His friends had told him to think of the stroke as offering a new set of parameters to work within, but he could tell by the protracted way they looked at the old pieces that they didn’t believe it. He had never been one to enjoy rolling around in the abstract, and so the thought of using the partial death of his body as an excuse for paintings that merely suggested depressed him so much that he set about eliminating the possibility, putting his paints and graphite pencils and fine and broad brushes and scissors away without knowing if he’d take them out again. With the apartment suddenly bare, he understood that he had been living life as completely as he’d meant to—an idea he meant to follow pinned to every surface—and from then on, he kept it clean and stark as a reminder of how much there was to fill.
He began to see the friends who stopped by as silly, vapid vessels, containers of undercooked opinion and little feeling. His congenital kindness remained, but he couldn’t bring himself to dance in their conversational circles anymore, could not bear to discuss whether some video artist had effectively captured the spirit of the working class through the documentation of silent after-hours factory break rooms, could not say with confidence that he saw one creative life as worthless and another as formidable. They sensed his discomfort and shifted the conversation to gossip. A woman he had dated, a beauty but something of a drunk, had lit a bathroom trash can on fire at a recent party and stayed on the toilet laughing for a full ten minutes until the flames reached the curtains and someone came in with an extinguisher. Could he believe it?
Yes, he said. He could. What was there to doubt? Nothing of their lives—the gathering of warm bodies to trade catty comments, the rush to make a late-night train, the unlikely success or failure of an acquaintance—felt remarkable to him. He began to find other things amusing. Washing machines, for instance; that self-important buck when they started. The tendency of rats eating their breakfasts on the rails of the subway to sit up on their haunches and sniff arrogantly, and all the people above waiting, refusing to touch each other. If grief was finding laundry comical, and the thought of picking up phone calls from family members and friends peculiar, and newspaper headlines or pedestrians on the street below more and more foreign, then so be it. He still found plenty of reasons to get up in the morning. Edith, for one.
He made a mental list of things he liked about Edith; it made him happy to put names to them. He enjoyed the way Edith disliked openly. She didn’t feel the need to offer complex criticisms or to imply that her preference came from superiority. Tomatoes? “Hate ’em!” she’d said. Also: sweaters that pilled, the man at the corner store who always said, “You look tired,” the smell of unwashed art students in the summer. She threw these off her back with efficiency and purpose, as though beating standing water from an awning, and it made Thomas feel more at home with his own distastes. But he adored Edith for plenty of other reasons: She understood slowness. She knew how to wait for the kettle to warm, how to move across a room and appreciate each photograph and plant within it. She was careful about laughter, went to it only when it truly called her. The anecdotes she offered were always well-formed, compact things he felt he could keep and carry with him. “Edith,” Thomas had said on several occasions, in moments drunk on self-pity. “Sometimes I just don’t know! What recommends the rest of my life?” She was the only one he exclaimed around. When he said such things, she made a crumpled face, waved her hand through the air to banish his wallowing as it bounced off the high ceilings. “Dear heart,” she said. “Of course you don’t know. How could you? But have you ever been astounded by what you knew was coming?”
EDWARD USED TO BRING WOMEN home only to make them laugh, to watch as the different points of their naked bodies rippled with a punch line in the half-dark, as their ringed hands playfully slapped him to stop. He would calm enough finally to do what they expected, to cup their breasts with hunger and move and keen until they were still. Sometimes he even managed the tenderness afterward, the holding and sighing and postcoital half-sentences, the wiping of sweat and come, the leaving for two glasses of water with the promise to be right back. But then he was onstage again, there in his own bedroom, doing his best to make the girls cackle and stay awake on a mattress growing lumped, and he would remember how it began.
He’d never been able to sleep; neither had his brother. Their parents were not alcoholics or child abusers, nothing so directly antagonistic, but they cultivated in their children a mounting fear of the universe, a suspicion of evil in the familiar that transcended caution and became paranoia. They spent breakfast stabbing at the pages of the newspaper, challenging each other to produce the more horrific news story. A father, somewhere in Kansas, who killed his wife and children before cutting his own feet off! Drug lords in faraway cities keeping prostitutes in cages and feeding them only dog food or Styrofoam packing peanuts! Three and four decades later, Edward had a hard time deciphering which of these had been exaggerations; the text of those headlines seemed to pulse at the periphery of his thoughts the moment he walked a darkened street alone, approached a window at home he didn’t recall opening.