A Home At The End Of The World Part 4

When he awoke in the mornings, he'd look around with a startled expression, realize where he was, and smile. The light slanting in through my window turned the medallion of hair on his chest from gold to copper.

I bought myself a pair of boots like his. I started growing my hair.

With time, he began to talk more fluently. "I like this house," he said one winter evening as we sat idly in my room, smoking dope and listening to The Doors. Snowflakes tapped against the gla.s.s, whirled down into the empty, silent street. The Doors sang "L.A. Woman."

"How much would a house like this cost?" he said.

"Can't be too much," I said. "We're not rich."

"I want a house like this someday," he said, pa.s.sing me the joint.

"No you don't," I told him. I had other things in mind for us.

"Yeah," he said. "I do. I like this place."

"You don't really," I said. "You just think you do because you're stoned."

He sucked on the joint. He had a cultivated, almost feminine way of handling his dope, pinching a joint precisely between thumb and middle finger. "So I'll stay stoned all the time," he said on his exhale. "Then I'll always like this house and Cleveland and everything, just the way it is now."

"Well, that would be one way to live," I answered.

"Don't you like it?" he said. "You should like it. You don't know what you got here."

"What I've got here," I said, "is a mother who asks me first thing in the morning what I think I'd like to have for dinner that night, and a father who hardly ever leaves his movie theater."

"Yeah, man," he grinned.

His forearm, thick-wristed, golden-haired, rested casually on his knee. It just rested there, as if it was nothing special.

I believe I know the moment my interest turned to love. One night in early spring Bobby and I were sitting together in my room, listening to the Grateful Dead. It was an ordinary night in my altered life. Bobby pa.s.sed me the joint, and after I'd accepted it, he withdrew his hand and glanced at a liver-colored mole on the underside of his left wrist. His face registered mild incredulity-in the thirteen years he had known his own body, he had apparently not taken stock of that particular mole, though I had noticed it on any number of occasions, a slightly off-center discoloration riding the fork in a vein. The mole surprised him. I suspect it frightened him a little, to see his own flesh made strange. He touched the mole, curiously, with his right index finger, and his face was nakedly fretful as a baby's. As he worried over that small imperfection, I saw that he inhabited his own flesh as fully and with the same mix of wonder and confusion that I brought to my own. Until then I had believed-though I would never have confessed it, not even to myself-that all others were slightly less real than I; that their lives were a dream composed of scenes and emotions that resembled snapshots: discrete and unambiguous, self-evident, flat. He touched the mole on his wrist with tenderness, and with a certain dread. It was a minute gesture. Seeing it was no more dramatic than seeing somebody check his watch and register surprise at the time. But in that moment Bobby cracked open. I could see him-he was in in there. He moved through the world in a chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom. there. He moved through the world in a chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.

Then the moment pa.s.sed and I was on the other side of something. After that night-a Tuesday-I could not have returned, even if I'd desired it, to a state that did not involve thinking and dreaming of Bobby. I could not help investing his every quality with a heightened sense of the real, nor could I quit wondering, from moment to moment, exactly what it was like to be inside his skin.

Night after night we roamed the streets like spies. We befriended a b.u.m named Louis, who lived in a piano crate and bought us bottles of red wine in exchange for food we stole from my mother's kitchen. We climbed up fire escapes onto downtown roofs for the strangeness of standing in a high place. We dropped acid and wandered for hours through a junkyard that sparkled like a diamond mine, rife with caverns and peculiar glitterings and plateaus that glowed with a bleached, lunar light I tried to scoop up with my hands. We hitchhiked to Cincinnati to see if we could get there and back before my parents realized we were missing.

Once, on a Thursday night, Bobby took me to the cemetery where his brother and mother were buried. We sat on their graves, pa.s.sing a joint.

"Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."

"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.

"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people here wanted."

"What was that?"

He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.

He ran his fingers over the gra.s.s. He handed me the joint, which was wet with our mingled saliva, and I blew a stream of white smoke up into the sky, where the Seven Sisters quivered and sparked. Cleveland sent up its own small lights-television and shaded lamps. A pa.s.sing car left a few bars of "Helter Skelter" behind on the cold night air.

April came. It was not swimming weather yet, but I insisted that we go to the quarry as soon as the last scabs of old snow had disappeared from the shadows. I knew we'd go swimming naked. I was rus.h.i.+ng the season.

