Infinite Home (21 page)

T
HOMAS STOOD
on the top floor of the rapidly emptying library, dreading exit, ignoring the announcements about closing, printing several copies of the photo.

Jenny and another girl stand in the shadow of a man wearing only jeans and sunny brown hair hanging past his nipples. His hipbones, distinct above the denim’s low waistline, gleam. A variety of greenery, spiked and reedy and leafed, moves up their legs. Jenny, on his right, rests her hands on the wooden handle of a shovel nearly as tall as she is. On her biceps is a tattoo of a circle, perhaps something more that Thomas can’t make out. To the man’s left, the other woman leans her soft face and long braids against his sculpted shoulders. In the unfocused background sit lopsided structures made of waste, bits of crates printed with half names of brands, deformed soda bottles, slices of tire, all of them thatched with twisted steel and strips of faded cloth.

The accompanying article, dated 1973, concerned a group of people who had departed San Francisco, gone farther north, in a return-to-the-land movement characterized by an emphasis on quiet. While they specifically avoided terms such as “leader,” the twenty-odd individuals—mostly young women—had followed the man in the photo, who called himself Root, to the property just below the border of the Trinity Alps Wilderness, an area rich in conifer diversity and poor in people. The son of a prominent senator, he had washed himself of his family’s reputation and spent their money on three hundred acres.

They spoke only one hour of the day and harvested simple crops, arugula and tomatoes and corn. In what little of an interview the reporter could manage, Root offered few words about their rejection of identity. “We’re no one, just like everybody else,” he said. “And we’re not afraid of it.” Regarding their notions about silence: “It’s not a hard and fast rule. Nobody is upbraided if they need to talk outside the hour of the day we set aside for it. But we find that the lion’s share of verbalization is an unnecessary excess, a vehicle that brings us away from ourselves.”

Jenny, who had begun to call herself Song, spoke only when asked about her home—had she come far to join this? Did her family approve?—and she answered only, “I was born in a place surrounded by water you can’t drink. Can you imagine?”

—

W
HEN A
N
I
NTERNET
SEARCH
confirmed the community still existed, Thomas felt the return of obligation. Back in the hotel room, he parted his hair neatly and combed it, took a harsh gulp of the tiny mouthwash. He kept expecting to find an out, to follow a selfish wish, and felt some surprise in the cab en route to the nearest car rental, as he spoke clear directions to the driver, and in the moment after the uniformed employee dropped the keys to a bland sedan into his hand and he crossed the parking lot, humming. He hadn’t driven a car since the stroke, and some part of him had expected a test demanding he raise both hands and make fists. He pushed away his mounting anxiety until the road was already rushing invisibly under him, then transferred it to the pressure on the gas pedal. The indirect route he’d planned, he hoped, would work to collect his confidence. On the Golden Gate, he ignored the way his left hand wilted across the steering wheel and watched the light perform on the bay. North of San Francisco, the land turned first into a near canopy of deep green, then cow-spotted hills that sloped modestly into imposing height.

C
LAUDIA
WHIRLED
AROUN
D
corners and opened and closed closets with a mania that frightened Paulie. It recalled his mother, who had always taken to cleaning after Paulie’s visits to the doctor: all surfaces of the house wet and gleaming so that touching them seemed wrong, the carpets robbed of all the soft steps they’d collected and shampooed to an unnatural sheen, the toilets so bright Paulie had felt guilty using them.

Paulie followed Claudia’s laps, shadowed her bent figure as she opened drawers and bumped them shut with her round hip, sat nearby as she unzipped and rezipped outer pockets on the two neon-pink suitcases she had purchased for the occasion. She told Paulie that when they returned from camping with the fireflies, the two of them were going to find a new place together, and that was why she had begun packing up his things. He felt squeezed watching his cymbals and ladybug cups, their shapes concealed by the seedy headlines of the
New York Post
, disappear without fanfare into the plain cardboard boxes. But he said nothing, just stuffed his hands in his armpits and returned every smile she flashed him.

Around ten a.m. Claudia hinted at a surprise in the afternoon, which made Paulie sweat and repetitively swallow to ease the dryness in his throat. He had never been fond of putting off joy, or giving his imagination the chance to inflate possibilities. He worried Claudia was making decisions too fast. In the bathroom, he sang a verse of Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow” and turned on the faucet to obscure the sound he knew was coming, and vomited.

