Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“But he’s an actor,” I said. “We know that much.”

“Oh, I think a lot of those guys deal drugs. Don’t you think so? I mean, how else could they support themselves?”

“What do you imagine him looking like?”

“Well, dark,” he said. “Not so much handsome as interesting-looking. Sort of hip, in, like, a natty way. I picture him having a little ponytail.”

“Hmm. I imagine him very young. You know, one of those squeaky-clean blonds who pour in out of the Midwest and end up in toothpaste commercials.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Bobby said. And half an hour later, we did.

Jonathan and Erich arrived together. They brought yellow hothouse tulips, and a bottle of red wine. Jonathan let Erich in ahead of him. He lingered near the door as if he might slip away and leave the three of us together.

Erich shook my hand, then shook Bobby’s. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

He was thin, and balding. He wore jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt with a Ralph Lauren insignia—the polo pony—stitched in red at the breast.

“Erich,” I said. “The mystery man.”

His high forehead darkened. He had a sharp face, with a small sharp chin and a sharp nose and small bright eyes set close together. It was a squeezed, panicky face. Erich might have been a man with his head caught between a pair of elevator doors. He nodded.

“I’m not really a mystery,” he said. “Oh no, not a mystery at all. I’m sorry we haven’t met before. I’m, well, just very glad to be here.”

He laughed in a way that suggested he had been punched in the stomach.

“How about a drink?” I said. He said a seltzer would be nice, and Jonathan jumped to get the drinks. We sat down in the living room.

“This is a nice apartment,” Erich said.

“It’s a dump,” I answered. “But thank you. You didn’t have to step over any dead bodies in the hallway, did you?”

“Oh no,” he said. “No. Why? Has that happened here?”

I couldn’t tell if he was repelled or excited by the idea of hallway murders. He had one of those enthusiastic, unreadable voices.

“Not lately,” I said. “So. You’re an actor?”

“Yes. Well, I don’t know anymore. Lately I’m just sort of a bartender. What do you do?”

He had seated himself in the armchair I’d found on First Avenue. A fan-backed old monster covered in green brocade. He sat as if he’d been assigned to occupy as little space as possible, with his legs crossed at the knee and his hands folded on his thigh.

“Junk dealer,” I said. “I make earrings out of old garbage.”

He nodded. “And you can make a living at that?” he said.

“In a fashion,” I answered.

I never told strangers about my trust money. I felt too trivial and spoiled, having an unearned income while everyone around me struggled to pay the rent. I always had jobs, but not the awful, unrelenting ones people take when they’re paying all their own expenses.

Now I felt, obscurely, that I’d given away something incriminating. Erich could have been a plant from the CIA. An undercover agent so obvious and undisguised that people blurted their petty deceits out of social discomfort.

Jonathan brought our drinks. “Here’s to the end of the mystery,” I said, and we all drank to that.

“Do you, um, like any special kind of music?” Bobby asked.

Erich blinked in his direction. “I love music,” he said. “I love all kinds.”

“I’m going to put a record on,” Bobby said, standing up. “Is there, like, anything special you’d like to hear?”

“Let me see what you have,” Erich said. And with surprising grace he sprang up from the derelict chair and followed Bobby to the cassette player.

Jonathan and I had our first opportunity to make eye contact. He mouthed the words “I told you so.”

Bobby squatted before the shelves where the cassettes were kept. “We’ve sort of got a little of everything,” he said. “We’re sort of, you know, all over the map.”

“You have Coltrane,” Erich said. “Oh, look here, you have the Doors.”

“You like the Doors?” Bobby asked.

“When I was younger I wanted to be Jim Morrison,” Erich said. “I used to practice his moves in the back yard. Every day, I used to practice, and lip-sync. But then I realized I lacked some of the basic equipment.” He laughed, that same astonished outrush of air.

“Let’s put him on right now,” Bobby said, and punched his Doors tape into the player.

“Do you like Bob Dylan?” he asked Erich.

“Oh, sure. I wanted to be him, too.”

“I brought some records out from Ohio,” Bobby said. “I’ve got some, you know, pretty rare ones. You like Hendrix?”

“I love Hendrix. He was, you know, the greatest.”

“Some of the records I could get cassettes of. But some are just too rare. You want to see them?”

“Okay. Sure. Sure I do.”

“We can’t listen to them,” Bobby said. “We haven’t got a turntable yet. We’ve got to buy one. Even though they’re, you know, going out of style.”

“I have a turntable,” Erich said. “If you want to, you could come over sometime and play your records at my place. If you want to.”

“Oh, great. That’d be great. Come here, the records are stored away in Clare’s and my room.”

Erich said to Jonathan and me, “Would you excuse us for a minute?” And suddenly I could see him as he must have been at the age of eight or nine: polite and overenthusiastic, prone to tears, a mystery to his parents.

“Of course,” I said. After they were gone I said to Jonathan in a low voice, “Well, the kids seem to be getting along all right.”

He shook his head. “I told you this would be a disaster. You wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Nonsense. It’s not a disaster. Bobby’s in love with him.”

“And you think he’s a twerp and a bore.”

“Jonathan. I’ve known him about five minutes.”

“Five minutes is enough. You’d have to sleep with him for him to make any more sense than he does right now.”

“I don’t know why you’ve kept seeing him all these years if you dislike him this much,” I said.

“Sex,” Jonathan said. “And my own craziness. Oh, I guess I’m fond of him in an unromantic way. I just never wanted to mix him in with the rest of my life, and I was right about that.”

“You’re a very strange man.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said.

When Bobby and Erich came back, I suggested we take our drinks up to the roof to watch the sunset. The important thing was to keep this dinner party moving, physically if necessary. It was a freakishly warm late-March evening. The kind of weather that implies either an early spring or the effects of nuclear testing.

Jonathan agreed enthusiastically, Bobby and Erich less so. I knew what they were thinking. If we went up to the roof, they’d miss the next cut of Strange Days.

“Boys, we can start the music again when we come back down,” I said, and was surprised at how much like a mother I could sound.

We went up the stairs to the roof, a tarred plateau bound at the edges with patterned concrete pediments. The orange sun hovered over the New Jersey horizon. Television aerials threw intricate, birdlike shadows. The windows of the tall buildings uptown flashed amber and bronze. A fat pink-stained cloud, its every billow and furl distinct as carved ivory, hung soaking up the last light over Brooklyn. Frilled curtains and salsa music blew out of an open window across the alley. We stood facing west, trailing twenty-foot shadows.

“Beautiful,” Jonathan said. “Just when you think you’re going to move to the country, the city does something like this.”

“I adore the roof,” I said. I was surprised, again, at the sound of my own voice. When had I turned into such a hostess?