A home at the end of the world (17 page)

I said, “We were kids, Johnny. That was years ago.”

“I know. Are you, I mean, have you been seeing anyone?”

“Not really,” I said. “Basically, I’ve just been working and listening to records. It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? I mean, at my age.”

“Well, there are stranger things.”

We left it at that. We lay for a while with the noise washing over us—car horns and shouts. Just before I fell asleep I heard people passing by, laughing, a gigantic group of them—a cathedral choir of laughers.

CLARE

I
WANTED
a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father’s daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn’t learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.

I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth’s belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I’d never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition.

I didn’t try to sleep with Bobby. He looked too much like a man who’d been in a cartoon accident. He might have had stars and planets fluttering around his head. You got the impression that he was slightly cross-eyed. But still, he touched you. Maybe because you believed that if you took your eyes off him for too long, he’d have another accident. He’d grin rapturously, and fall through an open manhole. He’d get hit by a falling piano, and come up with a mouthful of keys where his teeth should be. I hated to think I was getting protective at the threshold of middle age. I hated to think I was developing a weakness for stunned, inefficient men who’d need looking after, the way my mother looked after my father until her patience failed.

Although I kept my hands off him I couldn’t deny Bobby’s shaggy, lost-pony appeal. He had big square hands and a face blank and earnest as a shovel. If it weren’t for his eyes, his innocence would have been too lunar to touch. It was his eyes that cut through. Imagine a snug little house in the suburbs, with a plaster dwarf on the lawn and petunias in the window boxes. Then imagine someone ancient and howlingly sad looking out through an upstairs window. That was Bobby’s face. That’s what it was about him.

All I did was notice him, though. Lately I was bothered by desire the way a horse is bothered by flies. It was a minor, if persistent, irritation. It could be flicked away.

Maybe the money was what hampered me. My family had money; my mother’s side did. Not the genteel, Old World kind—my mother’s father made a killing in costume jewelry. He built the third-biggest house in Providence. He changed his name from Stein to Stone, sent my mother to Wellesley. It’s an old story. Rhinestone king shoots for legitimacy through the progress of generations. He bought my mother a Seven Sisters education, set up a trust for me before I was born. According to his timetable the blood would be purified by steady exposure to money, and his great-grandchildren would be true aristocrats, with composure and a serene sense of their own worth. He died when I was ten. But I know the future he had in mind. A cast-iron deer had raised stiff antlers on his front lawn. Gold-plated fish had spit water into the bathroom sinks.

Desire fouled the plan, though. My mother didn’t care for the boys she met at Wellesley mixers, or they didn’t care for her. She had decisive features and the grim, secretive manners of a jeweler. She didn’t flirt. She harbored operatic passions, or believed she did, and had no interest in coy little experiments. A hundred years earlier she’d have been known as a good woman. At Wellesley in the nineteen-forties she could only have been known as a drag. She walked in a disgruntled trance through four years of college and then married my father, who said he was “in sales” and who had enough personality for both of them. He was her one adventure. She never wanted another.

I don’t know if he married her for money. I don’t think it was as simple as that. My father was a seducer. He bored easily. He must have liked the challenge posed by my mother, a woman who never feigned laughter or any other polite reaction and who’d been accepted by every law school she’d applied to. He was a great, frivolous beauty. Maybe he thought she knew him in some deeper way, and could redeem him through her unamused powers of scrutiny. Maybe he planned on loosening her up.

When I was younger all my lovers had been clenched, possessive people. My husband Denny had danced six hours a day, and still despised himself for dilettantism. My lover Helene had had screaming opinions on every subject from women’s rights to washing spinach. I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I’d suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you’d have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret. I’d offered lovers my willingness and susceptibility—it seemed to be all I had. I’d worked out a general policy of pliable sweetness toward people who eventually changed the locks over some unguessable offense of mine. Who claimed they’d die if I left them but slapped me in a rage when I brought home the wrong brand of beer. After the divorce I’d gone from one lover straight to the next, thinking every time that I’d learned a lesson I wouldn’t repeat. This new lover would have a sense of humor, or wouldn’t take drugs. This new one would be a woman, or a black man, or a computer magnate whose heart belonged to data.

Since my early thirties I’d been retired from love. I’d been living like a child. Just hour to hour, while other women my age went to their own children’s recitals and school plays. Drifting wasn’t hard. I had a silly little job, and a big lump of inheritance money waiting for me when I turned forty. There were people to meet for coffee, and movies and clubs to go to. Time had passed pleasantly. And now—it seemed so sudden—salesgirls called me “ma’am.” Young men didn’t glance up automatically when I passed them in the street. I no longer showed on their radar screens.

In a sense I liked the way I was aging. I’d invented a life of my own. I wasn’t a prim careerist living with two cats in a town house full of ancient maps. I wasn’t a drunk drifting from binges to purges and back again. I was proud of that. But still, I’d expected by this time of life to have developed a more general sense of pride in my larger self. I’d thought I’d be able to say, if somebody asked me, just exactly what I was doing in the world.

BOBBY

I
T WAS
the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own—a wilder orbit inside the earth’s calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn’t open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places. Here, people drove through red lights. They walked cursing in front of cars.

