A home at the end of the world (15 page)

That seemed a sufficient accounting, at least for the time being. Erich would be Doctor Feelgood. From that night on, the longer I called him by that name, the more perfectly it came to fit. Clare and I continued our sisterly relations with our loyalties undiluted. I had found myself a nice little thing on the side. Clare counseled me to ride it until it thinned out, as such flings inevitably did. That seemed like sound advice.

And so Erich and I started dating. Since he worked nights, we usually met after eleven. We’d have a drink or two in a bar, and go to his place.

I did not learn many particulars of his life. He had a singular ambition, an ill-defined but persistent one: to be recognized. The means by which he’d achieve recognition were uncertain—he was simply looking for a break, trying to position himself for discovery. He’d audition for anything. He tried out for Broadway musicals though he couldn’t sing. He’d work fourteen-hour days as an extra in any movie being shot in New York, and at Christmastime willingly played a life-sized mechanical soldier at F. A.O. Schwarz. He took endless acting classes, spoke convincingly of his ambition to become a better actor, but as I knew him longer, I began to realize that acting wasn’t really the point. Acclaim was the point, and his gig at the toy store provided roughly the same mix of satisfaction and anguish he’d have derived from playing the lead in a Broadway show. He enjoyed methodical pursuit and he worshipped attention; he did not dream of accomplishment per se. In his ordinary life he was all but invisible—he wore jeans and polo shirts, stammered his way through the simplest conversations, lived alone in a barren apartment. But at Schwarz during the Christmas season he never fell out of character, never ceased his stiff-limbed robotic movements during the whole of an eight-hour shift. In gym shorts on a 30° day he jogged forty-five times down the same block of Bleecker Street for the sake of being a shadowy, background figure in a movie that would never be released. At night, with the lights off, he was great in bed.

Although I saw him once or twice a week, I didn’t get to know him. I suspect he worried that if I—if anyone—came to know him too well, the motion of his life would somehow wind down—his obscure destiny would be confirmed. I myself worried that he lived on the brink of total surrender to another person’s will. I thought that when he finally, fully despaired of achieving fame he would make himself into a fan, find a lover and cheerfully relinquish every vestige of his will. Maybe I’d sensed it the first moment I saw him, nodding eagerly at an old man’s barroom conversation. He was practicing his powers of attention. I didn’t want them focused too ardently on me.

When we were together, we emphasized the local details: anecdotes from our working lives, the movies we’d loved or hated. Finally, on what may have been our tenth or fifteenth date, as we lay quietly sweating onto one another’s flesh, he said, “So, um, who are you, anyway?”

“What?”

His ears reddened. I suspected it was a line he’d picked up from a movie.

“What I mean is, I don’t really know anything about you,” he said.

“I don’t know much of anything about you either,” I said. “I basically know you’re an actor working as a bartender, you want to change jobs but aren’t doing anything much about it, and you loved
The Killing Fields
.”

“Well, I grew up in Detroit,” he said.

“I’m from the Midwest, too.”

“I know. From Cleveland.”

After a pause, he said, “Well, this is very interesting. We’re both from the Midwest. That really, you know, explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t explain much of anything,” I said. I believed this conversation was the beginning of the end for us, and I didn’t entirely mind. Goodbye, Doctor Feelgood. Set me back on the street in my own skin, with my old sense of a limitless future.

After a moment he said, “I used to be a musician. When I was a kid. I was crazy for it. I dreamed about it. I had dreams that were just music, just…music.”

“Really?” I said. “What did you play?”

“Piano. Cello. Some violin.”

“Do you still play?”

“No,” he said. “Never. I wasn’t, you know, good enough. I was pretty good. But not really good enough.”

“I see.”

We lay together for a while in uneasy silence, waiting to see what would happen next. We were neither friends nor lovers. We had no natural access to one another outside the realm of sex. I believed I could feel the weight of Erich’s unhappiness the way a diver feels the weight of the ocean, but I couldn’t help him. This was the price we paid for sleeping together first and getting acquainted later—we shared an intimacy devoid of knowledge or affection. I couldn’t listen to Erich’s confessions; I didn’t know him well enough for that. I remembered Clare’s admonition—ride it until it thins out.

“Listen,” I said.

He put a finger to my lips. “Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t talk. This isn’t really, you know, a very good time to talk.” He started to stroke my hair and nibble his way along my shoulder.

