A Home At The End Of The World Part 11

"Personally? Or for the baby?"

"The baby."

"I wouldn't hit her," she said. "I couldn't. Oh, I don't know. I'd probably be one of those mothers who get huffy and disappointed, and the kid wishes you'd just haul off and smack him and get it over with."

Clare worked for a jeweler on St. Marks Place. She had a genius for putting odd things together-she made earrings and brooches out of rhinestones, broken gla.s.s, rusted tin, and tiny plastic figures from dime stores. Her work had a small but loyal following. I had unexpectedly become the restaurant critic for a weekly newspaper that started underground and grew too popular for its own crude facilities and its inexperienced staff. When I took the job, straight out of NYU, I'd thought of it as a first step toward my true career on the staff of a glossy national magazine, but as it happened I'd stumbled unawares-almost against my will-onto the ground floor of a good thing. In three years the paper had moved from dank offices in the garment district to a suite on Union Square. Its staff had tripled. And I'd been promoted from typist and occasional reporter to food columnist.

The joke was this: I knew nothing about food. It had been my mother's obsession, and I'd vehemently denied ingress to every particle of knowledge on the subject. When the editor decided to add a restaurant section, and told me he wanted me to write it, I protested that I didn't even know what quiche Lorraine was made of. He said, "That's the point. A lot of people don't." He offered a raise, and a minimum of twenty-four column inches every week. And so I became Plain John, a character of relatively modest means who appreciated good food but was not transported by the unexpected dash of cardamom in a red-pepper puree; who liked to go out to dinner with friends or lovers once or twice a week and was willing to spring for something fancy when the occasion demanded it. I reviewed Polish and Chinese restaurants, scoured Manhattan for the best hamburgers and pizza and pad Thai. I indicated which trendy restaurants treated even noncelebrities kindly, which served ludicrously small portions, which would be impressive but nonthreatening to parents when they visited from out of town. Both Clare and I subsisted on the meals paid for by the paper, though we repaid the debt through the eccentricities of our diet. One week we ate only burritos, another nothing but Peking duck. Clare speculated over whether our nutritional monism might be doing us some sort of lasting harm. She brought home vitamins, and drinks made with aloe vera, and protein powders supposedly favored by famous bodybuilders, who grinned and flexed on the brightly colored labels.

We told one another that the baby should be read to constantly, even before it was old enough to understand. We agreed that parents should above all be honest with their children, about the darker facts as well as the pleasant ones.

My other half-lover's name was Erich. He and I had s.e.x, though he did not inspire in me the urgency or the sorrowful, exhilarating edge that, combined with desire, must add up to love. I kept my head with Erich. To be honest, since leaving Cleveland I had never loved a man I'd slept with-I hadn't come close to the feeling, though I'd gotten to know dozens of bodies in their every mood and condition. My own capacity for devotion focused actually on Clare and hypothetically on certain men I saw walking the streets of the city: strong-looking men who didn't aspire to conventional fame or happiness, who cleaved the air with definitive thoughtlessness. I looked as un.o.btrusively as possible at punks in black army boots, sullen Italian boys, and tough long-haired kids from small towns who had come to New York expecting their criminal reputations to hold.

I knew my interests were unrealistic, and probably unhealthy. But they obdurately remained-they were the geography of my desire. A particular boy I saw sometimes at the corner newsstand, with unkempt hair and an irritated expression, could make me tingle by brus.h.i.+ng my elbow with his sleeve. The man I slept with seemed sketchy and remote.

Erich and I made love once or twice a week, usually at his apartment in the East Twenties. We'd met two years earlier, in the restaurant where he tended bar. I was reviewing gay restaurants that week-my column would evaluate the various places gay readers could go with their lovers if they wanted to hold hands across the table. I'd eaten alone that night, and I stopped at the bar for a brandy on my way out. Although the bar wasn't crowded, the bartender took nearly five minutes to ask me what I wanted to drink. He was hunched at the bar's opposite end, his forearms folded on the splashboard like a Flemish housewife leaning out her door, nodding with steady emphatic little bobs of his head at a story being told by an elderly man wearing gold jewelry and an emerald-green scarf. While I waited I watched the bartender's a.s.s, which was small and compact, twitching in counter-rhythm to his nods.