When they finally left the apartment four hours and many boxes later, when Paulie felt the beloved rush of the subway and in Manhattan moved through a crowd of people who all smelled different and Claudia stopped him in front of the REI, he couldn’t form the smile that appropriately expressed his excitement. The tall double doors opened and he galloped through Skiing and Running and Swimming before he reached Camping, where he stood taking shallow breaths and deciding what object to touch first. He fingered the tiniest portable stoves and caressed glossy freeze-dried bags of food in flavors from chicken noodle to chickpea curry. Under the supervision of a cheery and vested employee, he evaluated six different sleeping pads in icy blues and sharp purples and mature greens. Lying there, he wondered at all the clunky items of human life rendered collapsible and manageable, efficient and unbreakable. He closed and opened the windows of the model tents, loved the clean sound of the plastic teeth coming together. Suddenly worried by the scale of options, Paulie asked Claudia what he could buy and she said, “Whatever you want. We’re going to drive around camping for a month!” He wilted onto a plastic log, where he sat with his hands on his knees, overcome with shock, blinking as he tried to absorb the prospect. He knew what was happening in his ears was called ringing, but it didn’t feel safe to hear the sounds of your body competing with the rest of the world, every breath struggling on its long way out.

I
’
M
SORRY
for not calling sooner,” Thomas began, on speaker in the compact rental car, his phone plugged into the stereo system so that when Adeleine spoke her voice caressed the rearview mirror, the sun-spotted windows, the pristine cloth of the backseat. He turned her soft voice up.

“That’s okay,” she said, indicating her situation was anything but. “Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Edith went to the hospital. She slipped. Or something. Owen was back for the weekend it happened and then she came home and he left again. Also, were you going to tell me about the eviction, or did you plan just to let me rot up here?”

“You have to believe that I’m taking care of it. That’s what I’m out here doing. Is she okay? How did it happen?” He posed the question as if the information were at all surprising, as though it concerned an Olympic athlete and not a woman in her late eighties with a flailing grasp on the season. It occurred to him that he had counted on the building to pause, an immutable tableau, while he left to save it.

“I don’t really know—but—”

“Who’s taking care of her?”

“That’s the thing.” The fear in her voice was evident through the speaker’s magnification and lent the dappled light a frantic quality, every fluctuation in brightness a mirror of her manic stuttering.

“He asked
me
to, I mean, he came into my apartment and basically ordered me to! And I can’t, I can’t. I’m worried I won’t be able to leave. I mean, I went down there without you once, but it was the first time in so long that I felt like I could and now, god, the
lights
are off—”

“Honey.” He paused, gathered the confidence to swaddle her in while he leaned slightly into the turns of the mountainous road and tightened his hand on the wheel. He resented the telephone, wished just to give her the view of the highway that cut improbably through cliff.

“Yes, you can. Think about it: you’re still not going outside, right? And you sounded so industrious on the phone when I called and you were with her! You sounded like someone who could orchestrate a space shuttle launch with the flick of a wrist.”

“I think you’d better come home,” she quavered. “The
lights
are off,” she repeated. “And I think Edward and Paulie and Claudia have left. I haven’t heard anything, but I looked down and there are all these boxes on their floor in the hall, and it feels like being the last person alive.”

“Adeleine. Can you stop scaring yourself? She probably just didn’t pay the bill. She keeps all her papers on her desk, under all the plants. You just call Con Ed and pretend to be her. Go down there and check on her, tell her it will be okay. She needs you.” Thomas couldn’t believe the gruffness in his voice, the impatience for her shrill worry. Wasn’t she the woman whose pathology he had taken such pains to dance around, more or less protecting it? He felt decidedly vexed at her then, her solipsism and odd intelligence, all her resistance to a regular life out in the open.

She hadn’t answered.

“Did you hear me?

“Adeleine?”

He heard the soft cluck of her mouth opening and waited for some murmur of assent.

“Okay,” she gasped. “Okay.”

“It will be all right. I’m on my way to Jenny as we speak—I’ll tell you the story next time we talk. Call me and let me know when you’ve got the lights back on and give me an update on Edith.” He didn’t give her the opportunity to hesitate again. “Good-bye, love.”

