A home at the end of the world (32 page)

“Jonathan, honey. Don’t you think there’s something a little…
kitschy
about all this yearning for a home?”

He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. “Mother,” he said. “Are you telling me to get hip?”

“I’m telling you to stop worrying so much,” I said. “Your father’s dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave.”

He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, “Mom, if anything happened to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said quickly.

“But if something did.”

I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I’d lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan’s simple bachelorhood, his sexual disenfranchisement. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I’d never met, giving me the name of a hospital.

“All right,” I said. “If something did.”

“If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don’t want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?”

I didn’t speak. I got up and poured coffee.

“Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?” I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“It’s up to you,” I said. “This is strictly your decision.”

“I know. I’ll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?”

“How about a game of Scrabble instead?”

“Fine,” he said. “Great. You’re on.”

The following day we drove to the airport with Ned’s ashes tucked inside Jonathan’s black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I’d claimed the driver’s position, and Jonathan didn’t protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky filled with clouds that had bumped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.

Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.

“Hey,” he said. “Is this a shortcut?”

“No. It’s not.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just hang on.”

“I’ll miss my plane,” he said.

“No you won’t. If you do, you can get another one.”

The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert’s small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush grasses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which shimmered as if in perpetual surprise.

I stopped the car in that ravine. It looked especially beautiful in the cloudy light. The white trunks and pale green leaves of the aspens were luminous, and a spoke of sunlight, breaking through, set fire to a single facet of the rough red mountainside beyond.

“Jonathan,” I said. “Let’s scatter the ashes here. Let’s be done with it.”

“Here?” he asked. “Why here?”

“Why not? It’s lovely, don’t you think?”

“Well, sure. But—”

He glanced at the back seat, in the direction of his bag.

“Get out the box,” I said. “Come on, now. Trust me.”

Slowly, with great deliberation, he reached into the back and unzipped his bag. He returned with the box cradled in both hands.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m sure. Come along.”

We got out of the car, and walked several paces into the thick dry grass. Jonathan held the box. Flies buzzed lazily around us, and a dust-colored lizard froze atop a waist-high pink rock, staring at us with the whole of its darting, speeded-up life.

“This
is
pretty,” Jonathan said.

“I pass by sometimes,” I said. “I have customers out here. Whenever you come to visit from now on, we can come out here if you like.”

“Should I open the box?” he asked.

“Yes. It isn’t hard. Can you see how it works?”

“I think so.” He touched the catch. Then he took his hand away, without lifting the lid.

“No,” he said. “I can’t. It isn’t the right place.”

“Honey, they’re only ashes. Let’s scatter them and get on with our lives.”

“I promised. This isn’t the right place. It isn’t what he’d have wanted.”

“Forget about what he wanted,” I said.

“You could do that. I can’t.”

He held tightly to the box, his knuckles whitening as if he feared I’d take it away from him. I said, “That isn’t fair.”

“I don’t know if it’s fair. It’s true. Mom, why did you want to marry Dad?”

“I’ve told you that story.”

“You’ve told me about wearing white shoes after Labor Day and him having nice thick hair and how you couldn’t think of any reason not to, so you did,” he said. “But why did you marry him, why did you
stay
married to him, if you weren’t any more interested than that? Did our whole family start just because getting married and having a baby was what you thought you were supposed to do?”

“Now watch yourself, young man. I loved your father. You didn’t sit it out in that condominium for years. You didn’t wake up with him in the night when he couldn’t breathe and fell into a panic.”

“No. But did you love him? That’s all I really want to know. I know you sacrificed for him, and supported him, and all that. But were you in love with him?”

“What a question to ask your mother.”

He cradled the box in his arms. “I think maybe I was in love with him,” he said softly. “I adored him.”

“He was just an ordinary man.”

“I know. Don’t you think I know that?”

We stood for a while at the edge of the aspen grove. Nothing happened; nothing moved. Jonathan held the box, his face set stubbornly, his eyes squeezed shut. After several minutes I said, “Jonathan, find someone of your own to love.”

“I’ve got someone,” he said.

