A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “He has friends,” I said. “What do you think, he lives in a vacuum? You think he’s just some sort of bit player with no life of his own?”

  “How would I know?” Clare said.

  I realized, from the sound of her voice, that she blamed me in some way for failing to love Erich. Since the baby was born she’d discarded a measure of her old cynicism, and held the world more accountable to standards of unfaltering affection.

  “Please don’t get peevish with me,” I said. “Not now. You can get doubly peevish with me another time.”

  “I’m not being peevish,” she said. It was a habit of hers to disavow her actions even as she performed them. I believed, at that moment, that by being herself she could do serious harm to the baby. How would it affect Rebecca to grow up with a mother who screamed, “I’m not screaming”?

  “Right,” I said. “You’re not. You always know exactly what’s coming out of your own mouth, and whatever anybody else thinks he hears is an illusion.”

  “We don’t need to have a fight right now,” she said. “Unless you really want to.”

  “Maybe I do. You’re pissed off at me for not being in love with Erich, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m not. How could I be mad about something like that? Either you’re in love with somebody or you’re not.”

  “Oh, we three are more used to ambiguity than that,” I said. “Aren’t we? Tell me this. Do you think I’ve fucked up my life? Do you think there’s been something wrong about my being in love with you and Bobby and having a strictly sexual relationship with Erich?”

  “You’re saying that,” she said.

  “But I want to hear what you think. You think there’s something unfinished about me. Don’t you? You think Bobby and I are each half a man. That’s why you ended up with the two of us. Together we add up to one person in your eyes. Right?”

  “Stop this. You’re just upset, this isn’t a good time to try and talk.”

  “This isn’t what I asked for,” I said. “It’s just what happened. I don’t want you turning on me all of a sudden because of it. Clare, for God’s sake, I’m too scared.”

  She started to say, “I’m not—” but caught herself. “Oh, maybe I am,” she said. “I’m scared, too.”

  “I don’t have to love Erich just because he’s sick,” I said. “I don’t have to suddenly take responsibility for him.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

  “Shit, why did I have to invite him?”

  “Jonathan, honey,” she said. “Erich’s being here doesn’t make any difference. You sound as if you think he’s brought some sort of germ with him.”

  “Hasn’t he? I could go a full day without thinking about it before. Now I’ve lost that.”

  “You’re not making sense,” she said. “Well, you’re making crazy sense. I know what you’re saying. But don’t blame him. It isn’t his fault.”

  “I know,” I said miserably. “I know that.”

  My limitation was my own rationality. I was too balanced, too well behaved. Had I been a different sort of person I could have stormed through the house, shattering crockery and ripping pictures off the walls. It would not of course have solved anything, but there’d have been a voluptuous release in it—the only pleasure I could imagine just then. The idea of sex revolted me, as did the comfort of friends who knew their blood was sound. My one desire was to run screaming through the house, tearing down the curtains and splintering the furniture, smashing every pane of glass.

  “Try to sleep,” Clare said. “There’s no point in staying up worrying about it.”

  “I know. I’ll try.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She slipped her arm over my belly, and pulled me closer into her own nimbus of warmth and perfume. Bobby breathed softly on my other side. I knew I should have felt comforted and I almost did, but the actual sensation of comfort trembled just beyond my reach. I was in a remote place with people whose lives would continue unchanged if I died. I lay between Clare and Bobby, listening for Rebecca. If she awoke and cried, I’d go to her room and console her. I’d heat a bottle and hold her while she drank it. I lay listening for the first whimper, but she slept on.

  BOBBY

  I T WAS after midnight. The clouds had rolled past on their long journey to the Atlantic from the heart of the continent. The full moon blared freely through our bedroom window. As I crossed the moon-whitened floorboards I paused to look at Jonathan and Clare, asleep in the shadow of the dormer. She released her low snores, blowing soft, breathy bubbles. He lay with his head canted away from her, as if he was dreaming pure noise and didn’t want to disturb her sleep.

  I went down the hall and tapped on the door, but I didn’t wait for an answer. That room was on the moonless side of the house—it maintained a deeper darkness. I stood for a moment by the door, then whispered, “Erich?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “No. Well, no. I wasn’t, really.”

  “I just, you know. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”

  “I am,” he said. “This is a good bed.”

  His head was a spot of moving darkness at the edge of the bright quilt. I caught glints of him: his eyes, his domed forehead. The room didn’t smell of sickness.

  “It was Clare’s old bed,” I said. “Well, Clare’s and mine, for a while. Now it’s Jonathan’s and we have, you know, this other one.”

