Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“Listen to me now. Go out and find yourself someone to love. Have a baby of your own, if that’s what you want.”

“I’ve already got one,” he said. “Rebecca is as much mine as she is anyone’s.”

“Three is an odd number. When there are three, one usually gets squeezed out.”

“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “You don’t have any fucking idea.”

“Please don’t speak to me that way. I’m still your mother.”

“And please don’t pull rank on me. You’re the one who wants to talk.”

He had me there. I was the one who wanted to talk. I was the one who had disappeared into marriage, let myself be carried along by the simple, ceaseless comfort of domestic particulars. And now in a desert grove I wanted to talk.

“All I’m saying,” I said, “is that there seem to be certain limits. We have a hard enough time staying together as couples.”

“And I,” he said, “am seriously considering the possibility that those limits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bobby, Clare, and I are happy together. We plan on staying together.”

“History teaches differently.”

“History changes. Mom, it isn’t the same world anymore. The world’s going to end any minute, why shouldn’t we try to have everything we can?”

“People have believed the world was ending since the day the world began, dear. It hasn’t, and it hasn’t changed much either.”

“How can you say that?” he said. “Look at yourself.”

I was aware of the ground under my feet, chalky and red-gray. I was aware of myself in jeans and a suede jacket, under the open sky.

I said, “Do you think that when it comes down to brass tacks, Bobby will chose you? That’s it, isn’t it? You think Clare will recede, and you and Bobby will raise that child together, with her in the background.”

He looked at me, and I saw him. I saw everything: his hunger for men, his guilt and disappointment, his rage. I saw that in ways his anger was a woman’s anger. He had a woman’s sense of betrayal. He believed he’d been pushed unfairly onto the margins, been loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. For a moment I felt afraid of him. I feared my own son, out in that wild place so far from other beings. We had protected ourselves with silence because our only other choice was to howl at one another, to scratch and bite and shriek. We were too ashamed, both of us, for ordinary anger.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, and I conceded that I probably didn’t. We had lost track of one another; we were strangers in some deep, impenetrable way that ran like a river under our devotion and our cordiality. Perhaps that had always been the case.

“We’d better go try and catch your flight,” I said.

“Yes. We’d better.”

“About the ashes. It’s your choice. Let me know what you decide, whenever you decide.”

He nodded. “Maybe I’ll give them to Rebecca someday,” he said. “Here, kid. Your family heritage.”

“She won’t know what to do with them either,” I said.

“If I have any say in things, she will. I want her to grow up with no question about where to put her grandfather’s ashes.”

“That would be nice. That would be nice for her.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “We can just barely make it if we hurry.”

We got back into the car, and drove the rest of the way in silence. Jonathan returned the ashes to his bag and closed the zipper. As I drove I tried to phrase some bit of parental advice, but I couldn’t think of how to get it said. I’d have liked to tell him something I’d taken almost sixty years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness—a small enough chance—lay in welcoming change. But I couldn’t manage it.

Because we’d lost time, he had to jump out at the curb in front of the terminal. “Bye, Mom,” he said.

“Goodbye. Take care of yourself.”

“Yep. I always do.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Go, quick. You’ll miss your plane.”

He got out of the car and slung his bag over his shoulder. Before sprinting for his plane, he came around to the driver’s side. “So long,” he said.

Was he ill, or simply aging? Why did he look a little haggard, his eyes slightly too large in his skull?

“Jonathan? Call me when you get in, all right? Just so I know you made it in one piece.”

“Okay. Sure.”

He bent before the open window and I kissed him, lightly but square on the mouth. I kissed him goodbye. And then, without a wave or a backward glance, he was gone.

BOBBY and I arrived at the station a few minutes before Erich’s train was due. At a small-town station like that—which was only a maroon-brick building the size of a toolshed, fronting a concrete platform—you got a true sense of your own remoteness. Here, where the country and the city met, you understood that the important fact about an approaching train was its subsequent departure for other places. Even as we watched the silver line of the train snake around the last green hillside, I could imagine the gritty windstorm it would cause on its way out. Cinders and a stray paper cup would blow briefly around the platform and then settle again into the prevailing hush. A lopsided red vending machine that had once sold newspapers stood gaping among the cattails and nettle across the tracks.

I had called Erich because I was lonely. That’s not true: I should call my condition by its proper name. When we moved to Woodstock I’d thought there would be more unattached gay men around; I’d imagined meeting them in bars and yard sales. But, as it turned out, the gay men who lived there had all arrived in pairs. So, eventually, I’d called Dr. Feelgood and invited him up for a weekend.

I patted Bobby’s shoulder, because I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Erich in over a year. The only other person on the platform was an obese elderly woman searching with mounting irritation for something in a white straw bag. I kept my hand on Bobby’s shoulder as the train curved toward us. A figure from my old, more sensible life was about to visit me in my strange and bucolic new one.

The train rumbled in, its doors sighed open. A family disembarked, followed by a bald man in a brown suit, followed by the obese younger woman who was being met by the old woman with the white straw bag. For a moment, it seemed Erich was not on the train after all. And then he appeared, holding a blue canvas suitcase, at the top of the train’s three metal steps.

I knew the moment I saw him. On someone as wiry as Erich, the loss of even five pounds would have had a noticeable diminishing effect. He had lost at least ten. His skin was gray and dense-looking.

He smiled. He got down the stairs competently if slowly, moving as if he balanced an invisible jug atop his head. Bobby took his elbow when he stepped from the last tread to the concrete.

“Hi,” Erich said. “Here I am.”

“Here you are,” I said.

After a brief hesitation, we embraced. Through his clothes—black jeans and a blue denim shirt—I could feel the true thinness of him. It was like holding a bundle of sticks. In his embrace I felt a surge of panic. The blood rushed dizzyingly to my head. All I could think of was breaking away, running from the platform into the cattails. As Erich and I held one another the world broke down into bright swimming specks before my eyes, a garish moil of color, and I could for a moment have knocked him down, kicked him under the wheels of the train so he’d be ground to nothing. So he would no longer exist.

Instead, I took his bony shoulders in my hands and said, “It’s good to see you.” The train started up again, pulling away in a knee-high fury of sparkling dust.