A Home at the End of the World, Page 21

  Without speaking, we stood up and went to bed. It was our single incidence of psychic accord—ordinarily we explained our simplest acts in lavish detail. But that night we took our wineglasses and went without speaking to his bed, undressed, and lay down in one another’s arms.

  “These are scary times,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, they are.”

  We lay for a while without discussing the last remaining event in our sensual histories—the fact that we had not exercised bodily precautions together. Now it was too late to protect ourselves from one another. There was no rational accounting, beyond the fact that even four years ago, when we’d met, the disease had still seemed the province of another kind of man. Of course we’d known about it. Of course we’d been scared. But no one we knew personally had gotten sick. We’d believed—with a certain effort of will—that it befell men whose blood was thinned by too many drugs, who had sex with a dozen people every night. Erich had had a good record collection, and framed photographs of skinny brothers and sisters posing by a lake, in a wallpapered living room, and beside a glossy red Camaro. He talked about going to auditions, and about finding a better job. He had seemed too busy to be available to early death. I couldn’t say how he’d worked out the equation in his own head, because this did not seem to be a conversation we were capable of holding. We let a lengthy, silent embrace stand in for it. Then, with a new gravity, we made love as the Coltrane record played itself over and over and over again.

  Several days later, Bobby told me about himself and Clare. I had been to see Arthur in the hospital. His pneumonia was clearing—he’d expressed optimism about the future, and a conviction that the cessation of alcohol and the adoption of a macrobiotic diet would improve his health a hundred percent. Although there was still important work to do at the office, I hadn’t the heart for it. I went home instead, to spend the evening with Bobby and Clare.

  When I arrived they were in the kitchen together, making dinner. Our kitchen accommodated two people about as generously as a phone booth would, but they had managed somehow to wedge themselves in. From the living room I heard Clare’s laughter. Bobby said, “You’ve got to, like, move your butt another inch or I can’t get this out of the oven.”

  I called, “Hello, dears.”

  “Jonathan,” Clare said in a high, humorous voice. “Oh my Lord, he’s home.”

  They must have tried to leave the kitchen at the same time, and gotten stuck. I heard more laughter, and a grunt from Bobby. Clare came into the living room first. She wore a yellow bowling shirt with a strand of red glass beads. Bobby followed, in his T-shirt and black jeans.

  “Hi, honey,” Clare said. “What a surprise. Did the paper burn down?”

  “No, I just missed you both. I’m taking the night off. Want to go bowling or something?”

  Clare kissed my cheek, and Bobby did, too. “We were making, like, chicken and biscuits,” he said.

  “Like none of our mothers actually made,” Clare added. “I don’t know about you, but where I come from, home cooking was a Hungry Man Salisbury-steak TV dinner. Chicken with cream gravy seems so exotic and foreign.”

  “Jon’s mother was a great cook,” Bobby told her. “She never bought anything, you know, frozen. Or canned.”

  “Right,” Clare said. “And she dove for her own pearls and trapped her own minks. Jonathan, dear, would you like a cocktail?”

  “Love one,” I said. “What if we made a pitcher of martinis?”

  We had taken to drinking martinis. We’d bought three stemmed glasses, and kept jars of green olives in the refrigerator.

  “Great,” Bobby said. “We can, um, drink a toast.”

  “You know me. I’ll drink to anything. Isn’t this Guy Fawkes Day, or something?”

  “Well,” Bobby said. He grinned with cordial embarrassment.

  “Is there something more specific to toast?” I said.

  “I’m going to make those martinis,” Clare said. “You two wait right here.”

  She went back to the kitchen. “What’s up, sport?” I asked Bobby when we were alone.

  He kept on grinning, and looked at the floor as if he saw secrets printed on the carpet. Bobby had no capacity for subterfuge. He could fail to answer a question but could not answer it falsely. Whether it was morality or simple lack of imagination, I couldn’t say. Sometimes the two are so closely related as to be indistinguishable.

  “Jonny,” he said. “Clare and I—”

  “Clare and you what?”

  “We’ve started, that is we’ve fallen. You know.”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah. You do.”

  “You mean you’re sleeping together?” I said.

  He lifted his gaze from the floor, but couldn’t meet my eyes. He was smiling and wincing at once, with a sense of barely contained hilarity, as if he was waiting for me to realize I’d forgotten to put my pants on.

  “Well,” he said after a moment. “Aw, Jonny. We’re, like, in love. Isn’t it amazing?”

  “It is. It’s truly amazing.”

  I hadn’t expected my own voice to sound so cold and peevish. I had meant to respond in a firm but kindly voice—to cut through the romantic nonsense. At the tone in my voice, Bobby looked uncertainly at me, his smile frozen.

  “Jon,” he said. “Now we’re, like, really a family.”

  “What?”

  “The three of us. Man, don’t you see how great it is? I mean, it’s like, now all three of us are in love.”

