WE WERE half-lovers. Together we occupied love’s bright upper realm, where people delight in otherness, cherish their mates’ oddities, and wish them well. Because we were not lovers in the fleshly sense we had no use for the little murders. Clare and I told our worst secrets and admitted to our most foolish fears. We ate dinner and went shopping together, assessed the qualities of men who passed on the streets. Looking back, I think we were like the sisters in old stories; the stories in which the pretty younger girl can’t marry until somebody claims the older, less attractive one. In our case, though, we were both sisters at once. We shared a life of clothes and gossip and self-examination. We waited, with no particular urgency, to see whether someone would claim one of us for the other, more terrifying kind of love.
For three years we’d lived together in a sixth-floor walk-up on East Third Street between Avenues A and B, where Puerto Rican women argued in Spanish and drug dealers moved perpetually in and out of basement apartments. Drugged, heartbreakingly beautiful boys danced to enormous radios on the corner. We lived there because it was cheap, and because—we’d admitted this one drunken night—it struck us as more interesting than the safer parts of the city. I’d further confessed that I considered this neighborhood a source of anecdotes to be told in the better life that was still to come. When I’d said this, Clare had looked at me skeptically and said, “Belief in the future is a disreputable virtue, don’t you think? It’s sort of like building ships in bottles. You know? Admirable, but in a creepy kind of way.”
Clare was thirty-six, eleven years older than I. She lived according to several assumptions, which she held with quiet but unremitting ferocity. She believed that James M. Cain was the greatest American writer, that society had reached its pinnacle in the late nineteen-thirties, and that there were no men left for a woman of her age and peculiarities. When contested on the final point, she replied in a tone of willing but nearly exhausted patience, like a good teacher facing her ten thousandth unpromising student. “Eliminate the following,” she said, counting on her fingers. “Gay men. Married men. Men under the age of twenty-five. Men over the age of twenty-five who are only interested in young, beautiful women. Men who are still available because they can’t commit to anyone. Men who are just plain assholes. Rapists and psycho killers. All right, now. Who’s left?”
She conducted her daily affairs with ironic good cheer, like the second banana in a thirties comedy. Like a survivor of a war, who still wears heels and lipstick to walk among the wreckage.
When she grew depressed, we talked about having a baby together. Clare had already gotten through a marriage, an abortion, dozens of lovers, and three changes of career. I was three years out of college, writing a food column for a weekly newspaper, certain only of my lust for the man I called my lover. At night our street glittered with broken glass. Every morning an enormous Hispanic woman passed under our windows, singing loud sentimental love songs on her way to work.
One morning in early spring, when a single pale ivy leaf had worked its way between the crosspieces of the burglar-proof grate on the kitchen window, Clare sighed into her coffee and said, “Maybe I’ll have my hair dyed back to its normal color. Don’t you think a woman of a certain age should stop trying to look eccentric?”
She wore a kimono from a thrift store, not a delicate watery silk but a garish, lipstick-red rayon that must have been bought new in Hawaii or Las Vegas five years earlier. Clare was not beautiful, and claimed to be opposed to beauty in general.
“No,” I said. “I think a woman of a certain age has all the more right.” I stood in the doorway, because our kitchen accommodated only one person at a time.
“The difference between thirty-six and twenty-five,” she said, “is that at twenty-five you can’t look pathetic. Youth is the one overriding excuse. You can try anything out, do anything at all to your hair, and walk around looking perfectly fine. You’re still thinking yourself up, so it’s okay. But you get a little older, and you find your illusions starting to show.”
“Is this going to be another Black Saturday?” I asked.
“Early to tell.”
“Let’s not. It’s so pretty out. Let’s go shopping and see a movie instead of contemplating suicide.”
“When we have the baby,” she said, “what sort of hair do you think it’ll have?”
“What color is yours supposed to be?”
“Lord, I’d have to think way back. A sort of dull dark brown, I think. Salesgirl hair.”
“Maybe the kid would get my coloring,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s surprising what weak but determined genes can do.”
She sipped her coffee. “To be perfectly frank,” she said, “I have a feeling my black Rumanian ancestors would swarm all over your pensive Swedish ones.”
“Is that what you’d want? A miniature version of yourself?”
“Lord, no. Another me? We’d hate each other. I’d want the kid to have your intelligence, for one thing.”
“Don’t be coy,” I said. “You’re plenty smart.”
“If I were all that smart,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’d be thirty-six years old, standing in a teensy little kitchen trying to think of the best way to have a baby without falling in love.”
We kept talking about the baby. We did not make plans, but we talked a good deal. That was our way together. We’d had other ideas in the past: we’d talked about starting a breakfast-in-bed catering service, and about moving to the coast of Spain. We always discussed the particulars of these actions in such detail that eventually we crossed an invisible line and began to feel as if we had already performed them; our talk ultimately took on an aspect of reverie. We had practiced getting eggs Benedict from Third Street to upper Park Avenue in a steam cabinet (they arrived a congealed mess); we’d bought travel guides and cassettes that taught conversational Spanish. I did not expect the baby to be any different.
“I like the name Ethan for a boy,” I said. “Or Trevor.”
“Honey, please,” she said. “No fancy names. If it’s a boy let’s call it Jon Junior. If it’s a girl, how about Mary or Ann?”
“Why not Clare Junior?”
“I told you. I want her to be different from me.”
Clare’s rival was her own image, the elaborate personality she’d worked out for herself. She lived at a shifting, troubled distance from her ability to be tough and salty and “interesting.” When her gestures were too perfectly executed she could be slightly grotesque—practiced and slick. I saw how it troubled her. Sometimes she embraced her persona with palpable defiance, looking out at the world as if to say That’s right, so what ? Sometimes she frightened herself. She had grown so adept it was hard for her to act out of character.
Still, she’d led what I considered to be a full, interesting life, and I disliked hearing her self-disparagements. She’d been married to a dancer now living in West Berlin whose troupe periodically played New York to extravagant acclaim. She’d been the lover of a semi-famous woman author. She’d taken heroin and opium, and enough Dexedrine to require treatment at a clinic in Baltimore. My own life, compared to hers, seemed timid and cautious. I hated to think that either choice—an oversized, dangerous life or a comfortable wage-earning one—led eventually to the same vague itch; the same conviction that the next generation must improve its lot.
“What do you think about punishment?” I asked.
“Personally? Or for the baby?”
“The baby.”
“I wouldn’t hit her,” she said. “I couldn’t. Oh, I don’t know. I’d probably be one of those mothers who get huffy and disappointed, and the kid wishes you’d just haul off and smack him and get it over with.”
Clare worked for a jeweler on St. Marks Place. She had a genius for putting odd things together—she made earrings and brooches out of rhinestones, broken glass, rusted tin, and tiny plastic figures from dime stores. Her work had a small but loyal following. I had unexpectedly become the restaurant critic for a weekly newspaper that started underground and grew too popular for its own crude facilities and its inexperienced staff. When I took the job, straight out of NYU, I’d thought of it as a first step toward my true career on the staff of a glossy national magazine, but as it happened I’d stumbled unawares—almost against my will—onto the ground floor of a good thing. In three years the paper had moved from dank offices in the garment district to a suite on Union Square. Its staff had tripled. And I’d been promoted from typist and occasional reporter to food columnist.
The joke was this: I knew nothing about food. It had been my mother’s obsession, and I’d vehemently denied ingress to every particle of knowledge on the subject. When the editor decided to add a restaurant section, and told me he wanted me to write it, I protested that I didn’t even know what quiche Lorraine was made of. He said, “That’s the point. A lot of people don’t.” He offered a raise, and a minimum of twenty-four column inches every week. And so I became Plain John, a character of relatively modest means who appreciated good food but was not transported by the unexpected dash of cardamom in a red-pepper puree; who liked to go out to dinner with friends or lovers once or twice a week and was willing to spring for something fancy when the occasion demanded it. I reviewed Polish and Chinese restaurants, scoured Manhattan for the best hamburgers and pizza and pad Thai. I indicated which trendy restaurants treated even noncelebrities kindly, which served ludicrously small portions, which would be impressive but nonthreatening to parents when they visited from out of town. Both Clare and I subsisted on the meals paid for by the paper, though we repaid the debt through the eccentricities of our diet. One week we ate only burritos, another nothing but Peking duck. Clare speculated over whether our nutritional monism might be doing us some sort of lasting harm. She brought home vitamins, and drinks made with aloe vera, and protein powders supposedly favored by famous bodybuilders, who grinned and flexed on the brightly colored labels.
We told one another that the baby should be read to constantly, even before it was old enough to understand. We agreed that parents should above all be honest with their children, about the darker facts as well as the pleasant ones.
My other half-lover’s name was Erich. He and I had sex, though he did not inspire in me the urgency or the sorrowful, exhilarating edge that, combined with desire, must add up to love. I kept my head with Erich. To be honest, since leaving Cleveland I had never loved a man I’d slept with—I hadn’t come close to the feeling, though I’d gotten to know dozens of bodies in their every mood and condition. My own capacity for devotion focused actually on Clare and hypothetically on certain men I saw walking the streets of the city: strong-looking men who didn’t aspire to conventional fame or happiness, who cleaved the air with definitive thoughtlessness. I looked as unobtrusively as possible at punks in black army boots, sullen Italian boys, and tough long-haired kids from small towns who had come to New York expecting their criminal reputations to hold.
I knew my interests were unrealistic, and probably unhealthy. But they obdurately remained—they were the geography of my desire. A particular boy I saw sometimes at the corner newsstand, with unkempt hair and an irritated expression, could make me tingle by brushing my elbow with his sleeve. The man I slept with seemed sketchy and remote.
Erich and I made love once or twice a week, usually at his apartment in the East Twenties. We’d met two years earlier, in the restaurant where he tended bar. I was reviewing gay restaurants that week—my column would evaluate the various places gay readers could go with their lovers if they wanted to hold hands across the table. I’d eaten alone that night, and I stopped at the bar for a brandy on my way out. Although the bar wasn’t crowded, the bartender took nearly five minutes to ask me what I wanted to drink. He was hunched at the bar’s opposite end, his forearms folded on the splashboard like a Flemish housewife leaning out her door, nodding with steady emphatic little bobs of his head at a story being told by an elderly man wearing gold jewelry and an emerald-green scarf. While I waited I watched the bartender’s ass, which was small and compact, twitching in counter-rhythm to his nods.
Finally the old man who was telling the story inclined his head in my direction, saying, “I think you’ve got a customer.” The bartender turned with a startled look. His face was thin, the nose and chin too sharply pointed for ordinary handsomeness, though his color was good and his eyes were as milkily, innocently blue as a child’s. His was the sort of face that, given a proneness to vanity, could be agonized over in a mirror—a face that could switch from beauty to plainness and back again. New York is full of faces like that, the not-quite-handsome faces of young men and women who have been fussed over by their mothers and who believe, with rigorous if slightly apologetic hopefulness, that they can make a future with their looks.
“Oops, oh, sorry,” he said. “What can I get you?”
I ordered a brandy. “Business a little slow tonight?” I asked.
He nodded, pouring brandy into an oversized snifter. The elderly man in the emerald scarf pulled a cigarette out of the pack he’d set before himself on the bartop and slipped it into a short gold cigarette holder with elaborate concentration.
“It’s been, you know, a little slow in general,” the bartender said.
I suspected the restaurant wouldn’t last much longer. It had an air of decline, and I knew more or less what I would write in my column the next day. A few phrases had already suggested themselves: “A fifties-ish nowhere zone that serves formal, vaguely embarrassing food”; “like a ghostly ocean liner that steams into port at midnight every hundred years.” It was the sort of place a rich old aunt might take you, except that the customers were older men and bright-eyed, hungry-looking boys instead of dowagers in furs and brooches.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, “this place is a little frightening.”
He set the brandy in front of me on a cocktail napkin and glanced at the old man, who was languidly expelling plumes of smoke through his nostrils. “Isn’t it just the creepiest?” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been looking for another job.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said.
He glanced again at the smoker, and settled himself at my end of the bar. He folded his arms on the splashboard and nodded his head.
“You’d be surprised how hard it is to get bartending jobs,” he said. “I mean in, you know, good places. You haven’t been here before, have you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think I’d seen you.”
A depth of scrutiny passed briefly behind his pallid blue eyes. He was trying, without deep conviction or curiosity, to figure me out. I imagined the bar was frequented by young men looking to meet up with money. I was neither handsome enough to be on the block nor prosperous-looking enough to be a buyer.
“I just wanted to try it,” I said. “You can’t keep going to the same old places over and over again.”
He nodded, unconvinced. It was not a casual restaurant; not the sort of place for people without an ulterior motive.
“Do you, um, work around here?” he asked.
“Downtown,” I said. “I was just in the neighborhood. I’m a writer.”
“Really? What do you write?”
I told him the name of the newspaper, and he nodded with particular zeal. The paper was hot then. “What do you write?” he asked again.
“Oh, different things. Listen, do you get off soon?”
“Well, we close in another hour.”
“You want to meet me for a drink in a less creepy place?” I asked.
“Well, okay,” he said. “I mean, yes.”
“My name is Jonathan.”
“I’m Erich. My name is Erich.”
He nodded as he announced his name. His eyes lost their uncertainty. Here was my subvert business—I’d come to pick up the bartender.
I went for a walk, and met him an hour later at a place in the Thirties. He’d arrived ahead of me. He stood at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, feigning interest in the Esther Williams movie on the videoscreen. He said hello and nodded slightly, as if agreeing with his own salutation.
I ordered a beer, and we worked our way through a conversation. We talked about the usual things, delivered brief accounts of our origins and ambitions. It was a Wednesday night, the crowd at the bar was sparse. Technicolor chorus girls splashed in a brilliant aquamarine world on the videoscreen, filling the room with a colored, shifting dusk. Erich was all edgy inattention, the sort of person who shreds napkins and taps his feet and fails to hear fully half of what’s said to him. His hair was already thinning on top—I would be surprised to learn he was three months younger than I.
After what seemed to both of us a decent interval—two beers—we went to his apartment on Twenty-fourth Street, where he introduced his second surprise.
