Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

I breathed deeply and pressed Alice to my breasts. I could feel her smaller breasts in their brassiere, and her ribs and spine. I could tell she had a skeleton.

“Good,” she said. “Even harder.”

I held one of my own wrists with the opposite hand, like a wrestler, and squeezed until I heard her gasp for breath. I realized she had taken hold of me, too.

“Oh Lord,” she whispered. “Hold me tighter. Don’t let go.”

I was still holding her when a car pulled up in front. “Bobby and Jonathan are back,” I said, relaxing my grip.

“Oh no,” she said. “I need a little longer without them.”

The car door slammed. “Now, now. It’ll be all right,” I said helplessly.

“I’m not ready,” she said. “I need a little longer.”

The front door opened. There was no place to go. The wall ran all around the yard, chest high, and on the other side were more buildings exactly like this one. “Come on,” I said. I led her by the hand to the farthest corner of the yard, where the brightness was less intense.

“Just stand here,” I said, setting her in the curve of the wall. I could hear Jonathan calling for his mother. A window blazed with light.

“I’m not crying,” she said. “Am I?”

“No. Stand right here,” I said. I placed myself in front of her, with my back to the house, blocking the light.

Soon Bobby opened the back door and stood in the doorway, a dark shape cut out of the light. “Clare?” he called. “Alice?”

“We’re all right, Bobby,” I said. “Go back in. We’ll be there in a minute.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”

“Oh, don’t let him come out here,” Alice said.

“Nothing, darling,” I called. “We’re fine. Just go back in, please.”

“What’s wrong?” He walked out onto the grass and stood several paces away. He planted his fists on his hips, like an angry father. I felt the strongest twist of dislike I’d ever felt for him.

“What?” he said.

Alice had by that time begun to cry, from humiliation as much as grief, long dry sobs that caught in her throat and made a tearing sound. “Is that Alice?” Bobby said.

“Of course it’s Alice,” I said. “Go inside.”

He came and stood next to me. “Alice?” he said, as if he didn’t recognize her.

I put my hands on her shoulders. I didn’t try to embrace her. I just held on to her, so she wouldn’t feel like she was dropping away from everything.

“Oh, Alice, I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.”

“You didn’t do—” was all Alice could get out.

Bobby drew a noisy breath and started to cry, too. I wanted to punch him. How dare he be anything but strong at a moment like this? I actually lifted one hand to do it, to slap him out of himself. I had always wanted to make a gesture like that. But my hand stopped halfway and, following the line of least resistance, settled comfortingly on his back instead. What else could I do with my hand? I wasn’t the heroic type. I had no plan of action. Bobby trembled, and as I touched him his trembling went through me like an electric shock. My father popped into my mind. Suddenly he was there, solid as a photograph, handsome and arrogant in his winter coat. I kept one hand on Alice and one on Bobby. I could see my father so clearly, and my mother: outraged, efficient, aging in a square-shouldered red jacket. I saw Ned distinctly as if I had known him, turned away by his discontented wife, watching movies among his dwindling audience, dreaming of Faye Dunaway or Elizabeth Taylor.

I held on to Bobby and Alice. Obeying no one but myself I put my head back and laughed. Not that anything was funny. But I laughed anyway. I knew I ought to feel embarrassed, for laughing at a time like that, but things had gone too far. I decided not to be embarrassed, and wasn’t. I kept laughing. The fact that nothing was funny only seemed to make me laugh harder.

Soon a light, questioning touch landed on my shoulder. It was Jonathan, looking timid and hungry, asking by his touch to be let into the circle. I made room for him between myself and Bobby, and laid my arm across his shoulders so I could keep my hold on Bobby, too. I let myself go on laughing. I felt a weight beginning to rise inside me, something big and sodden, like a lump of dough I’d swallowed so long ago I’d forgotten it was lodged in my gut. I laughed on. I laughed at my father, a drunken boy tortured by his own devotion to sleaze and disorder, and at my tough, vengeful mother. I laughed at Ned, a dreamer reduced to ash and bone; at wimpy Jonathan; at Bobby and at myself, knocked up three months after my fortieth birthday by a man I wasn’t sure I liked. I laughed at Alice, stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard. At every lousy little thing.

CLARE got sick in seven different states. She was nauseated first at the Grand Canyon, standing wan and erect beside an unused telescope on the South Rim, looking in the direction of the view from behind dark glasses. As Bobby strained against the railing, exclaiming over the profound distances, Clare touched my elbow and said in a low voice, “Sweetheart, I don’t think I can manage it.”

“Manage what?” I asked.

“This,” she said, waving in the direction of the abyss. “All this grandeur and beauty. A great moment like this. It’s too much for me.”

I stood close to her. Although the morning was calm, I had some idea of shielding her from whatever winds might be stirred up by the canyon’s vastness. The sun had just risen. It threw a hammered, golden light onto the cliff faces, which tumbled down into an unsteady, shimmering lake of translucent purple darkness that appeared to be bottomless. Bobby danced ecstatically at the rim, hugging himself and emitting surprised little groans.

“There’s nothing to it,” I told Clare. “Just stand here and look, and when we’re through looking, we’ll go have breakfast.”

The word “breakfast” made her retch. She caught the telescope for support. It swung creakily up toward a vivid pink gash of cloud. She crouched, gagging, but did not vomit. A thread of saliva dangled from her mouth, shining in the light.

I held her shoulders. “Honey, you’re sick,” I said.

“Too goddamn beautiful,” she said. “Better put me back in that Chevy Nova.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll go get Bobby.”

“Leave him,” she said. “Don’t interrupt, he’s in a trance or something.”

She may have been right. Bobby had ceased his hopping, wound-up little dance and was now standing with both hands on the rail, like a captain commanding his ship in a storm. He was more available than Clare or I to outright fits of sentiment—he had no sense of going too far.

I helped Clare into our rented Chevrolet. She and I had agreed, with mingled feelings of irony and plain interest, to drive back to New York from Arizona. This was our first morning—we’d set out at 3 a.m. from my mother’s house to make the Grand Canyon by sunrise. In the next five days we would cross the Rockies and the Plains, pay our respects to the Ohio dead, buy Shaker boxes in Pennsylvania. It was Bobby’s trip at heart. He would drive most of the time, and insist on stopping in stores that advertised “Homemade Jam” or “Local Handicrafts,” which, three times out of four, had been made somewhere in Asia. He would, with my credit card, buy over a hundred dollars’ worth of cassette tapes: the Stones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen. He would play “Born to Run” over and over, until Clare finally threw it out the window on the road approaching Sandusky.

I settled her into the front seat. The car had an immaculate, rubberized smell and she inhaled deeply, as if the disinfected air could revive her. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “Now go. Look at the view.”