A Home At The End Of The World Part 25

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 pa.s.sers-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 gla.s.s.

"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 d.a.m.n 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, pa.s.sing the clock back and forth like a football. She stroked her pregnant belly. She breathed steam onto the gla.s.s.

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 gra.s.s. 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 to 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 Cafe. 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 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. . 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."

"Aw, darling, what's not to feel good about?" I say. "We're some some thing now, I mean we won't just blow away if one of us takes a notion." thing now, I mean we won't just blow away if one of us takes a notion."

"It would be nice if that were true," she says.

"You know what I'd like to do someday? I'd like to fix up the shed as a separate little house, so Alice could move up here when she gets tired of the catering business."

"Oh, sure. Let's build a cottage for my old fourth-grade teacher, too."

"Clare?" I say.

"Mm-hm?"

"You really are happy here, aren't you? I mean, this is our life. Right?"

"Oh, sure it is. It's our life. You know me, I think in terms of complaint. It's how my mind works."

"Right," I say.

We stand watching the mountains, then turn to watch the house. This house is so old the spirits themselves have melted into the walls. It feels inhabited not by anyone's private unhappiness but by the collected days of ten generations, their meals and fights, their births and last gasps. Now, right now, it's a disreputable marriage of old and new disappointments. The floorboards are crumbling, and the remodeled kitchen seethes with orange linoleum and Spanish-style wood-like cabinets. We're going to fix it up, slowly, with the money we make from our restaurant. We are forces of order, come from the city with talents and tools and our belief in a generous future. Jonathan and Clare look at the house and see what it can become. They talk antique fixtures, eight-over-eights, a limestone mantel rescued from a house in Hudson and trucked up here. Although I wouldn't fight progress I like the house as it is, with bug-riddled floors and wood-grain chemical paneling that looks like sorrow and laziness made into a domestic fixture. Sitting on its four overgrown acres, the house answers the elderly mountains. It, too, is docile and worn smooth. It has been humbled by time.

"I've been thinking," Clare says. "What if we painted the windowpanes blue? Like a cobalt blue, you know? Do you think that'd look too cutesy?"

"Ask Jonathan," I answer. "He's the one who knows about things like that."

She nods. "Bobby?" she says.

"Uh-huh?"

"Oh, I don't know. I walk around the place and I feel like I'm standing on an airplane wing. At thirty thousand feet. I guess I want you and Jonathan to think this is as strange as I do."

From the house, the baby starts crying. "That's what really does it," Clare says. "I've always just made my own mistakes, I never had to worry about somebody else like this before."

"It's okay," I tell her. "Everything's fine and perfect. Trust me. Okay?"

She nods uncertainly. She keeps losing the battle to decide instead of worry. Worry is part of what makes her short-tempered; she is trying to develop a personality to match her worst expectations.

"Let's go see how Jonathan's doing with her," she says.

"Okay. Sure."

We go into the house together. The door opens straight into the living room, a big shabby rectangle still papered in scowling red eagles and blue drums. At this time of day it's filled with squares of light that slant in from three sides. Jonathan is walking a circle with Rebecca propped on his shoulder. She wails, a series of short piercing cries like mortified hiccups.

"Mystery tantrum," he says. "Her diaper's fine, and she just ate half an hour ago."

"Let me try with her," Clare says.

Jonathan fails to hide his reluctance. He dislikes giving the baby up, even to her own dreams. But when Clare holds out her arms he pa.s.ses her over.

Clare folds her in, whispers to her. "Hey, sweetheart," she says. "What's the matter? Just a little fit of existential despair?"

Rebecca is a twenty-pound being with feathery hair and dark, furious eyes. Already, at eleven months, she has a nature. She is p.r.o.ne to contemplation. She resists both laughter and sorrow until they overwhelm her, and then she gives herself up completely.

Clare walks the living room with her, whispering. She speaks to the baby the same way she speaks to Jonathan or me, in full sentences, but she speaks to the baby without an undercurrent of rage.

"Now, Miss Rebecca," she says, "you're not being reasonable. But, hey, why should you be? Lord, if I ever start nagging you to be reasonable, will you shoot me, please?"

Jonathan watches in an ecstasy of edgy affection. Parenthood has brought several surprises-the biggest is his tortured devotion. Clare and I are calmer in the face of Rebecca's fragility and her unending needs. Jonathan hasn't rested since she entered the world. He is a living ill.u.s.tration of love's power to unsettle our nerves.

Now he has something vital to lose. Now there is a small victim for every tragic story he can tell himself.

Rebecca won't be quiet, and we take her outside. She is lost in crying the way a motorboat gets lost in sound and spray. We walk the property with her, and let her cries dissipate in the noon air. Jonathan picks a daisy. He twirls it in front of her pinched red face.

"Hey, kid," he says. "Hey. Take a look at this amazing, unprecedented thing here." Of all her qualities, Jonathan is most in love with her capacity for amazement. He almost weeps when she stares goggle-eyed at a yarn ball or a teaspoon cupping the sun. But she keeps crying, right into the daisy.

"Can't be bought with flowers," Clare says. There is true pride in her voice. If Jonathan loves her for being the world's best audience, Clare loves her stubborn insistence on her own mysteries.

We walk into the stand of trees behind the house. Here, in the endless shade, there is no gra.s.s to speak of. There is only forest trash-pine cones and shed branches, the droppings of deer. We walk among the silent trees with Rebecca's noise trailing behind us like a glittery scarf.

