A Home At The End Of The World Part 27

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

"A little. I didn't eat the lunch they served on the plane. At a certain point in my flying career I realized I could just refuse the tray when they brought it. I still feel reckless doing it, though. Like I'm throwing away money."

"Why don't we go out for a late lunch?" I said. "I've found a marvelous place about ten miles from here, where they make their tortillas from scratch. I'd love to hire their cook away from them, have somebody who really knows traditional Mexican cooking, but I don't think I could pay her enough."

"Sounds great," he said. "Let's go."

For a moment he was so like his father that I stopped and stared at him, the blood ringing in my head. All mothers must experience such moments, when their grown children-who have seemed to depart irrevocably into their own personalities-suddenly reveal a strain of their father's nature so pure and undiluted they might be the man himself, reborn, right down to the three-note cough that has punctuated the past forty-plus years. What I saw in Jonathan just then was Ned's easy, boneless willingness; his urge to be pleasantly enthusiastic and to keep things rolling along. If I'd been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I'd have taken him by the shoulders and said, "Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you'll never make a life that uses you."

Instead, I took the car keys from him and said, "I'd better drive this time. Even I'm not sure exactly how to get to this place, and I've been a dozen times."

We spent the next two days talking and eating and going to movies. I gave him the tour of my rented kitchen and makes.h.i.+ft office, introduced him to my staff of three. I inquired after his life as well, although I wasn't always sure how to phrase my questions. "How's the baby?" was the most obvious opening.

"She's fine," he said over a margarita. "She's amazing. Sometimes it seems like she's changing a little every day. I'm beginning to understand why people have a half dozen kids-it's hard to realize that now she can crawl, and she'll never be quite so helpless again. It's a relief, too. But I can see how you'd want to have another one just for the sake of seeing somebody else through that incredibly helpless period again."

"And you spend a good deal of time with her?" I asked.

"Of course. Of course I do. I'm her father. I'm one of her fathers."

I shook my head. "Maybe I don't quite get it," I said.

"What's to get? You've been there, you've seen us all together. We're three people who have a baby. What's the big deal?"

"No big deal," I said. "I guess I'm just old-fas.h.i.+oned."

"You're not old-fas.h.i.+oned. Not with a haircut like that."

"Well, all right. I worry that you're being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What have you got?"

This was delicate ground. We'd never formally acknowledged his proclivities-other than Bobby, I'd never met a liaison of his. As far as I knew, he didn't have them. And here's the awful truth: I preferred it that way. If he'd insisted on it, I'd have tried to accommodate a mental image of my son engaged in s.e.xual acts with other men. But he wasn't p.r.o.ne to insistence. He paid his visits in the guise of a chaste bachelor, and his father and I had always been willing to receive him as such. If life was failing to mark him in some way, I suppose we must have played our part.

"We've all got each other," he said. "Mom, you're right. You're not getting it. Maybe we should talk about something else."

"If you like. Just tell me this. You're happy doing what you're doing?"

"Yes. I'm ecstatic. And I'm part of something. I'm part of a family and a business. We're building a home together. You get too caught up in the fact that we don't look exactly like an ordinary family."

"All right. I'll try not to get too caught up in that."

And, after a moment, we moved on to other subjects. I could have responded to confessions of unorthodox love, if he'd chosen to make them. But I could not demand such candor. I simply couldn't. It would be his move to make.

I didn't get around to my own business until the night before his departure. We had eaten in-I'd made a simple avocado vinaigrette and done salmon steaks on the grill. After the plates were cleared away I started coffee and said, "Jonathan, dear, there's a reason I asked you to come this time. There's something I want to give you."

His eyes quickened-he must have thought I had a family treasure put away for him. For a moment I could see him perfectly at the age of four, precociously well mannered but beside himself with greed in a toy store, where no acquisition was too lavish to lie beyond imagining.

"What is it?" he asked, his eagerness politely concealed.

I sighed. If I'd had a quilt or a gold watch I'd have given it to him instead, but neither Ned nor I had ever saved things like that. We both came from families more interested in the future than in the past. I went upstairs to the bedroom without speaking, got the box out of my dresser and brought it down.

He knew what it was. "Oh, Mom," he said.

I set it gently on the table, a smooth wooden rectangle with a bra.s.s plaque that bore Ned's full name and his dates. "It's time for you to take charge of this," I said. "That was your father's one request. That you decide about disposal."

He nodded. He looked at the box but did not touch it. "I know," he said. "He told me."

"Have you been thinking about it?" I asked.

"Sure. Sure I have. Mom, that's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm trying to make some kind of home."

"I see." I sat down beside him. We both watched the box as if we suspected it might move on its own.

"Have you looked inside?" he asked.

"Yes. At first I thought I couldn't stand to. Then as time pa.s.sed I realized I couldn't stand not to."

"And?"

"It's sooty. Yellowish-gray. There's more than you'd think. I'd imagined just a handful, something talc.u.my you could toss into the wind with one hand. But it's not like that, there's quite a lot. There are some little slivers of bone, dark, like old ivory. Honey, I can tell you this-it's no more of your father than a pair of his old shoes would be. Do you want to look?"

"No. Not right now."

"All right."

