A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “Aw, darling, what’s not to feel good about?” I say. “We’re some thing now, I mean we won’t just blow away if one of us takes a notion.”

  “It would be nice if that were true,” she says.

  “You know what I’d like to do someday? I’d like to fix up the shed as a separate little house, so Alice could move up here when she gets tired of the catering business.”

  “Oh, sure. Let’s build a cottage for my old fourth-grade teacher, too.”

  “Clare?” I say.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “You really are happy here, aren’t you? I mean, this is our life. Right?”

  “Oh, sure it is. It’s our life. You know me, I think in terms of complaint. It’s how my mind works.”

  “Right,” I say.

  We stand watching the mountains, then turn to watch the house. This house is so old the spirits themselves have melted into the walls. It feels inhabited not by anyone’s private unhappiness but by the collected days of ten generations, their meals and fights, their births and last gasps. Now, right now, it’s a disreputable marriage of old and new disappointments. The floorboards are crumbling, and the remodeled kitchen seethes with orange linoleum and Spanish-style wood-like cabinets. We’re going to fix it up, slowly, with the money we make from our restaurant. We are forces of order, come from the city with talents and tools and our belief in a generous future. Jonathan and Clare look at the house and see what it can become. They talk antique fixtures, eight-over-eights, a limestone mantel rescued from a house in Hudson and trucked up here. Although I wouldn’t fight progress I like the house as it is, with bug-riddled floors and wood-grain chemical paneling that looks like sorrow and laziness made into a domestic fixture. Sitting on its four overgrown acres, the house answers the elderly mountains. It, too, is docile and worn smooth. It has been humbled by time.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Clare says. “What if we painted the windowpanes blue? Like a cobalt blue, you know? Do you think that’d look too cutesy?”

  “Ask Jonathan,” I answer. “He’s the one who knows about things like that.”

  She nods. “Bobby?” she says.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I walk around the place and I feel like I’m standing on an airplane wing. At thirty thousand feet. I guess I want you and Jonathan to think this is as strange as I do.”

  From the house, the baby starts crying. “That’s what really does it,” Clare says. “I’ve always just made my own mistakes, I never had to worry about somebody else like this before.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine and perfect. Trust me. Okay?”

  She nods uncertainly. She keeps losing the battle to decide instead of worry. Worry is part of what makes her short-tempered; she is trying to develop a personality to match her worst expectations.

  “Let’s go see how Jonathan’s doing with her,” she says.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  We go into the house together. The door opens straight into the living room, a big shabby rectangle still papered in scowling red eagles and blue drums. At this time of day it’s filled with squares of light that slant in from three sides. Jonathan is walking a circle with Rebecca propped on his shoulder. She wails, a series of short piercing cries like mortified hiccups.

  “Mystery tantrum,” he says. “Her diaper’s fine, and she just ate half an hour ago.”

  “Let me try with her,” Clare says.

  Jonathan fails to hide his reluctance. He dislikes giving the baby up, even to her own dreams. But when Clare holds out her arms he passes her over.

  Clare folds her in, whispers to her. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “What’s the matter? Just a little fit of existential despair?”

  Rebecca is a twenty-pound being with feathery hair and dark, furious eyes. Already, at eleven months, she has a nature. She is prone to contemplation. She resists both laughter and sorrow until they overwhelm her, and then she gives herself up completely.

  Clare walks the living room with her, whispering. She speaks to the baby the same way she speaks to Jonathan or me, in full sentences, but she speaks to the baby without an undercurrent of rage.

  “Now, Miss Rebecca,” she says, “you’re not being reasonable. But, hey, why should you be? Lord, if I ever start nagging you to be reasonable, will you shoot me, please?”

  Jonathan watches in an ecstasy of edgy affection. Parenthood has brought several surprises—the biggest is his tortured devotion. Clare and I are calmer in the face of Rebecca’s fragility and her unending needs. Jonathan hasn’t rested since she entered the world. He is a living illustration of love’s power to unsettle our nerves.

  Now he has something vital to lose. Now there is a small victim for every tragic story he can tell himself.

  Rebecca won’t be quiet, and we take her outside. She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. We walk the property with her, and let her cries dissipate in the noon air. Jonathan picks a daisy. He twirls it in front of her pinched red face.

  “Hey, kid,” he says. “Hey. Take a look at this amazing, unprecedented thing here.” Of all her qualities, Jonathan is most in love with her capacity for amazement. He almost weeps when she stares goggle-eyed at a yarn ball or a teaspoon cupping the sun. But she keeps crying, right into the daisy.

  “Can’t be bought with flowers,” Clare says. There is true pride in her voice. If Jonathan loves her for being the world’s best audience, Clare loves her stubborn insistence on her own mysteries.

