A home at the end of the world (16 page)

“No. Is it good?”

“Excellent. Oh, hey, have you got this Van Morrison?”

“No. I don’t think I’ve listened to Van since I was in Cleveland, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, this record’ll kill you,” I said. “He’s still, like, one of the best. I’m going to put it on, okay?”

“We don’t have a turntable,” he said. “Just a cassette player. Sorry.”

“Oh. Well,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Bobby,” he said. “We have music, too. We don’t live in silence. But if Van Morrison is a priority, we can go out right now and get him on tape. The biggest record store you’ve ever seen is about six blocks from here.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got stuff of your own I’ve probably never heard, right?”

“Sure. Of course we do. But look me straight in the eye. We need to go out and buy that Van Morrison tape right this minute, don’t we?”

“Naw,” I said. “It’s okay, really.” But Jonathan shook his head.

“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll take care of the important business first, and then we can unpack.”

He took me back out of the apartment, and we walked to a record store on Broadway. He had not been lying about that store. Nothing shy of the words “dream come true” would do here—it was the cliché made into flesh. This place spanned a city block; it filled three separate floors. In Ohio I had haunted the chain store in the mall, and the dying establishment of an old beatnik whose walls were still covered with pegboard. Here, you passed through a bank of revolving doors into a room tall as a church. The sound of guitars and a woman’s voice, clean as a razor, rocked over rows and immaculate rows of albums. Neon arrows flashed, and a black-haired woman who could have been in perfume ads browsed next to a little boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. It was an important place—you’d have known that if you were blind and deaf. You’d have smelled it; you’d have felt it tingling on your skin. This was where the molecules were most purely and ecstatically agitated. I believed then it was the heart of New York City. I believe it to this day.

We went downstairs to the cassette section, and found Van Morrison. We also found an old Stones Jonathan didn’t have, and
Blonde on Blonde
, and Janis Joplin’s greatest hits. Jonathan paid for them all with a credit card. He insisted. “This is your welcome-to-New-York present,” he said. “Buy me something when you’ve got a job.”

We walked back with our cassettes in a yellow plastic bag. It was early evening on a day without weather—a warm one with a blank white sky, one of those timeless days that are more like illuminated nights, when only the clock tells you whether it’s morning or afternoon. Jonathan and I talked about Ned and Alice as we traveled bright brown streets lined with Spanish grocery stores and warehouses that had already pulled down their metal grates. With those cassettes solidly in the bag and Jonathan talking about his parents I felt an early click of rightness about the place—as of that moment, I had history there. It was my first true experience of being in New York, walking down a street called Great Jones as a Wonder Bread wrapper, stirred by the day’s single gust of wind, skittered after us like a crazy pet.

When we got back to the apartment, Jonathan’s roommate Clare was home. We walked through the big door and she called, “Hello, dear.” Like a wife.

The living room was empty. She had called from offstage.

Jonathan answered, “Honey, we’ve got company.”

“Oh,” her voice said. “I forgot. It’s today, isn’t it?”

Then she came out.

I don’t know if I can describe Clare, though I can see her right down to her lazy way of gesturing, loose-wristed, until she gets to the point of the story, when she flicks her wrist with the lethal precision of a fly fisherman. If I close my eyes she’s there, and she’s there if I open them, too. But what I see is a way of walking and smiling, a way of sitting in a chair. All her moves are particular to her—she has a way of setting a glass on a table, of raising her shoulders when she laughs. Her appearance is harder to nail down. On first sighting, she was like New York made into a woman—she changed and changed. I could tell she was beautiful in a sharp, big-nosed way that had nothing to do with magazines. Her hair was orange then—it bristled as if her brain was on fire. She was several inches taller than I, with dark red lips. She wore tight pants, and a tiger-striped shirt that fell off her shoulders.

“Bobby, this is Clare,” Jonathan said.

She tilted her head in a hostess manner, and gave me a hand tipped with long purple fingernails. “Bobby,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you.”

I would learn later that she was raised by a good Lutheran mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and had never quite overcome her old habit of good manners. I said hello and shook her hand, which was strong and sure as an apple picker’s.

“We’ve been shopping,” Jonathan said. “We decided we needed a Van Morrison tape right away.”

I was grateful to him for explaining it as something
we
needed. I didn’t like to seem so delicate and peculiar, not right up front to a stranger.

