Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Finally, she came for me. She asked if I was all right, and I told her I was fine. I told her I was wonderful. When she asked what was going on, I gestured helplessly in the direction of the hanging clothes. She made a clucking noise, thinking I’d suffered a simple attack of shyness, and led me out by the hand.

Jonathan shrieked at the sight of my hair. He said I looked dangerous. “A Bobby for the eighties,” Clare proudly announced, and I didn’t disagree with her. Although Jonathan was exhausted, we took my hair out for a walk in the Village. We had drinks at a gay place on St. Marks and danced together, all three of us. I might have broken through a pane of glass and reached the party, after years of sitting in a graveyard thinking I was alive. When we got tired of dancing I insisted on walking down to the pier on the Hudson, to watch the neon coffee drip from the big neon cup. Then Clare and Jonathan got in a cab for home and I kept walking. I walked all over New York. I went down to Battery Park, where Miss Liberty raised her small light from the harbor, and I walked up to the line of horse carriages waiting hopefully for extravagant drunks and romantics outside the Plaza. I was on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties when the sky started to lighten. A bakery truck rolled by, the driver singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” in a loud off-key voice, and I sang along with him for half a block. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.

After that, changes were easy. There was no more need to stay married to the everyday. Clare made a hobby of changing me. She took me shopping for clothes in the thrift stores on First Avenue, where she knew all the salesclerks and half the customers. When shopping, Clare had the concentration of a mother eagle browsing for trout. She could swoop down on a cardboard carton full of bright polyester rags—stained Woolworth’s stuff that had been sad and desperate-looking when it was new—and pull out a silk shirt swarming with bright yellow fish. Hers was a garish but scavenging personality; you knew from her eyes that the things she wanted put out a faint glow not visible to other shoppers. I let her make the choices, and after two weeks I had a cheap new wardrobe of old clothes. I had baggy pants from the forties, and loose rayon shirts in putty and tobacco colors. I had old black jeans, and a leather motorcycle jacket, and a box-shouldered black sport coat shot through with random pewter threads. I even had strangers’ shoes: brown Oxfords with toes made of brittle leather mosquito net, and black army boots, and a pair of black sneakers spattered with paint.

I had an earring, too. Clare had pulled me into a jewelry store on Eighth Street, and in less time than it takes to say the word “change” a Middle Eastern man had punched a silver post into my left earlobe with a hydraulic gun. It was no more painful than a blackfly’s bite. Clare promised she’d make me a perfect earring. The Middle Eastern man smiled. He appeared to have teeth carved from a single piece of wood.

Those days I surprised myself each time I saw my reflection in a store window. I might have been my own rough twin, come from some meaner place to make trouble for ordinary working people. The man whose face I saw floating over shop displays would not have written “Happy Birthday” on ten thousand cakes. He would not have lived contentedly in an upstairs bedroom with a view of the neighbors’ jungle gym.

Clare introduced me to her friends: Oshiko the cynical hat designer; Ronnie the high-strung painter who spoke only in full paragraphs; Stephen Cooper who talked about cashing in his marijuana-import business and buying a jewelry store in Provincetown, where he could pay closer attention to his mystical gifts. Those people were like movies playing around me—I watched and listened with the same easy self-relinquishment you’d bring to a seat in the fifth row. They enjoyed being the characters they’d created, and didn’t depend on me for input. So we got along. I stood or sat in my clothes, watching things happen. If I developed a local reputation at all, it was for mystery and immovable calm. I learned that New Yorkers—at least the ones Clare knew—value silence in others. Their days and nights are so full of noise. Clare’s friends were willing to chalk my silence up to inner knowledge, when in fact I mainly watched, and thought of nothing. Every now and then I asked a question, or answered one. I wore the earring Clare made for me, a wire loop with a silver teardrop-shaped bead, a circle of rusted metal, and a tiny silver-winged horse. Sometimes she asked with a hint of nervousness if I was having a good time, and I always told her yes. It was always the truth. Going to those places—noisy clubs with unmarked entrances, parties in lofts white and spare as the Himalayas—made me simply and purely happy. I had been in a graveyard for years; now I was at the party. In the middle of all that life, I kept quiet as a ghost. A beautiful girl with skin the clear blue-white of skim milk walked serenely among the dancers with a fat, speckled snake coiled around her waist. Two boys in plaid schoolgirlish dresses stood gravely side by side, holding hands as if they were guarding the entrance to a sterner, more difficult world and couldn’t imagine that no one would try to get in.

But the best times were the nights Jonathan got off work early enough to go out. Sometimes it would be the two of us, and sometimes Clare came along. On Jonathan’s nights we went to movies, then for drinks in one of the bars we liked. Clare’s other friends were more intent on giving their lives a fabulous, windswept quality. They had dedicated themselves to motion and to knowing the exact right place, the party inside the party. I could understand that urge. But Jonathan, Clare, and I favored elderly bars that had caved in under the weight of dailiness. The Village was full of them then, and is full of them today. They maintain a stale interior dimness the color of dark beer. They sell potato chips and peanuts from a system of wire clips. Regulars—quiet steady drunks who believe things are getting worse and never cause a ruckus—sit on the bar stools as solid as roosting hens. We always took a booth in the rear.

We took to calling ourselves the Hendersons. I don’t remember how it started—it was part of a line tossed out by Clare or Jonathan, and it stuck. The Hendersons were a family with modest expectations and simple tastes. They liked going to the movies or watching TV. They liked having a few beers in a cheap little bar. When we went out together, the three of us, we called it “a night with the Hendersons.” Clare came to be known as Mom, I was Junior, and Jonathan was Uncle Jonny. The story took on details over time. Mom was the boss. She wanted us to mind our manners and sit up straight, she clicked her tongue if one of us swore. Junior was a well-intentioned, shadowy presence, a dim-witted Boy Scout type who could be talked into anything. Uncle Jonny was the bad influence. He had to be watched. “Junior,” Clare would say, “don’t sit too close to your Uncle Jonny. And he doesn’t need to go into the bathroom with you, you’re big enough now to manage just fine on your own.”

We came and went in the Henderson mode. It wasn’t something we always did. It was the story we drifted into when we lost interest in our truer, more complicated story. Before Jonathan left in the mornings he might say, “I should be through at a decent hour tonight, would the Hendersons like to go see the Fassbinder movie?” Clare and I nearly always said yes, because our lives were freer. We preferred a night with the Hendersons to our other entertainments. Sometimes when Clare and I were alone together she’d say something in her Mom voice, a shrill and vaguely British variation on her actual voice. But without Uncle Jonny, the Hendersons didn’t work. Without our bad uncle we were too simple—just bossy Mom and the boy who always obeyed. We needed all three points of the triangle. We needed mild manners, perversity, and a voice of righteousness.