Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“He’s still young,” Ned said. “You never know what’ll happen in a year or so.”

Burt said, “Whatever he chooses is all right with me. I wouldn’t interfere in his life. Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it. He’s got to do his own thing.”

“I guess,” Ned said. “They’ve all got to do their own things, don’t they?”

Burt nodded, pulling deeply at his Pall Mall as if sucking up the stuff of life itself. “Certainly,” he said sagely. “Certainly they do.”

It was his use of the word “certainly” that got to me. It made him sound so like a precocious child left in our care.

“They do not,” I said emphatically, “have to do their own thing. ”

“Well,” said Burt, “as long as they don’t hurt anybody—”

“Burt,” I said. “When Jonathan entered into a relationship with your son he was a sweet, open-natured boy, and now three years later he’s turned into someone I scarcely recognize. He’d been a straight-A student and by the time Bobby was through with him he was lucky to get into any college at all.”

Burt blinked at me through his own smoke. Ned said, “Now, Alice…”

“Oh, pipe down,” I said to him. “I just want to ask Burt here one question. I want to ask him what I did wrong.”

Burt said, “I don’t imagine you did anything wrong.”

“Then what am I doing here?” I asked. I had begun tapping my glass with my fingernail. I heard the steady rhythmic tapping as if it were an annoying sound being made by someone else. I said, “Why am I living in a city I despise? How did I end up with a son who hates me? I seemed to be doing just one thing and then the next, it all felt logical at the time, but sitting here at this moment, it all seems so impossible.”

“Well,” said Burt, swallowing smoke. I could still hear my fingernail tapping the glass.

“We just set out to be a family,” I told him. “We had every good intention.”

“Well,” said Burt. “Things will work out. You’ve got to have faith.”

“Faith is something the young can afford. I’ve read all the great books, and I’m not pretty anymore.”

“Whoa there,” Ned said. “If you’re not pretty I don’t know what half the men in the room have been staring at.”

“Don’t you patronize me,” I told him. “Don’t you dare. You’re welcome to resent me or despise me or feel bored silly by me, but don’t patronize me like I was some kind of little wife. It’s the one thing I won’t have. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

Ned, without speaking, put his hand over mine to silence the tapping of my nail against the glass. I looked at his face.

“Ned.”

I said only that, his name.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll pay for the drinks and go home.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s nothing,” he assured me. “We’ve had an emotional day. Our only son just graduated from high school.”

He kept his hand on mine. I looked across the table at Burt, who had fixed upon me a look of direct, dreadful understanding.

After Jonathan left for New York, Bobby got his own apartment in an austere limestone building across town. He enrolled in culinary school and worked nights as a waiter. He began to talk of our opening a restaurant together.

“A family place,” he said. “I think a restaurant would be a good business to go into, don’t you? We could all work there.”

I allowed as how I might make a passable dishwasher.

“You’ll be the head cook,” he said. “It’ll be, like, the only true Southern-style place in Ohio?”

Soon he was making dinners for Ned and me at our house. He did become a good cook, and seemed to have some cogent ideas about financing a restaurant.

I told him if he wanted to open a place on his own, I’d be his first customer, but to count me out as head cook. He smiled as he had when we first met years before—a smile that implied I had just switched over to a language he didn’t speak.

That winter I found a job myself, as a secretary in a real estate office. We needed the money. Ned’s theater was faring worse than ever, now that so many malls had established themselves on the outskirts. People avoided downtown after dark. The theater flashed its pink neon on an avenue where streetlights offered only small puddles of illumination; where nude mannequins smiled behind the dark glass of an extinct department store.

Although my secretarial job was nothing exalted or even especially interesting, I enjoyed having a daily destination so much that I began to dread the weekends. In my spare time I started an herb garden in the back yard.

Bobby met me occasionally for lunch downtown, since his cooking school was not far from the office in which I worked. He had grown rather handsome, in a conventional fine-featured way, and I must admit I took pleasure in meeting him at crowded restaurants, where the din of all those hungry wage-earners put an edge on the air.

Over our lunches, Bobby spoke with great animation about the restaurant business. At some undeterminable point he had ceased imitating a clean, personable young man and had actually become one, save for odd moments when his eyes glowed a bit too brightly and his skin took on a sweaty sheen. At those times he put me in mind of a Bible salesman, one of the excruciatingly cordial Southern zealots I knew well enough from my girlhood. In his excitement Bobby could take on that quality but he always caught himself, laughed apologetically, and lowered his voice, actually appeared to retract the sweat back into his pores, so that the effect finally was boyish and charming, a young dangerousness being brought under control.

I confessed my worries to him, and indulged myself every now and then in a complaint or two about my own situation, since I hated to burden Ned. His asthma had grown much worse as business declined, and he had started drinking a bit.

Bobby said numberless times, “I’ll find backers and have the restaurant going in another year, two at the most. We can all run it. Everything will turn out all right.”

I told him, “That’s easy for you to say. You’re young.”

“You’re young, too,” he said. “I mean, you’re young for your age? You’ll love being head chef, wait and see.”

“I am not going to be head anything.”

“Yes you will. You’ll want to when you see the place I’m going to build for you. Come on, Alice? Tell me you’re behind me, and I’ll build the best restaurant in Ohio.”

A man at the next table glanced our way. He was fiftyish, trim and successful-looking in a slate-colored suit. I could see the question in his eyes: older woman, severe of face but not utterly through with her own kind of beauty, lunching with avid, handsome young man. For a moment I followed the thread of his imagination as he saw Bobby and me out of the restaurant and up to a rented room where afternoon light slanted in through the blinds.

Bobby leaned forward, his big hands splayed on the tabletop. I reached out and lightly touched his broad, raw fingers with my own.

“All right,” I said. “If you’re really all that determined to start a restaurant, count me in. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“Good,” he said, and his eyes actually glowed with the possibility of tears.

He opened his restaurant less than a year later. Perhaps he’d been too much in a rush. If he’d waited until he knew more about the business, he might have done better. But he kept insisting he was ready, and I can only speculate whether Ned’s dwindling fortunes had any bearing on Bobby’s own sense of urgency. He got backing from a rather dubious-looking character named Beechum, a man with cottony hair brushed forward over his bald spot and several heavy silver-and-turquoise rings on his thin white fingers. This Beechum owned, or claimed to own, a prosperous string of coin laundries, and envisioned, or so Bobby said, similar success in the realm of Southern cooking.