A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  At first he strode back and forth in a rigid pattern, as if touching two invisible goals ten feet apart, screaming “You motherfucker, you stupid motherfucker.” As he shouted, his circuit between the two goals grew shorter and shorter, until he was striding in tight little circles, following the pattern of a coiled spring. His face was magenta. Finally he stopped walking, but still he turned completely around, three times, as if the spring were continuing to coil inside him. All the while he screamed. He stopped calling me a motherfucker and began making sounds I could not understand, a stream of infuriated babble that seemed directed not at me but at the sky and the cliffs, the mute trees.

  I watched dumbly. I had never seen wrath like that before; I had not known it occurred in everyday life. There was nothing for me to do but wait, and hope it ended.

  After some time, without saying what he was going to do, Bobby ran off to retrieve my clothes from the clifftop. Though his fury had quieted somewhat, it was by no means spent. I stood nude on the gravel, waiting for him. When he came back with my clothes and boots he dumped them in a pile at my feet, saying, “Put ’em on fast,” in a tone of deep reproach. I did as I was told.

  When I had dressed he draped his jacket around me, over my own. “No, you need it,” I said. “Your pants are all wet…”

  “Shut up,” he told me, and I did.

  We started back to the highway, where we would hitch a ride to town. On the way Bobby put his arm around my shoulders and held me close to him. “Stupid fucker,” he muttered. “Stupid, stupid. Stu pid.” He continued holding me as we stood with our thumbs out by the roadside, and continued holding me in the back seat of the Volkswagen driven by the two Oberlin students who picked us up. He kept his arm around me all the way home, muttering.

  Back at my house, he ran a scalding-hot shower. He all but undressed me, and ordered me in. Only after I was finished, and wrapped in towels, did he take off his own wet clothes and get in the shower himself. His bare skin was bright pink in the steamy bathroom. When he emerged, glistening, studded with droplets, the medallion of pale hair was plastered to his chest.

  We went to my room, put on Jimi Hendrix, and rolled a joint. We sat in our towels, smoking. “Stupid,” he whispered. “You could have killed yourself. You know how I’d have felt if you’d done that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’d have felt like, I don’t know.”

  And then he looked at me with such sorrow. I put the joint down in the ashtray and, in an act of courage that far outstripped jumping off a cliff into icy water—that exceeded all my brave acts put together—I reached out and laid my hand on his forearm. There it was, his arm, sinewy and golden-haired, under my fingers. I looked at the floor—the braided rug and pumpkin-colored planks. Bobby did not pull his arm away.

  A minute passed. Either nothing or something had to happen. In terror, with my pulse jumping at my neck, I began to stroke his arm with the tip of my index finger. Now, I thought, he will see what I’m after. Now he’ll bolt in horror and disgust. Still I kept on with that single miniature gesture, in a state of fear so potent it was indistinguishable from desire. He did not recoil, nor did he respond.

  Finally I managed to look at his face. His eyes were bright and unblinking as an animal’s, his mouth slack. I could tell he was frightened too, and it was his fear that enabled me to move my hand to his bare shoulder. His skin prickled with gooseflesh over the smooth broad curve of his scapula. I could feel the subtle rise and fall of his breathing.

  Quickly, because I lacked the nerve for deliberation, I moved my hand to his thigh. He twitched and grimaced, but did not retreat. I burrowed my hand in under the towel he wore. I watched expressions of fear and pleasure skate across his eyes. Because I had no idea what to do, I replicated the strokes I’d used on myself. When he stiffened in my hand it seemed like a gesture of forgiveness.

  Then he put out a hand and, with surprising delicacy, touched me, too. We did not kiss. We did not embrace. Jimi sang “Purple Haze.” The furnace rumbled from deep in the house. Steam hissed through the pipes.

  We mopped up with Kleenexes afterward, and dressed in silence. Once we were dressed, however, Bobby relit the joint and began talking in his usual voice about usual things: the Dead’s next concert tour, our plan to get jobs and buy a car together. We passed the joint and sat on the floor of my room like any two American teenagers, in an ordinary house surrounded by the boredom and struggling green of an Ohio spring. Here was another lesson in my continuing education: like other illegal practices, love between boys was best treated as a commonplace. Courtesy demanded that one’s fumbling, awkward performance be no occasion for remark, as if in fact one had acted with the calm expertise of a born criminal.

  ALICE

  O UR SON Jonathan brought him home. They were both thirteen then. He looked hungry as a stray dog, and just that sly and dangerous. He sat at our table, wolfing roast chicken.

  “Bobby,” I asked, “have you been in town long?”

  His hair was an electrified nest. He wore boots, and a leather jacket decorated with a human eye worked in faded cobalt thread.

  “All my life,” he answered, gnawing on a legbone. “It’s just that I’ve been invisible. I only lately decided to let myself be seen.”

