A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  Jonathan ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, and I had a beer. He clicked his glass softly against mine. “Did you think you’d ever see me again?” he said.

  “I didn’t know. How would I have known?”

  “Right. How would you?”

  “Where did you go?” I asked him. I still lacked any sense of the real. I thought fleetingly of excusing myself, going to the pay phone in back, and calling the police. But what would I tell them?

  “Well, I didn’t have a whole lot of money in the bank. I mean, if I’d had thousands I’d probably have gone to Florence or Tokyo or someplace. But with what I had, I just went out to California. Remember Donna Lee from college? She lives in San Francisco now, with a woman named Cristina. I went out there and slept on their sofa for a while and just sort of tried to concoct a San Francisco life for myself.”

  He sipped at his drink, and sucked in an ice cube at exactly the moment I knew he was going to. He still wore the silver Navajo ring he’d bought in Cleveland when we were fifteen. Details whirled and racketed inside my head.

  “I don’t really, you know, understand all this,” I told him. “I haven’t understood it since you left that note. We had a great time, the dinner with Erich was fine, and then you just left. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly make sense to me either. You know, I turned twenty-nine a month ago. I feel like I’ll be thirty in about five minutes.”

  “Um, happy birthday.”

  “You’ll be twenty-nine too, in another few weeks.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well. Listen, I’ve got to go. They’re still debating about whether to take me back at the newspaper, I’m supposed to go meet Fred and Georgeanne in half an hour. It seems they haven’t decided yet whether I’m a high-strung romantic genius or just plain irresponsible. Drinks are on me.”

  He tossed a pile of bills onto the table. I reached over and put my hand on top of his.

  “Do you want to come over tonight?” I asked. “Clare’ll want to see you.”

  He looked at our two hands. “No, Bobby,” he said. “I don’t want to come over. This was just an accident. I mean, you never come uptown. I figured I might as well have been in Michigan.”

  “You don’t want to see us?”

  Now he looked into my face. He pulled his hand out from under mine.

  “Bobby, the fact is, I seem to have fallen in love with both of you. That sounds strange, I know. I never expected anything like this to happen. I mean—Well. It’s not what you prepare yourself for. I seem to have fallen in love with you and Clare together. I saw it that night on the roof. I didn’t want Erich to be my date, or anybody else. It’s just hopeless. As long as I know you, I can’t seem to fall in love with anybody else.”

  He stood up. “Wait,” I told him. “Just wait a minute.”

  “Give my love to Clare,” he said. “If and when I pull myself together, I’ll call you.”

  He walked out of the bar. In my confusion, I lost track of what would be reasonable to do or say. I let him walk away into the November afternoon, and by the time I got out to the sidewalk he was gone.

  He did as he said. He lived a life apart. Although we were in the same city, I never ran into him again, and he didn’t call. He let the fall and winter pass. And then in the spring he left a message on our answering machine.

  “Hi, Bobby and Clare. This is such a weird thing to say on a tape like this. Bobby. My father died this morning. I thought I should let you know.”

  His voice was followed by a mechanical click and whir, as the machine moved along to the next message.

  CLARE

  W E WERE flying two thousand miles to the funeral of a man I’d never met. Through the airplane window I watched fat clouds throw shadows onto Texas. Texas was flat and one-colored as a manila envelope. Down there, in whatever farmhouses had chosen to attach themselves to the endless beige earth, people might be looking up at the airplane. They might be wondering, as I myself sometimes did, what rich interesting lives were being passed along to their next incident.

  “Sure you don’t want some wine?” Bobby asked. I shook my head.

  “I’m going on the wagon for a little while,” I said. “Maybe she could bring me a club soda or something.”

  Bobby leaned over to signal for the stewardess. The stream of cold air blowing from the overhead nozzle disarranged his hair, which he’d taken to wearing longer, slicked back with gel. I smoothed his hair into place. Then I changed my mind and messed it up again.

  I was over two months’ pregnant. I hadn’t told anyone. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it.

  “I’m really, like, glad you’re here,” he said.

  “Well, I hate to miss a funeral.”

  “You know what I was thinking?” he said. “I was thinking the three of us could rent a car and drive back. We could, you know, see the country.”

  “I guess we could,” I said.

  “We could go to Carlsbad Caverns. We could see the Grand Canyon.”

  “Mmm, I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We could probably rent hiking boots and backpacks. We could camp overnight.”

  “Bobby. They don’t rent things like that. People own them. Some people have camping lives. You and I are more the nightclub type.”

  I had only imagined seeing the Grand Canyon. Not hiking in it.

  “You don’t want to,” he said.