It was one of those spring days that emerge scoured from the long, long freeze, with a sky clear as melted snow. The first hardy, thick-stemmed flowers had poked out of the ground. The quarry, which lay three miles out of town, reflected sky on a surface dark and unmoving as obsidian. Except for a lone caramel-colored cow that had wandered down from a pasture to drink in the shallows, Bobby and I were the only living things there. We might have hiked to a glaciated lake high in the Himalayas.

"Beautiful," he said. We were pa.s.sing a joint. A blue jay rose, with a single questioning shrill, from an ash tree still in bud.

"We have to swim," I said. "We have to."

"Still too cold," he said. "That water'd be freezing, man."

"We have to, anyway. Come on. It's the first official swim of summer. If we don't swim today, it'll start snowing again tomorrow."

"Who told you that?"

"Everybody knows it. Come on on ." ."

"Maybe," he said. "Awful cold, though."

By then we had reached the gravel bed that pa.s.sed for a beach, where the cow, who stood primly at the water's edge, stared at us with coal-black eyes. This quarry had a rough horseshoe shape, with limestone cliffs that rose in a jagged half circle and then fell back again to the beach.

"It's not the least bit cold," I said to Bobby. "It's like Bermuda by this time of year. Watch me."

Spurred by my fear that we would do no more that day than smoke a joint, fully clothed, beside a circle of dark water, I started up the shale-strewn slope that led to the clifftop. The nearer cliffs were less than twenty feet high, and in summer the more courageous swimmers dove from there into the deep water. I had never even thought of diving off the cliff before. I was nothing like brave. But that day I scrambled in my cowboy boots, which still pinched, up the slope to the cracked limestone platform that sprouted, here and there, a lurid yellow crocus.

"It's summer up here," I shouted back to Bobby, who stood alone on the beach, cupping the joint. "Come on," I shouted. "Don't test the water with your fingers, just come up here and we'll dive in. We've got to."

"Naw, Jon," he called. "Come back."

With that, I began taking off my clothes in a state of humming, high-blown exhilaration. This was a more confident, daring Jonathan standing high on a sun-warmed rock, stripping naked before the puzzled gaze of a drinking cow.

"Jon," Bobby called, more urgently.

As I pulled off my s.h.i.+rt and then my boots and socks, I knew a raw abandon I had never felt before. The sensation grew as each new patch of skin touched the light and the cool, brilliant air. I could feel myself growing lighter, taking on possibility, with every st.i.tch I removed. I got ungracefully out of my jeans and boxer shorts, and stood for a moment, scrawny, naked, and wild, touched by the cold sun.

"This is it," I hollered.

Bobby, far below, said, "Hey, man, no-"

And for the sake of Bobby, for the sake of my new life, I dove.

A thin sheet of ice still floated on the water, no more than a membrane, invisible until I broke through it. I heard the small crackling, felt the ice splinter around me, and then I was plunged into unthinkable cold, a cold that stopped my breath and seemed, for a long moment, to have stopped my heart as well. My flesh itself shrank, clung in animal panic to the bone, and I thought with perfect clarity, I'm dead. This is what it's like.

Then I was on the surface, breaking through the ice a second time. My consciousness actually slipped out of my body, floated up, and in retrospect I have a distinct impression of watching myself swim to sh.o.r.e, gasping, lungs clenched like fists, the ice splintering with every stroke, sending diamond slivers up into the air.

Bobby waded in to his thighs to help pull me out. I remember the sight of his wet jeans, clinging darkly to his legs. I remember thinking his boots would be ruined.

It took another moment for my head to clear sufficiently to realize he was screaming at me, even as he helped me out of the water.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," he yelled, and his mouth was very close to my ear. "Oh, G.o.dd.a.m.n you. G.o.dd.a.m.n ." ."

I was too occupied with my own breathing to respond. He got us well up onto the gravel before letting go of me and launching into a full-scale rant. The best I could do was stand, breathing and s.h.i.+vering, as he shouted.

At first he strode back and forth in a rigid pattern, as if touching two invisible goals ten feet apart, screaming "You motherf.u.c.ker, you stupid motherf.u.c.ker." As he shouted, his circuit between the two goals grew shorter and shorter, until he was striding in tight little circles, following the pattern of a coiled spring. His face was magenta. Finally he stopped walking, but still he turned completely around, three times, as if the spring were continuing to coil inside him. All the while he screamed. He stopped calling me a motherf.u.c.ker and began making sounds I could not understand, a stream of infuriated babble that seemed directed not at me but at the sky and the cliffs, the mute trees.