He was great in bed. There is no other way to put it. It seemed nothing less than transfiguration. Conversing, he was fidgety and evasive, given to arrhythmic pauses and odd spasms of laughter. But when he got out of his clothes he took on the fluid self-assurance of a dancer. His physique was modest and sinewy, with veined arms and a prominent rib cage. That first night, when we got to his studio (a single room with a Pullman kitchen and bath), he was naked so quickly he might have been wearing a breakaway suit, the kind comedians use. He was dressed one moment and nude the next, while I was still unfastening the last button of my shirt.
“Hey,” I said, “how did you do that?”
He smiled, and helped me out of my own clothes. His movements were swift and efficient but gentle. He had abruptly traded his skittish, roving manner for calm focus and suave, unhurried competence. He unbuttoned my jeans and slid them tenderly down to my ankles, wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me, with only a hint of strain, up onto the bed.
I was not excited by him. I was excited by the idea of sex, the ease of it—I had gone out and caught someone, an unacclaimed man who was mine to do with as I liked. I admit it—there was a streak of sadism in my lusts. There was the taint of vanity. I chose ordinary men who would not refuse; who would feel lucky to have me. I did not thrill to the sight of their flesh—which was either bulky or scrawny but always abashed and grateful—so much as I did to the fact of their capture. As Erich set me on his bed I was aroused in the general, unfocused way that had become familiar. I would let him command the sex but I would leave his apartment undefeated. Part of me was already gone, even now, as our chests touched for the first time and our legs fumbled for position. I was more important than this. The excitement I felt was edgy and not entirely pleasant, like a swarm of bees inside my chest.
Erich nuzzled my shoulder, ran his fingers lightly along my ribs. He had a dry, powdery touch. There was something sweet about his earnestness and his balding, elusive beauty. There was something dreadful about it.
He lay for a while on top of me, peppering my chest with kisses. Then he deftly revolved our bodies so that I was on top. I got a thorough look at him, for the first time. He was thin but big-boned, his abdomen more densely furred than his chest. His cock angled off to the right, raggedly skirted by a vein. His gaunt, hairy stomach and skewed cock suddenly repulsed me. Usually with strangers there was a moment of shock like this, when I fully comprehended the privacy of their bodies. Looking at Erich’s thin torso, I felt as if I had caught him in some indiscretion. I saw the otherness of him, and it flipped me over from excitement to disgust—my own agitation soured, and I began bluffing my way through, cramming his cock blindly into my mouth. I was already thinking of going home and having a drink with Clare. Even as it happened, this was a story I would tell her. She and I would shake our heads together, and discuss the perplexing scarcity of love.
“Relax,” Erich whispered. I didn’t answer, because my mouth was full. When he repeated it, I pulled my head up and said, “I’m perfectly relaxed, thank you.” I would make him come quickly, come myself, and be back in my own skin, free on the street.
He slipped away, directing me to lie belly-down on the mattress. “You’re too tense,” he said. I skeptically obeyed, and he began massaging my back, tracing the curves of my shoulders and spine with his fingertips. “You’re very tight,” he said. “I can feel it all through here.”
Against my better judgment, I consigned myself to his hands. I disliked being told I was tense—it seemed he had recognized a flaw in my character. For the occasion of sex I always slipped over into an identity that was not quite my own. When making love I was like my own hypothetical older brother, a strong, slightly cynical man who lived adventurously, without the rabbity qualms that beset my other self. At my desk or on the subway I daydreamed of powerful, angry men who needed me to ease their pain. In bed with meek strangers I thought only of quick orgasm and escape.
Erich worked my back with ardent delicacy, his fingers expertly following the confluence of tendon and bone. When I remarked on his proficiency he said, “I took a course in this.” I would learn that he believed in acquiring accreditation. He was a diligent student of the world at large, and liked things broken down into sequences. He had also taken courses in conversational French, creative writing, and quiltmaking.
Under his ministrations, I relaxed almost against my will. Without having decided to, abruptly, I fell asleep. It was utterly unlike me. But I’d been keeping late hours, and working long days. The sensation resembled that of slipping under an anesthetic. One moment I was awake, looking at a framed photograph of two bland-faced strangers propped on the nightstand, and the next I was being roused from slumber by a kiss.
I startled, and nearly jumped off the bed. For a moment I lost track of everything. Where was I, and whose cologned jaw was this? “Shh,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
“Oh God, did I fall asleep?” I asked. I was groggy and ashamed. Had I snored? Had I drooled?
“Just for a couple of minutes,” he said. He kissed my neck and gently but steadily positioned himself between my legs.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I’ve never, you know.”
“Just stay relaxed,” he said. “This is a dream you’re having.”
For some reason, I obeyed. Although my instinct was to return to myself, to quickly polish off the sex and get on about my business, I decided to relax. There was surprising, voluptuous pleasure in it. I let Erich manage things and our lovemaking passed as if in fact I was dreaming. He carried it through the way he pursued all his projects, with a scholar’s scrupulous attention. If our coupling lacked the abandon of true passion it had a schooled solidity that was the next best thing. Erich could pour a precise ounce of whiskey without measuring. He could make a double-wedding-ring quilt by hand. And he could tell how far to thrust, when to withdraw, when to throw in an unexpected move. I gave myself up to it. He enjoyed being in command, and I relinquished my own desire to impress.
We made love three times that night. After the first time we did not roll away. I didn’t make my escape. He held me, and I stroked his sparsely haired thigh. I could smell his sweat, which was sharp but not unpleasant. We embraced in silence for ten minutes or longer. Then he said, “Are you ready again?”
By the time I got dressed his apartment had lost some of its strangeness. It was not in any way an auspicious or even particularly comfortable home—a viewless room in a white brick building that must have been built, hurriedly, in the early sixties. It contained a platform bed covered with quilts, a stereo and television, and an absurdly large black sofa which, at sunrise, would begin its daily function of sucking up whatever light filtered in through the single window. On the wall was a silver-framed poster depicting a Matisse painting of a gaudy, lavishly draped room empty of life except for three dagger-shaped goldfish suspended in a bright blue bowl. Erich’s apartment could have been a doctor’s waiting room. It conveyed little about its inhabitant beyond a certain thin sorrow. Still, by the time I’d dressed, and had written down his phone number and left my own on a slip of paper, the apartment had taken on weight. It did not appear to be any less bleak than it had when we first arrived; it had merely begun to reveal itself as a place in which someone did, in fact, live. A red light blinked on the answering machine, signifying unheard messages. I blew Erich a kiss from the door, whispered, “See you later,” and walked three flights down to the street.
This was usually my favorite moment, after the sex was finished and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless; I couldn’t quite pick up my sense of myself. Twenty-fourth Street lay quietly in its bath of dark yellow light. A lone hooker strolled in black stockings and a fur jacket, and an all-night produce stand offered displays of oranges, waxy apples, and carnations dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. I was infused with a bodily pleasure that was intricately, brittlely edged in regret. Something had been lost, at least for the moment—some measure of possibility. I walked twenty blocks home, but couldn’t shake the feeling. It followed me like a thief.
I didn’t get home until after four. Clare was asleep. When I saw her the following evening, I didn’t offer to tell her much about Erich. Clare and I based our conversations about men on a shared attitude of ironic disdain, and I wasn’t sure how to present a man like Erich. I was not in love, but for once an evening’s sex had been something other than clownish comedy, desperation, or boredom.
Clare said, “You’re being very quiet about this, Jonathan. What exactly is up?”
“Nothing’s up.” We were sipping Pernod on the sofa. Pernod was our latest drink. We had a habit of brief but devout loyalties to different exotic liquors.
“You’re being circumspect,” she said, “and you’re not the type. Does this guy seem like he could turn out to be someone special? What exactly are you hiding?”
“‘This guy’ is another would-be actor slinging drinks in hell. He happens to be a great fuck.”
“Honey, don’t toss something like that off lightly,” she said. “I met my last great fuck in, what, 1979? Let’s have a few details, please. Come on, give. This is your Aunt Clare.”
She took a deep swallow of her drink, and I thought I saw under her friendly avidity the plain fear that I would leave her; that I’d disappear into love. It showed in her eyes and along her mouth, which could go stern and disapproving despite her lavish crimson lipstick.
“Honey, there are places even the best of friends can’t travel together,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not true,” she said. “You don’t mean that, you’re just embarrassed by the subject. Right?”
Clare and I kept no secrets—that was the heady, reckless aspect of our friendship. Perhaps it was our substitute for the creaturely knowledge other couples glean from sex. Clare and I confessed everything. We stripped ourselves naked and numbered our faults. We knew one another’s most disreputable fantasies; we confessed our deceits and greeds, our self-flattering lies. We described all our sexual entanglements, and we knew the condition of one another’s bowels.
And now, for the first time, I wanted to hold something apart. I wasn’t sure why. It may have been that very uncertainty I hoped to preserve. Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me—his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn’t know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.
But I chose that night not to cultivate secrets. I, too, feared solitude and abandonment, and I knew I would never make a life with Erich. He would, at best, have been a first step toward something uncertain that lay beyond the circle of domestic warmth I shared with Clare. She was my main love in the world. I had no other attachment half so profound.
So I told her everything. There wasn’t, as it turned out, very much to tell. When I had finished, Clare said, “Honey, you’ve just found yourself a Doctor Feelgood.” She sang a couple of lines from Aretha’s song. “‘Don’t call me no doctor, filling me up with all of them pills, I got me a man named Dr. Feelgood, makes me feel real gooo-oood.’”
That seemed a sufficient accounting, at least for the time being. Erich would be Doctor Feelgood. From that night on, the longer I called him by that name, the more perfectly it came to fit. Clare and I continued our sisterly relations with our loyalties undiluted. I had found myself a nice little thing on the side. Clare counseled me to ride it until it thinned out, as such flings inevitably did. That seemed like sound advice.
And so Erich and I started dating. Since he worked nights, we usually met after eleven. We’d have a drink or two in a bar, and go to his place.
I did not learn many particulars of his life. He had a singular ambition, an ill-defined but persistent one: to be recognized. The means by which he’d achieve recognition were uncertain—he was simply looking for a break, trying to position himself for discovery. He’d audition for anything. He tried out for Broadway musicals though he couldn’t sing. He’d work fourteen-hour days as an extra in any movie being shot in New York, and at Christmastime willingly played a life-sized mechanical soldier at F. A.O. Schwarz. He took endless acting classes, spoke convincingly of his ambition to become a better actor, but as I knew him longer, I began to realize that acting wasn’t really the point. Acclaim was the point, and his gig at the toy store provided roughly the same mix of satisfaction and anguish he’d have derived from playing the lead in a Broadway show. He enjoyed methodical pursuit and he worshipped attention; he did not dream of accomplishment per se. In his ordinary life he was all but invisible—he wore jeans and polo shirts, stammered his way through the simplest conversations, lived alone in a barren apartment. But at Schwarz during the Christmas season he never fell out of character, never ceased his stiff-limbed robotic movements during the whole of an eight-hour shift. In gym shorts on a 30° day he jogged forty-five times down the same block of Bleecker Street for the sake of being a shadowy, background figure in a movie that would never be released. At night, with the lights off, he was great in bed.
Although I saw him once or twice a week, I didn’t get to know him. I suspect he worried that if I—if anyone—came to know him too well, the motion of his life would somehow wind down—his obscure destiny would be confirmed. I myself worried that he lived on the brink of total surrender to another person’s will. I thought that when he finally, fully despaired of achieving fame he would make himself into a fan, find a lover and cheerfully relinquish every vestige of his will. Maybe I’d sensed it the first moment I saw him, nodding eagerly at an old man’s barroom conversation. He was practicing his powers of attention. I didn’t want them focused too ardently on me.
When we were together, we emphasized the local details: anecdotes from our working lives, the movies we’d loved or hated. Finally, on what may have been our tenth or fifteenth date, as we lay quietly sweating onto one another’s flesh, he said, “So, um, who are you, anyway?”
“What?”
His ears reddened. I suspected it was a line he’d picked up from a movie.
“What I mean is, I don’t really know anything about you,” he said.
“I don’t know much of anything about you either,” I said. “I basically know you’re an actor working as a bartender, you want to change jobs but aren’t doing anything much about it, and you loved The Killing Fields.”
“Well, I grew up in Detroit,” he said.
“I’m from the Midwest, too.”
“I know. From Cleveland.”
After a pause, he said, “Well, this is very interesting. We’re both from the Midwest. That really, you know, explains a lot, doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t explain much of anything,” I said. I believed this conversation was the beginning of the end for us, and I didn’t entirely mind. Goodbye, Doctor Feelgood. Set me back on the street in my own skin, with my old sense of a limitless future.
After a moment he said, “I used to be a musician. When I was a kid. I was crazy for it. I dreamed about it. I had dreams that were just music, just…music.”
“Really?” I said. “What did you play?”
“Piano. Cello. Some violin.”
“Do you still play?”
“No,” he said. “Never. I wasn’t, you know, good enough. I was pretty good. But not really good enough.”
“I see.”
We lay together for a while in uneasy silence, waiting to see what would happen next. We were neither friends nor lovers. We had no natural access to one another outside the realm of sex. I believed I could feel the weight of Erich’s unhappiness the way a diver feels the weight of the ocean, but I couldn’t help him. This was the price we paid for sleeping together first and getting acquainted later—we shared an intimacy devoid of knowledge or affection. I couldn’t listen to Erich’s confessions; I didn’t know him well enough for that. I remembered Clare’s admonition—ride it until it thins out.
“Listen,” I said.
He put a finger to my lips. “Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t talk. This isn’t really, you know, a very good time to talk.” He started to stroke my hair and nibble his way along my shoulder.
Our relations retained their halting, formal quality. Each time we saw one another, we might have been meeting for the first time. Months later, when I asked Erich about his old love of music, all he would say is “That’s over. That’s just, you know, ancient history. Have you seen any movies?” Our conversation stalled sometimes, and the ensuing silences refused to take on an aspect of ease. He never came to my apartment, never met Clare or any of my other friends. I left my life to visit him in his. In Erich’s company I developed a new persona. I was tough and slightly insensitive; a bit of an object. Our communion took place only at the bodily level, and that came to seem right for us. Anything else would have been sentimental, forced, indiscreet. Our relations were cordial and respectful. We did not infringe. I believe that in some way we despised one another. Because I brought nothing but my nerves and muscles to the affair, I found I could be surprisingly noisy in bed. I could walk unapologetically across the floorboards, my boots ringing like the strokes of an ax. And I could be a little cruel. I could bite Erich’s skin hard enough to leave red clamshell marks behind. I could fantasize about him—an unknown man—manacled, humiliated, stripped naked and tied to a Kafkaesque machine that fucked him relentlessly.
