A home at the end of the world (23 page)

“What I’d really like,” I said, “is to know what happened to me. Why can’t I seem to make a life for myself?”

His face clenched up. It was a familiar expression of his, this gathering of the facial muscles under the skin—it happened when he was confronted by the contrary or the inexplicable. His face actually appeared to pucker and shrink as his features worked their way toward center. He might have been straining to see through a keyhole from a distance of several feet.

“You’ll find something,” he said. “You’re still young, it takes time.”

“What
happened
? You were there, you must have seen it. I keep thinking there must be something I don’t remember. I’ve got a decent job, I have lovers and friends. So why do I feel so numb and separate? Why do I feel like a failure? Did you do something to me? I won’t hold it against you. I just need to know.”

He paused to take in a gulp of air. His face continued to shrink.

“I loved you,” he said. “I worked hard, I don’t know. I must have made mistakes. Your mother and I took the best care of you we could.”

“Well, I know you did,” I said. “I know. So how have I turned out to be such a mess?”

“You’re not a mess,” he said. “I mean, if you’re having some problems—”

“Just answer the question.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. His eyes went glassy, and his mouth hung slightly open. What was he remembering? There would of course have been
some
thing—a spasm of hatred when I would not stop crying, some meanness born from jealousy. Some little act or omission, a brief ordinary failure of love that would not, in the end, explain anything.

We stood for a while in silence, which was rare for us. Ordinarily, my father and I avoided silence. We were both good talkers, and we knew how to keep the air around us thoroughly occupied with talk or games or snatches of song. The sickle shape of a hawk skated over the stars. An empty 7-Up can gleamed in the moonlight like something precious.

“Dad, listen,” I said.

He did not reply. It was only then that I realized how he was straining for breath.

“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”

His face was dim, his eyes unnaturally large as he concentrated on pulling in air. He had the shocked look of a fish pulled out of the water into a world of piercing, unbreathable light.

“Dad? Can you talk?”

He shook his head. My first thought was of flight. I could still get away; I could deny everything. No one need ever suspect me.

“Dad,” I said helplessly. “Oh, Dad, what should I do?”

He gestured me closer. I took hold of his shoulders, inhaling his whiskery, cologned smell, which had not changed since I was a baby. His lungs squeaked like a balloon being vigorously rubbed.

Carefully, as if he were made of porcelain, I helped lower him to a sitting position. I sat beside him, holding him, on the talcumy earth.

So this is it, I thought. This is my father’s death. I did not know how to help, what to do; where to bury him. I stroked his wispy hair, which had once been thick and prosperous enough to base a marriage on.

I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed clichés, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”

He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.

I said, “Don’t worry about Mom or me. We’ll be fine. Everything’s all right, really. Everything’s fine.”

I couldn’t tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.

And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the passage of oxygen.

Finally he was able to say, “Guess I overextended. I got a little carried away there.”

“You’d better stay here,” I said. “I’ll go get help.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “We just have to walk back very slowly. Okay?”

“Sure. Of course. Dad, I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

I helped him to his feet and we began the long walk home. It would take us over an hour to cover a distance we’d managed in twenty minutes on the way out. Stars fell overhead.

When I was fifteen, my father and I drove to Chicago together on a shopping trip and got caught in a storm on our way back. Rain fell in sheets; the sky deepened to the opaque green-gray that breeds tornadoes. It got so bad we pulled off at a rest area overlooking a muddy lake backed by the vast green of a barley field. Rain hammered on the roof and hood of our car. We sat in silence, occasionally clearing our throats, until a flick of lightning turned the lake’s surface a brief livid yellow. Then we both started to laugh. The lightning might have been the punch line of a long, complicated joke. When we were through laughing we talked about my future, about the possibility of getting a new dog, and about our ten favorite movies. After the storm passed we drove home with the radio playing and the windows open. Later we would learn that a tornado had in fact touched down in the vicinity and had flattened a water tower and an Amish cemetery not twenty miles from where we’d been parked.

Now we walked together, very slowly, through the blue-white desert night. “Dad?” I said.

“Yes, son.”

“Maybe we can go to another movie tomorrow. I hear
Moonstruck
isn’t too bad.”

“Fine. You know me, I’m always good for a movie.”

Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost—to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home.

CLARE

A
LL HE’D
say was “Basic visit to the parents. Guilt and movies. They live in a pueblo now.” But Jonathan was quieter after that, more prone to secrecy and half sentences. He kept the door to his room closed. In March, he announced that he was moving out.

I asked him why.

“To get a life,” he said.

When I asked what exactly he thought he was living at that moment, he said, “A canceled ticket.”

It was morning. One of the pale slushy March mornings that arrive one after another, as if they were raveling off a spool. Jonathan stared out the living-room window. He flicked his hair with his fingertips in a sullen café style when he said the word “ticket.”

“Honey,” I said, “just tell me what you mean in ordinary English.”

He sighed, reluctant to face me on plain terms. Displays of joy, affection, or generosity came easily to him. He could speak decorously in his own voice. But when he was angry or sad, he needed an image to work from. I had seen him get mad in the caustic, eye-popping style of Bette Davis. I’d seen him suffer embarrassment like a street kid, with downcast eyes and hands balled into fists. This hair-flicking, window-gazing thing was new.

“Come on,” I said. “Speak.”

He turned to face me. “The life I’d been preparing myself for has been called off,” he said. “I thought I could stay unattached and love a lot of different people. You and Bobby included.”

“You can. You do.”

“I can’t. It’s a new age, everybody’s getting married.”

“Not me, thank you,” I said.

“Yes you are. You’re with Bobby now. I’ve got to find somebody of my own, and I don’t feel like I have all the time in the world anymore. I mean, Clare, what if I’m sick?”

I paused. “You’re not sick,” I said.

“You don’t know that. We may not know for years.”

“Jonathan, sweetheart, you’re being melodramatic.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You’re fine, I can just tell. You’re perfectly healthy. Now don’t move out, you’ll break up the family.”

“You and Bobby are the family,” he said. “Just the two of you.” And he turned back to the window, where across the air shaft a young Puerto Rican woman was hanging boys’ briefs and men’s black socks on a laundry line.

I thought I’d be pregnant soon. I’d stopped taking precautions. But I couldn’t seem to tell anyone, not Bobby or Jonathan. I suppose I was ashamed of my own motives. I didn’t like the idea of myself as calculating or underhanded. All I wanted, really, was to get pregnant by accident. The unexpected disadvantage of modern life is our victory over our own fates. We’re called on to decide so much, almost everything, and we’re thoroughly informed about repercussions. In another era I’d have had babies in my twenties, when I was married to Denny. I’d have become a mother without quite deciding to. Without weighing the consequences. But Denny and I had at first been too sensible—we were living on my trust money, and he had big ambitions—and then too furious to let ourselves give birth. I did get pregnant accidentally, by a member of Denny’s dance troupe who’d told me he was gay. But I’d had it taken care of. At that age, during that time, you skimmed away the extraneous. You kept yourself lean and unencumbered, ready to travel.

Now I wanted a baby, and I wanted to raise it with Jonathan. We could be a new kind of family. A big disjointed one, with aunts and uncles all over town. But I couldn’t bring myself to confess what I was after. I was trying to stage my own accident. I just needed more time.

In an effort to cheer Jonathan up, I got him to bring Erich home for dinner. He didn’t want to. He had to be nagged into it. It took more than a week. I wouldn’t give in, though, because I believed in what I was doing. My theory of Jonathan’s trouble was simple. He had let his life get divided up into too many different compartments. There was his job, and his life with Bobby and me. There were a few friends from college, and a random sexual life with strangers, and an ongoing affair with a man none of us had ever met. I believed he needed more areas of overlap.

“Why don’t you want to bring Erich over for dinner?” I asked on a dim morning that would not quite settle into rain. “Are you ashamed of us?”

I had on a pink chenille bathrobe, and had tied my hair up in a zebra-print bandanna. For a moment I could see myself as somebody’s shrewish wife, hands fisted on her bony hips. It was far from a flattering image. But I didn’t mind it entirely. At least a woman like that knew what she wanted. Ambiguity and indecision didn’t swarm around her like flies.

“Of course not,” Jonathan said. “I’ve told you. He and the Hendersons wouldn’t get along.”

