They had brought their horrors in closer circles, too, warning Edward and Zachary about the gas station attendants three blocks down—hoodlums, criminals—and the single man up the street with the many cats: There is something about him I just don’t trust, his mother had said.
At night, instead of letting all these things sift and combine into a web of nightmares, Edward had crept into his younger brother’s room and lain on the floor, kneaded his fingers into the carpet kept so clean, and invented a place for himself and Zachary to hide. Edward made shadow puppets on the wall: talking heads of their parents bickering about the exact ingredients of the pastry they’d shared; the older girl down the street with the huge breasts and the way she tottered forward. He impersonated their grade school principal, who Edward thought spoke as if concealing a vat of cream cheese at the back of his throat, embellishing the nasal insistence, the sounds of the fat cheeks’ suction on squat teeth while he delivered the overused catchphrase. Dish-ipline will be dish-tributed, Edward would say. Now build me a schity of bagels!
His inability to play the somber lover aside, some of the women returned, insisted on it even, pushed him up against the sandstone of Greenwich Village and offered to hail a taxi. He always had trouble, though, giving them a humor they could confidently claim was inspired by their bond, personal between the two of them. Or not saying anything when they farted in a particularly musical way, even if their eyes said, Not now, not today. The ones he didn’t abandon out of sheer negligence, failing to call for days, left him violently, always using terrible names like bastard and narcissist and making dramatic accusations about the poverty of his heart.
This was the period after the glow of quitting his day job had worn. He’d begun appearing on nighttime television, sitting with an ankle on a knee in one of those interchangeable plush chairs and gesturing with the provided coffee mug actually filled with water. He still preferred the tiny, sweaty crowds, the possible explosions given the night’s chemistry. He brought other comedians and audience members alike back to his apartment in Brooklyn, always paying for cab fares and drugs and drink, thrilled each time by the continuation of the night. Wary of his success, he kept his cheap apartment.
A woman who could spit back and thrive in the unsavory back rooms and at the mostly male after-parties, Helena became a fixture by the mid-nineties. She wore high-waisted linen trousers and pale silk shirts that buttoned up the back in the fall, oversized maroon faux-fur coats in the winter, and her bones formed a collection of angles he grew to need. She worked for little pay as a social worker, touring the homes of destitute families, and talked about them over dinner, their names and misfortunes floating over the candles on the cramped restaurant patios where she and Edward ate.
The night she moved in, she hung small globes of light, placed red porcelain mugs in the cupboards, swept corners it had never occurred to him were dirty. Even when they fought, she exercised perfect timing, and after, while they made up, she held his arms against the sturdy wood bed frame she’d also brought with her, and insisted that the lights stay on.
He liked to maintain that she’d left when his success dwindled, despite so much proof of the contrary, and clutched this in his mind with all other things growing old and ossifying. But then he remembered her soft murmurs on waking at four a.m. to an empty bed, her coming to him on the couch and curling up and expressing fond interest in the decades-old movie keeping him company. The moment when she got up to put the kettle on, the sound of the old drawer unsticking so that she could retrieve a spoon for his sugar. How many times she had fallen back asleep there, in his lap, though the bedroom was a mere ten feet away. The way she accepted his deepening morbidity, listened intently to the story of his mom forbidding him to leave the house for two weeks at the rumor of a nasty flu, of the cleaning tasks she’d assigned her son during the quarantine. How Helena had insisted on washing the sweatpants he’d begun resigning himself to, how the use of fabric softener was evident. How he had cried when she cut off her hair the month before she left him, a child who couldn’t recognize his mother, and how she had held him, even then.