A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello, my dear.”

  We embraced, inquired after one another’s health and happiness, and started for the car. On the way he asked me, “How’s business?”

  “Booming,” I said. “I’m getting more calls than I can handle, but I hate to turn anybody away at this stage. I’ve been trying to hire another cook. But it’s hard to find anybody who’ll do things the way I like them done.”

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “Who ever expected you to turn into a catering mogul?”

  “Watch yourself, now. Don’t get patronizing.”

  “I’m not being patronizing. When did you get so thin-skinned?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “Nerves, I guess. I’ve never had a business at all, much less a successful one. I keep thinking something will happen and it will all just come apart.”

  “Don’t worry. Or is that being patronizing too? Do worry. Awful things happen to the nicest people.”

  “True,” I said. “Entirely true. How’s your own business?”

  “Insane. It seems like we’re always there, and everything is always right on the verge of total madness. But we’re breaking even. On our busiest days we even make a little money.”

  “Good,” I said. “It’s a tough field. Breaking even your first year means you’re succeeding.”

  “I guess. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘I forgot to take table five their coffee.’”

  “Welcome to the front lines,” I said.

  When we reached the car, we had a small cordial tussle over who would drive. I preferred to, since I knew the way, but a grown son doesn’t care to be chauffeured by his mother even on her home ground. I tossed him the keys, for his comfort’s sake.

  We drove along the flat bright highway, talking of ordinary things. The sun, which was not too merciless at that time of year, shone on the flowering yuccas and the exquisite charcoal-gray tangles of mesquite. I thought without envy of the drizzle and blear that prevailed just then in the East. The desert, I’d found, had a beauty too severe to sink immediately into your skin. Its nearest geographical relative was the glacier—like a glacier it could fool the uninitiated into mistaking its slow turning for stasis. We who lived there loved it for its simplicity and cleanliness, its daily suggestion of the everlasting. A forested landscape came to seem both crowded and ephemeral, sweet enough but far too young, and subject to unpredictable turns of fortune. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in deserts. It is no accident that the elderly often return there.

  “You look great,” Jonathan said as he drove. “I like what you did to your hair.”

  “Well, I have to make an appearance now,” I said. “I can’t stumble around town like the wild woman of the mountains anymore. To tell you the truth, I’ve found a barber. A men’s barber. Most of the women’s salons out here still insist on giving you these poofy lacquered hairdos , and I’ve got no interest in that. I have it cut once every three or four weeks, and don’t think about it otherwise.”

  “I love it,” he said. “My mother is a catering mogul with a crew cut. I’m not being patronizing. I’m being appreciative.”

  He pulled in at the condominium, and carried his bag into the house. “Place hasn’t changed,” he said.

  “It’s just lost a little more ground to the forces of entropy,” I said. “I meant to get it whipped into slightly better shape before you got here. But a good steady client of mine called with a last-minute dinner party, so I spent yesterday making shrimp with cilantro pesto instead of vacuuming and dusting.”

  “It’s okay. Our house in Cleveland was always a little too orderly, to tell you the truth. I mean, I’m glad to know you’re not out here cleaning all the time.”

  “That’s the least of your worries. Believe me.”

  Because he’d be sleeping on the fold-out couch, there was no unpacking to do. He simply set his suitcase in a corner. As he did so, I was overtaken by nervousness—I’d brought him all the way to Arizona for such a strange purpose. Perhaps I’d pass it off as a simple visit after all. Feed him, buy him a few new articles of clothing over his protests, and send him home again.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “A little. I didn’t eat the lunch they served on the plane. At a certain point in my flying career I realized I could just refuse the tray when they brought it. I still feel reckless doing it, though. Like I’m throwing away money.”

  “Why don’t we go out for a late lunch?” I said. “I’ve found a marvelous place about ten miles from here, where they make their tortillas from scratch. I’d love to hire their cook away from them, have somebody who really knows traditional Mexican cooking, but I don’t think I could pay her enough.”

  “Sounds great,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  For a moment he was so like his father that I stopped and stared at him, the blood ringing in my head. All mothers must experience such moments, when their grown children—who have seemed to depart irrevocably into their own personalities—suddenly reveal a strain of their father’s nature so pure and undiluted they might be the man himself, reborn, right down to the three-note cough that has punctuated the past forty-plus years. What I saw in Jonathan just then was Ned’s easy, boneless willingness; his urge to be pleasantly enthusiastic and to keep things rolling along. If I’d been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and said, “Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you.”

  Instead, I took the car keys from him and said, “I’d better drive this time. Even I’m not sure exactly how to get to this place, and I’ve been a dozen times.”

  We spent the next two days talking and eating and going to movies. I gave him the tour of my rented kitchen and makeshift office, introduced him to my staff of three. I inquired after his life as well, although I wasn’t always sure how to phrase my questions. “How’s the baby?” was the most obvious opening.

  “She’s fine,” he said over a margarita. “She’s amazing. Sometimes it seems like she’s changing a little every day. I’m beginning to understand why people have a half dozen kids—it’s hard to realize that now she can crawl, and she’ll never be quite so helpless again. It’s a relief, too. But I can see how you’d want to have another one just for the sake of seeing somebody else through that incredibly helpless period again.”

  “And you spend a good deal of time with her?” I asked.

  “Of course. Of course I do. I’m her father. I’m one of her fathers.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe I don’t quite get it,” I said.

  “What’s to get? You’ve been there, you’ve seen us all together. We’re three people who have a baby. What’s the big deal?”

  “No big deal,” I said. “I guess I’m just old-fashioned.”

  “You’re not old-fashioned. Not with a haircut like that.”

  “Well, all right. I worry that you’re being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What have you got?”

