—
IT WAS PAULIE who ultimately convinced Edward to come. “You know I love being friends, Eddy,” he said, leaning against the hallway in a neon-green sweat suit belted by a strip of bright blue pleather that held a pair of drumsticks, “but maybe you could use some more!” Paulie had reached out and touched the tip of a drumstick to Edward’s nose, and it was in that repulsed moment he flinched and agreed.
Upstairs, Thomas reasoned with Adeleine, who had become skittish again, had begun taking things off shelves, souvenir pennies and brittle bonsai trees, and setting them elsewhere.
“You won’t even be leaving the building. If you start to feel like screaming, all you have to do is walk out the door and up two flights of steps.”
After a time she nodded and moved to her closet, where she stood vacant and inert, as though waiting for a late train.
Three blocks away, Claudia took privacy in the bathroom, a small space made smaller by the clutter of scented creams and violet sprays and aromatic candles that clung to every surface, and began to compile the essentials in a shoe box she would take to Paulie’s. She tried to ignore the leaden steps of her husband, who had hardly spoken to her since the hospital, and had walked around agape as she packed her things. “Whatever it is you’re telling yourself about me,” he had said in their darkened bedroom the night before, “you can’t edit out how much I wanted a life with you.” Claudia hadn’t contested this, and it was the last thing she’d heard before falling asleep.
She wound her hair in the bun she wore to work, nursed wispy flyaways into cooperation, and thought about the coming evening. That night, she was sure, she would corner Edith, puff up her chest, demand a change in the management of the building. The bar of light above the mirror buzzed softly, as though listening, considering the holes in her argument.
—
THE EVENT BEGAN with a great deal of circling, a recurrent rearrangement of positions that would have looked, from above, like a natural disaster drill. Paulie, too excited for his own good, bounced between dusty walls and gray windows, from Edward to Edith to Claudia. Music was his idea: watching Adeleine, who wasn’t speaking, and Edward, who was never more than a foot away from the crumbling crackers Edith had set out, Paulie thought everyone could use a song. He sprang laterally to the shelf where Edith kept her records and tried to control his excitement while he touched them, these things that breathed music in their rare way. Once he made his selection, he requested Edward’s help, knowing that the compelling alien arm might prove beyond his grasp. He had never touched one, though he had watched his mother, in her melancholy floating moods, get up from the couch where she sat with feet tucked, reading, flip the record and realign the needle with an accuracy and control he envied so much that he had felt starved.
Edward sighed and narrowed his eyes. “Did you ask her?”
“Well no, but — I promise!”
Paulie held up The Muppet Movie soundtrack and Edward groaned, covered his face with a hairy hand and peered at him through two fingers. He gave a lackluster rendition of Miss Piggy’s trademark Hi-YA!, and Edward removed the perfect black circle from its sleeve, paused to secretly covet the soft colors of the album cover. Time had faded the pastels of Kermit and Miss Piggy, in a rowboat under a rainbow, supported by clouds and the suggestion of water. Edward had loved this record, and he held his breath as it opened and broadened: that familiar precipitous static, the first notes of “Rainbow Connection.” Paulie, the self-appointed minstrel of all things gleeful and airy, approached Adeleine with a mock-solemn pout. He bowed modestly and stretched out his hand. Thomas, trying not to laugh at the visible contraction of Adeleine’s frame, gave her a squeeze on the shoulder.
As it turned out, Adeleine was a practiced dancer, confident even with her eyes closed. She moved without hesitation, understood the relationship between the music and the body, allowed no delay between the first and the second. The rest of them watched as she and Paulie twirled and retreated. Thomas felt a loosening warmth, and when the song ended, he welcomed her return with an embrace that betrayed his longing. Claudia, sitting in the corner with a Vodka Collins — the viscous mix, she suspected, long expired — seemed more confident each moment of every tenant’s insanity, and returned the winks that Paulie, in a powder-blue tuxedo he had worn to a family wedding, kept sending her.
Edith, feeling girlish and opened as she never was in her memory, sidled up to Paulie’s sister and kissed her, wetly, on the cheek. “Move over, Muffin!” she said, settling on the couch, adjusting her knees and hips. Claudia, shocked and curious in equal measure, examined the source of the sticky saliva: she saw the slow turn and aim of the eyes, noted the misaligned buttons of the stiff shirt, and saw this was a woman with a rapidly receding grasp. Suddenly empowered by a feeling of goodwill and forgiveness, she took the gnarled hand and brought it into hers. “Declan and I just love a party,” said Edith, and Claudia nodded. She could hear but not see Paulie laughing. “Thank you for giving us this,” she said. “Edith.”
—
IN THE END, everyone drank enough to see double, except Paulie, who had altered his vision anyway with a pair of tortoiseshell prescription glasses found in a kitchen drawer. The light appeared to hold all the bits of old life unsettled and suspended by their dancing, so that a haze hung over the new circles of movement. Claudia and Edward sat on the musty couch making cruel fun of each other — his sullied sweatpants, her giant purse — before solidifying their bond and moving on to the ridicule of the others. Paulie taught Edith a dance he’d invented called The Slimiest Worm! and Adeleine sang with the songs coming from the stereo and eventually, in a momentous impulse, fetched her guitar from upstairs and led them all in a sing-along, her thumb and index and middle fingers tugging gently and confidently at the steel, as though beckoning someone shy closer. Thomas drew caricatures of everyone with his right hand — which was more talented than he believed — and taped them to their backs. Edith disappeared into her bedroom for a while and cried until she forgot why, exactly, and emerged wearing an enormous Sunday-at-church type hat, a monstrosity ringed by swirls of gauze that resembled a naive rendering of Saturn. Edward insisted on trying it on, and affecting a smug New England tone, dragging out his syllables. “I come from a long line of honorable Protestant people with sticks far up their anuses,” he said. “And as it happens, my family has culled those sticks over the years to build a lovely summer home on the Cape!” Claudia’s fingers dug into his wrists, begging that he continue to delight her. In that untouched space of four and a half hours, no one missed them and none of them missed anyone, and the sun went down and the streetlamps went on, and the phone never rang.
~ ~ ~
EDITH’S SON APPEARED again the next weekend, emerged from a taxi and paid the driver with pieces thumbed off the thick fold of his wallet, and soon there were men in the building, barrel-chested figures who took stairs two at a time and measured everything and nodded at Owen’s every word. Despite the gray of his hair and the wrinkles near his eyes, he moved through the space with the spry authority of someone young in the world. He pointed an arm in one direction and all the men followed, retrieved tools from their belts and pens from their breast pockets. He leapt towards points of interest and they mirrored him, pushing their faces close to imperfections in walls and doorframes and grunting, bringing stubby pencils across notepads the size of their hands.