Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“No, I’ll stay here with you.”

“Do you think I want to be the one who made you sit in a subcompact instead of seeing the Grand Canyon? Go. For Christ’s sake.”

I went. I stood beside Bobby at the railing. At this hour, in the off-season, the observation area was empty. One crushed paper cup sat luminous on the thin lip of red earth beyond the rail. The morning light, brilliant but without warmth, washed our faces and clothes.

“Amazing,” I said.

Bobby turned to me. He couldn’t speak, and probably wished I wouldn’t either. But his politeness never failed him.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“You don’t expect this,” I said. “I mean, you’ve seen it so many times on coasters and dish towels and I don’t know what-all. I thought maybe it was going to be sort of kitschy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It actually knocked Clare out. I had to put her back in the car.”

“Hmm.” He put his arm over my shoulder, because he loved me and because he ardently wished I would shut up. I slipped my arm around his waist. Here was his smell and his solid, familiar flesh. We watched the sun come up. Bobby was warm and substantial, his brain crawling with thoughts that were at once familiar and utterly strange to me. His wrist still bore the liver-colored mole. Clare waited for us in the car, defeated by the view. I believed, at that moment, that I had never loved anyone but my parents and these two people. Perhaps we don’t fully recover from our first loves. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.

Clare was sick again the following morning, at Pikes Peak. “Maybe I’m allergic to national monuments,” she said. We got her to the women’s room in a Shell station, and waited for nearly half an hour. She emerged pallid and straight-backed, with her sunglasses on and dark red lipstick newly applied. She might have been an ancient movie star. Behind her, granite peaks stood dusted with snow.

“Honey,” I said, “should we drive straight to Denver and put you on a plane?”

“No,” she said. “I think I’m all right. I got over it yesterday, didn’t I? It’s probably just some little bug.”

She had, in fact, recovered by ten o’clock. The color returned to her face, and her body gave up its clenched, formal posture. We drove among meadows that were taking on their first green, backed by mountains covered with pine and bare white aspens. It was a verdant, uncomplicated landscape—wide open, with no underlayer of menace. Farther north, I suspected, the terrain was rougher, the peaks more jagged, and if you strayed too far from the road you could be swallowed up by the sheer fathomless distance of the land and sky. Here, in the heart of Colorado, we passed only simple manifestations of broad, unterrifying beauty. There were mountains, and fields of cattle. There were silver streams that clattered alongside the highway, studded with chocolate-colored rocks. The landscape touched you with its fertile kindliness, but didn’t change you in any way. It never threatened to break your heart.

We drove all day, and reached Nebraska before dark. Clare read Vogue and Interview and Rolling Stone. “The thing I love best about car trips,” she said, “is the way you’re entitled to read stupid magazines for hours and hours. I mean, you can look at scenery anytime, scenery’s everywhere. But the chance to read an entire Interview without guilt? That’s rare.”

We slept in a motel fifty miles west of Lincoln, and started again just after daybreak. Clare was only slightly ill that morning. We fell into a lulled rhythm of driving, reading, eating, and listening to music, with the farmland of Nebraska and Iowa and Illinois rolling by. You have to travel through the Plains to fully appreciate the emptiness of this country. Its main characteristics are not traffic and abundant store displays but a windswept solitude that lacks the dignity of true remove—no horizon is truly empty. The sun always glints on a remote water tower or silo, a billboard or a tin-roofed, temporary storehouse. Every twenty or thirty miles you pass through a struggling town which continues to exist because at some point in the past it set out to exist. We stopped for meals in some of those towns, hoping for homemade hash browns or pies baked an hour earlier by the owners’ wives, but all the food was dead, thawed and microwaved. Fields rolled by, seeded but still bare, hour after hour of blank black earth exposed to the raw sky. Clare read to us from a book of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Our car became more and more disreputable, littered with wrappers and empty bottles. By nightfall, when we stopped at a motel in Indiana, we had all but lost track of our histories and futures—it seemed we had always been driving across a vast table of farmland and would always continue doing so. That is both the horror and the marvel of long travel. You lose track of your life with astonishing speed. An interstellar traveler would be not quite identifiable as an earthling within two weeks; after six months in deep space he or she might as well not return to earth at all.

The next day we drove through Cleveland. Clare was sick in the morning, worse than Nebraska but less severe than Pikes Peak. By the time we reached the Cleveland city limits, just after 11 a.m., she was more or less recovered.

“Cleveland,” she said. “Who ever expected to visit such a remote, exotic place?”

Bobby and I were overtaken by giddy nervousness at the town line. We pointed out buildings to one another, joked about their stature. They had seemed so grand. We drove past the limestone clutter of downtown, took the familiar exit. Our itinerary was brief. First we passed the six-story brick-and-concrete parking structure that stood where my father’s theater had been. The new building was an arrangement of tiered ramps with an unintentionally beautiful blue neon arrow pointing out the entrance. It was serene and uncomplicated, utterly functional, and it had the look of something that would stand for hundreds of years. My father’s old theater, built during the Depression, had been cheaply ornamented, its yellow bricks laid in a herringbone pattern and its aluminum marquee arched and buckling like an ocean wave. Even when it was new, it must have seemed temporary, a small monument to forgetfulness and good cheer thrown up during hard times. The parking structure was more businesslike, hard and smooth as a roach.

“That’s that,” I said. “Rest in peace, Dad.” I managed a brusque, flippant tone because I couldn’t bear the idea of myself gone maudlin at such an obvious moment. I didn’t mind my own sentimentality but I hated to be a sucker. I was not wholly sorry my father’s business was gone. I was vaguely ashamed and lonely, yet pleased with myself simply for being alive; for surviving into the future. Only the most dedicated nostalgist could have argued against the notion that this part of town had been generally improved. New restaurants announced their names in gilt letters, and a famous department-store chain was renovating the defunct family-owned store that had stocked drab outdated clothes and gaudy costume jewelry.

We passed my family’s old house, which looked wonderful. The new owners had painted it pine green, and had reshingled the roof. A skylight had been installed over my parents’ former bedroom. I could imagine the current state of the rooms: the woodwork would be painted white, and the carpet taken up to expose the oak floors. There would be art, and spare leather furniture.

“Shit,” Bobby said. “Look what they did to it.”

“It looks great,” I told him. “Don’t stop. It isn’t ours anymore, don’t even think about going up to the front door and asking if we can look inside.”