  Clare came out with martinis on the tray that had become part of our cocktail ritual. The tray was a battered old souvenir of Southern California, featuring oranges the color of manila envelopes and black-lipped, skirted beauties lolling with aloof, disappointed expressions on a pale turquoise beach.

  “I told him,” Bobby said proudly.

  “Just like you said you would.” She looked at me with an expression of mingled irony and apology. “Here, Jonathan. Have a drink.”

  “Is it true?” I asked her.

  “About Bobby and me? Yes. I guess we’re making our formal announcement.”

  Bobby took a glass from the tray and raised it. “Here’s to the family,” he said.

  “Oh, really, Bobby,” Clare said. “For Christ’s sake. You and I are sleeping together.” She turned to me and said, “He and I are sleeping together.”

  I took a swallow of my martini. I knew how I was supposed to feel: gleeful at love’s old habit of turning up unexpectedly to throw its transforming light onto the daily business. Instead, I felt dry and empty, like sand falling into a hole of sand. I worked to simulate the required gaiety. I thought I could catch up with it if I performed it convincingly enough.

  “It’s incredible,” I said. “How long has this been going on? That’s a song title, right? One of the troubles with love is, you can’t talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs.”

  “Just a few days,” Clare said. “We wanted to tell you about it, but it hasn’t seemed to come up in the course of regular conversation.”

  I nodded, and looked hard at her. Neither of us believed what she’d just said. We both knew that she and Bobby, whether consciously or otherwise, had hidden their love from me because they thought there was reason to hide it.

  �
��What if we had a kid now?” Bobby said. “The three of us.”

  “Bobby,” Clare said, “kindly shut up. Please just shut up.”

  “You two wanted to have a baby, right? You were talking about it. How about if we three had a baby? Or two?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s have six kids. An even half dozen.”

  “Let’s see if we can still stand the sight of each other by Christmas,” Clare said.

  “Well, here’s to the happy couple,” I said, lifting my glass.

  We drank to the happy couple. I said, “I never expected this. It makes sense now that it’s happened. But really, Bobby, when you arrived, it never occurred to me that you and Clare—”

  “Never occurred to me either,” Clare said.

  “Better tell me how it happened,” I said. “Every single detail, no matter how intimate.”

  We had our drinks, and then had another round, as Clare told the story, with Bobby injecting occasional brief clarifications. Unlike Bobby, Clare could exaggerate so artfully she herself sometimes lost track of the line between hyperbole and the undramatic truth. She was not self-serving. If anything, she chose to portray herself in an unflattering light, usually figuring in her own stories as a guileless, slightly ridiculous character, doomed to comeuppance like Lucy Ricardo and prone to hapless, inexplicable devotions like the fool in La Strada . She would always sacrifice veracity for color—her lies were lies of proportion, not content. She reported on her life in a clownish, surreal world that was convincing to her and yet existed at a deep remove from her inner realm, which was riddled with old batterings and a panicky sense of limited possibilities.

  Clare said, “Basically, Mom decided to teach Junior a lesson about life. And, well, I guess Mom got a little carried away. I don’t know what the girls in my bowling league are going to say about this.”

  “They won’t like it,” I said. “They’ll probably make you turn in your shoes.”

  “Oh, Uncle Jonny. I’ve been so good for so long. I guess I just couldn’t manage it anymore.”

  “Well, your uncle is speechless. This is such a surprise.”

  “Sure is,” she said.

  In a spasm of edgy joy, Bobby reached over to squeeze her bare elbow. His fingertips made pale impressions on the smooth flesh of her arm. I had a vision of them old together: Clare an eccentric, hopped-up old woman in an outlandish hat and too much makeup, telling the well-rehearsed story of her romantic downfall, while Bobby, potbellied and balding, sat blushingly alongside, murmuring, “Aw, Clare.” We become the stories we tell about ourselves.

  “I guess this is the end of the Hendersons as we know them,” she said.

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  We stood for a moment in an abrupt state of social discomfort, as if we were houseguests left alone together by a mutual friend. Bobby said, “Dinner’s just about ready. Do you want to, like, eat something?”

  I said I was hungry, because eating would be a next thing to do. My head seemed to be floating somewhere above my body. Numbed by gin, I felt my own emotions like radio transmissions being broadcast by my own disembodied head. I was angry and envious. I wanted Bobby. In another sense, I wanted Clare.

  We ate, and talked of other things. After dinner we went to see Thieves Like Us at the Thalia. Clare and I had both seen it several times over the years, but she insisted that Bobby had to see it, too. “If we’re some sort of item all of a sudden,” she said, “I want him to at least have seen a few of the fundamental movies.” During the film she whispered to him, and emphasized her points by squeezing his knee. She had painted her fingernails a blazing pink that showed clearly even in the theater’s darkness.