  “It’s a good bed. Not too soft. I always think they’re going to have soft beds in the country.”

  “Sometimes a mouse gets in here,” I said. “We keep saying we should trap it, but we never do. I’m not sure if we’re really, you know, thorough enough to be country people.”

  “The mice out here are probably cleaner,” he said. “They’re probably more like real animals.”

  A silence passed. After a moment, we heard the mouse scrabbling inside the wall. We laughed.

  “Do you have, like, people in New York to help take care of you?” I asked.

  “Well, there are volunteers,” he said. “If I get really really sick I can call one of those agencies.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My family’s written me off.”

  “They won’t help you?” I asked.

  “They don’t speak to me. I’m gone. My sister calls, but she wouldn’t want to be in a room with me. She thinks her kids could catch it.”

  “Do you still have your job?” I asked.

  “No. No, they laid me off a few weeks ago, after I was in the hospital with pneumonia.”

  “And your friends?”

  “A few of them have died in the last year. They just went like that , three people in, like, six months. The guy I’ve always thought of as my best friend is sicker than I am, he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t recognize people unless he’s having a very very good day.”

  “Are you scared?” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “
Yeah. Well, I would be, too.”

  He sighed. “And then sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It sort of comes and goes. But every minute is different now. Even when I’m not afraid, things are different. I feel—oh, I can’t explain it. Just different. I used to lose track of myself, you know. Like I didn’t have a body, like I was just, I don’t know, like I was the street I was walking on. Now I never lose track of myself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And, you know,” he said. “If I ever really thought about it, I pictured myself as being old and having no regrets. You know? I pictured something like a famous old man in bed with people around him, and him saying ‘I have no regrets.’ That’s really pretty silly, isn’t it? It’s really very silly.”

  “What do you regret, exactly?” I asked.

  “Oh, well. Nothing really, I guess. I mean, I did think I’d do more with my life than this. I just thought I had more time. And like I said, I thought I’d be famous and retire to a place like this.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, this wouldn’t be for everybody,” I said. “There’s only one movie theater. And no place to hear good music.”

  He laughed, a low sound with a rasp to it, like scraping a potato. You could hear his illness in his laugh. “I never really did those things in New York,” he said. “I just, well, I guess you’d have to say I’ve been gambling with my life. I guess you’d have to call it that. I was thinking things would somehow work out. I thought I just needed to work hard and have faith.”

  I walked over to the bed. I stood beside him, as the mouse went about its scratching inside the wall. “Um, hey, how about if I get in bed with you for a while?” I said.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t seem right for you to be alone here,” I said. “How about if I just got in under the covers with you for a little while?”

  “I don’t have any clothes on,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want to sleep with me because I’m sick?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Would you have wanted to if I wasn’t sick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Will you get out of here, please? Will you just get out of here?”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, offend you.”

  “I know you didn’t. But go. Please.”

  “Well. Okay,” I said.

  I left the room, and closed the door behind me. I felt a weight in my arms and legs, a stodgy sense of disappointment and nameless, floating embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to intrude on his privacy. I’d only wanted to hold him for a while, to guide his head to my chest. I’d only wanted to hold on to him as his body went through the long work of giving itself up to the past.

  JONATHAN

  E RICH came back the next weekend. I’m not sure why the invitation was issued or why it was accepted—none of us, Erich included, had seemed to have an especially good time. All day Sunday he’d been sulky and withdrawn. Still, when we took him to the train station Bobby asked, “Do you want to come back next weekend?” Erich hesitated, and then said all right. He said it in a flat, determined voice, as if laying claim to that which was rightfully his.

  As Bobby and I were driving home I asked, “Do you really want to have Erich back again so soon?”

  “Jon,” he said, “that guy needs some time in the country. Really, did you look at him?”

  For a moment it seemed Bobby did not yet understand the nature of Erich’s illness; he seemed to believe Erich was only stressed and overtired, in need of a good long rest. “He needs more than that, Bobby,” I said.

  “Well, a little time in the country is about all we can give him. He’s, like, a member of the family now. Whether we like it or not.”

  “The family,” I said. “You know, you’re going to drive me crazy with this shit.”

  He shrugged, and smiled ruefully, as if I was being petulant about a condition that clearly lay beyond anyone’s control. Erich was attached to us now, however tenuously, and in Bobby’s private economy we were obliged to offer everything we had.