  We walk into the stand of trees behind the house. Here, in the endless shade, there is no grass to speak of. There is only forest trash—pine cones and shed branches, the droppings of deer. We walk among the silent trees with Rebecca’s noise trailing behind us like a glittery scarf.

  Clare asks, “Did you boys call the plumber today?”

  “Yep,” Jonathan says. “He can’t fit us in until two weeks from Tuesday. Why don’t you let me try with her again?”

  “Shit. This house isn’t going to be done until the next century. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No big rush,” Jonathan says. “Come here, Rebecca.”

  He reaches for her, but Clare maintains her hold. “No big rush,” she says. “So we’ll just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?”

  “We’re pioneers,” Jonathan says. “Can’t expect all the suburban comforts right off the bat.”

  “I think,” she says, “that both of you are some kind of retards. I honestly do.”

  She holds the baby close and hurries ahead of us, deeper into the woods. Bars of light, fractured by pine boughs, hang stodgily. Jonathan takes off after her, as if he believes she might be planning to take Rebecca and raise her alone in the wild.

  Our restaurant will open in less than a week. Jonathan and I work all day, finishing it up. It’s nothing grand, just a nine-table restaurant in a former saloon. We’ve reformed the saloon like a pair of mail-order brides newly arrived on the frontier. We’ve painted it white, and hung striped curtains. Jonathan has covered the walls with old photos: school pictures of kids in bow ties and pinafores, men and women in plaid Bermuda shorts posing sunburned beside a lake, somebody’s grandmother shoveling snow. He’s hung a record-breaking salmon caught in 1957 and a shelf full of trophies. On the trophies bright gold men and women, sexlessly nake
d as angels, act out human excellence in bowling, golf, badminton, and citizenship. This will be a simple place, just breakfast and lunch. We’ve bought unmatched tables and chairs from the same secondhand stores where we found the trophies and photographs and the lacquered salmon.

  “Come on down, everybody,” Jonathan says. “The Homo Café is just about open for business.” He daubs white paint over a scar on the molding. He is wearing overalls, with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

  I’m in the kitchen, loading five-pound jars of preserves and ketchup onto the shelves. “They didn’t send strawberry jam,” I say. “They sent, like, half boysenberry and half peach.”

  “I’ll call up and yell at them. They probably think they can send us whatever they’re trying to get rid of, just because we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  When the jars are all stacked on the shelves I stand at the counter, watching Jonathan paint. “Clare thinks we should think what we’re doing is strange,” I say.

  “It is ,” he says. “Who thinks it isn’t strange?”

  “Well, I guess she thinks we should be more upset about it.”

  “She’s just anxious because she’s paying the bills. She’s waited all her life to get this money, and now, wham, it’s being spent.”

  “It’s being, you know, in vest ed,” I say.

  “Right. She has been sort of a pain in the ass lately, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I’d say that.”

  “I’ll say it. Clare has been a bitch for a long time now. Really, since she got pregnant.”

  “Well, you know,” I say. I punch a new cassette into the sound system. Jimi Hendrix sings “Are You Experienced?”

  “I guess she’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. “Motherhood is hard on all of us. I know it’s hard on me.”

  I get a paintbrush and help with the touch-ups. Jimi puts out his velvet growl, a living voice from the world of the dead, as Jonathan and I cover the last nicks. We sway to the music. There is some kind of small perfection in this, painting a wall together while Jimi sings. There is a knitting of times, the past tumbling into the future. It comes to me suddenly, in the form of a surprise: I’ve got what I wanted. A brother to work beside. A revised future shining like a light bulb over our heads.

  Here is what’s unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. We adore Clare but she’s not quite on the team. Not really. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We’re related. Each of us is the other born into different flesh. We may love Clare but she is not us. Only we can be ourselves and one another at the same time. I daub paint over an old scar. The tinted faces of grade-school kids, all in their forties or fifties now, look out from the walls with toothy, clear-eyed optimism.

  Later we lock up the restaurant and go to our car by way of the main street. I prefer walking through the middle of things—I’m the one who likes town. I’ve been on my way to Woodstock since I was nine and now, more than twenty years later, I’ve arrived. My brother was right—there are still people here. The concert, I’ve learned, happened sixty miles away, in a broad grassy field that is no more or less than that. An empty space ringed by green-black trees. Jonathan and I tried swimming in the chocolate-colored pond while Clare sat with Rebecca in the weeds, but mosquitoes drove us all back to our car. We ended up having lunch at what Clare believed was the same place she went with her husband-to-be when they fled the actual concert. She said the hamburgers would come with three pickles and a sealed ketchup envelope, and they did.