His thoughts purified quickly. The happiness that stemmed from tiny adjustments of the rearview mirror, the sharp turns he continued to handle, was large and flexible. The diffuse uncertainty of his predicament washed gently, like a tide eating slowly at firmly packed sand.

S
ITTING IN THE DARK WITH
E
DITH
, holding her hand, listening to her breath try and fail to determine a rhythm, Adeleine attempted to think of her condition as others saw it. As though considering a photo taken without her knowledge, she turned it, held it up to light to reveal some previously invisible element of herself. Had Thomas considered just how opportunely the arrangement had developed, the cheap punch line of an agoraphobe taking up with someone just across the hall? Did he see her affections as paltry for how little they traveled, how rarely they were tested? She had navigated the situation far too casually, she thought, had allowed her proximity and availability to stand as an ersatz reproduction of commitment. She may as well have said,
Yes, I’ll keep welcoming you in. I’ll stay, but how much that has to do with you and me is a little murky.

On the phone she had wanted to say,
My pillows are losing the scent you left,
but she had only moaned about her various inconveniences and inabilities, added to the tentacled shape of all that required his fixing. There hadn’t been any way to tell him, that week in early March when he came down with the flu in her apartment, how much it had meant to drag a damp cloth across his face, to fetch tea and watch him wrap his hand around its warm comfort.

Instead of closing the conversation with an assurance of love or even faith, she had only absorbed his instructions, sat on them for a day before following them downstairs. The bill was right where he’d said it would be, the phone number in bold. She had picked up the cracked plastic cordless phone, and she had dialed.

—

E
DITH
WAS THE WORD
Adeleine pushed out of her mouth slowly; what she’d intended to say—
Help—
had died somewhere on its escape. The shadowed suggestions of both their bodies, Edith’s flattened against the bed and Adeleine’s drawn close to her on a nearby chair, stretched across the room when cars passed, threatening to disintegrate. Adeleine liked the idea of confessing to Edith, the guarantee that nothing she mentioned would be long considered or captured.

“I haven’t left the house in more than six months. The closest I came was standing in the foyer when the ambulance came for you, and even that made me feel like I was in the mountains with not enough air.

“I used to be better. Brunches on Sundays with other hungover people in sunglasses. Parties—crowded ones. I always knew the corner store guy. The last one gave me boxes when I moved and kissed my cheek.”

The last fact was too much: the shared kindnesses she’d once enjoyed now only measurements of how she’d deteriorated. She leaned hard against the rigid wicker and pushed away images of herself balancing a grocery bag on her hip while she stopped to pet an acquaintance’s dog, biting her lip while she listened to a neighbor’s story of a hellish Christmas. The truth of her life came from her easily now, and she was freed to speak into the room that was not empty of love but also not quite listening.

“Edith? Thomas is so good to me. I’m worried I can’t or won’t be what he needs, or that he’ll leave me if I don’t get better. And that he’s with me so he can keep hiding from the rest of his life.”

“Oh, June. My sister.”

Edith reached her hand, which appeared as rough and inflexible as reef, towards Adeleine’s and covered it. She spoke calmly, as though reciting a multiplication table, facts that would never become less true.

“It’s not your job to say why someone loves you, is it?”

Adeleine, eyes wide, sniffed and shook her head. “No?”

“And you’ll never see the way your skeletons can dance. Not if you keep them to yourself. You’ve gotta let those bones twist!” Even in the dimness, Adeleine could make out true delight, the glint of silver-crowned molars as Edith smiled.

Edith’s grip tightened, and Adeleine watched the slack, spent skin on her arm collect as the muscles beneath it contracted.

“Now,” she instructed—Adeleine heard a woman who facilitated long-term plans and kept appointments—“come lie down here, next to me. You need your sleep after a long trip like that.”

Adeleine took in Edith’s fermenting odor, the brackish taste of her own weeping. Unable to decline even such a confused offer of warmth and rest, Adeleine surrendered and crawled towards her. The two women curled on top of the quilt sewn by hand sixty years before, their backs to each other but their hands linked, and began breathing deeply.

Two hours later, Adeleine woke to the sudden light of the bedside lamp. The living room overhead, the bar above the stove, the bulbs in the bathroom: they came on inch by inch, as though moved by flood, the
tink
s of the filaments like champagne flutes meeting somewhere nearby.