A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  One hot night in August I took a shower and walked naked into Jonathan’s bedroom, believing myself to be alone in the apartment. Clare had an old friend in town, who needed to be shown the sights, and Jonathan was supposed to be working. The black sky hung thick and heavy as smoke, and bums left sweat angels behind when they slept on the sidewalks. I walked in singing “Respect,” with water beads sizzling off my skin, and found him on the floor, taking off his sneakers.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Oh, hey. I thought you were, you know, at work.”

  “The air-conditioning at the office broke down, and we just decided we don’t care if the paper doesn’t come out this week. There are limits, even in journalism.”

  “Uh-huh.” I stood self-consciously, two steps in from the hallway. There was the problem of what to do with my hands. In this apartment, we were not casually naked. It wasn’t something we did. I felt my own largeness heating up the air. Though Jonathan looked at me with friendly interest, I could only think of how I’d come down, in the fleshly sense. When we were wild young boyfriends, more nervous than ecstatic in one another’s hands, I’d been proud of my body. I’d had a flat, square chest. My belly skin had stretched uncushioned over three square plates of muscle. Now I carried an extra fifteen pounds. I’d grown a precocious version of my father’s body—a barrel-shaped torso balanced on thin legs. I stood there in my furred, virginal flesh, sending water vapor into the air.

  “You just take a shower?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That sounds like it could make the difference between life and death.” He peeled off his socks and pulled his black T-shirt over his head. He dropped his black cutoffs, telling me how the staff of the newspaper decided to go home early when the receptionist’s desktop rose dropped its head and shed all its petals. “Like a canary in a coal mine,” he said.

  He took all his clothes off. I hadn’t seen Jonathan naked since we were both sixteen, but his body was just as I remembered it. Slim and almost hairless, unmuscled—a boy’s body. He had not grown new outposts of hair or fat. He had not taken on the heroic V shape of a more disciplined life. His skin looked fresh and taut as risen bread dough. His pink nipples rode innocently on the pale curve of his chest. The only change was a small red dragon, with a snake’s body and a mistrustful look, he’d had tattooed on his shoulder.

  He grinned at me, slightly embarrassed but unafraid. I thought of Carlton, boy-naked in the cemetery under a hard blue sky.

  “I’m going to turn the cold on full blast,” he said. “And I bet it’ll still feel tepid.”

  “Yeah. It will,” I said.

  He walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. I followed him. I could have stayed in the bedroom and put my clothes on, but I didn’t. I sat on the toilet lid and talked to him while he showered.

  When he was finished we went into the living room together. Our nudity had clicked over by then, lost its raw foolishness. Our skins had become a kind of clothing. He said, “The trouble with this place is, there’s no cross ventilation. Do you think it’d be any cooler on the roof?”

  I said yes, maybe it would be. He told me to wait, and ran to the bathroom. He came back with two towels.

  “Here,” he said, tossing me one. “For decency’s sake, in case we run into somebody.”

  “You mean go up there with nothing but a towel on?”

  “People have done worse things in lesser emergencies. Come on.”

  He got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. We wrapped the towels around our waists, and went barefoot into the hallway. It was mostly quiet. Electric fans whirred behind closed doors, and salsa music drifted up the stairwell. “Shh,” he said. He tiptoed in an exaggerated way up the stairs to the roof, holding the dripping blue plastic ice tray. I stuck close behind.

  The roof was black and empty, a tarred plateau surrounded by the electric riot of the city. A hot wind blew, carrying the smell of garbage so far gone it was turning sweet. “Better than nothing,” Jonathan said. “At least the air’s moving.”

  There was a dreamlike feel, standing all but naked in the middle of everything like that. There was excitement and a tingling, pleasant fear.

  “It’s nice up here,” I said. “It’s sort of beautiful.”

  “Sort of,” he said. He took his towel off, and spread it on the tar paper. His skin was ice-gray in the dark.

  “People can see you,” I said. Two blocks away, a high-rise blazed like a city in itself.

  “Not if we lie down,” he said. “It’s pretty dark up here. And, besides, who cares if they do see us?”

  He lay on his towel as if he was at the beach. I took mine off and spread it near his. Moving air from Third Street, full of car horns and Spanish music, touched my exposed parts.

