A Home At The End Of The World Part 16

"You did," I whispered.

He pressed his chest against mine. I could feel the heat of his tears. He didn't say anything else. He fell asleep in my bed and I let him stay there, though I couldn't get to sleep myself. I lay beside him for quite a while, inhaling his large sweaty essence and asking myself what exactly I had gone and done now.

JONATHAN.

T HE NIGHT HE NIGHT of the day Arthur the theater critic went to the hospital, I traded histories with Erich. We had never talked about our pasts, beyond the broadest details of place and family temperament. When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness. We'd spoken to one another from a continual present, in which profundity, despair, and old romantic aspirations did not exist; in which the ordinary vicissitudes of working life took on Wagnerian dimensions, and the periods between a boss's insane demands or a cab driver's hostility were pockets of utter unremarkable calm. of the day Arthur the theater critic went to the hospital, I traded histories with Erich. We had never talked about our pasts, beyond the broadest details of place and family temperament. When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness. We'd spoken to one another from a continual present, in which profundity, despair, and old romantic aspirations did not exist; in which the ordinary vicissitudes of working life took on Wagnerian dimensions, and the periods between a boss's insane demands or a cab driver's hostility were pockets of utter unremarkable calm.

Now we sat in Erich's apartment with a bottle of Merlot, tallying up. He'd put John Coltrane on the stereo.

"I know this is difficult," I said. I was to be the apologist, because I was the one who'd insisted on broaching the subject in the first place.

"A little," Erich said. "It is a little, yes. I'm not very...forthcoming about these things. I saw my therapist for over a year before I got around to telling her I was gay."

"You don't have to tell me anything you haven't told your therapist," I said. "I just want us to have, well, an idea about the scope of one another's pasts. To put it delicately."

Erich flushed, and emitted one of the sharp, painful-sounding laughs that social discomfort could produce in him. He was still unformed in some way. The monstrous imitation-leather sofa on which we sat had been a gift from his parents in celebration of his admission into law school in Michigan. His parents had evidently a.s.sumed him to be embarking on a twelve-room, wainscoted life, but after less than a year he'd left law school for the hope of an acting career in New York. Now his parents didn't speak to him and the sofa sat wall-to-wall in his apartment, like a cabin cruiser berthed in a swimming pool.

"Just an idea," I added. "No humiliating confessions required."

"I know," he said. "I don't honestly know why I'm so hesitant about things like this. I don't know why. I've always been more the type to, you know, listen to people. I guess it's a habit you get into from tending bar."

"I'll start," I said. And for almost an hour we called in all our old stray business, the affairs both good and bad, which we'd thought had receded too far into the past to impinge in any way on what we were now making of ourselves.

We both fell, it seemed, somewhere toward the middle of the risk spectrum. We had not, either of us, ever been rapacious. We had not worked the back rooms. We'd never made love to ten different strangers in a single bathhouse night, or paid by the hour for tough slim-hipped boys in the West Forties. But between us, we'd gone home with a full platoon of strangers. We'd both met men in bars or at parties; we'd slept with the friends of friends visiting from San Francisco or Vancouver or Laguna Beach. We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final, and so dull-love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. And in the meantime, we'd had s.e.x. We'd thought we lived at the beginning of an orgiastic new age, in which men and women could answer without hesitation to harmless inclinations of the flesh. It had been with a sense of my own unlimited choices that I'd made love to a simpleminded flute-playing boy I met in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park, to an old Frenchman in a purple cashmere jacket I'd met riding the uptown IRT, and to a pair of kindly doctors who sweetened their union by taking on an occasional third party. In my late teens and early twenties I'd seen myself as a Puckish figure, smart and quick-limbed, incorrigible. I'd imagined the prim houses and barren days of Ohio falling farther away with each new adventure.

