Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

When we were together, we emphasized the local details: anecdotes from our working lives, the movies we’d loved or hated. Finally, on what may have been our tenth or fifteenth date, as we lay quietly sweating onto one another’s flesh, he said, “So, um, who are you, anyway?”

“What?”

His ears reddened. I suspected it was a line he’d picked up from a movie.

“What I mean is, I don’t really know anything about you,” he said.

“I don’t know much of anything about you either,” I said. “I basically know you’re an actor working as a bartender, you want to change jobs but aren’t doing anything much about it, and you loved The Killing Fields. ”

“Well, I grew up in Detroit,” he said.

“I’m from the Midwest, too.”

“I know. From Cleveland.”

After a pause, he said, “Well, this is very interesting. We’re both from the Midwest. That really, you know, explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t explain much of anything,” I said. I believed this conversation was the beginning of the end for us, and I didn’t entirely mind. Goodbye, Doctor Feelgood. Set me back on the street in my own skin, with my old sense of a limitless future.

After a moment he said, “I used to be a musician. When I was a kid. I was crazy for it. I dreamed about it. I had dreams that were just music, just…music.”

“Really?” I said. “What did you play?”

“Piano. Cello. Some violin.”

“Do you still play?”

“No,” he said. “Never. I wasn’t, you know, good enough. I was pretty good. But not really good enough.”

“I see.”

We lay together for a while in uneasy silence, waiting to see what would happen next. We were neither friends nor lovers. We had no natural access to one another outside the realm of sex. I believed I could feel the weight of Erich’s unhappiness the way a diver feels the weight of the ocean, but I couldn’t help him. This was the price we paid for sleeping together first and getting acquainted later—we shared an intimacy devoid of knowledge or affection. I couldn’t listen to Erich’s confessions; I didn’t know him well enough for that. I remembered Clare’s admonition—ride it until it thins out.

“Listen,” I said.

He put a finger to my lips. “Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t talk. This isn’t really, you know, a very good time to talk.” He started to stroke my hair and nibble his way along my shoulder.

Our relations retained their halting, formal quality. Each time we saw one another, we might have been meeting for the first time. Months later, when I asked Erich about his old love of music, all he would say is “That’s over. That’s just, you know, ancient history. Have you seen any movies?” Our conversation stalled sometimes, and the ensuing silences refused to take on an aspect of ease. He never came to my apartment, never met Clare or any of my other friends. I left my life to visit him in his. In Erich’s company I developed a new persona. I was tough and slightly insensitive; a bit of an object. Our communion took place only at the bodily level, and that came to seem right for us. Anything else would have been sentimental, forced, indiscreet. Our relations were cordial and respectful. We did not infringe. I believe that in some way we despised one another. Because I brought nothing but my nerves and muscles to the affair, I found I could be surprisingly noisy in bed. I could walk unapologetically across the floorboards, my boots ringing like the strokes of an ax. And I could be a little cruel. I could bite Erich’s skin hard enough to leave red clamshell marks behind. I could fantasize about him—an unknown man—manacled, humiliated, stripped naked and tied to a Kafkaesque machine that fucked him relentlessly.

In my other life, I went out nightly with Clare for falafel or barbecued chicken or Vietnamese food. We argued over how much television a child should be permitted to watch. We agreed that the sterner reality of public school was an education in itself, and would balance the shoddy educations of the teachers. Sometimes handsome young fathers would stroll by the window of whatever restaurant we sat in, pushing strollers or cradling their sleeping children on their shoulders. I always watched them pass.

That was my life in the dead center of the Reagan years.

Then Bobby came to live in New York.

ISTAYED in Ned and Alice’s house for almost eight years. The urge to do nothing and not change caught up with me; for eight years I squeezed roses onto birthday cakes and thought of what I’d make for dinner. Each day was an identical package, and the gorgeousness of them was their perfect resemblance, each to the others. Like a drug, repetition changes the size of things. A day when my cinnamon rolls came out just right and the sky clicked over from rain to snow felt full and complete. I thumped melons at the grocery store, dug walnuts from the bins with my hands. I bought new records. I didn’t fall in love. I didn’t visit my family’s graves, three in a row. I waited for asparagus and tomatoes to show up again, and played Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album until the grooves flattened out. I’d be living like that today if Ned and Alice hadn’t moved to Arizona.

The doctor announced it: Ohio air was too heavy with spoor and lake water for Ned’s tired lungs. It was go to the desert or start planning the funeral. That’s what he said.

At first I thought I’d go with them. But Alice sat me down. “Bobby,” she said, “honey, it’s time for you to get out on your own. What would you do in Arizona?”

I told her I’d get a bakery job. I told her I’d do what I was doing now, but I’d do it there instead.

Her eyes shrank, pulled in their light. The singular crease, one deep vertical line, showed up in her forehead. “Bobby, you’re twenty-five. Don’t you want more of a life than this?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I mean, this is a life, and I like it pretty well.”

I knew how I sounded—slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he’d planned it that way. I couldn’t quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn’t tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I’d expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I’d expected to feel more like one single person.

“Dearie, there’s more to it than this,” she said. “Trust me.”

“You don’t want me to go to Arizona,” I said in a balky cousin’s voice. Still, it was what I had to say.

“No. Frankly, I don’t. I’m pushing you out of the nest, like I probably should have some time ago.”

I nodded. We were in the kitchen, and I could see myself reflected in the window glass. At that moment I looked gigantic, like a geek from a carnival, with a head the size of a football helmet and arms that hung inches above the floor. It was strange, because I’d always thought of myself as small and boy-like, the next best thing to invisible.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

I understood that my life would change with or without my agreement. I understood that my supply of this particular drug—these red-checked dish towels and this crock of wooden spoons—was about to run out.

I decided to go to New York. It was the only other logical place. My Cleveland life depended on Alice and Ned—I needed their house to clean, their dinner to cook. I needed them to protect and care for. Otherwise Cleveland was just a place where things failed to happen. The air reeked of disappointment: river water thick as maple syrup, cinder-block shopping centers with three out of five units dark. Working in a bakery, you get to know the local unhappiness. People stuff whole cakes into their sorrow, brownies and cookies and Bismarcks by the dozen. The regularity of my days with Ned and Alice was like a campfire. I’d loved that part of Cleveland. But, without them, there would only be bus stops, and the wind blowing off Lake Erie. I wasn’t ready to be a ghost so soon.