  “Here.” He cracked the plastic tray. He handed me an ice cube, and kept one for himself. “Just rub yourself with it,” he said. “It isn’t much, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  We lay side by side on our towels, running the ice over our sweating skins. After a while he reached over and pressed his own ice cube against the mound of my belly. “As long as Mom’s out,” he said, “let old Uncle Jonny take care of you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and did the same to him. We didn’t talk any more about what we were doing. We talked instead about work and music and Clare. While we talked we ran ice over one another’s bellies and chests and faces. There was sex between us but we didn’t have sex—we committed no outright acts. It was a sweeter, more brotherly kind of lovemaking. It was devotion to each other’s comfort, and deep familiarity with our own imperfect bodies. As one cube melted we took another from the tray. Jonathan swabbed ice over my back, and then I did it to him. I felt each moment break, a new possibility, as we lay using up the last of the ice and talking about whatever passed through our heads. Above us, a few pale stars had scattered themselves across a broiling, bruise-colored sky.

  CLARE

  I ’D BEEN thinking of having a baby since I was twelve. But I didn’t start thinking seriously about it until my late thirties. Jonathan and I had joked about parenthood—it was our method of flirtation. We always had a scheme going. That was how we discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up. It’s strange for two people to be in love without the possibility of sex. You find yourself planning trips and discussing moneymaking ventures. You bicker over colors for a house you’ll never own together. You debate names for a baby you won’t conceive.

  Lately, though, I wasn’t so sure. I’d get my money in a little over a year, more than half a million, but at thirty-eight you can’t think of your life as still beginning. Hope takes on a fragility. Think too hard and it’s gone. I was surprised by the inner emptiness I felt, my heart and belly swinging on cords. I’d always been so present in the passing moments. I’d assumed that was enough—to taste the coffee and the wine, to feel the sex along every nerve, to see all the movies. I’d thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing that happened.

  Soon there would be an important addition to the list of things I was too old to do. I could see the danger: aging woman in love with gay man gets pregnant to compensate herself for the connections she failed to make. I couldn’t follow that course with a straight face. Still, it gnawed at me. Jonathan had work, and a lover I’d never met. He had the latitude still avail
able to a man of twenty-seven. With my breasts shifting lower on my rib cage, I wanted something permanent. I wanted to do a better job with a child than my parents had done with me. I wanted my money and health and good fortune to be put to better use.

  One night Bobby came out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts, singing “Wild Horses.” I was going into my room and we inched past one another in the hall. He smiled. He had a soft, bulky body, muscles vying with incipient fat. My mother would have called him “a big husky fellow,” approvingly. Marriage to my father had cured her of her interest in slender, devious men. Bobby was a Midwestern specimen. He was strong and square-boned, untroubled. I said, “Hey, gorgeous.”

  His face reddened. In the late eighties there was still a man living in New York City who could blush at a compliment. He said, “Um, I’ll be ready in a little bit.”

  We were going out somewhere. I don’t remember where. I said, “Take your time, nobody’ll be there before midnight anyway.”

  “Okay.” He went into the room he shared with Jonathan. I paused, then walked into the bathroom and rubbed a circle on the steamed mirror. There was my face. Neither pretty nor plain. I’d always been a queasy combination of my mother and father.

  Surprisingly, my mother was growing better-looking. At an age when women are considered “handsome” rather than “beautiful,” she was in fact quite handsome: slightly mannish, broad-faced, with scrubbed pink skin and hair gone from brown to gunmetal gray. Her inexpressive face hadn’t wrinkled, and her abrupt, businesslike manner seemed more attractive as other women her age began appearing in stiff ruffles and too much rouge. My mother had caught up with herself. She’d found her beauty. She was always meant to be sixty, even as a girl.

  My father, on the other hand, had withered like a plum. His cheeks had deflated and touched bone. His bristly, blue-black hair had dissolved, and the skin hung loose and leathery on his neck. As a girl I’d looked hopefully in mirrors for every sign of my father’s face remade in mine. Now I checked for signs of his deterioration, and found them. My neck had gone a little slack. The skin around my eyes was darkening. The genes were at work.

  Mother, you didn’t need to be so jealous of Dad’s love for me. You’re winning in the end. You’re a good-looking attorney untroubled by lusts. Dad and I are fading, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves .

  I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I went to Bobby and Jonathan’s room, and stood in the doorway. Bobby was bent over a dresser drawer, looking for a pair of socks. His ass was larger than the ideal, but shapely. If the word “Rubensesque” applied to men, it would be perfect for Bobby. His flesh was ample but proportionate, like those old pink-and-white beauties cavorting in dusky glades. There was something maidenly about his reticence, though he wasn’t feminine in the least. He might have been a stag. A precise tiny-hoofed creature, shy but not delicate.

  I said, “Why don’t you wear the black gabardine shirt tonight?”

  He jumped at the sound of my voice. There was something erotic about surprising him. I felt it like a zipper pulled in my stomach. I was a hunter and he a stout, unsuspecting buck.

  “Um, okay,” he said.

