A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  I shrugged again, and smiled. “This is my life,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like the wrong one.”

  “But this is just the beginning. You’re not going to sit around this apartment cooking and cleaning forever.”

  “Right,” I said, though truthfully I had drifted halfway into the conviction that that was exactly what I’d do.

  “And, sweetie, that Bee Gees haircut is only going to mislead people. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Uh-huh. Okay. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go to a, you know, haircut place.”

  My stomach crawled. Would I need clown-colored hair to have a New York life? If I let that happen, I wouldn’t fit back into Cleveland, or into Ned and Alice’s Arizona house. All my backup options would snap shut.

  “I could do it,” she said. “Free of charge.”

  “Really?”

  I could tell from her laughter that my every doubt had sounded through that single word.

  “I went to hairdressing school, if you can believe that,” she said. “I’ve still got my scissors, I can give you a new look right now. What do you say?”

  I paused. Then I decided. It was only hair. I could grow it back to its present state and reapply for my Ohio job; I did not have to lose the thread of my old life.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  She had me take my shirt off, which was the first embarrassment. I was not in trim or imposing shape. I looked exactly like someone who’d worked in a bakery. But Clare had already switched over to a crisp hairdresser’s manner, and did not let her attention stray below my collarbone. She told me in a firmly professional voice to soak my head under the kitchen faucet. Then she put a towel over my shoulders and sat me in a chair in the middle of the living-room floor.

  I told her, “The barber at home always just trimmed a little off the sides.”

  “Well, I’m preparing to do major surgery,” she said. “Do you trust me?”

  “No,” I said, before the instinct to tell cooperative lies could assert itself.

  She laughed. “Well, why should you? But just try and relax, okay? Let Momma take care of it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in with the scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is good practice. The scissors snipped close to my ear. Wet clumps of my hair, surprisingly dead and separate-looking, fell on the floor around me.

  “Just keep going until you’re finished, okay?” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to look until you’re all through.”

  “Perfect,” she said. She stopped cutting for a minute and put Van Morrison on, to help keep me calm.

  She spent almost forty-five minutes on my haircut. I felt the warmth and the faint jasmine smell of her, the quick competent fingers on my scalp. I felt the tickle of her breath. Once it was started I’d have been glad to have the haircut go on all night—to never see my transformed head but just sit shirtless amid a growing pile of my own shed hair, with the crackle of Clare’s scented concentration hovering around me.

  But then, finally, she was through. With a deep exhalation and a last snip at my temple she said, “ Voilà . Come into the bathroom and see the result.”

  I let her lead me, though I knew the way well enough. I wanted to stay a little longer in the cooperative mode, with the state of my hair and my future taken out of my hands. She led me into the bathroom, stood me in front of the mirror, and turned on the overhead fixture.

  “Ta-da,” she said. And there I was, blinking in the light.

  She’d given me a crew cut. The sides were so short my scalp shone through, and the top was a single bristly shelf. Seeing my own face under that haircut, I got my first good look at myself from the outside. I had ears that were small and stingy, curled up on themselves. I had narrow glittering eyes, and a big nose that split at the tip, as if it were meant to be two smaller noses. Those features had always seemed inevitable. Now I saw how particular they were. Seeing my face in the harsh light, backed by white tiles, I might have been a relative called in to identify a body. If we have spirits that fly out when the system shuts down, this may be how we see our own vacated selves—with the same interest and horror we bring to an accident victim.

  “Yow,” I said.

  “You look wonderful,” she told me. “Give it a little time. I know it’s a shock at first. But trust me. You’re going to start turning heads around here.”

  I just kept staring at the face in the mirror. If this was who I was supposed to be, I didn’t know how to do it. Clare might as well have taken me to a pay phone and told me to dial Jupiter.

  She said we had to wait up for Jonathan, to show him the new me. I didn’t much like the idea of showing myself to Jonathan. I felt too foolish in my exposed vanity, my own willingness to be remade. Still, I agreed. As I’ve said, Clare had a musical effect on me. She entered my brain. I found myself not only doing what she wanted but losing track of where my desires ended and hers began.

  While waiting for Jonathan, we did what had become our usual things. We made popcorn and worked our way through a six-pack of Diet Coke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore . I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed.

  Jonathan got home after one. When we heard his key, Clare made me hide in the kitchen. “I’m going to sit here very normally,” she whispered. “I’ll keep him in the living room. After a few minutes, you just walk casually out.”

  I was reluctant to perform that way. To spotlight my self-concern. But Clare was too big and bright-haired for me. I had a dim recollection of a birthday party at which an old man in a red nose and lettuce-colored wig plucked quarters from my ears and pulled a paper bouquet from inside my shirt. Yes, I’d pretended unhumiliated astonishment and delight.

