A Home at the End of the World

  After a while, we left the cemetery again. It seemed there should have been more to say or do, but the dead are difficult subjects. What’s most remarkable about them is their constancy. They will be dead in just this way a thousand years from now. I was still getting used to it with my own father. The whole time he lived I had thought in terms of how we might still change in one another’s eyes. Now we could not revise ourselves. He’d taken the possibility with him into the crematorium’s fire.

  We got back into the car. I touched the two silver hoops I wore in my ear, looked down at my own clothes. I was a man in cowboy boots and black jeans. I wore ten black rubber bracelets on one wrist. I could still travel, change jobs, read Turgenev. Any kind of love was possible.

  “Next stop, New York City,” Bobby said from behind the wheel. If he was not quite somber, he had grown more blank—it was his old response to sorrow. His voice lost its rhythm and lilt, his face slackened. I have never seen this in anyone else. Bobby could withdraw from the surface of his skin, and when he did so you suspected that if you stuck him with a needle the point would penetrate a fraction of an inch before he cried out. In these vacant states he said and did nothing different. His speech and actions continued unimpaired. But something in him departed, the living snap went out, and he took on a slumbering quality that might have been mistaken for stupidity by someone who knew him less.

  I asked if he wanted to go by the bakery to see his old boss and he said no. He said it was past time to get back on the road, as if we needed to reach New York by a particular hour. I stroked his shoulder as we pulled onto the highway. I think we both felt defeated by Cleveland, its ordinary aims and modestly rising prospects. Perhaps others have a more agreeably definitive experience when they revisit their hometowns: those who’ve escaped from industrial slums or declined from pinnacles of great wealth or happiness. Maybe they’re better able to say, “Once I was there and now I’m somewhere else.”

  We were all quiet for the next hour. Clare was so withdrawn I asked her if she was feeling sick again, and she told me no in an irritated tone. Pennsylvania arrived with its long steady roll of white barns and gentle hills. We drove along in a small hothouse of sourceless gloom.

  Without preamble, as we approached a sign for Jay-Dee’s Cheese Popcorn, Bobby said, “I’ve been thinking. Would you both ever want to, like, get a place out of the city? Like a house we could all live in?”

  “You mean all three of us?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Clare said, “Communes are out of style.”

  “We wouldn’t be a commune, exactly. I mean, we’re more like a family, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “We are nothing like a family,” Clare said.

  “Like it or not,” Bobby told her. “Too late to back out now.”

  In a low voice, Clare said, “Stop the car.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Stop. Just stop the car.”

  Bobby pulled over to the side, assuming she was going to be sick. We were literally nowhere, in a stretch of farmland gone fallow, the fields weedy and strewn with trash. A Texaco sign shimmered at the curve of the road ahead.

  “Honey,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  She had opened the door almost before Bobby came to a full stop. But instead of leaning out to vomit she jumped from the car and began walking, with fierce determination, along the brushy shoulder. Bobby and I hesitated, searching for the proper response.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’d better go after her.”

  We got out of the car and ran to catch up with her. An eighteen-wheel truck ground past, swirling grit and a windstorm of garbage around our feet.

  “Hey,” Bobby said. He touched her elbow. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please just go back to the car and leave me alone.”

  She may have meant, in a disorganized way, to leave us in Pennsylvania. She may have meant to hitchhike back, or to begin a life of drifting around the country, getting waitress jobs and renting rooms in small-town hotels. I had entertained similar impulses myself.

  “Clare,” I said. “Clare.” I thought the sound of my voice would calm her. I was her closest friend, her confidant. She turned. Her face was dark with rage.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “Just go. The two of you.”

  “What is it?” Bobby asked. “Are you, like, really sick?”

  “Yes,” she said. To escape us she left the roadside and veered across the flat expanse of chalky, untended ground. Shredded tires lay around, and the matted pelt of a raccoon that had been mummified by the passing seasons. We kept up, flanking her.

  “Clare,” I said, “what is it? Just what in the hell exactly is it?”

  Her voice hissed. “I’m pregnant. All right?”

  “Pregnant?”

  “We’re having a kid?” Bobby said. “You and me?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Please just shut the fuck up. I don’t want to have any goddamn baby.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No. Oh, hell. I’ve let it go over three months now. I’ve never had morning sickness before. The other time I was pregnant, I had it taken care of before anything like this happened.”

