Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

ALL HE’D say was “Basic visit to the parents. Guilt and movies. They live in a pueblo now.” But Jonathan was quieter after that, more prone to secrecy and half sentences. He kept the door to his room closed. In March, he announced that he was moving out.

I asked him why.

“To get a life,” he said.

When I asked what exactly he thought he was living at that moment, he said, “A canceled ticket.”

It was morning. One of the pale slushy March mornings that arrive one after another, as if they were raveling off a spool. Jonathan stared out the living-room window. He flicked his hair with his fingertips in a sullen café style when he said the word “ticket.”

“Honey,” I said, “just tell me what you mean in ordinary English.”

He sighed, reluctant to face me on plain terms. Displays of joy, affection, or generosity came easily to him. He could speak decorously in his own voice. But when he was angry or sad, he needed an image to work from. I had seen him get mad in the caustic, eye-popping style of Bette Davis. I’d seen him suffer embarrassment like a street kid, with downcast eyes and hands balled into fists. This hair-flicking, window-gazing thing was new.

“Come on,” I said. “Speak.”

He turned to face me. “The life I’d been preparing myself for has been called off,” he said. “I thought I could stay unattached and love a lot of different people. You and Bobby included.”

“You can. You do.”

“I can’t. It’s a new age, everybody’s getting married.”

“Not me, thank you,” I said.

“Yes you are. You’re with Bobby now. I’ve got to find somebody of my own, and I don’t feel like I have all the time in the world anymore. I mean, Clare, what if I’m sick?”

I paused. “You’re not sick,” I said.

“You don’t know that. We may not know for years.”

“Jonathan, sweetheart, you’re being melodramatic.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You’re fine, I can just tell. You’re perfectly healthy. Now don’t move out, you’ll break up the family.”

“You and Bobby are the family,” he said. “Just the two of you.” And he turned back to the window, where across the air shaft a young Puerto Rican woman was hanging boys’ briefs and men’s black socks on a laundry line.

I thought I’d be pregnant soon. I’d stopped taking precautions. But I couldn’t seem to tell anyone, not Bobby or Jonathan. I suppose I was ashamed of my own motives. I didn’t like the idea of myself as calculating or underhanded. All I wanted, really, was to get pregnant by accident. The unexpected disadvantage of modern life is our victory over our own fates. We’re called on to decide so much, almost everything, and we’re thoroughly informed about repercussions. In another era I’d have had babies in my twenties, when I was married to Denny. I’d have become a mother without quite deciding to. Without weighing the consequences. But Denny and I had at first been too sensible—we were living on my trust money, and he had big ambitions—and then too furious to let ourselves give birth. I did get pregnant accidentally, by a member of Denny’s dance troupe who’d told me he was gay. But I’d had it taken care of. At that age, during that time, you skimmed away the extraneous. You kept yourself lean and unencumbered, ready to travel.

Now I wanted a baby, and I wanted to raise it with Jonathan. We could be a new kind of family. A big disjointed one, with aunts and uncles all over town. But I couldn’t bring myself to confess what I was after. I was trying to stage my own accident. I just needed more time.

In an effort to cheer Jonathan up, I got him to bring Erich home for dinner. He didn’t want to. He had to be nagged into it. It took more than a week. I wouldn’t give in, though, because I believed in what I was doing. My theory of Jonathan’s trouble was simple. He had let his life get divided up into too many different compartments. There was his job, and his life with Bobby and me. There were a few friends from college, and a random sexual life with strangers, and an ongoing affair with a man none of us had ever met. I believed he needed more areas of overlap.

“Why don’t you want to bring Erich over for dinner?” I asked on a dim morning that would not quite settle into rain. “Are you ashamed of us?”

I had on a pink chenille bathrobe, and had tied my hair up in a zebra-print bandanna. For a moment I could see myself as somebody’s shrewish wife, hands fisted on her bony hips. It was far from a flattering image. But I didn’t mind it entirely. At least a woman like that knew what she wanted. Ambiguity and indecision didn’t swarm around her like flies.

“Of course not,” Jonathan said. “I’ve told you. He and the Hendersons wouldn’t get along.”

He was trying to leave for work. He had one shoe on. He was sipping at a mug of coffee while Bobby buttered a bagel for him.

“We won’t invite the Hendersons,” I said. “It can just be the four of us, regular civilians too worried about our own shortcomings to notice anybody else’s.”

“He and I don’t have that kind of relationship,” Jonathan said.

“What kind?”

“The ‘Come on over and meet the roommates’ kind. It’d just be uncomfortable. For everyone.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never done it?” I asked. “Honey, to be perfectly honest with you, I think you set limits on your relationships by deciding in advance and entirely on your own what they can and cannot involve.”

Bobby brought Jonathan his bagel, and gave me an affectionate pat on the rump. I thought fearfully of the quiet nights we’d have together. The unvarying domestic routines we’d develop.

“Maybe you’re right,” Jonathan said. “Got to go now, bye.”

I followed him into the hallway. “We wouldn’t tell him any of your secrets,” I called. “We wouldn’t make stupid jokes, or show slides of our trip to a national park.”

I finally got my way through ordinary persistence. My persistence, though it worked more often than not, was hard to count as a virtue, since I had no patience to back it up. My own doggish determination had led me, in the face of all reasonable counsel, to marry a Messianic dancer and then fall in love with a renowned woman who said she’d teach me to stop hating myself. It had led me into the used-clothes business, to hairdressing school, to Buddhism and modern dance. Bulldogs must experience a similar kind of trouble. Once they lock their jaws onto a bull’s ear or tail they probably believe they’ve concluded their business with the whole animal.

Erich came to dinner on a Friday night. Bobby and I were making the kind of sparse, crisp dinner that was fashionable then: pasta with fresh herbs, roast chicken, vegetables from three continents. We were looking to impress. As we fixed dinner, we speculated over what Erich might be like.

“Brooding, I think,” I said. “One of those silent, temperamental types people say are ‘difficult’ when what they really mean is ‘an asshole.’”

“You think Jonathan would, like, go for somebody like that?” Bobby said.

“I think he could be attracted to somebody like that,” I said. “Remember, this is somebody he hasn’t introduced to any of his friends.”

Bobby was dicing a yellow pepper. I stood with my back pressed against his, washing arugula. We had gotten used to working in that minuscule kitchen together. We’d learned to move in concert.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, maybe you’re right. I picture him more like a criminal type.”

“A criminal ? Really?”

“Not like a murderer. Not a bad criminal. More of a drug-dealer type. You know. Somebody who works scams.”