  I went to the closet and took out the shirt. “This is one of my favorites,” I said. “We should try and get you another like this.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I held the shirt up to his bare torso. “Beautiful,” I said.

  Again, the color rose to his face. It wasn’t working. Nothing sexual entered the room. I was too motherly in my concern for his appearance. We hadn’t worked out a subtext.

  Some things couldn’t be willed. I’d spent a good deal of time learning even that small lesson.

  “Maybe we’ll go out for a drink first,” I said. “We don’t want to get there too early.” I laid the shirt on Jonathan’s futon. It was black and crisp against the white batting, a snapshot of sexless male beauty. I went to my own room to start putting my face together for another night on the town.

  A month passed. Winter came early that year. A week before Thanksgiving, snowflakes big as dimes dropped unexpectedly from the sky and eddied around the streetlights. Shop owners on our block frantically swept new snow from their sidewalks as if it was their own youthful mistakes caught up with them. When Bobby came home from work I was sitting on the living-room sofa, doing my toenails and drinking a glass of wine.

  “Hey,” he said, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat.

  I nodded. I wasn’t in a mood for conversation. Winter was back, sooner than expected.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “I mean, you don’t really think of New York as having, like, this much weather . You know?”

  “Subject to the forces of nature,” I said. “Just like anywhere.”

  I wanted him to choke on his youthful enthusiasm. I was fit company that night only for chain-smoking dowagers or defrocked priests.

  “It’s really, you know, beautiful ,” he said. “It’s so quiet out there. You want to go for a walk in it?”

  I offered a look that I hoped summed up my views about frolicking in the snow. But he was rolling now; unstoppable. The weather had him all jacked up. He came and sat on the sofa beside me.

  “Watch the nail polish,” I said.

  “I like that color.”

  “Bile green. It’s what I’m into this season.”

  “You want to go to a movie later?” he said.

  “Nope. I’m getting drunk and wallowing in self-pity tonight.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t ask me a question like that right now, unless you really want to hear the answer.”

  “I do,” he said. “I do want to.”

  “Forget it. It’s just wintertime, I don’t take well to it. I’ll be my old fun-loving self in another six months or so.”

  “Poor Clare,” he said. I defeated the urge to brush nail polish onto his face.

  “It’s fucking winter a full month ahead of schedule,” I said, “and my ex is coming to town in a couple of weeks. Too much in one month.”

  “You mean your ex-husband?”

  “Yep. His troupe is touring again, they’re going to be at the Brooklyn Academy.”

  “Will you see him?”

  “He’ll probably call. He always does when he comes to New York. He has this idea that we didn’t abuse each other enough when we were married.”

  “You never talk about him,” he said. “I sometimes, you know, forget you were married.”

  “I’ve been trying to forget it myself.”

  “Um, where did you meet him?” he asked.

  “You want a real laugh? At Woodstock. Yes, the concert. Seven years of torment born from a weekend of peace and love.”

  “You were at Woodstock?”

  “Mm-hm. I’d dropped out of four different colleges and taken up with a group of people who traveled around New England buying old clothes to sell in New York. We heard about a free concert just a little ways from where we were combing people’s attics for Hawaiian shirts. This isn’t something I tell just anybody.”

  “You were really there? You went to the concert?”

  “Makes me seem like a relic, doesn’t it? It’s like having been around before there were c
ars.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Muddy,” I said. “You’ve never seen so much mud. I felt like a pig. I was attracted to Denny because he had a big bar of Lifebuoy soap down at the pond. After we’d washed up together he said, ‘You want to get out of here and get a hamburger in town?’ And I said yes, absolutely. I’d gotten tired of the used-clothes people. I mean, they thought of themselves as some sort of mystics, but they were paying widows five dollars for old rugs and furs they’d sell for two hundred in town.”

  “You were there,” he said in a tone of hushed amazement. “You went.”

  “And my life has been one disappointment after another ever since. Bobby, people make way too much of it. It was a concert. It was dirty and crowded. I left before it was half over, and I married a perfect asshole three months later.”

  I finished brushing green polish onto my big toe. Then I looked over at Bobby, and saw the change. His eyes were bright and a little damp. He sat with his neck craned forward avidly, watching me.

  I thought I recognized the expression. It was the way men had sometimes looked at me when I was younger; when I was pretty and exotic instead of just colorful. It was simple, straightforward desire. Right there, on the face of a man not yet thirty.

  We didn’t sleep together that night. It took us another week. But from that night on, the possibility of sex edged its way onto relations that had been merely cordial and benign. We’d been friends and now we were something else. We bristled a little, grew shyer together. When we ran out of things to say, we seemed to notice the silence.