When people asked his name, he blushed, knowing they’d ask him to repeat the foreign syllables as though they were a code or password. For a month he didn’t mention to Adeleine that his father had been a monk in the Himalayas, his mother the free-spirited American who’d coaxed him away from the monastery and quickly become pregnant. When he did tell her, while they passed a cheap bottle of red wine that stained her pale, chapped lips but not his soft brown ones, he moved over the information quickly, eager to cast it as anything but remarkable. He’d spent the first two years of his life in Los Angeles, attached to his mother by a cloth papoose as she completed a graduate degree, and the next sixteen homeschooled in the northernmost parts of California, where as a teenager he made cash as a river raft guide, a job in which his pathological stoicism went unnoticed under the deafening mountainous current.
In the months before he appeared, Adeleine had been flailing in a waitressing job, crying in the restaurant kitchen where she often escaped to hear the thick warmth of spoken Spanish. “Oh mami,” they would say, “why you always look so sad!” Sometimes they’d sing to her: “Ay ay ay ay, canta, no llores. Sing, don’t cry.” But the commanding nature of the song had seemed to trap her, and she had only smiled feebly. Once he surfaced, she moved through her shifts happily, cleaning silverware and anticipating coming home to him and talking very little, to the commute from her bedroom across the hall to his. All she could say to friends who asked about her new companion was that he seemed good, incapable of concealing or manipulating. Whenever she had asked him what he thought, about a book he was reading or a childhood memory she had shared, he had scratched at his elbows and scanned the room as though in yearning, mentally arranging his most earnest response. He was also, she had told girlfriends on the phone with a surprised laugh, the most beautiful human she had ever personally seen.
The pills, at least initially, had appeared as afterthoughts. She had convinced herself that he received them passively: it was true that someone at the parties he took her to usually placed them in his hands, and that he had shrugged with each swallow as he began his slow disappearing act. Later Adeleine remembered the view from over various shoulders, chiffon necklines and sheep’s wool collars and dangling lightbulbs, the strain to see into the next room and the next, the search for him. The people at these places were attractive but removed, their attention spans short, and they parted easily as she passed through their conversations.
She’d find him nesting somewhere, looking more comfortable than she’d ever felt in her life: propped up by dingy pillows on the corner of someone else’s rumpled bed or arranged carefully in a chair while people stood around him, his eyes hardly moving. Can we go home now? she would say, and he would nod, eventually, after remembering that he had one. Would he notice if she left, or just go on grazing at the edges of consciousness—the thought crossed her mind more and more often, and always she pushed it away. Eventually, she had started swallowing the same things he did, painkillers that produced everything from a slight and pleasant hum to near-paralysis. They found an apartment together, furnished it with a low center of gravity: a ground layer of cushions; long, squat black tables; photos hung a few feet up the wall; a coffeemaker on the ground next to their mattress.
Adeleine had taken to the drugs with the same wandering attention that had steered her through a series of talents but kept her from any lasting passions. N—— would grow twitchy without the anesthetic assistance of various opioids, but she had proved to be the rare individual who did not develop an addiction. The times the pills made her vomit, Adeleine took a certain pleasure in it, a scouring her body needed on occasion.
She was, habitually, the caretaker. They left their apartment unlocked, and often she’d push the door open, find him lying on top of the bed, eyes fixed on a point visible only to him. She would wave to the two or four friends or strangers in various positions of detachment in the room, and change the record if requested. At the end of the night, she would slowly nurse those who had passed out awake with a maternal hand.