It gave me a kind of vertigo, to hear us both talk like this—a tingling, lightheaded sensation of great height and insufficient protection. We had always been so circumspect with one another. Now, rather late in the game, when I had things to discuss with him, we possessed no easy language.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

He looked petulantly away, as if something on the horizon and to my right had captured his attention. There, right there before me, angrily avoiding my eyes, was the four-year-old boy I’d known more intimately than I knew myself. Now he was back in the guise of a man aging in a British, professorial way; taking on a weedy, slightly ravaged, indoor quality.

“You don’t know anything about it,” he said at length. “Our lives are more different than you can imagine.”

“I know well enough about women,” I said. “And I can tell you this. That woman is not going to let you have equal rights to her baby.”

Now he could look at me. His eyes were hard and brilliant.

“Rebecca isn’t
her
baby. Rebecca is
our
baby,” he said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“No. Literally. Bobby and Clare and I don’t know which of us is the father. That’s how we decided to do it.”

I didn’t believe him. I knew—somehow I knew—that he and that woman had not been lovers. He was telling me a story, as he’d liked to do as a child. Still, I went along with it.

“And that’s what Clare wanted, too?”

“Yes. It’s what she wanted.”

“It may be what she said she wanted,” I said. “It may be what she thought she wanted.”

“You don’t know Clare. You’re thinking of a different kind of person.”

“No, my darling. You are. I know what it is to believe the people you know are different, that your life is going to be different. And I’m standing here telling you there are universal laws. A woman won’t share her baby.”

“Mom,” he said in an elaborately calm voice. “Mom, you’re talking about yourself. It’s you who wouldn’t give your baby up.”

“Listen to me now. Go out and find yourself someone to love. Have a baby of your own, if that’s what you want.”

“I’ve already got one,” he said. “Rebecca is as much mine as she is anyone’s.”

“Three is an odd number. When there are three, one usually gets squeezed out.”

“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “You don’t have any fucking idea.”

“Please don’t speak to me that way. I’m still your mother.”

“And please don’t pull rank on me. You’re the one who wants to talk.”

He had me there. I was the one who wanted to talk. I was the one who had disappeared into marriage, let myself be carried along by the simple, ceaseless comfort of domestic particulars. And now in a desert grove I wanted to talk.

“All I’m saying,” I said, “is that there seem to be certain limits. We have a hard enough time staying together as couples.”

“And I,” he said, “am seriously considering the possibility that those limits are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bobby, Clare, and I are happy together. We plan on staying together.”

“History teaches differently.”

“History changes. Mom, it isn’t the same world anymore. The world’s going to end any minute, why shouldn’t we try to have everything we can?”

“People have believed the world was ending since the day the world began, dear. It hasn’t, and it hasn’t changed much either.”

“How can you say that?” he said. “Look at yourself.”

I was aware of the ground under my feet, chalky and red-gray. I was aware of myself in jeans and a suede jacket, under the open sky.

I said, “Do you think that when it comes down to brass tacks, Bobby will chose you? That’s it, isn’t it? You think Clare will recede, and you and Bobby will raise that child together, with her in the background.”

He looked at me, and I saw him. I saw everything: his hunger for men, his guilt and disappointment, his rage. I saw that in ways his anger was a woman’s anger. He had a woman’s sense of betrayal. He believed he’d been pushed unfairly onto the margins, been loved by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. For a moment I felt afraid of him. I feared my own son, out in that wild place so far from other beings. We had protected ourselves with silence because our only other choice was to howl at one another, to scratch and bite and shriek. We were too ashamed, both of us, for ordinary anger.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, and I conceded that I probably didn’t. We had lost track of one another; we were strangers in some deep, impenetrable way that ran like a river under our devotion and our cordiality. Perhaps that had always been the case.

“We’d better go try and catch your flight,” I said.

“Yes. We’d better.”

“About the ashes. It’s your choice. Let me know what you decide, whenever you decide.”

He nodded. “Maybe I’ll give them to Rebecca someday,” he said. “Here, kid. Your family heritage.”

“She won’t know what to do with them either,” I said.

“If I have any say in things, she will. I want her to grow up with no question about where to put her grandfather’s ashes.”

“That would be nice. That would be nice for her.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “We can just barely make it if we hurry.”

We got back into the car, and drove the rest of the way in silence. Jonathan returned the ashes to his bag and closed the zipper. As I drove I tried to phrase some bit of parental advice, but I couldn’t think of how to get it said. I’d have liked to tell him something I’d taken almost sixty years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness—a small enough chance—lay in welcoming change. But I couldn’t manage it.

