Infinite Home (19 page)

T
HOMAS
SLEPT
LATE
in the exorbitantly priced hotel room, succored by the white anonymous space as he dreamt, slowly, of untouched earth. Even as he walked through the dream, he knew it was strange that his mind, so accustomed to an urban setting, would conjure rivers rapid and green, footpaths curving under the grand theater of forest. When he woke, he thought of water. He wrapped the plush, bleached robe around him and crossed the empty hall, where he stepped into the washed glow of the elevator.

The pool possessed a certain type of lavish 1920s grandeur: the curved glass ceiling demarcated by thin white panes, the pale tiles and plush lounges immaculate, the verdant fronds tall and loose in each corner of the room. As he willed himself to float, he looked up through the glass at oxidized copper roofs, at office buildings pulsing with light, and marveled at how his liquid surroundings rendered the paralyzed side of him just the same as the other.

In the late afternoon, dry but still drunk with the sensation of floating, Thomas stepped out of the lobby and walked. He carried the last photo of Jenny in his pocket, studied it on various benches, patted it while he ascended and descended the hills that seemed impractical for the purposes of a city. Why build on such angles? But he admired them, enjoyed the performance, the way they routinely hid the next mile from view and surprised with an abrupt path downward. After two hours of walking he realized what he’d known but ignored: that the city wasn’t as large as New York was, wasn’t a place that offered getting lost as a gift. Through some unconscious set of lefts, he had already begun to return: to his scant luggage, the pennies and dimes on the night table.

He walked down Market Street, the early stretch of it still dominated by strip clubs and SROs and the woven dens of the homeless, constructed of scraps of cotton and cardboard as though designed by earthbound birds. Thomas dodged a handful of requests for change that varied in tone and volume, stepped over a half-dozen sleeping bags, and then he saw her. Her outstretched hands, her skin that appeared to have experienced flood and drought in an unending cycle, her eyes unchanged.

H
ARD
LY
FEELING
THE
DIP
between curb and street, he glided towards her. He was sure, or nearly, that this was the child Edith and Declan had lost. She was standing with a foot on the concrete ledge of an angular fountain, working a denim pant leg up with one hand and holding the plastic handle of an overflowing shopping cart with the other.

He approached and stepped into the fetid scent, understanding too late he was interrupting her bath.

“Jenny?”

The woman wrinkled her forehead to regard him, and the dirt on her face realigned. She was worn in the way of broken things left out in brown yards, stretched and sun-bleached and sagging.

“Who are you to ask,” she spat. “You a cop?”

“No, I—”

She pulled on his sweater and tilted her head to the side. “No, you’re not a cop.”

“I came to talk to you—”

“I’m hungry,” she barked. “You gonna get me some fuckin’ food or what?”

Before he could answer she was shuffling off, pushing her cart against the light through protesting honks. He tried to keep up, weaving through traffic and raising his hand in thanks to the drivers who let him. In front of a McDonald’s she acknowledged two hunched and gaunt men pinching cigarettes between diminished lips and leaning against the intricately scratched window, and parked her rolling pile of possessions there.

Inside, she told Thomas what to order, grabbed a booth while he waited in line. She’d brought in four bulging plastic bags, which she examined and sniffed. Thomas looked up at the backlit photos of hamburgers, unsure if this was how he had wanted to feel when he found her. It had happened too quickly: he had not been prepared: but how, he wondered, could he have readied himself for this?

She didn’t comment on the way he crouched to slide the tray, one armed, onto the table. While she inhaled a double cheeseburger and gnawed the ice from the soda, splintering it in her open mouth, Thomas looked for words, aware he’d spent much of life like this, stammering and searching. Wasn’t this outcome more likely than any other he’d considered—couldn’t he have guessed that the lost child, damaged by an era that chewed up so many, would be somewhere between life and death, growling, pushing her rotting blankets and talismans through depressed intersections?

“I guess I’ll get right to it. Your mother? Edith? Is sick. Your brother is trying to take the property from her against her will.”

She said nothing, kept eating, opening ketchup packets with her sawed-down teeth and picking at her gray gums with a pinky nail.

“I know it’s been practically a lifetime, but—”

“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but you must be a lunatic or somethin’,” she said, finally. “Don’t know why you want to tell me this shit. Like I don’t have plenty to deal with. Everything I can do just to survive. City making new laws to illegalize me every day.” Her frustration soon became unintelligible, and she was speaking in schizophrenic apostrophe. “Little bitches,” she said. “Flying around, not even my own age.”

Her cool anger seemed to flash, vanishing from her face before it appeared in her body. Their circumferences like those of dinner plates, her enormous hands spread and hovered over the table, then slammed down. “Fucker. Mother
fucker
.”

“Jenny?” He said it again, though he knew now how wrong he was, and longed at once for all the clean, quiet moments of his life, as though summoning them might give him some power in the barbed present.

“I’m leaving, and I don’t want to see you again.” She removed a butter knife from one of the plastic bags that swayed from her arm and stood before him, swiping it through the air vertically. Thomas found himself laughing, everything suddenly a well-earned punch line: the carving on the bench that read
SUK OR FUK MY DIK
, the irate homeless person he’d tried to offer free real estate, the filthy woman’s eyes protruding as she gripped the dull, bent knife.

“Lunatic is right!” Thomas said, as she backed away. Freed in some way, he closed his eyes and sank into the vinyl backrest.

