Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Here is what’s unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. We adore Clare but she’s not quite on the team. Not really. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We’re related. Each of us is the other born into different flesh. We may love Clare but she is not us. Only we can be ourselves and one another at the same time. I daub paint over an old scar. The tinted faces of grade-school kids, all in their forties or fifties now, look out from the walls with toothy, clear-eyed optimism.

Later we lock up the restaurant and go to our car by way of the main street. I prefer walking through the middle of things—I’m the one who likes town. I’ve been on my way to Woodstock since I was nine and now, more than twenty years later, I’ve arrived. My brother was right—there are still people here. The concert, I’ve learned, happened sixty miles away, in a broad grassy field that is no more or less than that. An empty space ringed by green-black trees. Jonathan and I tried swimming in the chocolate-colored pond while Clare sat with Rebecca in the weeds, but mosquitoes drove us all back to our car. We ended up having lunch at what Clare believed was the same place she went with her husband-to-be when they fled the actual concert. She said the hamburgers would come with three pickles and a sealed ketchup envelope, and they did.

Woodstock is what towns were supposed to become before the old future got sidetracked and a new one took its place. Bearded romantics still strum guitars in the town square, still dreaming of themselves as forest creatures and apprentice magicians. Old ladies with their gray hair frizzy and loose nod in time on the benches. Clare calls it pathetic and Jonathan doesn’t pay close attention one way or the other, but I appreciate the kindness of its quiet streets and the people’s cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.

Jonathan and I drive home in our used Toyota, up and down the rises, with branch shadows flicking across the windshield. He sits low in the passenger seat, his sneakers propped on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you what’s really strange about all this,” he says. “What’s really, truly strange is the fact that we’re doing it at all. People say they’re going to move to the country and open a little café, but who actually does it?”

“We did,” I say. “We are.”

When we top the last hill, I hit the brakes. “What is it?” Jonathan asks.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “I just want to look for a second.”

From where I’ve stopped we can see our old brown house raising its chimney among a riot of junipers. Three dormered windows catch the light that will soon slip away behind the mountains, and the ivy that has grown unchecked for decades flutters, the leaves showing their silver undersides. The house has stood for more than a century without giving in to the landscape. No vines have snaked their way through the masonry, no underground lake has increased its boundaries by seeping into the foundation. Although I usually sing it to tease Clare, now I sing the Woodstock song to Jonathan, with a half-serious attitude that is all the pleasanter for being only half. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” He listens to a few bars, and joins in.

At dinner, we talk about the restaurant and the baby. Lately our lives are devoted to the actual—we worry over Rebecca’s cough and the delivery of our used-but-refurbished walk-in refrigerator. I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

“I don’t like Dr. Glass,” Clare says. She is sitting beside Rebecca’s high chair, spooning vanilla pudding into Rebecca’s mouth. Between each bite Rebecca looks suspiciously at the spoon, double-checking the contents. She has inherited my appetite but has also inherited Clare’s skepticism. She is both hungry and watchful.

“Why not?” I ask.

“Well, he’s a hippie. And he can’t be more than thirty-five. I’d just rather take Rebecca to an old fart. You know, somebody in sensible shoes who got your mother and all her sisters and brothers through things like smallpox and polio when they were kids. When Glass tells me not to worry about these coughing fits I keep thinking, ‘I’m being told this by a man in Birkenstocks.’”

“I agree,” Jonathan says. “Glass does Tai Chi. I’d rather find somebody who plays golf.”

“Glass seems okay to me,” I say. “I mean, I like him. You can talk to him.”

Jonathan says, “I suppose what it really gets down to is, you want your baby’s doctor to be some sort of fatherly type. You know? Someone who seems unaffected by trends.”

“Amen,” Clare says. “Tomorrow I’m going out looking for a new pediatrician.”

“I really think Glass is fine,” I say.

Clare holds a spoonful of pudding an inch from Rebecca’s open mouth. “I want to try someone else,” she says. “I’m nervous about Glass, I think he’s too easygoing. Okay?”

“Well. Okay,” I say.

“Okay.” She slips the spoon into Rebecca’s mouth with smooth, practiced accuracy. Clare is turning herself into the Mom character from our Henderson days. We don’t talk about the Hendersons anymore, maybe because the difference between our actual lives and their hypothetical ones has shrunk below the measuring point.

Later, after we’ve put Rebecca to bed, we watch television together. It’s what there is to do at night, with a baby, in the country. We lie on the queen-size bed, surrounded by corn chips and beer and Diet Coke. The upstairs bedrooms are snug and dark. Their ceilings follow the curve of the roof. The last owners—the ones who did the downstairs in eagle wallpaper and Spanish-style cabinetry—must have run out of money at the stairwell. Up here the shabbiness has more patina. The wallpaper in this room swarms with faded carnivorous-looking flowers, and the venetian blinds dangle from frayed cords the color of strong tea. Clare flips around the channels. We have cable here, a powerful magnet that sucks down each invisible impulse passing overhead. Along with the normal stations we get strip shows from New York, Mexican soap operas, Japanese women gleefully demonstrating inventions so complex that only other inventions can fully appreciate them. Occasionally we tune in a hesitant, snowy channel that is almost frightening—it looks like men and women walking, just walking, through an empty field. It could be a transmission we’ve picked up by mistake, something from a world we aren’t meant to see.

“A hundred and twenty stations and there’s still nothing to watch,” Clare says.

“Nothing on TV tonight, let’s fuck,” Jonathan says.

Clare looks at him with her brows arched and her eyes dark. “You two fuck,” she says.

Jonathan jumps on her and simulates frantic, rabbit-like copulation. “Oh baby oh baby oh baby,” he moans.

“Off,” she says. “Get off me. Really. Go jump on Bobby.”

“Ooh baby,” Jonathan says.

“Bobby, make him stop,” she says.

I shrug, powerless. “I’ll scream,” she says. “I’ll call the police.”

“And tell them what?” Jonathan asks.

“That I’m being held prisoner in this house by two men. That they lured me here for purposes of breeding, and force me to live in a perpetual 1969.”

“You’ve done the breeding,” Jonathan says. “If that were your only purpose here, we’d be through with you by now.”

“The baby still needs milk, doesn’t she?” Clare says. “And the house needs a momma. Doesn’t it?”