Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“I’ve been thinking,” Clare says. “What if we painted the windowpanes blue? Like a cobalt blue, you know? Do you think that’d look too cutesy?”

“Ask Jonathan,” I answer. “He’s the one who knows about things like that.”

She nods. “Bobby?” she says.

“Uh-huh?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I walk around the place and I feel like I’m standing on an airplane wing. At thirty thousand feet. I guess I want you and Jonathan to think this is as strange as I do.”

From the house, the baby starts crying. “That’s what really does it,” Clare says. “I’ve always just made my own mistakes, I never had to worry about somebody else like this before.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s fine and perfect. Trust me. Okay?”

She nods uncertainly. She keeps losing the battle to decide instead of worry. Worry is part of what makes her short-tempered; she is trying to develop a personality to match her worst expectations.

“Let’s go see how Jonathan’s doing with her,” she says.

“Okay. Sure.”

We go into the house together. The door opens straight into the living room, a big shabby rectangle still papered in scowling red eagles and blue drums. At this time of day it’s filled with squares of light that slant in from three sides. Jonathan is walking a circle with Rebecca propped on his shoulder. She wails, a series of short piercing cries like mortified hiccups.

“Mystery tantrum,” he says. “Her diaper’s fine, and she just ate half an hour ago.”

“Let me try with her,” Clare says.

Jonathan fails to hide his reluctance. He dislikes giving the baby up, even to her own dreams. But when Clare holds out her arms he passes her over.

Clare folds her in, whispers to her. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “What’s the matter? Just a little fit of existential despair?”

Rebecca is a twenty-pound being with feathery hair and dark, furious eyes. Already, at eleven months, she has a nature. She is prone to contemplation. She resists both laughter and sorrow until they overwhelm her, and then she gives herself up completely.

Clare walks the living room with her, whispering. She speaks to the baby the same way she speaks to Jonathan or me, in full sentences, but she speaks to the baby without an undercurrent of rage.

“Now, Miss Rebecca,” she says, “you’re not being reasonable. But, hey, why should you be? Lord, if I ever start nagging you to be reasonable, will you shoot me, please?”

Jonathan watches in an ecstasy of edgy affection. Parenthood has brought several surprises—the biggest is his tortured devotion. Clare and I are calmer in the face of Rebecca’s fragility and her unending needs. Jonathan hasn’t rested since she entered the world. He is a living illustration of love’s power to unsettle our nerves.

Now he has something vital to lose. Now there is a small victim for every tragic story he can tell himself.

Rebecca won’t be quiet, and we take her outside. She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. We walk the property with her, and let her cries dissipate in the noon air. Jonathan picks a daisy. He twirls it in front of her pinched red face.

“Hey, kid,” he says. “Hey. Take a look at this amazing, unprecedented thing here.” Of all her qualities, Jonathan is most in love with her capacity for amazement. He almost weeps when she stares goggle-eyed at a yarn ball or a teaspoon cupping the sun. But she keeps crying, right into the daisy.

“Can’t be bought with flowers,” Clare says. There is true pride in her voice. If Jonathan loves her for being the world’s best audience, Clare loves her stubborn insistence on her own mysteries.

We walk into the stand of trees behind the house. Here, in the endless shade, there is no grass to speak of. There is only forest trash—pine cones and shed branches, the droppings of deer. We walk among the silent trees with Rebecca’s noise trailing behind us like a glittery scarf.

Clare asks, “Did you boys call the plumber today?”

“Yep,” Jonathan says. “He can’t fit us in until two weeks from Tuesday. Why don’t you let me try with her again?”

“Shit. This house isn’t going to be done until the next century. You know that, don’t you?”

“No big rush,” Jonathan says. “Come here, Rebecca.”

He reaches for her, but Clare maintains her hold. “No big rush,” she says. “So we’ll just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?”

“We’re pioneers,” Jonathan says. “Can’t expect all the suburban comforts right off the bat.”

“I think,” she says, “that both of you are some kind of retards. I honestly do.”

She holds the baby close and hurries ahead of us, deeper into the woods. Bars of light, fractured by pine boughs, hang stodgily. Jonathan takes off after her, as if he believes she might be planning to take Rebecca and raise her alone in the wild.

Our restaurant will open in less than a week. Jonathan and I work all day, finishing it up. It’s nothing grand, just a nine-table restaurant in a former saloon. We’ve reformed the saloon like a pair of mail-order brides newly arrived on the frontier. We’ve painted it white, and hung striped curtains. Jonathan has covered the walls with old photos: school pictures of kids in bow ties and pinafores, men and women in plaid Bermuda shorts posing sunburned beside a lake, somebody’s grandmother shoveling snow. He’s hung a record-breaking salmon caught in 1957 and a shelf full of trophies. On the trophies bright gold men and women, sexlessly naked as angels, act out human excellence in bowling, golf, badminton, and citizenship. This will be a simple place, just breakfast and lunch. We’ve bought unmatched tables and chairs from the same secondhand stores where we found the trophies and photographs and the lacquered salmon.

“Come on down, everybody,” Jonathan says. “The Homo Café is just about open for business.” He daubs white paint over a scar on the molding. He is wearing overalls, with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

I’m in the kitchen, loading five-pound jars of preserves and ketchup onto the shelves. “They didn’t send strawberry jam,” I say. “They sent, like, half boysenberry and half peach.”

“I’ll call up and yell at them. They probably think they can send us whatever they’re trying to get rid of, just because we don’t know what we’re doing.”

When the jars are all stacked on the shelves I stand at the counter, watching Jonathan paint. “Clare thinks we should think what we’re doing is strange,” I say.

“It is, ” he says. “Who thinks it isn’t strange?”

“Well, I guess she thinks we should be more upset about it.”

“She’s just anxious because she’s paying the bills. She’s waited all her life to get this money, and now, wham, it’s being spent.”

“It’s being, you know, in vest ed,” I say.

“Right. She has been sort of a pain in the ass lately, hasn’t she?”

“Oh, I don’t know if I’d say that.”

“I’ll say it. Clare has been a bitch for a long time now. Really, since she got pregnant.”

“Well, you know,” I say. I punch a new cassette into the sound system. Jimi Hendrix sings “Are You Experienced?”

“I guess she’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. “Motherhood is hard on all of us. I know it’s hard on me.”

I get a paintbrush and help with the touch-ups. Jimi puts out his velvet growl, a living voice from the world of the dead, as Jonathan and I cover the last nicks. We sway to the music. There is some kind of small perfection in this, painting a wall together while Jimi sings. There is a knitting of times, the past tumbling into the future. It comes to me suddenly, in the form of a surprise: I’ve got what I wanted. A brother to work beside. A revised future shining like a light bulb over our heads.