Clare asks, "Did you boys call the plumber today?"

"Yep," Jonathan says. "He can't fit us in until two weeks from Tuesday. Why don't you let me try with her again?"

"s.h.i.+t. This house isn't going to be done until the next century. You know that, don't you?"

"No big rush," Jonathan says. "Come here, Rebecca."

He reaches for her, but Clare maintains her hold. "No big rush," she says. "So we'll just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?"

"We're pioneers," Jonathan says. "Can't expect all the suburban comforts right off the bat."

"I think," she says, "that both of you are some kind of r.e.t.a.r.ds. I honestly do."

She holds the baby close and hurries ahead of us, deeper into the woods. Bars of light, fractured by pine boughs, hang stodgily. Jonathan takes off after her, as if he believes she might be planning to take Rebecca and raise her alone in the wild.

Our restaurant will open in less than a week. Jonathan and I work all day, finis.h.i.+ng it up. It's nothing grand, just a nine-table restaurant in a former saloon. We've reformed the saloon like a pair of mail-order brides newly arrived on the frontier. We've painted it white, and hung striped curtains. Jonathan has covered the walls with old photos: school pictures of kids in bow ties and pinafores, men and women in plaid Bermuda shorts posing sunburned beside a lake, somebody's grandmother shoveling snow. He's hung a record-breaking salmon caught in 1957 and a shelf full of trophies. On the trophies bright gold men and women, s.e.xlessly naked as angels, act out human excellence in bowling, golf, badminton, and citizens.h.i.+p. This will be a simple place, just breakfast and lunch. We've bought unmatched tables and chairs from the same secondhand stores where we found the trophies and photographs and the lacquered salmon.

"Come on down, everybody," Jonathan says. "The h.o.m.o Cafe is just about open for business." He daubs white paint over a scar on the molding. He is wearing overalls, with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

I'm in the kitchen, loading five-pound jars of preserves and ketchup onto the shelves. "They didn't send strawberry jam," I say. "They sent, like, half boysenberry and half peach."

"I'll call up and yell at them. They probably think they can send us whatever they're trying to get rid of, just because we don't know what we're doing."

When the jars are all stacked on the shelves I stand at the counter, watching Jonathan paint. "Clare thinks we should think what we're doing is strange," I say.

"It is is ," he says. "Who thinks it isn't strange?" ," he says. "Who thinks it isn't strange?"

"Well, I guess she thinks we should be more upset about it."

"She's just anxious because she's paying the bills. She's waited all her life to get this money, and now, wham, it's being spent."

"It's being, you know, invest ed," I say. ed," I say.

"Right. She has been sort of a pain in the a.s.s lately, hasn't she?"

"Oh, I don't know if I'd say that."

"I'll say it. Clare has been a b.i.t.c.h for a long time now. Really, since she got pregnant."

"Well, you know," I say. I punch a new ca.s.sette into the sound system. Jimi Hendrix sings "Are You Experienced?"

"I guess she'll be okay," Jonathan says. "Motherhood is hard on all of us. I know it's hard on me."

I get a paintbrush and help with the touch-ups. Jimi puts out his velvet growl, a living voice from the world of the dead, as Jonathan and I cover the last nicks. We sway to the music. There is some kind of small perfection in this, painting a wall together while Jimi sings. There is a knitting of times, the past tumbling into the future. It comes to me suddenly, in the form of a surprise: I've got what I wanted. A brother to work beside. A revised future s.h.i.+ning like a light bulb over our heads.

Here is what's unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old n.o.body else could join even if we wanted them to. We adore Clare but she's not quite on the team. Not really. What binds us is stronger than s.e.x. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into different flesh. We may love Clare but she is not us. Only we can be ourselves and one another at the same time. I daub paint over an old scar. The tinted faces of grade-school kids, all in their forties or fifties now, look out from the walls with toothy, clear-eyed optimism.

Later we lock up the restaurant and go to our car by way of the main street. I prefer walking through the middle of things-I'm the one who likes town. I've been on my way to Woodstock since I was nine and now, more than twenty years later, I've arrived. My brother was right-there are still people here. The concert, I've learned, happened sixty miles away, in a broad gra.s.sy field that is no more or less than that. An empty s.p.a.ce ringed by green-black trees. Jonathan and I tried swimming in the chocolate-colored pond while Clare sat with Rebecca in the weeds, but mosquitoes drove us all back to our car. We ended up having lunch at what Clare believed was the same place she went with her husband-to-be when they fled the actual concert. She said the hamburgers would come with three pickles and a sealed ketchup envelope, and they did.

Woodstock is what towns were supposed to become before the old future got sidetracked and a new one took its place. Bearded romantics still strum guitars in the town square, still dreaming of themselves as forest creatures and apprentice magicians. Old ladies with their gray hair frizzy and loose nod in time on the benches. Clare calls it pathetic and Jonathan doesn't pay close attention one way or the other, but I appreciate the kindness of its quiet streets and the people's cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.

Jonathan and I drive home in our used Toyota, up and down the rises, with branch shadows flicking across the winds.h.i.+eld. He sits low in the pa.s.senger seat, his sneakers propped on the dashboard. "I'll tell you what's really strange about all this," he says. "What's really, truly strange is the fact that we're doing it at all. People say they're going to move to the country and open a little cafe, but who actually does it?"

"We did," I say. "We are."

When we top the last hill, I hit the brakes. "What is it?" Jonathan asks.