  This was delicate ground. We’d never formally acknowledged his proclivities—other than Bobby, I’d never met a liaison of his. As far as I knew, he didn’t have them. And here’s the awful truth: I preferred it that way. If he’d insisted on it, I’d have tried to accommodate a mental image of my son engaged in sex
ual acts with other men. But he wasn’t prone to insistence. He paid his visits in the guise of a chaste bachelor, and his father and I had always been willing to receive him as such. If life was failing to mark him in some way, I suppose we must have played our part.

  “We’ve all got each other,” he said. “Mom, you’re right. You’re not getting it. Maybe we should talk about something else.”

  “If you like. Just tell me this. You’re happy doing what you’re doing?”

  “Yes. I’m ecstatic. And I’m part of something. I’m part of a family and a business. We’re building a home together. You get too caught up in the fact that we don’t look exactly like an ordinary family.”

  “All right. I’ll try not to get too caught up in that.”

  And, after a moment, we moved on to other subjects. I could have responded to confessions of unorthodox love, if he’d chosen to make them. But I could not demand such candor. I simply couldn’t. It would be his move to make.

  I didn’t get around to my own business until the night before his departure. We had eaten in—I’d made a simple avocado vinaigrette and done salmon steaks on the grill. After the plates were cleared away I started coffee and said, “Jonathan, dear, there’s a reason I asked you to come this time. There’s something I want to give you.”

  His eyes quickened—he must have thought I had a family treasure put away for him. For a moment I could see him perfectly at the age of four, precociously well mannered but beside himself with greed in a toy store, where no acquisition was too lavish to lie beyond imagining.

  “What is it?” he asked, his eagerness politely concealed.

  I sighed. If I’d had a quilt or a gold watch I’d have given it to him instead, but neither Ned nor I had ever saved things like that. We both came from families more interested in the future than in the past. I went upstairs to the bedroom without speaking, got the box out of my dresser and brought it down.

  He knew what it was. “Oh, Mom,” he said.

  I set it gently on the table, a smooth wooden rectangle with a brass plaque that bore Ned’s full name and his dates. “It’s time for you to take charge of this,” I said. “That was your father’s one request. That you decide about disposal.”

  He nodded. He looked at the box but did not touch it. “I know,” he said. “He told me.”

  “Have you been thinking about it?” I asked.

  “Sure. Sure I have. Mom, that’s part of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m trying to make some kind of home.”

  “I see.” I sat down beside him. We both watched the box as if we suspected it might move on its own.

  “Have you looked inside?” he asked.

  “Yes. At first I thought I couldn’t stand to. Then as time passed I realized I couldn’t stand not to.”

  “And?”

  “It’s sooty. Yellowish-gray. There’s more than you’d think. I’d imagined just a handful, something talcumy you could toss into the wind with one hand. But it’s not like that, there’s quite a lot. There are some little slivers of bone, dark, like old ivory. Honey, I can tell you this—it’s no more of your father than a pair of his old shoes would be. Do you want to look?”

  “No. Not right now.”

  “All right.”

  “Why are you giving this to me now?” he asked. “I mean, well, exactly that. Why now?”

  I hesitated. Here was the truth: I had started seeing someone. He was younger than I, his name was Paul Martinez, and he’d begun teaching me a range of pleasures I had hardly imagined while married to Ned.

  It seemed I was living my life in reverse. With Ned I had had order and sanctuary, the serenity one hopes for in old age. Now, at the onset of my true old age, I seemed to be falling in love with an argumentative dark-skinned man who played the guitar and kissed me in spots Ned had hesitated even to call by their names. I felt wrong about having his ashes in the house now.

  But all I said to Jonathan was “I’m afraid I’m turning into Morticia Addams, with my husband’s ashes on the mantelpiece. I shouldn’t have kept them this long.”

  There would be time to tell about Paul, if the attraction caught and held. Although his attentions thrilled me, I didn’t trust them yet—there were so many reasons for a younger man to fleetingly believe he loved an older woman. Why upset Jonathan needlessly? I’d wait and see whether this affair was serious enough to merit upsetting him.

  “I can understand that,” he said. “I can’t quite believe these are his real ashes here. It seems so…It doesn’t seem like something that would happen in the twentieth century. For a private citizen to just have his father’s ashes in a box.”

  “Do you want to take them out to the desert together?” I said. “We could go right now.”

  “Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?”

  “Yes. Now listen. This isn’t the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn’t our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it’s where we ended up, and we weren’t unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I’ve been very happy.”

  “He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home.”

  “Jonathan, honey. Don’t you think there’s something a little… kitschy about all this yearning for a home?”

  He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. “Mother,” he said. “Are you telling me to get hip?”

  “I’m telling you to stop worrying so much,” I said. “Your father’s dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave.”

  He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, “Mom, if anything happened to me—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said quickly.

  “But if something did.”

  I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I’d lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan’s simple bachelorhood, his sexual disenfranchisement. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I’d never met, giving me the name of a hospital.

  “All right,” I said. “If something did.”

  “If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don’t want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?”

  I didn’t speak. I got up and poured coffee.

  “Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?” I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “This is strictly your decision.”

  “I know. I’ll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?”

  “How about a game of Scrabble instead?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Great. You’re on.”

  The following day we drove to the airport with Ned’s ashes tucked inside Jonathan’s black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I’d claimed the driver’s position, and Jonathan didn’t protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky fill
ed with clouds that had bumped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.

  Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.

  “Hey,” he said. “Is this a shortcut?”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just hang on.”

  “I’ll miss my plane,” he said.

  “No you won’t. If you do, you can get another one.”

  The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert’s small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush grasses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which shimmered as if in perpetual surprise.