“I’m not leaving my home.” Her voice yowled, cracking at its edges. “You made her but you won’t make me.”
The next time Thomas saw them, crossing the foyer at the fullest possible distance from each other, Edith’s frame held her left arm like a box of mementos, with fright and care, and Owen let out a low, flat whistle as he unlocked her front door.
~ ~ ~
NO ONE EXPECTS to find devotion where they do, and Adeleine liked to think she wouldn’t have sought him out, wouldn’t have chosen his life as the one she’d like to inhabit. Whose fault had it been that she’d wandered into the kitchen of her first apartment in New York, a railroad flat with a revolving cast of roommates, and N— (now a name she tried not to even think) had been standing there making breakfast? Whose fault had it been that his worn T-shirt had hung from his shoulder blades just so, hinting at the unblemished almond skin beneath?
Certainly not hers. Neither could she claim responsibility for the winter, which was already descending, though they shared a few brief moments on the stoop in the sun; for the sense of quiet that surrounded him and nestled comfortably into hers; for the sanctity of his movement when he got up to change the record; for the face he made when he pushed his cock inside her, determined like a person building something slowly by hand. Never had she longed so specifically for a body, spent so much energy imagining the arrangement of the parts she had memorized.
When people asked his name, he blushed, knowing they’d ask him to repeat the foreign syllables as though they were a code or password. For a month he didn’t mention to Adeleine that his father had been a monk in the Himalayas, his mother the free-spirited American who’d coaxed him away from the monastery and quickly become pregnant. When he did tell her, while they passed a cheap bottle of red wine that stained her pale, chapped lips but not his soft brown ones, he moved over the information quickly, eager to cast it as anything but remarkable. He’d spent the first two years of his life in Los Angeles, attached to his mother by a cloth papoose as she completed a graduate degree, and the next sixteen homeschooled in the northernmost parts of California, where as a teenager he made cash as a river raft guide, a job in which his pathological stoicism went unnoticed under the deafening mountainous current.
In the months before he appeared, Adeleine had been flailing in a waitressing job, crying in the restaurant kitchen where she often escaped to hear the thick warmth of spoken Spanish. “Oh mami,” they would say, “why you always look so sad!” Sometimes they’d sing to her: “Ay ay ay ay, canta, no llores. Sing, don’t cry.” But the commanding nature of the song had seemed to trap her, and she had only smiled feebly. Once he surfaced, she moved through her shifts happily, cleaning silverware and anticipating coming home to him and talking very little, to the commute from her bedroom across the hall to his. All she could say to friends who asked about her new companion was that he seemed good, incapable of concealing or manipulating. Whenever she had asked him what he thought, about a book he was reading or a childhood memory she had shared, he had scratched at his elbows and scanned the room as though in yearning, mentally arranging his most earnest response. He was also, she had told girlfriends on the phone with a surprised laugh, the most beautiful human she had ever personally seen.
The pills, at least initially, had appeared as afterthoughts. She had convinced herself that he received them passively: it was true that someone at the parties he took her to usually placed them in his hands, and that he had shrugged with each swallow as he began his slow disappearing act. Later Adeleine remembered the view from over various shoulders, chiffon necklines and sheep’s wool collars and dangling lightbulbs, the strain to see into the next room and the next, the search for him. The people at these places were attractive but removed, their attention spans short, and they parted easily as she passed through their conversations.
She’d find him nesting somewhere, looking more comfortable than she’d ever felt in her life: propped up by dingy pillows on the corner of someone else’s rumpled bed or arranged carefully in a chair while people stood around him, his eyes hardly moving. Can we go home now? she would say, and he would nod, eventually, after remembering that he had one. Would he notice if she left, or just go on grazing at the edges of consciousness — the thought crossed her mind more and more often, and always she pushed it away. Eventually, she had started swallowing the same things he did, painkillers that produced everything from a slight and pleasant hum to near-paralysis. They found an apartment together, furnished it with a low center of gravity: a ground layer of cushions; long, squat black tables; photos hung a few feet up the wall; a coffeemaker on the ground next to their mattress.
Adeleine had taken to the drugs with the same wandering attention that had steered her through a series of talents but kept her from any lasting passions. N— would grow twitchy without the anesthetic assistance of various opioids, but she had proved to be the rare individual who did not develop an addiction. The times the pills made her vomit, Adeleine took a certain pleasure in it, a scouring her body needed on occasion.
She was, habitually, the caretaker. They left their apartment unlocked, and often she’d push the door open, find him lying on top of the bed, eyes fixed on a point visible only to him. She would wave to the two or four friends or strangers in various positions of detachment in the room, and change the record if requested. At the end of the night, she would slowly nurse those who had passed out awake with a maternal hand.
Adeleine had known — or had told herself in the beginning — that it must be wrong to adore someone who spent his time tending an artificial happiness, but the way he blossomed when drugged blinded her. He would release the caged-in quiet that was synonymous with his sobriety and flow, describing all the parts of her he admired, wrapping every limb of his too-thin body around hers, telling her stories of the little boy he’d been, speaking with conviction of the life he could imagine for them. They would make a home in the country, grow their own beets and cucumbers, call to silver dogs who swam across rivers, watch their children as they napped in the garden. He would shiver as he fell asleep sometimes, and though she had understood this as a consequence of the narcotics, she relished the opportunity to meet his repeated request: “Keep me warm,” he would whisper, “please will you keep me warm?”
They had still managed some kind of domestic cycle, kept eggs in the refrigerator most weeks, pulled the hand-knit afghan up in neat corners after they had drunk in enough sleep, left handwritten notes of private amusements on the counter, tenderly passed the soap and shampoo in the shower. There were five good months, in which he flickered but remained recognizable, and Adeleine continued to defer practical questions to some later point, a milestone that she felt she would recognize once it arrived. One night she stayed late at work and came home to find him particularly soft, particularly cold. “It’s you,” he had said, blinking as slowly as the lone traffic lights that hung over intersections in the small town she came from. “Come sleep with me.” He had held her that night with more vigor, as though making a point, and in the morning wasn’t sleeping in bed or sighing in the shower or smoking on the fire escape.
She had waited two weeks, skulking about the apartment, trying to catch his shadow around a corner, although after the first she had filed a police report and spent scrambled hours on the telephone with friends who had no answers. After a month his phone was shut off, and the social pages on the Internet he had passively monitored grew graffitied with confused mourning, the pitch of the posts becoming panicked: Where are you we love you / Please just come home / Please just say you’re okay. And then, after his vanishing had settled, pieces of eulogy—I’ll always miss you man, you lit up everything / Sweet dreams baby / We always knew you belonged to somewhere else—and she had stopped checking them. She couldn’t spend another hour scrolling through the images of him she had long since memorized, hoping they might deliver a message, or respond to the digital sympathies bestowed on her by friends and acquaintances. The distance between their bland online attempts at condolence and their averted glances when she ran into them in person — as though grief and abandonment were an airborne contagion — was too great for her to reconcile. She had deleted as much evidence of herself on the Internet as was possible, wiped her laptop’s hard drive clean, and placed it one night on a bench at the West 4th Street subway station. Dressed in whites and blues, quiet and pale, she had caught the first train that heaved into the tunnel and had begun, in her own fashion, to recede.