A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  I ought to have let the insult pass. I ought simply to have ignored him and served the grapefruit. But instead I turned and asked pleasantly, “What did you say?”

  He just smiled as if unutterably pleased with himself.

  I asked again, “What did you say, darling? I’m not sure if I heard correctly.”

  He stood up and left the house, saying, “Believe I’ll skip break-fuss this mornin’, dahling.” As he walked away that eye stared at me from the back of the jacket.

  It happened again in the evening, while we were watching television. That night we did have Bobby. Ned was at the theater, and we were watching a Star Trek rerun, the boys and I. I said, “Mr. Spock might not be much fun at parties, but I love him best of all.”

  Jonathan said, “He’s on a five-year mission in deep space. If you were married to him, you’d need a dozen sons to keep you company.”

  I might have laughed along like a true sport but I was still too surprised by this new, outright meanness. “I rather thought we kept one another company,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Boys like nothing better than to shop and cook.”

  Bobby sat on the floor, as was his custom. He objected for some reason to furniture.

  He said, “Quit, Jon.”

  “All in fun,” Jonathan said.

  “Yeah, but quit anyway.”

  And so Jonathan quit. He watched the program without further comment. His feet looked huge and rather weapon-like in the black cowboy boots he had insisted on buying.

  Bobby had pared his fingernails, and forced a comb through his hair. He appeared to have abandoned boots in favor of simple black sneakers.

  He was always polite to me. More than polite, really: he was courtly, in his way. He inquired after the particulars of the dinners I made, and asked me how my day had gone. Answering wasn’t always easy, because I was never quite sure to whom I spoke. He stubbornly retained his foreign quality, although with time he did a better job of simulating the clean-minded normality of a television character. He polished his act. He took to trimming his hair, and even turned up in some new clothes that had not originally belonged to Jonathan.

  One night in May I was passing by Jonathan’s room when I heard music less shrill and raucous than what the boys usually played. I had grown accustomed to the endless noise of their music, the way one does to a barking dog. Electric guitars and bass drums had become a new kind of silence for me, but this particular music—a single, sweet female voice accompanied by a piano—was distinctly audible.

  I hesitated outside Jonathan’s door. Then I knocked, and was surprised by the timid little mouse-like sound my knuckles made against the wood. He was my son, living in my house. I was entitled to knock on his bedroom door. I knocked again, louder.

  “Yeah?” he called from within.

  “Only me,” I called back. “May I come in a minute?”

  There was silence, filled with the tinkle of piano keys. After a moment, Bobby opened the door.

  “Hey,” he said. He stood smiling, looking rather peculiar—miscast—in a pin-striped dress shirt and jeans. I could see Jonathan within, sitting sulkily in his black boots and T-shirt.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you boys,” I said, and was annoyed at the craven sound of my own voice. I might have been a poor relation, come for her annual duty dinner.

  “It’s okay,” Bobby said. “It’s fine.”

  “I just, well, I wondered what that music was. It sounded so…different.”

  “You like it?” Bobby asked.

  It seemed a trick question. Would I open myself to ridicule? Then, brushing aside my own girlish fears, I answered like a woman of thirty-five. “It’s lovely,” I said. “Who is she?”

  “Laura Nyro,” Bobby said. “Yeah, she’s good. It’s an old one, you want to come in and hear it for a minute?”

  I glanced at Jonathan. I should of course have said no. I should have gone about my offstage business, folding the towels and sheets. But I said, “All right, just for a minute,” and stepped gratefully into the room to which I had previously enjoyed free access. During the past year, Jonathan had all but covered the walls with posters of scowling long-haired rock singers. The woman’s voice, soaring and melancholy, filled the room rather tenuously, surrounded by all those hard masculine eyes.

  Jonathan sat on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands clasped over his shins. He had sat in just that way since the age of four—it was a sulking posture. I saw, perhaps for the first time, how the nascent man had always been folded up inside the boy. He would carry those same gestures with him right into adulthood. It surprised me a little, though it was the most ordinary of insights. I had rather imagined Jonathan transformed as an adult, appearing one day as a kind, solicitous stranger. I saw that I had been both right and wrong about that.

  Bobby picked up the album cover and held it out to me, as if I had come to consider buying it. “This is it,” he said. When I took it from him his face flushed, either with pride or with embarrassment.

  The album cover was dark, a murky chocolate color. It depicted a rather plain-looking woman with a high, pale forehead and limp black hair parted in the middle. She might have been a poetic, unpopular student at a girls’ school, more an object of pity than of ridicule. I’d known such girls well enough. I’d felt in danger of becoming one myself, and so had forced myself to change. To speak up and take risks, to date boys you couldn’t take home to mother. Ned Glover had driven down from Michigan in an electric-blue convertible, a suave, humorous man far too old for me.

  “Lovely,” I said. “She has such a pretty voice.”