  So I went to the dark kitchen as Jonathan came through the door. I heard the porcine squeak of the hinges, and his simple conversation with Clare. “Hi, honey.” “Hello, dear.” “How’d it go?” “Cataclysmic. The usual.” They could sound more perfectly like a husband and wife than any couple I’d met. I understood how having a baby could come to seem like their logical next step.

  I listened to them. Weak air-shaft light floated in through the window like fog. Clare’s mason jars full of herbs put out a dull grandmotherly gleam on the sill. They bore their names on paper labels, in her small spiky handwriting: foolscap, star anise, nettle.

  I heard Jonathan ask, “Where’s Bobby?”

  “Oh, he’s around somewhere,” she answered.

  That would have been my cue. It was time to walk out as if nothing unusual had happened. What I did, though, was stay in the kitchen. I got distracted by the pale darkness, the refrigerator’s hum and the jars of spices meant to cure headaches, insomnia, and bad luck. I might have been a body buried in a brick wall, eavesdropping on the simple business of the living. It came to me that death itself could be a more distant form of participation in the continuing history of the world. Death could be like this, a simultaneous presence and absence while your friends continued to chat among the lamps and furniture about someone who was no longer you. For the first time in years I felt my brother’s presence. I felt it, unmistakably—the purpose and somethingness of him, the Carlton quality that lingered after voice
and flesh and all other bodily consequences were gone. I felt him in that kitchen as surely as I’d felt him one cold white afternoon in the graveyard, years ago, when a brilliant future shimmered beyond the headstones, beyond the curve of the earth. He’s here, I said to myself, and I knew it was true. I had worked up a habit of not thinking about him; of treating myself as if I’d been born into Ned and Alice’s house after our father died. Now I thought of them all, dead in Cleveland. Right now there would be wild daisies on their graves, and dandelions gone to fluff. My harmonica, which I’d tucked into Carlton’s breast pocket at the funeral home, would have slipped through his ribs and clunked onto the coffin boards. I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen—into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. Outside, a line of laundry hung in the air shaft. Empty shirtsleeves dangled. I saw that as myself and my brother combined—in both our names—I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feed him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. I watched a white dress shirt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.

  Finally, she came for me. She asked if I was all right, and I told her I was fine. I told her I was wonderful. When she asked what was going on, I gestured helplessly in the direction of the hanging clothes. She made a clucking noise, thinking I’d suffered a simple attack of shyness, and led me out by the hand.

  Jonathan shrieked at the sight of my hair. He said I looked dangerous. “A Bobby for the eighties,” Clare proudly announced, and I didn’t disagree with her. Although Jonathan was exhausted, we took my hair out for a walk in the Village. We had drinks at a gay place on St. Marks and danced together, all three of us. I might have broken through a pane of glass and reached the party, after years of sitting in a graveyard thinking I was alive. When we got tired of dancing I insisted on walking down to the pier on the Hudson, to watch the neon coffee drip from the big neon cup. Then Clare and Jonathan got in a cab for home and I kept walking. I walked all over New York. I went down to Battery Park, where Miss Liberty raised her small light from the harbor, and I walked up to the line of horse carriages waiting hopefully for extravagant drunks and romantics outside the Plaza. I was on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties when the sky started to lighten. A bakery truck rolled by, the driver singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” in a loud off-key voice, and I sang along with him for half a block. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.

  After that, changes were easy. There was no more need to stay married to the everyday. Clare made a hobby of changing me. She took me shopping for clothes in the thrift stores on First Avenue, where she knew all the salesclerks and half the customers. When shopping, Clare had the concentration of a mother eagle browsing for trout. She could swoop down on a cardboard carton full of bright polyester rags—stained Woolworth’s stuff that had been sad and desperate-looking when it was new—and pull out a silk shirt swarming with bright yellow fish. Hers was a garish but scavenging personality; you knew from her eyes that the things she wanted put out a faint glow not visible to other shoppers. I let her make the choices, and after two weeks I had a cheap new wardrobe of old clothes. I had baggy pants from the forties, and loose rayon shirts in putty and tobacco colors. I had old black jeans, and a leather motorcycle jacket, and a box-shouldered black sport coat shot through with random pewter threads. I even had strangers’ shoes: brown Oxfords with toes made of brittle leather mosquito net, and black army boots, and a pair of black sneakers spattered with paint.

  I had an earring, too. Clare had pulled me into a jewelry store on Eighth Street, and in less time than it takes to say the word “change” a Middle Eastern man had punched a silver post into my left earlobe with a hydraulic gun. It was no more painful than a blackfly’s bite. Clare promised she’d make me a perfect earring. The Middle Eastern man smiled. He appeared to have teeth carved from a single piece of wood.

  Those days I surprised myself each time I saw my reflection in a store window. I might have been my own rough twin, come from some meaner place to make trouble for ordinary working people. The man whose face I saw floating over shop displays would not have written “Happy Birthday” on ten thousand cakes. He would not have lived contentedly in an upstairs bedroom with a view of the neighbors’ jungle gym.

