A Home at the End of the World

  “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 .

  “Boys, we can start the music again when we come back down,” I said, and was surprised at how much like a mother I could sound.

  We went up the stairs to the roof, a tarred plateau bound at the edges with patterned concrete pediments. The orange sun hovered over the New Jersey horizon. Television aerials threw intricate, birdlike shadows. The windows of the tall buildings uptown flashed amber and bronze. A fat pink-stained cloud, its every billow and furl distinct as carved ivory, hung soaking up the last light over Brooklyn. Frilled curtains and salsa music blew out of an open window across the alley. We stood facing west, trailing twenty-foot shadows.

  “Beautiful,” Jonathan said. “Just when you think you’re going to move to the country, the city does something like this.”

  “I adore the roof,” I said. I was surprised, again, at the sound of my own voice. When had I turned into such a hostess?

  “You don’t hear music like this in my neighborhood,” Erich said. “Never this kind of Mexican stuff, no.”

  “I sort of like it,” Bobby said.

  “So do I,” Erich answered.

  Bobby swayed his hips in rhythm, and soon began to dance. Watching him in his cheerful, slightly baffled progress through the day, you could forget what a dancer he was. It was one of his surprises. The moment a note of music sounded he could move with such grace and buoyancy. He appeared to shed some interior weight. A ghost of the flesh, all gristle and bone, that dissolved at a guitar’s strum or the first bleat of a horn. On the record, a woman backed by maracas and guitars sang full-throated in Spanish, with shamelessly simple passion. Bobby, who loved all music, good and bad, danced as the last of the sun disappeared.

  Erich glanced at Jonathan and me. I knew what he was thinking. I said, “Go ahead.” And with a shy smile, he started dancing with Bobby.

  He was not nearly the dancer Bobby was, but he moved his feet in time to the music and made little twitching movements with his arms. Bobby turned to him as the sky gave up its last bit of blue and a faint star appeared in the growing violet to the east.

  Jonathan and I stood watching, with our drinks in our hands. Jonathan said, “I don’t think I want to just be the chaperon at this party. Do you?”

  “No,” I said. “Not especially.”

  Jonathan set his drink on the parapet, and started dancing with Bobby and Erich. He was an elegant if contained dancer. He moved within a small column of air, the exact boundaries of which he never overstepped. I watched. For a moment—a moment—I felt the world spinning away from me. I saw myself standing in the last light, aging in a bright purple thrift-store dress as a group of younger men danced together. It was far from an ordinary moment. And yet I felt as if I’d lived it before.

  To get myself back into real life, I started dancing. What else could I do? The heels of my shoes stuck in the tar, making soft pock sounds until I stepped out of them and danced in my stocking feet.

  Jonathan said, “Okay, the rooftop number from West Side Story . Are you ready?”

  “How does it start?” I asked.

  “Let’s see. ‘I like to be in America.’”

  “‘Okay by me in America.’”

  “‘Everything free in America.’”

  “‘For a small fee in America.’”

  We whooped and clapped. When the number was finished I turned three perfect cartwheels in a row. I hadn’t done it in at least fifteen years. I felt my legs flashing straight and clean as knives.

  “I used to want to be a cheerleader,” I told them. “Before I decided to just go to hell.”

  Something took hold of us up there. I remembered the sensation from childhood, when a game gathered momentum. Bobby unbuttoned his shirt, which bellied in the wind. We all danced exaggeratedly, like members of a Broadway chorus, with leaps and twirls. When the salsa music went off, we started singing. We sang as much as we could remember of the Jets song and “Officer Krupke.” We sang every number from Hair .

  Bobby said, “My brother used to play that record ten times a day. Till our mother threw it out. He just got another one. So then she threw his stereo out.”

  “One of my cousins was in Hair ,” I said. “A couple of years ago, at a dinner theater in Florida.”

  We sang a few numbers from South Pacific , and all the My Fair Lady we could come up with. We danced to the sound of our own voices. When we couldn’t dance any longer we sat down on the sun-warmed tar, inhaling its mingled smell of sour earth and chemicals. We kept singing. Once, while we were singing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” I glanced at Jonathan and caught him staring at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It was an injured, glowering look, something between anger and sorrow. When our eyes met, he looked quickly back at the sky. We sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and we sang “Norwegian Wood.” Bobby and Jonathan sang a couple of Laura Nyro songs together, until I made them switch back to something we all knew. We sat singing on that roof until darkness proper had set in, and the city blazed around us with the light of ten million parties.

