During a droopy-elbowed comic’s bit about boring marriage sex—“and I’m like one of those robot vacuums on toppa her, shoving into wherever I can”—Edward drifted off, towards memories of himself onstage during the pathetic denouement of his career, post-Helena, and imagined Paulie into the room, inserted him in the audience. He saw the kid right up front in the toxic orange shorts he loved, totally engaged by Edward’s infrequent and deeply morose sentence, even at the set in which the only words he uttered were “Time. Death. Time. Death. Time. Death.”
Edward was smiling broadly at this, at the ridiculous juxtaposition, when the act finished, and he didn’t even hear the moderate clapping, reemerging only when Paulie put his hand on his shoulder: “I knew it. I knew you still loved this!” Only then did Edward realize he’d been laughing, his eyes and nose wet from the lengthened pleasure.
~ ~ ~
BEFORE EDWARD and before the accident, Paulie had liked nothing more than going one floor up and watching Thomas in his world. Thomas had colors in small tubes and colors from thin pencils and colors from dusty jars. There were orangey reds and reddy blues and bluey greens. “Why go outside when I can see any color on the earth right here,” Paulie liked to joke, and Thomas always made a happy sound at that. Nubbly strips of cloth lay on every surface and their job was to clean up extra color or to keep a pink from bleeding out of its place. There were gleaming scissors and six rusty tins of paintbrushes and crumbling half pastels like the stumps of a forest in miniature and leaves of paper that floated around marked with unfinished sketches like secret messages. Tacked to the wall were glossy full-color photos of outer space and sepia maps and intricate inky drawings of ships and black-and-white photos of women and men in friendly hats and maps of trains from all over the world, all layered over each other so that the wall was hidden. Paulie liked to ask Thomas about the images and Thomas would say they were all possibilities. Paulie started saying that, sometimes just to himself: everything is a possibility.
Before the accident Paulie had gone up most afternoons and sometimes handed Thomas the things he needed and tried not to breathe very loud and watched the pieces get bigger slowly and sometimes poured tall cool glasses of water and carried them across the room as if in religious procession. In Paulie’s very favorite piece Thomas drew a whole life in figures that grew and then shrank. Every afternoon he watched. Egg zygote toddler kid teenager, all the way to a bent-over old man. It took four months and more kinds of whites and creams and blushing pinks than Paulie had ever seen in concert. The change from day to day was never obvious and that was what he liked so much about it. Even if he concentrated and stayed very quiet he couldn’t see everything, only the tuft of hair or the underside of a foot that Thomas was shading. It made him feel that waiting meant more than how it felt in the moment, that little seconds often combined and became something of weight and worth.
When Thomas took breaks from making his marks he would clear a space on the kitchen table as if cleaning a window to see out of and spread out a lunch of celery pieces and carrots and dried fruit, everything small enough to hold in their hands, and they would eat. Thomas asked Paulie questions about music and said things like “I could hear you playing last night, and it sounded a little bit like seaweed moving in the ocean” or “It made me feel like making a mess.” Paulie sometimes thought he loved Thomas more than anyone else, and it made him feel desperate and occasionally very quiet.
After the accident it was hard to know. Paulie saw him in the hall and Thomas explained that a stroke had done something to him. Paulie tried to hug him but Thomas felt like a dirty sponge slick with oil that wouldn’t take anything he tried to give it. His body was hanging wrong and it scared Paulie to look at it.
Paulie would go up to Thomas’s at the usual time but the door was always locked. He would do their usual knock that was just for them three little knocks plus scritchy-scratchy nails and then call out, “Tommy Tommy” but the sounds turned to ghosts in the hallway. Once or twice Thomas came to the door but didn’t open it and said, “I’m sorry, pal, not today.” Paulie wanted to say, “What about the seaweed, what about the music that feels like the right kind of mess, what about what you’re building and what about lunch with friends?” But Thomas wouldn’t even look through the milky peephole that changed the size of everyone outside.
In the afternoons when he missed Thomas he played music especially loud. He learned Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and he did that between four and six times a day. One night he got out the Christmas decorations Claudia had asked him to please leave in the closet for the rest of the year and he pulled out the string of white lights that pulsed. He brought them up to Thomas’s floor and bunched them into a knot and put them in a big glass jar and plugged them in right next to his door. He thought Thomas would like how he had put everything bright in one place and tangled all of it together.
But nothing happened and even his ribs and teeth hurt, and Paulie asked Claudia, who said, “Friendships are more like oceans than rivers. There are high tides and low tides but not a steady rush. You’re up against a lot of currents, not just one.” Paulie was wordless at that, so Claudia said, “Sometimes people have a hard time looking out of themselves and need to just be alone and listen to all the conversations in their head.”
He waited months. He felt proud and brave and thought: a number of currents, some unseen. Then one day he went up and knocked, and Thomas opened the door all the way and said, Hey, pal, and the crow’s foot by his right eye did the crinkle Paulie remembered, and he invited him in.
The tin cans with the brushes reaching out like strong arms were gone, and the layers of maybes on the walls were gone, and there were no slips of paper anywhere, and not even one color where it didn’t belong and not one idea growing. “Different, I know,” Thomas had said, and shrugged in a way Paulie didn’t recognize, and offered him tea. Paulie kept looking around the room for the easy way the two of them had been. He didn’t go up after that and had to make loud noises when he thought of Thomas surrounded by all that white and said hi in the hallway but not much else. In dreams he still balanced glasses on his long fingers and floated towards the wilderness of colors, eager to cure his friend’s thirst, to listen to the water slide down his fine throat.
~ ~ ~
AFTER TWO MONTHS of cloistered nights spent almost exclusively in her bed, surrounded by the encroaching assortment of archaic coin banks and cardigans embroidered with glass beads and shell-colored moth-eaten lampshades, Thomas prepared himself to broach the issue. It was, he decided, a matter of phrasing.
Do you ever get out of the house? was obvious on top of insensitive, he thought, but something that merely circled—Do you prefer to stay home? — was the kind of inquiry she would cleverly deflect. Her intelligence, unlike her sanity or income or background, was never in question.