Infinite Home (18 page)

E
VEN
THOUGH
HE
WASN
’
T
SUPPOSED
TO
, Paulie believed there was nothing wrong, not really, with going down to visit Edith when Claudia was off at work; if at first she was surprised to see him, he knew she enjoyed their games. Paulie had never witnessed anyone else play Go Fish so rigorously: she clapped and she slammed the stern kings and mischievous jacks on the table, she said
fish
like she meant every last one, of every size and color, in all the five oceans.

On a bright day that didn’t soften with afternoon, the sun at four still white and the heat closely packed, Edith’s attention to their game dwindled. Her fan of cards loosened until they slipped, one by one, onto the floor. She leaned into the table and wheezed.

“What do I look like to you? You haven’t got twenty-one,” she said, “not by a long shot!”

“What? Um?”

“Give me back that money!”

“Edith, please—I’m not—this isn’t—”

Her gnarled fingers made a fist that she waved as though it held a ticket, and she looked at him and saw a man she didn’t know: he had curly hair long enough for braids and a shirt printed with images of constellations, and he was crying from huge eyes. She turned away from him and bit the sides of her cheeks. The temperature felt like punishment.

They sat in silence for fifteen minutes. The last of Paulie’s tears emptied onto the galaxy of his shirt, and Edith focused on her surroundings, tried to place herself in them, burning all her energy in the attempt to recognize a chipped teapot or spiked plant or open door.

“We could play something else,” he said finally. “Let me just visit the men’s room.”

Paulie had loved the phrase “the men’s room” for as long as he could remember; it felt like a password into the world of suits and cars and wives that had otherwise rejected him. He closed the door behind him and splashed water on his face, sat down to pee as he’d been taught by the mishaps incurred by standing and aiming. He observed the shelves in front of him, their mysterious spectrum of jars and boxes and tubes and brushes, some dusty and some never used, the colors ranging from bright to earthy. He forgave Edith for yelling. The inflexible losses of games, the rules you couldn’t reason with, upset him too.

Back in the kitchen, with the cosmetics spread across the table, he kissed her forehead before he smeared on the first splash of blue.

When he finished Edith’s face, Paulie stepped back and regarded her with a hand on his chin, surveying his work from several angles. His hand-eye coordination had never been exquisite, and he had employed an abstract approach, marking Edith’s pores with meandering paths of red lipstick that met lush fields of green eye shadow. He felt particularly proud of her nose, an isolated bridge of shimmering cyan, and moved in and out of the late sunlight to observe it.

“It’s your turn,” he said finally. “Now you do me.” He pulled up a chair in front of her and closed his eyes. “Jungle cat preferred!”

An hour later, the people returning from jobs in the city paused to glance at the sight on the stoop: an old woman in an oversized sun hat and a grown man who sat with his legs splayed like a six-year-old in a sandbox, their faces altered by a mess of pigments. Beside them sat a time-yellowed cream-colored radio, the taped antennae resting on the lip of the stone step above, and they mouthed the words of the songs that came in over a base of static. The last of the commuters saw the nest of white hair bent into the neck of the man, who stroked the head and sang a thirty-year-old commercial jingle for squat, rounded figurines marketed as untippable.

Weebles wobble

Weebles wobble

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

Multicolored and projecting a two-headed shadow, they were still sitting there when the streetlamps came on.

I
N
T
H
OMAS
’
S
ABSENCE
, Adeleine felt a distinct anger: at the way he had entered her home and classified it as strange, at how he had decided her relationship with her possessions needed broadcasting: the night before he had boarded the airplane, he’d set up an array of recording devices and urged her to catalogue her songs.