I watched dumbly. I had never seen wrath like that before; I had not known it occurred in everyday life. There was nothing for me to do but wait, and hope it ended.

After some time, without saying what he was going to do, Bobby ran off to retrieve my clothes from the clifftop. Though his fury had quieted somewhat, it was by no means spent. I stood nude on the gravel, waiting for him. When he came back with my clothes and boots he dumped them in a pile at my feet, saying, "Put 'em on fast," in a tone of deep reproach. I did as I was told.

When I had dressed he draped his jacket around me, over my own. "No, you need it," I said. "Your pants are all wet..."

"Shut up," he told me, and I did.

We started back to the highway, where we would hitch a ride to town. On the way Bobby put his arm around my shoulders and held me close to him. "Stupid f.u.c.ker," he muttered. "Stupid, stupid. Stu Stu pid." He continued holding me as we stood with our thumbs out by the roadside, and continued holding me in the back seat of the Volkswagen driven by the two Oberlin students who picked us up. He kept his arm around me all the way home, muttering. pid." He continued holding me as we stood with our thumbs out by the roadside, and continued holding me in the back seat of the Volkswagen driven by the two Oberlin students who picked us up. He kept his arm around me all the way home, muttering.

Back at my house, he ran a scalding-hot shower. He all but undressed me, and ordered me in. Only after I was finished, and wrapped in towels, did he take off his own wet clothes and get in the shower himself. His bare skin was bright pink in the steamy bathroom. When he emerged, glistening, studded with droplets, the medallion of pale hair was plastered to his chest.

We went to my room, put on Jimi Hendrix, and rolled a joint. We sat in our towels, smoking. "Stupid," he whispered. "You could have killed yourself. You know how I'd have felt if you'd done that?"

"No," I said.

"I'd have felt like, I don't know."

And then he looked at me with such sorrow. I put the joint down in the ashtray and, in an act of courage that far outstripped jumping off a cliff into icy water-that exceeded all my brave acts put together-I reached out and laid my hand on his forearm. There it was, his arm, sinewy and golden-haired, under my fingers. I looked at the floor-the braided rug and pumpkin-colored planks. Bobby did not pull his arm away.

A minute pa.s.sed. Either nothing or something had to happen. In terror, with my pulse jumping at my neck, I began to stroke his arm with the tip of my index finger. Now, I thought, he will see what I'm after. Now he'll bolt in horror and disgust. Still I kept on with that single miniature gesture, in a state of fear so potent it was indistinguishable from desire. He did not recoil, nor did he respond.

Finally I managed to look at his face. His eyes were bright and unblinking as an animal's, his mouth slack. I could tell he was frightened too, and it was his fear that enabled me to move my hand to his bare shoulder. His skin p.r.i.c.kled with gooseflesh over the smooth broad curve of his scapula. I could feel the subtle rise and fall of his breathing.

Quickly, because I lacked the nerve for deliberation, I moved my hand to his thigh. He twitched and grimaced, but did not retreat. I burrowed my hand in under the towel he wore. I watched expressions of fear and pleasure skate across his eyes. Because I had no idea what to do, I replicated the strokes I'd used on myself. When he stiffened in my hand it seemed like a gesture of forgiveness.

Then he put out a hand and, with surprising delicacy, touched me, too. We did not kiss. We did not embrace. Jimi sang "Purple Haze." The furnace rumbled from deep in the house. Steam hissed through the pipes.

We mopped up with Kleenexes afterward, and dressed in silence. Once we were dressed, however, Bobby relit the joint and began talking in his usual voice about usual things: the Dead's next concert tour, our plan to get jobs and buy a car together. We pa.s.sed the joint and sat on the floor of my room like any two American teenagers, in an ordinary house surrounded by the boredom and struggling green of an Ohio spring. Here was another lesson in my continuing education: like other illegal practices, love between boys was best treated as a commonplace. Courtesy demanded that one's fumbling, awkward performance be no occasion for remark, as if in fact one had acted with the calm expertise of a born criminal.

ALICE.

O UR SON UR SON Jonathan brought him home. They were both thirteen then. He looked hungry as a stray dog, and just that sly and dangerous. He sat at our table, wolfing roast chicken. Jonathan brought him home. They were both thirteen then. He looked hungry as a stray dog, and just that sly and dangerous. He sat at our table, wolfing roast chicken.

