A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  When we reached the gravel drive that led up to the house, Erich gasped and said, “Oh, this is wonderful. I can’t believe this is yours.”

  I had never heard this note of excitement in his voice—this undertone of quivering wonder. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. It had a false, gushing quality. He might have been the wife of an ambitious man, taken to the boss’s country house.

  “Wait till you see the inside,” I said. “It’s got a long way to go.”

  “Oh, no, it’s perfect. It’s just perfect,” he said. “Whatever it looks like inside.”

  “Just you wait,” I said.

  Clare met us on the porch with the baby. Rebecca, recently bathed, looked at us with buggishly astonished eyes, as if she had never seen anything like us before—three men getting out of a car and mounting the porch stairs. Clare called, “Hello, boys.”

  “Hello,” Erich said. “Oh, it’s, well, it’s very good to see you again. Oh, look at the baby.”

  I could tell from Clare’s face that she suspected something. I could almost see the interior process she went through, struggling to match this Erich with the Erich she’d met years ago. Had he always been so ashen and thin? Had his skin been so opaque?

  “This is her,” Clare said after a moment. “You’re catching her on a good day, she’s been angelic from the moment she opened her eyes this morning. Better admire her quick, because things could change at any moment.”

  Erich, uncertain about small children, stood several feet away and said, “Hi, baby. Hello there.” Rebecca gawked at him or at the empty air in his vicinity, a string of saliva dangling voluptuously from her chin. She’d been talking for months by then. In private she could babble for hours, mixing actual words with her own private vocabulary, but when faced with strangers she retreated, staring with unabashed and slightly fearful fascination, committing herself to nothing, waiting to see what would happen next. When she was uncertain she still claimed the infant’s privilege, and in her boggled fixations there was a quality of self-abandonment that was almost sexual. I’d already learned one lesson about fatherhood—you love your child, in part, because you see her utterly naked. A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks. In a year and a half I’d learned that while I could imagine Rebecca growing up to make me angry, to hurt or disappoint me, I did not see how she could ever make herself strange. Not if she came to weigh three hundred pounds. Not if she preached the ascendancy of an insect god, or committed murder for personal gain. We were connected; we’d established an intimacy that couldn’t be undone while we both lived.

  “How about giving me a squeeze?” I said. Clare reluctantly passed her over. As I took her in my arms she looked at me with unflinching amazement. I said, “Hey, Miss Rebecca,” and she laughed abruptly and ecstatically, as if I had just popped out of a box.

  I held her close to my chest. I put my nose to her fat shoulder and inhaled.

  Erich said, “This is really interesting. What you all are doing out here. I mean, it’s just very very interesting.”

  “Putting it mildly,” Clare said. “Come on inside, I’ll show you to your room. Ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that to somebody.”

  Clare led Erich into the house, and Bobby followed with the suitcase. I stayed outside with Rebecca for a moment. Afternoon light, which had taken on the golden weight of October, picked out each individual tree on the mountainside. A fat speckled spider sat motionless in the exact middle of a web that described a taut hexagon between two posts and the porch rail. As quickly as we swept the webs away with a broom, these country spiders—some gaily colored, some pale as dust—rebuilt them. Rebecca murmured. She started batting her hands in the frantic, exasperated way that preceded her sourceless fits of crying. I stroked her hair, waiting for the tears to start. I thought of walking away with her, just taking her into the mountains with me.

  “There’s so much still to do,” I whispered. “The floors have still got dry rot. And we haven’t even started on the kitchen yet.”

  We took Erich to see the restaurant, which was doing well enough by then for Bobby and me to have left it for a few hours in the charge of Marlys, our prep cook, and her lover Gert, the new waitress. When we started the restaurant we’d set out to simulate the kind of place we’d hoped to find on the drive back from Arizona—an eccentric little café that served honest food made by human hands. As it turned out, we weren’t alone in our desire for that simple, elusive café. Our place was always full, and on weekends the customers lined up halfway down the block. It was gratifying and slightly uncomfortable to see people so avid for such ordinary food: bread and hash browns made from scratch, soups and stews, two different pies every day. I sometimes felt we were deceiving them by pretending to be simple—we’d led convoluted, neurotic lives and now we were earning our living by arranging lattice crusts over apples from an orchard less than ten miles away and contracting with a local grandmother for homemade preserves. Still, half our customers wore country clothes they’d ordered from catalogues and rustic sweaters knitted in Hong Kong or Guatemala. I don’t suppose anyone was fooled.

  “Oh, this is won derful,” Erich cried. The restaurant had closed for the day, although half the tables were still full of customers finishing up. Marlys and Gert greeted us with their particular mix of comradely good cheer and fleeting, untraceable hatred. I found that I was vaguely embarrassed by Erich’s pallor and thinness—it seemed I had brought some perversity of mine, some unpleasant secret, into the place where I had effectively simulated innocence.

