Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Late Sunday afternoon I was in the kitchen with Clare and Rebecca. Clare sliced an avocado. Rebecca sat on the counter top, sorting through a set of plastic animal-shaped cookie cutters, and I stood alongside, to keep her from falling. Outside the window we could see Bobby and Erich sitting in the unruly grass, talking earnestly. Bobby made sweeping motions with his hands, indicating enormity, and Erich nodded without much conviction.

“So, Bobby has a new love,” I said.

“Don’t be nasty, dear,” Clare said. “It isn’t becoming in you.” She laid avocado slices on a plate, began peeling a Bermuda onion.

“I just don’t feel like Erich needs to suddenly become our favorite charity,” I said. “He’s practically a stranger.”

“We have room here for a stranger, don’t you think? It’s not like we lack for anything ourselves.”

“So now you’re Mother Teresa?” I said. “This seems a little sudden.”

She looked at me with an even-tempered calm that was more cogently accusing than any censure could have been. Something had happened to Clare. I couldn’t read her anymore—she’d given up her cynicism and taken on an opaque motherliness. We were still friends and domestic partners but we were no longer intimate.

“I know,” I said. “I’m just a rotten person.”

She patted my shoulder. “Please don’t pat me,” I said. “You never used to pat me like this.”

Rebecca, who had been droolingly contemplating a cookie cutter shaped like a moose, started to cry. Discord cut into her skin like a fine cord; she wept whenever anyone in her vicinity spoke in anger.

“Hey, kid,” I said. “It’s okay, never mind about us.”

I tried to take her in my arms but she didn’t want to be held by me. She insisted on being picked up by Clare, who walked with her into the living room while I finished slicing the onion.

Eventually, Erich took up residence. He had nowhere else to go except his sparse, comfortless apartment in the East Twenties. He’d have endured his illness in the company of volunteers until he moved to whatever hospital beds were available to the unprosperous and the uninsured. Bobby insisted that he visit us often, and when the trip got to be too much for him he moved in for good. I offered my bedroom, claiming I’d learned to prefer sleeping downstairs. Taking Erich in was not a simple process. I resented him for being sick and at the same time felt compelled to treat him in ways I hoped to be treated if I fell ill myself. I practiced the tenderness I hoped I might inspire in others if my vigor leaked away and my body started to change. Sometimes I caught up with the feeling and experienced it, a flush and flutter of true concern. Sometimes I only manifested it. After a period of resistance Erich agreed to take over my bed, and in doing so almost palpably relinquished a degree of participation in the ongoing, living world. This moment may come to us all, at some point in our eventual move from health into sickness. We abandon our old obligation to consider the needs of others, and give ourselves up to their care. There is a shift in status. We become citizens of a new realm, and although we retain the best and worst of our former selves we are no longer bodily in command of our fates. Erich needed my room for the complex business of his dying. He was a private person and would not suffer well in the midst of our domestic traffic. So with a courteous and slightly aggrieved smile he allowed me to put him into my bed. I turned thirty-two the day after he arrived for the final time.

We took him for walks in the woods, cooked meals that wouldn’t tax his system. He was an elderly spirit in the house, alternately courtly and short-tempered. Our grandfather might have come to live with us.

Winter passed, spring came. The restaurant prospered. Rebecca cut new teeth, and discovered the lush possibility of saying no to whatever was asked of her. Erich declined unpredictably. His energy dwindled and returned, sometimes from hour to hour. He had intestinal trouble, fevers, a cloudiness of vision. His mind drifted occasionally—he could grow vague and forgetful. He made weekly trips to the hospital in Albany. On his best days he could walk into the woods with a basket, hunting mushrooms. On his worst days he lay curled in bed, neither discernibly awake nor asleep.

I lived slightly apart, in the middle of everything. I would not have asked Erich to live with us but I couldn’t bring myself to actively wish him gone—I was too nervous about my own status as the house crank. I learned to find a chilly comfort in being good to Erich. It offered some obscure hope of appeasing the fates.

One evening when I came home from the restaurant I found him sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. The sun had fallen behind the mountain. Violet shadows were gathering though the sky was still bright—we would always suffer early dusks in this house. Erich sat on the ancient wicker chair with an old blue blanket of mine pulled up to his neck, looking like a tubercular teenager. As his flesh grew gaunter, his appearance became more and more adolescent. His ribs stuck out, and his ears, hands, and feet came to seem too large for his body.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”

“Okay,” he answered. “Not too bad.”

A formality prevailed between us, just as it had when we were sleeping together. We were courteous and remote. We continued to act as if we had recently met.

“Bobby’s staying late at work,” I said. “Marlys had some kind of women’s thing to go to, so Bobby’s doing the pies for tomorrow. Are Clare and Rebecca around?”

“They’re in the house,” he said.

“I’m going to go get Rebecca. Maybe I’ll bring her out here for a while, okay?”

“Okay. Jonathan?”

“Mm-hm?”

“This is going to be, you know, hard for me to say. But I’ve been thinking. Do you ever, well, wonder about us? I mean, about you and me.”

“I think about us,” I said. “Sure I do.”

“I don’t mean just think. I don’t just mean that. I mean, well, do you ever wonder why we always held back? It seems like we could have done so much more to make each other happy.”

Even in an extreme condition, such direct talk was hard on him. His fingers kneaded the edge of the blanket, and his foot tapped dryly against the wicker chair leg.

“Well, we had a certain kind of relationship,” I said. “It was pretty much what we both wanted, wasn’t it?”

“I guess so. I guess it was. But lately I’ve been wondering, you know. I’ve been wondering, what were we waiting for?”

“I suppose we were waiting for our real lives to start. I think we probably made a mistake.”

He drew a ragged breath. At the exact center of the web that stretched between the newel posts, a pretty yellow spider hung motionless.

“We did make a mistake,” he said. “I mean, I think we probably did. I think I was in love with you, and I couldn’t admit it. I was, I don’t know. Too afraid to admit it. And now it just seems like such a waste.”

I stood on the weathered boards atop my own purple shadow. I looked at him. He had an ancient, utterly dignified quality at that moment, an aspect neither old nor young, neither male nor female. His body was invisible under the thick folds of the blanket, and his eyes were brilliant in his colorless face. He could have been a sphinx posing a riddle.

I believed I knew the answer. Erich and I were never in love; we weren’t meant to be lovers. We had missed no romantic opportunity. Instead we’d hidden out together, in our good sex and undemanding companionship. We’d kept one another afloat while we waited. We might have been servants, two chaste balding men who’d given up their lives to vague ideals of obedience and order.