A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  Jonathan met me at the station in New York. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, heavy black shoes with a dull shine like licorice. You could count on him to be wearing something you didn’t expect.

  We hugged in the station, and Jonathan put a precise little kiss on my cheek. He led me out to the sidewalk. Seeing him hail a cab was my first lesson in how different we’d become. He stepped off the crowded curb and shot one hand straight up, with the calm certainty of a general. It was a small enough act, but the sense of his own entitlement was unmistakable. I myself tended to move like a long apology.

  When we were in the back seat of the cab, Jonathan pinched my arm. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

  “Me neither. That’s why I wanted to see Pennsylvania go by, so I’d believe it. I mean, if I just got off a plane, this’d seem like, you know, some kind of hallucination.”

  “It is. This city is just a dream you’re having,” he said. And during the time it took us to reach his apartment, we didn’t think of anything else we needed to say.

  The cab crept through late-afternoon traffic. I had only been to New York once before, years earlier, when Jonathan was still in school. I’d been interested in it but it wasn’t about me; or rather it was only about me in the most indirect way, like a highway or a battleship. I’d done the tourist things. I’d gone to the tops of monuments and walked through Greenwich Village and had a drink with Jonathan and his friends at a bar where a famous poet died. I’d been comfortable in my tourist smallness, pleased with myself for being in an amazing place and for having a snug unsurprising home to return to.

  Now I was going to live here. Now it was a different city altogether.

  It shimmered. That was the first thing I noticed. Its molecules seemed more excited; things shivered and gleamed in a way that made them hard to see. The buildings and streets put out more light than the sky sent down—it all broke up in front of you, so your vision only caught the fragments. Cleveland offered itself differently, in bigger pieces. There you saw a billboard, a cloud, an elm standing over its own fat shadow. Here, my first ten minutes in New York, I could only be sure of seeing a woman’s red straw hat, a flock of pigeons, and a pale neon sign that said LOLA . Everything else was an ongoing explosion, the city blowing itself to bits, over and over again.

  When we reached Jonathan’s apartment, things settled down and became more visible. He lived in a brown building on a narrow brown street. If Cleveland was mainly a gray city—limestone and granite—New York was brown, all rust and faded chocolate and schoolteacherish yellow-beige.

  Jonathan said, “Here it is. The Tarantula Arms.”

  “This is your building,” I said, as if I thought he might not be sure about it.

  “This is it. I warned you. Come on, it’s better when you get inside.”

  Inside, the stairwell floated in a green aquarium light. One fluorescent halo buzzed at each landing. I carried a suitcase and my backpack; Jonathan carried my other suitcase. I hadn’t brought much to my new life. Both suitcases were full of records. The backpack held my clothes, which, I could already see, had nothing to do with life in a city like this. I might have been an exchange student.

  “We’re going up to the sixth floor,” Jonathan said. “Be brave.”

  I followed him. The landings smelled like something fried. Slow Spanish music hung in the swampy light. As we went up I watched my borrowed suitcase, an old blue American Tourister of Alice’s, whump against Jonathan’s black-jeaned thigh. Even my suitcase looked wrong here—sad and hoarily innocent as an old virgin.

  When we got to the sixth floor, Jonathan unlocked three locks and opened the metal door. “Ta-da,” he said as the door swung heftily open, squeaking on its hinges.

  “Your place,” I said. I could not seem to shed the habit of telling him we had reached his apartment.

  “And yours, too,” he said. He ushered me in with a bow.

  The apartment was, in fact, a change from the underwater gloom of the stairs and hall. You stepped straight into the living room, which was painted orange-red, the color of a flowerpot. There was a sofa covered with a leopard-skin sheet, and a huge painting of a naked blue woman twisting ecstatically to reach something that hovered just off the edge of the canvas. The room was full of light. Streams of it tumbled in through the barred windows, which were bracketed by thick fifties curtains crawling with green and red leaves. If you pulled those curtains the sunlight would snap out like electricity. They were as weighty and businesslike as the metal door we had just passed through.

  “Yow,” I said. And then, without meaning to: “This is your place .”

  “My roommate Clare had a lot to say about decorating,” he said. “Come on, let’s take your things to my room.”

  We went down a short hall, past two closed doors, to his room. His room was white, with no pictures on the walls. He had a futon on the bare wooden floor, and a white paper lamp that stood on wire legs thin as pencil lines.

  “I got a little carried away with this Zen thing,” he said. “I just needed some relief from all that color.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I like white.”

  We set my bags down, and stood through a moment of difficult silence. Over the years we’d lost our inevitability together; now we were like the relatives of two old friends who had died.

  He said, “I’ve got a sleeping bag you can sleep in. And we’ll cram your things in the closet somehow.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do you want to unpack now?”

