A Home at the End of the World, Page 32

  “And tell them what?” Jonathan asks.

  “That I’m being held prisoner in this house by two men. That they lured me here for purposes of breeding, and force me to live in a perpetual 1969.”

  “You’ve done the breeding,” Jonathan says. “If that were your only purpose here, we’d be through with you by now.”

  “The baby still needs milk, doesn’t she?” Clare says. “And the house needs a momma. Doesn’t it?”

  Jonathan pauses a moment, considering. “Naw,” he says. “You’re free to go.” He rolls off of her and picks up the remote-control box. “Let’s see if there’s anything good coming in from Jupiter tonight.”

  “If I go,” Clare says, “I’m taking the kid.”

  “Oh no you’re not,” he answers. Then he remembers to adjust his voice. “She’s everybody’s,” he says more gently.

  Clare leans back, cocks her head in my direction. “Bobby?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I’d like to know the secret of your imperturbable calm. Here we are in the middle of a highly peculiar and unorthodox arrangement, in a house that could fall down around us at any moment, Jonathan and I are bickering over possession of my child—”

  “ Our child,” Jonathan says. “Really, Clare, you’ve got to stop with this yours business.”

  “Over possession of our baby,” she says, “and you just sit here like Dagwood Bumstead. Sometimes I think you’re what’s coming in from Jupiter.”

  “I guess I am,” I say. “I mean, none of this seems all that strange to me.”

  She looks up at the ceiling, her eyes dilated to black disks. “I should have known,” she says. “I should have figured it out the first moment I saw you, with blow-dried hair and Calvin Klein jeans. And then you could switch practically overnight to East Village hip. It’s so funny. It turns out Jonathan and I are the conservative ones. We’re the ones who need to look in the mirror and know what we’re going to see from day to day. You can just do anything, can’t you?”

  “No,” I tell her. “I can’t just do anything.”

  “Name me something. Name something you wouldn’t do.”

  “Um, well, I wouldn’t be alone. I haven’t been, you know, by myself since I was a kid.”

  “That’s it,” she says. “You’re a company man, aren’t you? You mirror everybody’s desires. Oh, why didn’t I think of this before? When you lived with Jonathan’s parents you were a nice Ohio boy, when you lived in the East Village you were cool, and now that we live in the country you’re this sweet sort of hippie-dad figure. You just give people whatever they want. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  There are things I can’t tell her, things I wouldn’t know how to say. I am part of the living and part of the dead. I am living for more people than just myself.

  “Oh, Clare,” Jonathan says from the foot of the bed. “What are you all of a sudden, some sort of Nancy Drew of the psyche? Do you really think you can sum Bobby up in a sentence like that?”

  “You go sentence by sentence in this life,” she says.

  I reach over and stroke Clare’s hair. I try to kiss her troubled lips.

  “Boys, boys,” she says, pulling away from my kiss. “What a perverse crew we are. What a deeply weird bunch.”

  “We’re really, you know, not much weirder than any family,” I say. “At least we love each other. Didn’t you say that first?”

  “Maybe I did. About a thousand years ago.”

  I look into her scared, aging face. I think I know what frightens Clare—a certain ability to invent our own futures has been lost. Now we are following a plan that got made in a haphazard way along a highway in Pennsylvania. Now the good things are the predictable ones, and surprises mean bad news.

  I put my lips on hers again. This time she returns the kiss. Jonathan continues flipping channels, lazily half-watching.

  CLARE

  I NEVER expected this, a love so ravenous it’s barely personal. A love that displaces you, pushes you out of shape. I knew that if I was crossing the street with the baby and a car screamed around the corner, horn blaring, I’d shield her with my body. I’d do it automatically, the way you protect your head or heart by holding up your arms. You defend your vital parts with your tougher, more expendable ones. In that way, motherhood worked as promised. But I found that I loved her without a true sense of charity or goodwill. It was a howling, floodlit love; a frightening thing. I would shield her from a speeding car but I’d curse her as I did it, like a prisoner cursing the executioner.