In my other life, I went out nightly with Clare for falafel or barbecued chicken or Vietnamese food. We argued over how much television a child should be permitted to watch. We agreed that the sterner reality of public school was an education in itself, and would balance the shoddy educations of the teachers. Sometimes handsome young fathers would stroll by the window of whatever restaurant we sat in, pushing strollers or cradling their sleeping children on their shoulders. I always watched them pass.
That was my life in the dead center of the Reagan years.
Then Bobby came to live in New York.
I STAYED in Ned and Alice’s house for almost eight years. The urge to do nothing and not change caught up with me; for eight years I squeezed roses onto birthday cakes and thought of what I’d make for dinner. Each day was an identical package, and the gorgeousness of them was their perfect resemblance, each to the others. Like a drug, repetition changes the size of things. A day when my cinnamon rolls came out just right and the sky clicked over from rain to snow felt full and complete. I thumped melons at the grocery store, dug walnuts from the bins with my hands. I bought new records. I didn’t fall in love. I didn’t visit my family’s graves, three in a row. I waited for asparagus and tomatoes to show up again, and played Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album until the grooves flattened out. I’d be living like that today if Ned and Alice hadn’t moved to Arizona.
The doctor announced it: Ohio air was too heavy with spoor and lake water for Ned’s tired lungs. It was go to the desert or start planning the funeral. That’s what he said.
At first I thought I’d go with them. But Alice sat me down. “Bobby,” she said, “honey, it’s time for you to get out on your own. What would you do in Arizona?”
I told her I’d get a bakery job. I told her I’d do what I was doing now, but I’d do it there instead.
Her eyes shrank, pulled in their light. The singular crease, one deep vertical line, showed up in her forehead. “Bobby, you’re twenty-five. Don’t you want more of a life than this?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I mean, this is a life, and I like it pretty well.”
I knew how I sounded—slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he’d planned it that way. I couldn’t quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn’t tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I’d expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I’d expected to feel more like one single person.
“Dearie, there’s more to it than this,” she said. “Trust me.”
“You don’t want me to go to Arizona,” I said in a balky cousin’s voice. Still, it was what I had to say.
“No. Frankly, I don’t. I’m pushing you out of the nest, like I probably should have some time ago.”
I nodded. We were in the kitchen, and I could see myself reflected in the window glass. At that moment I looked gigantic, like a geek from a carnival, with a head the size of a football helmet and arms that hung inches above the floor. It was strange, because I’d always thought of myself as small and boy-like, the next best thing to invisible.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
I understood that my life would change with or without my agreement. I understood that my supply of this particular drug—these red-checked dish towels and this crock of wooden spoons—was about to run out.
I decided to go to New York. It was the only other logical place. My Cleveland life depended on Alice and Ned—I needed their house to clean, their dinner to cook. I needed them to protect and care for. Otherwise Cleveland was just a place where things failed to happen. The air reeked of disappointment: river water thick as maple syrup, cinder-block shopping centers with three out of five units dark. Working in a bakery, you get to know the local unhappiness. People stuff whole cakes into their sorrow, brownies and cookies and Bismarcks by the dozen. The regularity of my days with Ned and Alice was like a campfire. I’d loved that part of Cleveland. But, without them, there would only be bus stops, and the wind blowing off Lake Erie. I wasn’t ready to be a ghost so soon.
I called Jonathan. I did it with true nervousness—by then we were more like relatives than friends. We bought presents, and smoked joints together before Christmas dinners. That was friendly enough. But months went by between holidays, and he wore clothes I would never have thought of on my own. He talked about theater; I went to the movies with Ned or watched TV with Alice. I lay in my room—formerly his room—for hours, just listening to music. Jonathan was quick and bright, going places, and although I loved him his visits always embarrassed me. In his presence I could feel like that gawky cousin or, worse, like a bachelor uncle; a jovial undemanding type who only knew the outer surface of things. Jonathan put my life in a miniaturizing light, and I couldn’t help looking forward to the day he got back on the plane because I knew on that day my life would return to its proper size, and I could walk down the Ohio streets with no washed-up, refugee feeling.
Still, when my Cleveland life ran out on me, I called Jonathan. I didn’t want an arbitrary new life in Boston or Los Angeles. I couldn’t imagine being so alone. And though I was friendly enough with Rose and Sammi and Paul at the bakery, I didn’t have what you could truthfully call friends. You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.
The first few times I called I got Jonathan’s answering machine, and couldn’t talk to it. Each time the machine answered I hung up with a small criminal pang. Finally, after almost a week of trying, he answered in person.
“Hello,” he said.
“Jon? Jonny?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Jon. It’s Bobby.”
“Bobby. Hey, this is a surprise. Is everything all right?”
That was where we were together. A phone call from me implied bad news about the family’s fortunes.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Fine and perfect, couldn’t be better.”
“Good. How are you?”
“I’m good. I’m very, very good. How about you?”
“Oh, all right,” he said. “You know. Life goes on.”
I sat through my own urge to say, “Well, that’s great, goodbye,” and hang up the phone. A scene from my possible Cleveland future passed in front of me. On my next birthday, the bakery would have a party for me. Rose, who’d be seventy by then, would kiss a lipstick mark onto my cheek and call me her best beau. There’d be a cake, free to the customers. We’d cut a big slice for George Dubb, a three-hundred-pound bachelor who bought Napoleons and a dozen Linzer cookies every day.
“Listen,” I said. “Um. You know how Ned and Alice are going to Arizona?”
“Well, sure. Sure I do. I think it’ll be good for them. They’ve needed a change of scene since about 1953.”
“Yeah. Well, you see, now that they’re leaving, I’ve been thinking, like, what am I hanging around here for? They tore down the Moonlight, did you hear about that?”
“No,” he said. “God, I haven’t thought about that place in ten years. Have you been going there?”
“Well, no. You and I went once. Remember? On acid.”
“I’ll never forget. I spent the whole night getting my skates on and going once around the rink.”
“It’s gone now,” I said. “It’s a Midas Muffler now.”
“Huh.”
“Jon?”
“Yes?”
“Would it be okay with you if I came to New York? I mean, could I stay with you for a little while? Just until I got, like, a job and an apartment?”
There was a pause. I could hear the buzz of the miles, all those voices cutting the air between Jonathan and me. He said, “Do you really want to come to New York?”
“Yeah. I really do. I think I really do.”
“It’s a rough place, Bobby. Last week somebody was murdered a few blocks from where I live. They found the body in four different trash cans.”
“I know it isn’t Cleveland,” I said. “I know that. But, Jonny. I’m, like, up to my elbows in frosting here. I mean, I’ve made a million cupcakes by now.”
He let another pause slip through the line. Then he said, “If you honestly think you want to give New York a try, of course you can stay with me. Of course you can. I’ll see what I can do to keep you safe here.”
I took the train, because it was cheaper and because I wanted to see exactly how much distance I was covering. I looked out the window the whole time, with my full attention, as if I was reading a book.
Jonathan met me at the station in New York. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, heavy black shoes with a dull shine like licorice. You could count on him to be wearing something you didn’t expect.
We hugged in the station, and Jonathan put a precise little kiss on my cheek. He led me out to the sidewalk. Seeing him hail a cab was my first lesson in how different we’d become. He stepped off the crowded curb and shot one hand straight up, with the calm certainty of a general. It was a small enough act, but the sense of his own entitlement was unmistakable. I myself tended to move like a long apology.
When we were in the back seat of the cab, Jonathan pinched my arm. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.
“Me neither. That’s why I wanted to see Pennsylvania go by, so I’d believe it. I mean, if I just got off a plane, this’d seem like, you know, some kind of hallucination.”
“It is. This city is just a dream you’re having,” he said. And during the time it took us to reach his apartment, we didn’t think of anything else we needed to say.
The cab crept through late-afternoon traffic. I had only been to New York once before, years earlier, when Jonathan was still in school. I’d been interested in it but it wasn’t about me; or rather it was only about me in the most indirect way, like a highway or a battleship. I’d done the tourist things. I’d gone to the tops of monuments and walked through Greenwich Village and had a drink with Jonathan and his friends at a bar where a famous poet died. I’d been comfortable in my tourist smallness, pleased with myself for being in an amazing place and for having a snug unsurprising home to return to.
Now I was going to live here. Now it was a different city altogether.
It shimmered. That was the first thing I noticed. Its molecules seemed more excited; things shivered and gleamed in a way that made them hard to see. The buildings and streets put out more light than the sky sent down—it all broke up in front of you, so your vision only caught the fragments. Cleveland offered itself differently, in bigger pieces. There you saw a billboard, a cloud, an elm standing over its own fat shadow. Here, my first ten minutes in New York, I could only be sure of seeing a woman’s red straw hat, a flock of pigeons, and a pale neon sign that said LOLA. Everything else was an ongoing explosion, the city blowing itself to bits, over and over again.
When we reached Jonathan’s apartment, things settled down and became more visible. He lived in a brown building on a narrow brown street. If Cleveland was mainly a gray city—limestone and granite—New York was brown, all rust and faded chocolate and schoolteacherish yellow-beige.
Jonathan said, “Here it is. The Tarantula Arms.”
“This is your building,” I said, as if I thought he might not be sure about it.
“This is it. I warned you. Come on, it’s better when you get inside.”
Inside, the stairwell floated in a green aquarium light. One fluorescent halo buzzed at each landing. I carried a suitcase and my backpack; Jonathan carried my other suitcase. I hadn’t brought much to my new life. Both suitcases were full of records. The backpack held my clothes, which, I could already see, had nothing to do with life in a city like this. I might have been an exchange student.
“We’re going up to the sixth floor,” Jonathan said. “Be brave.”
I followed him. The landings smelled like something fried. Slow Spanish music hung in the swampy light. As we went up I watched my borrowed suitcase, an old blue American Tourister of Alice’s, whump against Jonathan’s black-jeaned thigh. Even my suitcase looked wrong here—sad and hoarily innocent as an old virgin.
When we got to the sixth floor, Jonathan unlocked three locks and opened the metal door. “Ta-da,” he said as the door swung heftily open, squeaking on its hinges.
“Your place,” I said. I could not seem to shed the habit of telling him we had reached his apartment.
“And yours, too,” he said. He ushered me in with a bow.
The apartment was, in fact, a change from the underwater gloom of the stairs and hall. You stepped straight into the living room, which was painted orange-red, the color of a flowerpot. There was a sofa covered with a leopard-skin sheet, and a huge painting of a naked blue woman twisting ecstatically to reach something that hovered just off the edge of the canvas. The room was full of light. Streams of it tumbled in through the barred windows, which were bracketed by thick fifties curtains crawling with green and red leaves. If you pulled those curtains the sunlight would snap out like electricity. They were as weighty and businesslike as the metal door we had just passed through.
“Yow,” I said. And then, without meaning to: “This is your place.”
“My roommate Clare had a lot to say about decorating,” he said. “Come on, let’s take your things to my room.”
We went down a short hall, past two closed doors, to his room. His room was white, with no pictures on the walls. He had a futon on the bare wooden floor, and a white paper lamp that stood on wire legs thin as pencil lines.
“I got a little carried away with this Zen thing,” he said. “I just needed some relief from all that color.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I like white.”
We set my bags down, and stood through a moment of difficult silence. Over the years we’d lost our inevitability together; now we were like the relatives of two old friends who had died.
He said, “I’ve got a sleeping bag you can sleep in. And we’ll cram your things in the closet somehow.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you want to unpack now?”
I didn’t care about unpacking, but it would have been a logical next step. At that moment I felt I understood about the past. In another century a guest unpacked, and rested, and dressed for dinner, so that everybody had a good long period alone with himself. In the modern age, we have to negotiate vaster expanses of uninterrupted time.
“Okay,” I said. “I mean, I mostly brought records.”
He laughed. “That’s what you’d bring into a bomb shelter, isn’t it?” he said.
I opened the American Tourister and took out a short stack. “Have you heard Joni’s new one?” I asked.
“No. Is it good?”
“Excellent. Oh, hey, have you got this Van Morrison?”
“No. I don’t think I’ve listened to Van since I was in Cleveland, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh, this record’ll kill you,” I said. “He’s still, like, one of the best. I’m going to put it on, okay?”
“We don’t have a turntable,” he said. “Just a cassette player. Sorry.”
“Oh. Well,” I said.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Bobby,” he said. “We have music, too. We don’t live in silence. But if Van Morrison is a priority, we can go out right now and get him on tape. The biggest record store you’ve ever seen is about six blocks from here.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got stuff of your own I’ve probably never heard, right?”
“Sure. Of course we do. But look me straight in the eye. We need to go out and buy that Van Morrison tape right this minute, don’t we?”
“Naw,” I said. “It’s okay, really.” But Jonathan shook his head.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll take care of the important business first, and then we can unpack.”
He took me back out of the apartment, and we walked to a record store on Broadway. He had not been lying about that store. Nothing shy of the words “dream come true” would do here—it was the cliché made into flesh. This place spanned a city block; it filled three separate floors. In Ohio I had haunted the chain store in the mall, and the dying establishment of an old beatnik whose walls were still covered with pegboard. Here, you passed through a bank of revolving doors into a room tall as a church. The sound of guitars and a woman’s voice, clean as a razor, rocked over rows and immaculate rows of albums. Neon arrows flashed, and a black-haired woman who could have been in perfume ads browsed next to a little boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. It was an important place—you’d have known that if you were blind and deaf. You’d have smelled it; you’d have felt it tingling on your skin. This was where the molecules were most purely and ecstatically agitated. I believed then it was the heart of New York City. I believe it to this day.
We went downstairs to the cassette section, and found Van Morrison. We also found an old Stones Jonathan didn’t have, and Blonde on Blonde, and Janis Joplin’s greatest hits. Jonathan paid for them all with a credit card. He insisted. “This is your welcome-to-New-York present,” he said. “Buy me something when you’ve got a job.”
We walked back with our cassettes in a yellow plastic bag. It was early evening on a day without weather—a warm one with a blank white sky, one of those timeless days that are more like illuminated nights, when only the clock tells you whether it’s morning or afternoon. Jonathan and I talked about Ned and Alice as we traveled bright brown streets lined with Spanish grocery stores and warehouses that had already pulled down their metal grates. With those cassettes solidly in the bag and Jonathan talking about his parents I felt an early click of rightness about the place—as of that moment, I had history there. It was my first true experience of being in New York, walking down a street called Great Jones as a Wonder Bread wrapper, stirred by the day’s single gust of wind, skittered after us like a crazy pet.