  I begged off on drinks after the movie, though it had become our habit to finish our evenings together at a bar, no matter how late the hour. Clare put her palm to my forehead and asked, “Honey, are you sick?” I told her no, just exhausted, and claimed to have to be in the office by dawn to make up for what I hadn’t done tonight. Bobby and Clare said they’d come home with me, but I told them to go have a drink by themselves. I kissed them both. As I walked home the air was so clear and frozen that the Big Dipper penetrated the lights of Manhattan, angling faintly off the roof of Cooper Union. Frigid air sparkled around the window lights. Even on a night like that, blank-eyed boys walked the streets with black, boxy radios, their music chipping away at the cold.

  At home, I rolled up Bobby’s sleeping bag and put it in the closet. I knew that, as of tonight, he would be sleeping in Clare’s room. I made myself another martini for a nightcap. A light snow began to fall, meandering flakes that seemed little more than the air itself coalesced into hard gray pellets. I drank the martini in my room, and imagined Bobby and Clare embarking on a future together. They were an unlikely couple. They would probably reach the limits of their novelty together, and their affair would wind down into an anecdote. But possibly, just possibly, it would not. If they stayed together, by some combination of attraction, cussedness, and plain good luck, they would have a home of some sort. They would probably have children. They would have unexceptional jobs and find themselves pushing a cart through the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket. They would have all that.

  ALICE

  N ED AND I packed up the home we’d made for ourselves and established a new one in the Arizona desert, under doctor’s orders. We bought a condominium less than half the size of our old house, in a complex that had not lived up to its developer’s expectations. Nearly half the units stood empty three years after their construction, and strings of multicolored pennants, some of them torn, still festooned the entrance gates. The buildings were done up as pueblos, their concrete walls stained a reddish mud color and the ends of poles protruding above the aluminum-framed windows. We were able to get a good price on a one-bedroom, our means being limited. Neither our house nor the theater had sold for much.

  “Hacienda Glover,” Ned called it. And, in what passed in him for the darker moods, “Tobacco Road, 1987.”

  He didn’t permit himself much in the way of gloom or pessimism. Perhaps he was incapable. His demonstrated emotions ran the gamut from rueful acceptance to mild disapproval, and as I bid my own farewells to the Cleveland kitchen and the pear tree in the back yard I realized I had always planned, in some uncertain way, on leaving him. Or, rather, I had planned on someday having a life beyond our mild domestic comedy, the cordial good cheer of our evening feedings and our chaste, dreamless sleep. The trouble with an even-tempered union is that it refuses to crack—at no point does injustice or hardheartedness provide an opening through which you could walk blamelessly into another way of being. You live in the details: a kitchen arranged just the way you want it, tomatoes ripening on vines you’ve staked and tied with your own hands. Now Ned was ill, banished to an unfamiliar place, and I could not summon the anger or self-interest I’d have needed to send him there alone. As I packed my knives into a cardboard carton, I contemplated the rising divorce rate—how did so many manage it? The movies and novels of our childhoods don’t adequately prepare some of us for the impression our future homes will make; we are not warned of the seductive powers exerted by our own south-facing living-room windows, or by hollyhocks edging a set of French doors.

  And now Ned and I were disassembling it, just like that, because his lungs couldn’t negotiate the sodden Ohio air. It was almost shockingly easy. We listed our property with a rouged woman in toreador pants who took less than a month to sell it at
a bargain rate to a pair of young computer programmers willing to gamble on a neighborhood that might or might not improve. The theater would be torn down for a parking structure. Less than eight months after the doctor’s pronouncement, we lived in a place I had never even imagined visiting.

  The desert proved to have its own wild beauty; its odd mix of emptiness and moment and its searing, bottomless sky. Between the time we closed escrow and the day we arrived with our belongings, the cactus in front of our unit had produced a single ivory-colored flower, which it wore like an extravagant hat. Few fates are wholly disagreeable. If they were, we might do a better job of evading them. Ned and I set up housekeeping in those small white-painted rooms, hung curtains and set the copper pans against a new kitchen wall, where they shone just as brightly in the desert light. I realized that in no time this place would take on its own inevitability. Indeed, it was assuming that quality even as we debated the arrangement of chairs and pictures. Ned put a comradely arm around me as we paused in our work, cupping my shoulder in the same firm, gentle manner he’d used as a man of twenty-six, when I’d gotten into a convertible with him and driven into the Louisiana bayous. He said, “This won’t be so bad. What do you think, kiddo?”

  I told him no, it would be fine, and I did not experience the statement as a lie. We are adaptable creatures. It’s the source of our earthly comfort and, I suppose, of our silent rage. Ned held me in what would be our living room. The familiar curtains were parted, and beyond them lay a lovely, desolate landscape in which an unprotected traveler would not last so much as a single day.

  JONATHAN

  S OMETHING was wrong with me. I lacked some central ability to connect, and I worried that it might be an early indicator of disease. First you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn’t add up to whole days and your presence—in an airplane, on the streets—didn’t affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily do. Then dark sores and fevers, a cough that wouldn’t stop. Maybe this was how death announced itself, by breaking up your sense of participation in your own affairs.