They were too sad to clean the shower and Claudia’s hair stuck to the walls in shapes like countries on maps. In the kitchen the area by the coffeemaker radiated long-set spills and raised crusts of grinds. Most of his shirts had several kinds of dinners on them and there was a smell like milk left out that followed him up and down the stairs.
He had been everyone’s favorite at the hospital and the nurse said maybe he should work there and so had his mom grinning in the white gown in the white bed in the white room. He sang and sang. Seymour and Claudia asked him to please keep it quiet pal and so he went up to his mom and he sang soft but right into her mouth. So that way it lives in there he said. Her teeth didn’t smell right. He kept expecting his mom to cry like everyone else but her face hardly ever changed, so he surprised her with his best impression of a Christmas tree. Arms spread to make a triangle with his head as the tip and eyes blinking on and off like lights. She used to love it but she had said Paulie, Paulie, please stop honey, you look like an epileptic, and that was the first time Seymour and Claudia laughed and he left and did the thing where he took off his shoes and slid down the shining tile in socks but it wasn’t fun alone and the people in the rooms didn’t have real clothes just the paper kind and the rooms didn’t have any colored quilts and the whole vast hospital didn’t have one place not one where you could talk loudly about how the bottom of the ocean felt or how the neighbor’s baby with the starfish hands looked like he knew more than everyone not less or why some people needed their radios and TVs on while they slept. All that light and sound to protect them from what.
BECAUSE EDWARD MISSED the cramped spaces and the accumulated smell of hundreds of comics sweating onstage, and because Paulie had been begging him, and because Edward saw this look in Claudia’s eyes that was like searching for a missed turnoff in a rearview mirror, he began taking Paulie to the clubs where he used to perform. On the train the first time, Edward heard each breath he took, heard his heart’s percussion magnified by a mocking echo, and without looking up at him took Paulie’s freckled hand.
The first acute betrayal, a reminder of how far from his life he’d run, was the bouncer, a man he didn’t recognize and who took long seconds sneering at their IDs.
They sat in the back, past the spill of spotlights. Though he hoped they would be there, Edward didn’t want anyone from his old circle to see him, and he wore a slightly malformed baseball cap that spread shadows over his nose. Paulie took no hints, laughed at almost everything, ordered nachos from the waitresses that came around with sour looks and outdated hairdos, consumed them with such force Edward struggled to hear the punch lines over the crunching. He wasn’t eating so much as pitching them in the general direction of his mouth, then letting his tongue and incisors go crazy trying to harangue them. Following the catch came a great deal of slurping, which did nothing to keep their profile low, and at one point Edward returned from the urinal to find that Paulie had ordered him two pints of beer in a giant glass boot.
Edward, who painfully remembered the abuse that flowed off the stage to hang viciously over all the little tables, felt concerned that his companion might become the butt of one of the comics’ jokes, and attempted to hush him. But it was like Paulie floated in some bubble of munificence, or exuded chemicals that inspired goodwill. Everyone seemed happy to have him there: the tourists in line whose photos he took happily when they asked, the waitresses who winked at him. Those comics who noticed the insane cackle coming from the back of the room acknowledged it jovially, sometimes saluted him as they crossed the room to leave.
During a droopy-elbowed comic’s bit about boring marriage sex—“and I’m like one of those robot vacuums on toppa her, shoving into wherever I can”—Edward drifted off, towards memories of himself onstage during the pathetic denouement of his career, post-Helena, and imagined Paulie into the room, inserted him in the audience. He saw the kid right up front in the toxic orange shorts he loved, totally engaged by Edward’s infrequent and deeply morose sentence, even at the set in which the only words he uttered were “Time. Death. Time. Death. Time. Death.”
Edward was smiling broadly at this, at the ridiculous juxtaposition, when the act finished, and he didn’t even hear the moderate clapping, reemerging only when Paulie put his hand on his shoulder: “I knew it. I knew you still loved this!” Only then did Edward realize he’d been laughing, his eyes and nose wet from the lengthened pleasure.