Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

I would learn later that she was raised by a good Lutheran mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and had never quite overcome her old habit of good manners. I said hello and shook her hand, which was strong and sure as an apple picker’s.

“We’ve been shopping,” Jonathan said. “We decided we needed a Van Morrison tape right away.”

I was grateful to him for explaining it as something we needed. I didn’t like to seem so delicate and peculiar, not right up front to a stranger.

“I love Van Morrison,” she said. “I used to have all his records. But, you know. You lose things in various divorce settlements.”

“Should I put this on?” I asked.

“Honey, absolutely,” she said. “Right over there.”

I walked across the room to the shelves where the sleek black tape player stood. On the shelf above it a collection of animal skulls silently displayed their empty sockets and their different arrangements of ivory-colored fang and tooth. Jonathan and Clare discussed domestic particulars. I got the cellophane off the cassette, punched Van into the machine, and pushed the Play button. After a few moments of soft mechanical whir, Van’s voice singing “Tore Down à la Rimbaud” filled the room. I took a breath, and I took another.

“Bobby?” Jonathan said. “Are you hungry?”

“I guess,” I said. I was looking at the skulls from a safe distance, surrounded by Van’s voice.

“How about if we listen to this for a while, then all go out for dinner?” Jonathan said. “It’s on the newspaper. I’m doing meat loaf this week, is that all right with you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Perfect.” I was lost in the music. I’d have agreed to beaver tail.

We stayed around the apartment through one side of the tape. Jonathan and Clare were being polite—they liked Van’s record well enough, but considered it background for a conversation. Clare asked courteous questions about my trip and my past life with Jonathan, which I suspect I must have answered with sweaty, grinning incoherence. I couldn’t concentrate with music in the room.

When side one was finished, we went out. Clare put on an old leather jacket with a white peace sign painted on the back. She made an odd kind of sense to me, though she was the least sensible-looking person I’d ever met. She had a gaudy openness—a circus quality, with no hint of a hidden agenda. She made you feel like you could take her hand as you walked down the street.

We went to a restaurant that didn’t look like a restaurant. An uninformed pedestrian might have thought it was a cheap insurance agency, with Venetian blinds and a few dusty bowling trophies displayed in the windows. But, inside, it was packed with people. Elvis Presley sang through the laughter and the clink of silverware. At a table near the door, a woman in a fur dress said something about gorillas, in an English accent.

I myself had on Calvin Klein jeans and a rugby shirt. It was my most interesting outfit. We sat at a table in a corner, so close to three other tables we had to slide sideways into our chairs. The walls were covered with souvenir plates and old postcards, with stuffed deer heads and kitchen clocks and faded record albums by Dusty Springfield and the Kingston Trio. A sign near my head said “Disregard This Sign.”

“This place has a lot of decor,” Clare said to me.

“Uh-huh.”

“More decor than the entire state of Maine,” Jonathan added.

“So, Bobby,” Clare said. “What do you think you want to do here? In New York.”

“I’m a pretty good baker,” I said. “I guess I’ll probably do that. I mean, that’s what I sort of know how to do.”

“I thought you came here to get out of the bakery business,” Jonathan said. “I thought you were drowning in all that fudge.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I guess I said that, yes. But, well, I don’t really know anything else. I mean, I can’t walk into a hospital and ask if they need any surgeons.” My ears burned. I felt like I was being tested on material I hadn’t studied.

“You’d probably be about as qualified as half the doctors there,” Clare said. “Now, sweetheart, listen to your aunt. One of the great features of New York is, you can do anything here. This is the Land of Opportunity, capital L, capital O. Here you can get paid to do just about anything you can think of.”

I nodded, aware that she was tracing little figure eights with a fingernail on the cloudy Formica. She had green eyes that didn’t waver, didn’t seek out the periphery when she talked to you. She wore one tinkling, complex silver earring that was half a foot long. Her effect on me resembled the effect of music. I had a hard time conversing in the face of her.

“It’s true, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to rush right out and get the first job you can find. You have rich friends.”

“Um, what do you do?” I asked Clare.

“Basically, I play,” she said. “I run around town finding things to make jewelry out of.”

“Clare’s a designer,” Jonathan said.

“Hogwash. I’m a junk dealer, is what I am. If women ever stop wanting to look ridiculous, I’ll be out of a job.”

I looked at her tangerine hair, and wondered what kind of women she thought of as ridiculous-looking. What I said was “It sounds like, you know, fun.”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s a great scam. And when the baby comes, I can just do it at home.”

“You’re having a baby?”

“Didn’t Jonathan tell you? We’re expecting.”

Jonathan’s face darkened. Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock.”

“We’re not expecting, dear,” he said. “We’re still in the planning stages.”

“Same difference.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were, um—”

“Lovers?” Jonathan said. “We’re not. We’re just talking about becoming parents.”

“Oh.”

“Most parents aren’t lovers,” Clare said. “Mine weren’t. Mine were only married, and they didn’t care much for one another. At least Jonathan and I are good friends.”

“It’s the modern age,” Jonathan said, half apologetically.

I nodded. Then the waitress came, and we had to decide on dinner. Jonathan said he was professionally obliged to order meat loaf, but that Clare and I should have whatever we wanted. I had fried chicken with mashed potatoes, and Clare had the special—tuna-fish casserole, with potato chips crumbled on top.

After dinner we went for a walk. We walked down to the Hudson River and stood on a pier looking across the dark agitated water at New Jersey. On the far side a giant neon coffee cup spilled a red drop of coffee, then sucked it back up and spilled it again. Clare and Jonathan were both good talkers. I rode their talk as if it was a hammock stretched between them. Together, they were performers. They seemed happy enough to have an audience—I didn’t need to speak much. They talked about babies, about moving to the country, and about how to survive in New York. They traded tips on apartment hunting, and told one another where the bargains were.

“Honey,” Clare said to me, “I’m taking you to the Lower East Side on Sunday. That’s where you get the best deals.”

“It is not,” Jonathan said. “Clare has this peculiar devotion to Orchard Street.”

“Jonathan buys retail,” she said. Her voice implied that it was a slothful, possibly dangerous, practice.

“The Lower East Side,” said Jonathan, “is a fine place to shop if you want to look like a disco king, circa 1975.”

“Do I look like a disco king?” she said.

“It’s different for women. The world doesn’t conspire to make them look like assholes in quite the same way.”

“Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a department store should never make a statement like that. Don’t you listen to him, Bobby.”