For as long as his memory went, Paulie had loved children. When his mother’s sister had a baby and brought it over and it started crying, Paulie was the only one who could get it to stop: he’d made up a song about the ocean, about how waves only leave so they can come back larger. The choking sobbing had stopped, the starfish hands reached up to grab Paulie’s nose, the eyes formed invisible lines right to his, and he had known right away how much he wanted this, to be the center and the protection of another’s life.
For his tenth birthday he asked for a baby doll, a blue-eyed boy in washable velour, and named it Oscar and tried to never lose sight of him. He slept with him in his bed and sometimes his breath grew constricted, so nervous did he feel that he might fall asleep and roll over onto him. He learned how to sleep like a pencil. He brought Oscar along on trips in the car and pointed out the trees whose names he knew, white pine and dogwood and redbud. He made sure his socks and soft blue cap and clean cotton pants went into the wash frequently. He stayed up in bed explaining the things that had puzzled him once, where all the household garbage went and who decided when to open the post office and what made heat lightning and how sex must feel.
Oscar’s silence and slumped way of sitting grew tedious, but Paulie valued the feeling of worth that came from putting the world in order for someone else, from folding the tiny sweaters. When he was fourteen, his true capacity for love filled with the arrival of Eleanor, a neighborhood beauty imported from the mysterious wilds of North Carolina who spoke slowly, wore old-fashioned saddle shoes, and had a cocoa-colored birthmark shaped like a bow tie on her nose. After a long week spent skulking around the street they shared, singing the romantic songs he knew on the edge of her lawn, he confessed his affliction to Seymour, asked how one went about asking a girl to be the mother of his children.
“Do I go up to her and say, let’s combine bodies forever?”
“I think that might scare her, Paul. People generally like to think of their bodies as just theirs.”
“Okay, how about—”
He thought his father was joking when he told him. Seymour said the probability of passing it on was about fifty percent, that the limits of his condition made parenthood impossible. Paulie, stunned, protested. “But you’ve always said I was an exception to a lousy rule. But I can look at a person and know what kind of story they need, you said. But I can light a room like that’s my job on the planet, you said!”
He had cried with dedication, the tears leaking down onto his teal hoodie and matching sweatpants. He saw in front of him the visions he’d always cherished—himself as father, tucking a lock of hair behind an ear at bedtime, teaching his son about which fish glow in the dark, sitting with him at the piano every day after school—and tried to reach them but couldn’t. His gut felt like fire spreading through a forest. “It hurts me, and I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” Seymour kept saying. “Then don’t,” Paulie said. “Then why would you?”
Wants could remain possible, Paulie still believed, so long as you didn’t speak them aloud.
He remembered, then, the synchronized sacrifice of all childhood things. How the boys and girls from his street suddenly sprouted longer limbs and adult shadows, how they dropped their baseball mitts and water balloons and Halloween masks and turned away. His father held him, and Paulie tightened his shoulders against the embrace as he saw the unbearable length of it, the life in which he would always be a child.
EDITH WAS IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION and did not know why or how or even when. She wished for hats, a sea of them, cashmere gloves and polite nods, leather suitcases of browns and greens with sturdy locks. Fine pocketbooks where the tickets paid for lived until you pulled them out to show the conductor proudly, there on the train, where everything fit into roomy compartments above and below, where the world was stacked neatly.
But where were they, the fine pressed brims and tie clips and stockings with the clean black line down the back of the leg? No matter how long she closed her eyes, each time she opened them the people did not belong. Little girls crossed the floor in baseball caps, and under scrolling electronic screens grown women in clingy whites bickered. They all carried beach bags and neon-colored towels and not one of them stood up straight, not one of them was someone she could imagine knowing.