When we got back to the apartment, Jonathan’s roommate Clare was home. We walked through the big door and she called, “Hello, dear.” Like a wife.
The living room was empty. She had called from offstage.
Jonathan answered, “Honey, we’ve got company.”
“Oh,” her voice said. “I forgot. It’s today, isn’t it?”
Then she came out.
I don’t know if I can describe Clare, though I can see her right down to her lazy way of gesturing, loose-wristed, until she gets to the point of the story, when she flicks her wrist with the lethal precision of a fly fisherman. If I close my eyes she’s there, and she’s there if I open them, too. But what I see is a way of walking and smiling, a way of sitting in a chair. All her moves are particular to her—she has a way of setting a glass on a table, of raising her shoulders when she laughs. Her appearance is harder to nail down. On first sighting, she was like New York made into a woman—she changed and changed. I could tell she was beautiful in a sharp, big-nosed way that had nothing to do with magazines. Her hair was orange then—it bristled as if her brain was on fire. She was several inches taller than I, with dark red lips. She wore tight pants, and a tiger-striped shirt that fell off her shoulders.
“Bobby, this is Clare,” Jonathan said.
She tilted her head in a hostess manner, and gave me a hand tipped with long purple fingernails. “Bobby,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you.”
I would learn later that she was raised by a good Lutheran mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and had never quite overcome her old habit of good manners. I said hello and shook her hand, which was strong and sure as an apple picker’s.
“We’ve been shopping,” Jonathan said. “We decided we needed a Van Morrison tape right away.”
I was grateful to him for explaining it as something we needed. I didn’t like to seem so delicate and peculiar, not right up front to a stranger.
“I love Van Morrison,” she said. “I used to have all his records. But, you know. You lose things in various divorce settlements.”
“Should I put this on?” I asked.
“Honey, absolutely,” she said. “Right over there.”
I walked across the room to the shelves where the sleek black tape player stood. On the shelf above it a collection of animal skulls silently displayed their empty sockets and their different arrangements of ivory-colored fang and tooth. Jonathan and Clare discussed domestic particulars. I got the cellophane off the cassette, punched Van into the machine, and pushed the Play button. After a few moments of soft mechanical whir, Van’s voice singing “Tore Down à la Rimbaud” filled the room. I took a breath, and I took another.
“Bobby?” Jonathan said. “Are you hungry?”
“I guess,” I said. I was looking at the skulls from a safe distance, surrounded by Van’s voice.
“How about if we listen to this for a while, then all go out for dinner?” Jonathan said. “It’s on the newspaper. I’m doing meat loaf this week, is that all right with you?”
“Sure,” I said. “Perfect.” I was lost in the music. I’d have agreed to beaver tail.
We stayed around the apartment through one side of the tape. Jonathan and Clare were being polite—they liked Van’s record well enough, but considered it background for a conversation. Clare asked courteous questions about my trip and my past life with Jonathan, which I suspect I must have answered with sweaty, grinning incoherence. I couldn’t concentrate with music in the room.
When side one was finished, we went out. Clare put on an old leather jacket with a white peace sign painted on the back. She made an odd kind of sense to me, though she was the least sensible-looking person I’d ever met. She had a gaudy openness—a circus quality, with no hint of a hidden agenda. She made you feel like you could take her hand as you walked down the street.
We went to a restaurant that didn’t look like a restaurant. An uninformed pedestrian might have thought it was a cheap insurance agency, with Venetian blinds and a few dusty bowling trophies displayed in the windows. But, inside, it was packed with people. Elvis Presley sang through the laughter and the clink of silverware. At a table near the door, a woman in a fur dress said something about gorillas, in an English accent.
I myself had on Calvin Klein jeans and a rugby shirt. It was my most interesting outfit. We sat at a table in a corner, so close to three other tables we had to slide sideways into our chairs. The walls were covered with souvenir plates and old postcards, with stuffed deer heads and kitchen clocks and faded record albums by Dusty Springfield and the Kingston Trio. A sign near my head said “Disregard This Sign.”
“This place has a lot of decor,” Clare said to me.
“Uh-huh.”
“More decor than the entire state of Maine,” Jonathan added.
“So, Bobby,” Clare said. “What do you think you want to do here? In New York.”
“I’m a pretty good baker,” I said. “I guess I’ll probably do that. I mean, that’s what I sort of know how to do.”
“I thought you came here to get out of the bakery business,” Jonathan said. “I thought you were drowning in all that fudge.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I guess I said that, yes. But, well, I don’t really know anything else. I mean, I can’t walk into a hospital and ask if they need any surgeons.” My ears burned. I felt like I was being tested on material I hadn’t studied.
“You’d probably be about as qualified as half the doctors there,” Clare said. “Now, sweetheart, listen to your aunt. One of the great features of New York is, you can do anything here. This is the Land of Opportunity, capital L, capital O. Here you can get paid to do just about anything you can think of.”
I nodded, aware that she was tracing little figure eights with a fingernail on the cloudy Formica. She had green eyes that didn’t waver, didn’t seek out the periphery when she talked to you. She wore one tinkling, complex silver earring that was half a foot long. Her effect on me resembled the effect of music. I had a hard time conversing in the face of her.
“It’s true, Bobby,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to rush right out and get the first job you can find. You have rich friends.”
“Um, what do you do?” I asked Clare.
“Basically, I play,” she said. “I run around town finding things to make jewelry out of.”
“Clare’s a designer,” Jonathan said.
“Hogwash. I’m a junk dealer, is what I am. If women ever stop wanting to look ridiculous, I’ll be out of a job.”
I looked at her tangerine hair, and wondered what kind of women she thought of as ridiculous-looking. What I said was “It sounds like, you know, fun.”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s a great scam. And when the baby comes, I can just do it at home.”
“You’re having a baby?”
“Didn’t Jonathan tell you? We’re expecting.”
Jonathan’s face darkened. Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock.”
“We’re not expecting, dear,” he said. “We’re still in the planning stages.”
“Same difference.”
I said, “I didn’t know you were, um—”
“Lovers?” Jonathan said. “We’re not. We’re just talking about becoming parents.”
“Oh.”
“Most parents aren’t lovers,” Clare said. “Mine weren’t. Mine were only married, and they didn’t care much for one another. At least Jonathan and I are good friends.”
“It’s the modern age,” Jonathan said, half apologetically.
I nodded. Then the waitress came, and we had to decide on dinner. Jonathan said he was professionally obliged to order meat loaf, but that Clare and I should have whatever we wanted. I had fried chicken with mashed potatoes, and Clare had the special—tuna-fish casserole, with potato chips crumbled on top.
After dinner we went for a walk. We walked down to the Hudson River and stood on a pier looking across the dark agitated water at New Jersey. On the far side a giant neon coffee cup spilled a red drop of coffee, then sucked it back up and spilled it again. Clare and Jonathan were both good talkers. I rode their talk as if it was a hammock stretched between them. Together, they were performers. They seemed happy enough to have an audience—I didn’t need to speak much. They talked about babies, about moving to the country, and about how to survive in New York. They traded tips on apartment hunting, and told one another where the bargains were.
“Honey,” Clare said to me, “I’m taking you to the Lower East Side on Sunday. That’s where you get the best deals.”
“It is not,” Jonathan said. “Clare has this peculiar devotion to Orchard Street.”
“Jonathan buys retail,” she said. Her voice implied that it was a slothful, possibly dangerous, practice.
“The Lower East Side,” said Jonathan, “is a fine place to shop if you want to look like a disco king, circa 1975.”
“Do I look like a disco king?” she said.
“It’s different for women. The world doesn’t conspire to make them look like assholes in quite the same way.”
“Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a department store should never make a statement like that. Don’t you listen to him, Bobby.”
I let myself swing along. I played a sound track, silently, inside my head.
We had cappuccinos in a restaurant with a garden, where Christmas lights blinked in the trees and a small marble boy pissed into a marble clamshell. Then we went home. Clare kissed me on the cheek, said, “Welcome to Perdition,” and disappeared into her own room. Jonathan and I spread his fat green sleeping bag out on the floor. He gave me a pillow from his bed.
When we were both settled, when the white paper light was out, he said, “Tomorrow I’ll take you up to Central Park. I figure if we do a different part of town every day, you’ll have your bearings by next week.”
“You know where I’d like to go?” I said. “Um, I’d like to go see Woodstock.”
“It’s over a hundred miles from here.”
“I know. I know that.”
“We could probably go sometime,” he said. “I’ve never been. I’m sure it’s pretty up there. Full of old hippies, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh. Hey, are you and Clare really having a baby?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been talking about it.”
“I like Clare,” I said.
“So do I.”
A spell of semi-dark silence passed. Noise from the street filtered in through the curtains.
“Bobby?” he said.
“Uh-huh?”
“I don’t know. I feel like there are things I need to talk to you about, but I don’t really know how. I’m not sure what to say.”
“Um, what things?” I asked. He lay on his back, with his head cradled in his hands. Sometimes he fell asleep that way, his waking ideas marching straight into his dreams. He could have trouble separating real memories from dreamed ones. I knew that about him.
“You know,” he said. “The things we used to do together. The, well, sexual things. I mean, we never talked about it, and after high school we just stopped. I guess I’m wondering what you thought about all that.”
I could hear my own breathing. This was a hard subject. I had realized by then that I didn’t feel what others called “desire.” Something was missing in me. I felt love—the strain and heat of it, the animal comfort mixed up with human fear. I felt it for all the Glovers, for Sammi at the bakery, for Dylan when he sang “Baby Blue.” But nothing built up in my groin. Nothing quickened, or struggled for release. I’d made a kind of love with Jonathan because he’d wanted to, and because I’d loved him. I’d had orgasms that passed through me like the spirits of people more devoted to the body than I was. These spirits were pleasant enough in passing but truly gone when they were gone. After Jonathan left town, I was alone inside myself. This lack was probably what had made it possible for me to live my bakery life in Cleveland; to need no sensations beyond the first feathers of November snow and the living hiss of a needle touching vinyl.
I said, “We were kids, Johnny. That was years ago.”
“I know. Are you, I mean, have you been seeing anyone?”
“Not really,” I said. “Basically, I’ve just been working and listening to records. It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? I mean, at my age.”
“Well, there are stranger things.”
We left it at that. We lay for a while with the noise washing over us—car horns and shouts. Just before I fell asleep I heard people passing by, laughing, a gigantic group of them—a cathedral choir of laughers.
I WANTED a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father’s daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn’t learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.
I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth’s belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I’d never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition.
I didn’t try to sleep with Bobby. He looked too much like a man who’d been in a cartoon accident. He might have had stars and planets fluttering around his head. You got the impression that he was slightly cross-eyed. But still, he touched you. Maybe because you believed that if you took your eyes off him for too long, he’d have another accident. He’d grin rapturously, and fall through an open manhole. He’d get hit by a falling piano, and come up with a mouthful of keys where his teeth should be. I hated to think I was getting protective at the threshold of middle age. I hated to think I was developing a weakness for stunned, inefficient men who’d need looking after, the way my mother looked after my father until her patience failed.
Although I kept my hands off him I couldn’t deny Bobby’s shaggy, lost-pony appeal. He had big square hands and a face blank and earnest as a shovel. If it weren’t for his eyes, his innocence would have been too lunar to touch. It was his eyes that cut through. Imagine a snug little house in the suburbs, with a plaster dwarf on the lawn and petunias in the window boxes. Then imagine someone ancient and howlingly sad looking out through an upstairs window. That was Bobby’s face. That’s what it was about him.
All I did was notice him, though. Lately I was bothered by desire the way a horse is bothered by flies. It was a minor, if persistent, irritation. It could be flicked away.
Maybe the money was what hampered me. My family had money; my mother’s side did. Not the genteel, Old World kind—my mother’s father made a killing in costume jewelry. He built the third-biggest house in Providence. He changed his name from Stein to Stone, sent my mother to Wellesley. It’s an old story. Rhinestone king shoots for legitimacy through the progress of generations. He bought my mother a Seven Sisters education, set up a trust for me before I was born. According to his timetable the blood would be purified by steady exposure to money, and his great-grandchildren would be true aristocrats, with composure and a serene sense of their own worth. He died when I was ten. But I know the future he had in mind. A cast-iron deer had raised stiff antlers on his front lawn. Gold-plated fish had spit water into the bathroom sinks.
Desire fouled the plan, though. My mother didn’t care for the boys she met at Wellesley mixers, or they didn’t care for her. She had decisive features and the grim, secretive manners of a jeweler. She didn’t flirt. She harbored operatic passions, or believed she did, and had no interest in coy little experiments. A hundred years earlier she’d have been known as a good woman. At Wellesley in the nineteen-forties she could only have been known as a drag. She walked in a disgruntled trance through four years of college and then married my father, who said he was “in sales” and who had enough personality for both of them. He was her one adventure. She never wanted another.
I don’t know if he married her for money. I don’t think it was as simple as that. My father was a seducer. He bored easily. He must have liked the challenge posed by my mother, a woman who never feigned laughter or any other polite reaction and who’d been accepted by every law school she’d applied to. He was a great, frivolous beauty. Maybe he thought she knew him in some deeper way, and could redeem him through her unamused powers of scrutiny. Maybe he planned on loosening her up.
When I was younger all my lovers had been clenched, possessive people. My husband Denny had danced six hours a day, and still despised himself for dilettantism. My lover Helene had had screaming opinions on every subject from women’s rights to washing spinach. I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I’d suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you’d have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret. I’d offered lovers my willingness and susceptibility—it seemed to be all I had. I’d worked out a general policy of pliable sweetness toward people who eventually changed the locks over some unguessable offense of mine. Who claimed they’d die if I left them but slapped me in a rage when I brought home the wrong brand of beer. After the divorce I’d gone from one lover straight to the next, thinking every time that I’d learned a lesson I wouldn’t repeat. This new lover would have a sense of humor, or wouldn’t take drugs. This new one would be a woman, or a black man, or a computer magnate whose heart belonged to data.
