A home at the end of the world (21 page)

“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 glass.

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 prone to hapless, inexplicable devotions like the fool in
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.

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-rehearsed story of her romantic downfall, while Bobby, potbellied and balding, sat blushingly 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
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 pushing a cart through the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket. They would have all that.

ALICE

N
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.

“Hacienda Glover,” Ned called it. And, in what passed in him for the darker moods, “Tobacco Road, 1987.”

He didn’t permit himself much in the way of gloom or pessimism. Perhaps he was incapable. His demonstrated emotions ran the gamut from rueful acceptance to mild disapproval, and as I bid my own farewells to the Cleveland kitchen and the pear tree in the back yard I realized I had always planned, in some uncertain way, on leaving him. Or, rather, I had planned on someday having a life beyond our mild domestic comedy, the cordial good cheer of our evening feedings and our chaste, dreamless sleep. The trouble with an even-tempered union is that it refuses to crack—at no point does injustice or hardheartedness provide an opening through which you could walk blamelessly into another way of being. You live in the details: a kitchen arranged just the way you want it, tomatoes ripening on vines you’ve staked and tied with your own hands. Now Ned was ill, banished to an unfamiliar place, and I could not summon the anger or self-interest I’d have needed to send him there alone. As I packed my knives into a cardboard carton, I contemplated the rising divorce rate—how did so many manage it? The movies and novels of our childhoods don’t adequately prepare some of us for the impression our future homes will make; we are not warned of the seductive powers exerted by our own south-facing living-room windows, or by hollyhocks edging a set of French doors.

And now Ned and I were disassembling it, just like that, because his lungs couldn’t negotiate the sodden Ohio air. It was almost shockingly easy. We listed our property with a rouged woman in toreador pants who took less than a month to sell it at a bargain rate to a pair of young computer programmers willing to gamble on a neighborhood that might or might not improve. The theater would be torn down for a parking structure. Less than eight months after the doctor’s pronouncement, we lived in a place I had never even imagined visiting.

The desert proved to have its own wild beauty; its odd mix of emptiness and moment and its searing, bottomless sky. Between the time we closed escrow and the day we arrived with our belongings, the cactus in front of our unit had produced a single ivory-colored flower, which it wore like an extravagant hat. Few fates are wholly disagreeable. If they were, we might do a better job of evading them. Ned and I set up housekeeping in those small white-painted rooms, hung curtains and set the copper pans against a new kitchen wall, where they shone just as brightly in the desert light. I realized that in no time this place would take on its own inevitability. Indeed, it was assuming that quality even as we debated the arrangement of chairs and pictures. Ned put a comradely arm around me as we paused in our work, cupping my shoulder in the same firm, gentle manner he’d used as a man of twenty-six, when I’d gotten into a convertible with him and driven into the Louisiana bayous. He said, “This won’t be so bad. What do you think, kiddo?”

I told him no, it would be fine, and I did not experience the statement as a lie. We are adaptable creatures. It’s the source of our earthly comfort and, I suppose, of our silent rage. Ned held me in what would be our living room. The familiar curtains were parted, and beyond them lay a lovely, desolate landscape in which an unprotected traveler would not last so much as a single day.

JONATHAN

S
OMETHING
was wrong with me. I lacked some central ability to connect, and I worried that it might be an early indicator of disease. First you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn’t add up to whole days and your presence—in an airplane, on the streets—didn’t affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily do. Then dark sores and fevers, a cough that wouldn’t stop. Maybe this was how death announced itself, by breaking up your sense of participation in your own affairs.

The plane taxied, climbed through tumbling whiteness to a blue sky as bright and featureless as the primmest notions of heavenly reward. I sat quietly, flying across the country in a state of dislocation that was almost lulling—almost like going to the movies. I watched myself as a man of twenty-seven, strapped in against the predicted turbulence, pouring Scotch into a clear plastic glass, on his way to visit his parents in a house he’d never seen.

In Arizona, for the first time, my father spoke to me about death. A second doctor had confirmed the diagnosis—emphysema—but insisted that with precautions another thirty years were possible. Still, it was time to talk of certain things.

What my father said was “Son, when it gets down to it, you bury me wherever you want to.” He and I were sitting at the dinette table, where we had been playing Yahtzee while my mother made dinner.

“It won’t really matter to me,” he added. “I’ll be dead.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to decide something like that.”

“Well, you should decide,” he said. “It’s the place you’re going to have to visit for the next fifty years. Or the next thousand, if they figure out how to replace your organs with plastic.”

My mother could hear us easily from the kitchen, which formed the lesser end of the L-shaped living-room-dining-area-kitchen. “Biological immortality is no longer in fashion,” she said. “It went out with monorails and vacations on Mars.”

She brought a platter of tortilla chips and salsa to the table. Since she and my father had retired to Arizona she’d stopped styling her hair. She wore it pulled back in a ponytail, and she had a leathery tan. My father, prone to skin cancers, was white as the moon. They looked like a settler and his Indian bride.