"Why are you giving this to me now?" he asked. "I mean, well, exactly that. Why now?"

I hesitated. Here was the truth: I had started seeing someone. He was younger than I, his name was Paul Martinez, and he'd begun teaching me a range of pleasures I had hardly imagined while married to Ned.

It seemed I was living my life in reverse. With Ned I had had order and sanctuary, the serenity one hopes for in old age. Now, at the onset of my true old age, I seemed to be falling in love with an argumentative dark-skinned man who played the guitar and kissed me in spots Ned had hesitated even to call by their names. I felt wrong about having his ashes in the house now.

But all I said to Jonathan was "I'm afraid I'm turning into Morticia Addams, with my husband's ashes on the mantelpiece. I shouldn't have kept them this long."

There would be time to tell about Paul, if the attraction caught and held. Although his attentions thrilled me, I didn't trust them yet-there were so many reasons for a younger man to fleetingly believe he loved an older woman. Why upset Jonathan needlessly? I'd wait and see whether this affair was serious enough to merit upsetting him.

"I can understand that," he said. "I can't quite believe these are his real ashes here. It seems so...It doesn't seem like something that would happen in the twentieth century. For a private citizen to just have his father's ashes in a box."

"Do you want to take them out to the desert together?" I said. "We could go right now."

"Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?"

"Yes. Now listen. This isn't the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn't our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it's where we ended up, and we weren't unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I've been very happy."

"He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home."

"Jonathan, honey. Don't you think there's something a little...kitschy about all this yearning for a home?" about all this yearning for a home?"

He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. "Mother," he said. "Are you telling me to get hip?"

"I'm telling you to stop worrying so much," I said. "Your father's dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn't imagine anyone being happy if he wasn't tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father's lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave."

He nodded. After a moment's hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, "Mom, if anything happened to me-"

"Nothing's going to happen to you," I said quickly.

"But if something did."

I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I'd lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan's simple bachelorhood, his s.e.xual disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I'd never met, giving me the name of a hospital.

"All right," I said. "If something did."

"If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don't want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?"

I didn't speak. I got up and poured coffee.

"Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?" I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.

"Maybe. I'm not sure."

"It's up to you," I said. "This is strictly your decision."

"I know. I'll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?"

"How about a game of Scrabble instead?"

"Fine," he said. "Great. You're on."

The following day we drove to the airport with Ned's ashes tucked inside Jonathan's black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I'd claimed the driver's position, and Jonathan didn't protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky filled with clouds that had b.u.mped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.

Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.

"Hey," he said. "Is this a shortcut?"

"No. It's not."

"Where are we going?"

"Just hang on."

"I'll miss my plane," he said.

"No you won't. If you do, you can get another one."

The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert's small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush gra.s.ses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which s.h.i.+mmered as if in perpetual surprise.

I stopped the car in that ravine. It looked especially beautiful in the cloudy light. The white trunks and pale green leaves of the aspens were luminous, and a spoke of sunlight, breaking through, set fire to a single facet of the rough red mountainside beyond.

"Jonathan," I said. "Let's scatter the ashes here. Let's be done with it."

"Here?" he asked. "Why here?"

"Why not? It's lovely, don't you think?"

"Well, sure. But-"

He glanced at the back seat, in the direction of his bag.

"Get out the box," I said. "Come on, now. Trust me."

Slowly, with great deliberation, he reached into the back and unzipped his bag. He returned with the box cradled in both hands.

"Are you sure?" he said.

"I'm sure. Come along."

We got out of the car, and walked several paces into the thick dry gra.s.s. Jonathan held the box. Flies buzzed lazily around us, and a dust-colored lizard froze atop a waist-high pink rock, staring at us with the whole of its darting, speeded-up life.

"This is is pretty," Jonathan said. pretty," Jonathan said.

"I pa.s.s by sometimes," I said. "I have customers out here. Whenever you come to visit from now on, we can come out here if you like."

"Should I open the box?" he asked.

"Yes. It isn't hard. Can you see how it works?"

"I think so." He touched the catch. Then he took his hand away, without lifting the lid.

"No," he said. "I can't. It isn't the right place."

"Honey, they're only ashes. Let's scatter them and get on with our lives."

"I promised. This isn't the right place. It isn't what he'd have wanted."

"Forget about what he wanted," I said.

"You could do that. I can't."

He held tightly to the box, his knuckles whitening as if he feared I'd take it away from him. I said, "That isn't fair."

"I don't know if it's fair. It's true. Mom, why did you want to marry Dad?"

"I've told you that story."

"You've told me about wearing white shoes after Labor Day and him having nice thick hair and how you couldn't think of any reason not to, so you did," he said. "But why did you marry him, why did you stay stay married to him, if you weren't any more interested than that? Did our whole family start just because getting married and having a baby was what you thought you were supposed to do?" married to him, if you weren't any more interested than that? Did our whole family start just because getting married and having a baby was what you thought you were supposed to do?"

"Now watch yourself, young man. I loved your father. You didn't sit it out in that condominium for years. You didn't wake up with him in the night when he couldn't breathe and fell into a panic."

"No. But did you love him? That's all I really want to know. I know you sacrificed for him, and supported him, and all that. But were you in love with him?"

"What a question to ask your mother."