So much later, used to the quiet of a space free of clutter, when he finally released the doors of cabinets and closets, he held his breath for the inevitable tumble and crash. But the instruments, pressed together so long, came out shyly, adjusting to the newly available space with small sounds, like the creaking of frosted branches, the meeting of utensils over a plate.
The brown paper grocery bag, which Thomas cradled with his arm and chin as he descended the stairs, held a modest sampling: a watercolor set he’d never used (he thought Edith might like to just see colors bleed into each other), a set of crayon-pastel hybrids whose smears always felt forgiving, some glue to accompany a number of rice paper scraps of emerald green and pink and cyan he couldn’t remember acquiring. Feeling confident and duplicitous both, Thomas strode purposefully into Edith’s increasingly chaotic space and set the bag down on the tablecloth, which still held stains from the party, clouds of oil that had spread and set.
“Edith!” he said, grinning. “It’s art day!”
As he’d hoped, she blinked but believed readily, and brought her palms together as in prayer.
“Oh my: oh my oh my oh my.”
Edith’s hand gripped the brushes and sticks as though she had limited experience in manipulating objects towards her will, her fingers curled but not tensed, so he coaxed them. She would get distracted by a blue once she picked up a gray—her focus broad, as though surveying an ocean—so he asked her to tell him the story of each. And what is that one doing? Where have you seen that green before? What will that orange become?
Edith liked this very much: at least it kept her pressing on the paper, at least it kept her talking. But then he took it too far. And what will they all do together, that washed blue and that sharp emerald and that ripened yellow? Edith halted her shaky but expanding line and looked down at the page as if it were inaccessible, a codified to-do list written by someone else.
“Dear?” she said. “I’m tired, now.”
Thomas suggested that he help. He wrapped his right hand over hers. He looked at the lines she’d put on the page and simply went about solidifying them, feeling the familiar movement of his wrist as he matched curve for curve, created thicknesses of hues that scored the thin paper. He did not see how she leaned in, how her eyes grew wet as she reached for a dangling memory, and they sat there like that, orbiting each other.
BECAUSE HE HAD A DIFFICULT TIME looking right at him, or acknowledging the way Paulie made him feel, which was happy and panicked both, Edward started filming. Capturing Paulie in a frame, no less keeping him there, was a task Edward met with varying dedication. So often the footage took the pattern of Paulie on-screen, his bright and tiny teeth exposed and shining, his body forever batting like a moth to keep up with his wilderness of thoughts, and then the picture instantly as empty of him as it had been full. In one of Edward’s first attempts, Paulie discussed Canada geese.
He’s sitting on his kitchen counter, dangerously close to the plastic vase of fresh flowers Claudia places there each Monday, wearing a turquoise zip-up sweatshirt with the strings pulled taut so that the hood forms a circle of tension around his cheeks and chin. (“Like an Eskimo,” he says earlier in the tape, when Edward asks about it, “with a new style.”)
“They fall in love only one time, Eddy. These guys and gals are for keeps with their feelings. Once they know, they know. But if one of them goes away, and by that I mean dies, Ed, the other says, no way can I abide this”—here Paulie spreads his arms to indicate the wingspan of lone eternity that lies ahead, and the camera zooms out to reveal it—“and instead of staying with the gaggle, which is what their friend group is called, Ed, the sad goose flies alone for the rest of his life. He stops grooming so his feathers get to looking like monsters, he moves over all kinds of trees and lakes without ever getting to say, again, ‘Hey, do you see that? Do you see how green that is?’”