A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  I needn’t offer much detail about the restaurant’s optimistic beginnings and its immediate decline. Suffice to say that Bobby named it Alice’s, and did what he could with a fluorescent-lit, acoustic-ceilinged room that had most recently failed as a pizza parlor. He hung framed posters of New Orleans—wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, a black man blowing a trumpet—and found old wooden tables and chairs at garage sales. I tested recipes with Bobby, debated over seasonings, though Beechum generally prevailed with admonitions about cost overruns or the timidity of Ohio tastes. The final menu turned out to be a Northerner’s version of Southern cooking: gumbo, hush puppies, frozen shrimp fixed every which way. The desserts were remarkable. I made it a point to stop by as often as I could.

  Sometimes when I came for lunch I’d find one or two other parties—shoppers with bags from the discount store next door, lone salesclerks on their lunch hours—and sometimes I’d be the sole customer. On those occasions Bobby sat with me while the waitress either wiped the already clean pie case or gave in and read a movie magazine beside the refrigerator.

  Through it all, Bobby never lost his Bible-salesman’s good cheer.

  “Things are always slow at first,” he said. “You’ve got to let word of mouth get around. The people who leave here have all had great meals, they’ll tell ten other people. You’ve got to give it some time.”

  “The food is fine, Bobby,” I said. “I’d like to think people will come to recognize a good thing.”

  “Sure they will,” he said. “If you’ve got the product, people’ll find you. It’s a matter of time.”

  We sat talking together in the empty room, under the fluorescent tubes. People passed by the spotless window and looked in with an expression I recognized: the humorous and rather frightened face one turns toward any ill-fated enterprise. I had looked in just that way through countless windows myself, into the depopulated interiors of fussy little gift shops, understocked delicatessens, boutiques in which every dress was five years out of style. As people rushed past with packages from Sears and Penney’s, I understood their feelings; I understood the particular sort of nervous disdain inspired by any singular evidence of mankind’s general failure to spin the straw into gold.

  On an unseasonably warm night in November, six months after the restaurant’s opening, Burt Morrow burned himself and half his house to ashes by falling asleep with a cigarette. Ned and I were awakened by the sirens, though of course we could not know their destination.

  Still, I had a feeling. I just had a nameless edgy feeling and so I stayed awake long after Ned had returned to his noisy, almost painful-sounding slumber. When the phone rang I knew. We drove straight over, with coats pulled on over our bathrobes.

  Bobby saw us pull up. He did not move. He stood on the lawn beside a black-coated fireman. As Ned and I ran to him, Bobby watched us with his old numbed, uncomprehending expression; that foreigner’s look.

  I put my arms around him. He was still as salt. He said in a high, clear voice, “My father died tonight at about twelve-thirty.”

  Bobby’s shirtsleeves were singed, and his hair emitted an awful burnt smell. He must have tried to go into the burning house.

  I stroked his ruined hair. He stood unmoving in my embrace. Half the house had burned to rubble; the other half was obscenely unscarred. The front door hung open, offering the blackened floral paper of an interior wall on which a mirror still hung in its ornate frame.

  Presently Ned went off to see about Burt. I stayed with Bobby. He soon began to tremble, so I held him the harder, which seemed in turn to inspire more trembling. His spasms frightened me but I did not loosen my hold. I just dug in the way I had with Jonathan, when he was a baby given to mysterious crying fits and I, ignorant even for twenty-two, knew nothing but to hold him tight through my own terror and uncertainty.

  Jonathan came home for the funeral. His blond hair still tumbled down past his shoulders, but he had taken to wearing loafers and a tweed jacket with his jeans. Bobby dressed in the style of the working young of Cleveland: sharply creased synthetic slacks, pastel shirts with epaulets.

  They went for drives together, watched old movies on television. Bobby was pale and distracted, as if the interior of his own skull was putting out a noise only he could hear. Jonathan watched him carefully, sat close by, touched his shoulder or hand.

  They might have been a convalescent and his nurse. There was compassion between them, but no hint of romance. For all their youth, they had taken on an elderly quality; sitting on the sofa together, they made you think of curio cabinets and Venetian blinds. Bobby always sat beside Jonathan, childishly close. At any given moment a stranger might not have been able to tell which was the comforter and which the consoled. After a week, Jonathan returned to his new life in New York City.

  Bobby soon closed the restaurant, and finally declared bankruptcy as a way of clearing his debts. Now he works in a bakery. He seems to feel more secure amid the floured surfaces, the fresh eggs and pastry tubes.

  Because he could no longer pay the rent on his apartment, he has moved in with us. He stays upstairs, in Jonathan’s room, sleeping on the narrow bed.

  We don’t much mind having Bobby. To be honest, we can use even the small amount of rent he pays, what with Jonathan in college and Ned’s theater refusing to pull out of its slump. He has started booking foreign films, the kind that don’t play in the mall theaters. He mends the lobby carpet with duct tape.

  Jonathan calls on Sundays, like a dutiful son. He’s moved out of the dormitory into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I try to imagine his life: movies and coffeehouses, music in basement clubs. I need to imagine those details because he relates none of them. What I hear from him is that his classes are going well, and that he requires no bedding, kitchen utensils, or new clothes.