  I wondered if his parents fed him. He kept glancing around the dining room with such appetite that I felt for a moment like the witch in Hansel and Gretel . As a child in New Orleans, I had watched termites browsing the wooden scrollwork under our parlor window, and found that the intricate carving broke away in my hands like sugar.

  “Well, welcome to the material world,” I said.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  He did not smile. He bit down on that bone hard enough to crack it.

  After he’d gone I said to Jonathan, “He’s a character, isn’t he? Where did you find him?”

  “He found me ,” Jonathan said with the exaggerated patience that was a particular feature of his adolescence. Although his skin was still smooth and his voice sweet, he had devised a brusque knowingness by way of entry into manhood.

  “And how did he find you?” I asked mildly. I could still work Southern innocence to my advantage, even after all those years in Ohio.

  “He came up to me the first day of school and just started hanging around.”

  “Well, I think he’s peculiar,” I said. “He gives me the creeps just a little, to tell you the truth.”

  “I think he’s cool,” Jonathan said with finality. “He had an older brother who was murdered.”

  In New Orleans we’d had a term for people like Bobby, unprosperous-looking people whose relations were more than usually prone to violent ends. Still, I allowed as how he was quite evidently a cool customer.

  “What would you say to a game of hearts before bed?” I asked.

  “No, Mom. I’m tired of playing cards.”

  “Just one game,” I said. “You’ve got to give me a chance to recoup my losses.”

  “Well, okay. One game.”

  We cleared the table, and I dealt the cards. I played badly, though. My mind kept straying to that boy. He had looked at our house with such open, avid greed. Jonathan took trick after trick. I went upstairs for a sweater and still could not seem to get warm.

  Jonathan shot
the moon. “Look out,” he said. “I’m hot tonight.”

  He took such simple, boyish delight in winning that he forgot about his new peevishness. I could not imagine why he wasn’t more popular at school. He was clever, and better-looking than most of the boys I saw around town. Perhaps my Southern influence had rendered him too gentle and articulate, too little the brute for that hard Midwestern city. But of course I was no judge. What mother isn’t a bit in love with her own son?

  Ned got home late, after midnight. I was upstairs reading when I heard his key in the door. I resisted an urge to snap out the bedside light and feign sleep. Soon I would turn thirty-five. I had made some promises to myself regarding our marriage.

  I could hear his breathing as he mounted the stairs. I sat up a bit straighter on the pillow, adjusted the strap of my nightgown. He stood in the bedroom doorway, a man of forty-three, still handsome by ordinary standards. His hair was going gray at the sides, in movie-star fashion.

  “You’re still up,” he said. Was he pleased or annoyed?

  “I’m a slave to this,” I said, gesturing at the book. No, wrong already. I waited up for you . That was the proper response. Still, the book had in fact been what kept me awake. I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths.

  He came into the room, unbuttoning his shirt. A V of chest appeared, the dark hair flecked with gray. “Looks like Deliverance is a little too strong for Cleveland,” he said. “Three sets of parents called to complain tonight.”

  “I don’t know why you booked it,” I said.

  He peeled off his shirt and wadded it into the clothes hamper. Sweat glistened under his arms. When he turned I could see the hair, like a symmetrical map of Africa, that had sprouted on his back.

  No. Focus on his kindness, his gentle humor. Focus on the shape of his flanks, still lean, in his gabardine slacks.

  “I’m lucky to have it,” he said. “It’ll be a hit. The seven o’clock was three-quarters full.”

  “Good,” I said. I put my book down on the night table. It made a soft but surprisingly audible sound against the wood.

  He took his slacks off. If I’d been a different sort of person I could have said, humorously, “Sweetheart, take your socks off first. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s the sight of a man in nothing but his Jockey shorts and a pair of black socks.”

  I wasn’t that sort of person. Ned hung his pants up neatly and stood for a moment in the lamplight, wearing briefs and the slick dark socks he insisted on buying. They had rubbed the hair off his shins. When he removed them, they would leave the imprint of their weave on the hairless flesh.

  He put his pajama bottoms on over his shorts, then sat on the bed to remove his socks. Outside of the shower, Ned was rarely stark naked.

  “Whew,” he said. “I’m beat.”

  I reached over to stroke his back, which was moist with perspiration. He startled.

  “Don’t you worry,” I said. “I mean you no harm.”

  He smiled. “Nervous Nellie,” he said.

  “Jonathan had a new friend over tonight. You should see him.”

  “Worse than Adam?” he asked.

  “Oh, much. Of a different order entirely. This one’s a little, well, frightening.”

  “How so?”

  “Grubby,” I said. “Silent. Sort of hungry-looking.”

  Ned shook his head. “Leave it to Jonny,” he said. “He can pick ’em.”

