A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Okay,” he answered. “Not too bad.”

  A formality prevailed between us, just as it had when we were sleeping together. We were courteous and remote. We continued to act as if we had recently met.

  “Bobby’s staying late at work,” I said. “Marlys had some kind of women’s thing to go to, so Bobby’s doing the pies for tomorrow. Are Clare and Rebecca around?”

  “They’re in the house,” he said.

  “I’m going to go get Rebecca. Maybe I’ll bring her out here for a while, okay?”

  “Okay. Jonathan?”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “This is going to be, you know, hard for me to say. But I’ve been thinking. Do you ever, well, wonder about us? I mean, about you and me.”

  “I think about us,” I said. “Sure I do.”

  “I don’t mean just think . I don’t just mean that. I mean, well, do you ever wonder why we always held back? It seems like we could have done so much more to make each other happy.”

  Even in an extreme condition, such direct talk was hard on him. His fingers kneaded the edge of the blanket, and his foot tapped dryly against the wicker chair leg.

  “Well, we had a certain kind of relationship,” I said. “It was pretty much what we both wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess so. I guess it was. But lately I’ve been wondering, you know. I’ve been wondering, what were we waiting for?”

  “I suppose we were waiting for our real lives to start. I think we probably made a mistake.”

  He drew a ragged breath. At the exact center of the web that stretched between the newel posts, a pretty yellow spider hung motionless.

  “We did make a mistake,” he said. “I mean, I think we probably did. I think I was in love with you, and I couldn’t admit it. I was, I don’t know. Too afraid to admit it. And now it just seems like such a waste.”

  I stood on the weathered boards atop my own purple shadow. I looked at him. He had an ancient, utterly dignified quality at that moment, an aspect neither old nor young, neither male nor female. His body was invisible under the thick folds of the blanket, and his eyes were brilliant in his colorless face. He could have been a sphinx posing a riddle.

  I believed I knew the answer. Erich and I were never in love; we weren’t meant to be lovers. We had missed no romantic opportunity. Instead we’d hidden out together, in our good sex and undemanding companionship. We’d kept one another afloat while we waited. We might have been servants, two chaste balding men who’d given up their lives to vague ideals of obedience and order.

  But I said, “I think I was probably in love with you, too.”

  I didn’t want him to die untouched. If he died in that condition I might have to, too.

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  I thought of my father in the desert, receiving nothing from me but empty reassurances. He had died on his way back from the mailbox, with a handful of catalogues and flyers. I’d had a letter for him, in my pocket.

  “Yes, you are,” Erich said.

  I hesitated. Then I told him, “No, really. I think I was probably in love with you.”

  He nodded, in a cold fury. He was not comforted. An early moth, so white it was nearly translucent, more an agitation of air than a physical presence, whirred past.

  “We could have done better than this, you and I,” he said. “What was the matter with us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We didn’t move or speak for at least a minute. We stared at each other in furious disbelief. “We’re cowards,” I said at last. “This wasn’t a dramatic mistake we made. It was just a stupid little one that got out of hand. What do they call them? Sins of omission.”

  “I think maybe that’s what bothers me most.”

  “Me, too,” I said. And then, because there was nothing more to say, I went into the house to find Rebecca.

  CLARE

  E RICH brought something new into the house. Or maybe he conjured up something old. Something that had been there all along. He rattled down the halls, skimmed failing breath from the dusty air. The plain facts of illness and death can seem remote as long as you don’t smell the immaculate chalk of the medicines. As long as you don’t see skin turning the color of clay.

  Being a mother made certain things impossible, things I could have done almost without thinking in my other life. I couldn’t deny Erich what he needed and at the same time I couldn’t embrace him. I found that more or less against my will I’d become capable only, singularly, of protection. I suppose it was sentimental, though I didn’t taste anything like sentiment in my mouth. I felt hard and clinical, glacial. For the first time I didn’t think about myself. A district in my brain, that which I’d thought of as me , seemed to have been sucked clean. In its place was this steady uninflected drive to do what was needed. I fed Erich while the boys were at work, saw that he took his medicine, helped him to the toilet on the days he needed help. I spoke kindly to him. Nothing could have stopped me from doing that. But I didn’t care about him. In a sense our relations were strictly business. I cared only, truly, for Rebecca, who was alive and growing. Erich had already passed partway out of the world. While his comfort and safety were vitally important to me his existence was not. Now I better understand why mothers appear so often in stories as saints or as monsters. We are not human in the ordinary sense, at least not when our children are very small. We become monsters of care, inexorable, and if we occasionally lose track of the finer, imperishable points of the soul while ministering to the fragile body, that can’t be helped.