Since my early thirties I’d been retired from love. I’d been living like a child. Just hour to hour, while other women my age went to their own children’s recitals and school plays. Drifting wasn’t hard. I had a silly little job, and a big lump of inheritance money waiting for me when I turned forty. There were people to meet for coffee, and movies and clubs to go to. Time had passed pleasantly. And now—it seemed so sudden—salesgirls called me “ma’am.” Young men didn’t glance up automatically when I passed them in the street. I no longer showed on their radar screens.
In a sense I liked the way I was aging. I’d invented a life of my own. I wasn’t a prim careerist living with two cats in a town house full of ancient maps. I wasn’t a drunk drifting from binges to purges and back again. I was proud of that. But still, I’d expected by this time of life to have developed a more general sense of pride in my larger self. I’d thought I’d be able to say, if somebody asked me, just exactly what I was doing in the world.
IT WAS the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own—a wilder orbit inside the earth’s calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn’t open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places. Here, people drove through red lights. They walked cursing in front of cars.
I didn’t find a job right away. I admit that I put out a mild-hearted effort. Jonathan went to the office most days. Sometimes he stayed until midnight. He called the paper’s fame a natural disaster—a volcano that wouldn’t stop erupting long enough for the village to rebuild. The typesetter edited copy, the receptionist did overflow paste-up work with six calls on hold and three advertisers checking their watches in the slick new white-on-white reception room. Along with his weekly column, Jonathan laid out the entertainment pages and wrote reviews of movies he hadn’t seen, under an assumed name. Some mornings he mainlined two cups of coffee, steamed out the door, and wasn’t back for sixteen hours.
Clare led an easier life. She was one of those people who have more money than they logically should, given what they do. But I wasn’t in a questioning mode. I was glad for the company.
I always got up when Jonathan did. I brewed coffee while he showered. We talked and played music as he dressed himself in that day’s black. When he was ready he’d kiss me on the cheek. He’d kiss Clare, too, if she was up by then. He’d say, “Bye, dears,” and take off with half a bagel in his hand.
Once he was gone, the morning switched over to its more leisurely pace. Its housewifely, daylight life. Clare and I sat at the dining-room table with second and third cups. We looked through the classifieds. Sometimes she redid her nails in a new color. Sometimes we watched The Price Is Right.
She left for work at a quarter to eleven. I straightened up the house, bought groceries for dinner. I went to the record store every day. I didn’t buy records. I stood listening to whatever the store had picked as a background for shopping. I watched other people figure out what someone like them would want to listen to.
Clare came home by seven. I always had dinner ready. Jonathan ate out every night so he could write about the food. Clare said she used to meet him wherever, and eat with him, but was happy to have a break from eating the same thing all week. Sometimes after dinner she went places with her friends, and sometimes she stayed home with me, listening to music and watching television. She said going out was starting to seem more like work than her job. On the nights she stayed home we made popcorn and drank Diet Coke. Sometimes she repainted her nails for the second time that day. And on a Wednesday night in June, she took on the long work of redoing me.
She began it with a haircut. Jonathan was at the office, and Clare and I had gone to the movies. She’d taken me to see All About Eve, shocked that I’d never heard of it. It turned out to be an old gray-and-white comedy playing at a theater where a mouse ran across our feet, quick and feathery as a bad impulse.
Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room. I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard Steve Reich?”
I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on right now.” And she did.
Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was the kind of electronic music that doesn’t come from instruments—that seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.
By then, Clare knew me well enough to let me listen. She didn’t talk about unrelated matters during Steve Reich any more than she would have during All About Eve. When the record was finished, I said, “Whew.”
“I thought you’d like him,” she said.
“Oh, yeah. He’s great. He’s just, you know—”
I tried to finish the sentence by approximating the shape of the music with my hands. I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to tell her.
She did shake her head and say, “Bobby.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Nothing. You really are a fanatic, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t tell where my fanaticism placed me in her view of the world. I didn’t know whether to claim it or deny it. I looked at the rug pattern between my feet.
“Do you know what I think?” she said. “Can I be absolutely honest with you?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, curious about absolute honesty and fearing it with my whole heart.
“I think you need a new haircut, is what I think.”
It was only an outer suggestion, a question of cosmetics rather than personal insufficiency. “Really?” I said.
“I’m talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don’t quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else’s whole life.”
I shrugged again, and smiled. “This is my life,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like the wrong one.”
“But this is just the beginning. You’re not going to sit around this apartment cooking and cleaning forever.”
“Right,” I said, though truthfully I had drifted halfway into the conviction that that was exactly what I’d do.
“And, sweetie, that Bee Gees haircut is only going to mislead people. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go to a, you know, haircut place.”
My stomach crawled. Would I need clown-colored hair to have a New York life? If I let that happen, I wouldn’t fit back into Cleveland, or into Ned and Alice’s Arizona house. All my backup options would snap shut.
“I could do it,” she said. “Free of charge.”
“Really?”
I could tell from her laughter that my every doubt had sounded through that single word.
“I went to hairdressing school, if you can believe that,” she said. “I’ve still got my scissors, I can give you a new look right now. What do you say?”
I paused. Then I decided. It was only hair. I could grow it back to its present state and reapply for my Ohio job; I did not have to lose the thread of my old life.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
She had me take my shirt off, which was the first embarrassment. I was not in trim or imposing shape. I looked exactly like someone who’d worked in a bakery. But Clare had already switched over to a crisp hairdresser’s manner, and did not let her attention stray below my collarbone. She told me in a firmly professional voice to soak my head under the kitchen faucet. Then she put a towel over my shoulders and sat me in a chair in the middle of the living-room floor.
I told her, “The barber at home always just trimmed a little off the sides.”
“Well, I’m preparing to do major surgery,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
“No,” I said, before the instinct to tell cooperative lies could assert itself.
She laughed. “Well, why should you? But just try and relax, okay? Let Momma take care of it.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in with the scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is good practice. The scissors snipped close to my ear. Wet clumps of my hair, surprisingly dead and separate-looking, fell on the floor around me.
“Just keep going until you’re finished, okay?” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to look until you’re all through.”
“Perfect,” she said. She stopped cutting for a minute and put Van Morrison on, to help keep me calm.
She spent almost forty-five minutes on my haircut. I felt the warmth and the faint jasmine smell of her, the quick competent fingers on my scalp. I felt the tickle of her breath. Once it was started I’d have been glad to have the haircut go on all night—to never see my transformed head but just sit shirtless amid a growing pile of my own shed hair, with the crackle of Clare’s scented concentration hovering around me.
But then, finally, she was through. With a deep exhalation and a last snip at my temple she said, “ Voilà. Come into the bathroom and see the result.”
I let her lead me, though I knew the way well enough. I wanted to stay a little longer in the cooperative mode, with the state of my hair and my future taken out of my hands. She led me into the bathroom, stood me in front of the mirror, and turned on the overhead fixture.
“Ta-da,” she said. And there I was, blinking in the light.
She’d given me a crew cut. The sides were so short my scalp shone through, and the top was a single bristly shelf. Seeing my own face under that haircut, I got my first good look at myself from the outside. I had ears that were small and stingy, curled up on themselves. I had narrow glittering eyes, and a big nose that split at the tip, as if it were meant to be two smaller noses. Those features had always seemed inevitable. Now I saw how particular they were. Seeing my face in the harsh light, backed by white tiles, I might have been a relative called in to identify a body. If we have spirits that fly out when the system shuts down, this may be how we see our own vacated selves—with the same interest and horror we bring to an accident victim.
“Yow,” I said.
“You look wonderful,” she told me. “Give it a little time. I know it’s a shock at first. But trust me. You’re going to start turning heads around here.”
I just kept staring at the face in the mirror. If this was who I was supposed to be, I didn’t know how to do it. Clare might as well have taken me to a pay phone and told me to dial Jupiter.
She said we had to wait up for Jonathan, to show him the new me. I didn’t much like the idea of showing myself to Jonathan. I felt too foolish in my exposed vanity, my own willingness to be remade. Still, I agreed. As I’ve said, Clare had a musical effect on me. She entered my brain. I found myself not only doing what she wanted but losing track of where my desires ended and hers began.
While waiting for Jonathan, we did what had become our usual things. We made popcorn and worked our way through a six-pack of Diet Coke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore. I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed.
Jonathan got home after one. When we heard his key, Clare made me hide in the kitchen. “I’m going to sit here very normally,” she whispered. “I’ll keep him in the living room. After a few minutes, you just walk casually out.”
I was reluctant to perform that way. To spotlight my self-concern. But Clare was too big and bright-haired for me. I had a dim recollection of a birthday party at which an old man in a red nose and lettuce-colored wig plucked quarters from my ears and pulled a paper bouquet from inside my shirt. Yes, I’d pretended unhumiliated astonishment and delight.
So I went to the dark kitchen as Jonathan came through the door. I heard the porcine squeak of the hinges, and his simple conversation with Clare. “Hi, honey.” “Hello, dear.” “How’d it go?” “Cataclysmic. The usual.” They could sound more perfectly like a husband and wife than any couple I’d met. I understood how having a baby could come to seem like their logical next step.
I listened to them. Weak air-shaft light floated in through the window like fog. Clare’s mason jars full of herbs put out a dull grandmotherly gleam on the sill. They bore their names on paper labels, in her small spiky handwriting: foolscap, star anise, nettle.
I heard Jonathan ask, “Where’s Bobby?”
“Oh, he’s around somewhere,” she answered.
That would have been my cue. It was time to walk out as if nothing unusual had happened. What I did, though, was stay in the kitchen. I got distracted by the pale darkness, the refrigerator’s hum and the jars of spices meant to cure headaches, insomnia, and bad luck. I might have been a body buried in a brick wall, eavesdropping on the simple business of the living. It came to me that death itself could be a more distant form of participation in the continuing history of the world. Death could be like this, a simultaneous presence and absence while your friends continued to chat among the lamps and furniture about someone who was no longer you. For the first time in years I felt my brother’s presence. I felt it, unmistakably—the purpose and somethingness of him, the Carlton quality that lingered after voice and flesh and all other bodily consequences were gone. I felt him in that kitchen as surely as I’d felt him one cold white afternoon in the graveyard, years ago, when a brilliant future shimmered beyond the headstones, beyond the curve of the earth. He’s here, I said to myself, and I knew it was true. I had worked up a habit of not thinking about him; of treating myself as if I’d been born into Ned and Alice’s house after our father died. Now I thought of them all, dead in Cleveland. Right now there would be wild daisies on their graves, and dandelions gone to fluff. My harmonica, which I’d tucked into Carlton’s breast pocket at the funeral home, would have slipped through his ribs and clunked onto the coffin boards. I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen—into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. Outside, a line of laundry hung in the air shaft. Empty shirtsleeves dangled. I saw that as myself and my brother combined—in both our names—I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feed him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. I watched a white dress shirt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.
Finally, she came for me. She asked if I was all right, and I told her I was fine. I told her I was wonderful. When she asked what was going on, I gestured helplessly in the direction of the hanging clothes. She made a clucking noise, thinking I’d suffered a simple attack of shyness, and led me out by the hand.
Jonathan shrieked at the sight of my hair. He said I looked dangerous. “A Bobby for the eighties,” Clare proudly announced, and I didn’t disagree with her. Although Jonathan was exhausted, we took my hair out for a walk in the Village. We had drinks at a gay place on St. Marks and danced together, all three of us. I might have broken through a pane of glass and reached the party, after years of sitting in a graveyard thinking I was alive. When we got tired of dancing I insisted on walking down to the pier on the Hudson, to watch the neon coffee drip from the big neon cup. Then Clare and Jonathan got in a cab for home and I kept walking. I walked all over New York. I went down to Battery Park, where Miss Liberty raised her small light from the harbor, and I walked up to the line of horse carriages waiting hopefully for extravagant drunks and romantics outside the Plaza. I was on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties when the sky started to lighten. A bakery truck rolled by, the driver singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” in a loud off-key voice, and I sang along with him for half a block. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.
After that, changes were easy. There was no more need to stay married to the everyday. Clare made a hobby of changing me. She took me shopping for clothes in the thrift stores on First Avenue, where she knew all the salesclerks and half the customers. When shopping, Clare had the concentration of a mother eagle browsing for trout. She could swoop down on a cardboard carton full of bright polyester rags—stained Woolworth’s stuff that had been sad and desperate-looking when it was new—and pull out a silk shirt swarming with bright yellow fish. Hers was a garish but scavenging personality; you knew from her eyes that the things she wanted put out a faint glow not visible to other shoppers. I let her make the choices, and after two weeks I had a cheap new wardrobe of old clothes. I had baggy pants from the forties, and loose rayon shirts in putty and tobacco colors. I had old black jeans, and a leather motorcycle jacket, and a box-shouldered black sport coat shot through with random pewter threads. I even had strangers’ shoes: brown Oxfords with toes made of brittle leather mosquito net, and black army boots, and a pair of black sneakers spattered with paint.
I had an earring, too. Clare had pulled me into a jewelry store on Eighth Street, and in less time than it takes to say the word “change” a Middle Eastern man had punched a silver post into my left earlobe with a hydraulic gun. It was no more painful than a blackfly’s bite. Clare promised she’d make me a perfect earring. The Middle Eastern man smiled. He appeared to have teeth carved from a single piece of wood.
Those days I surprised myself each time I saw my reflection in a store window. I might have been my own rough twin, come from some meaner place to make trouble for ordinary working people. The man whose face I saw floating over shop displays would not have written “Happy Birthday” on ten thousand cakes. He would not have lived contentedly in an upstairs bedroom with a view of the neighbors’ jungle gym.
Clare introduced me to her friends: Oshiko the cynical hat designer; Ronnie the high-strung painter who spoke only in full paragraphs; Stephen Cooper who talked about cashing in his marijuana-import business and buying a jewelry store in Provincetown, where he could pay closer attention to his mystical gifts. Those people were like movies playing around me—I watched and listened with the same easy self-relinquishment you’d bring to a seat in the fifth row. They enjoyed being the characters they’d created, and didn’t depend on me for input. So we got along. I stood or sat in my clothes, watching things happen. If I developed a local reputation at all, it was for mystery and immovable calm. I learned that New Yorkers—at least the ones Clare knew—value silence in others. Their days and nights are so full of noise. Clare’s friends were willing to chalk my silence up to inner knowledge, when in fact I mainly watched, and thought of nothing. Every now and then I asked a question, or answered one. I wore the earring Clare made for me, a wire loop with a silver teardrop-shaped bead, a circle of rusted metal, and a tiny silver-winged horse. Sometimes she asked with a hint of nervousness if I was having a good time, and I always told her yes. It was always the truth. Going to those places—noisy clubs with unmarked entrances, parties in lofts white and spare as the Himalayas—made me simply and purely happy. I had been in a graveyard for years; now I was at the party. In the middle of all that life, I kept quiet as a ghost. A beautiful girl with skin the clear blue-white of skim milk walked serenely among the dancers with a fat, speckled snake coiled around her waist. Two boys in plaid schoolgirlish dresses stood gravely side by side, holding hands as if they were guarding the entrance to a sterner, more difficult world and couldn’t imagine that no one would try to get in.
