Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

I called Jonathan. I did it with true nervousness—by then we were more like relatives than friends. We bought presents, and smoked joints together before Christmas dinners. That was friendly enough. But months went by between holidays, and he wore clothes I would never have thought of on my own. He talked about theater; I went to the movies with Ned or watched TV with Alice. I lay in my room—formerly his room—for hours, just listening to music. Jonathan was quick and bright, going places, and although I loved him his visits always embarrassed me. In his presence I could feel like that gawky cousin or, worse, like a bachelor uncle; a jovial undemanding type who only knew the outer surface of things. Jonathan put my life in a miniaturizing light, and I couldn’t help looking forward to the day he got back on the plane because I knew on that day my life would return to its proper size, and I could walk down the Ohio streets with no washed-up, refugee feeling.

Still, when my Cleveland life ran out on me, I called Jonathan. I didn’t want an arbitrary new life in Boston or Los Angeles. I couldn’t imagine being so alone. And though I was friendly enough with Rose and Sammi and Paul at the bakery, I didn’t have what you could truthfully call friends. You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

The first few times I called I got Jonathan’s answering machine, and couldn’t talk to it. Each time the machine answered I hung up with a small criminal pang. Finally, after almost a week of trying, he answered in person.

“Hello,” he said.

“Jon? Jonny?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Jon. It’s Bobby.”

“Bobby. Hey, this is a surprise. Is everything all right?”

That was where we were together. A phone call from me implied bad news about the family’s fortunes.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Fine and perfect, couldn’t be better.”

“Good. How are you?”

“I’m good. I’m very, very good. How about you?”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “You know. Life goes on.”

I sat through my own urge to say, “Well, that’s great, goodbye,” and hang up the phone. A scene from my possible Cleveland future passed in front of me. On my next birthday, the bakery would have a party for me. Rose, who’d be seventy by then, would kiss a lipstick mark onto my cheek and call me her best beau. There’d be a cake, free to the customers. We’d cut a big slice for George Dubb, a three-hundred-pound bachelor who bought Napoleons and a dozen Linzer cookies every day.

“Listen,” I said. “Um. You know how Ned and Alice are going to Arizona?”

“Well, sure. Sure I do. I think it’ll be good for them. They’ve needed a change of scene since about 1953.”

“Yeah. Well, you see, now that they’re leaving, I’ve been thinking, like, what am I hanging around here for? They tore down the Moonlight, did you hear about that?”

“No,” he said. “God, I haven’t thought about that place in ten years. Have you been going there?”

“Well, no. You and I went once. Remember? On acid.”

“I’ll never forget. I spent the whole night getting my skates on and going once around the rink.”

“It’s gone now,” I said. “It’s a Midas Muffler now.”

“Huh.”

“Jon?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be okay with you if I came to New York? I mean, could I stay with you for a little while? Just until I got, like, a job and an apartment?”

There was a pause. I could hear the buzz of the miles, all those voices cutting the air between Jonathan and me. He said, “Do you really want to come to New York?”

“Yeah. I really do. I think I really do.”

“It’s a rough place, Bobby. Last week somebody was murdered a few blocks from where I live. They found the body in four different trash cans.”

“I know it isn’t Cleveland,” I said. “I know that. But, Jonny. I’m, like, up to my elbows in frosting here. I mean, I’ve made a million cupcakes by now.”

He let another pause slip through the line. Then he said, “If you honestly think you want to give New York a try, of course you can stay with me. Of course you can. I’ll see what I can do to keep you safe here.”

I took the train, because it was cheaper and because I wanted to see exactly how much distance I was covering. I looked out the window the whole time, with my full attention, as if I was reading a book.

Jonathan met me at the station in New York. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, heavy black shoes with a dull shine like licorice. You could count on him to be wearing something you didn’t expect.

We hugged in the station, and Jonathan put a precise little kiss on my cheek. He led me out to the sidewalk. Seeing him hail a cab was my first lesson in how different we’d become. He stepped off the crowded curb and shot one hand straight up, with the calm certainty of a general. It was a small enough act, but the sense of his own entitlement was unmistakable. I myself tended to move like a long apology.

When we were in the back seat of the cab, Jonathan pinched my arm. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

“Me neither. That’s why I wanted to see Pennsylvania go by, so I’d believe it. I mean, if I just got off a plane, this’d seem like, you know, some kind of hallucination.”

“It is. This city is just a dream you’re having,” he said. And during the time it took us to reach his apartment, we didn’t think of anything else we needed to say.

The cab crept through late-afternoon traffic. I had only been to New York once before, years earlier, when Jonathan was still in school. I’d been interested in it but it wasn’t about me; or rather it was only about me in the most indirect way, like a highway or a battleship. I’d done the tourist things. I’d gone to the tops of monuments and walked through Greenwich Village and had a drink with Jonathan and his friends at a bar where a famous poet died. I’d been comfortable in my tourist smallness, pleased with myself for being in an amazing place and for having a snug unsurprising home to return to.

Now I was going to live here. Now it was a different city altogether.

It shimmered. That was the first thing I noticed. Its molecules seemed more excited; things shivered and gleamed in a way that made them hard to see. The buildings and streets put out more light than the sky sent down—it all broke up in front of you, so your vision only caught the fragments. Cleveland offered itself differently, in bigger pieces. There you saw a billboard, a cloud, an elm standing over its own fat shadow. Here, my first ten minutes in New York, I could only be sure of seeing a woman’s red straw hat, a flock of pigeons, and a pale neon sign that said LOLA. Everything else was an ongoing explosion, the city blowing itself to bits, over and over again.

When we reached Jonathan’s apartment, things settled down and became more visible. He lived in a brown building on a narrow brown street. If Cleveland was mainly a gray city—limestone and granite—New York was brown, all rust and faded chocolate and schoolteacherish yellow-beige.

Jonathan said, “Here it is. The Tarantula Arms.”

“This is your building,” I said, as if I thought he might not be sure about it.

“This is it. I warned you. Come on, it’s better when you get inside.”

Inside, the stairwell floated in a green aquarium light. One fluorescent halo buzzed at each landing. I carried a suitcase and my backpack; Jonathan carried my other suitcase. I hadn’t brought much to my new life. Both suitcases were full of records. The backpack held my clothes, which, I could already see, had nothing to do with life in a city like this. I might have been an exchange student.