly in a nearly vacant house.

“Okay, Claude,” Paulie had said. “Okay, Claude!” He had pulled her to where he sat on the bare mattress and taken her hand, formed a brief O of suction on each of her fingertips as he kissed them. Claudia had brought his head to her shoulder as though he weren’t thirty years old and three inches taller, and closed her eyes so as not to look out the window at the yard, now empty of the peeling red picnic table that had stood there for thirty years, Seymour’s much beloved barbecue, the hammock where their mother had read her mystery novels and spread coconut-scented tanning oil on her thick calves. The tree Claudia had climbed to peer down at her family remained, but appeared to understand its obsolescence, and drooped.

T
HE DEGREE TO WHICH
the space expressed Adeleine, the fact that she had found and touched and arranged all these things—this alone made Thomas happy to be there each night. The supply of treasures seemed endless, as did the gentle exuberance with which she presented them, though he noted the bowed shelves, the lack of counter space, and wondered about the difference between pleasure and need.

Adeleine smoked out the window with a frequency that worried him. She cycled between a standing ashtray with a marble top and another, disc-shaped but thick, which spun to receive butts in a hidden underbelly. She had a record player and a whole wall of albums and invited him to run his fingers over them and choose. With her projector they watched movies on the one bare patch of wall—a tipsy Clark Gable stroked his mustache and charmed his way out of corners, Harpo Marx absconded with someone’s hat again—and as the hours passed in the monochromatic and jerking light, he felt peaceful, saturated. He caught her laughing and turned to see her mouth open. Adeleine had a past, but it was distinctly absent from the display.

On a night when she seemed particularly pliable and garrulous, giggling at and mouthing punch lines like a sugar-addled child, he resolved to chip away at her mystery. When the film ended, he crossed his legs Indian-style, willing confidence.

“You know, I was wondering. How did your parents give you your name?”

“With a great deal of hope and fear, I guess.” She grinned. “Like anyone faced with accounting for the life they’ve unexpectedly created.”

“I guess I meant—”

“Was it a family name? Did it appear to my mother in a dream? Did an old woman place her hand on the bump that was me and divine it?”

“I wasn’t betting on those situations, exactly, but—”

“My father drank a lot—drinks a lot. It was a good choice for slurring. Can’t really fuck it up. All soft consonants. I’m sleepy. Are you?”

She exaggerated a yawn, patting her fingertips on the oval of her mouth, and walked him to the door, where she gave his arm an avuncular squeeze before locking herself in.

T
HOU
GH
E
DWARD HAD TAKEN
to dressing like someone who spent recreational hours outside a small-town 7-Eleven, he showered and shaved and dressed up for therapy: cardigans buttoned up his chest and crisp collared shirts of muted blues and pinks, corduroys ironed and creased. During the sessions he was painfully conscious of his facial expressions, eager to convey an intelligent thoughtfulness, a willing openness, a sense of humor despite it all. He found Mariana’s frequent nods erotic, the cross of her ankles too much to glance at for long.

He tried to find the brand of tissues she kept in her office—they were the softest he’d ever touched, slightly scented with aloe and something else probably only people like Mariana knew the name of—and even the health food stores, the places where imported peaches sold for two dollars each, didn’t carry it.

Mariana identified Edward’s late mother’s behavior during his childhood as wildly inappropriate, and urged him to understand that cultivating forgiveness and assigning accountability were not mutually exclusive. It was no wonder, Mariana said, that being kept inside and overly protected from all hypotheticals for much of his childhood had led to a great deal of wildness and experimentation later on. Mariana’s speech was peppered with words like
choice
and
self
and
journey
, and much of the time she spent talking, Edward spent trying not to think of how he might arrange her naked form, how all the firm parts of her might move together.

He wanted to kiss her until she no longer resembled the upright and incisive figure in the chair, to erase the wall behind her and the three framed degrees from liberal arts schools that sounded like poisonous plants, to upset the precise arrangement of pins at the nape of her neck. Afterward, he would tell her, “That was a thoroughly positive and expansive experience,” and take her out for cheeseburgers, in jest spurning the sparkling probiotic drinks he’d seen in her mini-fridge.

He wanted to feel that the distance between men like him and women like her was not so great, that he hadn’t been doomed from birth to struggle, to run from one dysfunctional corner to the next while another stratum of people functioned gracefully and fell asleep easily.

