Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

WE WERE half-lovers. Together we occupied love’s bright upper realm, where people delight in otherness, cherish their mates’ oddities, and wish them well. Because we were not lovers in the fleshly sense we had no use for the little murders. Clare and I told our worst secrets and admitted to our most foolish fears. We ate dinner and went shopping together, assessed the qualities of men who passed on the streets. Looking back, I think we were like the sisters in old stories; the stories in which the pretty younger girl can’t marry until somebody claims the older, less attractive one. In our case, though, we were both sisters at once. We shared a life of clothes and gossip and self-examination. We waited, with no particular urgency, to see whether someone would claim one of us for the other, more terrifying kind of love.

For three years we’d lived together in a sixth-floor walk-up on East Third Street between Avenues A and B, where Puerto Rican women argued in Spanish and drug dealers moved perpetually in and out of basement apartments. Drugged, heartbreakingly beautiful boys danced to enormous radios on the corner. We lived there because it was cheap, and because—we’d admitted this one drunken night—it struck us as more interesting than the safer parts of the city. I’d further confessed that I considered this neighborhood a source of anecdotes to be told in the better life that was still to come. When I’d said this, Clare had looked at me skeptically and said, “Belief in the future is a disreputable virtue, don’t you think? It’s sort of like building ships in bottles. You know? Admirable, but in a creepy kind of way.”

Clare was thirty-six, eleven years older than I. She lived according to several assumptions, which she held with quiet but unremitting ferocity. She believed that James M. Cain was the greatest American writer, that society had reached its pinnacle in the late nineteen-thirties, and that there were no men left for a woman of her age and peculiarities. When contested on the final point, she replied in a tone of willing but nearly exhausted patience, like a good teacher facing her ten thousandth unpromising student. “Eliminate the following,” she said, counting on her fingers. “Gay men. Married men. Men under the age of twenty-five. Men over the age of twenty-five who are only interested in young, beautiful women. Men who are still available because they can’t commit to anyone. Men who are just plain assholes. Rapists and psycho killers. All right, now. Who’s left?”

She conducted her daily affairs with ironic good cheer, like the second banana in a thirties comedy. Like a survivor of a war, who still wears heels and lipstick to walk among the wreckage.

When she grew depressed, we talked about having a baby together. Clare had already gotten through a marriage, an abortion, dozens of lovers, and three changes of career. I was three years out of college, writing a food column for a weekly newspaper, certain only of my lust for the man I called my lover. At night our street glittered with broken glass. Every morning an enormous Hispanic woman passed under our windows, singing loud sentimental love songs on her way to work.

One morning in early spring, when a single pale ivy leaf had worked its way between the crosspieces of the burglar-proof grate on the kitchen window, Clare sighed into her coffee and said, “Maybe I’ll have my hair dyed back to its normal color. Don’t you think a woman of a certain age should stop trying to look eccentric?”

She wore a kimono from a thrift store, not a delicate watery silk but a garish, lipstick-red rayon that must have been bought new in Hawaii or Las Vegas five years earlier. Clare was not beautiful, and claimed to be opposed to beauty in general.

“No,” I said. “I think a woman of a certain age has all the more right.” I stood in the doorway, because our kitchen accommodated only one person at a time.

“The difference between thirty-six and twenty-five,” she said, “is that at twenty-five you can’t look pathetic. Youth is the one overriding excuse. You can try anything out, do anything at all to your hair, and walk around looking perfectly fine. You’re still thinking yourself up, so it’s okay. But you get a little older, and you find your illusions starting to show.”

“Is this going to be another Black Saturday?” I asked.

“Early to tell.”

“Let’s not. It’s so pretty out. Let’s go shopping and see a movie instead of contemplating suicide.”

“When we have the baby,” she said, “what sort of hair do you think it’ll have?”

“What color is yours supposed to be?”

“Lord, I’d have to think way back. A sort of dull dark brown, I think. Salesgirl hair.”

“Maybe the kid would get my coloring,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s surprising what weak but determined genes can do.”

She sipped her coffee. “To be perfectly frank,” she said, “I have a feeling my black Rumanian ancestors would swarm all over your pensive Swedish ones.”

“Is that what you’d want? A miniature version of yourself?”

“Lord, no. Another me? We’d hate each other. I’d want the kid to have your intelligence, for one thing.”

“Don’t be coy,” I said. “You’re plenty smart.”

“If I were all that smart,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’d be thirty-six years old, standing in a teensy little kitchen trying to think of the best way to have a baby without falling in love.”

We kept talking about the baby. We did not make plans, but we talked a good deal. That was our way together. We’d had other ideas in the past: we’d talked about starting a breakfast-in-bed catering service, and about moving to the coast of Spain. We always discussed the particulars of these actions in such detail that eventually we crossed an invisible line and began to feel as if we had already performed them; our talk ultimately took on an aspect of reverie. We had practiced getting eggs Benedict from Third Street to upper Park Avenue in a steam cabinet (they arrived a congealed mess); we’d bought travel guides and cassettes that taught conversational Spanish. I did not expect the baby to be any different.

“I like the name Ethan for a boy,” I said. “Or Trevor.”

“Honey, please,” she said. “No fancy names. If it’s a boy let’s call it Jon Junior. If it’s a girl, how about Mary or Ann?”

“Why not Clare Junior?”

“I told you. I want her to be different from me.”

Clare’s rival was her own image, the elaborate personality she’d worked out for herself. She lived at a shifting, troubled distance from her ability to be tough and salty and “interesting.” When her gestures were too perfectly executed she could be slightly grotesque—practiced and slick. I saw how it troubled her. Sometimes she embraced her persona with palpable defiance, looking out at the world as if to say That’s right, so what ? Sometimes she frightened herself. She had grown so adept it was hard for her to act out of character.

Still, she’d led what I considered to be a full, interesting life, and I disliked hearing her self-disparagements. She’d been married to a dancer now living in West Berlin whose troupe periodically played New York to extravagant acclaim. She’d been the lover of a semi-famous woman author. She’d taken heroin and opium, and enough Dexedrine to require treatment at a clinic in Baltimore. My own life, compared to hers, seemed timid and cautious. I hated to think that either choice—an oversized, dangerous life or a comfortable wage-earning one—led eventually to the same vague itch; the same conviction that the next generation must improve its lot.

“What do you think about punishment?” I asked.