  Rebecca’s mouth worked to form the word “Momma.” She fretted whenever I left her. Someday she’d pay a fortune to therapists for their help in solving the mystery of my personality. There would be plenty of material—a mother living with two men, intricately in love with both of them. An undecided, disorganized woman who fell out of every conventional arrangement. Who dragged her own childhood along with her into her forties. I’d been just a private, slipshod person going about my business and now I was on my way to becoming the central riddle in another person’s life.

  Being a mother was the weighted, unsettling thing. Being a lover—even an unorthodox lover—was tame and ordinary by comparison.

  Maybe that was the secret my own mother discovered. She’d thought my wild, undisciplined father would prove to be her life’s adventure. And then she’d given birth.

  We worked out a variation on the classic arrangement, we three. Bobby and Jonathan went to the café before sunrise every morning, I stayed home with Rebecca. I didn’t want a business. Eventually I’d start making jewelry again, or some other little thing. The restaurant was the boys’ project, a way for them to support themselves and begin paying me back. They were good, uncomplaining workers. Or, Bobby was a good, uncomplaining worker and Jonathan more or less followed his example. They left the house at five o’clock every morning, just as the darkness was beginning to turn, and didn’t come back until four or five in the afternoon, when the dark was already working its way back into the corners of the house. To be honest, I didn’t know too much about their work lives. Bobby cooked, Jonathan was the waiter, and a sweet dim-witted boy from town bussed tables and did the dishes. Although I listened to their stories—furious customers, kitchen fixtures that blew up or caught fire in the middle of the lunch rush, wildly improbable thefts (someone stole the stuffed salmon right off the wall, someone else took the seat off the toilet in the women’s room)—it all seemed to happen in a remote, slightly unliving realm of anecdote. I felt for the boys. But to me their single, salient characteristic was an eleven- or twelve-hour daily absence. Real life, the heart and heft of it, was what happened during the hours they were gone.

  For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing my hair.

  Now, with Rebecca to care for, each moment had an electrified gravity that was not always pleasant but ran right down to the core. Sometimes I grew bored—babies aren’t always interesting—but always, in another minute or hour, she would need something only I could provide. It seemed that every day s
he developed a new gesture or response that carried her that much closer to her own eventual personality. From hour to hour, she kept turning more fully into somebody. The hours were stitched together, and nothing limp or hopeless ever threatened to unravel the day. I bathed Rebecca, fed her, mopped up her shit. I played with her. I showed her what I could of the world.

  All right, I liked it best when the boys were gone. Once they came home, a sense of continuing emergency was lost. Weary as they were, they told me to relax while they attended to Rebecca. They were being good, responsible fathers. I knew I should feel appreciative. But I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to be stretched and beset. I wanted to be frantically busy with Rebecca every waking moment, and then fall into a sleep black and shapeless as the unlived future.

  Bobby loved our daughter but was not tormented by her vulnerable, noisy existence. In a world with more room in it he might have been a settler, with visions of reinventing society on a patch of ground far from the site of the old mistakes. He had that religious quality. He was soft-hearted and intensely focused. He was not deeply interested in the flesh. Sometimes when he held Rebecca I knew how he saw her—as a citizen in his future world. He respected her for swelling the local population but did not agonize over particulars of her fate. In his eyes, she was part of a movement.

  Bobby and I slept together in a new queen-size bed. Rebecca’s room was the next down the hall, followed by the bathroom and Jonathan’s room. Bobby’s days were unrelenting. He flipped eggs and baked pies, fought with suppliers. He came home to Rebecca’s cries and dirty diapers. At night he slept the sleep of the exhausted and depleted—a desperate unconsciousness. I was grateful for his waning interest in sex, not only because I was tired also but because my nipples had turned brown from Rebecca’s nursing. Three yellow stretch marks stitched their way from my bottom rib to my crotch. I was forty-one. I couldn’t feel pretty anymore. If Bobby had been more ardent or high-strung, if he’d shamefacedly confessed that I repelled him now, I’d have had something to work from. I might have started on a new kind of defiant pride. But he was himself, a charitable, hardworking man. We slept peacefully together.