Sometimes when these visions floated across his brain, the thought of her sock on his floor or locket on his nightstand, his face betrayed him, and Mariana would pause and say, “Well, Edward, you’re smiling broadly now—can you tell me what that’s about?” He would reply, “Oh, sure. I think I just made a breakthrough. Several, in fact
.
” So far, therapy had cost him $42,563. His money was disappearing, running from him like some feral animal.

Y
OU
’
RE AN EMPTY BAG
of a person and I know you have it!”

Edith, at the door of Edward’s apartment, dressed in a polka dot dress with misaligned shoulder pads and a bowler hat that obscured her forehead entirely, lurched forward, gesturing menacingly with a ballpoint pen. “Let me in!”

Edward, woken that day by a particularly crippling fugue of melancholy, could not contend with the figure at his door. He could barely even follow the sounds and images of his television. He’d been dreaming of Helena again.

She’d been waiting for him for hours in a Victorian greenhouse, ready for a road trip they’d planned carefully, her evenly worn leather bag packed and her hair tightly braided, but he was stuck in a club, trying to squeeze in one last gig: he’d been sweating under the lights, telling the audience about how his mother used to lock him inside for days, and tasting the blood that was filling his mouth.

“Have what?” he mumbled, reminding himself that the day was happening to him, despite his brain urging him elsewhere. He found it laughable that anyone could believe he possessed anything of transferable value. In his long-unwashed corduroys, lacking the crucial fly button and permanently tented open, with his beard that grew in temperamental patches and smelled of inexpensive soup, he stood and waited for her to clarify her accusation. He felt a pathetic thrill at the opportunity to expound upon how little he had.

“You’ve got my checkbook,” she hissed, pointing at him. “I know you do!”

“I do, huh?” He knew it was wrong to indulge her, but something acidic in his body had turned over. “Is that how I’ve managed to finance this luxurious lifestyle of mine? Cars and women, all the time? Why don’t you come in! View my collection of expired milk and secondhand sweaters! Gilded! Rare!”

Unfazed by his teasing, Edith shuffled closer with the determination of a prospector, her elbows forming sharp angles.

“Woolworth’s called. You’re buying up the jewelry department on my dime, you big-nosed faggot!”

“Listen,” said Edward. He found that the nastiness he felt towards himself shifted easily to another target. “Why don’t you just head back downstairs in your crazy hat and fix yourself a cup of bathwater tea, pick a fight with one of your moldy couches—”

Edith’s invented anger coursed through her thin body and she shoved him, but the reality of her lunge was slow, and Edward easily backed away. In a moment that felt much later and unbearably quiet, he looked down at her form laid across the doorframe, watched her hat as it lolled on the floor in a slowly diminishing half-life: he could understand time was advancing only from the movements of the felt brim on the hardwood. Edith’s open mouth made little gasps, and a thread of saliva trembled and played between her lower and upper lips.

“Thief,” she breathed and repeated, in and out, the false word finding lodging in her body.

—

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, Edward had arranged Edith on his chest and bent his knees in preparation for the first step down. He had determined that nothing was broken, but she refused to ambulate on her own, had remained bubbling the beginnings of sentences from her prone position in his entryway. His left arm cradled the blues and purples of her legs, and his right tensed against her shoulder blades. Her hat, which he had placed back on her head, obstructed his view as he felt his way down the steps, and her breath sounded in strained puffs from her unevenly pink-frosted lips. She began to sing.

Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?

Right on track twenty-nine, boy can you give me a shine?

Edward knew this song. His mother, though pathologically joyless, used to play this 45 as if to say, I was once a person who wore dresses, took trains, looked out windows.

I can afford to board the Chattanooga Choo-choo,

I’ve got my fare and just a trifle to spare.

He whistled with her as her voice traveled down to the foyer like a recording slowly warping, the notes faltering in their execution.

You leave the Pennsylvania station at a quarter to four,

read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore;

dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,

than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina.

On the landing, finally resigned to the absurdity and the necessity of it, he shuffled his feet and put his throat into the next bit of song—
Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin’—
and raised up the dust from the maroon runner in several waves. Edward surfaced from his performance to see a man who appeared composed of only sharp angles standing in the foyer, where the light caught his gold-watched wrist. He removed the sunglasses from his bronze cheeks, folded them into the top button of a crisp pink shirt and sighed, even that sound precise.

“Mother,” the man said. His presentation of the word was hard, useful, as though he’d addressed a gas station cashier, asked for ten dollars on number six. Just inside Edward’s line of vision, Edith’s cheeks filled with blood. On the back of his chilled neck, her nails dug for a better hold. The brass mailboxes glinted, and the agitated air smelled like a garage thrown open to meet the street.