Infinite Home (11 page)

T
HE BOILER IN THE BASEMEN
T
, ancient and tall and dust-covered, gave its last hiss early one mid-January morning. Sometimes Adeleine grew so absorbed by the story of Miriam’s life, her perfect cursive and the talk of dinner parties and operas, that she forgot to eat. Slim and forever sensitive to the cold, she became more so on these forgotten afternoons, so the first day without heat she could only understand the chill as a failure of her own body. The thermostat, mounted on the yellowed wall of Edith’s living room and typically kept at a sturdy sixty-five degrees, crept backward into the evening. The snow outside piled on and obscured bushes, trash cans, bicycles, until they looked only like suggestions, nebulous shapes drawn by small children.

Distracted by a young Miriam’s description of her son’s first Christmas, the escalators in the department stores and how she accidentally forgot him under a rack of red felt coats, Adeleine put on another pair of wool socks and finally crawled into bed after fetching an extra quilt and afghan from the overflowing linen cabinet. She never had guests but always vaguely expected them, kept piles of folded warmth clean and ready, and when she slept that night, she dreamt of arrivals, doors opened and ready, mouths kissed and embraces shared.

At 2:15 she woke from shivering and saw her breath in clouds around her, the multiplied snow out the window through the thin ancient glass. She crossed into the living room and stood below the heating vents, spread her hands and finally realized. Her teeth clattered as she moved across the hall, and she knocked more loudly than she’d expected. As the creak of his mattress and lean rhythm of his gait sounded, she was surprised to find that the tremor the cold made in her body was nearly equaled by the thrill of his approach. When he answered, his face admitted a struggle: in opening the door with his good hand the blanket he’d wrapped around himself had slipped.

“Come here,” he said, wit and effort gone from his speech. She understood he was as glad to offer his body heat as she was to take it, and pressed into his shoulder a while before they spoke.

“I called her at six and knocked at nine—no answer. I think she was exhausted after that visit from her son—she’s finally catching up on sleep. Probably she accidentally nudged the tab on the thermostat in a hurry to lock the door.” His speculative optimism was like that of a mother attempting to diminish her own worry.

“Either that or she was scheming up a way to finally get us in bed together.”

His startled laughter at her bold joke lasted a while, and then she followed him through his apartment—bereft of life’s clutter, gleaming, dusted—into his bed. The whole night, they practiced various combinations, linking their bodies at an endless series of points. They were too cold and tired for anything but this, though still she felt briefly the stutter from between his legs. When the sun rose glacial and early, they absorbed the suggestion of it as filtered through four layers of blankets, but didn’t move to watch it. She never released his limp left hand.

Midmorning he grunted, spoke directly into Adeleine’s skin: “All right, enough. I’m going to find her.”

—

T
HOMAS KNOCKED
with the volume of a man with a full body: nothing. He pressed his head, lightly, to the doorframe, and wished angrily to return to thirty-six hours before, when the situation hadn’t yet demanded he assume a position of competence. Or eight hours before, in the locked position with Adeleine, the moment so flawlessly lit and enfolded he believed he could bear the chill forever. The prospect of what might happen next exhausted him, brought a leaden weight, and he leaned still more heavily on Edith’s door.

It opened, had been unlocked all along.

He found her in the bedroom, hands tightly clasped in her lap, sitting in an unevenly stuffed armchair, covered minimally by a cocktail dress, which, he realized with dread, he could smell: the odor, like the damp underside of rotted wood, rushed in and out of his nostrils. Its blue lace, variously faded, held a raised system of wrinkles, and from under it came forth a jagged spray of tulle. The back, undone, struggled to remain on the shoulders, and her flesh fell slack, in lumps, to the root of the zipper.

“Oh! I’ve been waiting for you,” she said with a choked warmth, as though practicing words recently acquired in a foreign language, emphasizing syllables arbitrarily. “A little chilly for summer, huh!”

Thomas moved closer, aware of his irregular heartbeat.

“Dear,” she said. “It’s about time we make it to the market, or they’ll be out of the things you like.”

He finally understood, with an uneasiness that made his ears ring, how lost she was. Thomas crouched down and began to speak, articulating each sound.

“Edith.” She leaned forward and clutched her elbow around his neck, placed a tremor-ridden hand on his cheek.

“I knew you were just down the street the whole time—”

“Edith.”

“And I
said
that to June, but she said, ‘Oh, probably out carousing again, charming the world and leaving his own house empty.’
Long distance
she calls to say!”

“
Edith!
”

He put his arms around her and whispered the facts in her ear—“It’s me, Thomas, I live upstairs, it’s Thomas from upstairs, you’re Edith and we drink tea together sometimes on my sofa by the window, I ask you about your life, Declan isn’t here anymore but I am, it’s me Thomas”—and continued in spite of her warbling, gripped the limp, gelid skin, the bones of her shoulders, tried with every portion of available energy to focus. Finally, she stilled and looked up at him, horrified, as though surveying a car she’d just crashed from the driver’s seat. On her nightstand was a dingy legal pad, open to a blank page, and a sponge and some keys; around her feet were a series of shoes, a lone violet heel, vinyl yellow rain boots, braided leather sandals. He pulled a faded rose blanket from her unmade bed and wrapped it around her.

