Around ten a.m. Claudia hinted at a surprise in the afternoon, which made Paulie sweat and repetitively swallow to ease the dryness in his throat. He had never been fond of putting off joy, or giving his imagination the chance to inflate possibilities. He worried Claudia was making decisions too fast. In the bathroom, he sang a verse of Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow” and turned on the faucet to obscure the sound he knew was coming, and vomited.
When they finally left the apartment four hours and many boxes later, when Paulie felt the beloved rush of the subway and in Manhattan moved through a crowd of people who all smelled different and Claudia stopped him in front of the REI, he couldn’t form the smile that appropriately expressed his excitement. The tall double doors opened and he galloped through Skiing and Running and Swimming before he reached Camping, where he stood taking shallow breaths and deciding what object to touch first. He fingered the tiniest portable stoves and caressed glossy freeze-dried bags of food in flavors from chicken noodle to chickpea curry. Under the supervision of a cheery and vested employee, he evaluated six different sleeping pads in icy blues and sharp purples and mature greens. Lying there, he wondered at all the clunky items of human life rendered collapsible and manageable, efficient and unbreakable. He closed and opened the windows of the model tents, loved the clean sound of the plastic teeth coming together. Suddenly worried by the scale of options, Paulie asked Claudia what he could buy and she said, “Whatever you want. We’re going to drive around camping for a month!” He wilted onto a plastic log, where he sat with his hands on his knees, overcome with shock, blinking as he tried to absorb the prospect. He knew what was happening in his ears was called ringing, but it didn’t feel safe to hear the sounds of your body competing with the rest of the world, every breath struggling on its long way out.
I’M SORRY for not calling sooner,” Thomas began, on speaker in the compact rental car, his phone plugged into the stereo system so that when Adeleine spoke her voice caressed the rearview mirror, the sun-spotted windows, the pristine cloth of the backseat. He turned her soft voice up.
“That’s okay,” she said, indicating her situation was anything but. “Thomas?”
“Yes?”
“Edith went to the hospital. She slipped. Or something. Owen was back for the weekend it happened and then she came home and he left again. Also, were you going to tell me about the eviction, or did you plan just to let me rot up here?”
“You have to believe that I’m taking care of it. That’s what I’m out here doing. Is she okay? How did it happen?” He posed the question as if the information were at all surprising, as though it concerned an Olympic athlete and not a woman in her late eighties with a flailing grasp on the season. It occurred to him that he had counted on the building to pause, an immutable tableau, while he left to save it.
“I don’t really know—but—”
“Who’s taking care of her?”
“That’s the thing.” The fear in her voice was evident through the speaker’s magnification and lent the dappled light a frantic quality, every fluctuation in brightness a mirror of her manic stuttering.
“He asked me to, I mean, he came into my apartment and basically ordered me to! And I can’t, I can’t. I’m worried I won’t be able to leave. I mean, I went down there without you once, but it was the first time in so long that I felt like I could and now, god, the lights are off—”
“Honey.” He paused, gathered the confidence to swaddle her in while he leaned slightly into the turns of the mountainous road and tightened his hand on the wheel. He resented the telephone, wished just to give her the view of the highway that cut improbably through cliff.
“Yes, you can. Think about it: you’re still not going outside, right? And you sounded so industrious on the phone when I called and you were with her! You sounded like someone who could orchestrate a space shuttle launch with the flick of a wrist.”
“I think you’d better come home,” she quavered. “The lights are off,” she repeated. “And I think Edward and Paulie and Claudia have left. I haven’t heard anything, but I looked down and there are all these boxes on their floor in the hall, and it feels like being the last person alive.”
“Adeleine. Can you stop scaring yourself? She probably just didn’t pay the bill. She keeps all her papers on her desk, under all the plants. You just call Con Ed and pretend to be her. Go down there and check on her, tell her it will be okay. She needs you.” Thomas couldn’t believe the gruffness in his voice, the impatience for her shrill worry. Wasn’t she the woman whose pathology he had taken such pains to dance around, more or less protecting it? He felt decidedly vexed at her then, her solipsism and odd intelligence, all her resistance to a regular life out in the open.
She hadn’t answered.
“Did you hear me?
“Adeleine?”
He heard the soft cluck of her mouth opening and waited for some murmur of assent.
“Okay,” she gasped. “Okay.”