  Sometimes I think I’ll leave Ned. Sometimes I think I’ll just announce the fact and go, like a child of seventeen. But I can’t imagine doing it, not really. One of the revelations of my early middle age is the fact that I care for him, right down to the marrow of my bones. He inspires my tenderness, even my pity. If he were more successful, perhaps I could manage it.

  Instead, I am making another effort to fit in here. I’ve rejoined the church guild. I’ve begun giving a baking class at the YMCA, for wives who want to surprise their families at the holidays. My class has attracted a surprising number of students. Many of them are humorous and good-hearted, and some can probably be coaxed away from their devotion to Jell-O and granulated-pudding mix. When the class ends at Christmastime, three or four of us will probably continue as baking friends.

  This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand. I sit typing at a desk from Monday to Friday, and twice weekly instruct other women in the art of folding eggs into batter, of rolling dough so thin you could read newsprint through it. I have little time for housework, but Bobby keeps the whole place spotless in my absence. Save for the hours he puts in at the bakery, he is always home. Always. He makes dinner every night. After dinner, Ned returns to the theater and Bobby and I watch television or play cards. I sit with him until it’s time for bed. Sometimes I suggest he go out and see what the world is up to. I even offer to slip him some money, but he always says he’s exactly where he wants to be. So there we sit, passing the hours. To be perfectly frank, I sometimes wish he’d leave. He’s so dogged in his devotions, so endlessly agreeable.

  PART II

  JONATHAN

  W E WERE
half-lovers. Together we occupied love’s bright upper realm, where people delight in otherness, cherish their mates’ oddities, and wish them well. Because we were not lovers in the fleshly sense we had no use for the little murders. Clare and I told our worst secrets and admitted to our most foolish fears. We ate dinner and went shopping together, assessed the qualities of men who passed on the streets. Looking back, I think we were like the sisters in old stories; the stories in which the pretty younger girl can’t marry until somebody claims the older, less attractive one. In our case, though, we were both sisters at once. We shared a life of clothes and gossip and self-examination. We waited, with no particular urgency, to see whether someone would claim one of us for the other, more terrifying kind of love.

  For three years we’d lived together in a sixth-floor walk-up on East Third Street between Avenues A and B, where Puerto Rican women argued in Spanish and drug dealers moved perpetually in and out of basement apartments. Drugged, heartbreakingly beautiful boys danced to enormous radios on the corner. We lived there because it was cheap, and because—we’d admitted this one drunken night—it struck us as more interesting than the safer parts of the city. I’d further confessed that I considered this neighborhood a source of anecdotes to be told in the better life that was still to come. When I’d said this, Clare had looked at me skeptically and said, “Belief in the future is a disreputable virtue, don’t you think? It’s sort of like building ships in bottles. You know? Admirable, but in a creepy kind of way.”

  Clare was thirty-six, eleven years older than I. She lived according to several assumptions, which she held with quiet but unremitting ferocity. She believed that James M. Cain was the greatest American writer, that society had reached its pinnacle in the late nineteen-thirties, and that there were no men left for a woman of her age and peculiarities. When contested on the final point, she replied in a tone of willing but nearly exhausted patience, like a good teacher facing her ten thousandth unpromising student. “Eliminate the following,” she said, counting on her fingers. “Gay men. Married men. Men under the age of twenty-five. Men over the age of twenty-five who are only interested in young, beautiful women. Men who are still available because they can’t commit to anyone. Men who are just plain assholes. Rapists and psycho killers. All right, now. Who’s left?”

  She conducted her daily affairs with ironic good cheer, like the second banana in a thirties comedy. Like a survivor of a war, who still wears heels and lipstick to walk among the wreckage.

  When she grew depressed, we talked about having a baby together. Clare had already gotten through a marriage, an abortion, dozens of lovers, and three changes of career. I was three years out of college, writing a food column for a weekly newspaper, certain only of my lust for the man I called my lover. At night our street glittered with broken glass. Every morning an enormous Hispanic woman passed under our windows, singing loud sentimental love songs on her way to work.

  One morning in early spring, when a single pale ivy leaf had worked its way between the crosspieces of the burglar-proof grate on the kitchen window, Clare sighed into her coffee and said, “Maybe I’ll have my hair dyed back to its normal color. Don’t you think a woman of a certain age should stop trying to look eccentric?”

  She wore a kimono from a thrift store, not a delicate watery silk but a garish, lipstick-red rayon that must have been bought new in Hawaii or Las Vegas five years earlier. Clare was not beautiful, and claimed to be opposed to beauty in general.

  “No,” I said. “I think a woman of a certain age has all the more right.” I stood in the doorway, because our kitchen accommodated only one person at a time.

  “The difference between thirty-six and twenty-five,” she said, “is that at twenty-five you can’t look pathetic. Youth is the one overriding excuse. You can try anything out, do anything at all to your hair, and walk around looking perfectly fine. You’re still thinking yourself up, so it’s okay. But you get a little older, and you find your illusions starting to show.”

  “Is this going to be another Black Saturday?” I asked.