He was trying to leave for work. He had one shoe on. He was sipping at a mug of coffee while Bobby buttered a bagel for him.

“We won’t invite the Hendersons,” I said. “It can just be the four of us, regular civilians too worried about our own shortcomings to notice anybody else’s.”

“He and I don’t have that kind of relationship,” Jonathan said.

“What kind?”

“The ‘Come on over and meet the roommates’ kind. It’d just be uncomfortable. For everyone.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never done it?” I asked. “Honey, to be perfectly honest with you, I think you set limits on your relationships by deciding in advance and entirely on your own what they can and cannot involve.”

Bobby brought Jonathan his bagel, and gave me an affectionate pat on the rump. I thought fearfully of the quiet nights we’d have together. The unvarying domestic routines we’d develop.

“Maybe you’re right,” Jonathan said. “Got to go now, bye.”

I followed him into the hallway. “We wouldn’t tell him any of your secrets,” I called. “We wouldn’t make stupid jokes, or show slides of our trip to a national park.”

I finally got my way through ordinary persistence. My persistence, though it worked more often than not, was hard to count as a virtue, since I had no patience to back it up. My own doggish determination had led me, in the face of all reasonable counsel, to marry a Messianic dancer and then fall in love with a renowned woman who said she’d teach me to stop hating myself. It had led me into the used-clothes business, to hairdressing school, to Buddhism and modern dance. Bulldogs must experience a similar kind of trouble. Once they lock their jaws onto a bull’s ear or tail they probably believe they’ve concluded their business with the whole animal.

Erich came to dinner on a Friday night. Bobby and I were making the kind of sparse, crisp dinner that was fashionable then: pasta with fresh herbs, roast chicken, vegetables from three continents. We were looking to impress. As we fixed dinner, we speculated over what Erich might be like.

“Brooding, I think,” I said. “One of those silent, temperamental types people say are ‘difficult’ when what they really mean is ‘an asshole.’”

“You think Jonathan would, like, go for somebody like that?” Bobby said.

“I think he could be
attracted
to somebody like that,” I said. “Remember, this is somebody he hasn’t introduced to any of his friends.”

Bobby was dicing a yellow pepper. I stood with my back pressed against his, washing arugula. We had gotten used to working in that minuscule kitchen together. We’d learned to move in concert.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, maybe you’re right. I picture him more like a criminal type.”

“A
criminal
? Really?”

“Not like a murderer. Not a bad criminal. More of a drug-dealer type. You know. Somebody who works scams.”

“But he’s an actor,” I said. “We know that much.”

“Oh, I think a lot of those guys deal drugs. Don’t you think so? I mean, how else could they support themselves?”

“What do you imagine him looking like?”

“Well, dark,” he said. “Not so much handsome as interesting-looking. Sort of hip, in, like, a natty way. I picture him having a little ponytail.”

“Hmm. I imagine him very young. You know, one of those squeaky-clean blonds who pour in out of the Midwest and end up in toothpaste commercials.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Bobby said. And half an hour later, we did.

Jonathan and Erich arrived together. They brought yellow hothouse tulips, and a bottle of red wine. Jonathan let Erich in ahead of him. He lingered near the door as if he might slip away and leave the three of us together.

Erich shook my hand, then shook Bobby’s. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

He was thin, and balding. He wore jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt with a Ralph Lauren insignia—the polo pony—stitched in red at the breast.

“Erich,” I said. “The mystery man.”

His high forehead darkened. He had a sharp face, with a small sharp chin and a sharp nose and small bright eyes set close together. It was a squeezed, panicky face. Erich might have been a man with his head caught between a pair of elevator doors. He nodded.

“I’m not really a mystery,” he said. “Oh no, not a mystery at all. I’m sorry we haven’t met before. I’m, well, just very glad to be here.”

He laughed in a way that suggested he had been punched in the stomach.

“How about a drink?” I said. He said a seltzer would be nice, and Jonathan jumped to get the drinks. We sat down in the living room.

“This is a nice apartment,” Erich said.

“It’s a dump,” I answered. “But thank you. You didn’t have to step over any dead bodies in the hallway, did you?”

“Oh no,” he said. “No. Why? Has that happened here?”