  I didn’t care about unpacking, but it would have been a logical next step. At that moment I felt I understood about the past. In another century a guest unpacked, and rested, and dressed for dinner, so that everybody had a good long period alone with himself. In the modern age, we have to negotiate vaster expanses of uninterrupted time.

  “Okay,” I said. “I mean, I mostly brought records.”

  He laughed. “That’s what you’d bring into a bomb shelter, isn’t it?” he said.

  I opened the American Tourister and took out a short stack. “Have you heard Joni’s new one?” I asked.

  “No. Is it good?”

  “Excellent. Oh, hey, have you got this Van Morrison?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ve listened to Van since I was in Cleveland, to tell you the truth.”

  “Oh, this record’ll kill you,” I said. “He’s still, like, one of the best. I’m going to put it on, okay?”

  “We don’t have a turntable,” he said. “Just a cassette player. Sorry.”

  “Oh. Well,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Bobby,” he said. “We have music, too. We don’t live in silence. But if Van Morrison is a priority, we can go out right now and get him on tape. The biggest record store you’ve ever seen is about six blocks from here.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got stuff of your own I’ve probably never heard, right?”

  “Sure. Of course we do. But look me straight in the eye. We need to go out and buy that Van Morrison tape right this minute, don’t we?”

  “Naw,” I said. “It’s okay, really.” But Jonathan shook his head.

  “Come with me,” he said. “We’ll take care of the important business first, and then we can unpack.”

  He took
me back out of the apartment, and we walked to a record store on Broadway. He had not been lying about that store. Nothing shy of the words “dream come true” would do here—it was the cliché made into flesh. This place spanned a city block; it filled three separate floors. In Ohio I had haunted the chain store in the mall, and the dying establishment of an old beatnik whose walls were still covered with pegboard. Here, you passed through a bank of revolving doors into a room tall as a church. The sound of guitars and a woman’s voice, clean as a razor, rocked over rows and immaculate rows of albums. Neon arrows flashed, and a black-haired woman who could have been in perfume ads browsed next to a little boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. It was an important place—you’d have known that if you were blind and deaf. You’d have smelled it; you’d have felt it tingling on your skin. This was where the molecules were most purely and ecstatically agitated. I believed then it was the heart of New York City. I believe it to this day.

  We went downstairs to the cassette section, and found Van Morrison. We also found an old Stones Jonathan didn’t have, and Blonde on Blonde , and Janis Joplin’s greatest hits. Jonathan paid for them all with a credit card. He insisted. “This is your welcome-to-New-York present,” he said. “Buy me something when you’ve got a job.”

  We walked back with our cassettes in a yellow plastic bag. It was early evening on a day without weather—a warm one with a blank white sky, one of those timeless days that are more like illuminated nights, when only the clock tells you whether it’s morning or afternoon. Jonathan and I talked about Ned and Alice as we traveled bright brown streets lined with Spanish grocery stores and warehouses that had already pulled down their metal grates. With those cassettes solidly in the bag and Jonathan talking about his parents I felt an early click of rightness about the place—as of that moment, I had history there. It was my first true experience of being in New York, walking down a street called Great Jones as a Wonder Bread wrapper, stirred by the day’s single gust of wind, skittered after us like a crazy pet.

  When we got back to the apartment, Jonathan’s roommate Clare was home. We walked through the big door and she called, “Hello, dear.” Like a wife.

  The living room was empty. She had called from offstage.

  Jonathan answered, “Honey, we’ve got company.”

  “Oh,” her voice said. “I forgot. It’s today, isn’t it?”

  Then she came out.

  I don’t know if I can describe Clare, though I can see her right down to her lazy way of gesturing, loose-wristed, until she gets to the point of the story, when she flicks her wrist with the lethal precision of a fly fisherman. If I close my eyes she’s there, and she’s there if I open them, too. But what I see is a way of walking and smiling, a way of sitting in a chair. All her moves are particular to her—she has a way of setting a glass on a table, of raising her shoulders when she laughs. Her appearance is harder to nail down. On first sighting, she was like New York made into a woman—she changed and changed. I could tell she was beautiful in a sharp, big-nosed way that had nothing to do with magazines. Her hair was orange then—it bristled as if her brain was on fire. She was several inches taller than I, with dark red lips. She wore tight pants, and a tiger-striped shirt that fell off her shoulders.

  “Bobby, this is Clare,” Jonathan said.

  She tilted her head in a hostess manner, and gave me a hand tipped with long purple fingernails. “Bobby,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you.”

  I would learn later that she was raised by a good Lutheran mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and had never quite overcome her old habit of good manners. I said hello and shook her hand, which was strong and sure as an apple picker’s.