But the best times were the nights Jonathan got off work early enough to go out. Sometimes it would be the two of us, and sometimes Clare came along. On Jonathan’s nights we went to movies, then for drinks in one of the bars we liked. Clare’s other friends were more intent on giving their lives a fabulous, windswept quality. They had dedicated themselves to motion and to knowing the exact right place, the party inside the party. I could understand that urge. But Jonathan, Clare, and I favored elderly bars that had caved in under the weight of dailiness. The Village was full of them then, and is full of them today. They maintain a stale interior dimness the color of dark beer. They sell potato chips and peanuts from a system of wire clips. Regulars—quiet steady drunks who believe things are getting worse and never cause a ruckus—sit on the bar stools as solid as roosting hens. We always took a booth in the rear.
We took to calling ourselves the Hendersons. I don’t remember how it started—it was part of a line tossed out by Clare or Jonathan, and it stuck. The Hendersons were a family with modest expectations and simple tastes. They liked going to the movies or watching TV. They liked having a few beers in a cheap little bar. When we went out together, the three of us, we called it “a night with the Hendersons.” Clare came to be known as Mom, I was Junior, and Jonathan was Uncle Jonny. The story took on details over time. Mom was the boss. She wanted us to mind our manners and sit up straight, she clicked her tongue if one of us swore. Junior was a well-intentioned, shadowy presence, a dim-witted Boy Scout type who could be talked into anything. Uncle Jonny was the bad influence. He had to be watched. “Junior,” Clare would say, “don’t sit too close to your Uncle Jonny. And he doesn’t need to go into the bathroom with you, you’re big enough now to manage just fine on your own.”
We came and went in the Henderson mode. It wasn’t something we always did. It was the story we drifted into when we lost interest in our truer, more complicated story. Before Jonathan left in the mornings he might say, “I should be through at a decent hour tonight, would the Hendersons like to go see the Fassbinder movie?” Clare and I nearly always said yes, because our lives were freer. We preferred a night with the Hendersons to our other entertainments. Sometimes when Clare and I were alone together she’d say something in her Mom voice, a shrill and vaguely British variation on her actual voice. But without Uncle Jonny, the Hendersons didn’t work. Without our bad uncle we were too simple—just bossy Mom and the boy who always obeyed. We needed all three points of the triangle. We needed mild manners, perversity, and a voice of righteousness.
I found work, just a nothing job doing prep at an omelette parlor in SoHo. I told people, and sometimes I told myself, that I was learning the restaurant business from the bottom up, so that someday I could have my own place again. But I didn’t believe in that ambition, not really. I could only inhabit it for a few minutes at a time, by concentrating on details: my future self frowningly checking a tray of desserts before they left the kitchen, or running my hand along a mahogany bartop smooth and prosperous as a brood mare’s flank. I could want that. It could pull the heat to the surface of my skin. But the moment I lost my concentration I fell right back into my present life, just being in New York with Jonathan and Clare, doing an ordinary job. I was content to spend my days with the Mexican dishwasher in the restaurant’s greasy kitchen, chopping mushrooms and shredding Gruyère. That was still my embarrassing secret.
One hot night in August I took a shower and walked naked into Jonathan’s bedroom, believing myself to be alone in the apartment. Clare had an old friend in town, who needed to be shown the sights, and Jonathan was supposed to be working. The black sky hung thick and heavy as smoke, and bums left sweat angels behind when they slept on the sidewalks. I walked in singing “Respect,” with water beads sizzling off my skin, and found him on the floor, taking off his sneakers.
“Hi,” he said.
“Oh, hey. I thought you were, you know, at work.”
“The air-conditioning at the office broke down, and we just decided we don’t care if the paper doesn’t come out this week. There are limits, even in journalism.”
“Uh-huh.” I stood self-consciously, two steps in from the hallway. There was the problem of what to do with my hands. In this apartment, we were not casually naked. It wasn’t something we did. I felt my own largeness heating up the air. Though Jonathan looked at me with friendly interest, I could only think of how I’d come down, in the fleshly sense. When we were wild young boyfriends, more nervous than ecstatic in one another’s hands, I’d been proud of my body. I’d had a flat, square chest. My belly skin had stretched uncushioned over three square plates of muscle. Now I carried an extra fifteen pounds. I’d grown a precocious version of my father’s body—a barrel-shaped torso balanced on thin legs. I stood there in my furred, virginal flesh, sending water vapor into the air.
“You just take a shower?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“That sounds like it could make the difference between life and death.” He peeled off his socks and pulled his black T-shirt over his head. He dropped his black cutoffs, telling me how the staff of the newspaper decided to go home early when the receptionist’s desktop rose dropped its head and shed all its petals. “Like a canary in a coal mine,” he said.
He took all his clothes off. I hadn’t seen Jonathan naked since we were both sixteen, but his body was just as I remembered it. Slim and almost hairless, unmuscled—a boy’s body. He had not grown new outposts of hair or fat. He had not taken on the heroic V shape of a more disciplined life. His skin looked fresh and taut as risen bread dough. His pink nipples rode innocently on the pale curve of his chest. The only change was a small red dragon, with a snake’s body and a mistrustful look, he’d had tattooed on his shoulder.
He grinned at me, slightly embarrassed but unafraid. I thought of Carlton, boy-naked in the cemetery under a hard blue sky.
“I’m going to turn the cold on full blast,” he said. “And I bet it’ll still feel tepid.”
“Yeah. It will,” I said.
He walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. I followed him. I could have stayed in the bedroom and put my clothes on, but I didn’t. I sat on the toilet lid and talked to him while he showered.
When he was finished we went into the living room together. Our nudity had clicked over by then, lost its raw foolishness. Our skins had become a kind of clothing. He said, “The trouble with this place is, there’s no cross ventilation. Do you think it’d be any cooler on the roof?”
I said yes, maybe it would be. He told me to wait, and ran to the bathroom. He came back with two towels.
“Here,” he said, tossing me one. “For decency’s sake, in case we run into somebody.”
“You mean go up there with nothing but a towel on?”
“People have done worse things in lesser emergencies. Come on.”
He got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. We wrapped the towels around our waists, and went barefoot into the hallway. It was mostly quiet. Electric fans whirred behind closed doors, and salsa music drifted up the stairwell. “Shh,” he said. He tiptoed in an exaggerated way up the stairs to the roof, holding the dripping blue plastic ice tray. I stuck close behind.
The roof was black and empty, a tarred plateau surrounded by the electric riot of the city. A hot wind blew, carrying the smell of garbage so far gone it was turning sweet. “Better than nothing,” Jonathan said. “At least the air’s moving.”
There was a dreamlike feel, standing all but naked in the middle of everything like that. There was excitement and a tingling, pleasant fear.
“It’s nice up here,” I said. “It’s sort of beautiful.”
“Sort of,” he said. He took his towel off, and spread it on the tar paper. His skin was ice-gray in the dark.
“People can see you,” I said. Two blocks away, a high-rise blazed like a city in itself.
“Not if we lie down,” he said. “It’s pretty dark up here. And, besides, who cares if they do see us?”
He lay on his towel as if he was at the beach. I took mine off and spread it near his. Moving air from Third Street, full of car horns and Spanish music, touched my exposed parts.
“Here.” He cracked the plastic tray. He handed me an ice cube, and kept one for himself. “Just rub yourself with it,” he said. “It isn’t much, but it’s all we’ve got.”
We lay side by side on our towels, running the ice over our sweating skins. After a while he reached over and pressed his own ice cube against the mound of my belly. “As long as Mom’s out,” he said, “let old Uncle Jonny take care of you.”
“Okay,” I said, and did the same to him. We didn’t talk any more about what we were doing. We talked instead about work and music and Clare. While we talked we ran ice over one another’s bellies and chests and faces. There was sex between us but we didn’t have sex—we committed no outright acts. It was a sweeter, more brotherly kind of lovemaking. It was devotion to each other’s comfort, and deep familiarity with our own imperfect bodies. As one cube melted we took another from the tray. Jonathan swabbed ice over my back, and then I did it to him. I felt each moment break, a new possibility, as we lay using up the last of the ice and talking about whatever passed through our heads. Above us, a few pale stars had scattered themselves across a broiling, bruise-colored sky.
I’D BEEN thinking of having a baby since I was twelve. But I didn’t start thinking seriously about it until my late thirties. Jonathan and I had joked about parenthood—it was our method of flirtation. We always had a scheme going. That was how we discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up. It’s strange for two people to be in love without the possibility of sex. You find yourself planning trips and discussing moneymaking ventures. You bicker over colors for a house you’ll never own together. You debate names for a baby you won’t conceive.
Lately, though, I wasn’t so sure. I’d get my money in a little over a year, more than half a million, but at thirty-eight you can’t think of your life as still beginning. Hope takes on a fragility. Think too hard and it’s gone. I was surprised by the inner emptiness I felt, my heart and belly swinging on cords. I’d always been so present in the passing moments. I’d assumed that was enough—to taste the coffee and the wine, to feel the sex along every nerve, to see all the movies. I’d thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing that happened.
Soon there would be an important addition to the list of things I was too old to do. I could see the danger: aging woman in love with gay man gets pregnant to compensate herself for the connections she failed to make. I couldn’t follow that course with a straight face. Still, it gnawed at me. Jonathan had work, and a lover I’d never met. He had the latitude still available to a man of twenty-seven. With my breasts shifting lower on my rib cage, I wanted something permanent. I wanted to do a better job with a child than my parents had done with me. I wanted my money and health and good fortune to be put to better use.
One night Bobby came out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts, singing “Wild Horses.” I was going into my room and we inched past one another in the hall. He smiled. He had a soft, bulky body, muscles vying with incipient fat. My mother would have called him “a big husky fellow,” approvingly. Marriage to my father had cured her of her interest in slender, devious men. Bobby was a Midwestern specimen. He was strong and square-boned, untroubled. I said, “Hey, gorgeous.”
His face reddened. In the late eighties there was still a man living in New York City who could blush at a compliment. He said, “Um, I’ll be ready in a little bit.”
We were going out somewhere. I don’t remember where. I said, “Take your time, nobody’ll be there before midnight anyway.”
“Okay.” He went into the room he shared with Jonathan. I paused, then walked into the bathroom and rubbed a circle on the steamed mirror. There was my face. Neither pretty nor plain. I’d always been a queasy combination of my mother and father.
Surprisingly, my mother was growing better-looking. At an age when women are considered “handsome” rather than “beautiful,” she was in fact quite handsome: slightly mannish, broad-faced, with scrubbed pink skin and hair gone from brown to gunmetal gray. Her inexpressive face hadn’t wrinkled, and her abrupt, businesslike manner seemed more attractive as other women her age began appearing in stiff ruffles and too much rouge. My mother had caught up with herself. She’d found her beauty. She was always meant to be sixty, even as a girl.
My father, on the other hand, had withered like a plum. His cheeks had deflated and touched bone. His bristly, blue-black hair had dissolved, and the skin hung loose and leathery on his neck. As a girl I’d looked hopefully in mirrors for every sign of my father’s face remade in mine. Now I checked for signs of his deterioration, and found them. My neck had gone a little slack. The skin around my eyes was darkening. The genes were at work.
Mother, you didn’t need to be so jealous of Dad’s love for me. You’re winning in the end. You’re a good-looking attorney untroubled by lusts. Dad and I are fading, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves.
I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I went to Bobby and Jonathan’s room, and stood in the doorway. Bobby was bent over a dresser drawer, looking for a pair of socks. His ass was larger than the ideal, but shapely. If the word “Rubensesque” applied to men, it would be perfect for Bobby. His flesh was ample but proportionate, like those old pink-and-white beauties cavorting in dusky glades. There was something maidenly about his reticence, though he wasn’t feminine in the least. He might have been a stag. A precise tiny-hoofed creature, shy but not delicate.
I said, “Why don’t you wear the black gabardine shirt tonight?”
He jumped at the sound of my voice. There was something erotic about surprising him. I felt it like a zipper pulled in my stomach. I was a hunter and he a stout, unsuspecting buck.
“Um, okay,” he said.
I went to the closet and took out the shirt. “This is one of my favorites,” I said. “We should try and get you another like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
I held the shirt up to his bare torso. “Beautiful,” I said.
Again, the color rose to his face. It wasn’t working. Nothing sexual entered the room. I was too motherly in my concern for his appearance. We hadn’t worked out a subtext.
Some things couldn’t be willed. I’d spent a good deal of time learning even that small lesson.
“Maybe we’ll go out for a drink first,” I said. “We don’t want to get there too early.” I laid the shirt on Jonathan’s futon. It was black and crisp against the white batting, a snapshot of sexless male beauty. I went to my own room to start putting my face together for another night on the town.
A month passed. Winter came early that year. A week before Thanksgiving, snowflakes big as dimes dropped unexpectedly from the sky and eddied around the streetlights. Shop owners on our block frantically swept new snow from their sidewalks as if it was their own youthful mistakes caught up with them. When Bobby came home from work I was sitting on the living-room sofa, doing my toenails and drinking a glass of wine.
“Hey,” he said, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat.
I nodded. I wasn’t in a mood for conversation. Winter was back, sooner than expected.
“This is amazing,” he said. “I mean, you don’t really think of New York as having, like, this much weather. You know?”
“Subject to the forces of nature,” I said. “Just like anywhere.”
I wanted him to choke on his youthful enthusiasm. I was fit company that night only for chain-smoking dowagers or defrocked priests.
“It’s really, you know, beautiful,” he said. “It’s so quiet out there. You want to go for a walk in it?”