Erich and I didn't go case by case. We were not so clinical as that. We offered the highlights, but dwelt more explicitly-more happily-on the pleasures we'd denied ourselves. Cupping the bell of his winegla.s.s in his long fingers, Erich frowned and said, "I never cared all that much for totally anonymous s.e.x. That was never for me. I've met sort of a lot of men working in bars, and I, you know, went home with some of them, but I never really did the whole scene. I tried going to the baths, but it just scared me. I just took a sauna and went home." After a pause he added, "To m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e," and smiled in agony, his forehead turning nearly purple.

Although we sat together on that gargantuan sofa, we did not touch. We occupied different pools of lamplight. This reticence was standard for us, neither more nor less p.r.o.nounced as we talked about the loves we prayed would not prove fatal. In the conduct of our ordinary affairs, we always maintained a cordial remove. Anyone seeing us in the street together might have a.s.sumed we were former college roommates losing our grip on our old intimacy but unwilling to formally declare it dead. Only at home, naked, did we jump out of our separate skins. On the stereo, Coltrane played "A Love Supreme."

"The funny thing is," I said, "I used to feel guilty for not being more more adventuresome. I'd hear other men talking about how they'd turned four tricks in a night and think, 'I'm the most repressed gay man who ever lived.' I mean, most of the guys I went with, I knew I'd probably never see again. But I always had to feel like maybe I'd adventuresome. I'd hear other men talking about how they'd turned four tricks in a night and think, 'I'm the most repressed gay man who ever lived.' I mean, most of the guys I went with, I knew I'd probably never see again. But I always had to feel like maybe I'd want want to see them again, like in some way it was remotely possible that we might fall in love. Even though we never did." Erich looked into his wine and said something inaudible. to see them again, like in some way it was remotely possible that we might fall in love. Even though we never did." Erich looked into his wine and said something inaudible.

"Hmm?"

He said, "Well, do you think we're, you know, falling in love?"

I had never seen anyone so embarra.s.sed. His whole head glowed crimson, and the wine in his gla.s.s quivered.

I believed I knew what he wanted. He wanted to collapse into love. Life was too frightening. Renown was withheld despite his constant efforts, and the future we'd all counted on could be revoked with a nagging cough, a violet bloom on a s.h.i.+n.

"No," I said. "I care about you. But no."

He nodded. He didn't speak.

"Are you in love with me?" I asked, though I knew the answer. He wanted desperately to be in love with someone. I fulfilled the fundamental age, height, and weight requirements. But his desire didn't attach directly to me. It was not quite personal.

He shook his head. We sat for a while in silence, and then I reached over and took his hand. I had to be tender with him because I hated him; because I had it in me to scream at him for being ordinary, for failing to change my life. I was frightened, too; I, too, wanted to fall in love. I stroked Erich's hand. The turntable, set to repeat, started the Coltrane alb.u.m again. Erich tried out a laugh, but swallowed it along with a deep draught of wine.

I could have murdered him, though his only crimes were lack of focus and dearth of wit. I could have skewered his heart with a kitchen fork because he was a peripheral character promoted by circ.u.mstances to a role he was ill equipped to play. I can't deny this: I thought I deserved better.

Without speaking, we stood up and went to bed. It was our single incidence of psychic accord-ordinarily we explained our simplest acts in lavish detail. But that night we took our winegla.s.ses and went without speaking to his bed, undressed, and lay down in one another's arms.

"These are scary times," I said.

"Yes. Yes, they are."

We lay for a while without discussing the last remaining event in our sensual histories-the fact that we had not exercised bodily precautions together. Now it was too late to protect ourselves from one another. There was no rational accounting, beyond the fact that even four years ago, when we'd met, the disease had still seemed the province of another kind of man. Of course we'd known about it. Of course we'd been scared. But no one we knew personally had gotten sick. We'd believed-with a certain effort of will-that it befell men whose blood was thinned by too many drugs, who had s.e.x with a dozen people every night. Erich had had a good record collection, and framed photographs of skinny brothers and sisters posing by a lake, in a wallpapered living room, and beside a glossy red Camaro. He talked about going to auditions, and about finding a better job. He had seemed too busy to be available to early death. I couldn't say how he'd worked out the equation in his own head, because this did not seem to be a conversation we were capable of holding. We let a lengthy, silent embrace stand in for it. Then, with a new gravity, we made love as the Coltrane record played itself over and over and over again.