  Marlys took Bobby into the kitchen to show him what needed reordering, and to point out the leak she had managed, temporarily, to plug in the dishwasher. I’d learned that even a small, successful restaurant operated in a continual state of crisis. The machinery broke down, caught fire, failed when it was needed most. Produce arrived bruised or unripe, mealworms tunneled into the flour. The customers’ appetites followed distinct but unpredictable patterns, so that the ingredients we ran out of one week would spoil on our shelves the next. The profits, though steady, were small, and it seemed that literally every hour it was time to bake more pies, cut more potatoes, haggle with the vegetable man about a carton of wilted lettuce. Sometimes I’d walk into the dining room and see, with a certain astonishment, that people sat at every table eating without concern or particular attention, talking to one another about the facts of their lives. They believed this was a restaurant, they found it unextraordinary that we’d fought decay and parasites, the endless petty dishonesty of suppliers, to get this simple food onto these white ceramic plates. On the rare occasions when a customer complained that his eggs were overcooked or his bacon underdone, I had to force myself not to scream, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are that we do this at all? Don’t you get it? Where’s your gratitude, for God’s sake?” I’d begun to better understand the appeal of the flash-frozen, the freeze-dried or microwavable. This tastes almost as good, and it’s predictable. It’s already diced or kneaded, already rolled or chopped. It can’t rot. It will keep until the customers decide they want to order it again . Less than two years ago, the proprietors of all those brightly lit, desolate roadside cafés had seemed like our enemies, selling corrupted food out of greed and laziness. Now I saw them as victims of a more practical, seductive kind of defeat.

  Gert asked Erich and me if we’d like anything. The coffee was still on, she said, and when last she checked there were still two pieces of blueberry pie. Did she know Erich was sick? Was that the true cause of her solicitude? I could tell Erich was charmed by Gert, for she was in fact charming, a str
ong-faced, ruddy woman with long gray hair who had left a good job in publishing to live up here with Marlys. She dressed like a farm wife, in print dresses and cardigan sweaters, but she spoke Russian and had edited the work of a great poet. After we’d said no thank you to coffee and pie and she’d returned to the customers, I had to work to keep from whispering, “We think she’s stealing from the register.”

  Erich said in his new, overanimated voice, “This place looks so sweet.”

  “Part of the package,” I said. “An integral aspect of our appeal to our target audience.”

  “Who are all these children?” he asked, meaning the photographs on the walls.

  “Strangers,” I said. “Five for a dollar at a junk store up the Hudson. Half of them are alcoholics or Jesus freaks or inmates at the state penitentiary by now. The other half live in trailer parks with their six kids.”

  He nodded approvingly, as if those were good ends for grown children. Bobby came out of the kitchen followed by Marlys, a hefty, freckled woman with apricot hair. “I think the dishwasher may be shot,” he said. “It looks, you know, pretty bad.”

  “Great,” I said. “It’ll take them weeks to get a new dishwasher up here. You know how they are.”

  Marlys threw me a shadow punch. “Hey, butch,” she said.

  I threw my hands up over my head. “Ooh, don’t hurt me,” I answered. This was the method Marlys and I worked out for threading our way through the maze of sexuality and power. She earned good money at our restaurant and was constantly pummeling us, pinching our cheeks too hard or slapping our asses. I was her boss, and I feigned a physical terror not wholly unrelated to my actual feelings. Marlys was broad and calm and competent in worldly matters. She had repaired the dishwasher in the midst of the morning rush. She was an expert sailor and skier, and she knew the names of trees.

  “Well, we’ll have to manage with this one until it breaks down completely,” Bobby said. “You and I may have to be back there washing dishes by hand for a while. And hope the health inspector doesn’t stop by.”

  “The glamorous life of a restaurant owner,” I said to Erich, who nodded agreeably.

  We had dinner at home, and talked mainly about the baby. Clare and I used Erich as an audience for our own interest in the minutiae of child-rearing. As we passed around the corn and the hamburgers and the tomato salad we clamored over each other to tell the next story of Rebecca’s peculiarities, our own shock at the various moral and bodily issues of parenthood, and our assorted resolutions about how to usher her, relatively undamaged, into a life of love and wages. Erich, whose good manners might have been imprinted on his genes, feigned or actually felt ardent, blinking interest in our talk. There was no telling.

  After dinner, we put Rebecca to bed and watched one of the movies Clare had rented. (“We are not ,” she’d said, “relying on conversation alone this weekend. I’m laying in movies, games, whatever. I’d hire a dog act if I knew where to find one around here.”) After the movie, we stretched and yawned and talked of how weary we were—a partial truth. Yes, we agreed, it was just about time for bed. Erich sat folded into his chair, with his hands slipped between his knees as if the room was freezing. He was so small, and so determined to be a good, unobtrusive guest—one who agreed to everything, who insisted that his hosts’ desires exactly matched his own. Almost before I knew I’d do it, I said, “Erich, how long have you been like this?”