  It sounded exactly like the response of a prim middle-aged woman. I handed the album cover back quickly, as if it cost far more than I could afford.

  “She quit singing,” Bobby said. “She got married and, like, moved to Connecticut or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  We stood there awkwardly, like strangers at a party. I could feel the force of Jonathan’s desire impelling me from the room. It registered physically, a pressure on my forehead and shoulders. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for letting an old lady barge in.”

  “Sure,” Bobby said. One song had ended and another begun, a faster number I thought I recognized. Yes. “Jimmy Mack,” once sung by Martha and the Vandellas.

  “I know this one,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard it before.”

  “Yeah?” Bobby said.

  And then he did something peculiar. He started to dance.

  I can only think that language ran out on him, and he resorted to what he knew. He did it automatically, as if it were a logical extension of the conversation. He started swaying his hips in rhythm, and shifting his feet. His sneakers squeaked on the floorboards.

  “Yes, indeed,” I said. “This is an ancient one.”

  I glanced at Jonathan, who looked startled. He returned my glance, and for a moment we found our old complicity again. We were united in our consternation over the habits of the local people. I half expected that once we were alone together, he might do an imitation of Bobby—dancing big-shouldered and dim-faced—just to make me laugh.

  But then Bobby took my hand and pulled me gently forward. “Come on,” he said.

  “Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

 
“Can’t take no,” he said cheerfully. He did not let go of my hand.

  “ No ,” I said again. But my refusal lacked force. Perhaps it was my Southern upbringing; my inbred determination to avoid social unpleasantness at any cost. I laughed a little as I said no, without quite having meant to.

  He turned with me gently, moving in rhythm. He was a better dancer than his ordinary manner let on. I’d been quite a dancer myself as a girl—it was one of the resolutions I’d made, a salient feature of the person I’d meant to become—and I recognized the signs. There were boys you knew you could trust on the dance floor; you knew it almost instantly, more by feel than by appearance. Certain dancers imparted to the air itself a sense of confidence and inevitability. They had a generous grace that took you in; they told you just by the touch of their hands that you were incapable of making a wrong move. Bobby was that kind of dancer. I could not have been more surprised if he’d snapped a flock of live pigeons from under his pin-striped cuffs.

  I responded. I took his other hand and danced with him as well as I could in that cramped room, under the disapproving eyes of my son and the sullen stares of the rock singers. Bobby smiled shyly. The woman’s voice ran through the notes with sorrowful abandon, like somebody’s gawky cousin set briefly, deliriously free.

  After the song had ended I took back my hands and touched my hair. “Lord,” I said. “Look what you drove an old lady to do.”

  “You’re good,” Bobby said. “You can dance.”

  “Used to. In the early Pleistocene.”

  “Naw,” he said. “Come on.”

  I looked again at Jonathan, and saw what I expected: all sense of complicity was burned out of his face. He stared at me not so much with resentment as with nonrecognition, as if I were someone who only resembled his mother.

  “Stroke of midnight,” I said. “Love to stay, but I’ve got sheets to fold.”

  I got quickly out of the room. In less than a minute the melancholy woman had been replaced by a driving male voice and a cacophony of electric guitars.

  Ned came home late that night, after I’d gone to sleep. I awoke and found him beside me, breathing deeply and frowning over a dream. I lay on my side watching him for a while. Ned had once been a boy. Perhaps the fact had never quite impressed itself on me, though of course I’d seen the pictures: little Ned grinning under an oversized bowler hat, Ned scrawny and big-footed in sandals at the beach. I had personally packed a carton of his iron cars and lead soldiers into the attic. Still, I’d never fully apprehended it. This man here was what grew from a boy. He had been twenty-six and I seventeen when we met; by my lights he’d been middle-aged even then. He might have been born an adult. Those pictures and toys might have been the artifacts of a boy who had died young, the former inhabitant of an old house who took his sense of limitless possibility out of the world with him when he went. What remained was china stored behind glass and the patience of African violets—an unhurried elderly life. But now, as if for the first time, lying beside Ned, I could see the boyish crook of his elbow under the pillow, the young muscles of a chest gone hairy and slack. Poor thing, I thought. Poor boy.

  I reached over to stroke his shoulder. I might have kissed him. I might have let my hand stray down to the lush tangle of his chest. But my new sense of his innocent beauty was still too delicate. If he awoke and kissed me hard, if he mauled my ribs, it might collapse altogether. So I contented myself with watching him, and petting the soft, furred mound of his shoulder.

  BOBBY

  M Y FATHER has bought himself a new pair of glasses—aviator style, with spindly pink-gold rims. He comes to my bedroom door and poses there, one elbow crooked jauntily against the frame.

  “Bobby, what do you think?” he asks.

  “Huh?” I say. I’ve been lying in the dark with the headphones on, smoking a joint and listening to Jethro Tull. The music has scooped out my thoughts and I need a few minutes to reenter the world of cause and effect.