  BOBBY

  T HE DAY after we danced on the roof together, Jonathan slipped through the fabric of his life. He left nothing behind but a few words on a piece of notebook paper anchored to the table by the pepper shaker. “Dear B. and C, I wish you great happiness together. That sounds so corny, doesn’t it? Anyway, I’m starting again somewhere else, I honestly don’t know where. I’ll call eventually. Give away whatever of mine you can’t use yourselves. Love, J.”

  Clare and I read those lines over and over, as if they were code for another, more sensible message. She called the newspaper and found he had quit his job that morning, without notice. He had left no forwarding address. His room was as white and uninhabited-looking as it had always been. As far as we could tell, only a few of his clothes were missing.

  “Fuck,” Clare said. “That motherfucker. How could he do this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he just did it.”

  Clare was furious and I was stupefied. Departures brought out my blankness—I could feel my brain cloud over. When someone left I lost track of everything. I was filled with a dense, prickly confusion strong as the effect of a drug. It was a kind of retardation, I suppose. A missing neural connection. Somebody who was here isn’t here anymore. I couldn’t seem to get it.

  “Jonathan, you asshole,” Clare said. “Just when things were starting to work out.” She balled up the note and threw it in the trash, though later she’d r
etrieve it, as if she thought it might be needed as evidence.

  “He’ll be back?” I said. I’d thought I was telling her something but it came out as a question.

  “What’s wrong with men?” Clare said. She stood on the living-room carpet with her arms folded over her breasts and her jaw gone stony. I saw that in another life she could have been a crazy schoolteacher, one of those wild spinsters who strike you as pathetic at first but end up changing your life. I didn’t answer. I was sitting on the bald velvet chair, the one we’d dragged home from the corner of Fifth and Eighteenth. My hands were squeezed between my thighs. “Really,” she said. “I’d like to know. Do you have any idea? What goes on in their heads? What do they want?”

  I shrugged. It was not a question I could answer, though it seemed she expected me to. I might have been the worst student in her class, failing even the easy ones she lobbed in my direction.

  “I’m going out,” she said. She threw her jacket over her shoulders, the faded leather one with the peace symbol on the back. Her earrings clicked and flashed. She went down the stairs with such heel-clattering determination that I thought she’d be back within an hour, dragging Jonathan by the ear. She’d check the train stations and the airports, stop traffic on the George Washington Bridge. She was too angry and enormous to evade. But less than an hour later she came back alone. I had hardly moved. I’d spent the hour sitting in the living room, watching it go through its own patient history. When Clare returned she stopped for a moment, staring at me in confusion.

  “Did you find him?” I asked.

  “Of course I didn’t find him.”

  She walked up to me in a blazing, businesslike way. “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. All I could think of was the truth.

  “I don’t know if I love you either,” she said. She pulled my shirt off hard enough to rip the seams. We made love on the living-room floor. She bit my neck and nipples, pulled at my hair. She left bloodied lines running along my back and over my ass.

  Jonathan had taken all his money out of the bank and bought a ticket somewhere. Clare and I spent a few weeks getting over expecting to hear from him.

  “I don’t get this,” she said. “This doesn’t seem real, it’s some kind of gesture . You know how Jonathan can be.”

  “I know how he can be,” I said. But in fact he had gone. Alice and Ned couldn’t tell us anything, and all we knew about Erich was his first name and the fact that he worked in a restaurant somewhere. After dinner that night we’d all congratulated each other for our ability to enjoy ourselves. We’d promised to do something just as riotous again soon. We didn’t think we’d need any particulars for getting in touch.

  Jonathan might have dropped through a trapdoor. The last time we saw him he’d washed the dishes, downed a final shot of Scotch, and kissed us both good night. He’d left early for work in the morning. And when Clare and I got home that night, there was the note.

  “Stupid bastard,” Clare said. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s a dramatic kind of person,” I said. “He can’t help it.”

  I waited for my true feelings to arrive. I waited for all the proper reactions: rage and disappointment, a sense of betrayal. But weeks passed and the blankness held. Nothing happened; nothing at all. I felt myself slipping back to my old Cleveland mode, living a life made up of details. At work, I shredded mountains of cheese and chopped my weight in mushrooms. At home I watched television, or watched the light change outside the window, or watched time passing as I played my records. I was surprised to learn that New York could be as ordinary and windblown as Cleveland. It could take on that same feeling of disuse. Although we think of the dead inhabiting the past, I now believe they exist in an unending present. There is no hope of better things to come. There is no memory of the human progress that led to each moment.

  Without Jonathan, I haunted my own life. I couldn’t make contact. I walked through the hours like a shade wandering in helpless astonishment through rooms he’d once danced and wept and made love in; rooms he’d once been alive enough to ignore.