I didn’t find a job right away. I admit that I put out a mild-hearted effort. Jonathan went to the office most days. Sometimes he stayed until midnight. He called the paper’s fame a natural disaster—a volcano that wouldn’t stop erupting long enough for the village to rebuild. The typesetter edited copy, the receptionist did overflow paste-up work with six calls on hold and three advertisers checking their watches in the slick new white-on-white reception room. Along with his weekly column, Jonathan laid out the entertainment pages and wrote reviews of movies he hadn’t seen, under an assumed name. Some mornings he mainlined two cups of coffee, steamed out the door, and wasn’t back for sixteen hours.

Clare led an easier life. She was one of those people who have more money than they logically should, given what they do. But I wasn’t in a questioning mode. I was glad for the company.

I always got up when Jonathan did. I brewed coffee while he showered. We talked and played music as he dressed himself in that day’s black. When he was ready he’d kiss me on the cheek. He’d kiss Clare, too, if she was up by then. He’d say, “Bye, dears,” and take off with half a bagel in his hand.

Once he was gone, the morning switched over to its more leisurely pace. Its housewifely, daylight life. Clare and I sat at the dining-room table with second and third cups. We looked through the classifieds. Sometimes she redid her nails in a new color. Sometimes we watched
The Price Is Right
.

She left for work at a quarter to eleven. I straightened up the house, bought groceries for dinner. I went to the record store every day. I didn’t buy records. I stood listening to whatever the store had picked as a background for shopping. I watched other people figure out what someone like them would want to listen to.

Clare came home by seven. I always had dinner ready. Jonathan ate out every night so he could write about the food. Clare said she used to meet him wherever, and eat with him, but was happy to have a break from eating the same thing all week. Sometimes after dinner she went places with her friends, and sometimes she stayed home with me, listening to music and watching television. She said going out was starting to seem more like work than her job. On the nights she stayed home we made popcorn and drank Diet Coke. Sometimes she repainted her nails for the second time that day. And on a Wednesday night in June, she took on the long work of redoing me.

She began it with a haircut. Jonathan was at the office, and Clare and I had gone to the movies. She’d taken me to see
All About Eve
, shocked that I’d never heard of it. It turned out to be an old gray-and-white comedy playing at a theater where a mouse ran across our feet, quick and feathery as a bad impulse.

Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room. I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard Steve Reich?”

I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on right now.” And she did.

Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was the kind of electronic music that doesn’t come from instruments—that seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.

By then, Clare knew me well enough to let me listen. She didn’t talk about unrelated matters during Steve Reich any more than she would have during
All About Eve
. When the record was finished, I said, “Whew.”

“I thought you’d like him,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. He’s great. He’s just, you know—”

I tried to finish the sentence by approximating the shape of the music with my hands. I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to tell her.

She did shake her head and say, “Bobby.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Nothing. You really are a fanatic, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t tell where my fanaticism placed me in her view of the world. I didn’t know whether to claim it or deny it. I looked at the rug pattern between my feet.

“Do you know what I think?” she said. “Can I be absolutely honest with you?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, curious about absolute honesty and fearing it with my whole heart.

“I think you need a new haircut, is what I think.”

It was only an outer suggestion, a question of cosmetics rather than personal insufficiency. “Really?” I said.

“I’m talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don’t quite
look
like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else’s whole life.”

I shrugged again, and smiled. “This is my life,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like the wrong one.”

“But this is just the beginning. You’re not going to sit around this apartment cooking and cleaning forever.”

“Right,” I said, though truthfully I had drifted halfway into the conviction that that was exactly what I’d do.

“And, sweetie, that Bee Gees haircut is only going to mislead people. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Uh-huh. Okay. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go to a, you know, haircut place.”

My stomach crawled. Would I need clown-colored hair to have a New York life? If I let that happen, I wouldn’t fit back into Cleveland, or into Ned and Alice’s Arizona house. All my backup options would snap shut.

“I could do it,” she said. “Free of charge.”

“Really?”

I could tell from her laughter that my every doubt had sounded through that single word.

“I went to hairdressing school, if you can believe that,” she said. “I’ve still got my scissors, I can give you a new look right now. What do you say?”

I paused. Then I decided. It was only hair. I could grow it back to its present state and reapply for my Ohio job; I did not have to lose the thread of my old life.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

She had me take my shirt off, which was the first embarrassment. I was not in trim or imposing shape. I looked exactly like someone who’d worked in a bakery. But Clare had already switched over to a crisp hairdresser’s manner, and did not let her attention stray below my collarbone. She told me in a firmly professional voice to soak my head under the kitchen faucet. Then she put a towel over my shoulders and sat me in a chair in the middle of the living-room floor.

I told her, “The barber at home always just trimmed a little off the sides.”

“Well, I’m preparing to do major surgery,” she said. “Do you trust me?”

“No,” I said, before the instinct to tell cooperative lies could assert itself.

She laughed. “Well, why should you? But just try and relax, okay? Let Momma take care of it.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in with the scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is good practice. The scissors snipped close to my ear. Wet clumps of my hair, surprisingly dead and separate-looking, fell on the floor around me.

