Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Jonathan had taken all his money out of the bank and bought a ticket somewhere. Clare and I spent a few weeks getting over expecting to hear from him.

“I don’t get this,” she said. “This doesn’t seem real, it’s some kind of gesture. You know how Jonathan can be.”

“I know how he can be,” I said. But in fact he had gone. Alice and Ned couldn’t tell us anything, and all we knew about Erich was his first name and the fact that he worked in a restaurant somewhere. After dinner that night we’d all congratulated each other for our ability to enjoy ourselves. We’d promised to do something just as riotous again soon. We didn’t think we’d need any particulars for getting in touch.

Jonathan might have dropped through a trapdoor. The last time we saw him he’d washed the dishes, downed a final shot of Scotch, and kissed us both good night. He’d left early for work in the morning. And when Clare and I got home that night, there was the note.

“Stupid bastard,” Clare said. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s a dramatic kind of person,” I said. “He can’t help it.”

I waited for my true feelings to arrive. I waited for all the proper reactions: rage and disappointment, a sense of betrayal. But weeks passed and the blankness held. Nothing happened; nothing at all. I felt myself slipping back to my old Cleveland mode, living a life made up of details. At work, I shredded mountains of cheese and chopped my weight in mushrooms. At home I watched television, or watched the light change outside the window, or watched time passing as I played my records. I was surprised to learn that New York could be as ordinary and windblown as Cleveland. It could take on that same feeling of disuse. Although we think of the dead inhabiting the past, I now believe they exist in an unending present. There is no hope of better things to come. There is no memory of the human progress that led to each moment.

Without Jonathan, I haunted my own life. I couldn’t make contact. I walked through the hours like a shade wandering in helpless astonishment through rooms he’d once danced and wept and made love in; rooms he’d once been alive enough to ignore.

Clare negotiated a more predictable run of feelings, and came out the other end. She taught herself to accept Jonathan’s mysteries and his nagging self-involvement. She worked up a story to tell: never trust anyone under the age of thirty. “People can’t be held accountable, not even at twenty-eight,” she said. “At that age you’re still thinking yourself up. I wish Jonathan well, I really do. I hope he gives me a call sometime after he’s developed a personality.”

For a while she hated me for being twenty-eight. After that one sweaty, clawing session on the living-room floor, she put an end to our lovemaking and sent me to sleep in Jonathan’s bed, so she wouldn’t feel the lack when I, too, turned up missing one day. Then, after almost a month, she slipped into bed with me at midnight. “I’ve been a real asshole, haven’t I?” she whispered. “Please forgive me, sweetheart. I’ve got a sort of soft spot about abandonment. What do you think? Do you think we could manage together, just the two of us?”

I told her I thought we probably could. We were in a kind of love, as far as we knew. I liked making love to her; I liked the heat and unexpectedness of her body. I liked the trail of tiny gold hairs scattered from her navel to her crotch, and I liked the creases her ass made when it met her thighs. We made love that night, for the first time in a month, and though all the moves came off, the central point was missing. I’d suspected it would be that way. Now sex was a succession of details, with a sweet implosion at the end. It was another feature of the regular day.

After that, we slept in the same bed again. We made love once or twice a week. But Jonathan took something out of the air when he left—a next thing kept failing to happen. Clare and I got stuck in the present. According to current wisdom, that was the right place to be. But when it happened—when we lost our sense of the past and the future—we started to drift. Clare felt it, too. She called me “sweetheart” and “honey” more often. She looked at me with a certain mild kindliness that was the living opposite of desire. I began to notice how the cords of her neck jumped when she talked. I became more conscious of the way she scratched invisible pictures on a tabletop as she spoke, and of how her mascara sometimes hardened into gluey clumps on her eyelashes.

We did the things we’d always done. We watched television and went to the movies, bought old clothes and took long walks through the changing neighborhoods. We went to clubs and parties sometimes. But our own occasion kept slipping away from us. We didn’t find necessary things to say to each other. I was no talker. I took things in, but couldn’t give them back again, transformed, as language. Jonathan had had enough voice for both of us. Now there were silences that reached no logical ends. No one but Clare and me was ever coming home. We had no one to gossip about or worry over, except one another.

I thought of my own parents. I thought of Alice and Ned.

This was love between a man and a woman. I’d made that much more progress in my continuing education.

Summer passed, fall came. I didn’t see Jonathan until late November, and then only by accident. I had gone to a chiropractor on the Upper West Side, for the damage I did to my back lifting a case of champagne at work. The Upper West Side might have been a different city—we lived a downtown life. Walking along Central Park West to the subway, I gawked tourist-like at the autumn yellows of Central Park and the trim little dogs clipping alongside their masters’ glossy shoes. I got so absorbed in the rich otherness of the place I nearly walked past Jonathan.

He was leaning against the brick flank of an apartment building, reading The Village Voice. I stared at him as if he was a particularity of the neighborhood. He might have been a photograph come to life, the way the details of Paris must look if you barrel through it on a three-day package tour.

I said, “Jonathan?”

He looked up, and said my name.

“Jonathan, I—this is you, right?”

He nodded. “It’s me. I got into town a couple of weeks ago.”

“I, wow, man. I don’t know what to say. Um, are you all right?”

I was as confused by his reappearance as I’d been by his departure. Once again, my circuits shut down and left me floating in space.

“I’m okay. Bobby, I didn’t mean for us to meet like this.”

“Uh-huh. I mean, can you tell me what’s going on?”

He sighed. “I’m sorry about the way I left. That was sort of ridiculous, wasn’t it? I just…I knew I wouldn’t do it any other way. I’d just stay around being the uncle until you and Clare moved out and left me alone in that awful apartment. How’s Clare?”

“She’s okay. She’s, like, pretty much the same. I guess we’re both pretty much the same.”

“You make it sound like a terrible fate,” he said.

I shrugged, and he nodded again. He was too familiar to see. His face and clothes kept blurring. It seemed possible that I’d crossed a mental line, and was in fact talking to someone who only looked like Jonathan. New York is full of people who’ve caved in under their particular losses, and decided they have business with everyone on the street.

“You want to go for a drink or something?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

We went to the first place we saw, an Irish bar that sold corned beef from a steam table. It was the uptown version of the Village bars we used to frequent on our nights with the Hendersons. Crepe-paper Christmas decorations had become year-round fixtures there, and the television showed a wavering, too-bright soap opera to the single old woman who sat at the bar waiting to scream at anyone who interfered with her.