Our relations retained their halting, formal quality. Each time we saw one another, we might have been meeting for the first time. Months later, when I asked Erich about his old love of music, all he would say is “That’s over. That’s just, you know, ancient history. Have you seen any movies?” Our conversation stalled sometimes, and the ensuing silences refused to take on an aspect of ease. He never came to my apartment, never met Clare or any of my other friends. I left my life to visit him in his. In Erich’s company I developed a new persona. I was tough and slightly insensitive; a bit of an object. Our communion took place only at the bodily level, and that came to seem right for us. Anything else would have been sentimental, forced, indiscreet. Our relations were cordial and respectful. We did not infringe. I believe that in some way we despised one another. Because I brought nothing but my nerves and muscles to the affair, I found I could be surprisingly noisy in bed. I could walk unapologetically across the floorboards, my boots ringing like the strokes of an ax. And I could be a little cruel. I could bite Erich’s skin hard enough to leave red clamshell marks behind. I could fantasize about him—an unknown man—manacled, humiliated, stripped naked and tied to a Kafkaesque machine that fucked him relentlessly.

In my other life, I went out nightly with Clare for falafel or barbecued chicken or Vietnamese food. We argued over how much television a child should be permitted to watch. We agreed that the sterner reality of public school was an education in itself, and would balance the shoddy educations of the teachers. Sometimes handsome young fathers would stroll by the window of whatever restaurant we sat in, pushing strollers or cradling their sleeping children on their shoulders. I always watched them pass.

That was my life in the dead center of the Reagan years.

Then Bobby came to live in New York.

BOBBY

I
STAYED
in Ned and Alice’s house for almost eight years. The urge to do nothing and not change caught up with me; for eight years I squeezed roses onto birthday cakes and thought of what I’d make for dinner. Each day was an identical package, and the gorgeousness of them was their perfect resemblance, each to the others. Like a drug, repetition changes the size of things. A day when my cinnamon rolls came out just right and the sky clicked over from rain to snow felt full and complete. I thumped melons at the grocery store, dug walnuts from the bins with my hands. I bought new records. I didn’t fall in love. I didn’t visit my family’s graves, three in a row. I waited for asparagus and tomatoes to show up again, and played Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
album until the grooves flattened out. I’d be living like that today if Ned and Alice hadn’t moved to Arizona.

The doctor announced it: Ohio air was too heavy with spoor and lake water for Ned’s tired lungs. It was go to the desert or start planning the funeral. That’s what he said.

At first I thought I’d go with them. But Alice sat me down. “Bobby,” she said, “honey, it’s time for you to get out on your own. What would you do in Arizona?”

I told her I’d get a bakery job. I told her I’d do what I was doing now, but I’d do it there instead.

Her eyes shrank, pulled in their light. The singular crease, one deep vertical line, showed up in her forehead. “Bobby, you’re twenty-five. Don’t you want more of a life than this?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I mean, this is a life, and I like it pretty well.”

I knew how I sounded—slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he’d planned it that way. I couldn’t quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn’t tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I’d expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I’d expected to feel more like one single person.

“Dearie, there’s more to it than this,” she said. “Trust me.”

“You don’t want me to go to Arizona,” I said in a balky cousin’s voice. Still, it was what I had to say.

“No. Frankly, I don’t. I’m pushing you out of the nest, like I probably should have some time ago.”

I nodded. We were in the kitchen, and I could see myself reflected in the window glass. At that moment I looked gigantic, like a geek from a carnival, with a head the size of a football helmet and arms that hung inches above the floor. It was strange, because I’d always thought of myself as small and boy-like, the next best thing to invisible.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

I understood that my life would change with or without my agreement. I understood that my supply of this particular drug—these red-checked dish towels and this crock of wooden spoons—was about to run out.

I decided to go to New York. It was the only other logical place. My Cleveland life depended on Alice and Ned—I needed their house to clean, their dinner to cook. I needed them to protect and care for. Otherwise Cleveland was just a place where things failed to happen. The air reeked of disappointment: river water thick as maple syrup, cinder-block shopping centers with three out of five units dark. Working in a bakery, you get to know the local unhappiness. People stuff whole cakes into their sorrow, brownies and cookies and Bismarcks by the dozen. The regularity of my days with Ned and Alice was like a campfire. I’d loved that part of Cleveland. But, without them, there would only be bus stops, and the wind blowing off Lake Erie. I wasn’t ready to be a ghost so soon.

