The admission set her whole body rippling. Her fingers worked the rounded edges of the throw pillow, searching for a steadier hold, and her lungs emptied themselves into the worn material. Edward lifted his hand as if to catch a fly; the motion’s inappropriate briskness struck him, and he remembered the slowness required by solace, lowered his palm to Claudia’s back and saw with shock that he had begun to rub it.
As Claudia’s bellows changed from uneven gasps to steady sobs, as though sliding from verse to chorus, he knew or learned to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, to go to the sink for water and offer it without speaking. It was a strange moment to realize how glad he was she’d forgiven him for a blunder he’d made the night before, fueled by a surplus of stout and the thrill of making a woman laugh. In their hallway she had begun a search of her purse, first shaking it near her head to detect the jangle of keys, then emptying it item by item. Finally she had held them up, the grin on her face like that of a Labrador with a retrieved ball, and hiccuped, and thanked him for listening.
“No,” he had said. “Thank you,” and reached out to touch her nose in a way that was meant to be avuncular, and folded her into a hug. The embrace, made sluggish with beer, had lasted longer than it should have, and Edward had made a miscalculation. His right hand shot up under her shirt, only the first knuckles making it beneath the taut underwire of her bra and becoming trapped there, wiggling a little, unsure whether to tunnel ahead or turn back. While he clumsily deliberated, Claudia squinted at the ceiling as though retrieving some once-memorized fact.
“I don’t think—” she said.
“What is completely inappropriate?” Edward asked, feigning the earnestness of a Jeopardy contestant, then the heartening, fatherly reply of Alex Trebek. “You are correct!”
“I’ll see too yamorrow,” she had said, laughing, waving off the gaffe. “You, tomorrow.” From across the hall each had heard the other’s clumsy preparations for sleep, faucets going off at full strength and hands slapping at the walls to kill the light.
EVEN THOUGH HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO, Paulie believed there was nothing wrong, not really, with going down to visit Edith when Claudia was off at work; if at first she was surprised to see him, he knew she enjoyed their games. Paulie had never witnessed anyone else play Go Fish so rigorously: she clapped and she slammed the stern kings and mischievous jacks on the table, she said fish like she meant every last one, of every size and color, in all the five oceans.
On a bright day that didn’t soften with afternoon, the sun at four still white and the heat closely packed, Edith’s attention to their game dwindled. Her fan of cards loosened until they slipped, one by one, onto the floor. She leaned into the table and wheezed.
“What do I look like to you? You haven’t got twenty-one,” she said, “not by a long shot!”
“What? Um?”
“Give me back that money!”
“Edith, please—I’m not—this isn’t—”
Her gnarled fingers made a fist that she waved as though it held a ticket, and she looked at him and saw a man she didn’t know: he had curly hair long enough for braids and a shirt printed with images of constellations, and he was crying from huge eyes. She turned away from him and bit the sides of her cheeks. The temperature felt like punishment.
They sat in silence for fifteen minutes. The last of Paulie’s tears emptied onto the galaxy of his shirt, and Edith focused on her surroundings, tried to place herself in them, burning all her energy in the attempt to recognize a chipped teapot or spiked plant or open door.
“We could play something else,” he said finally. “Let me just visit the men’s room.”
Paulie had loved the phrase “the men’s room” for as long as he could remember; it felt like a password into the world of suits and cars and wives that had otherwise rejected him. He closed the door behind him and splashed water on his face, sat down to pee as he’d been taught by the mishaps incurred by standing and aiming. He observed the shelves in front of him, their mysterious spectrum of jars and boxes and tubes and brushes, some dusty and some never used, the colors ranging from bright to earthy. He forgave Edith for yelling. The inflexible losses of games, the rules you couldn’t reason with, upset him too.
Back in the kitchen, with the cosmetics spread across the table, he kissed her forehead before he smeared on the first splash of blue.
When he finished Edith’s face, Paulie stepped back and regarded her with a hand on his chin, surveying his work from several angles. His hand-eye coordination had never been exquisite, and he had employed an abstract approach, marking Edith’s pores with meandering paths of red lipstick that met lush fields of green eye shadow. He felt particularly proud of her nose, an isolated bridge of shimmering cyan, and moved in and out of the late sunlight to observe it.