Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“Personally? Or for the baby?”

“The baby.”

“I wouldn’t hit her,” she said. “I couldn’t. Oh, I don’t know. I’d probably be one of those mothers who get huffy and disappointed, and the kid wishes you’d just haul off and smack him and get it over with.”

Clare worked for a jeweler on St. Marks Place. She had a genius for putting odd things together—she made earrings and brooches out of rhinestones, broken glass, rusted tin, and tiny plastic figures from dime stores. Her work had a small but loyal following. I had unexpectedly become the restaurant critic for a weekly newspaper that started underground and grew too popular for its own crude facilities and its inexperienced staff. When I took the job, straight out of NYU, I’d thought of it as a first step toward my true career on the staff of a glossy national magazine, but as it happened I’d stumbled unawares—almost against my will—onto the ground floor of a good thing. In three years the paper had moved from dank offices in the garment district to a suite on Union Square. Its staff had tripled. And I’d been promoted from typist and occasional reporter to food columnist.

The joke was this: I knew nothing about food. It had been my mother’s obsession, and I’d vehemently denied ingress to every particle of knowledge on the subject. When the editor decided to add a restaurant section, and told me he wanted me to write it, I protested that I didn’t even know what quiche Lorraine was made of. He said, “That’s the point. A lot of people don’t.” He offered a raise, and a minimum of twenty-four column inches every week. And so I became Plain John, a character of relatively modest means who appreciated good food but was not transported by the unexpected dash of cardamom in a red-pepper puree; who liked to go out to dinner with friends or lovers once or twice a week and was willing to spring for something fancy when the occasion demanded it. I reviewed Polish and Chinese restaurants, scoured Manhattan for the best hamburgers and pizza and pad Thai. I indicated which trendy restaurants treated even noncelebrities kindly, which served ludicrously small portions, which would be impressive but nonthreatening to parents when they visited from out of town. Both Clare and I subsisted on the meals paid for by the paper, though we repaid the debt through the eccentricities of our diet. One week we ate only burritos, another nothing but Peking duck. Clare speculated over whether our nutritional monism might be doing us some sort of lasting harm. She brought home vitamins, and drinks made with aloe vera, and protein powders supposedly favored by famous bodybuilders, who grinned and flexed on the brightly colored labels.

We told one another that the baby should be read to constantly, even before it was old enough to understand. We agreed that parents should above all be honest with their children, about the darker facts as well as the pleasant ones.

My other half-lover’s name was Erich. He and I had sex, though he did not inspire in me the urgency or the sorrowful, exhilarating edge that, combined with desire, must add up to love. I kept my head with Erich. To be honest, since leaving Cleveland I had never loved a man I’d slept with—I hadn’t come close to the feeling, though I’d gotten to know dozens of bodies in their every mood and condition. My own capacity for devotion focused actually on Clare and hypothetically on certain men I saw walking the streets of the city: strong-looking men who didn’t aspire to conventional fame or happiness, who cleaved the air with definitive thoughtlessness. I looked as unobtrusively as possible at punks in black army boots, sullen Italian boys, and tough long-haired kids from small towns who had come to New York expecting their criminal reputations to hold.

I knew my interests were unrealistic, and probably unhealthy. But they obdurately remained—they were the geography of my desire. A particular boy I saw sometimes at the corner newsstand, with unkempt hair and an irritated expression, could make me tingle by brushing my elbow with his sleeve. The man I slept with seemed sketchy and remote.

Erich and I made love once or twice a week, usually at his apartment in the East Twenties. We’d met two years earlier, in the restaurant where he tended bar. I was reviewing gay restaurants that week—my column would evaluate the various places gay readers could go with their lovers if they wanted to hold hands across the table. I’d eaten alone that night, and I stopped at the bar for a brandy on my way out. Although the bar wasn’t crowded, the bartender took nearly five minutes to ask me what I wanted to drink. He was hunched at the bar’s opposite end, his forearms folded on the splashboard like a Flemish housewife leaning out her door, nodding with steady emphatic little bobs of his head at a story being told by an elderly man wearing gold jewelry and an emerald-green scarf. While I waited I watched the bartender’s ass, which was small and compact, twitching in counter-rhythm to his nods.

Finally the old man who was telling the story inclined his head in my direction, saying, “I think you’ve got a customer.” The bartender turned with a startled look. His face was thin, the nose and chin too sharply pointed for ordinary handsomeness, though his color was good and his eyes were as milkily, innocently blue as a child’s. His was the sort of face that, given a proneness to vanity, could be agonized over in a mirror—a face that could switch from beauty to plainness and back again. New York is full of faces like that, the not-quite-handsome faces of young men and women who have been fussed over by their mothers and who believe, with rigorous if slightly apologetic hopefulness, that they can make a future with their looks.

“Oops, oh, sorry,” he said. “What can I get you?”

I ordered a brandy. “Business a little slow tonight?” I asked.

He nodded, pouring brandy into an oversized snifter. The elderly man in the emerald scarf pulled a cigarette out of the pack he’d set before himself on the bartop and slipped it into a short gold cigarette holder with elaborate concentration.

“It’s been, you know, a little slow in general,” the bartender said.

I suspected the restaurant wouldn’t last much longer. It had an air of decline, and I knew more or less what I would write in my column the next day. A few phrases had already suggested themselves: “A fifties-ish nowhere zone that serves formal, vaguely embarrassing food”; “like a ghostly ocean liner that steams into port at midnight every hundred years.” It was the sort of place a rich old aunt might take you, except that the customers were older men and bright-eyed, hungry-looking boys instead of dowagers in furs and brooches.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, “this place is a little frightening.”

He set the brandy in front of me on a cocktail napkin and glanced at the old man, who was languidly expelling plumes of smoke through his nostrils. “Isn’t it just the creepiest?” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been looking for another job.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.

He glanced again at the smoker, and settled himself at my end of the bar. He folded his arms on the splashboard and nodded his head.

“You’d be surprised how hard it is to get bartending jobs,” he said. “I mean in, you know, good places. You haven’t been here before, have you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think I’d seen you.”

A depth of scrutiny passed briefly behind his pallid blue eyes. He was trying, without deep conviction or curiosity, to figure me out. I imagined the bar was frequented by young men looking to meet up with money. I was neither handsome enough to be on the block nor prosperous-looking enough to be a buyer.