  “I only brought funeral clothes,” I said. “Can you see me tottering along some trail in a black dress and heels?”

  Bobby nodded. He smoothed his hair with his fingers. The light over Texas shone silver on his square face and his heavy, intricately veined hands. Despite the glossy Italian hair and the earring, his face was innocent as an empty bowl. It was still the face of a man who believed human differences could be resolved by a pilgrimage to famous geological phenomena.

  “Just, you know, an idea,” he said.

  “I know. Let’s leave it for another time.”

  He nodded again. The baby coalescing inside me was following the dictates of his genes as well as my own. Tiny nails were being driven into the passing moments. Bobby sipped his wine. We stared out the window at the emptiness passing below.

  Jonathan met us at the airport. He looked physically diminished, as if some air or vital fluid had leaked out of him. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Had he always been so small and wan? Sunburned, brightly dressed people crowded around him in the waiting area. He might have been a refugee, in his pallor and his black T-shirt. Someone newly arrived from a grim, impoverished place. When Bobby and I got off the plane he gave us stiff, formal embraces, like the ones French politicians exchange.

  “How’s Alice, Jon?” Bobby asked.

  “Made of stern stuff,” he said. “Much sterner than me.”

  “And how are you?” I asked.

  “Hysterical,” he said calmly. “A mess.”

  We drove to Jonathan’s parents’ condominium in Jonathan’s father’s car, an enormous blue Oldsmobile. I had never seen Jonathan drive before. He loo
ked both childlike and paternal behind the wheel of that big car. He held the wheel with both hands, as if he was steering a ship.

  On the way he told us how his father’s heart attack had struck him on his way to the mailbox. He explained that fact in particular. His father had had asthma and then emphysema. So his death by heart failure seemed to make everyone feel as cheated as they would have had he been in faultless health. Bobby asked, “On his way back from the mail box?” as if that were the most appalling thing about it.

  I put on my sunglasses and watched the shopping centers pass. They shimmered in the heat. Between them lay open country, reddish-gray, studded with cacti. Arizona was the first place I had ever been that turned out to look exactly as I’d pictured it. As we drove along the blindingly bright highway I felt powerful and competent. I was an older woman in sunglasses who’d come to help a couple of confused men contend with their grief. I thought at that moment that I would leave Bobby and have the child by myself.

  “I’d written him a letter,” Jonathan said. “The first one in at least a year. I hadn’t gotten around to mailing it, though. It was still in my jacket pocket when I heard.”

  Jonathan’s parents’ condominium was part of a sprawling, mud-colored complex several miles from a shopping mall called Teepee Town. A sign beside the entrance said “Choice Units Still Available” in faded blue letters. Jonathan parked. He led us up a crushed-gravel walk to one of the buildings, past the mailbox, a conventional one painted brown to match the adobe-like substance. I suspected the adobe had been sprayed on with a hydraulic gun. I wondered what sort of people would want to live in a place like that.

  The inside of the condominium was dark and cool. Instead of Indian rugs and pottery, there were wing chairs, ferns, family photographs in chrome frames. The only evidence of death was the flowers. There were a half-dozen arrangements in vases and foil-wrapped pots. A white porcelain shepherdess stood on a round polished table between two bouquets, serene and alarming as a bone. Before we had had a chance to acclimate ourselves to the interior darkness, a small, deeply tanned woman came out of what must have been the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her jeans.

  “The prodigal returns,” she said with a hint of a Southern drawl. “Welcome to the reservation.”

  “Hello, Alice,” Bobby said.

  She took Bobby’s chin in her hand and turned his face one way and another. She examined it as keenly as an anthropologist checking the completeness of a skull. Suddenly I knew where Jonathan had picked up that stiff, politician’s embrace.

  “Hello, beautiful,” she said. She planted a tight little kiss on his lips.

  Bobby stood with his arms at his sides, as if struck dumb by her. Jonathan had to introduce me. Alice scanned me with a scientific eye and shook my hand. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “Thank you for having me,” I said. It seemed like the stupidest possible thing to say to a woman whose husband had just died.

  “I’m so sorry about Ned, Alice,” Bobby said. He had put one of his arms uncertainly over Jonathan’s shoulders.

  “I know,” she said. “I am, too.”

  “Are we the first ones to get here?” I asked.

  “Well, we’re not making a big party of it,” Alice said. “I’m expecting Ned’s brother from Muncie, and a few of the people from around here. We decided to keep it intimate.”

  “Oh,” I said. I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice. New widow or no.

  “How about a drink?” Jonathan said. “Does anybody want a drink?”