I couldn’t tell if he was repelled or excited by the idea of hallway murders. He had one of those enthusiastic, unreadable voices.

“Not lately,” I said. “So. You’re an actor?”

“Yes. Well, I don’t know anymore. Lately I’m just sort of a bartender. What do you do?”

He had seated himself in the armchair I’d found on First Avenue. A fan-backed old monster covered in green brocade. He sat as if he’d been assigned to occupy as little space as possible, with his legs crossed at the knee and his hands folded on his thigh.

“Junk dealer,” I said. “I make earrings out of old garbage.”

He nodded. “And you can make a living at that?” he said.

“In a fashion,” I answered.

I never told strangers about my trust money. I felt too trivial and spoiled, having an unearned income while everyone around me struggled to pay the rent. I always had jobs, but not the awful, unrelenting ones people take when they’re paying all their own expenses.

Now I felt, obscurely, that I’d given away something incriminating. Erich could have been a plant from the CIA. An undercover agent so obvious and undisguised that people blurted their petty deceits out of social discomfort.

Jonathan brought our drinks. “Here’s to the end of the mystery,” I said, and we all drank to that.

“Do you, um, like any special kind of music?” Bobby asked.

Erich blinked in his direction. “I love music,” he said. “I love all kinds.”

“I’m going to put a record on,” Bobby said, standing up. “Is there, like, anything special you’d like to hear?”

“Let me see what you have,” Erich said. And with surprising grace he sprang up from the derelict chair and followed Bobby to the cassette player.

Jonathan and I had our first opportunity to make eye contact. He mouthed the words “I told you so.”

Bobby squatted before the shelves where the cassettes were kept. “We’ve sort of got a little of everything,” he said. “We’re sort of, you know, all over the map.”

“You have Coltrane,” Erich said. “Oh, look here, you have the Doors.”

“You like the Doors?” Bobby asked.

“When I was younger I wanted to
be
Jim Morrison,” Erich said. “I used to practice his moves in the back yard. Every day, I used to practice, and lip-sync. But then I realized I lacked some of the basic equipment.” He laughed, that same astonished outrush of air.

“Let’s put him on right now,” Bobby said, and punched his Doors tape into the player.

“Do you like Bob Dylan?” he asked Erich.

“Oh, sure. I wanted to be him, too.”

“I brought some records out from Ohio,” Bobby said. “I’ve got some, you know, pretty rare ones. You like Hendrix?”

“I love Hendrix. He was, you know, the greatest.”

“Some of the records I could get cassettes of. But some are just too rare. You want to see them?”

“Okay. Sure. Sure I do.”

“We can’t listen to them,” Bobby said. “We haven’t got a turntable yet. We’ve got to buy one. Even though they’re, you know, going out of style.”

“I have a turntable,” Erich said. “If you want to, you could come over sometime and play your records at my place. If you want to.”

“Oh, great. That’d be great. Come here, the records are stored away in Clare’s and my room.”

Erich said to Jonathan and me, “Would you excuse us for a minute?” And suddenly I could see him as he must have been at the age of eight or nine: polite and overenthusiastic, prone to tears, a mystery to his parents.

“Of course,” I said. After they were gone I said to Jonathan in a low voice, “Well, the kids seem to be getting along all right.”

He shook his head. “I told you this would be a disaster. You wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Nonsense. It’s not a disaster. Bobby’s in love with him.”

“And you think he’s a twerp and a bore.”

“Jonathan. I’ve known him about five minutes.”

“Five minutes is enough. You’d have to sleep with him for him to make any more sense than he does right now.”

“I don’t know why you’ve kept seeing him all these years if you dislike him this much,” I said.

“Sex,” Jonathan said. “And my own craziness. Oh, I guess I’m fond of him in an unromantic way. I just never wanted to mix him in with the rest of my life, and I was right about that.”

“You’re a very strange man.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said.

When Bobby and Erich came back, I suggested we take our drinks up to the roof to watch the sunset. The important thing was to keep this dinner party moving, physically if necessary. It was a freakishly warm late-March evening. The kind of weather that implies either an early spring or the effects of nuclear testing.

Jonathan agreed enthusiastically, Bobby and Erich less so. I knew what they were thinking. If we went up to the roof, they’d miss the next cut of
Strange Days
.