Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

Thomas sensed her resistance spreading and tried to remove the judgment from his voice. He wanted to find the noble aspect of her motivation, to justify it as she had. Where had she found them, he asked. Did she mean to repurpose them, or tell their original stories, or try to imagine the people who had owned them?

She dismissed him curtly, crossed one knee over the other and glanced somewhere over his left shoulder. “It’s intimate.”

He wondered in blazing silence whether cradling her in her volatile sleep, pushing his tongue between her legs, holding down her hips while she came, did not quite meet that classification. He felt that the elasticity he’d afforded their relationship — to unfold without the usual expectations of reciprocity and honesty, to continue only under her exacting requirements in her cluttered apartment — had been a mistake. He angrily promised himself to stop giving her so much, but he still couldn’t get up to leave.

In what he would come to understand as her concerted generosity, sometime after midnight she roused Thomas from her bed. It was late enough that little light came in from the street, and he could barely make out the strap of her guitar across her chest, the angle of her arms holding up objects that sent several teetering shadows. She brought light to the dusky mauve lampshade on her lace-covered side table and placed the items on the bed, kept her eyes low.

“Pick,” she said.

Still fuzzy from the dream he’d just been having — Adeleine in a taupe cotton shift and rubber boots, backlit by pink sky, pointing at something far up in a tree, another in a series of fantasies he’d had of her outside — he selected an ivory comb. Her breathing was arrhythmic when she began, and her fingers flew between the strings quickly, like insects to sources of sugar. The song concerned the rituals of daily presentation, the careful grooming for an empty job that paid too little. She started into the next without being asked, briefly indicating the object before she began: a Polaroid showing the spectral spaces on a painted wall where framed photos had once hung, a broom leaning against a wall. The words she had composed in honor of it were quiet and kind, and they wondered: will the house remember us when we’re gone?

When she stopped he removed the instrument from between them, caught her flushed face in his hands, mashed his nose against hers. As their eyelashes met briefly, he saw that she was proud, and he tried to determine if what he felt about her was pride. He wished he could see her behind the wheel of some long and gleaming American car, could watch the circle of leather spin under her hands as they made wide, elegant turns. He fell asleep teasing that want, following it to the image of Adeleine at some peeling picnic table, setting cheeses and apricots on little napkins, placing her hands at its edges and swinging her legs in, settling down on the bench and calling to him, insistent, eager.

THE THIN STRUCTURE of the building ensured that no sound was contained by the apartment that produced it: the three floors gave and received heavy-footed trips to the refrigerator and unsnoozed alarm clocks and the burst-and-whoosh of bath faucets and late-night infomercials in a reliable cycle. Living with the proof of other people’s lone domestic movements had become a kind of comfort for the tenants, a telephone that didn’t require they speak into it, a letter that didn’t ask for a reply. Several bleak sunsets and seasonally ambiguous days into March, just after four in the morning, the sound of Edith in the stairwell bounced up and down, with increasing depth and urgency, until they all decided to meet it.

Paulie emerged first, in a blue terry cloth union suit with one back button undone, carrying the lamp shaped like a crescent moon with a cherubic face smiling from the center. He joined her where she sat, exactly halfway between the second and third floors, and plugged the light into the nearby outlet. Still waking from a dream of a doomed romance between a Labrador and a Roman candle — the dog catching the sparks in its mouth and yowling — Paulie did not ask her why she was crying, just laced his right hand’s fingers in hers. Claudia, with her sixth sense concerning his whereabouts, appeared shortly after, having awoken to find him gone. She settled on the stair below them and admired the way her curly-haired brother took naturally to the care of others, considered in her half-sleep how strange it was that she and her parents had spent exasperated lifetimes asking Paulie to conform to the rest of the world.

“I don’t want to go,” Edith said. “I want to go home.” Her voice sounded like the decline of a music box, gasping but still percussive. Edward, who had lain awake eavesdropping for a good ten minutes before joining them, lingered with a palm on his doorframe, caught in a role familiar to him. He was saddened by the proof of someone else’s pain and embarrassed by the open acknowledgment of it: he had perfected the art of devising clever ways to describe his inadequacies but felt like an unwelcome guest around those who wanted to dissect their own. That night, he knew it was wrong to remain there listening, so he washed his face and clenched his body and ascended the stairs.

He stood over the three of them, feeling too large for an event so delicate; Claudia, sensing his discomfort, tugged the sleeve of his sweatshirt and urged him downward. Edith’s sobs had paused but her shaking continued, and Paulie, in a gesture Edward could recognize as noble, continued to wipe at her face with his sleeve.

Thomas and Adeleine came last, floated down the stairs clasping hands, still groggy from the rich sleep of people new to sharing a bed. Dressed in cotton pajama sets in different shades of blue and blinking rhythmically, they appeared somehow synthetic, like projections of slides or photorealist paintings. From where they sat above her, Thomas made circles on Edith’s back with the palm of his hand, and Adeleine began to braid the scant fluff of white hair behind her ears. Edward wondered when everyone had agreed upon such silence, and with a jerk like a quarter horse outside a bodega suddenly brought to motion, he narrowed his eyes and put a hand on the very tip of Edith’s left foot. Edith’s body continued to buck, though in incrementally smaller movements, and Paulie began to speak. He tried to whisper, to suit the hush of shame they all felt at their inability to reach her, but delicacy of volume was a skill he had never mastered.

“I think we all need to give our friend Edith something she can take back to bed with her,” he said. “We are all going to say one thing we like about Edith. I’ll start. I like how she lets these monster sounds out. Okay, Eddy, you go.”

Edward had closed his eyes in the hope of disappearing, or encouraging Paulie’s swift span of attention to move past him. His sweating feet caught the low light and glistened.

“Maybe you should hold my moon for help.”

Edward opened his eyes and saw the glowing thing coming quickly, almost violently, towards his face. He received it as though it were covered in mold and held it with four tensed fingertips. “Oh god. Okay. One thing I like about Edith is that… is that she hasn’t raised the rent in fourteen years.”

Claudia gave a swift but robust pinch of Edward’s ear and began. As she spoke, she focused her gaze on her brother. “I like how Edith appreciates all different kinds of people.”

“I like the way Edith respects time,” said Adeleine. “And also privacy.”

Paulie nodded with violent enthusiasm, sending a bounce through his hair. Thomas fixed his vision on Edward’s awkward cradling of the lamp.