A Home at the End of the World

  “Oh.”

  “Most parents aren’t lovers,” Clare said. “Mine weren’t. Mine were only married, and they didn’t care much for one another. At least Jonathan and I are good friends.”

  “It’s the modern age,” Jonathan said, half apologetically.

  I nodded. Then the waitress came, and we had to decide on dinner. Jonathan said he was professionally obliged to order meat loaf, but that Clare and I should have whatever we wanted. I had fried chicken with mashed potatoes, and Clare had the special—tuna-fish casserole, with potato chips crumbled on top.

  After dinner we went for a walk. We walked down to the Hudson River and stood on a pier looking across the dark agitated water at New Jersey. On the far side a giant neon coffee cup spilled a red drop of coffee, then sucked it back up and spilled it again. Clare and Jonathan were both good talkers. I rode their talk as if it was a hammock stretched between them. Together, they were performers. They seemed happy enough to have an audience—I didn’t need to speak much. They talked about babies, about moving to the country, and about how to survive in New York. They traded tips on apartment hunting, and told one another where the bargains were.

  “Honey,” Clare said to me, “I’m taking you to the Lower East Side on Sunday. That’s where you get the best deals.”

  “It is not,” Jonathan said. “Clare has this peculiar devotion to Orchard Street.”

  “Jonathan buys retail,” she said. Her voice implied that it was a slothful, possibly dangerous, practice.

  “The Lower East Side,” said Jonathan, “is a fine place to shop if you want to look like a disco king, circa 1975.”

  “Do I look like a disco king?” she said.

  “It’s different for women. The world doesn’t conspire to make them look like assholes in quite the same way.”

  “Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a department store should never make a statement like that. Don’t you listen to him, Bobby.”

  I let myself swing along. I played a sound track, silently, inside my head.

  We had cappuccinos in a restaurant with a garden, where Christmas lights blinked in the trees and a small marble boy pissed into a marble clamshell. Then we went home. Clare kissed me on the cheek, said, “Welcome to Perdition,” and disappeared into her own room. Jonathan and I spread his fat green sleeping bag out on the floor. He gave me a pillow from his bed.

  When we were both settled, when the white paper light was out, he said, “Tomorrow I’ll take you up to Central Park. I figure if we do a different part of town every day, you’ll have your bearings by next week.”

  “You know where I’d like to go?” I said. “Um, I’d like to go see Woodstock.”

  “It’s over a hundred miles from here.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “We could probably go sometime,” he said. “I’ve never been. I’m sure it’s pretty up there. Full of old hippies, I suppose.”

  “Uh-huh. Hey, are you and Clare really having a baby?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been talking about it.”

  “I like Clare,” I said.

  “So do I.”

  A spell of semi-dark silence passed. Noise from the street filtered in through the curtains.

  “Bobby?” he said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like there are things I need to talk to you about, but I don’t really know how. I’m not sure what to say.”

  “Um, what things?” I asked. He lay on his back, with his head cradled in his hands. Sometimes he fell asleep that way, his waking ideas marching straight into his dreams. He could have trouble separating real memories from dreamed ones. I knew that about him.

  “You know,” he said. “The things we used to do together. The, well, sexual things. I mean, we never talked about it, and after high school we just stopped. I guess I’m wondering what you thought about all that.”

  I could hear my own breathing. This was a hard subject. I had realized by then that I didn’t feel what others called “desire.” Something was missing in me. I felt love—the strain and heat of it, the animal comfort mixed up with human fear. I felt it for all the Glovers, for Sammi at the bakery, for Dylan when he sang “Baby Blue.” But nothing built up in my groin. Nothing quickened, or struggled for release. I’d made a kind of love with Jonathan because he’d wanted to, and because I’d loved him. I’d had orgasms that passed through me like the spirits of people more devoted to the body than I was. These spirits were pleasant enough in passing but truly gone when they were gone. After Jonathan left town, I was alone inside myself. This lack was probably what had made it possible for me to live my bakery life in Cleveland; to need no sensations beyond the first feathers of November snow and the living hiss of a needle touching vinyl.

  I said, “We were kids, Johnny. That was years ago.”

  “I know. Are you, I mean, have you been seeing anyone?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Basically, I’ve just been working and listening to records. It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? I mean, at my age.”