He folded his arms on the table, buried his sight in the scratchy wool once Declan’s, and found the memories of his past life there: himself at an art gallery, shaking hands with suited men, later sharing their cabs, waiting for the girls in belted linen dresses to come to him, packaging his pieces for shipment once they’d sold, taking a nap in the afternoon, knowing the world would be ready to receive him when he awoke. He sighed and rose and pushed the door open.

Before he felt the force of hands around him, he noticed the scent of old sweat. Then the voice of the woman who wasn’t Jenny, skirted by two others, and the coughs as they slammed his head against a wall, searching his body as though it were a cluttered drawer. The greedy push of their fingers was several seconds gone before he opened his eyes, saw them running and the man in the blue uniform approaching.

P
A
ULIE
HAD
SWUM
towards a quiet place within the limits of his condition. He had come to understand that the affection he shared with Claudia was as sacred as any—but still sometimes an alarm went off, all parts of him knocked together. When at the zoo he saw a father hoisting a child to see the wild goats canter, or on the street he watched a pair of sweethearts speaking to the stroller between them, he felt angry at the simple shape of his life: at the meals Claudia helped him prepare and the way she watched him complete the tasks she nervously assigned, at the days he sometimes spent playing music for just himself, at the brightly colored blankets and playful lamps that smeared his apartment as reminders of a permanent childhood. Once in a while he would still plead with Claudia,
But what if I adopted, but what if you helped me take care of the baby
, and always ended up red-faced and tear-streaked.

The conversation had happened again. Paulie had shut himself in his bedroom, turned on the light shaped like the moon and insisted, uncharacteristically, on wallowing in his poor temper. He had fallen asleep in his clothes, slept through Claudia leaving for work in the morning, and woken up with a mood that moved like an injured bee, frantically, from wall to wall.

Paulie thought he might go see Edward, either lie on his couch and ask him questions about what he was writing or convince him to go somewhere with plenty of color and sound, a loud movie or fast train, but when he knocked, no one answered. He sat down on the landing, not yet ready to return to his apartment, and tried to think up a story he liked about staircases. When he heard Edith’s door open, he brightened. He called her name too loud and stood waving like a traffic guard, trying to direct her eyes to his voice.

She turned and blinked steadily for most of a minute.

“How is today looking?” he asked. Running her fingers over the peach costume jewels that ringed her neck, Edith squinted up at him. Her face reacted as though to some improbability, a lynx strolling through a bank or a waterfall tumbling out a third-story window.

Her eyes welled. She had gotten dressed, put on makeup, left her apartment with a purpose, but now it was gone. Paulie watched her slow crumple and felt an immediate sense of guilt. How had his cheerful intentions betrayed him in their brief trip from his mouth to her ears? Shoelaces flying, he rushed down to meet her.

Most people he knew, even Claudia, tried to smother any complicated emotions in his presence, and so he found himself in some way honored when Edith didn’t try to conceal her crying. The tears drove tracks on her face, snatched up the beige powder from her eyelids and moved it through the unblended pinks and reds.

“Did staying inside with all your things start to feel bad?”

Paulie knew you should ask someone before you touched them, but he didn’t, this time, before he cradled her. The swollen pads of her fingers groped at the back of his neck as he lifted her half an inch, and her body’s weight left the floor in small increments as his frame received it. When she kept shaking, Paulie searched his body for a solution, then started to lead her towards her door, which remained open, as though she hadn’t been sure she had everything she needed.

Paulie escorted her in, mentally reviewing a list of the ways Claudia comforted him, tried to remember how his mother had spoken when he was sick. He placed Edith on the couch, crouched and kissed each of her cheeks, then her eyelids. Then an idea came to him, and he bounced on his knees. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Upstairs, Paulie handled the Nesquik as though it were holy. To stop it from trembling, his left hand held his right wrist, which grasped the spoon and stirred. He could smell the froth of the cocoa on his way down the stairs, and he ached with wanting it for himself.

“Chocolate milk!” he announced, near her again, on the dining room chair next to hers. She appraised his offering as if it were an idling, unfamiliar car, so he said, more softly, “For drinking.” Finally, he brought the glass to her lips and she pushed out her tongue, touched the milky surface.

“Drink it like a dog!” encouraged Paulie. “I don’t care! It probably tastes better that way.” It did—he could tell by the way her breathing had changed. He sat beside Edith and moved his hands in what he hoped were perfect circles on her shoulders.

“What now?” He was unsure how long consolation should last. “I have another idea!” He turned so that their knees met in two neat points and put his hands up in a gesture that could have meant stop. Edith regarded him warily, but then the song he sang,

Three, six, nine

The goose drank wine

and the way he pushed his hands forward to meet hers, his right to her left, then both of his on both of hers, then his left to her right,

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line

called her back.

The line broke

The monkey got choked

Jenny, as a shy little girl in a linen jumper on the stoop, had loved this song, the elaborate hand-clapping pattern, how Edith had trusted her daughter’s small palms to meet her larger ones, how her mother’s voice bounced, carried all the animals to the safe homes the story kept for them—

And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat

Clap, clap

The song stayed with her, and later that afternoon, as she crossed into the kitchen to put on the kettle, she was mouthing the words to herself, thinking of the mother she’d been in her best moments, when her right foot moved into the cocoa-colored puddle Paulie had left behind. As her legs flew out in front of her, she pictured the tufts of down and fur, the oars pumping skyward.