Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Jonathan sat on the floor with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands clasped over his shins. He had sat in just that way since the age of four—it was a sulking posture. I saw, perhaps for the first time, how the nascent man had always been folded up inside the boy. He would carry those same gestures with him right into adulthood. It surprised me a little, though it was the most ordinary of insights. I had rather imagined Jonathan transformed as an adult, appearing one day as a kind, solicitous stranger. I saw that I had been both right and wrong about that.

Bobby picked up the album cover and held it out to me, as if I had come to consider buying it. “This is it,” he said. When I took it from him his face flushed, either with pride or with embarrassment.

The album cover was dark, a murky chocolate color. It depicted a rather plain-looking woman with a high, pale forehead and limp black hair parted in the middle. She might have been a poetic, unpopular student at a girls’ school, more an object of pity than of ridicule. I’d known such girls well enough. I’d felt in danger of becoming one myself, and so had forced myself to change. To speak up and take risks, to date boys you couldn’t take home to mother. Ned Glover had driven down from Michigan in an electric-blue convertible, a suave, humorous man far too old for me.

“Lovely,” I said. “She has such a pretty voice.”

It sounded exactly like the response of a prim middle-aged woman. I handed the album cover back quickly, as if it cost far more than I could afford.

“She quit singing,” Bobby said. “She got married and, like, moved to Connecticut or something.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

We stood there awkwardly, like strangers at a party. I could feel the force of Jonathan’s desire impelling me from the room. It registered physically, a pressure on my forehead and shoulders. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for letting an old lady barge in.”

“Sure,” Bobby said. One song had ended and another begun, a faster number I thought I recognized. Yes. “Jimmy Mack,” once sung by Martha and the Vandellas.

“I know this one,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard it before.”

“Yeah?” Bobby said.

And then he did something peculiar. He started to dance.

I can only think that language ran out on him, and he resorted to what he knew. He did it automatically, as if it were a logical extension of the conversation. He started swaying his hips in rhythm, and shifting his feet. His sneakers squeaked on the floorboards.

“Yes, indeed,” I said. “This is an ancient one.”

I glanced at Jonathan, who looked startled. He returned my glance, and for a moment we found our old complicity again. We were united in our consternation over the habits of the local people. I half expected that once we were alone together, he might do an imitation of Bobby—dancing big-shouldered and dim-faced—just to make me laugh.

But then Bobby took my hand and pulled me gently forward. “Come on,” he said.

“Oh, no. Absolutely not.”

“Can’t take no,” he said cheerfully. He did not let go of my hand.

“ No, ” I said again. But my refusal lacked force. Perhaps it was my Southern upbringing; my inbred determination to avoid social unpleasantness at any cost. I laughed a little as I said no, without quite having meant to.

He turned with me gently, moving in rhythm. He was a better dancer than his ordinary manner let on. I’d been quite a dancer myself as a girl—it was one of the resolutions I’d made, a salient feature of the person I’d meant to become—and I recognized the signs. There were boys you knew you could trust on the dance floor; you knew it almost instantly, more by feel than by appearance. Certain dancers imparted to the air itself a sense of confidence and inevitability. They had a generous grace that took you in; they told you just by the touch of their hands that you were incapable of making a wrong move. Bobby was that kind of dancer. I could not have been more surprised if he’d snapped a flock of live pigeons from under his pin-striped cuffs.

I responded. I took his other hand and danced with him as well as I could in that cramped room, under the disapproving eyes of my son and the sullen stares of the rock singers. Bobby smiled shyly. The woman’s voice ran through the notes with sorrowful abandon, like somebody’s gawky cousin set briefly, deliriously free.

After the song had ended I took back my hands and touched my hair. “Lord,” I said. “Look what you drove an old lady to do.”

“You’re good,” Bobby said. “You can dance.”

“Used to. In the early Pleistocene.”

“Naw,” he said. “Come on.”

I looked again at Jonathan, and saw what I expected: all sense of complicity was burned out of his face. He stared at me not so much with resentment as with nonrecognition, as if I were someone who only resembled his mother.

“Stroke of midnight,” I said. “Love to stay, but I’ve got sheets to fold.”

I got quickly out of the room. In less than a minute the melancholy woman had been replaced by a driving male voice and a cacophony of electric guitars.

Ned came home late that night, after I’d gone to sleep. I awoke and found him beside me, breathing deeply and frowning over a dream. I lay on my side watching him for a while. Ned had once been a boy. Perhaps the fact had never quite impressed itself on me, though of course I’d seen the pictures: little Ned grinning under an oversized bowler hat, Ned scrawny and big-footed in sandals at the beach. I had personally packed a carton of his iron cars and lead soldiers into the attic. Still, I’d never fully apprehended it. This man here was what grew from a boy. He had been twenty-six and I seventeen when we met; by my lights he’d been middle-aged even then. He might have been born an adult. Those pictures and toys might have been the artifacts of a boy who had died young, the former inhabitant of an old house who took his sense of limitless possibility out of the world with him when he went. What remained was china stored behind glass and the patience of African violets—an unhurried elderly life. But now, as if for the first time, lying beside Ned, I could see the boyish crook of his elbow under the pillow, the young muscles of a chest gone hairy and slack. Poor thing, I thought. Poor boy.

I reached over to stroke his shoulder. I might have kissed him. I might have let my hand stray down to the lush tangle of his chest. But my new sense of his innocent beauty was still too delicate. If he awoke and kissed me hard, if he mauled my ribs, it might collapse altogether. So I contented myself with watching him, and petting the soft, furred mound of his shoulder.

MY FATHER has bought himself a new pair of glasses—aviator style, with spindly pink-gold rims. He comes to my bedroom door and poses there, one elbow crooked jauntily against the frame.

“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks.

“Huh?” I say. I’ve been lying in the dark with the headphones on, smoking a joint and listening to Jethro Tull. The music has scooped out my thoughts and I need a few minutes to reenter the world of cause and effect.

“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks again.

“I don’t know,” I answer eventually. He will have to give me more time with the question.

My father points to his head. He is standing in light. Hundred-watt rays stream around him, cut through the dusk of my room.

What do I think of his head? It is in fact an expansive question, probably beyond my scope.

“Well,” I say. I let the syllable hang.

“My glasses,” he says. “Bobby, I got new glasses today.”

A stitch of time passes. He says, “What do you think? Are they a little young for me?”