A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  Still, he wouldn’t have initiated anything. He was too uncertain. He was too accustomed to our pattern of sister-instructing-younger-brother. I had never met anyone so unmarked by the world. Men in the Middle Ages might have been like this: intricately considerate, terrified of touching a woman’s sleeve. If it was going to happen, I’d have to take charge of it myself.

  I did it on a Tuesday night. I hadn’t timed it to my cycle. I wasn’t as calculating as that. I liked Bobby too much. My attraction to his person was easier to act on than my more complicated interest in his genes. That, I figured, could come later.

  We’d been to see Providence at the St. Marks, which nearly changed my mind about the whole enterprise. Bobby had talked during the movie. He’d asked me if the wolfman was real. He’d wanted to know if Elaine Stritch was Dirk Bogarde’s mother or his girlfriend.

  I answered his questions, thinking, Oh, Jonathan. Why aren’t you straight?

  But once we were outside again, walking home, I regained my interest. Bobby was half child, an innocent. He couldn’t really be blamed for what he lacked. New York presented no shortage of people to go to movies with. Other qualities were harder to find.

  When we got home I put an old Stones tape on. I lit up a joint, and asked Bobby if he’d care to dance. Jonathan was out with his boyfriend that night.

  “Dance?” Bobby said. I passed him the joint. He toked on it, standing in the middle of the living room in jeans and a black T-shirt and a cowboy belt with a steer-head buckle. This was a difficult seduction to accomplish straight-faced. It was hard not to feel like a floozy, in eyeliner and a girdle, playing a scratchy record to try and coax a farm boy out of his overalls.

  “Bobby,” I said, “I’m going to ask you a direct question. Do you mind?”

  “No. I don’t mind.” He passed the joint back to me.

  “Answer truthfully, now. What do you like about me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t make me repeat the question. It’s too embarrassing.”

  “What do I like about you?”

  “Are you, well, interested in me?”

  “Um, sure. Sure I am.” I returned the joint and he took a long, deep hit.

  “Bobby, have you ever slept with a woman?”

  “Oh. Well, no. Actually, I haven’t.”

  “Do you ever think you might like to?”

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. The stones sang “Ruby Tuesday.” I said, “Come here. Put that marijuana down now and just dance with me a little, all right?”

  Obediently, he took one more hit and put the joint in an ashtray. I opened my arms to him. He walked in. I tried not to feel like a spider; a ravenous old creature who preys on the reluctant flesh of not-quite-bright young men. I skated over the feeling as best I could.

  We swayed in a loose circle. He was a fine dancer, which helped. He wasn’t awkward or uncertain; his body didn’t appeal to mine to show him the rhythm or the next move. Dancing, a little stoned, in one another’s arms, we were neither relaxed nor excited. As we danced we could have been a brother and sister practicing for romances of the future but also attracted to one another, attracted and guilt-ridden and slightly mournful over the hopelessness of this ordinary but charged and subtly dangerous contact. Brother and sister, practicing.

  He smelled clean and woody, like fresh pencil shavings. His back was solid as an opera singer’s. He said, “When you went to the concert, did you stay long enough to see Hendrix?”

  “Hmm?”

  “At Woodstock. Did you see Jimi Hendrix?”

  “Sure I saw Jimi. We got to be very good friends. You come here with me, now. I can tell there’s not going to be any smooth or sophisticated way to do this.”

  I stopped dancing and led him to my bedroom. He didn’t quite participate but didn’t resist either. I left the light off. I closed the door and said, “Are you nervous?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t be. This is just for fun. This is just because I like you. There’s nothing in this world for you to be nervous about.” I unbuttoned his shirt, and helped him slide it off his shoulders. His shoulders were damp and ticklish with hair.

  “I’m not, you know, in very good shape,” he said, though by then I’d seen his bare chest a hundred times.

  “I think you’re lovely,” I said. I took off my blouse and dropped it on the floor. I never wore a bra. I put his hand on my left breast.

  “These are below par, to tell you the truth,” I said. “You’ll be with other women who have a lot more going on here.”

  “I don’t think about other women,” he said.

  “You’re too much, you know that?”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Not a thing. Come on now, get undressed. Old Clare’s going to show you a few tricks.”

  We took the rest of our clothes off quickly, as if the real tenants might get home at any moment and find us using their apartment. When we were naked I took him in my arms again and kissed him, with more concern than passion. His breath was hot and a little strong but not foul. It was carnivore’s breath.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “This is the most natural thing in the world. You might even like it.”

  “I do like it,” he said. “I think I do.”

  I guided him to the bed, and had him lie down. I’d never before been so completely in charge. If this was part of the aging process, I didn’t mind it. There was something agreeably frightening about running a fuck.

