But nothing happened and even his ribs and teeth hurt, and Paulie asked Claudia, who said, “Friendships are more like oceans than rivers. There are high tides and low tides but not a steady rush. You’re up against a lot of currents, not just one.” Paulie was wordless at that, so Claudia said, “Sometimes people have a hard time looking out of themselves and need to just be alone and listen to all the conversations in their head.”
He waited months. He felt proud and brave and thought: a number of currents, some unseen. Then one day he went up and knocked, and Thomas opened the door all the way and said, Hey, pal, and the crow’s foot by his right eye did the crinkle Paulie remembered, and he invited him in.
The tin cans with the brushes reaching out like strong arms were gone, and the layers of maybes on the walls were gone, and there were no slips of paper anywhere, and not even one color where it didn’t belong and not one idea growing. “Different, I know,” Thomas had said, and shrugged in a way Paulie didn’t recognize, and offered him tea. Paulie kept looking around the room for the easy way the two of them had been. He didn’t go up after that and had to make loud noises when he thought of Thomas surrounded by all that white and said hi in the hallway but not much else. In dreams he still balanced glasses on his long fingers and floated towards the wilderness of colors, eager to cure his friend’s thirst, to listen to the water slide down his fine throat.
AFTER TWO MONTHS of cloistered nights spent almost exclusively in her bed, surrounded by the encroaching assortment of archaic coin banks and cardigans embroidered with glass beads and shell-colored moth-eaten lampshades, Thomas prepared himself to broach the issue. It was, he decided, a matter of phrasing.
Do you ever get out of the house? was obvious on top of insensitive, he thought, but something that merely circled—Do you prefer to stay home?—was the kind of inquiry she would cleverly deflect. Her intelligence, unlike her sanity or income or background, was never in question.
In the end, he framed it as an announcement, took her face in his hand late at night in the dark and gave the words with guilt, as though returning something long borrowed to its rightful owner. “You never leave your apartment.”
“That’s true,” Adeleine replied. “And you’ve got scars up and down your arms, ones I assume not placed there by the grace of God, or any accident except yourself.”
Thomas had expected her to crumble at his examination, and the surprise of her competent reversal made him laugh.
“There’s plenty,” she said coldly, as if stabbing at a contract on a long, polished table, “that we haven’t discussed. Did you think I didn’t notice?” Instead of turning away, like he’d witnessed so often, Adeleine leaned over to switch on the golden light, then placed her excessively ringed hands on his shoulders.
“What would you like to tell me”—she ran her fingers down the scars—“about these?”
Her confidence had arrived without notice, and Thomas found the narrative he expected upended: she forged ahead on some mountain, beckoned him to hurry towards the view while he struggled with the bulk of what he’d carried.
“I haven’t,” he said, filled with quiet fear, “since you.”
Adeleine remained above him, wiping at his eyes without fanfare, pulling the blanket closer around them. “Would it help,” she said, “if I told you about me?”
—
THEY WATCHED the streetlamps going off, the doors on the street opening, the precision of morning sharpening the colors of leaves and fire hydrants. She explained to him about the perfectly placed pillows of psychoanalysts’ couches, and pills of different colors meant to regulate a spiked range of crippling emotions: they had told her she was bipolar but not about the specific horrors that made up a life swinging between the two extremes. Not about the manic afternoons in which she would change her clothing sixteen times, or the sheer cliff of the other side of her condition, the slide into bed and the passing of hours there only indicated by the light’s shift from gold to blue to black.