  Jonathan generated more static electricity as he ran through his days. If Bobby moved with the methodical, slightly bovine will of a vacuum cleaner, sucking up each errand and task, Jonathan clattered along like an eggbeater. He was manic and flushed, vague-eyed from lack of rest. He and Bobby both told me that, as a waiter, he offered charm in place of competence. Water glasses went unfilled. Eggs ordered scrambled arrived sunnyside up. He said there were moments during the breakfast rush when he actually seemed to fall asleep while moving. One moment he’d be filling a cream pitcher and the next he’d be standing beside a table, in the middle of taking an order, with no recollection of the intervening time. Soon he and Bobby would hire a waitress, and Jonathan would become the host and backup errand boy. “I’ll make sure everybody’s happy,” he said. “I’ll pour them more coffee and ask about their hometowns. We’ll hire a specialist to see that they actually get what they order.”

  His true vocation was the baby. Every evening after work he brought her something: a plastic doll from the dime store, a rose from somebody’s garden, a pair of miniature white sunglasses. He took her for long walks before dinner and read to her after.

  Around four in the morning he’d wake her, change her diaper, and bring her to Bobby’s and my bed. He was comically paternal in boxer shorts, carrying our sleepy child. “I know it borders on child abuse, getting her up like this,” he said. “But we need to see her before we go off to bake the bread.” He’d crawl into bed beside me, holding Rebecca on his lap. Some mornings she whined sleepily in the lamplight. Some mornings she chuckled and mouthed unintelligible words. “Miss Rebecca,” Jonathan would whisper. “Oh, you’re a fine thing, aren’t you? Mm-hm. Oh yes. Look at those hands. You’ll be a tennis player, huh? Or a violinist, or a human fly.” He kept up a stream of talk, an unwavering flow. Sometimes when she cried, only Jonathan could comfort her. She’d wail in my arms, and buck and shriek in Bobby’s. But when Jonathan took her she’d quiet down. She’d stare at him with eyes that were greedy and surprisingly hard. She clung to him because he was elusive and because, during his hours at home, he took the most elaborate, courtly care of her. Even that early, I believe she was falling in love.

  Rebecca and I shared a more nervous kind of love. While the boys were away, she and I lived together in a state of constant need. She needed and, with growing vehemence, resented my protection. I only needed her safety but I needed it completely, all the time. I had to know she was all right, every minute. It took its toll on both of us. Sometimes when we were together, when I checked the temperature of her bathwater or snatched a pencil out of her mouth, I could almost feel the question crackling in the air around us— What if I fail to protect ? We could grow irritable together. I could be short-tempered with her, and bossy; I could deny her too much. She was addicted to my fears. She wept if I watched her too closely, and wept if she realized that for a moment I’d forgotten to watch her at all.

  I was beginning to understand something about my mother. She’d made a choice after I was born. There wasn’t room in the house or in her parsimonious nature for two difficult children. She’d been forced to choose. Maybe that was how the battle started. My father had had to fight for a share. He’d used his best weapons, his sex and recklessness, but my mother had prevailed with her powers of organization and rectitude. I’d loved my father more. He’d called me Peg and Scarlett O’Hara, said it was all right to buy anything we wanted. But toward the end, when he fell cursing on the front lawn and drunkenly broke furniture, I’d turned away from him. Finally, a child will choose order over passion or charm.

  As a grown woman I’d fallen in love with Jonathan’s intelligence and humor and, I suppose, with his harmlessness. He was neither frigid nor dangerous. Neither man nor woman. There was no threat of failure through sex. Now I saw how Rebecca, too, would one day fall in love with him. He had a father’s allure. He had a mother’s warmth without the implied threat—she would not die if Jonathan briefly lost track of her. He worked all day and then came home with a present in his hands, flushed with the sheer excitement of seeing her after so many hours’ separation. Bobby was sweetly remote and I was too constant. Jonathan exerted a steady charm made perfect by his daily absence. Rebecca would be his. She’d care for Bobby and me but she’d belong to Jonathan.