“It’s not really all that big a deal,” my father said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

I glanced at my mother, who shrugged away any stake in the conversation and returned to her
chilis rellenos
.

“Listen, Jonathan,” my father said. “If your mother and I both dropped over right now, if we clutched our hearts and dropped face down in the tortilla chips, what would you do with us?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d have you sent back to Cleveland.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do,” he said. “You’ll never move back to Cleveland. What would be the point of having dead parents there?”

“We lived there for years,” I said. “I mean, it still seems like home.”

“We spent thirty years getting out of Cleveland,” he said. “That theater nearly killed me, and the weather just about killed your mother and me both. If you put me back there, I promise to come haunt you. I’ll wake you up early every Saturday for the rest of your life and tell you to help me trim the hedge.”

“Well, what about here?” I said. “You like it here, don’t you?”

“Here I can breathe the air, and your mother’s learning to make blue margaritas. That’s exactly how much Phoenix means to us.”

I could not picture him buried in Arizona. It would be like a joke on him, having a grave in the Western desert, with coyotes howling over his head.

“I don’t know if I can talk about this much more,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Okay,” my father said. “How would you like to be trounced again at Yahtzee?”

“I think I’d rather lie down for a while. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. Are you sick?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to close my eyes for a minute.” I got up and went to the sofa, which had been newly purchased in Arizona, a copy of the Cleveland sofa, with knobbed maple armrests and a starched colonial skirt. This new one, which folded creakily out into a bed, had been bought especially to accommodate me on my visits, since my parents’ condominium had only one bedroom, as did all the others in the complex. It was a neighborhood of widows and widowers.

“Why don’t you fold it out and take a nap?” my father said.

“No, I’ll just lie on it like a sofa,” I said. I lay down, and propped a needlepoint pillow under my head. The sofa upholstery depicted cattails, rust-colored boats, and brown mallard ducks flying away in repeated series of three. A small Christmas tree gleamed on the end table, strung with ornaments I remembered choosing in a dime store as a child. After years of “decorator” trees—with red and silver balls, candy canes, and small white lights—my parents had returned, in miniature, to the gaudy chaotic tree of a household with children.

“I’m glad you came home for a while,” my father said. “You’re looking a little pale, if you want to know the truth.”

“Everybody in New York is pale this time of year,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move to Arizona.”

“Why would you want to move here?” my father said, rattling the Yahtzee dice in their cup. “There’s nothing for a young person to do.”

“What do
you
do here?”

“Nothing. There’s really nothing for anybody to do.” He rolled the dice. “Small straight,” he said. “Do you want another drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

As he went to the closet-sized bar to pour another for himself, I could hear the labor of his breathing. The bar, a narrow contrivance between the living room and the dinette, displayed its neat row of bottles on a mirrored shelf. A beige hand towel, never used, sat folded beside the miniature chrome sink.

My parents had brought their Cleveland sense of order to the desert with them. Here, where fine sand blew through the windows at night, where tumbleweed occasionally scratched at the door, the spices on the rack were kept in strict alphabetical order. Each houseplant shone with green, glossy life, and every morning my mother inspected them all, plucking dead leaves and dropping them into a plastic bag.

“As long as you’re having another drink, I guess I will, too,” I said. I heard the particular gurgle the bourbon made as it flowed out the spout of the quart bottle.

“Hope and Glory
is showing at the mall,” my father said.

“We could go to the matinee tomorrow,” I said. “It’d keep us out of the sun.”

“Good.” He brought me my drink.

“I really don’t want to decide about, you know, funeral arrangements for you guys,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it so much. By the time we’re dead you’ll probably be settled down somewhere. Just bury us within commuting distance.”

“What if I don’t settle down, though?”

“You will. Believe me, it gets you sooner or later.”

“I think I’ll go see if Mom needs help in the kitchen,” I said.

“Okay.”

“It’s just that I have no idea where I’ll settle down,” I said. “I could end up anywhere. I could go to Sri Lanka.”

“Well, that’s fine. You should travel while you’re young.” My father rolled the dice again, and cursed his dearth of luck.

“I’m not that young anymore,” I said.

“Ha. That’s what you think.”

In the kitchen, my mother dried romaine lettuce with weary efficiency. She might have been diapering her tenth baby. I stood beside her at the sink. She had taken on a brittle smell, like dry leaves.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“Will you look at what they call lettuce here?” she said. “I went to three different stores for this, and it still looks like somebody beat it all the way to Phoenix with a stick.”

She delivered the complaint in a tone of skittish good cheer. Lately, on my visits home, first to Cleveland and now Phoenix, she alternated between fits of irony and folksy, high-strung friendliness.

“Pretty sad,” I said.

We stood quietly as my father lifted himself from his chair and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Once he was out of range my mother said, “So. How’s everything? How’s Bobby doing?”

“Okay. He’s fine. Things are pretty much okay.”

“Good,” she said, and nodded enthusiastically, as if the answer had been full and sufficient.

“Mom?” I said.

“Mm-hm?”

“To tell you the truth, I’ve been…oh, I don’t know. I sometimes feel so alone in New York.”