Because we’d lost time, he had to jump out at the curb in front of the terminal. “Bye, Mom,” he said.

“Goodbye. Take care of yourself.”

“Yep. I always do.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Go, quick. You’ll miss your plane.”

He got out of the car and slung his bag over his shoulder. Before sprinting for his plane, he came around to the driver’s side. “So long,” he said.

Was he ill, or simply aging? Why did he look a little haggard, his eyes slightly too large in his skull?

“Jonathan? Call me when you get in, all right? Just so I know you made it in one piece.”

“Okay. Sure.”

He bent before the open window and I kissed him, lightly but square on the mouth. I kissed him goodbye. And then, without a wave or a backward glance, he was gone.

JONATHAN

B
OBBY
and I arrived at the station a few minutes before Erich’s train was due. At a small-town station like that—which was only a maroon-brick building the size of a toolshed, fronting a concrete platform—you got a true sense of your own remoteness. Here, where the country and the city met, you understood that the important fact about an approaching train was its subsequent departure for other places. Even as we watched the silver line of the train snake around the last green hillside, I could imagine the gritty windstorm it would cause on its way out. Cinders and a stray paper cup would blow briefly around the platform and then settle again into the prevailing hush. A lopsided red vending machine that had once sold newspapers stood gaping among the cattails and nettle across the tracks.

I had called Erich because I was lonely. That’s not true: I should call my condition by its proper name. When we moved to Woodstock I’d thought there would be more unattached gay men around; I’d imagined meeting them in bars and yard sales. But, as it turned out, the gay men who lived there had all arrived in pairs. So, eventually, I’d called Dr. Feelgood and invited him up for a weekend.

I patted Bobby’s shoulder, because I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Erich in over a year. The only other person on the platform was an obese elderly woman searching with mounting irritation for something in a white straw bag. I kept my hand on Bobby’s shoulder as the train curved toward us. A figure from my old, more sensible life was about to visit me in my strange and bucolic new one.

The train rumbled in, its doors sighed open. A family disembarked, followed by a bald man in a brown suit, followed by the obese younger woman who was being met by the old woman with the white straw bag. For a moment, it seemed Erich was not on the train after all. And then he appeared, holding a blue canvas suitcase, at the top of the train’s three metal steps.

I knew the moment I saw him. On someone as wiry as Erich, the loss of even five pounds would have had a noticeable diminishing effect. He had lost at least ten. His skin was gray and dense-looking.

He smiled. He got down the stairs competently if slowly, moving as if he balanced an invisible jug atop his head. Bobby took his elbow when he stepped from the last tread to the concrete.

“Hi,” Erich said. “Here I am.”

“Here you are,” I said.

After a brief hesitation, we embraced. Through his clothes—black jeans and a blue denim shirt—I could feel the true thinness of him. It was like holding a bundle of sticks. In his embrace I felt a surge of panic. The blood rushed dizzyingly to my head. All I could think of was breaking away, running from the platform into the cattails. As Erich and I held one another the world broke down into bright swimming specks before my eyes, a garish moil of color, and I could for a moment have knocked him down, kicked him under the wheels of the train so he’d be ground to nothing. So he would no longer exist.

Instead, I took his bony shoulders in my hands and said, “It’s good to see you.” The train started up again, pulling away in a knee-high fury of sparkling dust.

“Thanks,” he said, nodding. “Thanks a lot. It’s good to be here. I haven’t been in the country in a long long time. Hello, Bobby.”

He and Bobby shook hands. I couldn’t tell from Bobby’s face how much he knew. He carried Erich’s suitcase to the car with the impassive certainty of an old family retainer. Erich could walk well enough, though there was palpable caution in his step, an elderly deliberateness, as if his bones were soft and brittle as wax.

“Did you have a good trip?” I asked.

“Fine. Oh, yes, fine. The train goes through some beautiful parts, it really is, well, just beautiful up here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “If you like this sort of thing.”

He blinked uncertainly. Erich understood formal jokes, but lost track of small ironies.

“We like it here,” I said. “It’s every bit as restful, satisfying, and dull as you ever imagined the country would be.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, good. That’s good.”