  Clare introduced me to her friends: Oshiko the cynical hat designer; Ronnie the high-strung painter who spoke only in full paragraphs; Stephen Cooper who talked about cashing in his marijuana-import business and buying a jewelry store in Provincetown, where he could pay closer attention to his mystical gifts. Those people were like movies playing around me—I watched and listened with the same easy self-relinquishment you’d bring to a seat in the fifth row. They enjoyed being the characters they’d created, and didn’t depend on me for input. So we got along. I stood or sat in my clothes, watching things happen. If I developed a local reputation at all, it was for mystery and immovable calm. I learned that New Yorkers—at least the ones Clare knew—value silence in others. Their days and nights are so full of noise. Clare’s friends were willing to chalk my silence up to inner knowledge, when in fact I mainly watched, and thought of nothing. Every now and then I asked a question, or answered one. I wore the earring Clare made for me, a wire loop with a silver teardrop-shaped bead, a circle of rusted metal, and a tiny silver-winged horse. Sometimes she asked with a hint of nervousness if I was having a good time, and I always told her yes. It was always the truth. Going to those places—noisy clubs with unmarked entrances, parties in lofts white and spare as the Himalayas—made me simply and purely happy. I had been in a graveyard for years; now I was at the party. In the middle of all that life, I kept quiet as a ghost. A beautiful girl with skin the clear blue-white of skim milk walked serenely among the dancers with a fat, speckled snake coiled around her waist. Two boys in plaid schoolgirlish dresses stood gravely side by side, holding hands as if they were guarding the entrance to a sterner, more difficult world and couldn’t imagine that no one would try to get in.

  But the best times were the nights Jonathan got off work early enough to go out. Sometimes it would be the two of us, and sometimes Clare came along. On Jonathan’s nights we went to movies, then for drinks in one of the bars we liked. Clare’s other friends were more intent on giving their lives a fabulous, windswept quality. They had dedicated themselves to motion and to knowing the exact right place, the party inside the party. I could understand that urge. But Jonathan, Clare, and I favored elderly bars that had caved in under the weight of dailiness. The Village was full of them then, and is full of them today. They maintain a stale interior dimness the color of dark beer. They sell potato chips and peanuts from a system of wire clips. Regulars—quiet steady drunks who believe things are getting worse and never cause a ruckus—sit on the bar stools as solid as roosting hens. We always took a booth in the rear.

  We took to calling ourselves the Hendersons. I don’t remember how it started—it was part of a line tossed out by Clare or Jonathan, and it stuck. The Hendersons were a family with modest expectations and simple tastes. They liked going to the movies or watching TV. They liked having a few beers in a cheap little bar. When we went out together, the three of us, we called it “a night with the Hendersons.” Clare came to be known as Mom, I was Junior, and Jonathan was Uncle Jonny. The story took on details over time. Mom was
the boss. She wanted us to mind our manners and sit up straight, she clicked her tongue if one of us swore. Junior was a well-intentioned, shadowy presence, a dim-witted Boy Scout type who could be talked into anything. Uncle Jonny was the bad influence. He had to be watched. “Junior,” Clare would say, “don’t sit too close to your Uncle Jonny. And he doesn’t need to go into the bathroom with you, you’re big enough now to manage just fine on your own.”

  We came and went in the Henderson mode. It wasn’t something we always did. It was the story we drifted into when we lost interest in our truer, more complicated story. Before Jonathan left in the mornings he might say, “I should be through at a decent hour tonight, would the Hendersons like to go see the Fassbinder movie?” Clare and I nearly always said yes, because our lives were freer. We preferred a night with the Hendersons to our other entertainments. Sometimes when Clare and I were alone together she’d say something in her Mom voice, a shrill and vaguely British variation on her actual voice. But without Uncle Jonny, the Hendersons didn’t work. Without our bad uncle we were too simple—just bossy Mom and the boy who always obeyed. We needed all three points of the triangle. We needed mild manners, perversity, and a voice of righteousness.

  I found work, just a nothing job doing prep at an omelette parlor in SoHo. I told people, and sometimes I told myself, that I was learning the restaurant business from the bottom up, so that someday I could have my own place again. But I didn’t believe in that ambition, not really. I could only inhabit it for a few minutes at a time, by concentrating on details: my future self frowningly checking a tray of desserts before they left the kitchen, or running my hand along a mahogany bartop smooth and prosperous as a brood mare’s flank. I could want that. It could pull the heat to the surface of my skin. But the moment I lost my concentration I fell right back into my present life, just being in New York with Jonathan and Clare, doing an ordinary job. I was content to spend my days with the Mexican dishwasher in the restaurant’s greasy kitchen, chopping mushrooms and shredding Gruyère. That was still my embarrassing secret.