At the station, she made it a few feet into the light above and stopped at the head of the stairwell, where people diverged around her like cars avoiding a spill. At the tail of the rush, a man with a damp face and a burdened suitcase came upon her and stopped.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you need help finding something?”
“I know where I’m supposed to go,” she said, turning a severe bun in his direction. Three bobby pins had slipped halfway out of position, threatening to destroy the form, and the skin of her nape was patched red.
“I don’t need any help getting home,” she said.
~ ~ ~
IN THE DAYS AFTER THE STROKE, delirious and sleep-sodden as he was, Thomas hadn’t always been sure that Edith’s voice was actually there, outside his door, muttering in circles about her small offerings. Stacked on the worn sandy carpet that ran the length of the hall, the things she had left confirmed it: plates of cheddar mashed potatoes and roasted chicken and dark greens, just cooked, the steam finding a way through the tinfoil; recent New Yorkers and puckered crime novels taken from her own shelf; six-packs of soda water; his mail; a lily in a cracked ceramic mug; a scarf knit into a loop, the signature merchandise of a stormy-faced vendor who was always outside their subway station.
He would be on the couch, chasing a nap despite having been awake only two hours, and hear the clearing of her throat, the sound in two parts.
“Okay,” she would say, with the voice of someone speaking to a colleague about a routine procedure, an issue with the copy machine or a slight change in schedule. “I’m leaving a few things here. Something for eating and something for reading and something else just because. They’re just out the door to your left. I know you probably have silverware but I put some in there because what the hell. All these things are only if you want. The vegetables are a little swampy. Can’t ever seem to avoid that hellish feature. It’s food. It’s definitely food. All right, I’m headed back to my pensioner’s grotto now.”
After a week of that, her odd discursions often the only points of amusement in his otherwise black days, he heard the shuffle of her approach and startled her by opening the door. It was he who should have been embarrassed, he thought, he who had not bothered to crawl even briefly from his depressive hole and leave a note of thanks, but as she entered, she kept her sight fixed on the tray she had brought, reddening like someone allergic.
“Well, I know I’ve been a busybody,” she said, her eyes scanning the room for a place to set the platter down.
“Anywhere is fine. Here, on the counter. You haven’t at all. You’ve been some kind of magic post-catastrophe elf. And I haven’t paid rent.” He gestured for her to sit at the bare kitchen table, and she gripped her hands on its edge to lower her stooped frame into a chair. Her hair was carefully curled, the stiff white reminiscent of a subaquatic reef formation, and her wedding ring sat bright but noticeably off-center on her diminished finger.
“Elves are meant to be a little quieter, probably.”
“It’s true I could hear you bustling out there.”
He laughed for the first time since his injury, and it surprised his voice, which strained at the exertion. She had the kind of older face that hinted at its young features, as though it were a hologram that could be tilted, the murky slate of the eyes restored to their former inquiring blue, the wattle of the neck tightened to reveal the stark line of the jaw.
“Never my strong suit. Never a suit at all, in fact. Not even hanging in my closet.”
He carried them over one by one, the teapot, the mugs, a jar of almonds, and Edith knew not to offer her help, not to watch as he arranged the things on the table. She drank the still-warm tea gratefully, as though she hadn’t prepared it herself, thanking him, looking around and complimenting the large wooden blocks he used as coffee tables, the bright teal of the couch, a series of octagonal shelves he had mounted on the longest wall. She didn’t mention the vestiges of his work, which infested the sizable corner of his space where a tarp lay to protect the floor.
And then she barked out the question, the one nobody else had posed alongside the stilted condolences they’d e-mailed. She offered it without the upward lilt at the end, like an appraisal of something obvious, a foul smell or a probable rain.
“And how are you.”
“I’m shit,” he said. It was a relief to say so.
“Can’t say I expected anything else. You were handed some misadventure. Is this retribution for some former crime of yours? A nun you robbed?”
He smiled modestly, as though afforded a compliment, grateful under the generous cover of her humor.
“At nun-point,” they said, nearly at the same time, their embarrassment about the weak pun turning to delight in the coincidence.
“About the rent,” she said. “You shouldn’t—”
He put his hand up, let the unkempt line of his amber hair fall over his eyes.
“I should,” he said. “And I will. I’ll get you a check—”
“But how are you going to—”
She stopped, immediately aware her brash tongue had taken her for the wrong turn, and communicated her apology by tapping a hand to her mouth and cringing.
“That’s okay, Edith. It’s a good question. I’m okay for a few months, and then I don’t know. My gallerist wants to put together some… memorial show, it seems like to me, although of course no one will call it that. The things I had finished and a number I hadn’t.”
“Then I’ll buy some. I don’t have anything on my walls but twenty years ago.”
“I hope that won’t be necessary. Maybe I can give you one.”
In the way that it sometimes does for people whose rapport has advanced very quickly, the open speech had dried up, as if to reflect on how recently theirs had been a cordial but transactional relationship. They assessed each other in the silence, making eye contact then letting it break.
“Well,” she said. “I could bring you some lunch tomorrow. Will you be here?”
He was. She did. For weeks it became his only routine, and he had showered for it, cracked windows here and there, swept.
—
“WHY DON’T YOU CALL IT A Living Question,” he’d said, over coffee with his gallerist, a woman whose hair was always mounted asymmetrically and who typed intermittently on her smartphone as she spoke to him, ostensibly taking notes.
“Oh, that’s good,” she’d answered, not detecting the dark humor in his voice, spitting a little through the signature gap in her front teeth.
“No, Ivy, it’s—I’m the—”
“Of course this is all up to you. But I was thinking we could mount them from finished to un-, so we’re sort of watching the progress in reversal, almost a record of decay.” Her voice was rich with her own regard for it. Thomas tried to cover the disgust he felt appearing on his face with a hand over his mouth and a series of discerning nods.
Chased by absurd nightmares of poverty in which debt collectors followed him in Groucho Marx masks, Thomas had agreed to meet Ivy for the sake of his practical future, but the thought of his unfinished pieces on display, the naked lines in pencil, made all the pulse points in his body raise up and hammer.