We got into the car and started for home. Bobby drove, and Erich sat in the front seat. I sat in back, the child’s place. As we drove over the familiar road, I looked out at the fields of wild grass and could not stop thinking of hiding myself in it; of burrowing deep into a grassy field until I was completely hidden among the yellow-green blades, which were blanching with the coming season. Fourteen months ago, when Erich and I last made love, we’d been careful with one another. But less than a year before that, we had practiced no caution. I ran my fingertips lightly over my chest, and watched the leaves of grass sway under the sky.

Erich said, “Bobby, did you bring your record collection here with you?”

“Oh, sure,” Bobby said. “You know me. We got a turntable and everything.”

“I brought you some presents from the city,” Erich said. “There’s a great record store down in the financial district, if you can believe that.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Bobby said. “Yeah. I used to go there.”

We drove home, managing our conversation in spasms. I found, to my surprise, that I felt a distinctly social aversion to asking Erich about his health. It was not horror but embarrassment that prevented me from mentioning it; he might have come back from a war missing his arms or legs. From where I sat, I could see the patch of unprosperous skin that showed through his thin hair—both skin and hair had lost a luster that was perceptible only by its absence. Although Erich had never been robust, his hair now looked as if it would break off in your hands. The scalp underneath was hard and dry; juiceless. What I did, faced with his evident decline, was point out my favorite views, discuss the eccentricities of the local population, and tell of our recent visit to the county fair, where prize cucumbers and 4-H piglets had been proudly displayed. I could not stop stroking my chest. We crossed the Hudson. Beneath us, barges cut through the sparkling brown water. The trees on the far bank were going yellow and red from the first frosty nights. Among the trees, the crumbling mansions of dead millionaires looked blindly out at the cooling, ice-blue sky.

When we reached the gravel drive that led up to the house, Erich gasped and said, “Oh, this is wonderful. I can’t believe this is yours.”

I had never heard this note of excitement in his voice—this undertone of quivering wonder. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. It had a false, gushing quality. He might have been the wife of an ambitious man, taken to the boss’s country house.

“Wait till you see the inside,” I said. “It’s got a long way to go.”

“Oh, no, it’s perfect. It’s just perfect,” he said. “Whatever it looks like inside.”

“Just you wait,” I said.

Clare met us on the porch with the baby. Rebecca, recently bathed, looked at us with buggishly astonished eyes, as if she had never seen anything like us before—three men getting out of a car and mounting the porch stairs. Clare called, “Hello, boys.”

“Hello,” Erich said. “Oh, it’s, well, it’s very good to see you again. Oh, look at the baby.”

I could tell from Clare’s face that she suspected something. I could almost see the interior process she went through, struggling to match this Erich with the Erich she’d met years ago. Had he always been so ashen and thin? Had his skin been so opaque?

“This is her,” Clare said after a moment. “You’re catching her on a good day, she’s been angelic from the moment she opened her eyes this morning. Better admire her quick, because things could change at any moment.”

Erich, uncertain about small children, stood several feet away and said, “Hi, baby. Hello there.” Rebecca gawked at him or at the empty air in his vicinity, a string of saliva dangling voluptuously from her chin. She’d been talking for months by then. In private she could babble for hours, mixing actual words with her own private vocabulary, but when faced with strangers she retreated, staring with unabashed and slightly fearful fascination, committing herself to nothing, waiting to see what would happen next. When she was uncertain she still claimed the infant’s privilege, and in her boggled fixations there was a quality of self-abandonment that was almost sexual. I’d already learned one lesson about fatherhood—you love your child, in part, because you see her utterly naked. A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks. In a year and a half I’d learned that while I could imagine Rebecca growing up to make me angry, to hurt or disappoint me, I did not see how she could ever make herself strange. Not if she came to weigh three hundred pounds. Not if she preached the ascendancy of an insect god, or committed murder for personal gain. We were connected; we’d established an intimacy that couldn’t be undone while we both lived.

“How about giving me a squeeze?” I said. Clare reluctantly passed her over. As I took her in my arms she looked at me with unflinching amazement. I said, “Hey, Miss Rebecca,” and she laughed abruptly and ecstatically, as if I had just popped out of a box.

I held her close to my chest. I put my nose to her fat shoulder and inhaled.

Erich said, “This is really interesting. What you all are doing out here. I mean, it’s just very very interesting.”

“Putting it mildly,” Clare said. “Come on inside, I’ll show you to your room. Ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that to somebody.”