“They should be heard,” he had said, posturing with an authority she found obnoxious. “The creation is only ever the first part of it. The next is letting it go.” She had started to buzz, was still buzzing, with the familiar anxiety that used to sound when someone urged her to do something with her talents. Songs were fine and good, she thought, but they were not the water that turned seeds to plants, or the materials that built steady houses, or the ointments that healed a wound. Once, when she had voiced concerns along these lines to a psychiatrist, he had asked her why she hadn’t become a farmer or a carpenter or a physician. She hadn’t had an answer, and had hated him for asking.

In an attempt to smother the old temper in her stomach, she washed the dishes and scrubbed the perpetually grimy bathtub, but the activity only heightened her heart rate. All she had ever wanted, she realized, since she was a little girl who turned away from doting cameras, was to be left alone.

Lying on the floor with her palms up, hoping to receive some wave of calm, Adeleine could hear, layered under the fluttering notes of Paulie’s keyboard, warped, feral sounds. She pressed her left cheekbone into the hardwood until it ached and listened until she recognized the noises as coming from Edith. Without further thought, she rose and approached the doorframe, watched her wrist and palm rotate the knob.

T
HOMAS
HADN
’
T
VISITED
San Francisco since losing his old body, but there was a time he had flown out once or twice a year: he would casually tour the spectacular heights and views, stay with friends and spend unfocused hours on foggy rooftops. He had always arrived with no definite plans and found a city that didn’t require any. As he looked away from the airport’s organic grocery store, its rainbow bounty of produce, as the escalator carried him down from
ARRIVALS
to
GROUND
TRANSPORTATION
, he reminded himself of the wholly different shape of this visit. Imagining himself as he’d last been on the same steel moving walkways—his linen thrift store slacks, his military-green duffel bag, his carefree stroll towards the line of cars outside and the warm way he’d greeted the friend who’d picked him up—he constricted and grabbed for the handrail.

There was no one pulling up in a car for him out front, no one waving and grinning: he hadn’t let anyone know he was coming, couldn’t imagine summing up the last two years or explaining his total lack of plans for the next few. He followed the signs to other transportation, fumbled with the unfamiliar ticketing system, pulled his rolling suitcase into the train car, and waited for motion.

—

H
IS PLANS WERE VAGUE
, loose as algae. He had wished—so hard that he’d begun to expect—that he would divine some clue or plan from the sea-brined air, the Victorians that seemed to lean crookedly uphill. Instead he was a man in a city not his own, holding the decades-old mementos of someone’s lost daughter, standing at the exit of an unfamiliar station with no itinerary besides a stop at the library. He had smothered such hatred of himself since meeting Adeleine, had distracted himself with the unfolding mystery of her, but now he felt the creep of fog under his light sweater and tugged at his sleeves, furious with himself for failing even to look after this basic aspect of survival.

He narrowly skirted an argument between two bearded homeless men but not the thick odor of urine it seemed to agitate, pulled Declan’s cardigan against him, and cut a path towards the library, a seven-story building of angular granite that abutted its neighbors’ stone reliefs of angels. The automatic doors acknowledged him and opened.

Three hours later, on the top floor, where the city records lived in quiet decay, Thomas had found an excess of nothing concerning Jennifer Faith Christine Whalen, save the small fact that she had attended, or at the very least signed up for, a class—on what the registrar didn’t reveal—at the city college the year she arrived. It was as though she had never assumed an address, or cast her ballot in an election, or subscribed to a journal, or taken any of the measures that mean inclusion or community or home.

Why, he wondered, in all the photos of her, did she seem uncomfortable in the world of domesticity and people: why had she seemed to hover over the couch rather than let the cushions receive her? Why hadn’t she reached out to hold the volunteered crook of Declan’s elbow? Why had she only packed such a modest suitcase on the day she left, forsaking the playthings of childhood and pinned-up photos of idols so easily?

Thomas’s frustration with the lack of results nudged at his aching for Adeleine; the smell of browned papers and the creak of century-old book spines in the records room had irritated it, reminded him of all the antiquated things she worshipped so stubbornly. The sound of the chair as he pushed it back reverberated, a loud screech in a room full of things still and near soundless, and he took the stairs down at a clip, determined to hear her voice on the telephone.