I called Jonathan. I did it with true nervousness—by then we were more like relatives than friends. We bought presents, and smoked joints together before Christmas dinners. That was friendly enough. But months went by between holidays, and he wore clothes I would never have thought of on my own. He talked about theater; I went to the movies with Ned or watched TV with Alice. I lay in my room—formerly his room—for hours, just listening to music. Jonathan was quick and bright, going places, and although I loved him his visits always embarrassed me. In his presence I could feel like that gawky cousin or, worse, like a bachelor uncle; a jovial undemanding type who only knew the outer surface of things. Jonathan put my life in a miniaturizing light, and I couldn’t help looking forward to the day he got back on the plane because I knew on that day my life would return to its proper size, and I could walk down the Ohio streets with no washed-up, refugee feeling.

Still, when my Cleveland life ran out on me, I called Jonathan. I didn’t want an arbitrary new life in Boston or Los Angeles. I couldn’t imagine being so alone. And though I was friendly enough with Rose and Sammi and Paul at the bakery, I didn’t have what you could truthfully call friends. You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

The first few times I called I got Jonathan’s answering machine, and couldn’t talk to it. Each time the machine answered I hung up with a small criminal pang. Finally, after almost a week of trying, he answered in person.

“Hello,” he said.

“Jon? Jonny?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Jon. It’s Bobby.”

“Bobby. Hey, this is a surprise. Is everything all right?”

That was where we were together. A phone call from me implied bad news about the family’s fortunes.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Fine and perfect, couldn’t be better.”

“Good. How are you?”

“I’m good. I’m very, very good. How about you?”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “You know. Life goes on.”

I sat through my own urge to say, “Well, that’s great, goodbye,” and hang up the phone. A scene from my possible Cleveland future passed in front of me. On my next birthday, the bakery would have a party for me. Rose, who’d be seventy by then, would kiss a lipstick mark onto my cheek and call me her best beau. There’d be a cake, free to the customers. We’d cut a big slice for George Dubb, a three-hundred-pound bachelor who bought Napoleons and a dozen Linzer cookies every day.

“Listen,” I said. “Um. You know how Ned and Alice are going to Arizona?”

“Well, sure. Sure I do. I think it’ll be good for them. They’ve needed a change of scene since about 1953.”

“Yeah. Well, you see, now that they’re leaving, I’ve been thinking, like, what am I hanging around here for? They tore down the Moonlight, did you hear about that?”

“No,” he said. “God, I haven’t thought about that place in ten years. Have you been going there?”

“Well, no. You and I went once. Remember? On acid.”

“I’ll never forget. I spent the whole night getting my skates on and going once around the rink.”

“It’s gone now,” I said. “It’s a Midas Muffler now.”

“Huh.”

“Jon?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be okay with you if I came to New York? I mean, could I stay with you for a little while? Just until I got, like, a job and an apartment?”

There was a pause. I could hear the buzz of the miles, all those voices cutting the air between Jonathan and me. He said, “Do you really want to come to New York?”

“Yeah. I really do. I think I really do.”

“It’s a rough place, Bobby. Last week somebody was murdered a few blocks from where I live. They found the body in four different trash cans.”

“I know it isn’t Cleveland,” I said. “I know that. But, Jonny. I’m, like, up to my elbows in frosting here. I mean, I’ve made a million cupcakes by now.”

He let another pause slip through the line. Then he said, “If you honestly think you want to give New York a try, of course you can stay with me. Of course you can. I’ll see what I can do to keep you safe here.”

I took the train, because it was cheaper and because I wanted to see exactly how much distance I was covering. I looked out the window the whole time, with my full attention, as if I was reading a book.

Jonathan met me at the station in New York. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, heavy black shoes with a dull shine like licorice. You could count on him to be wearing something you didn’t expect.

We hugged in the station, and Jonathan put a precise little kiss on my cheek. He led me out to the sidewalk. Seeing him hail a cab was my first lesson in how different we’d become. He stepped off the crowded curb and shot one hand straight up, with the calm certainty of a general. It was a small enough act, but the sense of his own entitlement was unmistakable. I myself tended to move like a long apology.

When we were in the back seat of the cab, Jonathan pinched my arm. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

“Me neither. That’s why I wanted to see Pennsylvania go by, so I’d believe it. I mean, if I just got off a plane, this’d seem like, you know, some kind of hallucination.”