Clare led Erich into the house, and Bobby followed with the suitcase. I stayed outside with Rebecca for a moment. Afternoon light, which had taken on the golden weight of October, picked out each individual tree on the mountainside. A fat speckled spider sat motionless in the exact middle of a web that described a taut hexagon between two posts and the porch rail. As quickly as we swept the webs away with a broom, these country spiders—some gaily colored, some pale as dust—rebuilt them. Rebecca murmured. She started batting her hands in the frantic, exasperated way that preceded her sourceless fits of crying. I stroked her hair, waiting for the tears to start. I thought of walking away with her, just taking her into the mountains with me.

“There’s so much still to do,” I whispered. “The floors have still got dry rot. And we haven’t even started on the kitchen yet.”

We took Erich to see the restaurant, which was doing well enough by then for Bobby and me to have left it for a few hours in the charge of Marlys, our prep cook, and her lover Gert, the new waitress. When we started the restaurant we’d set out to simulate the kind of place we’d hoped to find on the drive back from Arizona—an eccentric little café that served honest food made by human hands. As it turned out, we weren’t alone in our desire for that simple, elusive café. Our place was always full, and on weekends the customers lined up halfway down the block. It was gratifying and slightly uncomfortable to see people so avid for such ordinary food: bread and hash browns made from scratch, soups and stews, two different pies every day. I sometimes felt we were deceiving them by pretending to be simple—we’d led convoluted, neurotic lives and now we were earning our living by arranging lattice crusts over apples from an orchard less than ten miles away and contracting with a local grandmother for homemade preserves. Still, half our customers wore country clothes they’d ordered from catalogues and rustic sweaters knitted in Hong Kong or Guatemala. I don’t suppose anyone was fooled.

“Oh, this is
won
derful,” Erich cried. The restaurant had closed for the day, although half the tables were still full of customers finishing up. Marlys and Gert greeted us with their particular mix of comradely good cheer and fleeting, untraceable hatred. I found that I was vaguely embarrassed by Erich’s pallor and thinness—it seemed I had brought some perversity of mine, some unpleasant secret, into the place where I had effectively simulated innocence.

Marlys took Bobby into the kitchen to show him what needed reordering, and to point out the leak she had managed, temporarily, to plug in the dishwasher. I’d learned that even a small, successful restaurant operated in a continual state of crisis. The machinery broke down, caught fire, failed when it was needed most. Produce arrived bruised or unripe, mealworms tunneled into the flour. The customers’ appetites followed distinct but unpredictable patterns, so that the ingredients we ran out of one week would spoil on our shelves the next. The profits, though steady, were small, and it seemed that literally every hour it was time to bake more pies, cut more potatoes, haggle with the vegetable man about a carton of wilted lettuce. Sometimes I’d walk into the dining room and see, with a certain astonishment, that people sat at every table eating without concern or particular attention, talking to one another about the facts of their lives. They believed this was a restaurant, they found it unextraordinary that we’d fought decay and parasites, the endless petty dishonesty of suppliers, to get this simple food onto these white ceramic plates. On the rare occasions when a customer complained that his eggs were overcooked or his bacon underdone, I had to force myself not to scream, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are that we do this at all? Don’t you
get
it? Where’s your gratitude, for God’s sake?” I’d begun to better understand the appeal of the flash-frozen, the freeze-dried or microwavable.
This tastes almost as good, and it’s predictable. It’s already diced or kneaded, already rolled or chopped. It can’t rot. It will keep until the customers decide they want to order it again
. Less than two years ago, the proprietors of all those brightly lit, desolate roadside cafés had seemed like our enemies, selling corrupted food out of greed and laziness. Now I saw them as victims of a more practical, seductive kind of defeat.

Gert asked Erich and me if we’d like anything. The coffee was still on, she said, and when last she checked there were still two pieces of blueberry pie. Did she know Erich was sick? Was that the true cause of her solicitude? I could tell Erich was charmed by Gert, for she was in fact charming, a strong-faced, ruddy woman with long gray hair who had left a good job in publishing to live up here with Marlys. She dressed like a farm wife, in print dresses and cardigan sweaters, but she spoke Russian and had edited the work of a great poet. After we’d said no thank you to coffee and pie and she’d returned to the customers, I had to work to keep from whispering, “We think she’s stealing from the register.”