  He looked at me with a mingled expression of surprise and disappointment, blinking rapidly. It occurred to me that he might consider me the source of his illness. As in fact I might have been.

  “I wasn’t sure if it showed,” he said. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His voice was mild as a radiator’s hiss. But he blinked furiously, and pressed his thighs tighter around his hands. “I’ve been feeling better ,” he said. “I mean, well, I thought I looked all right.”

  “How long has it been?” Clare asked. Before I’d spoken she had stood, on the pretext of making herb tea, and she remained standing, fixed in place beside the sofa. Bobby, still seated, watched in silence.

  Erich hesitated, as if struggling to remember. “Well, I’d been feeling sick for more than a year,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, I mean it seemed so strange to have imagined these symptoms so clearly and then start having them. I thought for a while that maybe I was just being a hypochondriac. But then, well. I got the diagnosis about five months ago.”

  “And you didn’t call me?” I said.

  “What good would it have done?” he said. Now his voice cut through the air cleanly as a cable through fog. His voice had lost its polite, enthusiastic tone and taken on a bitterness I’d never heard from him. “It’s not like there’s a cure,” he said. “It’s not like you could do anything but worry about it.”

  “I’ve seen you when you were sick,” I said. “You didn’t mention it.”

  But at the same time I remembered: we have no relationship to speak of. Our exchange is based primarily on sex and shared loneliness.

  He looked at me. His eyes were terrible. “To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed,” he said. “When I thought about something like this happening, when I thought and, you know, imagined it, I knew I’d be afraid and angry. And, well, guilty. None of those things surprises me very much. But I’m surprised to be feeling this embarrassed about it.”

  “Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Clare said.

  Erich nodded. “Of course it’s okay,” he said. “What else could it be but okay?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “I thought I was working my way toward something like this house,” he said. “You know, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I’d make money somehow and end up somewhere like this.”

  “The nights get long out here,” Clare said.

  “It’s paradise,” he said. “Don’t try to kid me. It’s fucking paradise, and you know it is.”

  We remained where we were, with the lights on and the clock ticking. All I could think of was Rebecca. Just as I had wanted, earlier, to disappear into the tall grass, now I wanted only to go to her room, wake her up, and comfort her. I thought of her perfect feet, and of the way she clutched at her hair with one hand as she sucked the thumb of the other. I wondered if, at twenty-five, some vestige of the habit would remain. Would she, as a young woman, tend to play with her hair when she grew anxious or tired? Would someone love that about her—the brown hair being twirled and untwirled and twirled again around an unconscious finger? Would someone be irritated by it? Would someone someday look at her in her exhaustion, her fingers working busily, and think, “I’ve had enough of this”?

  I said, “I’m going up to check on the baby.”

  “She’s fine,” Clare said. “She hasn’t made a sound.”

  “Still, can’t hurt to check.”

  “Jonathan, she’s fine,” Clare said. “Really. She is.”

  Erich slept alone in my bed that night. Although I’d claimed I was going to sleep on the futon downstairs, I ended up with Bobby and Clare in their bed. I lay between them, with my arms folded over my chest.

  “What I feel really shitty about,” I said, “is how worried I am for myself. Erich is sick , and I feel sorry for him, but in this sort of remote way. It’s like my self-concern is a Sousa march, and Erich’s actual illness is this piccolo playing in the background.”

  “That’s natural enough
,” she said. “But listen, you’re probably fine. You’ve been healthy for, what, over a year since the last time you and Erich…”

  “It can incubate for at least five years,” I said. “Lately they’ve been thinking it could be as long as ten.”

  She nodded. Something was wrong; she wasn’t responding the way I’d expected her to, with Clare-like grit and flippancy. She seemed to have fallen out of character.

  Bobby lay in silence on my other side. He had barely spoken since dinner. “Bobby?” I said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “What’s going on over there? You’re so damn quiet.”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”

  Clare squeezed my elbow. I knew what she meant: leave him alone until he’s had time to settle into his own reaction. Bobby negotiated the world’s surprises with a deliberateness that was almost somnolent. Clare and I had decided privately that if the house caught fire, one of us would take responsibility for helping him decide which window to jump out of.

  “I just feel so…strange,” I said. “How am I going to get through the days from now on without checking myself for symptoms every five minutes?”

  “Honey, you’re probably fine,” Clare said, but her voice lacked conviction. By way of compensation, she patted my chest. Since the baby was born, Clare had become more prone to physical contact, though her caresses were still flighty and vague, as if she suspected the flesh of others might burn her hands.

  “What do you think, Bobby?” I asked.

  “I think you’re okay,” he answered.

  “Well, that’s good. I’m glad you think so.”

  Clare said, “I wonder how Erich is going to manage this. I have a feeling he hasn’t got a lot of friends.”