  Everybody agreed to want a drink. Jonathan made himself busy, getting them. I realized that was probably how he grew up, ushering things along, proposing drinks or Scrabble games or walks in the park. I could picture him at two, frantically interrupting with a new word he’d never spoken before, to draw his mother’s attention away from herself. Now, at thirty, he was turning into her. He administered dry kisses in airports. He was cultivating a life as orderly and cut off as his mother’s Early American living room.

  After we’d had drinks and dinner, Alice announced that she was spending the night in a motel. Bobby and Jonathan objected. But she had made up her mind. “There’s not enough room to swing a cat in here,” she said. “The last thing anybody needs in quarters this close is to have to try and respect the privacy of an old lady.”

  Bobby insisted that he and I should be the ones to go to a motel, but Alice wouldn’t budge. “My bag is already packed,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning, before any of you are up.”

  “But it isn’t right,” Bobby said. “We don’t want to put you out of your own house.”

  I gave his knee what I hoped was a discreet squeeze. Couldn’t he see how much Alice wanted to spend the night alone? I knew just what she’d do. She’d step into the scoured motel room, turn the air-conditioning on high, and lie down on an impersonal bed. She’d have a few hours outside her life. I’d done that myself, when a romance ended and my own apartment seemed suddenly too personal. Whether or not Bobby caught the meaning of the squeeze, he soon gave up on his protests. Alice got herself out of the house, promising to have Belgian waffles made before anyone stirred in the morning. I said a brisk unapologetic goodbye, which might or might not have telegraphed the fact that I knew Alice wasn’t doing anybody any favors. That although I understood the impulse it didn’t make me like her any better.

  Then she was gone. Then we were alone together, with no idea of what to say or do. Although I’d been through plenty of departures, I hadn’t had any direct experience with the death of the body. My parents were still alive. My grandparents had all died discreetly, in other states, when I was very young. Whatever sense of competence I’d felt in the back seat of the Oldsmobile had evaporated. In its place was nothing but a feeling of vague stupidity, and irritation at the prospect of sleeping in an unfamiliar house and going to a stranger’s funeral.

  “Anybody want another drink?” Jonathan asked.

  We had another drink. We arranged ourselves in the wing chairs and on the ugly colonial sofa. If I’d ever imagined the process of mourning I’d pictured it as an untrammeled exchange, flowing freely as tapwater between people who either loved one another without reservation or were so depleted by their loss that the little daily differences and old grudges spiraled down the drain. But here, sipping tonic in a cheaply furnished, formal little parlor, I didn’t forget my ordinary meanness and vanity. I couldn’t feel the shock of the father’s death. I couldn’t make the desolate condominium complex seem like anything other than a place where death was logical and somehow appropriate. A mild surprise the residents were only too well prepared for.

  Jonathan said, “I’m sorry we have to be seeing each other like this. I suspected I’d see you two again, but I’d imagined different circumstances.”

  I knew he had to strain to make a direct statement like that without adopting someone else’s gestures and inflection. It was Jonathan’s overriding instinct to act as if all were well. As if we were having the time of our lives.

  “It’s not what I pictured either,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t at all sure if I should come. I’m still not sure I should have.”

  He nodded. He didn’t reassure me.

  Nearly beside myself with nervousness and bile, I said, “I’m sure your father was a wonderful man.”

  Bobby said, “Ned was great. He was really, you know, great . I’m sorry you never got to me
et him, Clare. You’d’ve liked him a lot.”

  “Well, I’m sure I would have.”

  A silence passed. The ice cracked in Jonathan’s glass.

  I said, “Listen, Jonathan, I don’t know why you did what you did. I suppose you needed to. We should probably just try to forget about it as long as we’re here.”

  “I told Bobby,” he said. “I tried to tell you, too. I can’t seem to have a life around you.”

  “Do you have a life now?”

  “A sort of one. They wouldn’t take me back at the paper, but they helped me get an editorial thing at Esquire . I’m working my way back up. Unexplained disappearances don’t go over all that well, even in the magazine business.”

  “Well, I hope you’re happier than you were,” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I could start getting happier at any moment.”

  “Good.”

  He looked around the room as if he couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten there—as if a moment earlier he’d been in his bed in New York.

  He said, “I keep telling myself, ‘My father is dead.’ I can’t seem to make it feel like a fact. It keeps feeling like something that would happen on television. I mean, you’d think it would be so dramatic, but actually I feel sort of minor. Like this makes me less important. More of a bit player. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  Bobby said, “Ned was, you know. A really good man. Clare, you’d have been crazy about him. Really, you would.”