Finally the old man who was telling the story inclined his head in my direction, saying, "I think you've got a customer." The bartender turned with a startled look. His face was thin, the nose and chin too sharply pointed for ordinary handsomeness, though his color was good and his eyes were as milkily, innocently blue as a child's. His was the sort of face that, given a p.r.o.neness to vanity, could be agonized over in a mirror-a face that could switch from beauty to plainness and back again. New York is full of faces like that, the not-quite-handsome faces of young men and women who have been fussed over by their mothers and who believe, with rigorous if slightly apologetic hopefulness, that they can make a future with their looks.

"Oops, oh, sorry," he said. "What can I get you?"

I ordered a brandy. "Business a little slow tonight?" I asked.

He nodded, pouring brandy into an oversized snifter. The elderly man in the emerald scarf pulled a cigarette out of the pack he'd set before himself on the bartop and slipped it into a short gold cigarette holder with elaborate concentration.

"It's been, you know, a little slow in general," the bartender said.

I suspected the restaurant wouldn't last much longer. It had an air of decline, and I knew more or less what I would write in my column the next day. A few phrases had already suggested themselves: "A fifties-ish nowhere zone that serves formal, vaguely embarra.s.sing food"; "like a ghostly ocean liner that steams into port at midnight every hundred years." It was the sort of place a rich old aunt might take you, except that the customers were older men and bright-eyed, hungry-looking boys instead of dowagers in furs and brooches.

"Well, to tell you the truth," I said, "this place is a little frightening."

He set the brandy in front of me on a c.o.c.ktail napkin and glanced at the old man, who was languidly expelling plumes of smoke through his nostrils. "Isn't it just the creepiest?" he said in a low voice. "I've been looking for another job."

"That's probably a good idea," I said.

He glanced again at the smoker, and settled himself at my end of the bar. He folded his arms on the splashboard and nodded his head.

"You'd be surprised how hard it is to get bartending jobs," he said. "I mean in, you know, good places. You haven't been here before, have you?"

"No."

"I didn't think I'd seen you."

A depth of scrutiny pa.s.sed briefly behind his pallid blue eyes. He was trying, without deep conviction or curiosity, to figure me out. I imagined the bar was frequented by young men looking to meet up with money. I was neither handsome enough to be on the block nor prosperous-looking enough to be a buyer.

"I just wanted to try it," I said. "You can't keep going to the same old places over and over again."

He nodded, unconvinced. It was not a casual restaurant; not the sort of place for people without an ulterior motive.

"Do you, um, work around here?" he asked.

"Downtown," I said. "I was just in the neighborhood. I'm a writer."

"Really? What do you write?"

I told him the name of the newspaper, and he nodded with particular zeal. The paper was hot then. "What do you write?" he asked again.

"Oh, different things. Listen, do you get off soon?"

"Well, we close in another hour."

"You want to meet me for a drink in a less creepy place?" I asked.

"Well, okay," he said. "I mean, yes."

"My name is Jonathan."

"I'm Erich. My name is Erich."

He nodded as he announced his name. His eyes lost their uncertainty. Here was my subvert business-I'd come to pick up the bartender.

I went for a walk, and met him an hour later at a place in the Thirties. He'd arrived ahead of me. He stood at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, feigning interest in the Esther Williams movie on the videoscreen. He said h.e.l.lo and nodded slightly, as if agreeing with his own salutation.

I ordered a beer, and we worked our way through a conversation. We talked about the usual things, delivered brief accounts of our origins and ambitions. It was a Wednesday night, the crowd at the bar was spa.r.s.e. Technicolor chorus girls splashed in a brilliant aquamarine world on the videoscreen, filling the room with a colored, s.h.i.+fting dusk. Erich was all edgy inattention, the sort of person who shreds napkins and taps his feet and fails to hear fully half of what's said to him. His hair was already thinning on top-I would be surprised to learn he was three months younger than I.