  Woodstock is what towns were supposed to become before the old future got sidetracked and a new one took its place. Bearded romantics still strum guitars in the town square, still dreaming of themselves as forest creatures and apprentice magicians. Old ladies with their gray hair frizzy and loose nod in time on the benches. Clare calls it pathetic and Jonathan doesn’t pay close attention one way or the other, but I appreciate the kindness of its quiet streets and the people’s cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.

  Jonathan and I drive home in our used Toyota, up and down the rises, with branch shadows flicking across the windshield. He sits low in the passenger seat, his sneakers propped on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you what’s really strange about all this,” he says. “What’s really, truly strange is the fact that we’re doing it at all. People say they’re going to move to the country and open a little café, but who actually does it?”

  “We did,” I say. “We are.”

  When we top the last hill, I hit the brakes. “What is it?” Jonathan asks.

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “I just want to look for a second.”

  From where I’ve stopped we can see our old brown house raising its chimney among a riot of junipers. Three dormered windows catch the light that will soon slip away behind the mountains, and the ivy that has grown unchecked for decades flutters, the leaves showing their silver undersides. The house has stood for more than a century without giving in to the landscape. No vines have snaked their way through the masonry, no underground lake has increased its boundaries by seeping into the foundation. Although I usually sing it to tease Clare, now I sing the Woodstock song to Jonathan, with a half-serious attitude that is all the pleasanter for being only half. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” He listens to a few bars, and joins in.

  At dinner, we talk about the restaurant and the baby. Lately our lives are devoted to the actual—we worry over Rebecca’s cough and the delivery of our used-but-refurbished walk-in refrigerator. I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

  “I don’t like Dr. Glass,” Clare says. She is sitting beside Rebecca’s high chair, spooning vanilla pudding into Rebecca’s mouth. Between each bite Rebecca looks suspiciously at the spoon, double-checking the contents. She has inherited my appetite but has also inherited Clare’s skepticism. She is both hungry and watchful.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Well, he’s a hippie . And he can’t be more than thirty-five. I’d just rather take Rebecca to an old fart. You know, somebody in sensible shoes who got your mother and all her sisters and brothers through things like smallpox and polio when they were kids. When Glass tells me not to worry about these coughing fits I keep thinking, ‘I’m being told this by a man in Birkenstocks.’”

  “I agree,” Jonathan says. “Glass does Tai Chi. I’d rather find somebody who plays golf.”

  “Glass seems okay to me,” I say. “I mean, I like him. You can talk to him.”

  Jonathan says, “I suppose what it really gets down to is, you want your baby’s doctor to be some sort of fatherly type. You know? Someone who seems unaffected by trends.”

  “Amen,” Clare says. “Tomorrow I’m going out looking for a new pediatrician.”

  “I really think Glass is fine,” I say.

  Clare holds a spoonful of pudding an inch from Rebecca’s open mouth. “I want to try someone else,” she says. “I’m nervous about Glass, I think he’s too easygoing. Okay?”

  “Well. Okay,” I say.

  “Okay.” She slips the spoon into Rebecca’s mouth with smooth, practiced accuracy. Clare is turning herself into the Mom character from our Henderson days. We d
on’t talk about the Hendersons anymore, maybe because the difference between our actual lives and their hypothetical ones has shrunk below the measuring point.

  Later, after we’ve put Rebecca to bed, we watch television together. It’s what there is to do at night, with a baby, in the country. We lie on the queen-size bed, surrounded by corn chips and beer and Diet Coke. The upstairs bedrooms are snug and dark. Their ceilings follow the curve of the roof. The last owners—the ones who did the downstairs in eagle wallpaper and Spanish-style cabinetry—must have run out of money at the stairwell. Up here the shabbiness has more patina. The wallpaper in this room swarms with faded carnivorous-looking flowers, and the venetian blinds dangle from frayed cords the color of strong tea. Clare flips around the channels. We have cable here, a powerful magnet that sucks down each invisible impulse passing overhead. Along with the normal stations we get strip shows from New York, Mexican soap operas, Japanese women gleefully demonstrating inventions so complex that only other inventions can fully appreciate them. Occasionally we tune in a hesitant, snowy channel that is almost frightening—it looks like men and women walking, just walking, through an empty field. It could be a transmission we’ve picked up by mistake, something from a world we aren’t meant to see.

  “A hundred and twenty stations and there’s still nothing to watch,” Clare says.

  “Nothing on TV tonight, let’s fuck,” Jonathan says.

  Clare looks at him with her brows arched and her eyes dark. “You two fuck,” she says.

  Jonathan jumps on her and simulates frantic, rabbit-like copulation. “Oh baby oh baby oh baby,” he moans.

  “Off,” she says. “Get off me. Really. Go jump on Bobby.”

  “Ooh baby,” Jonathan says.

  “Bobby, make him stop,” she says.

  I shrug, powerless. “I’ll scream,” she says. “I’ll call the police.”