  Clare negotiated a more predictable run of feelings, and came out the other end. She taught herself to accept Jonathan’s mysteries and his nagging self-involvement. She worked up a story to tell: never trust anyone under the age of thirty. “People can’t be held accountable, not even at twenty-eight,” she said. “At that age you’re still thinking yourself up. I wish Jonathan well, I really do. I hope he gives me a call sometime after he’s developed a personality.”

  For a while she hated me for being twenty-eight. After that one sweaty, clawing session on the living-room floor, she put an end to our lovemaking and sent me to sleep in Jonathan’s bed, so she wouldn’t feel the lack when I, too, turned up missing one day. Then, after almost a month, she slipped into bed with me at midnight. “I’ve been a real asshole, haven’t I?” she whispered. “Please forgive me, sweetheart. I’ve got a sort of soft spot about abandonment. What do you think? Do you think we could manage together, just the two of us?”

  I told her I thought we probably could. We were in a kind of love, as far as we knew. I liked making love to her; I liked the heat and unexpectedness of her body. I liked the trail of tiny gold hairs scattered from her navel to her crotch, and I liked the creases her ass made when it met her thighs. We made love that night, for the first time in a month, and though all the moves came off, the central point was missing. I’d suspected it would be that way. Now sex was a succession of details, with a sweet implosion at the end. It was another feature of the regular day.

  After that, we slept in the same bed again. We made love once or twice a week. But Jonathan took something out of the air when he left—a next thing kept failing to happen. Clare and I got stuck in the present. According to current wisdom, that was the right place to be. But when it happened—when we lost our sense of the past and the future—we started to drift. Clare felt it, too. She called me “sweetheart” and “honey” more often. She looked at me with a certain mild kindliness that was the living opposite of desire. I began to notice how the cords of her neck jumped when she talked. I became more conscious of the way she scratched invisible pictures on a tabletop as she spoke, and of how her mascara sometimes hardened into gluey clumps on her eyelashes.

  We did the things we’d always done. We watched television and went to the movies, bought old clothes and took long walks through the changing neighborhoods. We went to clubs and parties sometimes. But our own occasion kept slipping away from us. We didn’t find necessary things to say to each other. I was no talker. I took things in, but couldn’t give them back again, transformed, as language. Jonathan had had enough voice for both of us. Now there were silences that reached no logical ends. No one but Clare and me was ever coming home. We had no one to gossip about or worry over, except one another.

  I thought of my own parents. I thought of Alice and Ned.

  This was love between a man and a woman. I’d made that much more progress in my continuing education.

  Summer passed, fall came. I didn’t see Jonathan until late November, and then only by accident. I had gone to a chiropractor on the Upper West Side, for the damage I did to my back lifting a case of champagne at work. The Upper West Side might have been a different city—we lived a downtown life. Walking along Central Park West to the subway, I gawked tourist-like at the autumn yellows of Central Park and the trim little dogs clipping alongside their masters’ glossy shoes. I got so absorbed in the rich otherness of the place I nearly walked past Jonathan.

  He was leaning
against the brick flank of an apartment building, reading The Village Voice . I stared at him as if he was a particularity of the neighborhood. He might have been a photograph come to life, the way the details of Paris must look if you barrel through it on a three-day package tour.

  I said, “Jonathan?”

  He looked up, and said my name.

  “Jonathan, I—this is you, right?”

  He nodded. “It’s me. I got into town a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I, wow, man. I don’t know what to say. Um, are you all right?”

  I was as confused by his reappearance as I’d been by his departure. Once again, my circuits shut down and left me floating in space.

  “I’m okay. Bobby, I didn’t mean for us to meet like this.”

  “Uh-huh. I mean, can you tell me what’s going on?”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry about the way I left. That was sort of ridiculous, wasn’t it? I just…I knew I wouldn’t do it any other way. I’d just stay around being the uncle until you and Clare moved out and left me alone in that awful apartment. How’s Clare?”

  “She’s okay. She’s, like, pretty much the same. I guess we’re both pretty much the same.”

  “You make it sound like a terrible fate,” he said.

  I shrugged, and he nodded again. He was too familiar to see. His face and clothes kept blurring. It seemed possible that I’d crossed a mental line, and was in fact talking to someone who only looked like Jonathan. New York is full of people who’ve caved in under their particular losses, and decided they have business with everyone on the street.

  “You want to go for a drink or something?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  We went to the first place we saw, an Irish bar that sold corned beef from a steam table. It was the uptown version of the Village bars we used to frequent on our nights with the Hendersons. Crepe-paper Christmas decorations had become year-round fixtures there, and the television showed a wavering, too-bright soap opera to the single old woman who sat at the bar waiting to scream at anyone who interfered with her.