I
N THE DAYS THAT F
OLLOWED
, Edith arranged for the boiler’s quick repair, and asked Thomas not to phone her son, though he assured her it had never been his intention. She apologized recursively for the “incident,” as she liked to refer to it—her language for catastrophe made mild by the era she’d come of age in—and branded it a onetime slip, simply the product of too much time on her hands. Indeed, she seemed, in some ways, renewed; she moved with new agency and a brand-new hot-pink feather duster, lifted vases and pots to get at their other angles. But he sensed an uptick in her speech and body that nagged at him: where was the slowness about her that had so comforted him before? One afternoon she put on a Bobby Darin record and insisted on dancing. The formal pose of the waltz was stiff and foreign to his body, but familiar as a prized memory on her light hands and proud back. Her eyes traveled with unfocused brightness as she pressed herself closer.

When that shark bites, with his teeth, babe.

“Oh you,” she murmured. “Let’s make a party!”

T
HE NIGHT
E
DITH HAD WONDERED
blithely about Declan’s whereabouts and the heat had fled the building like a reluctant visitor, Edward had taken a rare stroll in Manhattan, determined to find the city that had once embraced him, and ended up on an old friend’s doorstep. He and Martin had told stale stories and drank most of a fifth of whiskey, and Martin insisted, in a maudlin show of brotherhood, that Edward sleep on the couch. So Edward had not been there when his neighbor came to the door in his Santa-red full-body pajama suit with buttons up the back, at which point Paulie had called his sister, who had not answered. Paulie then set to fort building, hanging blankets over couches and tables and layering pillows on cushions, and told himself out loud not to worry. The winter moonlight that managed to slip into his creation was a wonder, and the fact he’d managed to construct himself any kind of new home had cheered him, but it hadn’t been enough.

In the hospital six hours later, Claudia hung from her chair with guilt and told her husband, Drew—who had offered brightly that pneumonia fatalities were nearly nonexistent in the Western world—to go fuck off to the vending machines. At Paulie’s side she followed panicked thoughts in circles until she settled, after a long exhale, on a conclusion: Paulie would live with them, and if her husband didn’t like that, she would move in with Paulie.

Drew, whom she’d met and married within the dim year that followed Seymour’s death, had told her he wanted to be her family. Slowly, with a feeling like coming home and realizing she’d been robbed, she had understood that he meant:
me, and no one else
. He treated her brother like a feral animal, cautiously tousling Paulie’s hair and then hurrying to the bathroom to scrub his hands. They had eloped at a rambling Victorian resort that straddled the Catskills, sat out on rocking chairs that faced the lake and giggled with the splashes of oversized trout who seemed haughty and bored by performing. “Do you see how simple things can be?” he had said.

Underfed and sleep-deprived in the hospital, Claudia began to picture the elaborate dinners she would cook Paulie: pork chops with apricots and red wine vinegar, fried chicken with orange zest batter, salads with Brie and spinach washed in the coldest, cleanest water. Looking down at the perforated plastic bracelet on his wrist, the paper gown, she thought of his tendency to eat with slapdash enthusiasm, food ending up in his eyebrows and hair, and she began to cry with such force that several nurses gathered in the backlit doorway to watch her body refill and empty. She passed the rest of the morning like that, and when she finally rose, fastening her hair at the nape of her neck, the shadows on the bleach-scented tiles were lengthening rapidly, trying to reach something up ahead. “I’ll be back so soon,” she whispered to Paulie, who napped with a hand placed demurely on his cheek, as if hosting a tea or judging a dog show.

She found Drew in the cafeteria, where a few nurses took mid-shift breaks, bringing cartons of orange juice to their lips with gold-ringed hands and tapping at their phones with artificial nails.

“Hi!” he said, rising from the plastic table, his arms spread to catch her. “Are we ready to go?”

She sat and he followed. She put one hand on his and another over her eyes.

“It depends on who you mean when you say ‘we.’”

“Oh. Well, how much longer do they need to keep him?”

“Oh! Well! I guess I’m not only talking about
today
, Drew.” She had meant to conserve her anger, spread it as a foundation, but instead she had shown herself immediately.

“What is it now, Claudia? Huh? I came here with you, I held your hand, I waited here in this godforsaken cafeteria—”

“I need to be with him—”

“And he’s going to be fine, as I said he would. Very soon he’ll be calling you at all hours again to read you the weather report—”

“We need to find a bigger place, one where we can all be comfortable.”

“And then what, Claudia? And then you spend the rest of your life,
our
life, mothering your older brother? How do I fit in there? How about kids? What will you do when our children need help at the same time he does?”

“This isn’t a choice. Some decisions are made for you. This one was made a long time ago. You knew this when we met.”

“Claudia, when we met, you had your therapist on speed dial and a pharmacy of anti-everythings in your purse. How was I supposed to rank your priorities in the middle of all that?”

“I’ll be at my brother’s house if you need me.”

Drew worked his jaw and brought the heel of his hand to the table, the thud of the impact quickly drowned by the industrial hum of the room, the commercial refrigerators’ whir and the soft ticks of the row of neon soda machines. As Claudia turned onto the wide hallway, the floors so clean they reflected the recessed lighting and passing gurneys, she felt as she had when exiting an important exam, the answers, wrong or right, left behind in the room where she’d decided them.