  “You want to have the baby,” Bobby said.

  “No. I’ve just been, I don’t know. Lazy and stupid.”

  “Yes. We can have it. We can all three have it.”

  “You’re crazy. Do you know how crazy you are?”

  “A kid,” Bobby said to me. “Hey. We’re having a kid.”

  “ We are not having anything,” she said. “ I may be having a baby. Or I may not.”

  “Honey, are you sure?” I said.

  “Oh, I’m very sure. I’m quite perfectly sure.”

  We were halfway across the field, headed nowhere. Nothing lay ahead but a line of bare, cement-colored trees bordering a second field. Still, Clare marched forward as if the answers to all her questions waited just past the horizon. Sun shone anemically through a thin gruel of cloud.

  “Clare,” Bobby said. “Stop.”

  She stopped. She looked around, and appeared to realize for the first time that she was in the middle of open country, with no reasonable destination at hand.

  “I can’t do it this way,” she said. “I should either be in love with one person, or I should have a baby on my own.”

  “You’re just scared,” Bobby said.

  “I wish I was. I’d rather be scared than furious. And embarrassed. I feel like such a fool. What would we do, sign up for birthing classes together? All three of us?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Why not?”

  “I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”

  She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.

 
“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

  PART III

  BOBBY

  T HE CITY’S pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure—she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease.

  “What if it turns out to be some sort of Heidi?” she said. “I don’t want any child of mine growing up too good. I couldn’t stand it.”

  I reminded her of what New York has ready for anyone too small or uninformed to do battle for a body-sized patch of air rights. I invented probability numbers about small-town schools and the effects of the color green on psychological development.

  “And listen, growing up in the country doesn’t doom anybody to good behavior anymore,” Jonathan said. “Most of the really interesting murderers come from derelict farms and trailer parks.”

  “Well, all right,” Clare finally said. “I guess everybody needs New York to escape to . If we raise the kid here, it’ll just move to the country when it grows up.”

  And so we started making phone calls. We started driving upstate to look at property so strange or desolate we could afford it with Clare’s inheritance money. Shopping for cheap real estate, you get an insider’s look at daily human defeat. You smell the dank, vegetable smell of the outdoors working its way in through soggy wallboards, see ceilings and floors in a slow-motion state of ongoing collapse. You see how weather and decay win just by continuing, day after day, until the money runs out.

  “We can’t stop too long to think,” Clare kept saying. “We have to keep looking. If we stop and think too long, I’m afraid I’ll come to my senses.”

  After three weeks we found a two-story brown house five miles out of Woodstock, a place with a motherly, slightly insane dignity whose advantages mostly balanced its faults. Its walls stood on a solid foundation. The price was low—a desperation sale. Light from an alfalfa field floated through the rooms as if the passage of time was man’s silliest delusion. Well water clear and cold as virtue itself flowed from the taps.

  On the debit side, the wiring had disintegrated and the pipes had gone lacy with rust. The old pine floors were alive with dry rot and carpenter ants.

  “At least this one has a soul,” Jonathan said. “You know what I mean? I feel like it’s not too late. This one isn’t dead in the water yet.”

  Clare nodded. She ran her thumb along a doorjamb, and looked with critical uncertainty at her thumb.

  “It feels right,” I said. “Don’t you get a feeling from this place?”

  “Mm-hm,” Clare said. “Nausea. Vertigo. Panic.” She kept looking at her thumb.

  We argued for a week, and bought the house. We bought the well and the afternoon light. We bought fifteen oaks, eight pines, a blackberry thicket, and a pair of graves so old the markers had been worn smooth as chalk. As Clare sat pregnant on a green vinyl chair signing the papers she said, “So long, Paris and Istanbul.”

  Jonathan added, “So long, Armani. So long, crocodile shoes.” The two of them shared a sour little laugh. And then the deal was made. Clare had bought us all a fresh start with her dead grandfather’s rhinestone fortune. By way of celebration, the real estate agent gave us complimentary white wine in white Styrofoam cups.

  When we left our New York apartment we got rid of everything worn out or broken—nearly half our possessions. We put them out on the street as offerings for the people who were just arriving, full of hope, at the place we were about to leave. We watched from the window as passers-by carried things away. A woman took the lava lamp. Two skinheads and a fat tattooed girl took the swaybacked sofa covered in leopard-skin polyester.