I offered a look that I hoped summed up my views about frolicking in the snow. But he was rolling now; unstoppable. The weather had him all jacked up. He came and sat on the sofa beside me.
“Watch the nail polish,” I said.
“I like that color.”
“Bile green. It’s what I’m into this season.”
“You want to go to a movie later?” he said.
“Nope. I’m getting drunk and wallowing in self-pity tonight.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ask me a question like that right now, unless you really want to hear the answer.”
“I do,” he said. “I do want to.”
“Forget it. It’s just wintertime, I don’t take well to it. I’ll be my old fun-loving self in another six months or so.”
“Poor Clare,” he said. I defeated the urge to brush nail polish onto his face.
“It’s fucking winter a full month ahead of schedule,” I said, “and my ex is coming to town in a couple of weeks. Too much in one month.”
“You mean your ex-husband?”
“Yep. His troupe is touring again, they’re going to be at the Brooklyn Academy.”
“Will you see him?”
“He’ll probably call. He always does when he comes to New York. He has this idea that we didn’t abuse each other enough when we were married.”
“You never talk about him,” he said. “I sometimes, you know, forget you were married.”
“I’ve been trying to forget it myself.”
“Um, where did you meet him?” he asked.
“You want a real laugh? At Woodstock. Yes, the concert. Seven years of torment born from a weekend of peace and love.”
“You were at Woodstock?”
“Mm-hm. I’d dropped out of four different colleges and taken up with a group of people who traveled around New England buying old clothes to sell in New York. We heard about a free concert just a little ways from where we were combing people’s attics for Hawaiian shirts. This isn’t something I tell just anybody.”
“You were really there? You went to the concert?”
“Makes me seem like a relic, doesn’t it? It’s like having been around before there were cars.”
“What was it like?”
“Muddy,” I said. “You’ve never seen so much mud. I felt like a pig. I was attracted to Denny because he had a big bar of Lifebuoy soap down at the pond. After we’d washed up together he said, ‘You want to get out of here and get a hamburger in town?’ And I said yes, absolutely. I’d gotten tired of the used-clothes people. I mean, they thought of themselves as some sort of mystics, but they were paying widows five dollars for old rugs and furs they’d sell for two hundred in town.”
“You were there,” he said in a tone of hushed amazement. “You went.”
“And my life has been one disappointment after another ever since. Bobby, people make way too much of it. It was a concert. It was dirty and crowded. I left before it was half over, and I married a perfect asshole three months later.”
I finished brushing green polish onto my big toe. Then I looked over at Bobby, and saw the change. His eyes were bright and a little damp. He sat with his neck craned forward avidly, watching me.
I thought I recognized the expression. It was the way men had sometimes looked at me when I was younger; when I was pretty and exotic instead of just colorful. It was simple, straightforward desire. Right there, on the face of a man not yet thirty.
We didn’t sleep together that night. It took us another week. But from that night on, the possibility of sex edged its way onto relations that had been merely cordial and benign. We’d been friends and now we were something else. We bristled a little, grew shyer together. When we ran out of things to say, we seemed to notice the silence.
Still, he wouldn’t have initiated anything. He was too uncertain. He was too accustomed to our pattern of sister-instructing-younger-brother. I had never met anyone so unmarked by the world. Men in the Middle Ages might have been like this: intricately considerate, terrified of touching a woman’s sleeve. If it was going to happen, I’d have to take charge of it myself.
I did it on a Tuesday night. I hadn’t timed it to my cycle. I wasn’t as calculating as that. I liked Bobby too much. My attraction to his person was easier to act on than my more complicated interest in his genes. That, I figured, could come later.
We’d been to see Providence at the St. Marks, which nearly changed my mind about the whole enterprise. Bobby had talked during the movie. He’d asked me if the wolfman was real. He’d wanted to know if Elaine Stritch was Dirk Bogarde’s mother or his girlfriend.
I answered his questions, thinking, Oh, Jonathan. Why aren’t you straight?
But once we were outside again, walking home, I regained my interest. Bobby was half child, an innocent. He couldn’t really be blamed for what he lacked. New York presented no shortage of people to go to movies with. Other qualities were harder to find.
When we got home I put an old Stones tape on. I lit up a joint, and asked Bobby if he’d care to dance. Jonathan was out with his boyfriend that night.
“Dance?” Bobby said. I passed him the joint. He toked on it, standing in the middle of the living room in jeans and a black T-shirt and a cowboy belt with a steer-head buckle. This was a difficult seduction to accomplish straight-faced. It was hard not to feel like a floozy, in eyeliner and a girdle, playing a scratchy record to try and coax a farm boy out of his overalls.
“Bobby,” I said, “I’m going to ask you a direct question. Do you mind?”
“No. I don’t mind.” He passed the joint back to me.
“Answer truthfully, now. What do you like about me?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t make me repeat the question. It’s too embarrassing.”
“What do I like about you?”
“Are you, well, interested in me?”
“Um, sure. Sure I am.” I returned the joint and he took a long, deep hit.
“Bobby, have you ever slept with a woman?”
“Oh. Well, no. Actually, I haven’t.”
“Do you ever think you might like to?”
He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. The stones sang “Ruby Tuesday.” I said, “Come here. Put that marijuana down now and just dance with me a little, all right?”
Obediently, he took one more hit and put the joint in an ashtray. I opened my arms to him. He walked in. I tried not to feel like a spider; a ravenous old creature who preys on the reluctant flesh of not-quite-bright young men. I skated over the feeling as best I could.
We swayed in a loose circle. He was a fine dancer, which helped. He wasn’t awkward or uncertain; his body didn’t appeal to mine to show him the rhythm or the next move. Dancing, a little stoned, in one another’s arms, we were neither relaxed nor excited. As we danced we could have been a brother and sister practicing for romances of the future but also attracted to one another, attracted and guilt-ridden and slightly mournful over the hopelessness of this ordinary but charged and subtly dangerous contact. Brother and sister, practicing.
He smelled clean and woody, like fresh pencil shavings. His back was solid as an opera singer’s. He said, “When you went to the concert, did you stay long enough to see Hendrix?”
“Hmm?”
“At Woodstock. Did you see Jimi Hendrix?”
“Sure I saw Jimi. We got to be very good friends. You come here with me, now. I can tell there’s not going to be any smooth or sophisticated way to do this.”
I stopped dancing and led him to my bedroom. He didn’t quite participate but didn’t resist either. I left the light off. I closed the door and said, “Are you nervous?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t be. This is just for fun. This is just because I like you. There’s nothing in this world for you to be nervous about.” I unbuttoned his shirt, and helped him slide it off his shoulders. His shoulders were damp and ticklish with hair.
“I’m not, you know, in very good shape,” he said, though by then I’d seen his bare chest a hundred times.
“I think you’re lovely,” I said. I took off my blouse and dropped it on the floor. I never wore a bra. I put his hand on my left breast.
“These are below par, to tell you the truth,” I said. “You’ll be with other women who have a lot more going on here.”
“I don’t think about other women,” he said.
“You’re too much, you know that?”
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing. Not a thing. Come on now, get undressed. Old Clare’s going to show you a few tricks.”
We took the rest of our clothes off quickly, as if the real tenants might get home at any moment and find us using their apartment. When we were naked I took him in my arms again and kissed him, with more concern than passion. His breath was hot and a little strong but not foul. It was carnivore’s breath.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “This is the most natural thing in the world. You might even like it.”
“I do like it,” he said. “I think I do.”
I guided him to the bed, and had him lie down. I’d never before been so completely in charge. If this was part of the aging process, I didn’t mind it. There was something agreeably frightening about running a fuck.
Bobby lay naked across my bed. His cock slumped softly against his thigh—a purplish one, circumcised, large but not enormous. He had a surprisingly sparse little muddle of pubic hair. I could hear the sound of his breathing.
“Everything’s okay, sweetheart,” I said. “Just relax, I’ll take care of everything.”
I knelt on the mattress beside him, and massaged his chest and belly. He looked up at me uncertainly. “Shh,” I said. “Don’t do anything, don’t think about anything. Your big sister’s gonna manage fine, just close your eyes.”
He closed his eyes. I bent over and flicked at his nipples with my tongue. I’d never done anything like this before. He was so big and inert. My sexual career had generally involved forceful people who wanted me, who went after me with obscure imperatives of their own. I did what I could to feign an older woman’s serene competence. As subtly as possible, I checked his cock for signs of arousal.
“Clare,” he said. “Clare, I don’t know if—”
“Shh. Hush. I’ll tell you when it’s time to speak.”
I kissed my way down his stomach, took his limp cock in my hand. It was like a rubber toy. I had to stay mindful of its sensitive humanness. I put it in my mouth and worked it around slowly, lapping the underside with my tongue. I took plenty of time. I tickled and stroked with my fingertips, ran my tongue around his scrotum, and nipped gently at his thighs. I forced myself not to hurry. Other men had had wishes, ways they liked things done. Helene had instructed me on every move. No one had ever abandoned himself to my care like this before. I mouthed his cock and thought of myself as a whore in a movie. A smart triumphant whore who always puts on a good show. I pulled at his pubic hair with my teeth, licked the violet tip of his cock. And finally it began to stiffen.
Then I let myself work harder. I took him into my mouth again and worked him up and down, up and down until my neck started to ache. I played my hands along his rib cage and gently pinched his nipples. I could feel his breathing quicken. I heard him softly moan, a fretful little cry like a dove’s. I myself was aroused. Not intensely, but with the ticklish queasiness I remembered as a girl, when I’d first started thinking of large, powerful bodies that wanted control and resisted it.
When I thought he was ready, I got up and straddled him. The look on his face surprised me. He was flushed and panicky, not pleased as I’d expected him to be. Still, I smiled reassuringly. I knew this was no time to lose our momentum. I said, “Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, I worked myself into position and slid his cock in.
Something wasn’t right. His face was so raw and terrified. Still, I kept up. There was no backing out now. I didn’t think of my own pleasure. I rose and fell, rose and fell. I whispered to him, “Sweetheart, you’re doing fine. Oh, yes. You’re doing wonderfully.” It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. It was what I heard myself saying. I stroked his chest. His face was shiny with sweat. I reached over and smoothed away a bit of hair that had gotten plastered to his forehead.
And suddenly, unexpectedly, he came. I felt the spasm. When he came he let out a wail of such agony. He might have been stabbed in the gut. It was an awful sound; inconsolable. I forgot what I was supposed to be doing and crouched with my knees pressed in against his rib cage, waiting for the wail to stop. There was a span of thick, echoing silence. Then he started weeping, openly and extravagantly as a baby.
I reached over and touched his face. His cock was still inside me. I knew we were lost to one another in some permanent, irremediable way. Now he was a mystery. I lay down beside him and told him it was all right. I told him everything was all right. He stroked my hair with heavy, flat-handed swipes. He said, “I never. I never thought I would.”
“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.
THE 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.
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 assumed 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 sex. 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 Washington 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 wineglass in his long fingers, Erich frowned and said, “I never cared all that much for totally anonymous sex. 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 masturbate,” 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 pronounced 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 assumed 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 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 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 embarrassed. His whole head glowed crimson, and the wine in his glass 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 shin.
“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 album 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 circumstances 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 wineglasses 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 sex 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 butt another inch or I can’t get this out of the oven.”
I called, “Hello, 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 shirt with a strand of red glass beads. Bobby followed, in his T-shirt 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 cocktail?”
“Love one,” I said. “What if we made a pitcher of martinis?”
We had taken to drinking martinis. We’d bought three stemmed glasses, 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 embarrassment.
“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 cocktail 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 glass 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 title, 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 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.
NED 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.
SOMETHING 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?”
I shrugged. “Who ever expects to end up living anywhere?”
“That’s too deep for me,” he said, and turned into the mall’s parking lot, following a line of neon cowboys on horses with flickering legs.
We were two of perhaps a half-dozen people at the movies, it being a weekday matinee. In its emptiness, the theater reminded me of my father’s old place. Although it was no more than a medium-sized room surrounded on all sides by a saffron-colored curtain, it had the same depopulated melancholy, and the same smell: mildew and old popcorn. An elderly woman two rows ahead turned to glance at us, because of my father’s heavy breathing. Meeting his eyes, she turned back and made a small adjustment to one of her earrings.
I believed I knew what she was thinking: That one’s not long for this world. She was probably a widow; a frequenter of matinees. I wanted to tap her fat shoulder and tell her the story of my father’s life. I’d have liked for her to know that he was not just an elderly man in a polyester sport shirt, gasping in a remote, sad little theater.
Hope and Glory turned out to be highly satisfying, and afterward my father and I browsed through the mall. It was a big mall, with a central oasis where floodlighted palms dipped their fronds into a fountain. The aged sat on benches, and a smiling man in a white denim suit demonstrated the organ. “Arizona is the state of the living dead,” my father told me. He hustled me past the interior grotto and into a Montgomery Ward, to see what was on sale.
We looked at stereos, miniature television sets, and aluminum window frames. We looked at power mowers arrayed on a field of Astroturf. “This is a good machine,” he said, trying the hand brakes on a bright red one.
“I’d rather have a Turf Titan,” I said, referring to a crimson monster the size of a small tractor. “Look, you can ride on it.”
“That’s ridiculous for a young person,” he said. “This one here is a third the price.”
We so vividly impersonated customers that a young salesman with a baldness-concealing haircut strode over and began describing the virtues of a model more expensive than the one my father had picked. As the salesman worked through his spiel, a slender woman walked by, carrying twins in a knapsack-like contraption. She was less than beautiful, with shaggy matte-brown hair and a sharp, shrewd little chin. Her eyes—her whole body—looked tired in a profound, almost permanent way, as if no amount of rest would ever quite restore her. Still, she possessed a sure-footed self-assurance that lent weight to the bright aisle she walked in search of the correct yard tool. Her twins stared with puzzled absorption at the empty air directly in front of them. As she made her way along the aisle I thought of how firmly anchored her life must be, for all its domestic hardship. A year from today, her twins would be walking and speaking. A year from today, she would know exactly how much time had passed.
She turned and disappeared into Lawn Furniture. The salesman pointed out safety features, indicating with his hands the three sensitive spots which rendered the mower incapable of snatching up an arm or a leg and giving it back as a spray of blood and bone chips. His hands were white and thin, the thumbs so curved it seemed they must hurt him.