  I was alone most days with Rebecca and Erich. Now that the boys had Marlys and Gert they were able to get home more often. But, still, the bulk of my time was spent with a two-year-old and a dying man.

  I rented movies and poured juice. I began toilet training Rebecca, and occasionally changed Erich’s soiled sheets. He had passable days and worse days. On the bad ones he could be cranky with me. He could suddenly say “I hate apple juice, I’m just so sick of it, don’t they have any other kind at the market?” He could complain about the movies I brought home. “Mrs. Miniver ? God, is this all they had left?”

  But he never lost patience with Rebecca. Sometimes, on the days he stayed in bed, the two of them watched videos together. I brought home Dumbo, Snow White , and anything involving the Muppets. Erich liked those movies, too. He didn’t charm Rebecca as thoroughly as Jonathan did, but he held her interest. He had a singular ability to focus, and I suspect she felt secure with him. He could so perfectly imitate a man who was good with children. He let her boss him around. He performed, on demand, a particular spastic dance with a stuffed monkey she had mysteriously named Shippo while she turned a doll named Baby Lou upside-down and waggled its stiff plastic legs in the air. He agreed to all the games she invented, many of which involved passing a rubber dinosaur back and forth while reciting a long, ever-changing list of demands. He could do the voice of Kermit the Frog, which she seemed to find hilarious and slightly upsetting.

  Sometimes when I brought them a snack I found them sitting together on Erich’s bed, watching television, with toys scattered everywhere. Sometimes I h
ad to catch my breath at the sight of them like that, Rebecca chattering and walking one of her miniature farm animals over Erich’s skinny knee or Erich absent-mindedly stroking her hair as they both watched cartoons. No matter how he felt on a given day, he was always attentive to my daughter. His powers of concentration were formidable. He seemed to have taken on a project: never to show this little girl any unpleasant or mean-spirited behavior, never to be anything but pliant and companionable in her presence. He was different from Jonathan. He didn’t love her. He liked her well enough. Being good with her was one of the organizing principles around which he built his days. He made it his job.

  At first I felt it as a vague unrest that fluttered around in my belly, halfway between nausea and pain. I believed at times that I was developing an ulcer, or worse, though the doctor told me it was just anxiety. Finally, after several months, I realized. I was coming to a decision. Or a decision was coming to me. It was growing inside me, almost against my conscious will.

  It didn’t reach its finished state until an afternoon in May, as I was taking a nap with Rebecca. She’d grown balky about naps, and would lie down in the afternoons only if I took her into Bobby’s and my bed and read to her from one of her books. She was almost two and a half then. She’d developed obsessions with several books, including one about a rabbit saying good night to every article in his bedroom and another about a pig who finds a magic bone. We’d read both books twice, and drifted off to sleep together. I woke twenty minutes later to the sound of Rebecca’s voice. She lay beside me, telling herself a story. This, too, was a recent habit. She could talk to herself for hours. I lay quietly, listening.

  “I go to the store,” she said. “I got a talking bone . The girl never saw it before. She picked up the bone and went to Bunny’s house. And Bunny was there, and Jonathan was there. And they said, ‘My, my, my, what a fine little kitty.’ And Jonathan took the bone. He said, ‘Now I’m going to make something good with this.’ And he made… porridge . It was very very good. And Bunny said, um, and then Mommy and Bobby and Erich said. And I gave Erich some salad, because he was sick. And Jonathan had some, too. And then it was night, and Bunny had to go to bed. And then it was the next day, and the kitty is going to town. ‘My my my,’ the kitty said. Just imagine his surprise.”

  As I lay listening to her, my chest constricted in panic. I could feel the heat rising to my face. I couldn’t tell at first why I was unnerved by what I heard. It was only Rebecca’s usual stream of consciousness, the kind of babbling I’d been hearing from her for over a month. But slowly, while lying on the bed with her, I figured it out. She was coming into herself. She was emerging from her foggy self-involvement and beginning to comprehend the independent life of other people. Soon she’d leave her disembodied child-world. She’d remember things. She was a camera getting ready to shoot. Click a brown house with a blue door. Click her favorite toys. Click Jonathan coming to get her in the mornings. She’d carry those images around for the rest of her life.

  What if she came into her full consciousness as Erich died and Jonathan started to get sick? What would it do to her if her earliest memories revolved around the decline and eventual disappearance of the people she most adored?

  One morning a few weeks later I was in bed with Rebecca, Bobby, and Jonathan. It was an ordinary morning. Rebecca had woken up in a good humor, and was telling herself an elaborate story about Bunny and a flying elephant. In a moment Bobby would shuffle downstairs to start the coffee. Erich was still asleep down the hall and Jonathan sat beside me with the sheet pulled over his chest.