Several days later, Bobby told me about himself and Clare. I had been to see Arthur in the hospital. His pneumonia was clearing-he'd expressed optimism about the future, and a conviction that the cessation of alcohol and the adoption of a macrobiotic diet would improve his health a hundred percent. Although there was still important work to do at the office, I hadn't the heart for it. I went home instead, to spend the evening with Bobby and Clare.

When I arrived they were in the kitchen together, making dinner. Our kitchen accommodated two people about as generously as a phone booth would, but they had managed somehow to wedge themselves in. From the living room I heard Clare's laughter. Bobby said, "You've got to, like, move your b.u.t.t another inch or I can't get this out of the oven."

I called, "h.e.l.lo, dears."

"Jonathan," Clare said in a high, humorous voice. "Oh my Lord, he's home."

They must have tried to leave the kitchen at the same time, and gotten stuck. I heard more laughter, and a grunt from Bobby. Clare came into the living room first. She wore a yellow bowling s.h.i.+rt with a strand of red gla.s.s beads. Bobby followed, in his T-s.h.i.+rt and black jeans.

"Hi, honey," Clare said. "What a surprise. Did the paper burn down?"

"No, I just missed you both. I'm taking the night off. Want to go bowling or something?"

Clare kissed my cheek, and Bobby did, too. "We were making, like, chicken and biscuits," he said.

"Like none of our mothers actually made," Clare added. "I don't know about you, but where I come from, home cooking was a Hungry Man Salisbury-steak TV dinner. Chicken with cream gravy seems so exotic and foreign."

"Jon's mother was a great cook," Bobby told her. "She never bought anything, you know, frozen. Or canned."

"Right," Clare said. "And she dove for her own pearls and trapped her own minks. Jonathan, dear, would you like a c.o.c.ktail?"

"Love one," I said. "What if we made a pitcher of martinis?"

We had taken to drinking martinis. We'd bought three stemmed gla.s.ses, and kept jars of green olives in the refrigerator.

"Great," Bobby said. "We can, um, drink a toast."

"You know me. I'll drink to anything. Isn't this Guy Fawkes Day, or something?"

"Well," Bobby said. He grinned with cordial embarra.s.sment.

"Is there something more specific to toast?" I said.

"I'm going to make those martinis," Clare said. "You two wait right here."

She went back to the kitchen. "What's up, sport?" I asked Bobby when we were alone.

He kept on grinning, and looked at the floor as if he saw secrets printed on the carpet. Bobby had no capacity for subterfuge. He could fail to answer a question but could not answer it falsely. Whether it was morality or simple lack of imagination, I couldn't say. Sometimes the two are so closely related as to be indistinguishable.

"Jonny," he said. "Clare and I-"

"Clare and you what?"

"We've started, that is we've fallen. You know."

"No. I don't know."

"Yeah. You do."

"You mean you're sleeping together?" I said.

He lifted his gaze from the floor, but couldn't meet my eyes. He was smiling and wincing at once, with a sense of barely contained hilarity, as if he was waiting for me to realize I'd forgotten to put my pants on.

"Well," he said after a moment. "Aw, Jonny. We're, like, in love. Isn't it amazing?"

"It is. It's truly amazing."

I hadn't expected my own voice to sound so cold and peevish. I had meant to respond in a firm but kindly voice-to cut through the romantic nonsense. At the tone in my voice, Bobby looked uncertainly at me, his smile frozen.

"Jon," he said. "Now we're, like, really a family."

"What?"

"The three of us. Man, don't you see how great it is? I mean, it's like, now all three of us are in love."