  Erich returned the following Friday on the five o’clock train. By then he’d regained his polite, slightly squeaky enthusiasm, though now it was more prone to lapses. Bobby took the main responsibility for seeing to Erich’s comfort, and by the end of the second visit the two of them had embarked on a kind of courtship. Bobby was doggedly affectionate, and Erich accepted his ministrations with a wan and slightly irritable greed, like an indignant ghost come back to exact reparations from the living.

  Late Sunday afternoon I was in the kitchen with Clare and Rebecca. Clare sliced an avocado. Rebecca sat on the counter top, sorting through a set of plastic animal-shaped cookie cutters, and I stood alongside, to keep her from falling. Outside the window we could see Bobby and Erich sitting in the unruly grass, talking earnestly. Bobby made sweeping motions with his hands, indicating enormity, and Erich nodded without much conviction.

  “So, Bobby has a new love,” I said.

  “Don’t be nasty, dear,” Clare said. “It isn’t becoming in you.” She laid avocado slices on a plate, began peeling a Bermuda onion.

  “I just don’t feel like Erich needs to suddenly become our favorite charity,” I said. “He’s practically a stranger.”

  “We have room here for a stranger, don’t you think? It’s not like we lack for anything ourselves.”

  “So now you’re Mother Teresa?” I said. “This seems a little sudden.”

  She looked at me with an even-tempered calm that was more cogently accusing than any censure could have been. Something had happened to Clare. I couldn’t read her anymore—she’d given up her cynicism and taken on an opaque motherliness. We were still friends and domestic partners but we were no longer intimate.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just a rotten person.”

  She patted my shoulder. “Please don’t pat me,” I said. “You never used to pat me like this.”

  Rebecca, who had been droolingly contemplating a cookie cutter shaped like a moose, started to cry. Discord cut into her skin like a fine cord; she wept whenever anyone in her vicinity spoke in anger.

  “Hey, kid,” I said. “It’s okay, never mind about us.”

  I tried to take her in my arms but she didn’t want to be held by me. She insisted on being picked up by Clare, who walked with her into the living room while I finished slicing the onion.

  Eventually, Erich took up residence. He had nowhere else to go except his sparse, comfortless apartment in the East Twenties. He’d have endured his illness in the company of volunteers until he moved to whatever hospital beds were available to the unprosperous and the uninsured. Bobby insisted that he visit us often, and when the trip got to be too much for him he moved in for good. I offered my bedroom, claiming I’d learned to prefer sleeping downstairs. Taking Erich in was not a simple process. I resented him for being sick and at the same time felt compelled to treat him in ways I hoped to be treated if I fell ill myself. I practiced the tenderness I hoped I might inspire in others if my vigor leaked away and my body started to change. Sometimes I caught up with the feeling and experienced it, a flush and flutter of true
concern. Sometimes I only manifested it. After a period of resistance Erich agreed to take over my bed, and in doing so almost palpably relinquished a degree of participation in the ongoing, living world. This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventual move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates. Erich needed my room for the complex business of his dying. He was a private person and would not suffer well in the midst of our domestic traffic. So with a courteous and slightly aggrieved smile he allowed me to put him into my bed. I turned thirty-two the day after he arrived for the final time.

  We took him for walks in the woods, cooked meals that wouldn’t tax his system. He was an elderly spirit in the house, alternately courtly and short-tempered. Our grandfather might have come to live with us.

  Winter passed, spring came. The restaurant prospered. Rebecca cut new teeth, and discovered the lush possibility of saying no to whatever was asked of her. Erich declined unpredictably. His energy dwindled and returned, sometimes from hour to hour. He had intestinal trouble, fevers, a cloudiness of vision. His mind drifted occasionally—he could grow vague and forgetful. He made weekly trips to the hospital in Albany. On his best days he could walk into the woods with a basket, hunting mushrooms. On his worst days he lay curled in bed, neither discernibly awake nor asleep.

  I lived slightly apart, in the middle of everything. I would not have asked Erich to live with us but I couldn’t bring myself to actively wish him gone—I was too nervous about my own status as the house crank. I learned to find a chilly comfort in being good to Erich. It offered some obscure hope of appeasing the fates.

  One evening when I came home from the restaurant I found him sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. The sun had fallen behind the mountain. Violet shadows were gathering though the sky was still bright—we would always suffer early dusks in this house. Erich sat on the ancient wicker chair with an old blue blanket of mine pulled up to his neck, looking like a tubercular teenager. As his flesh grew gaunter, his appearance became more and more adolescent. His ribs stuck out, and his ears, hands, and feet came to seem too large for his body.