  “Well, there are stranger things.”

  We left it at that. We lay for a while with the noise washing over us—car horns and shouts. Just before I fell asleep I heard people passing by, laughing, a gigantic group of them—a cathedral choir of laughers.

  CLARE

  I WANTED a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father’s daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn’t learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.

  I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth’s belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I’d never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition.

  I didn’t try to sleep with Bobby. He looked too much like a man who’d been in a cartoon accident. He might have had stars and planets fluttering around his head. You got the impression that he was slightly cross-eyed. But still, he touched you. Maybe because you believed that if you took your eyes off him for too long, he’d have another accident. He’d grin rapturously, and fall through an open manhole. He’d get hit by a falling piano, and come up with a mouthful of keys where his teeth should be. I hated to think I was getting protective at the threshold of middle age. I hated to think I was developing a weakness for stunned, inefficient men who’d need looking after, the way my mother looked after my father until her patience failed.

  Although I kept my hands off him I couldn’t deny Bobby’s shaggy, lost-pony appeal. He had big square hands and a face blank and earnest as a shovel. If it weren’t for his eyes, his innocence would have been too lunar to touch. It was his eyes that cut through. Imagine a snug little house in the suburbs, with a plaster dwarf on the law
n and petunias in the window boxes. Then imagine someone ancient and howlingly sad looking out through an upstairs window. That was Bobby’s face. That’s what it was about him.

  All I did was notice him, though. Lately I was bothered by desire the way a horse is bothered by flies. It was a minor, if persistent, irritation. It could be flicked away.

  Maybe the money was what hampered me. My family had money; my mother’s side did. Not the genteel, Old World kind—my mother’s father made a killing in costume jewelry. He built the third-biggest house in Providence. He changed his name from Stein to Stone, sent my mother to Wellesley. It’s an old story. Rhinestone king shoots for legitimacy through the progress of generations. He bought my mother a Seven Sisters education, set up a trust for me before I was born. According to his timetable the blood would be purified by steady exposure to money, and his great-grandchildren would be true aristocrats, with composure and a serene sense of their own worth. He died when I was ten. But I know the future he had in mind. A cast-iron deer had raised stiff antlers on his front lawn. Gold-plated fish had spit water into the bathroom sinks.

  Desire fouled the plan, though. My mother didn’t care for the boys she met at Wellesley mixers, or they didn’t care for her. She had decisive features and the grim, secretive manners of a jeweler. She didn’t flirt. She harbored operatic passions, or believed she did, and had no interest in coy little experiments. A hundred years earlier she’d have been known as a good woman. At Wellesley in the nineteen-forties she could only have been known as a drag. She walked in a disgruntled trance through four years of college and then married my father, who said he was “in sales” and who had enough personality for both of them. He was her one adventure. She never wanted another.

  I don’t know if he married her for money. I don’t think it was as simple as that. My father was a seducer. He bored easily. He must have liked the challenge posed by my mother, a woman who never feigned laughter or any other polite reaction and who’d been accepted by every law school she’d applied to. He was a great, frivolous beauty. Maybe he thought she knew him in some deeper way, and could redeem him through her unamused powers of scrutiny. Maybe he planned on loosening her up.

  When I was younger all my lovers had been clenched, possessive people. My husband Denny had danced six hours a day, and still despised himself for dilettantism. My lover Helene had had screaming opinions on every subject from women’s rights to washing spinach. I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I’d suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you’d have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret. I’d offered lovers my willingness and susceptibility—it seemed to be all I had. I’d worked out a general policy of pliable sweetness toward people who eventually changed the locks over some unguessable offense of mine. Who claimed they’d die if I left them but slapped me in a rage when I brought home the wrong brand of beer. After the divorce I’d gone from one lover straight to the next, thinking every time that I’d learned a lesson I wouldn’t repeat. This new lover would have a sense of humor, or wouldn’t take drugs. This new one would be a woman, or a black man, or a computer magnate whose heart belonged to data.