Clare came out with martinis on the tray that had become part of our c.o.c.ktail ritual. The tray was a battered old souvenir of Southern California, featuring oranges the color of manila envelopes and black-lipped, skirted beauties lolling with aloof, disappointed expressions on a pale turquoise beach.

"I told him," Bobby said proudly.

"Just like you said you would." She looked at me with an expression of mingled irony and apology. "Here, Jonathan. Have a drink."

"Is it true?" I asked her.

"About Bobby and me? Yes. I guess we're making our formal announcement."

Bobby took a gla.s.s from the tray and raised it. "Here's to the family," he said.

"Oh, really, Bobby," Clare said. "For Christ's sake. You and I are sleeping together." She turned to me and said, "He and I are sleeping together."

I took a swallow of my martini. I knew how I was supposed to feel: gleeful at love's old habit of turning up unexpectedly to throw its transforming light onto the daily business. Instead, I felt dry and empty, like sand falling into a hole of sand. I worked to simulate the required gaiety. I thought I could catch up with it if I performed it convincingly enough.

"It's incredible," I said. "How long has this been going on? That's a song t.i.tle, right? One of the troubles with love is, you can't talk about it without feeling like you keep cueing old songs."

"Just a few days," Clare said. "We wanted to tell you about it, but it hasn't seemed to come up in the course of regular conversation."

I nodded, and looked hard at her. Neither of us believed what she'd just said. We both knew that she and Bobby, whether consciously or otherwise, had hidden their love from me because they thought there was reason to hide it.

"What if we had a kid now?" Bobby said. "The three of us."

"Bobby," Clare said, "kindly shut up. Please just shut up."

"You two wanted to have a baby, right? You were talking about it. How about if we three had a baby? Or two?"

"Sure," I said. "Let's have six kids. An even half dozen."

"Let's see if we can still stand the sight of each other by Christmas," Clare said.

"Well, here's to the happy couple," I said, lifting my gla.s.s.

We drank to the happy couple. I said, "I never expected this. It makes sense now that it's happened. But really, Bobby, when you arrived, it never occurred to me that you and Clare-"

"Never occurred to me either," Clare said.

"Better tell me how it happened," I said. "Every single detail, no matter how intimate."

We had our drinks, and then had another round, as Clare told the story, with Bobby injecting occasional brief clarifications. Unlike Bobby, Clare could exaggerate so artfully she herself sometimes lost track of the line between hyperbole and the undramatic truth. She was not self-serving. If anything, she chose to portray herself in an unflattering light, usually figuring in her own stories as a guileless, slightly ridiculous character, doomed to comeuppance like Lucy Ricardo and p.r.o.ne to hapless, inexplicable devotions like the fool in La Strada La Strada . She would always sacrifice veracity for color-her lies were lies of proportion, not content. She reported on her life in a clownish, surreal world that was convincing to her and yet existed at a deep remove from her inner realm, which was riddled with old batterings and a panicky sense of limited possibilities. . She would always sacrifice veracity for color-her lies were lies of proportion, not content. She reported on her life in a clownish, surreal world that was convincing to her and yet existed at a deep remove from her inner realm, which was riddled with old batterings and a panicky sense of limited possibilities.

Clare said, "Basically, Mom decided to teach Junior a lesson about life. And, well, I guess Mom got a little carried away. I don't know what the girls in my bowling league are going to say about this."

"They won't like it," I said. "They'll probably make you turn in your shoes."

"Oh, Uncle Jonny. I've been so good for so long. I guess I just couldn't manage it anymore."

"Well, your uncle is speechless. This is such a surprise."

"Sure is," she said.

In a spasm of edgy joy, Bobby reached over to squeeze her bare elbow. His fingertips made pale impressions on the smooth flesh of her arm. I had a vision of them old together: Clare an eccentric, hopped-up old woman in an outlandish hat and too much makeup, telling the well-rehea.r.s.ed story of her romantic downfall, while Bobby, potbellied and balding, sat blus.h.i.+ngly alongside, murmuring, "Aw, Clare." We become the stories we tell about ourselves.