  “Bobby, what do you think?” he asks again.

  “I don’t know,” I answer eventually. He will have to give me more time with the question.

  My father points to his head. He is standing in light. Hundred-watt rays stream around him, cut through the dusk of my room.

  What do I think of his head? It is in fact an expansive question, probably beyond my scope.

  “Well,” I say. I let the syllable hang.

  “My glasses,” he says. “Bobby, I got new glasses today.”

  A stitch of time passes. He says, “What do you think? Are they a little young for me?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I can hear how foolish I sound; how empty. But I am helpless before his questions. He might as well be an angel, posing riddles.

  He sighs, a slow punctured hissing sound. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll start dinner.”

  “Good, Dad,” I say, in a voice I hope comes out cheerful and cooperative. I check with myself—is it his night or mine to make dinner? This is Tuesday. His. I have got that right.

  Only after he’s removed his shape from the doorway do I realize his questions were simple ones. He’s traded in his tortoiseshells for a racier model, and wants reassurance. I should follow him to the kitchen, start the conversation over. But I don’t do that. I collapse under the weight of my own self-interest, and permit myself a return to the music and the dark.

  Sometime later, my father calls me to dinner. He has made chopped steak and squares of frozen hash browns. He sips Scotch from a glass decorated with pictures of orange slices round and evenly spoked as wagon wheels.

  We eat for a while without talking. Once they’ve established themselves, our silences are hard to break. They are tough and seamless as shrink-wrap. Finally I say, “Those glasses look okay. I mean, I like them.”

  “I think they’re probably a bit too young,” he says. “I suspect a man my age probably looks a little foolish in glasses like these.”

  “Naw. All kinds of people wear that kind. They look fine.”

  “Do you honestly think so?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  “Well,” he says. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to have a younger person’s opinion on the subject.”

  “They do. They look, you know, real nice.”

  “Good.”

  Silverware clicks against the plates. I can hear the action of my father’s throat, swallowing.

  For weeks now, he has been dyeing his hair. He is on a strand-by-strand agenda—every few days, he dyes a few more. In this way he hopes to present the change as natural, as if time had reversed itself against his personal will.

  This is his solution—to age in big-collared shirts and leather vests, to try every combination of mustache, beard, and sideburns. I’ve seen him in the old courtship pictures, big-armed in T-shirts, a meandering, hard-drinking musician who bumped up against the limits of his own talent and fell in love with a farm woman, a widow who knew about seeds and harvest.

  Then I remember. It comes to me: today is the anniversary. It is two years ago today.

  He replenishes his drink from the Ballantine bottle and says, “Let me ask you another question.”

  “Okay.”

  “What would you think about a new car?”


  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Isn’t the one we’ve got okay?”

  He sets his drink down hard enough to splash Scotch and a thumbnail-sized ice cube on the tabletop. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right. There is absolutely no need for change of any kind. I couldn’t agree more.”

  The grandfather clock ticks. I say, “A new car would be okay, Dad.”

  “I was just thinking about something a little snazzier,” he says. “Perhaps a foreign model, with a sunroof.”

  “Uh-huh. Good.”

  “Something that would let a little air in.”

  “Yeah.”

  We work our way through dinner. My father’s face is remote and optimistic as he eats. He is taking the gray out, hair by hair. His eyes swim behind the oval lenses of his new glasses.

  She left by slow degrees before making it official. She lived in the guest room, made rare silent appearances in a pale turquoise robe. Once, when she passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, she stopped long enough to stroke my hair. She didn’t speak. She looked at me as if she was standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world.

  After my father and I found her he made the calls and we sat together, he and I, in the empty living room. We left her alone—it seemed like the polite thing to do. We sat quietly, waiting for the police and the paramedics to arrive. We didn’t speak.

  In the dining room, the autumn farm scene hasn’t changed. Cows still cast orange shadows, trees still sprout yellow leaves. My father nibbles demurely at his steak, doesn’t touch the square potatoes. I finish my dinner, take my plate to the kitchen and add it to the pile. An enormous fly, iridescent, roams ecstatically over a quarter moon of yellowed lamb fat. The curtains still sport blue teapots.

  Later, after my father has gone to bed, I get up and walk around. I took a hit of Dexedrine after school, thinking I might clean up the house, but I fell into music instead. Two joints haven’t dulled the speed enough to allow anything like sleep, so once my father has killed the bottle and settled into bed, I take a walk through the rooms, my head crackling and blazing like a light bulb. Under the gathering disorder is a perfect replica of a house, like the period reproductions they put together in small-town museums. Here is their living room, a cherry-red sofa once considered brash, and an old copper washtub, where logs would be kept if fires were built in the hearth. Here is the front door, yellow oak with a single frosted-glass window through which strangers can be seen but not identified. And here is the rumpus room, paneled, with a rag rug like a bull’s-eye on the brown linoleum floor.