“It is. This city is just a dream you’re having,” he said. And during the time it took us to reach his apartment, we didn’t think of anything else we needed to say.

The cab crept through late-afternoon traffic. I had only been to New York once before, years earlier, when Jonathan was still in school. I’d been interested in it but it wasn’t about me; or rather it was only about me in the most indirect way, like a highway or a battleship. I’d done the tourist things. I’d gone to the tops of monuments and walked through Greenwich Village and had a drink with Jonathan and his friends at a bar where a famous poet died. I’d been comfortable in my tourist smallness, pleased with myself for being in an amazing place and for having a snug unsurprising home to return to.

Now I was going to live here. Now it was a different city altogether.

It shimmered. That was the first thing I noticed. Its molecules seemed more excited; things shivered and gleamed in a way that made them hard to see. The buildings and streets put out more light than the sky sent down—it all broke up in front of you, so your vision only caught the fragments. Cleveland offered itself differently, in bigger pieces. There you saw a billboard, a cloud, an elm standing over its own fat shadow. Here, my first ten minutes in New York, I could only be sure of seeing a woman’s red straw hat, a flock of pigeons, and a pale neon sign that said
LOLA
. Everything else was an ongoing explosion, the city blowing itself to bits, over and over again.

When we reached Jonathan’s apartment, things settled down and became more visible. He lived in a brown building on a narrow brown street. If Cleveland was mainly a gray city—limestone and granite—New York was brown, all rust and faded chocolate and schoolteacherish yellow-beige.

Jonathan said, “Here it is. The Tarantula Arms.”

“This is your building,” I said, as if I thought he might not be sure about it.

“This is it. I warned you. Come on, it’s better when you get inside.”

Inside, the stairwell floated in a green aquarium light. One fluorescent halo buzzed at each landing. I carried a suitcase and my backpack; Jonathan carried my other suitcase. I hadn’t brought much to my new life. Both suitcases were full of records. The backpack held my clothes, which, I could already see, had nothing to do with life in a city like this. I might have been an exchange student.

“We’re going up to the sixth floor,” Jonathan said. “Be brave.”

I followed him. The landings smelled like something fried. Slow Spanish music hung in the swampy light. As we went up I watched my borrowed suitcase, an old blue American Tourister of Alice’s, whump against Jonathan’s black-jeaned thigh. Even my suitcase looked wrong here—sad and hoarily innocent as an old virgin.

When we got to the sixth floor, Jonathan unlocked three locks and opened the metal door. “Ta-da,” he said as the door swung heftily open, squeaking on its hinges.

“Your place,” I said. I could not seem to shed the habit of telling him we had reached his apartment.

“And yours, too,” he said. He ushered me in with a bow.

The apartment was, in fact, a change from the underwater gloom of the stairs and hall. You stepped straight into the living room, which was painted orange-red, the color of a flowerpot. There was a sofa covered with a leopard-skin sheet, and a huge painting of a naked blue woman twisting ecstatically to reach something that hovered just off the edge of the canvas. The room was full of light. Streams of it tumbled in through the barred windows, which were bracketed by thick fifties curtains crawling with green and red leaves. If you pulled those curtains the sunlight would snap out like electricity. They were as weighty and businesslike as the metal door we had just passed through.

“Yow,” I said. And then, without meaning to: “This is your
place
.”

“My roommate Clare had a lot to say about decorating,” he said. “Come on, let’s take your things to my room.”

We went down a short hall, past two closed doors, to his room. His room was white, with no pictures on the walls. He had a futon on the bare wooden floor, and a white paper lamp that stood on wire legs thin as pencil lines.

“I got a little carried away with this Zen thing,” he said. “I just needed some relief from all that color.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I like white.”

We set my bags down, and stood through a moment of difficult silence. Over the years we’d lost our inevitability together; now we were like the relatives of two old friends who had died.

He said, “I’ve got a sleeping bag you can sleep in. And we’ll cram your things in the closet somehow.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you want to unpack now?”

I didn’t care about unpacking, but it would have been a logical next step. At that moment I felt I understood about the past. In another century a guest unpacked, and rested, and dressed for dinner, so that everybody had a good long period alone with himself. In the modern age, we have to negotiate vaster expanses of uninterrupted time.

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, I mostly brought records.”

He laughed. “That’s what you’d bring into a bomb shelter, isn’t it?” he said.

I opened the American Tourister and took out a short stack. “Have you heard Joni’s new one?” I asked.