"I guess this is the end of the Hendersons as we know them," she said.

"Yes, I guess it is."

We stood for a moment in an abrupt state of social discomfort, as if we were houseguests left alone together by a mutual friend. Bobby said, "Dinner's just about ready. Do you want to, like, eat something?"

I said I was hungry, because eating would be a next thing to do. My head seemed to be floating somewhere above my body. Numbed by gin, I felt my own emotions like radio transmissions being broadcast by my own disembodied head. I was angry and envious. I wanted Bobby. In another sense, I wanted Clare.

We ate, and talked of other things. After dinner we went to see Thieves Like Us Thieves Like Us at the Thalia. Clare and I had both seen it several times over the years, but she insisted that Bobby had to see it, too. "If we're some sort of item all of a sudden," she said, "I want him to at least have seen a few of the fundamental movies." During the film she whispered to him, and emphasized her points by squeezing his knee. She had painted her fingernails a blazing pink that showed clearly even in the theater's darkness. at the Thalia. Clare and I had both seen it several times over the years, but she insisted that Bobby had to see it, too. "If we're some sort of item all of a sudden," she said, "I want him to at least have seen a few of the fundamental movies." During the film she whispered to him, and emphasized her points by squeezing his knee. She had painted her fingernails a blazing pink that showed clearly even in the theater's darkness.

I begged off on drinks after the movie, though it had become our habit to finish our evenings together at a bar, no matter how late the hour. Clare put her palm to my forehead and asked, "Honey, are you sick?" I told her no, just exhausted, and claimed to have to be in the office by dawn to make up for what I hadn't done tonight. Bobby and Clare said they'd come home with me, but I told them to go have a drink by themselves. I kissed them both. As I walked home the air was so clear and frozen that the Big Dipper penetrated the lights of Manhattan, angling faintly off the roof of Cooper Union. Frigid air sparkled around the window lights. Even on a night like that, blank-eyed boys walked the streets with black, boxy radios, their music chipping away at the cold.

At home, I rolled up Bobby's sleeping bag and put it in the closet. I knew that, as of tonight, he would be sleeping in Clare's room. I made myself another martini for a nightcap. A light snow began to fall, meandering flakes that seemed little more than the air itself coalesced into hard gray pellets. I drank the martini in my room, and imagined Bobby and Clare embarking on a future together. They were an unlikely couple. They would probably reach the limits of their novelty together, and their affair would wind down into an anecdote. But possibly, just possibly, it would not. If they stayed together, by some combination of attraction, cussedness, and plain good luck, they would have a home of some sort. They would probably have children. They would have unexceptional jobs and find themselves pus.h.i.+ng a cart through the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket. They would have all that.

ALICE.

N ED AND ED AND I packed up the home we'd made for ourselves and established a new one in the Arizona desert, under doctor's orders. We bought a condominium less than half the size of our old house, in a complex that had not lived up to its developer's expectations. Nearly half the units stood empty three years after their construction, and strings of multicolored pennants, some of them torn, still festooned the entrance gates. The buildings were done up as pueblos, their concrete walls stained a reddish mud color and the ends of poles protruding above the aluminum-framed windows. We were able to get a good price on a one-bedroom, our means being limited. Neither our house nor the theater had sold for much. I packed up the home we'd made for ourselves and established a new one in the Arizona desert, under doctor's orders. We bought a condominium less than half the size of our old house, in a complex that had not lived up to its developer's expectations. Nearly half the units stood empty three years after their construction, and strings of multicolored pennants, some of them torn, still festooned the entrance gates. The buildings were done up as pueblos, their concrete walls stained a reddish mud color and the ends of poles protruding above the aluminum-framed windows. We were able to get a good price on a one-bedroom, our means being limited. Neither our house nor the theater had sold for much.