Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Jonathan ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, and I had a beer. He clicked his glass softly against mine. “Did you think you’d ever see me again?” he said.

“I didn’t know. How would I have known?”

“Right. How would you?”

“Where did you go?” I asked him. I still lacked any sense of the real. I thought fleetingly of excusing myself, going to the pay phone in back, and calling the police. But what would I tell them?

“Well, I didn’t have a whole lot of money in the bank. I mean, if I’d had thousands I’d probably have gone to Florence or Tokyo or someplace. But with what I had, I just went out to California. Remember Donna Lee from college? She lives in San Francisco now, with a woman named Cristina. I went out there and slept on their sofa for a while and just sort of tried to concoct a San Francisco life for myself.”

He sipped at his drink, and sucked in an ice cube at exactly the moment I knew he was going to. He still wore the silver Navajo ring he’d bought in Cleveland when we were fifteen. Details whirled and racketed inside my head.

“I don’t really, you know, understand all this,” I told him. “I haven’t understood it since you left that note. We had a great time, the dinner with Erich was fine, and then you just left. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Well, it doesn’t exactly make sense to me either. You know, I turned twenty-nine a month ago. I feel like I’ll be thirty in about five minutes.”

“Um, happy birthday.”

“You’ll be twenty-nine too, in another few weeks.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well. Listen, I’ve got to go. They’re still debating about whether to take me back at the newspaper, I’m supposed to go meet Fred and Georgeanne in half an hour. It seems they haven’t decided yet whether I’m a high-strung romantic genius or just plain irresponsible. Drinks are on me.”

He tossed a pile of bills onto the table. I reached over and put my hand on top of his.

“Do you want to come over tonight?” I asked. “Clare’ll want to see you.”

He looked at our two hands. “No, Bobby,” he said. “I don’t want to come over. This was just an accident. I mean, you never come uptown. I figured I might as well have been in Michigan.”

“You don’t want to see us?”

Now he looked into my face. He pulled his hand out from under mine.

“Bobby, the fact is, I seem to have fallen in love with both of you. That sounds strange, I know. I never expected anything like this to happen. I mean—Well. It’s not what you prepare yourself for. I seem to have fallen in love with you and Clare together. I saw it that night on the roof. I didn’t want Erich to be my date, or anybody else. It’s just hopeless. As long as I know you, I can’t seem to fall in love with anybody else.”

He stood up. “Wait,” I told him. “Just wait a minute.”

“Give my love to Clare,” he said. “If and when I pull myself together, I’ll call you.”

He walked out of the bar. In my confusion, I lost track of what would be reasonable to do or say. I let him walk away into the November afternoon, and by the time I got out to the sidewalk he was gone.

He did as he said. He lived a life apart. Although we were in the same city, I never ran into him again, and he didn’t call. He let the fall and winter pass. And then in the spring he left a message on our answering machine.

“Hi, Bobby and Clare. This is such a weird thing to say on a tape like this. Bobby. My father died this morning. I thought I should let you know.”

His voice was followed by a mechanical click and whir, as the machine moved along to the next message.

WE WERE flying two thousand miles to the funeral of a man I’d never met. Through the airplane window I watched fat clouds throw shadows onto Texas. Texas was flat and one-colored as a manila envelope. Down there, in whatever farmhouses had chosen to attach themselves to the endless beige earth, people might be looking up at the airplane. They might be wondering, as I myself sometimes did, what rich interesting lives were being passed along to their next incident.

“Sure you don’t want some wine?” Bobby asked. I shook my head.

“I’m going on the wagon for a little while,” I said. “Maybe she could bring me a club soda or something.”

Bobby leaned over to signal for the stewardess. The stream of cold air blowing from the overhead nozzle disarranged his hair, which he’d taken to wearing longer, slicked back with gel. I smoothed his hair into place. Then I changed my mind and messed it up again.

I was over two months’ pregnant. I hadn’t told anyone. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it.

“I’m really, like, glad you’re here,” he said.

“Well, I hate to miss a funeral.”

“You know what I was thinking?” he said. “I was thinking the three of us could rent a car and drive back. We could, you know, see the country.”

“I guess we could,” I said.

“We could go to Carlsbad Caverns. We could see the Grand Canyon.”

“Mmm, I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

“Sure,” he said. “We could probably rent hiking boots and backpacks. We could camp overnight.”

“Bobby. They don’t rent things like that. People own them. Some people have camping lives. You and I are more the nightclub type.”

I had only imagined seeing the Grand Canyon. Not hiking in it.

“You don’t want to,” he said.

“I only brought funeral clothes,” I said. “Can you see me tottering along some trail in a black dress and heels?”

Bobby nodded. He smoothed his hair with his fingers. The light over Texas shone silver on his square face and his heavy, intricately veined hands. Despite the glossy Italian hair and the earring, his face was innocent as an empty bowl. It was still the face of a man who believed human differences could be resolved by a pilgrimage to famous geological phenomena.

“Just, you know, an idea,” he said.

“I know. Let’s leave it for another time.”

He nodded again. The baby coalescing inside me was following the dictates of his genes as well as my own. Tiny nails were being driven into the passing moments. Bobby sipped his wine. We stared out the window at the emptiness passing below.

Jonathan met us at the airport. He looked physically diminished, as if some air or vital fluid had leaked out of him. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Had he always been so small and wan? Sunburned, brightly dressed people crowded around him in the waiting area. He might have been a refugee, in his pallor and his black T-shirt. Someone newly arrived from a grim, impoverished place. When Bobby and I got off the plane he gave us stiff, formal embraces, like the ones French politicians exchange.

“How’s Alice, Jon?” Bobby asked.

“Made of stern stuff,” he said. “Much sterner than me.”

“And how are you?” I asked.

“Hysterical,” he said calmly. “A mess.”

We drove to Jonathan’s parents’ condominium in Jonathan’s father’s car, an enormous blue Oldsmobile. I had never seen Jonathan drive before. He looked both childlike and paternal behind the wheel of that big car. He held the wheel with both hands, as if he was steering a ship.

On the way he told us how his father’s heart attack had struck him on his way to the mailbox. He explained that fact in particular. His father had had asthma and then emphysema. So his death by heart failure seemed to make everyone feel as cheated as they would have had he been in faultless health. Bobby asked, “On his way back from the mail box?” as if that were the most appalling thing about it.

I put on my sunglasses and watched the shopping centers pass. They shimmered in the heat. Between them lay open country, reddish-gray, studded with cacti. Arizona was the first place I had ever been that turned out to look exactly as I’d pictured it. As we drove along the blindingly bright highway I felt powerful and competent. I was an older woman in sunglasses who’d come to help a couple of confused men contend with their grief. I thought at that moment that I would leave Bobby and have the child by myself.