“I love Van Morrison,” she said. “I used to have all his records. But, you know. You lose things in various divorce settlements.”

“Should I put this on?” I asked.

“Honey, absolutely,” she said. “Right over there.”

I walked across the room to the shelves where the sleek black tape player stood. On the shelf above it a collection of animal skulls silently displayed their empty sockets and their different arrangements of ivory-colored fang and tooth. Jonathan and Clare discussed domestic particulars. I got the cellophane off the cassette, punched Van into the machine, and pushed the
Play
button. After a few moments of soft mechanical whir, Van’s voice singing “Tore Down à la Rimbaud” filled the room. I took a breath, and I took another.

“Bobby?” Jonathan said. “Are you hungry?”

“I guess,” I said. I was looking at the skulls from a safe distance, surrounded by Van’s voice.

“How about if we listen to this for a while, then all go out for dinner?” Jonathan said. “It’s on the newspaper. I’m doing meat loaf this week, is that all right with you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Perfect.” I was lost in the music. I’d have agreed to beaver tail.

We stayed around the apartment through one side of the tape. Jonathan and Clare were being polite—they liked Van’s record well enough, but considered it background for a conversation. Clare asked courteous questions about my trip and my past life with Jonathan, which I suspect I must have answered with sweaty, grinning incoherence. I couldn’t concentrate with music in the room.

When side one was finished, we went out. Clare put on an old leather jacket with a white peace sign painted on the back. She made an odd kind of sense to me, though she was the least sensible-looking person I’d ever met. She had a gaudy openness—a circus quality, with no hint of a hidden agenda. She made you feel like you could take her hand as you walked down the street.

We went to a restaurant that didn’t look like a restaurant. An uninformed pedestrian might have thought it was a cheap insurance agency, with Venetian blinds and a few dusty bowling trophies displayed in the windows. But, inside, it was packed with people. Elvis Presley sang through the laughter and the clink of silverware. At a table near the door, a woman in a fur dress said something about gorillas, in an English accent.

I myself had on Calvin Klein jeans and a rugby shirt. It was my most interesting outfit. We sat at a table in a corner, so close to three other tables we had to slide sideways into our chairs. The walls were covered with souvenir plates and old postcards, with stuffed deer heads and kitchen clocks and faded record albums by Dusty Springfield and the Kingston Trio. A sign near my head said “Disregard This Sign.”

“This place has a lot of decor,” Clare said to me.

“Uh-huh.”

“More decor than the entire state of Maine,” Jonathan added.

“So, Bobby,” Clare said. “What do you think you want to do here? In New York.”

“I’m a pretty good baker,” I said. “I guess I’ll probably do that. I mean, that’s what I sort of know how to do.”

“I thought you came here to get out of the bakery business,” Jonathan said. “I thought you were drowning in all that fudge.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I guess I said that, yes. But, well, I don’t really know anything else. I mean, I can’t walk into a hospital and ask if they need any surgeons.” My ears burned. I felt like I was being tested on material I hadn’t studied.

“You’d probably be about as qualified as half the doctors there,” Clare said. “Now, sweetheart, listen to your aunt. One of the great features of New York is, you can do anything here. This is the Land of Opportunity, capital L, capital O. Here you can get paid to do just about anything you can think of.”

I nodded, aware that she was tracing little figure eights with a fingernail on the cloudy Formica. She had green eyes that didn’t waver, didn’t seek out the periphery when she talked to you. She wore one tinkling, complex silver earring that was half a foot long. Her effect on me resembled the effect of music. I had a hard time conversing in the face of her.

“It’s true, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to rush right out and get the first job you can find. You have rich friends.”

“Um, what do you do?” I asked Clare.

“Basically, I play,” she said. “I run around town finding things to make jewelry out of.”

“Clare’s a designer,” Jonathan said.

“Hogwash. I’m a junk dealer, is what I am. If women ever stop wanting to look ridiculous, I’ll be out of a job.”

I looked at her tangerine hair, and wondered what kind of women she thought of as ridiculous-looking. What I said was “It sounds like, you know, fun.”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s a great scam. And when the baby comes, I can just do it at home.”

“You’re having a baby?”

“Didn’t Jonathan tell you? We’re expecting.”

