Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Soon there would be an important addition to the list of things I was too old to do. I could see the danger: aging woman in love with gay man gets pregnant to compensate herself for the connections she failed to make. I couldn’t follow that course with a straight face. Still, it gnawed at me. Jonathan had work, and a lover I’d never met. He had the latitude still available to a man of twenty-seven. With my breasts shifting lower on my rib cage, I wanted something permanent. I wanted to do a better job with a child than my parents had done with me. I wanted my money and health and good fortune to be put to better use.

One night Bobby came out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts, singing “Wild Horses.” I was going into my room and we inched past one another in the hall. He smiled. He had a soft, bulky body, muscles vying with incipient fat. My mother would have called him “a big husky fellow,” approvingly. Marriage to my father had cured her of her interest in slender, devious men. Bobby was a Midwestern specimen. He was strong and square-boned, untroubled. I said, “Hey, gorgeous.”

His face reddened. In the late eighties there was still a man living in New York City who could blush at a compliment. He said, “Um, I’ll be ready in a little bit.”

We were going out somewhere. I don’t remember where. I said, “Take your time, nobody’ll be there before midnight anyway.”

“Okay.” He went into the room he shared with Jonathan. I paused, then walked into the bathroom and rubbed a circle on the steamed mirror. There was my face. Neither pretty nor plain. I’d always been a queasy combination of my mother and father.

Surprisingly, my mother was growing better-looking. At an age when women are considered “handsome” rather than “beautiful,” she was in fact quite handsome: slightly mannish, broad-faced, with scrubbed pink skin and hair gone from brown to gunmetal gray. Her inexpressive face hadn’t wrinkled, and her abrupt, businesslike manner seemed more attractive as other women her age began appearing in stiff ruffles and too much rouge. My mother had caught up with herself. She’d found her beauty. She was always meant to be sixty, even as a girl.

My father, on the other hand, had withered like a plum. His cheeks had deflated and touched bone. His bristly, blue-black hair had dissolved, and the skin hung loose and leathery on his neck. As a girl I’d looked hopefully in mirrors for every sign of my father’s face remade in mine. Now I checked for signs of his deterioration, and found them. My neck had gone a little slack. The skin around my eyes was darkening. The genes were at work.

Mother, you didn’t need to be so jealous of Dad’s love for me. You’re winning in the end. You’re a good-looking attorney untroubled by lusts. Dad and I are fading, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I went to Bobby and Jonathan’s room, and stood in the doorway. Bobby was bent over a dresser drawer, looking for a pair of socks. His ass was larger than the ideal, but shapely. If the word “Rubensesque” applied to men, it would be perfect for Bobby. His flesh was ample but proportionate, like those old pink-and-white beauties cavorting in dusky glades. There was something maidenly about his reticence, though he wasn’t feminine in the least. He might have been a stag. A precise tiny-hoofed creature, shy but not delicate.

I said, “Why don’t you wear the black gabardine shirt tonight?”

He jumped at the sound of my voice. There was something erotic about surprising him. I felt it like a zipper pulled in my stomach. I was a hunter and he a stout, unsuspecting buck.

“Um, okay,” he said.

I went to the closet and took out the shirt. “This is one of my favorites,” I said. “We should try and get you another like this.”

“Uh-huh.”

I held the shirt up to his bare torso. “Beautiful,” I said.

Again, the color rose to his face. It wasn’t working. Nothing sexual entered the room. I was too motherly in my concern for his appearance. We hadn’t worked out a subtext.

Some things couldn’t be willed. I’d spent a good deal of time learning even that small lesson.

“Maybe we’ll go out for a drink first,” I said. “We don’t want to get there too early.” I laid the shirt on Jonathan’s futon. It was black and crisp against the white batting, a snapshot of sexless male beauty. I went to my own room to start putting my face together for another night on the town.

A month passed. Winter came early that year. A week before Thanksgiving, snowflakes big as dimes dropped unexpectedly from the sky and eddied around the streetlights. Shop owners on our block frantically swept new snow from their sidewalks as if it was their own youthful mistakes caught up with them. When Bobby came home from work I was sitting on the living-room sofa, doing my toenails and drinking a glass of wine.

“Hey,” he said, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat.

I nodded. I wasn’t in a mood for conversation. Winter was back, sooner than expected.

“This is amazing,” he said. “I mean, you don’t really think of New York as having, like, this much weather. You know?”

“Subject to the forces of nature,” I said. “Just like anywhere.”

I wanted him to choke on his youthful enthusiasm. I was fit company that night only for chain-smoking dowagers or defrocked priests.

“It’s really, you know, beautiful, ” he said. “It’s so quiet out there. You want to go for a walk in it?”

I offered a look that I hoped summed up my views about frolicking in the snow. But he was rolling now; unstoppable. The weather had him all jacked up. He came and sat on the sofa beside me.

“Watch the nail polish,” I said.

“I like that color.”

“Bile green. It’s what I’m into this season.”

“You want to go to a movie later?” he said.

“Nope. I’m getting drunk and wallowing in self-pity tonight.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Don’t ask me a question like that right now, unless you really want to hear the answer.”

“I do,” he said. “I do want to.”

“Forget it. It’s just wintertime, I don’t take well to it. I’ll be my old fun-loving self in another six months or so.”

“Poor Clare,” he said. I defeated the urge to brush nail polish onto his face.

“It’s fucking winter a full month ahead of schedule,” I said, “and my ex is coming to town in a couple of weeks. Too much in one month.”

“You mean your ex-husband?”

“Yep. His troupe is touring again, they’re going to be at the Brooklyn Academy.”

“Will you see him?”

“He’ll probably call. He always does when he comes to New York. He has this idea that we didn’t abuse each other enough when we were married.”

“You never talk about him,” he said. “I sometimes, you know, forget you were married.”

“I’ve been trying to forget it myself.”

“Um, where did you meet him?” he asked.

“You want a real laugh? At Woodstock. Yes, the concert. Seven years of torment born from a weekend of peace and love.”

“You were at Woodstock?”

“Mm-hm. I’d dropped out of four different colleges and taken up with a group of people who traveled around New England buying old clothes to sell in New York. We heard about a free concert just a little ways from where we were combing people’s attics for Hawaiian shirts. This isn’t something I tell just anybody.”

“You were really there? You went to the concert?”

“Makes me seem like a relic, doesn’t it? It’s like having been around before there were cars.”

“What was it like?”

“Muddy,” I said. “You’ve never seen so much mud. I felt like a pig. I was attracted to Denny because he had a big bar of Lifebuoy soap down at the pond. After we’d washed up together he said, ‘You want to get out of here and get a hamburger in town?’ And I said yes, absolutely. I’d gotten tired of the used-clothes people. I mean, they thought of themselves as some sort of mystics, but they were paying widows five dollars for old rugs and furs they’d sell for two hundred in town.”