  “Early to tell.”

  “Let’s not. It’s so pretty out. Let’s go shopping and see a movie instead of contemplating suicide.”

  “When we have the baby,” she said, “what sort of hair do you think it’ll have?”

  “What color is yours supposed to be?”

  “Lord, I’d have to think way back. A sort of dull dark brown, I think. Salesgirl hair.”

  “Maybe the kid would get my coloring,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s surprising what weak but determined genes can do.”

  She sipped her coffee. “To be perfectly frank,” she said, “I have a feeling my black Rumanian ancestors would swarm all over your pensive Swedish ones.”

  “Is that what you’d want? A miniature version of yourself?”

  “Lord, no. Another me? We’d hate each other. I’d want the kid to have your intelligence, for one thing.”

  “Don’t be coy,” I said. “You’re plenty smart.”

  “If I were all that smart,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’d be thirty-six years old, standing in a teensy little kitchen trying to think of the best way to have a baby without falling in love.”

  We kept talking about the baby. We did not make plans, but we talked a good deal. That was our way together. We’d had other ideas in the past: we’d talked about starting a breakfast-in-bed catering service, and about moving to the coast of Spain. We always discussed the particulars of these actions in such detail that eventually we crossed an invisible line and began to feel as if we had already performed them; our talk ultimately took on an aspect of reverie. We had practiced getting eggs Benedict from Third Street to upper Park Avenue in a steam cabinet (they arrived a congealed mess); we’d bought travel guides and cassettes that taught conversational Spanish. I did not expect the baby to be any different.

  “I like the name Ethan for a boy,” I said. “Or Trevor.”

  “Honey, please,” she said. “No fancy names. If it’s a boy let’s call it Jon Junior. If it’s a girl, how about Mary or Ann?”

  “Why not Clare Junior?”

  “I told you. I want her to be different from me.”

  Clare’s rival was her own image, the elaborate personality she’d worked out for herself. She lived at a shifting, troubled distance from her ability to be tough and salty and “interesting.” When her gestures were too perfectly executed she could be slightly grotesque—practiced and slick. I saw how it troubled her. Sometimes she embraced her persona with palpable defiance, looking out at the world as if to say That’s right, so what ? Sometimes she frightened herself. She had grown so adept it was hard for her to act out of character.

  Still, she’d led what I considered to be a full, interesting life, and I disliked hearing her self-disparagements. She’d been married to a dancer now living in West Berlin whose troupe periodically played New York to extravagant acclaim. She’d been the lover of a semi-famous woman author. She’d taken heroin and opium, and enough Dexedrine to require treatment at a clinic in Baltimore. My own life, compared to hers, seemed timid and cautious. I hated to think that either choice—an oversized, dangerous life or a comfortable wage-earning one—led eventually to the same vague itch; the same conviction that the next generation must improve its lot.

  “What do you think about punishment?” I asked.

  “Personally? Or for the baby?”

  “The baby.”

  “I wouldn’t hit her,” she said. “I couldn’t. Oh, I don’t know.
I’d probably be one of those mothers who get huffy and disappointed, and the kid wishes you’d just haul off and smack him and get it over with.”

  Clare worked for a jeweler on St. Marks Place. She had a genius for putting odd things together—she made earrings and brooches out of rhinestones, broken glass, rusted tin, and tiny plastic figures from dime stores. Her work had a small but loyal following. I had unexpectedly become the restaurant critic for a weekly newspaper that started underground and grew too popular for its own crude facilities and its inexperienced staff. When I took the job, straight out of NYU, I’d thought of it as a first step toward my true career on the staff of a glossy national magazine, but as it happened I’d stumbled unawares—almost against my will—onto the ground floor of a good thing. In three years the paper had moved from dank offices in the garment district to a suite on Union Square. Its staff had tripled. And I’d been promoted from typist and occasional reporter to food columnist.

  The joke was this: I knew nothing about food. It had been my mother’s obsession, and I’d vehemently denied ingress to every particle of knowledge on the subject. When the editor decided to add a restaurant section, and told me he wanted me to write it, I protested that I didn’t even know what quiche Lorraine was made of. He said, “That’s the point. A lot of people don’t.” He offered a raise, and a minimum of twenty-four column inches every week. And so I became Plain John, a character of relatively modest means who appreciated good food but was not transported by the unexpected dash of cardamom in a red-pepper puree; who liked to go out to dinner with friends or lovers once or twice a week and was willing to spring for something fancy when the occasion demanded it. I reviewed Polish and Chinese restaurants, scoured Manhattan for the best hamburgers and pizza and pad Thai. I indicated which trendy restaurants treated even noncelebrities kindly, which served ludicrously small portions, which would be impressive but nonthreatening to parents when they visited from out of town. Both Clare and I subsisted on the meals paid for by the paper, though we repaid the debt through the eccentricities of our diet. One week we ate only burritos, another nothing but Peking duck. Clare speculated over whether our nutritional monism might be doing us some sort of lasting harm. She brought home vitamins, and drinks made with aloe vera, and protein powders supposedly favored by famous bodybuilders, who grinned and flexed on the brightly colored labels.