  Since my early thirties I’d been retired from love. I’d been living like a child. Just hour to hour, while other women my age went to their own children’s recitals and school plays. Drifting wasn’t hard. I had a silly little job, and a big lump of inheritance money waiting for me when I turned forty. There were people to meet for coffee, and movies and clubs to go to. Time had passed pleasantly. And now—it seemed so sudden—salesgirls called me “ma’am.” Young men didn’t glance up automatically when I passed them in the street. I no longer showed on their radar screens.

  In a sense I liked the way I was aging. I’d invented a life of my own. I wasn’t a prim careerist living with two cats in a town house full of ancient maps. I wasn’t a drunk drifting from binges to purges and back again. I was proud of that. But still, I’d expected by this time of life to have developed a more general sense of pride in my larger self. I’d thought I’d be able to say, if somebody asked me, just exactly what I was doing in the world.

  BOBBY

  I T WAS the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own—a wilder orbit inside the earth’s calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn’t open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places. Here, people drove through red lights. They walked cursing in front of cars.

  I didn’t find a job right away. I admit that I put out a mild-hearted effort. Jonathan went to the office most days. Sometimes he stayed until midnight. He called the paper’s fame a natural disaster—a volcano that wouldn’t stop erupting long enough for the village to rebuild. The typesetter edited copy, the receptionist did overflow paste-up work with six calls on hold and three advertisers checking their watches in the slick new white-on-white reception room. Along with his weekly column, Jonathan laid out the entertainment pages and wrote reviews of movies he hadn’t seen, under an assumed name. Some mornings he mainlined two cups of coffee, steamed out the door, and wasn’t back for sixteen hours.

  Clare led an easier life. She was one of those people who have more money than they logically should, given what they do. But I wasn’t in a questioning mode. I was glad for the company.

  I always got up when Jonathan did. I brewed coffee while he showered. We talked and played music as he dressed himself in that day’s black. When he was ready he’d kiss me on the cheek. He’d kiss Clare, too, if she was up by then. He’d say, “Bye, dears,” and take off with half a bagel in his hand.

  Once he was gone, the morning switched over to its more leisurely pace. Its housewifely, daylight life. Clare and I sat at the dining-room table with second and third cups. We looked through the classifieds. Sometimes she redid her nails in a new color. Sometimes we watched The Price Is Right .

  She left for work at a quarter to eleven. I straightened up the house, bought groceries for dinner. I went to the record store every day. I didn’t buy records. I stood listening to whatever the store had picked as a background for shopping. I watched other people figure out what someone like them would want to listen to.

  Clare came home by seven. I always had dinner ready. Jonathan ate out every night so he could write about the food. Clare said she used to meet him wherever, and eat with him, but was happy to have a break from eating the same thing all week. Sometimes after dinner she went places with her friends, and sometimes she stayed home with me, listening to music and watching television. She said going out was starting to seem more like work than her job. On the nights she stayed home we made popcorn and drank Diet Coke. Sometimes she repainted her nails for the second time that day. And on a Wednesday night in June, she took on the long work of redoing me.

  She began it with a haircut. Jonathan was at the office, and Clare and I had gone to the movies. She’d taken me to see All About Eve , shocked that I’d never heard of it. It turned out to be an old gray-and-white comedy playing at a theater where a mouse ran across our feet, quick and feathery as a bad impulse.

  Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room. I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard Steve Reich?”

  I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on right now.” And she did.

  Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was the kind of electronic mus
ic that doesn’t come from instruments—that seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.

  By then, Clare knew me well enough to let me listen. She didn’t talk about unrelated matters during Steve Reich any more than she would have during All About Eve . When the record was finished, I said, “Whew.”

  “I thought you’d like him,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. He’s great. He’s just, you know—”

  I tried to finish the sentence by approximating the shape of the music with my hands. I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to tell her.

  She did shake her head and say, “Bobby.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Nothing. You really are a fanatic, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t tell where my fanaticism placed me in her view of the world. I didn’t know whether to claim it or deny it. I looked at the rug pattern between my feet.

  “Do you know what I think?” she said. “Can I be absolutely honest with you?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, curious about absolute honesty and fearing it with my whole heart.

  “I think you need a new haircut, is what I think.”

  It was only an outer suggestion, a question of cosmetics rather than personal insufficiency. “Really?” I said.

  “I’m talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don’t quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else’s whole life.”