“Just keep going until you’re finished, okay?” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to look until you’re all through.”

“Perfect,” she said. She stopped cutting for a minute and put Van Morrison on, to help keep me calm.

She spent almost forty-five minutes on my haircut. I felt the warmth and the faint jasmine smell of her, the quick competent fingers on my scalp. I felt the tickle of her breath. Once it was started I’d have been glad to have the haircut go on all night—to never see my transformed head but just sit shirtless amid a growing pile of my own shed hair, with the crackle of Clare’s scented concentration hovering around me.

But then, finally, she was through. With a deep exhalation and a last snip at my temple she said, “
Voilà
. Come into the bathroom and see the result.”

I let her lead me, though I knew the way well enough. I wanted to stay a little longer in the cooperative mode, with the state of my hair and my future taken out of my hands. She led me into the bathroom, stood me in front of the mirror, and turned on the overhead fixture.

“Ta-da,” she said. And there I was, blinking in the light.

She’d given me a crew cut. The sides were so short my scalp shone through, and the top was a single bristly shelf. Seeing my own face under that haircut, I got my first good look at myself from the outside. I had ears that were small and stingy, curled up on themselves. I had narrow glittering eyes, and a big nose that split at the tip, as if it were meant to be two smaller noses. Those features had always seemed inevitable. Now I saw how particular they were. Seeing my face in the harsh light, backed by white tiles, I might have been a relative called in to identify a body. If we have spirits that fly out when the system shuts down, this may be how we see our own vacated selves—with the same interest and horror we bring to an accident victim.

“Yow,” I said.

“You look wonderful,” she told me. “Give it a little time. I know it’s a shock at first. But trust me. You’re going to start turning heads around here.”

I just kept staring at the face in the mirror. If this was who I was supposed to be, I didn’t know how to do it. Clare might as well have taken me to a pay phone and told me to dial Jupiter.

She said we had to wait up for Jonathan, to show him the new me. I didn’t much like the idea of showing myself to Jonathan. I felt too foolish in my exposed vanity, my own willingness to be remade. Still, I agreed. As I’ve said, Clare had a musical effect on me. She entered my brain. I found myself not only doing what she wanted but losing track of where my desires ended and hers began.

While waiting for Jonathan, we did what had become our usual things. We made popcorn and worked our way through a six-pack of Diet Coke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of
Mary Tyler Moore
. I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed.

Jonathan got home after one. When we heard his key, Clare made me hide in the kitchen. “I’m going to sit here very normally,” she whispered. “I’ll keep him in the living room. After a few minutes, you just walk casually out.”

I was reluctant to perform that way. To spotlight my self-concern. But Clare was too big and bright-haired for me. I had a dim recollection of a birthday party at which an old man in a red nose and lettuce-colored wig plucked quarters from my ears and pulled a paper bouquet from inside my shirt. Yes, I’d pretended unhumiliated astonishment and delight.

So I went to the dark kitchen as Jonathan came through the door. I heard the porcine squeak of the hinges, and his simple conversation with Clare. “Hi, honey.” “Hello, dear.” “How’d it go?” “Cataclysmic. The usual.” They could sound more perfectly like a husband and wife than any couple I’d met. I understood how having a baby could come to seem like their logical next step.

I listened to them. Weak air-shaft light floated in through the window like fog. Clare’s mason jars full of herbs put out a dull grandmotherly gleam on the sill. They bore their names on paper labels, in her small spiky handwriting: foolscap, star anise, nettle.

I heard Jonathan ask, “Where’s Bobby?”

“Oh, he’s around somewhere,” she answered.

That would have been my cue. It was time to walk out as if nothing unusual had happened. What I did, though, was stay in the kitchen. I got distracted by the pale darkness, the refrigerator’s hum and the jars of spices meant to cure headaches, insomnia, and bad luck. I might have been a body buried in a brick wall, eavesdropping on the simple business of the living. It came to me that death itself could be a more distant form of participation in the continuing history of the world. Death could be like this, a simultaneous presence and absence while your friends continued to chat among the lamps and furniture about someone who was no longer you. For the first time in years I felt my brother’s presence. I felt it, unmistakably—the purpose and somethingness of him, the Carlton quality that lingered after voice and flesh and all other bodily consequences were gone. I felt him in that kitchen as surely as I’d felt him one cold white afternoon in the graveyard, years ago, when a brilliant future shimmered beyond the headstones, beyond the curve of the earth. He’s here, I said to myself, and I knew it was true. I had worked up a habit of not thinking about him; of treating myself as if I’d been born into Ned and Alice’s house after our father died. Now I thought of them all, dead in Cleveland. Right now there would be wild daisies on their graves, and dandelions gone to fluff. My harmonica, which I’d tucked into Carlton’s breast pocket at the funeral home, would have slipped through his ribs and clunked onto the coffin boards. I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen—into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. Outside, a line of laundry hung in the air shaft. Empty shirtsleeves dangled. I saw that as myself and my brother combined—in both our names—I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feed him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. I watched a white dress shirt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.