After what seemed to both of us a decent interval-two beers-we went to his apartment on Twenty-fourth Street, where he introduced his second surprise.

He was great in bed. There is no other way to put it. It seemed nothing less than transfiguration. Conversing, he was fidgety and evasive, given to arrhythmic pauses and odd spasms of laughter. But when he got out of his clothes he took on the fluid self-a.s.surance of a dancer. His physique was modest and sinewy, with veined arms and a prominent rib cage. That first night, when we got to his studio (a single room with a Pullman kitchen and bath), he was naked so quickly he might have been wearing a breakaway suit, the kind comedians use. He was dressed one moment and nude the next, while I was still unfastening the last b.u.t.ton of my s.h.i.+rt.

"Hey," I said, "how did you do that?"

He smiled, and helped me out of my own clothes. His movements were swift and efficient but gentle. He had abruptly traded his skittish, roving manner for calm focus and suave, unhurried competence. He unb.u.t.toned my jeans and slid them tenderly down to my ankles, wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me, with only a hint of strain, up onto the bed.

I was not excited by him. I was excited by the idea of s.e.x, the ease of it-I had gone out and caught someone, an unacclaimed man who was mine to do with as I liked. I admit it-there was a streak of sadism in my l.u.s.ts. There was the taint of vanity. I chose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh-which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful-so much as I did to the fact of their capture. As Erich set me on his bed I was aroused in the general, unfocused way that had become familiar. I would let him command the s.e.x but I would leave his apartment undefeated. Part of me was already gone, even now, as our chests touched for the first time and our legs fumbled for position. I was more important than this. The excitement I felt was edgy and not entirely pleasant, like a swarm of bees inside my chest.

Erich nuzzled my shoulder, ran his fingers lightly along my ribs. He had a dry, powdery touch. There was something sweet about his earnestness and his balding, elusive beauty. There was something dreadful about it.

He lay for a while on top of me, peppering my chest with kisses. Then he deftly revolved our bodies so that I was on top. I got a thorough look at him, for the first time. He was thin but big-boned, his abdomen more densely furred than his chest. His c.o.c.k angled off to the right, raggedly skirted by a vein. His gaunt, hairy stomach and skewed c.o.c.k suddenly repulsed me. Usually with strangers there was a moment of shock like this, when I fully comprehended the privacy of their bodies. Looking at Erich's thin torso, I felt as if I had caught him in some indiscretion. I saw the otherness of him, and it flipped me over from excitement to disgust-my own agitation soured, and I began bluffing my way through, cramming his c.o.c.k blindly into my mouth. I was already thinking of going home and having a drink with Clare. Even as it happened, this was a story I would tell her. She and I would shake our heads together, and discuss the perplexing scarcity of love.

"Relax," Erich whispered. I didn't answer, because my mouth was full. When he repeated it, I pulled my head up and said, "I'm perfectly relaxed, thank you." I would make him come quickly, come myself, and be back in my own skin, free on the street.

He slipped away, directing me to lie belly-down on the mattress. "You're too tense," he said. I skeptically obeyed, and he began ma.s.saging my back, tracing the curves of my shoulders and spine with his fingertips. "You're very tight," he said. "I can feel it all through here."

Against my better judgment, I consigned myself to his hands. I disliked being told I was tense-it seemed he had recognized a flaw in my character. For the occasion of s.e.x I always slipped over into an ident.i.ty that was not quite my own. When making love I was like my own hypothetical older brother, a strong, slightly cynical man who lived adventurously, without the rabbity qualms that beset my other self. At my desk or on the subway I daydreamed of powerful, angry men who needed me to ease their pain. In bed with meek strangers I thought only of quick o.r.g.a.s.m and escape.