  Bobby said, “After work I’ve got to replace some shingles. Did you see how many have blown off? That roof has about, like, had it.”

  “We should just get a new one,” I said. “Let’s start calling roofers.”

  “When the place is more or less in shape,” Jonathan said, “I want to have my mother out again. I figure she’d have an easier time believing in my life if she saw more of it.”

  “Parents, parents,” I said. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I should really take Miss Rebecca to Washington for a few days, to see my mother.”

  Bobby got up to make the coffee, a half second before I knew he was going to. “Why not, you know, invite her up here?” he said.

  “Because she’s sixty-five and not the least bit liberal. Believe me, you don’t want Amelia up here, going on about our life-style. That’s what she thinks we have. Not a life. A life-style.”

  “Don’t you think she’d better get used to it?” Jonathan said.

  “Sweetheart, my mother hasn’t gotten used to my having breasts yet. The sight of me naked still makes her uneasy. Trust me. It’s better to take Rebecca down there for a few days.”

  “Well, you know, if you need to,” Bobby said, and went off on his morning errand.

  “Only a few days,” Jonathan said. “Right? Like two or three?”

  I nodded, and stroked Rebecca’s hair. I wondered if she might feel the tension in my hand, and start crying. But she babbled on, undisturbed. Our inner deceits don’t create much residue in this world.

  I only half knew what I was up to. It didn’t become a plan until I found myself doing it, and then it seemed I was following a procedure I’d known about for months or even years. I packed Rebecca’s things: her clothes and a few essential toys, her stroller and high chair. As Jonathan helped me load the car he said, “Honey, you’re only going for a few days. Not till the millennium.”

  “I want to be prepared,” I said. “It’s important to avoid shopping with my mother at all costs. If I run out of diapers, she’ll take me to Saks.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” Jonathan said. He wore a denim jacket with Albert Einstein’s gentle white face pinned to the lapel. A swarm of reddish-black tulips had sprouted on the lawn. A crazy meadowlark whose nest was nearby raged at us from the lowest branches of the oak. I lifted the stroller into the trunk, and Jonathan arranged the diaper bag around it.

  “Guilt,” I said. “Even my guilt over my mother’s money feels decadent sometimes. It’s better to just avoid it. Not get myself into a position where she can buy me a five-hundred-dollar dress that makes me look like an astronaut’s wife. It’s better to just lay in supplies and stay home with her.”

  I wondered if I was explaining too much. I didn’t want to sound like a criminal whose alibi is suspiciously perfect, her movements too intricately accounted for.

  “Whatever you say,” he answered. There was no mistrust in his voice.

  He closed the lid of the trunk. “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  In another moment, Bobby would come out of the house with Rebecca. I reached over and took hold of Jonathan’s sleeve.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, you know. I’m sorry I’m such a coward about my mother. Next time I’ll bring her up here. You’re right. She’s going to have to get used to it.”

  “Well, parents are tough. Believe me, I know about that,” he said.

  “I’m just really sorry,” I said. I could hear the possibility of tears in my own voice.

  “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  At that moment, I felt sure he knew. I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.

  He gave me a reassuring little squeeze. “Silly old Clare,” he said. “Good old crazy thing.” In fact, he didn’t know. He still hadn’t develope
d the habit of loss. He believed his life would get fatter and fatter. Maybe that was the fundamental flaw in his perception. Maybe that’s what prevented him from falling in love.

  “Oh, quit with that ‘good old crazy thing’ shit, all right? I’m an adult. I’m not some playmate of yours.”

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  “Really, Jonathan, I just wish you’d—”

  “What? You wish I’d what?”

  “I don’t know. How long do you plan on being a boy? All your life?”

  “As opposed to becoming a girl?” he said.

  “As opposed to…oh, never mind. I’m being a bitch today. I could feel it the minute I woke up.”

  “Listen, will you call me when you get there? So I know you’re okay?”

  “Sure. Of course I will.”

  We stood for a moment, looking around at the scenery as if we were new to it. As if we had just stepped out of our Winnebago to stretch our legs and marvel at this particular stretch of a national park.

  “Aren’t things supposed to be simpler than this?” I asked.

  “Bobby says it’s a new world. He says we can do anything we can imagine.”

  “That’s because Bobby’s a deluded asshole. I mean that only in the most complimentary sense.”

  I realized I was still holding on to the sleeve of Jonathan’s jacket. When I let go, the denim held the shape of my grip.