Jonathan’s face darkened. Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock.”

“We’re not
expecting
, dear,” he said. “We’re still in the planning stages.”

“Same difference.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were, um—”

“Lovers?” Jonathan said. “We’re not. We’re just talking about becoming parents.”

“Oh.”

“Most parents aren’t lovers,” Clare said. “Mine weren’t. Mine were only married, and they didn’t care much for one another. At least Jonathan and I are good friends.”

“It’s the modern age,” Jonathan said, half apologetically.

I nodded. Then the waitress came, and we had to decide on dinner. Jonathan said he was professionally obliged to order meat loaf, but that Clare and I should have whatever we wanted. I had fried chicken with mashed potatoes, and Clare had the special—tuna-fish casserole, with potato chips crumbled on top.

After dinner we went for a walk. We walked down to the Hudson River and stood on a pier looking across the dark agitated water at New Jersey. On the far side a giant neon coffee cup spilled a red drop of coffee, then sucked it back up and spilled it again. Clare and Jonathan were both good talkers. I rode their talk as if it was a hammock stretched between them. Together, they were performers. They seemed happy enough to have an audience—I didn’t need to speak much. They talked about babies, about moving to the country, and about how to survive in New York. They traded tips on apartment hunting, and told one another where the bargains were.

“Honey,” Clare said to me, “I’m taking you to the Lower East Side on Sunday. That’s where you get the best deals.”

“It is not,” Jonathan said. “Clare has this peculiar devotion to Orchard Street.”

“Jonathan buys retail,” she said. Her voice implied that it was a slothful, possibly dangerous, practice.

“The Lower East Side,” said Jonathan, “is a fine place to shop if you want to look like a disco king, circa 1975.”

“Do I look like a disco king?” she said.

“It’s different for women. The world doesn’t conspire to make them look like assholes in quite the same way.”

“Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a department store should never make a statement like that. Don’t you listen to him, Bobby.”

I let myself swing along. I played a sound track, silently, inside my head.

We had cappuccinos in a restaurant with a garden, where Christmas lights blinked in the trees and a small marble boy pissed into a marble clamshell. Then we went home. Clare kissed me on the cheek, said, “Welcome to Perdition,” and disappeared into her own room. Jonathan and I spread his fat green sleeping bag out on the floor. He gave me a pillow from his bed.

When we were both settled, when the white paper light was out, he said, “Tomorrow I’ll take you up to Central Park. I figure if we do a different part of town every day, you’ll have your bearings by next week.”

“You know where I’d like to go?” I said. “Um, I’d like to go see Woodstock.”

“It’s over a hundred miles from here.”

“I know. I know that.”

“We could probably go sometime,” he said. “I’ve never been. I’m sure it’s pretty up there. Full of old hippies, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh. Hey, are you and Clare really having a baby?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been talking about it.”

“I like Clare,” I said.

“So do I.”

A spell of semi-dark silence passed. Noise from the street filtered in through the curtains.

“Bobby?” he said.

“Uh-huh?”

“I don’t know. I feel like there are things I need to talk to you about, but I don’t really know how. I’m not sure what to say.”

“Um, what things?” I asked. He lay on his back, with his head cradled in his hands. Sometimes he fell asleep that way, his waking ideas marching straight into his dreams. He could have trouble separating real memories from dreamed ones. I knew that about him.

“You know,” he said. “The things we used to do together. The, well, sexual things. I mean, we never talked about it, and after high school we just stopped. I guess I’m wondering what you thought about all that.”

I could hear my own breathing. This was a hard subject. I had realized by then that I didn’t feel what others called “desire.” Something was missing in me. I felt love—the strain and heat of it, the animal comfort mixed up with human fear. I felt it for all the Glovers, for Sammi at the bakery, for Dylan when he sang “Baby Blue.” But nothing built up in my groin. Nothing quickened, or struggled for release. I’d made a kind of love with Jonathan because he’d wanted to, and because I’d loved him. I’d had orgasms that passed through me like the spirits of people more devoted to the body than I was. These spirits were pleasant enough in passing but truly gone when they were gone. After Jonathan left town, I was alone inside myself. This lack was probably what had made it possible for me to live my bakery life in Cleveland; to need no sensations beyond the first feathers of November snow and the living hiss of a needle touching vinyl.