  “We’ve been shopping,” Jonathan said. “We decided we needed a Van Morrison tape right away.”

  I was grateful to him for explaining it as something we needed. I didn’t like to seem so delicate and peculiar, not right up front to a stranger.

  “I love Van Morrison,” she said. “I used to have all his records. But, you know. You lose things in various divorce settlements.”

  “Should I put this on?” I asked.

  “Honey, absolutely,” she said. “Right over there.”

  I walked across the room to the shelves where the sleek black tape player stood. On the shelf above it a collection of animal skulls silently displayed their empty sockets and their different arrangements of ivory-colored fang and tooth. Jonathan and Clare discussed domestic particulars. I got the cellophane off the cassette, punched Van into the machine, and pushed the Play button. After a few moments of soft mechanical whir, Van’s voice singing “Tore Down à la Rimbaud” filled the room. I took a breath, and I took another.

  “Bobby?” Jonathan said. “Are you hungry?”

  “I guess,” I said. I was looking at the skulls from a safe distance, surrounded by Van’s voice.

  “How about if we listen to this for a while, then all go out for dinner?” Jonathan said. “It’s on the newspaper. I’m doing meat loaf this week, is that all right with you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Perfect.” I was lost in the music. I’d have agreed to beaver tail.

  We stayed around the apartment through one side of the tape. Jonathan and Clare were being polite—they liked Van’s record well enough, but considered it background for a conversation. Clare asked courteous questions about my trip and my past life with Jonathan, which I suspect I must have answered with sweaty, grinning incoherence. I couldn’t concentrate with music in the room.

  When side one was finished, we went out. Clare put on an old leather jacket with a white peace sign painted on the back. She made an odd kind of sense to me, though she was the least sensible-looking person I’d ever met. She had a gaudy openness—a circus quality, with no hint of a hidden agenda. She made you feel like you could take her hand as you walked down the street.

  We went to a restaurant that didn’t look like a restaurant. An uninformed pedestrian might have thought it was a cheap insurance agency, with Venetian blinds and a few dusty bowling trophies displayed in the windows. But, inside, it was packed with people. Elvis Presley sang through the laughter and the clink of silverware. At a table near the door, a woman in a fur dress said something about gorillas, in an English accent.

  I myself had on Calvin Klein jeans and a rugby shirt. It was my most interesting outfit. We sat at a table in a corner, so close to three other tables we had to slide sideways into our chairs. The walls were covered with souvenir plates and old postcards, with stuffed deer heads and kitchen clocks and faded record albums by Dusty Springfield and the Kingston Trio. A sign near my head said “Disregard This Sign.”

  “This place has a lot of decor,” Clare said to me.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “More decor than the entire state of Maine,” Jonathan added.

  “So, Bobby,” Clare said. “What do you think you want to do here? In New York.”

  “I’m a pretty good baker,” I said. “I guess I’ll probably do that. I mean, that’s what I sort of know how to do.”

  “I thought you came here to get out of the bakery business,” Jonathan said. “I thought you were drowning in all that fudge.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I guess I said that, yes. But, well, I don’t really know anything else. I mean, I can’t walk into a hospital and ask if they need any surgeons.” My ears burned. I felt like I was being tested on material I hadn’t studied.

  “You’d probably be about as qualified as ha
lf the doctors there,” Clare said. “Now, sweetheart, listen to your aunt. One of the great features of New York is, you can do anything here. This is the Land of Opportunity, capital L, capital O. Here you can get paid to do just about anything you can think of.”

  I nodded, aware that she was tracing little figure eights with a fingernail on the cloudy Formica. She had green eyes that didn’t waver, didn’t seek out the periphery when she talked to you. She wore one tinkling, complex silver earring that was half a foot long. Her effect on me resembled the effect of music. I had a hard time conversing in the face of her.

  “It’s true, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to rush right out and get the first job you can find. You have rich friends.”

  “Um, what do you do?” I asked Clare.

  “Basically, I play,” she said. “I run around town finding things to make jewelry out of.”

  “Clare’s a designer,” Jonathan said.

  “Hogwash. I’m a junk dealer, is what I am. If women ever stop wanting to look ridiculous, I’ll be out of a job.”

  I looked at her tangerine hair, and wondered what kind of women she thought of as ridiculous-looking. What I said was “It sounds like, you know, fun.”

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s a great scam. And when the baby comes, I can just do it at home.”

  “You’re having a baby?”

  “Didn’t Jonathan tell you? We’re expecting.”

  Jonathan’s face darkened. Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock.”

  “We’re not expecting , dear,” he said. “We’re still in the planning stages.”

  “Same difference.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you were, um—”

  “Lovers?” Jonathan said. “We’re not. We’re just talking about becoming parents.”