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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.

A S A CHILD , Paulie had liked to wake his parents with song and, once his hands were able to manipulate the large carton, glasses of orange juice. He called his mother Lovebird and his father Mr. Sheep, after his other favorite soft but crusty-looking thing. They had adored the intensity of his glances and taken to calling him The King for the way he trounced around the house, assigning all objects an enthusiastic nomenclature. His teeth, so pointed, so white, always showing. And the singing: a song for the dishwasher, the morning, the cat, the routine appearance of the mail through the metal slot in the living room, the shifting colors of a laundry cycle.
    Of course there were signs, of course there were, but Lydia and Seymour rarely had time to finish their conversation in the mornings, she brushing her teeth while sitting on the master bathroom toilet with her nightie bunched around her hips, preparing herself for the task of waking and guiding two children in picking clothing and eating breakfast, and Seymour at the sink splashing cold water in his eyes and clearing his throat. He was a good husband, that evident always, and he kissed her good-bye no matter what, and sometimes arrived to the office ten minutes late on account of hearing her troubling or wonder-filled dream. In any case: they loved Paulie, loved the dramatic curvature in his chest, loved his upturned eyes. They loved his inability to grasp the ambitions of villains in the films that flickered across his tiny body where he lay on the carpet.
    With the beginning of school, it changed, and they could no longer misbrand his behavior as idiosyncratic. Lydia remembered it sharply for the rest of her life: How well it began, how she exhaled with relief when Paulie ran up to his