"Bobby," I asked, "have you been in town long?"

His hair was an electrified nest. He wore boots, and a leather jacket decorated with a human eye worked in faded cobalt thread.

"All my life," he answered, gnawing on a legbone. "It's just that I've been invisible. I only lately decided to let myself be seen."

I wondered if his parents fed him. He kept glancing around the dining room with such appet.i.te that I felt for a moment like the witch in Hansel and Gretel Hansel and Gretel . As a child in New Orleans, I had watched termites browsing the wooden scrollwork under our parlor window, and found that the intricate carving broke away in my hands like sugar. . As a child in New Orleans, I had watched termites browsing the wooden scrollwork under our parlor window, and found that the intricate carving broke away in my hands like sugar.

"Well, welcome to the material world," I said.

"Thank you, ma'am."

He did not smile. He bit down on that bone hard enough to crack it.

After he'd gone I said to Jonathan, "He's a character, isn't he? Where did you find him?"

"He found me me ," Jonathan said with the exaggerated patience that was a particular feature of his adolescence. Although his skin was still smooth and his voice sweet, he had devised a brusque knowingness by way of entry into manhood. ," Jonathan said with the exaggerated patience that was a particular feature of his adolescence. Although his skin was still smooth and his voice sweet, he had devised a brusque knowingness by way of entry into manhood.

"And how did he find you?" I asked mildly. I could still work Southern innocence to my advantage, even after all those years in Ohio.

"He came up to me the first day of school and just started hanging around."

"Well, I think he's peculiar," I said. "He gives me the creeps just a little, to tell you the truth."

"I think he's cool," Jonathan said with finality. "He had an older brother who was murdered."

In New Orleans we'd had a term for people like Bobby, unprosperous-looking people whose relations were more than usually p.r.o.ne to violent ends. Still, I allowed as how he was quite evidently a cool customer.

"What would you say to a game of hearts before bed?" I asked.

"No, Mom. I'm tired of playing cards."

"Just one game," I said. "You've got to give me a chance to recoup my losses."

"Well, okay. One game."

We cleared the table, and I dealt the cards. I played badly, though. My mind kept straying to that boy. He had looked at our house with such open, avid greed. Jonathan took trick after trick. I went upstairs for a sweater and still could not seem to get warm.

Jonathan shot the moon. "Look out," he said. "I'm hot tonight."

He took such simple, boyish delight in winning that he forgot about his new peevishness. I could not imagine why he wasn't more popular at school. He was clever, and better-looking than most of the boys I saw around town. Perhaps my Southern influence had rendered him too gentle and articulate, too little the brute for that hard Midwestern city. But of course I was no judge. What mother isn't a bit in love with her own son?

Ned got home late, after midnight. I was upstairs reading when I heard his key in the door. I resisted an urge to snap out the bedside light and feign sleep. Soon I would turn thirty-five. I had made some promises to myself regarding our marriage.

I could hear his breathing as he mounted the stairs. I sat up a bit straighter on the pillow, adjusted the strap of my nightgown. He stood in the bedroom doorway, a man of forty-three, still handsome by ordinary standards. His hair was going gray at the sides, in movie-star fas.h.i.+on.

"You're still up," he said. Was he pleased or annoyed?

"I'm a slave to this," I said, gesturing at the book. No, wrong already. I waited up for you I waited up for you . That was the proper response. Still, the book had in fact been what kept me awake. I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths. . That was the proper response. Still, the book had in fact been what kept me awake. I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths.

He came into the room, unb.u.t.toning his s.h.i.+rt. A V of chest appeared, the dark hair flecked with gray. "Looks like Deliverance Deliverance is a little too strong for Cleveland," he said. "Three sets of parents called to complain tonight." is a little too strong for Cleveland," he said. "Three sets of parents called to complain tonight."

"I don't know why you booked it," I said.

He peeled off his s.h.i.+rt and wadded it into the clothes hamper. Sweat glistened under his arms. When he turned I could see the hair, like a symmetrical map of Africa, that had sprouted on his back.

No. Focus on his kindness, his gentle humor. Focus on the shape of his flanks, still lean, in his gabardine slacks.

"I'm lucky to have it," he said. "It'll be a hit. The seven o'clock was three-quarters full."