Outside, settled uncomfortably on a ledge that barely accommodated his body, Thomas listened as her phone rang but she didn’t answer, and vividly pictured the worst. She had recounted to him the psychiatrists and the pills, those prescribed and otherwise, and he had grown to sense her need for him, had seen her darken when he told her about his plans to travel. Three thousand miles away, he imagined the mass of her orange and beige anti-anxiety pills emptied out, the sleeping agents spread in lines, or her water-pruned body drawn in a tight shape in the bathtub where she had hid for hours, murky, loose as algae. His imagination, he considered as he withdrew from the fantasy, had never lacked ambition. Looking up towards the inscrutable gray of the sky, which hung low and concealed distance, he dialed another number.

E
DITH
’
S
VOICE
RANG
OUT
so firmly when she said hello that Thomas, on the other end, could almost believe her as capable as she once had been: he could fly back at once, let his mind flow into calm under her maternal reassurance, grow tired by the hiss of her worn blue kettle. It was mid-evening there, and he imagined her stroking the tufts of her hair, rocking slightly as they talked.

“You’re in San Francisco!” she chirped. “Why, that’s where our wild Jenny went off to.” The careful conversation he had led, informing Edith of his purpose, begging that she rummage for any more information about her daughter, quickly diverged.

“Yoo-hoo,” she giggled. “You wouldn’t believe who has joined me this morning. Ad-e-leine! And she’s got the loveliest housedress on, and I think I’m going to take the train into the city and find one just like it at Bergdorf’s!”

Standing upright, newly chilled by the fog, Thomas watched a homeless man in a shrunken sweater listlessly rearrange the cans in his shopping cart, and forced a chuckle.

“Listen, Edith, do you think I could speak to her?”

“To whom, dear?”

“Adeleine.”

The phone emptied of sound.

“Oh—yes,” Edith warbled.

Adeleine greeted him girlishly, with forced and uncharacteristic affection. He wanted to warm and unclench at this, at being addressed intimately for the first time in days, at being recognized, but her chipper tone bore a suspect echo.

“What are you, uh . . .
doing?
” It was not like her to get out and socialize with the neighbors, no less the demented and capricious landlord. He supposed he should congratulate her, but the suspicion arrived first and made its demands like a guest at the table too hungry for manners.

“Edith was having”—she paused while she searched for safe language—“a bad day, you could say. I heard it from my apartment and I came down.” She offered this information blithely, as if she were not someone who received her groceries exclusively by delivery, who had turned defensive and morose when Thomas suggested that she might someday join him on a camping trip.

“You could . . . hear her bad day?”

“Yes, well. I was on the floor, so. Anyway, I’ve been writing down some memories for her—she was upset because she said they were sort of losing their foundation, like they were flooded and pushed into the wrong rooms.”

“Flooded?” Thomas remained astonished. He didn’t recognize the uptick in her voice, or the assertive clip of her intentions; he tried to imagine her eyes focused in the muted lamplight while she urged Edith on in her remembering, while she pushed a pen across the page with a strong wrist, but couldn’t.

“Point is, I thought I should help. How are
you
?”

“I miss you.”

That was all he could manage. He had never had a talent for speaking on the phone, was always hovering over the conversation’s true purpose or cowed by the speed of the interaction, reacting too slowly, forgetting to assent with his voice as well as his face.

“Okay,” Adeleine agreed hesitantly. “Me too. I think I’ll get back to Edith now, but I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Okay,” he echoed, but she had already ended the call. How could it be, he thought, that the people he had gone galloping off on this fool’s mission to help were so comfortably supporting each other in a warm room? He felt glad for them, for the idea of Edith’s chatter being caught and held, but the phone call had left him more and not less lonely, and he knew that every passing hour was another in which he hadn’t earned his way home.