Erich worked my back with ardent delicacy, his fingers expertly following the confluence of tendon and bone. When I remarked on his proficiency he said, "I took a course in this." I would learn that he believed in acquiring accreditation. He was a diligent student of the world at large, and liked things broken down into sequences. He had also taken courses in conversational French, creative writing, and quiltmaking.

Under his ministrations, I relaxed almost against my will. Without having decided to, abruptly, I fell asleep. It was utterly unlike me. But I'd been keeping late hours, and working long days. The sensation resembled that of slipping under an anesthetic. One moment I was awake, looking at a framed photograph of two bland-faced strangers propped on the nightstand, and the next I was being roused from slumber by a kiss.

I startled, and nearly jumped off the bed. For a moment I lost track of everything. Where was I, and whose cologned jaw was this? "Shh," he whispered. "It's okay."

"Oh G.o.d, did I fall asleep?" I asked. I was groggy and ashamed. Had I snored? Had I drooled?

"Just for a couple of minutes," he said. He kissed my neck and gently but steadily positioned himself between my legs.

"I can't believe this," I said. "I've never, you know."

"Just stay relaxed," he said. "This is a dream you're having."

For some reason, I obeyed. Although my instinct was to return to myself, to quickly polish off the s.e.x and get on about my business, I decided to relax. There was surprising, voluptuous pleasure in it. I let Erich manage things and our lovemaking pa.s.sed as if in fact I was dreaming. He carried it through the way he pursued all his projects, with a scholar's scrupulous attention. If our coupling lacked the abandon of true pa.s.sion it had a schooled solidity that was the next best thing. Erich could pour a precise ounce of whiskey without measuring. He could make a double-wedding-ring quilt by hand. And he could tell how far to thrust, when to withdraw, when to throw in an unexpected move. I gave myself up to it. He enjoyed being in command, and I relinquished my own desire to impress.

We made love three times that night. After the first time we did not roll away. I didn't make my escape. He held me, and I stroked his spa.r.s.ely haired thigh. I could smell his sweat, which was sharp but not unpleasant. We embraced in silence for ten minutes or longer. Then he said, "Are you ready again?"

By the time I got dressed his apartment had lost some of its strangeness. It was not in any way an auspicious or even particularly comfortable home-a viewless room in a white brick building that must have been built, hurriedly, in the early sixties. It contained a platform bed covered with quilts, a stereo and television, and an absurdly large black sofa which, at sunrise, would begin its daily function of sucking up whatever light filtered in through the single window. On the wall was a silver-framed poster depicting a Matisse painting of a gaudy, lavishly draped room empty of life except for three dagger-shaped goldfish suspended in a bright blue bowl. Erich's apartment could have been a doctor's waiting room. It conveyed little about its inhabitant beyond a certain thin sorrow. Still, by the time I'd dressed, and had written down his phone number and left my own on a slip of paper, the apartment had taken on weight. It did not appear to be any less bleak than it had when we first arrived; it had merely begun to reveal itself as a place in which someone did, in fact, live. A red light blinked on the answering machine, signifying unheard messages. I blew Erich a kiss from the door, whispered, "See you later," and walked three flights down to the street.

This was usually my favorite moment, after the s.e.x was finished and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless; I couldn't quite pick up my sense of myself. Twenty-fourth Street lay quietly in its bath of dark yellow light. A lone hooker strolled in black stockings and a fur jacket, and an all-night produce stand offered displays of oranges, waxy apples, and carnations dyed green for St. Patrick's Day. I was infused with a bodily pleasure that was intricately, brittlely edged in regret. Something had been lost, at least for the moment-some measure of possibility. I walked twenty blocks home, but couldn't shake the feeling. It followed me like a thief.

I didn't get home until after four. Clare was asleep. When I saw her the following evening, I didn't offer to tell her much about Erich. Clare and I based our conversations about men on a shared att.i.tude of ironic disdain, and I wasn't sure how to present a man like Erich. I was not in love, but for once an evening's s.e.x had been something other than clownish comedy, desperation, or boredom.

Clare said, "You're being very quiet about this, Jonathan. What exactly is up?"

