Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear how foolish I sound; how empty. But I am helpless before his questions. He might as well be an angel, posing riddles.

He sighs, a slow punctured hissing sound. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll start dinner.”

“Good, Dad,” I say, in a voice I hope comes out cheerful and cooperative. I check with myself—is it his night or mine to make dinner? This is Tuesday. His. I have got that right.

Only after he’s removed his shape from the doorway do I realize his questions were simple ones. He’s traded in his tortoiseshells for a racier model, and wants reassurance. I should follow him to the kitchen, start the conversation over. But I don’t do that. I collapse under the weight of my own self-interest, and permit myself a return to the music and the dark.

Sometime later, my father calls me to dinner. He has made chopped steak and squares of frozen hash browns. He sips Scotch from a glass decorated with pictures of orange slices round and evenly spoked as wagon wheels.

We eat for a while without talking. Once they’ve established themselves, our silences are hard to break. They are tough and seamless as shrink-wrap. Finally I say, “Those glasses look okay. I mean, I like them.”

“I think they’re probably a bit too young,” he says. “I suspect a man my age probably looks a little foolish in glasses like these.”

“Naw. All kinds of people wear that kind. They look fine.”

“Do you honestly think so?”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“Well,” he says. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to have a younger person’s opinion on the subject.”

“They do. They look, you know, real nice.”

“Good.”

Silverware clicks against the plates. I can hear the action of my father’s throat, swallowing.

For weeks now, he has been dyeing his hair. He is on a strand-by-strand agenda—every few days, he dyes a few more. In this way he hopes to present the change as natural, as if time had reversed itself against his personal will.

This is his solution—to age in big-collared shirts and leather vests, to try every combination of mustache, beard, and sideburns. I’ve seen him in the old courtship pictures, big-armed in T-shirts, a meandering, hard-drinking musician who bumped up against the limits of his own talent and fell in love with a farm woman, a widow who knew about seeds and harvest.

Then I remember. It comes to me: today is the anniversary. It is two years ago today.

He replenishes his drink from the Ballantine bottle and says, “Let me ask you another question.”

“Okay.”

“What would you think about a new car?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “Isn’t the one we’ve got okay?”

He sets his drink down hard enough to splash Scotch and a thumbnail-sized ice cube on the tabletop. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right. There is absolutely no need for change of any kind. I couldn’t agree more.”

The grandfather clock ticks. I say, “A new car would be okay, Dad.”

“I was just thinking about something a little snazzier,” he says. “Perhaps a foreign model, with a sunroof.”

“Uh-huh. Good.”

“Something that would let a little air in.”

“Yeah.”

We work our way through dinner. My father’s face is remote and optimistic as he eats. He is taking the gray out, hair by hair. His eyes swim behind the oval lenses of his new glasses.

She left by slow degrees before making it official. She lived in the guest room, made rare silent appearances in a pale turquoise robe. Once, when she passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, she stopped long enough to stroke my hair. She didn’t speak. She looked at me as if she was standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world.

After my father and I found her he made the calls and we sat together, he and I, in the empty living room. We left her alone—it seemed like the polite thing to do. We sat quietly, waiting for the police and the paramedics to arrive. We didn’t speak.

In the dining room, the autumn farm scene hasn’t changed. Cows still cast orange shadows, trees still sprout yellow leaves. My father nibbles demurely at his steak, doesn’t touch the square potatoes. I finish my dinner, take my plate to the kitchen and add it to the pile. An enormous fly, iridescent, roams ecstatically over a quarter moon of yellowed lamb fat. The curtains still sport blue teapots.

Later, after my father has gone to bed, I get up and walk around. I took a hit of Dexedrine after school, thinking I might clean up the house, but I fell into music instead. Two joints haven’t dulled the speed enough to allow anything like sleep, so once my father has killed the bottle and settled into bed, I take a walk through the rooms, my head crackling and blazing like a light bulb. Under the gathering disorder is a perfect replica of a house, like the period reproductions they put together in small-town museums. Here is their living room, a cherry-red sofa once considered brash, and an old copper washtub, where logs would be kept if fires were built in the hearth. Here is the front door, yellow oak with a single frosted-glass window through which strangers can be seen but not identified. And here is the rumpus room, paneled, with a rag rug like a bull’s-eye on the brown linoleum floor.

After the accident, my father tried to sell the house. But in six months the single interested party offered slightly more than half the market value. This section of Cleveland was not a growth proposition.

Music plays inside my head. I walk down the hall to my father’s door. My head is an illuminated radio—for a moment I believe the music will wake him up. I stand in front of his door, watching the grain of the wood. I open the door and creep inside.

My father breathes noisily. His digital clock flips the red seconds away. I stand, just stand, with time passing on the bedside table. My head plays “Aqualung.” At that moment, I get the point of psycho killers. I could take his head in my hands, stroke his dead-black hair. I could punch him and feel his teeth break like sugar cubes, hear them scatter on the floor. I get it about the dark silence of the world, and your own crackling internal light and noise. I get the space-suit feeling.

I could have come to murder my father. Now, right now, I could sneak up and press a pillow over his face. He’s too drunk to fight. I can see myself doing it. The movie plays inside my head, with Jethro Tull on the sound track. A snow-white pillow and my own body pinning his; a brief struggle and then the rapture of the drowned. Aqualung my friend, don’t you start away uneasy.

Or I could plant a kiss on his worried head. He’s drunk enough to sleep through that, too. I could crawl into bed with him and lose myself in the musky warmth, the smells of Scotch and underarm and British Sterling. I stand a minute beside his bed, considering the possibilities.

What I finally do is leave. I go out of my father’s room, down the hall, and through the front door into the starry, streetlighted Cleveland night.

The Glovers live less than a mile away, in a house with diamond-pane windows. A white-wicker swing sways creakily on the front porch, crisp as frozen lace. I watch their house from among the irises. It is early June; flowers whisper around my knees. Careful as a thief I survey their property, keeping to the shadows. There is the light in Jonathan’s window, a feeble ivory glow from the gooseneck lamp beside his bed. He is reading John Steinbeck for school, and will tell me the story afterward. I creep behind a mulberry tree. Kitchen light throws a long rectangle onto the grass as Alice dries the spoons and the measuring cups. I can’t see her but I know her moves—she is fast and certain as science itself, though she cares more about perfection than she does about order. The cast-iron skillets are always oiled, but the Sunday paper still sits in the living room on a Wednesday night. The Glovers keep a nourishing, semi-clean house that has little to do with neatness. Things catch and hold here.