  “So long, treasures,” Clare said. Her breath made a spool-shaped flicker of steam on the glass.

  “So long, old garbage from thrift-store bins,” Jonathan said. “Honey, there are times when nostalgia is simply not called for.”

  “I dragged that sofa down here from Sixty-seventh Street,” she said. “Years ago, with Stephen Cooper and Little Bill. We’d carry the damn thing a few blocks, stop and sit on it, then walk another few blocks. It took us all night. Sometimes bag people would sit on it with us, and we’d all have a beer. We made a lot of friends that night.”

  “And now you’re a homeowner and a mother-to-be,” Jonathan said. “Did you really expect to scavenge around the streets of New York for the rest of your life?”

  “Little Bill died,” she said. “Did I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Corinne told me. He died in South Carolina, oh, at least a year ago. We’d all lost track of him.”

  “I’m sorry. Is Stephen all right?”

  “Oh, Stephen’s fine. He really did open a jewelry store up on Cape Cod. I suppose he’s making a mint selling little gold whales and sea gulls to tourists.”

  “Well,” Jonathan said. “That’s good. I mean, at least he’s alive.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  We watched the sofa travel down East Fourth Street. On the sidewalk below our window, a man and a woman in leather jackets whooped over Clare’s old kitchen clock—a yellow plastic boomerang shape covered with pink-and-red electrons.

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into throwing out the clock,” she said. “I’m going to go down there and tell those people it was a mistake.”

  “Forget it,” Jonathan said. “They’d kill you.”

  “Jonathan, that clock is a collector’s item. It’s worth money.”

  “Sweetie, it doesn’t run,” he said. “It doesn’t tell time anymore. Let them have it.”

  She nodded, and watched numbly as the couple jogged away toward First Avenue, passing the clock back and forth like a football. She stroked her pregnant belly. She breathed steam onto the glass.

  That was over ten months ago. Now we live in a field facing the mountains. Spiky blue flowers climb through the slats of our fence. Bees drone in their ecstasy of daily work, and a milk-blue sky hangs raggedly behind the trees. These are old mountains. They’ve been worn down by wind and rain. They are not about anarchy or grandeur, like the more photogenic ranges. These mountains throw a smooth shadow—their crags don’t imply the gnash of continental plates. They are evenly bearded with pine trees. They cut modest half-moons out of the sky.

  “I hate scenery,” Clare says. “It’s so obvious.” She is standing beside me in the unmowed grass. It’s the first April of the new decade and she’s a new Clare. She’s sharper now, with more true bite under her jokes. You’d expect motherhood to have had a softening effect.

  “Aw, come on,” I tell her. “Get over it, huh?”

  A pair of crows glide over the house. One lets out a raucous cry, like metal twisting on metal.

  “Buzzards,” Clare says. “Carrion-eaters. Waiting for the first of us to die of boredom.”

  I sing softly into her ear. I sing, “By the time we got t
o Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration.”

  “Stop that,” she says, batting the song away as if it was a taunting crow. Her silver bracelets click. “If there’s one thing I never expected to end up as,” she says, “it’s an old hippie.”

  “There are, you know, worse things to end up as,” I say.

  “It’s too late,” she says. “The butterflies are turning back into bombers. Haven’t you noticed? They’re going to build condos on that mountain, take my word for it.”

  “I don’t think they will. I don’t think there’d be enough customers.”

  She looks at the mountains as if the future was written there in small, bright letters. She squints. For a moment she could be a country woman, all sinew and suspicion, and never mind about her lipstick or her chartreuse shirt. She could be my mother’s mother, standing on the edge of her Wisconsin holdings and looking out disapprovingly at the vastness of what she doesn’t own.

  “As long as there are enough customers for the Home Café. Christ, I still can’t believe we decided to call it that.”

  “People’ll love it,” I say.

  “Oh, this is all just so weird. It’s so outdated and—weird.”

  “Well, it sort of is,” I say.

  “No ‘sort of’ about it.”

  She is so bitter and hard, so much like her revised self, that a rogue spasm of happiness rises up in me. She’s so real; so Clare . I do a quick, spastic dance. It has nothing to do with grace or the tight invisible laws of rhythm—I could be a small wooden man on a string. Clare rolls her eyes in a wifely way. There is room here for the daily peculiarities.

  She says, “I’m glad one of us feels good about all this.”