  Bobby lay naked across my bed. His cock slumped softly against his thigh—a purplish one, circumcised, large but not enormous. He had a surprisingly sparse little muddle of pubic hair. I could hear the sound of his breathing.

  “Everything’s okay, sweetheart,” I said. “Just relax, I’ll take care of everything.”

  I knelt on the mattress beside him, and massaged his chest and belly. He looked up at me uncertainly. “Shh,” I said. “Don’t do anything, don’t think about anything. Your big sister’s gonna manage fine, just close your eyes.”

  He closed his eyes. I bent over and flicked at his nipples with my tongue. I’d never done anything like this before. He was so big and inert. My sexual career had generally involved forceful people who wanted me, who went after me with obscure imperatives of their own. I did what I could to feign an older woman’s serene competence. As subtly as possible, I checked his cock for signs of arousal.

  “Clare,” he said. “Clare, I don’t know if—”

  “Shh. Hush. I’ll tell you when it’s time to speak.”

  I kissed my way down his stomach, took his limp cock in my hand. It was like a rubber toy. I had to stay mindful of its sensitive humanness. I put it in my mouth and worked it around slowly, lapping the underside with my tongue. I took plenty of time. I tickled and stroked with my fingertips, ran my tongue around his scrotum, and nipped gently at his thighs. I forced myself not to hurry. Other men had had wishes, ways they liked things done. Helene had instructed me on every move. No one had ever abandoned himself to my care like this before. I mouthed his cock and thought of myself as a whore in a movie. A smart triumphant whore who always puts on a good show. I pulled at his pubic hair with my teeth, licked the violet tip of his cock. And finally it began to stiffen.

  Then I let myself
work harder. I took him into my mouth again and worked him up and down, up and down until my neck started to ache. I played my hands along his rib cage and gently pinched his nipples. I could feel his breathing quicken. I heard him softly moan, a fretful little cry like a dove’s. I myself was aroused. Not intensely, but with the ticklish queasiness I remembered as a girl, when I’d first started thinking of large, powerful bodies that wanted control and resisted it.

  When I thought he was ready, I got up and straddled him. The look on his face surprised me. He was flushed and panicky, not pleased as I’d expected him to be. Still, I smiled reassuringly. I knew this was no time to lose our momentum. I said, “Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, I worked myself into position and slid his cock in.

  Something wasn’t right. His face was so raw and terrified. Still, I kept up. There was no backing out now. I didn’t think of my own pleasure. I rose and fell, rose and fell. I whispered to him, “Sweetheart, you’re doing fine. Oh, yes. You’re doing wonderfully.” It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. It was what I heard myself saying. I stroked his chest. His face was shiny with sweat. I reached over and smoothed away a bit of hair that had gotten plastered to his forehead.

  And suddenly, unexpectedly, he came. I felt the spasm. When he came he let out a wail of such agony. He might have been stabbed in the gut. It was an awful sound; inconsolable. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing and crouched with my knees pressed in against his rib cage, waiting for the wail to stop. There was a span of thick, echoing silence. Then he started weeping, openly and extravagantly as a baby.

  I reached over and touched his face. His cock was still inside me. I knew we were lost to one another in some permanent, irremediable way. Now he was a mystery. I lay down beside him and told him it was all right. I told him everything was all right. He stroked my hair with heavy, flat-handed swipes. He said, “I never. I never thought I would.”

  “You did,” I whispered.

  He pressed his chest against mine. I could feel the heat of his tears. He didn’t say anything else. He fell asleep in my bed and I let him stay there, though I couldn’t get to sleep myself. I lay beside him for quite a while, inhaling his large sweaty essence and asking myself what exactly I had gone and done now.

  JONATHAN

  T HE NIGHT of the day Arthur the theater critic went to the hospital, I traded histories with Erich. We had never talked about our pasts, beyond the broadest details of place and family temperament. When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness. We’d spoken to one another from a continual present, in which profundity, despair, and old romantic aspirations did not exist; in which the ordinary vicissitudes of working life took on Wagnerian dimensions, and the periods between a boss’s insane demands or a cab driver’s hostility were pockets of utter unremarkable calm.

  Now we sat in Erich’s apartment with a bottle of Merlot, tallying up. He’d put John Coltrane on the stereo.

  “I know this is difficult,” I said. I was to be the apologist, because I was the one who’d insisted on broaching the subject in the first place.

  “A little,” Erich said. “It is a little, yes. I’m not very…forthcoming about these things. I saw my therapist for over a year before I got around to telling her I was gay.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you haven’t told your therapist,” I said. “I just want us to have, well, an idea about the scope of one another’s pasts. To put it delicately.”