"Nothing's up." We were sipping Pernod on the sofa. Pernod was our latest drink. We had a habit of brief but devout loyalties to different exotic liquors.

"You're being circ.u.mspect," she said, "and you're not the type. Does this guy seem like he could turn out to be someone special? What exactly are you hiding?"

"'This guy' is another would-be actor slinging drinks in h.e.l.l. He happens to be a great f.u.c.k."

"Honey, don't toss something like that off lightly," she said. "I met my last great f.u.c.k in, what, 1979? Let's have a few details, please. Come on, give. This is your Aunt Clare."

She took a deep swallow of her drink, and I thought I saw under her friendly avidity the plain fear that I would leave her; that I'd disappear into love. It showed in her eyes and along her mouth, which could go stern and disapproving despite her lavish crimson lipstick.

"Honey, there are places even the best of friends can't travel together," I said.

"Oh, that's not true," she said. "You don't mean that, you're just embarra.s.sed by the subject. Right?"

Clare and I kept no secrets-that was the heady, reckless aspect of our friends.h.i.+p. Perhaps it was our subst.i.tute for the creaturely knowledge other couples glean from s.e.x. Clare and I confessed everything. We stripped ourselves naked and numbered our faults. We knew one another's most disreputable fantasies; we confessed our deceits and greeds, our self-flattering lies. We described all our s.e.xual entanglements, and we knew the condition of one another's bowels.

And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart. I wasn't sure why. It may have been that very uncertainty I hoped to preserve. Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me-his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn't know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I'd sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.

But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets. I, too, feared solitude and abandonment, and I knew I would never make a life with Erich. He would, at best, have been a first step toward something uncertain that lay beyond the circle of domestic warmth I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.

So I told her everything. There wasn't, as it turned out, very much to tell. When I had finished, Clare said, "Honey, you've just found yourself a Doctor Feelgood." She sang a couple of lines from Aretha's song. "'Don't call me no doctor, filling me up with all of them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood, makes me feel real gooo-oood.'"

That seemed a sufficient accounting, at least for the time being. Erich would be Doctor Feelgood. From that night on, the longer I called him by that name, the more perfectly it came to fit. Clare and I continued our sisterly relations with our loyalties undiluted. I had found myself a nice little thing on the side. Clare counseled me to ride it until it thinned out, as such flings inevitably did. That seemed like sound advice.

And so Erich and I started dating. Since he worked nights, we usually met after eleven. We'd have a drink or two in a bar, and go to his place.

I did not learn many particulars of his life. He had a singular ambition, an ill-defined but persistent one: to be recognized. The means by which he'd achieve recognition were uncertain-he was simply looking for a break, trying to position himself for discovery. He'd audition for anything. He tried out for Broadway musicals though he couldn't sing. He'd work fourteen-hour days as an extra in any movie being shot in New York, and at Christmastime willingly played a life-sized mechanical soldier at F. A.O. Schwarz. He took endless acting cla.s.ses, spoke convincingly of his ambition to become a better actor, but as I knew him longer, I began to realize that acting wasn't really the point. Acclaim was the point, and his gig at the toy store provided roughly the same mix of satisfaction and anguish he'd have derived from playing the lead in a Broadway show. He enjoyed methodical pursuit and he wors.h.i.+pped attention; he did not dream of accomplishment per se. In his ordinary life he was all but invisible-he wore jeans and polo s.h.i.+rts, stammered his way through the simplest conversations, lived alone in a barren apartment. But at Schwarz during the Christmas season he never fell out of character, never ceased his stiff-limbed robotic movements during the whole of an eight-hour s.h.i.+ft. In gym shorts on a 30 day he jogged forty-five times down the same block of Bleecker Street for the sake of being a shadowy, background figure in a movie that would never be released. At night, with the lights off, he was great in bed.