“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “It’s hard to avoid feeling lonely. Just about anywhere.”

She began cutting a cucumber into astonishingly thin, lucent slices. The knife blade seemed to impart illumination to the vegetable with every slice.

“You know what I’ve been wondering lately?” I said. “I’ve been wondering why you and Dad don’t have more friends. I mean, when I was a kid, I felt like we were marooned on another planet together. Like the family on the old TV show.”

“I don’t remember any show like that,” she said. “If you had a baby of your own, and a house and business to run, you’d know how much energy you’ve got left over for running around the neighborhood meeting people. And then your kids pack up and go after eighteen years.”

“Well, sure they do,” I said. “Of course they do. What else would you expect?”

She laughed. “They do if you’ve raised them right,” she said cheerfully. “Sweetheart, nobody wants you to have moved back into your old room after you graduated.”

We were not a confrontational family. We did not attempt to draw one another out. As our lives changed, we strove instead to develop new ways of acting normal in one another’s company.

“I’ve just been wondering lately if this is, you know,
it
,” I said. “An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

I asked, “Mom, when did you know you wanted to marry Dad?”

She didn’t speak for a full minute. She finished with the cucumber, and started in on a tomato.

Finally she said, “Well, I still don’t know if I wanted to marry him. I’m still trying to decide.”

“Come on. Seriously.”

“All right. Let’s see. I was barely seventeen, you know, and your father was twenty-six. He asked me on our fourth date. I remember I was wearing white shoes a week after Labor Day, and I felt defiant and sort of foolish at the same time. Your father and I were sitting in his car and I was feigning contemplation when in fact I was still worrying over having worn those damned shoes, and he leaned right over and said to me, ‘What if we were to get married?’ Just like that.”

“And you said?”

She reached for a second tomato. “I didn’t say anything. I was so startled. And embarrassed, to have been worrying about my shoes at a moment like that. I remember thinking, ‘I am the most trivial person who ever lived.’ I told him I’d need time to think about it. And I found I couldn’t think of one single reason why we shouldn’t get married. So we did.”

“You were in love with him?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together, as if the question had been impertinent and slightly irritating. “I was a
girl
,” she said. “But yes, sure. I was wild about him. Nobody had ever made me laugh the way he could, do you remember how serious Grandpa always was? And your father had the most beautiful thick chestnut hair then.”

“You knew that, of all the people in the world, he was the one you wanted to marry?” I asked. “You never worried that you might be making some sort of extended mistake, like losing track of your real life and going off on, I don’t know, a
tangent
you could never return from?”

She waved the question away as if it were a sluggish but persistent fly. Her fingers were bright with tomato pulp. “We didn’t ask such big questions then,” she said. “Isn’t it hard on you, to think and wonder and plan so much?”

From upstairs, I heard the toilet flush. I knew my father would be coming down again, ready for another round of Yahtzee. “How’s he doing, really?” I asked my mother.

“Oh, up and down,” she said.

“He’s looked fine since I got here.”

“That’s because you’re here. But Reuben says emphysema is funny. It can just start getting better. Like that.”

“So you think he’s getting better?” I asked.

“No. But he could. He could start getting better at any moment.”

“And how are you?”

“Me? I’m healthy as a horse,” she said. “I’m almost embarrassed by how good I feel.”

“I mean otherwise. You said you wanted to get a job here. You were talking about real estate school.”

“I should. I keep meaning to go out there and see what’s what. But then your father would be alone all day. It’s funny. He was always so capable when we lived in Ohio. He was at that theater so much of the time, I suppose I just figured he liked being on his own. But now that we’re here, he gets nervous if I’m at the
store
too long.”

“Do you think he’s getting senile?” I asked.

“No. He’s just good and scared, is what he is. Your father was never all that introspective. And now, well, he wants something going on all the time. I’m like the social director on a cruise for one.”

She smiled at me, rolling her eyes good-humoredly, but now the irony crackled through like tissue paper folded into silk.

“Two,” I said. “There are two of you.”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said.

My father and I went the next day to see
Hope and Glory
at the Phoenix Cinema Eight. My mother, who claimed to have seen enough movies that week, stayed home to work on what she called her garden, a small plot of extravagantly watered grass and hardy, thick-stemmed flowers. When we left her she was on her way out into the heat, wearing plaid Bermudas and a faded straw hat and gardening gloves the size of Minnie Mouse’s hands.

As we walked out the door my father said, “There goes the last of the gentlemen farmers.” She gave him back a look she had developed since they moved to the desert: the patient, clinically affectionate look of a good nurse.

We drove to the movies in my father’s Oldsmobile, a big deep blue Cutlass, silent and ponderous as a submarine. He kept his hands on the steering wheel at three and nine o’clock. He wore a pair of clip-on sunglasses over his ordinary glasses. Above us, the sky was a molten, shifting blue. Mountains shimmered in the distance, beyond the housing tracts and shopping centers. When we swerved to avoid a dead armadillo, my father shook his head and said, “Who ever expected to end up living in the desert, anyway?”