  Erich flushed, and emitted one of the sharp, painful-sounding laughs that social discomfort could produce in him. He was still unformed in some way. The monstrous imitation-leather sofa on which we sat had been a gift from his parents in celebration of his admission into law school in Michigan. His parents had evidently assumed him to be embarking on a twelve-room, wainscoted life, but after less than a year he’d left law school for the hope of an acting career in New York. Now his parents didn’t speak to him and the sofa sat wall-to-wall in his apartment, like a cabin cruiser berthed in a swimming pool.

  “Just an idea,” I added. “No humiliating confessions required.”

  “I know,” he said. “I don’t honestly know why I’m so hesitant about things like this. I don’t know why. I’ve always been more the type to, you know, listen to people. I guess it’s a habit you get into from tending bar.”

  “I’ll start,” I said. And for almost an hour we called in all our old stray business, the affairs both good and bad, which we’d thought had receded too far into the past to impinge in any way on what we were now making of ourselves.

  We both fell, it seemed, somewhere toward the middle of the risk spectrum. We had not, either of us, ever been rapacious. We had not worked the back rooms. We’d never made love to ten different strangers in a single bathhouse night, or paid by the hour for tough slim-hipped boys in the West Forties. But between us, we’d gone home with a full platoon of strangers. We’d both met men in bars or at parties; we’d slept with the friends of friends visiting from San Francisco or Vancouver or Laguna Beach. We’d hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn’t worried much about it, because we’d thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final, and so dull—love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn’t rush or grab, if we didn’t panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. And in the meantime, we’d had sex. We’d thought we lived at the beginning of an orgiastic new age, in which men and women could answer without hesitation to harmless inclinations of the flesh. It had been with a sense of my own unlimited choices that I’d made love to a simpleminded flute-playing boy I met in Washington Square Park, to an old Frenchman in a purple cashmere jacket I’d met riding the uptown IRT, and to a pair of kindly doctors who sweetened their union by taking on an occasional third party. In my late teens and early twenties I’d seen myself as a Puckish figure, smart and quick-limbed, incorrigible. I’d imagined the prim houses and barren days of Ohio falling farther away with each new adventure.

  Erich and I didn’t go case by case. We were not so clinical as that. We offered the highlights, but dwelt more explicitly—more happily—on the pleasures we’d denied ourselves. Cupping the bell of his wineglass in his long fingers, Erich frowned and said, “I never cared all that much for totally anonymous sex. That was never for me. I’ve met sort of a lot of men working in bars, and I, you know, went home with some of them, but I never really did the whole scene. I tried going to the baths, but it just scared me. I just took a sauna and went home.” After a pause he added, “To masturbate,” and smiled in agony, his forehead turning nearly purple.

  Although we sat together on that gargantuan sofa, we did not touch. We occupied different pools of lamplight. This reticence was standard for us, neither more nor less pronounced as we talked about the loves we prayed would not prove fatal. In the conduct of our ordinary affairs, we always maintained a cordial remove. Anyone seeing us in the street together might have assumed we were former college roommates losing our grip on our old intimacy but unwilling to formally declare it dead. Only at home, naked, did we jump out of our separate skins. On the stereo, Coltrane played “A Love Supreme.”

  “The funny thing is,” I said, “I used
to feel guilty for not being more adventuresome. I’d hear other men talking about how they’d turned four tricks in a night and think, ‘I’m the most repressed gay man who ever lived.’ I mean, most of the guys I went with, I knew I’d probably never see again. But I always had to feel like maybe I’d want to see them again, like in some way it was remotely possible that we might fall in love. Even though we never did.” Erich looked into his wine and said something inaudible.

  “Hmm?”

  He said, “Well, do you think we’re, you know, falling in love?”

  I had never seen anyone so embarrassed. His whole head glowed crimson, and the wine in his glass quivered.

  I believed I knew what he wanted. He wanted to collapse into love. Life was too frightening. Renown was withheld despite his constant efforts, and the future we’d all counted on could be revoked with a nagging cough, a violet bloom on a shin.

  “No,” I said. “I care about you. But no.”

  He nodded. He didn’t speak.

  “Are you in love with me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. He wanted desperately to be in love with someone. I fulfilled the fundamental age, height, and weight requirements. But his desire didn’t attach directly to me. It was not quite personal.

  He shook his head. We sat for a while in silence, and then I reached over and took his hand. I had to be tender with him because I hated him; because I had it in me to scream at him for being ordinary, for failing to change my life. I was frightened, too; I, too, wanted to fall in love. I stroked Erich’s hand. The turntable, set to repeat, started the Coltrane album again. Erich tried out a laugh, but swallowed it along with a deep draught of wine.

  I could have murdered him, though his only crimes were lack of focus and dearth of wit. I could have skewered his heart with a kitchen fork because he was a peripheral character promoted by circumstances to a role he was ill equipped to play. I can’t deny this: I thought I deserved better.