  There were times—moments—when I believed I had in fact found my reward. I had love, and a place on earth. I was part of something sweetened and buffered. A family. It was what I’d thought I wanted. My own family had crackled with jealousy and rage. Not a single one of my parents’ wedding gifts survived. We’d devoured the past. Now nothing was left to inherit but the improvements my mother had made, the gilt fixtures and floral prints, after my father went off to quit drinking and find Christ and then start drinking again.

  But at other times I missed the violent wrongheadedness of my own family. We’d been difficult people, known around the neighborhood: Poor Amelia Stuckart and That Man She Married. I’d grown famous in our suburb for being Their Poor Little Girl. I’d based my early self-inventions on the concepts of deprivation and pride. I’d worn the shortest skirts, teased my hair into a brittle storm. I’d fucked my first skinny bass player at fourteen, in the back of a van. The local forces of order made it easy for me by wearing lumpy bras and girlish hairdos, by slathering their jowls with Aqua Velva. They said, “Join us in our world,” and I found a drug dealer for a boyfriend. I watched myself shrink in the eyes of the counselors and the pastors— perhaps, in fact, Mrs. Rollins, this one is beyond our help . I went to school with a pint of tequila in my purse. I shot through the frozen Rhode Island nights sizzling on speed. I left a vapor
trail behind. People who’ve been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.

  Now, late in life, I’d been rescued. The boys came straight home every night, took care of Rebecca, cooked our dinner. Their love wasn’t immaculate. They may have loved one another more than they loved me. They may have been using me without quite knowing it. I could live with that. I didn’t mind touching the rough bottom of people’s good intentions. What I had trouble with sometimes was the simple friendliness of it. We lived in a world of kindness and domestic order. I sometimes thought of myself as Snow White living among the dwarfs. The dwarfs took good care of her. But how long would she have lasted there without the hope of meeting someone life-sized? How long would she have swept and mended before she began to see her life as composed of safe haven and subtle but pervasive lacks?

  ALICE

  W HEN I summoned Jonathan to Arizona, I didn’t mention the parcel I had for him. It wasn’t the sort of gift to talk about over the telephone. I simply exercised my motherly prerogative and demanded a visit. I wasn’t generally much trouble to him, and he had always suffered from an exaggerated sense of his own culpability. I suspect he wished I would burden him more. I think he’d have found some relief in a beleaguered, badgering mother. Given his nature, he had little choice but to obey when I called and said I wanted to see him. “The desert’s lovely this time of year,” I said. “Please come out for a few days.” And he did.

  I met him at the Phoenix airport. Country life hadn’t changed him much. Since he’d left for college more than ten years earlier, and I’d grown accustomed to going months without seeing him, I had learned a new objectivity. As a little boy he’d seemed like an invention of mine, and I’d loved him with a stinging, tangled intensity that hurt me at times. It was as if the part of me I felt tenderest toward, the little wounded part that wanted only to cry and be held, had been cut out and now lived separately, beyond my powers of consolation. His existence compelled and distressed me so much that I scarcely knew what he looked like. Now I loved him less dreadfully, from a deeper reserve of calm, and I could see him better in his human particulars. Among the disembarking passengers at the airport he was pale and pretty but unfinished-looking; as he aged I began to see that he stood in danger of growing old without acquiring a visible aspect of repose. Unmarked and boyish, with a boy’s equine beauty, he was taking on the perennially fresh, untried quality that can lead an old man to look like a shocked, ancient child. I waved from among those waiting and he made his way toward me, chipper and a little haunted-looking, threading gingerly through the crowd as if he suspected it might be full of enemies in disguise.