Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“We’re going up to the sixth floor,” Jonathan said. “Be brave.”

I followed him. The landings smelled like something fried. Slow Spanish music hung in the swampy light. As we went up I watched my borrowed suitcase, an old blue American Tourister of Alice’s, whump against Jonathan’s black-jeaned thigh. Even my suitcase looked wrong here—sad and hoarily innocent as an old virgin.

When we got to the sixth floor, Jonathan unlocked three locks and opened the metal door. “Ta-da,” he said as the door swung heftily open, squeaking on its hinges.

“Your place,” I said. I could not seem to shed the habit of telling him we had reached his apartment.

“And yours, too,” he said. He ushered me in with a bow.

The apartment was, in fact, a change from the underwater gloom of the stairs and hall. You stepped straight into the living room, which was painted orange-red, the color of a flowerpot. There was a sofa covered with a leopard-skin sheet, and a huge painting of a naked blue woman twisting ecstatically to reach something that hovered just off the edge of the canvas. The room was full of light. Streams of it tumbled in through the barred windows, which were bracketed by thick fifties curtains crawling with green and red leaves. If you pulled those curtains the sunlight would snap out like electricity. They were as weighty and businesslike as the metal door we had just passed through.

“Yow,” I said. And then, without meaning to: “This is your place. ”

“My roommate Clare had a lot to say about decorating,” he said. “Come on, let’s take your things to my room.”

We went down a short hall, past two closed doors, to his room. His room was white, with no pictures on the walls. He had a futon on the bare wooden floor, and a white paper lamp that stood on wire legs thin as pencil lines.

“I got a little carried away with this Zen thing,” he said. “I just needed some relief from all that color.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I like white.”

We set my bags down, and stood through a moment of difficult silence. Over the years we’d lost our inevitability together; now we were like the relatives of two old friends who had died.

He said, “I’ve got a sleeping bag you can sleep in. And we’ll cram your things in the closet somehow.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you want to unpack now?”

I didn’t care about unpacking, but it would have been a logical next step. At that moment I felt I understood about the past. In another century a guest unpacked, and rested, and dressed for dinner, so that everybody had a good long period alone with himself. In the modern age, we have to negotiate vaster expanses of uninterrupted time.

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, I mostly brought records.”

He laughed. “That’s what you’d bring into a bomb shelter, isn’t it?” he said.

I opened the American Tourister and took out a short stack. “Have you heard Joni’s new one?” I asked.

“No. Is it good?”

“Excellent. Oh, hey, have you got this Van Morrison?”

“No. I don’t think I’ve listened to Van since I was in Cleveland, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, this record’ll kill you,” I said. “He’s still, like, one of the best. I’m going to put it on, okay?”

“We don’t have a turntable,” he said. “Just a cassette player. Sorry.”

“Oh. Well,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Bobby,” he said. “We have music, too. We don’t live in silence. But if Van Morrison is a priority, we can go out right now and get him on tape. The biggest record store you’ve ever seen is about six blocks from here.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got stuff of your own I’ve probably never heard, right?”

“Sure. Of course we do. But look me straight in the eye. We need to go out and buy that Van Morrison tape right this minute, don’t we?”

“Naw,” I said. “It’s okay, really.” But Jonathan shook his head.

“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll take care of the important business first, and then we can unpack.”

He took me back out of the apartment, and we walked to a record store on Broadway. He had not been lying about that store. Nothing shy of the words “dream come true” would do here—it was the cliché made into flesh. This place spanned a city block; it filled three separate floors. In Ohio I had haunted the chain store in the mall, and the dying establishment of an old beatnik whose walls were still covered with pegboard. Here, you passed through a bank of revolving doors into a room tall as a church. The sound of guitars and a woman’s voice, clean as a razor, rocked over rows and immaculate rows of albums. Neon arrows flashed, and a black-haired woman who could have been in perfume ads browsed next to a little boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. It was an important place—you’d have known that if you were blind and deaf. You’d have smelled it; you’d have felt it tingling on your skin. This was where the molecules were most purely and ecstatically agitated. I believed then it was the heart of New York City. I believe it to this day.

We went downstairs to the cassette section, and found Van Morrison. We also found an old Stones Jonathan didn’t have, and Blonde on Blonde, and Janis Joplin’s greatest hits. Jonathan paid for them all with a credit card. He insisted. “This is your welcome-to-New-York present,” he said. “Buy me something when you’ve got a job.”

We walked back with our cassettes in a yellow plastic bag. It was early evening on a day without weather—a warm one with a blank white sky, one of those timeless days that are more like illuminated nights, when only the clock tells you whether it’s morning or afternoon. Jonathan and I talked about Ned and Alice as we traveled bright brown streets lined with Spanish grocery stores and warehouses that had already pulled down their metal grates. With those cassettes solidly in the bag and Jonathan talking about his parents I felt an early click of rightness about the place—as of that moment, I had history there. It was my first true experience of being in New York, walking down a street called Great Jones as a Wonder Bread wrapper, stirred by the day’s single gust of wind, skittered after us like a crazy pet.

When we got back to the apartment, Jonathan’s roommate Clare was home. We walked through the big door and she called, “Hello, dear.” Like a wife.

The living room was empty. She had called from offstage.

Jonathan answered, “Honey, we’ve got company.”

“Oh,” her voice said. “I forgot. It’s today, isn’t it?”

Then she came out.

I don’t know if I can describe Clare, though I can see her right down to her lazy way of gesturing, loose-wristed, until she gets to the point of the story, when she flicks her wrist with the lethal precision of a fly fisherman. If I close my eyes she’s there, and she’s there if I open them, too. But what I see is a way of walking and smiling, a way of sitting in a chair. All her moves are particular to her—she has a way of setting a glass on a table, of raising her shoulders when she laughs. Her appearance is harder to nail down. On first sighting, she was like New York made into a woman—she changed and changed. I could tell she was beautiful in a sharp, big-nosed way that had nothing to do with magazines. Her hair was orange then—it bristled as if her brain was on fire. She was several inches taller than I, with dark red lips. She wore tight pants, and a tiger-striped shirt that fell off her shoulders.

“Bobby, this is Clare,” Jonathan said.

She tilted her head in a hostess manner, and gave me a hand tipped with long purple fingernails. “Bobby,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you.”