  I felt a twinge of annoyance. Ned was away so much of the time. Whatever took place in his absence became a domestic comedy of sorts; a pleasant little movie playing to a sparse house across town. I continued stroking his back.

  “But this boy seems frightening in a more adult way,” I said. “Adam and the others were children. I feel like this boy could steal, he could be up to all kinds of things. And it got me thinking. Jonathan himself is changing, there’ll be girls and cars and lord knows what-all.”

  “Sure there will be, Grandmaw,” Ned said, and got good-naturedly under the bedcovers. I knew how he pictured it: a teenage comedy, harmlessly entertaining, replete with first dates and hippie friends. Perhaps he was right. But I couldn’t see it as a movie, myself. I couldn’t tell him how different it feels when it’s your hour-to-hour experience. I knew that if I tried to, I’d end up sounding just like the mother in the movie: a bird-like, overly dramatic character; the one who doesn’t get the jokes.

  “Okay with you if I douse the lights?” he said. “Or are you going to flail away at that book a little longer?”

  “No. Turn out the light.”

  We settled ourselves and lay side by side, breathing in the darkness. It seemed there should be so much for us to talk about. Perhaps the biggest surprise of married life was its continuing formality, even as you came to know the other’s flesh and habits better than you knew your own. For all that familiarity, we could still seem like two people on a date that was not going particularly well.

  “I made the chicken with tarragon tonight,” I said. “You should have seen him gobble it up. You’d have thought he hadn’t eaten in a week.”

  “The friend?” Ned said.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bobby.”

  Outside, one of the neighbor’s cats yowled. Since Miss Heidegger died, her house had been rented to a succession of three different families, all of whom were prone to noisy, underfed pets and sudden departures. The neighborhood was going down.

  “Ned?” I said.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Do I look much older to you?”

  “You look about sixteen,” he said.

  “Well, I’m far from sixteen. Thirty-four used to seem so old. Now it doesn’t seem like anything. But I’ve got a son who’s going to be shaving soon. Who’s going to be keeping secrets and driving away in the car.”

  I didn’t know how to tell him in a way he’d understand: I felt myself ceasing to be a main character. I couldn’t say it in just those words. They would not pass through the domestic air of our bedroom.

  “Thirty-four is nothing, kiddo,” he said. “Look who you’re talking to. I can hardly remember being thirty-four.”

  “I know. I’m just vain and foolish.”

  I reached over, under the blanket, and stroked his chest. Again, his skin prickled under my hand. He was not accustomed to these attentions from me.

  “You look great,” he said. “You’re in the prime of your life.”

  “Ned?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I do love you, you know. Lord, how long has it been since I’ve said that?”

  “Oh, sweetheart. I love you, too.”

  I worked my fingers down along his bicep, petted his forearm. “I’m being mawkish tonight,” I said. “I’m departing from my old stiff-backed ways.”

  “You’re not stiff-backed,” he said.

  “Not tonight,” I said in an even voice. It was not seductive, but neither was it dry or matronly.

  He wrapped his fingers over mine. I’d imagined marriage in one of two ways: either you loved a man and coupled with him happily, or you didn’t. I�
�d never considered the possibility of loving someone without an accompanying inclination of the flesh.

  He cleared his throat. I leaned over to kiss him, and he let himself be kissed with a passivity that was virginal, almost girlish. That touched me, even as his beard stubble scraped against my skin.

  “Not tonight,” I said again, and this time I was able to make my voice low and breathy. It seemed a good imitation of lust, one I might catch up with and take as my own if he caressed me as shyly as he permitted my kiss.

  “Mmm,” he said, a low growl that rumbled up from deep in his throat. I felt a lightness in the pit of my stomach, a sense of expanding possibility I had not known with him in some time. It could still happen.

  Then he kissed me back, raising his head off the pillow and pressing his mouth against mine. I felt the pressure of his teeth. The lightness collapsed inside me, but I did not give up. I answered his kiss, took his bare shoulder in the palm of my hand. It was moist with sweat. I could feel the coarse corkscrew hairs on the palm of my hand. His teeth, only thinly cushioned by his upper lip, bit urgently into my mouth.

  And I knew I couldn’t make it. Not that night. I fell out of the scene. My attention left my body and stepped to the far side of the room, where it watched disapprovingly as a man of forty-three roughly kissed his wife, ran moist hands over her aging back and sides. I could have gone through the motions but it would have been only that and nothing more. I’d have suffered through it with the smoldering anger that lies bring.

  I disengaged my mouth, planted a series of small kisses along his neck. “Honey,” I whispered, “just hold me a minute. Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said easily. “Sure.” To be honest, I think he was relieved.

  We lay embracing for a while, until Ned kissed my scalp affectionately and turned away for sleep. We did not sleep in one another’s arms; never had. Soon he was breathing rhythmically. Sleep came easily to Ned. Almost everything did. He had a talent for adjusting his expectations to meet his circumstances.