Although I saw him once or twice a week, I didn't get to know him. I suspect he worried that if I-if anyone-came to know him too well, the motion of his life would somehow wind down-his obscure destiny would be confirmed. I myself worried that he lived on the brink of total surrender to another person's will. I thought that when he finally, fully despaired of achieving fame he would make himself into a fan, find a lover and cheerfully relinquish every vestige of his will. Maybe I'd sensed it the first moment I saw him, nodding eagerly at an old man's barroom conversation. He was practicing his powers of attention. I didn't want them focused too ardently on me.

When we were together, we emphasized the local details: anecdotes from our working lives, the movies we'd loved or hated. Finally, on what may have been our tenth or fifteenth date, as we lay quietly sweating onto one another's flesh, he said, "So, um, who are you, anyway?"

"What?"

His ears reddened. I suspected it was a line he'd picked up from a movie.

"What I mean is, I don't really know anything about you," he said.

"I don't know much of anything about you either," I said. "I basically know you're an actor working as a bartender, you want to change jobs but aren't doing anything much about it, and you loved The Killing Fields The Killing Fields ." ."

"Well, I grew up in Detroit," he said.

"I'm from the Midwest, too."

"I know. From Cleveland."

After a pause, he said, "Well, this is very interesting. We're both from the Midwest. That really, you know, explains a lot, doesn't it?"

"No, it doesn't explain much of anything," I said. I believed this conversation was the beginning of the end for us, and I didn't entirely mind. Goodbye, Doctor Feelgood. Set me back on the street in my own skin, with my old sense of a limitless future.

After a moment he said, "I used to be a musician. When I was a kid. I was crazy for it. I dreamed about it. I had dreams that were just music, just...music."

"Really?" I said. "What did you play?"

"Piano. Cello. Some violin."

"Do you still play?"

"No," he said. "Never. I wasn't, you know, good enough. I was pretty good. But not really good enough."

"I see."

We lay together for a while in uneasy silence, waiting to see what would happen next. We were neither friends nor lovers. We had no natural access to one another outside the realm of s.e.x. I believed I could feel the weight of Erich's unhappiness the way a diver feels the weight of the ocean, but I couldn't help him. This was the price we paid for sleeping together first and getting acquainted later-we shared an intimacy devoid of knowledge or affection. I couldn't listen to Erich's confessions; I didn't know him well enough for that. I remembered Clare's admonition-ride it until it thins out.

"Listen," I said.

He put a finger to my lips. "Shh," he whispered. "Don't talk. This isn't really, you know, a very good time to talk." He started to stroke my hair and nibble his way along my shoulder.

Our relations retained their halting, formal quality. Each time we saw one another, we might have been meeting for the first time. Months later, when I asked Erich about his old love of music, all he would say is "That's over. That's just, you know, ancient history. Have you seen any movies?" Our conversation stalled sometimes, and the ensuing silences refused to take on an aspect of ease. He never came to my apartment, never met Clare or any of my other friends. I left my life to visit him in his. In Erich's company I developed a new persona. I was tough and slightly insensitive; a bit of an object. Our communion took place only at the bodily level, and that came to seem right for us. Anything else would have been sentimental, forced, indiscreet. Our relations were cordial and respectful. We did not infringe. I believe that in some way we despised one another. Because I brought nothing but my nerves and muscles to the affair, I found I could be surprisingly noisy in bed. I could walk unapologetically across the floorboards, my boots ringing like the strokes of an ax. And I could be a little cruel. I could bite Erich's skin hard enough to leave red clamsh.e.l.l marks behind. I could fantasize about him-an unknown man-manacled, humiliated, stripped naked and tied to a Kafkaesque machine that f.u.c.ked him relentlessly.

In my other life, I went out nightly with Clare for falafel or barbecued chicken or Vietnamese food. We argued over how much television a child should be permitted to watch. We agreed that the sterner reality of public school was an education in itself, and would balance the shoddy educations of the teachers. Sometimes handsome young fathers would stroll by the window of whatever restaurant we sat in, pus.h.i.+ng strollers or cradling their sleeping children on their shoulders. I always watched them pa.s.s.

That was my life in the dead center of the Reagan years.

Then Bobby came to live in New York.