My father and I listened attentively, promised to think about it. My father, nodding as he received the salesman’s card, looked waxily pale under the fluorescence of Montgomery Ward. Hard white light shone through his thin hair onto the scalp beneath. As soon as the salesman had finished I hurried my father out of the store and bought him a drink in the hushed darkness of a steak house. A sign planted in a bucket of plastic tulips said that the “Early Bird Specials” were now in effect. We were the only bar customers at that hour.
“That kid in there was full of beans,” my father said over his bourbon. “For an extra hundred dollars all you really get is a bigger grass catcher. You could have a grass catcher custom-made for less than a hundred dollars.”
“I haven’t got a lawn anyway,” I told him.
“Well, when you get one, you should know what lawn mower to buy.”
“If I ever have a lawn, then you and I can do some serious mower shopping.”
“I may not be around then,” he said. “I may as well help you get the information now.”
“Listen,” I said. “I really don’t know if I’m the lawn type. I don’t have any plants. I don’t even own a car.”
“That Olds has less than forty thousand miles on it,” he said. “It should still be in good shape when you get it someday.”
“I didn’t mean I want a car. I didn’t mean I feel the lack. Nobody in New York has a car. I can afford a cab when I need to get somewhere.”
“And you’re pretty happy out there?” he asked.
“Yes. I mean, I guess so. Sure.”
“That’s all I care about. You can turn the Olds into a birdbath if you like. I just want you to be happy.”
I drew in a breath, and at that moment, for the first time in months, I felt prodigally—almost obscenely—healthy. I’d been waiting most of my life for him to express desires more detailed and possible than his single overriding wish: that I be completely happy, every minute.
“Excuse me, please,” I said. “I’ve got to go to the men’s room.”
“I’ll be right here,” he said.
The bathrooms were at the front of the restaurant, behind the cashier’s station. I realized that instead of going to the men’s room I could walk out the front door without my father’s knowing it, and I did so, with no hesitation and no reason beyond the simple fact that it was possible. I stepped through the smoked-glass door into the even, shadowless light of the mall’s main concourse. I stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden brightness, as the door sighed shut behind me. When it had closed, a sensation of wild freedom opened up in me; a giddy vertiginous feeling. I threaded my way among the shoppers to the mall entrance, and passed through the hydraulic doors into daylight proper. The parking lot was filling up with husbands and wives just released from their jobs—golden afternoon sun gilded the windshields and radio antennae of their cars. It was an autumnal light without a hint of autumn’s chill. I walked, thinking of nothing in particular, over the parking lot’s western range to the line of stunted Joshua trees that separated the mall from the highway. Beyond the highway stood a scattering of mobile homes, and beyond the mobile homes was the desert, an immense cactus-studded flatness rimmed with irregular red mountains. I thought I would cross the highway and walk into the desert. I did not think of motives or consequences. I saw for the first time that one could walk away on little more than a whim. One could elect to leave behind his father’s death, his mother’s ironic loneliness, his own uncertain future. One could find a job and a room under a new name in a strange city, walk its boulevards without fear or embarrassment. I stood for a while, watching the desert as the cars whizzed by.
It was my father who called me back. Or, rather, it was the thought of his growing agitation as I failed to return. I didn’t mind so much the idea of him searching the empty men’s room, looking around Ward’s or Sears and finally calling the police. I didn’t mind thinking of the actions he would take. What I could not abide was the idea of him right at that moment, alone with his drink at the steak house, just beginning to realize something must be wrong. I jogged across the parking lot, and had to stand for a minute in front of the restaurant, catching my breath.
When I returned to the table, he said, “Are you all right? I was about to go in there after you.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “A little indigestion.”
“You don’t look all that well,” he said. “Maybe we’d better get you home.”
“Nope. I am perfectly, perfectly fine. I guess I’m not really used to drinking in the afternoon.”
The waitress, a woman about my age, wearing powder over bad skin, laughed at something the bartender said. They both smoked cigarettes. The bartender was a middle-aged man with the hopped-up, friendly look of a terrier. His own reflection hovered in the smoked mirror behind the bar, dark as a figure suspended in ice. Above the illuminated bottles, a team of small plastic Clydesdales pulled a miniature beer wagon in an eternal circle.
That night after dinner, when my father pulled out the Scrabble set, I asked if he’d like to go for a walk instead. “There’s no place to walk to,” he said. “It’s solid condos for miles around.”
“Go on, Ned,” my mother said. “Reuben said a little exercise might be good for you.”
“Just a short one,” I added. “Ten minutes.”
He stood with a dry, papery expenditure of breath. “All right,” he said. “But don’t think you’re getting out of Scrabble this way.”
“I’m going to hit the bathroom for a minute,” I said. “Be right back.”
“This kid is in the bathroom more than he’s out of it,” my father said to my mother.
“I’m twenty-seven,” I said. “I’m older than you were when you met Mom.”
In the powder room, which was papered in pert orange rosebuds, I splashed cold water over my face. I just stood there for a while, under the low hum of the fluorescent panel. I did not look at myself in the mirror. I looked instead at the wallpaper, its rosebuds arranged in soldierly lines, each suspended over a single olive-drab leaf.
At nineteen, I had worn a strand of pearls around my neck, and gotten a dragon tattooed on my right shoulder. I’d left NYU for a semester, without telling my parents, and used some of my tuition money to enroll in bartending school. I’d thought I could turn into the kind of person who would do a thing like that. And now here I was, standing in a powder room in Phoenix, with no idea what to do with my father, either alive or dead. I’d never expected to find myself in such a usual situation. I stayed in the bathroom as long as I credibly could. I flushed the toilet twice by way of explanation.
When I came out again, my father said, “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m great,” I said. “Come on, let’s go for that walk.”
Outside, it was a clear Arizona night, crazy with stars. When we reached the street my father said, “Which way do you want to go? There’s nothing in either direction.”
“Left, then.”
We went left. On either side of us, windows glowed in the snug parchment-colored houses. My father started softly singing “Give My Regards to Broadway,” and I joined in. After we’d gone a couple of blocks I said, “If we cut between two of these buildings, we’d be out in the desert, wouldn’t we?”
“Snakes out there,” my father said. “Scorpions.”
The idea that Ned Glover, former Ohio theater owner, lived in the same place as snakes and scorpions was so impossible that I laughed out loud. My father must have thought I was laughing at his caution. Saying, “Well, I hope you’ve got good thick shoes on,” he headed out between two houses toward the open country.
I hung back, wondering about the snakes. My father walked twenty yards or so, turned and beckoned to me, then walked on. When he passed from the shadow of the buildings into desert starlight the wind blew his hair straight up. It was like seeing him emerge from a tunnel. I trotted after him, checking the ground as I went.
“Are there really snakes?” I asked.
“Yep. Rattlers. Mrs. Cohen two doors down found one drowning in her Jacuzzi.”
We walked into the desert together. The ground was level as a movie set, spouting here and there the spiky black starburst of a yucca. Ahead of us stood the flat-topped mountain range, which brightened as it rose toward the sky. In the deep shadows at its base a few pale, watery lights shone, hermits’ lanterns or Navajo ghosts or aliens setting up camp.
“Nice night,” he said.
“Beautiful. Dad?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I feared we were running out of time. Although I’d always assumed in an unspoken way that my father would die before me, I’d imagined his demise taking place in some remote future; a future in which I’d be wiser and solider, more present. Suddenly—it seemed literally overnight—his lungs were failing at an unguessable rate and my own blood was possibly under invasion, preparing to manifest the first symptoms. There were things I wanted to ask him, but I couldn’t seem to get them phrased in the condo or the Oldsmobile or the shopping mall. I had hoped for more resolve out here under the stars.
“Cat got your tongue?” he said.
“I guess so.”
I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I’d been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.
My father said, “I’ve been thinking about that lawn mower.”
“What about it?”
“It’s such a good deal. Maybe tomorrow we’ll go back and get it, and I can keep it here until you need it.”
“Would you use it in the meantime?”
“Me?” he said. “What have I got to mow, my rock garden? We’ve got that big two-car garage, there’s plenty of room.”
“You mean on the off chance I ever have a lawn, I’m going to come out here and pick up this ten- or twenty-year-old mower?”
“They only make things worse and worse,” he said. “Do you know how much your mother would give to have her old Hoover upright back again? You can’t buy those anymore for any price, now vacuums are all made out of plastic.”
“You’re not serious about this,” I said.
“Sure I’m serious. You’ll inherit everything in that house anyway, why not inherit a good lawn mower at some future time when the only ones you can buy are made of rubber?”
“I don’t want a lawn mower,” I said. “Really. Thanks for offering.”
“Maybe I’ll buy it anyway,” he said. “Then it’ll be there, and if you don’t want it, you can give it to the Salvation Army or whatever.”
“Dad, I don’t want the mower,” I said.
“Well, wait and see.”
“I don’t want a power drill, or a microwave, or a Mercury sedan. I don’t want season tickets to the Indians. I don’t want a Rototiller, or a rod and reel, or a thermos that keeps coffee hot all day.”
“Now, now,” he said. “No need to get excited.”
“What I’d really like,” I said, “is to know what happened to me. Why can’t I seem to make a life for myself?”
His face clenched up. It was a familiar expression of his, this gathering of the facial muscles under the skin—it happened when he was confronted by the contrary or the inexplicable. His face actually appeared to pucker and shrink as his features worked their way toward center. He might have been straining to see through a keyhole from a distance of several feet.
“You’ll find something,” he said. “You’re still young, it takes time.”
“What happened ? You were there, you must have seen it. I keep thinking there must be something I don’t remember. I’ve got a decent job, I have lovers and friends. So why do I feel so numb and separate? Why do I feel like a failure? Did you do something to me? I won’t hold it against you. I just need to know.”
He paused to take in a gulp of air. His face continued to shrink.
“I loved you,” he said. “I worked hard, I don’t know. I must have made mistakes. Your mother and I took the best care of you we could.”
“Well, I know you did,” I said. “I know. So how have I turned out to be such a mess?”
“You’re not a mess,” he said. “I mean, if you’re having some problems—”
“Just answer the question.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. His eyes went glassy, and his mouth hung slightly open. What was he remembering? There would of course have been some thing—a spasm of hatred when I would not stop crying, some meanness born from jealousy. Some little act or omission, a brief ordinary failure of love that would not, in the end, explain anything.
We stood for a while in silence, which was rare for us. Ordinarily, my father and I avoided silence. We were both good talkers, and we knew how to keep the air around us thoroughly occupied with talk or games or snatches of song. The sickle shape of a hawk skated over the stars. An empty 7-Up can gleamed in the moonlight like something precious.
“Dad, listen,” I said.
He did not reply. It was only then that I realized how he was straining for breath.
“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”
His face was dim, his eyes unnaturally large as he concentrated on pulling in air. He had the shocked look of a fish pulled out of the water into a world of piercing, unbreathable light.
“Dad? Can you talk?”
He shook his head. My first thought was of flight. I could still get away; I could deny everything. No one need ever suspect me.
“Dad,” I said helplessly. “Oh, Dad, what should I do?”
He gestured me closer. I took hold of his shoulders, inhaling his whiskery, cologned smell, which had not changed since I was a baby. His lungs squeaked like a balloon being vigorously rubbed.
Carefully, as if he were made of porcelain, I helped lower him to a sitting position. I sat beside him, holding him, on the talcumy earth.
So this is it, I thought. This is my father’s death. I did not know how to help, what to do; where to bury him. I stroked his wispy hair, which had once been thick and prosperous enough to base a marriage on.
I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed clichés, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”
He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.
I said, “Don’t worry about Mom or me. We’ll be fine. Everything’s all right, really. Everything’s fine.”
I couldn’t tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.
And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the passage of oxygen.
Finally he was able to say, “Guess I overextended. I got a little carried away there.”
“You’d better stay here,” I said. “I’ll go get help.”
He shook his head. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “We just have to walk back very slowly. Okay?”
“Sure. Of course. Dad, I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
I helped him to his feet and we began the long walk home. It would take us over an hour to cover a distance we’d managed in twenty minutes on the way out. Stars fell overhead.
When I was fifteen, my father and I drove to Chicago together on a shopping trip and got caught in a storm on our way back. Rain fell in sheets; the sky deepened to the opaque green-gray that breeds tornadoes. It got so bad we pulled off at a rest area overlooking a muddy lake backed by the vast green of a barley field. Rain hammered on the roof and hood of our car. We sat in silence, occasionally clearing our throats, until a flick of lightning turned the lake’s surface a brief livid yellow. Then we both started to laugh. The lightning might have been the punch line of a long, complicated joke. When we were through laughing we talked about my future, about the possibility of getting a new dog, and about our ten favorite movies. After the storm passed we drove home with the radio playing and the windows open. Later we would learn that a tornado had in fact touched down in the vicinity and had flattened a water tower and an Amish cemetery not twenty miles from where we’d been parked.
Now we walked together, very slowly, through the blue-white desert night. “Dad?” I said.
“Yes, son.”
“Maybe we can go to another movie tomorrow. I hear Moonstruck isn’t too bad.”
“Fine. You know me, I’m always good for a movie.”
Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost—to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home.
ALL HE’D say was “Basic visit to the parents. Guilt and movies. They live in a pueblo now.” But Jonathan was quieter after that, more prone to secrecy and half sentences. He kept the door to his room closed. In March, he announced that he was moving out.
I asked him why.
“To get a life,” he said.
When I asked what exactly he thought he was living at that moment, he said, “A canceled ticket.”
It was morning. One of the pale slushy March mornings that arrive one after another, as if they were raveling off a spool. Jonathan stared out the living-room window. He flicked his hair with his fingertips in a sullen café style when he said the word “ticket.”
“Honey,” I said, “just tell me what you mean in ordinary English.”
He sighed, reluctant to face me on plain terms. Displays of joy, affection, or generosity came easily to him. He could speak decorously in his own voice. But when he was angry or sad, he needed an image to work from. I had seen him get mad in the caustic, eye-popping style of Bette Davis. I’d seen him suffer embarrassment like a street kid, with downcast eyes and hands balled into fists. This hair-flicking, window-gazing thing was new.
“Come on,” I said. “Speak.”
He turned to face me. “The life I’d been preparing myself for has been called off,” he said. “I thought I could stay unattached and love a lot of different people. You and Bobby included.”
“You can. You do.”
“I can’t. It’s a new age, everybody’s getting married.”
“Not me, thank you,” I said.
“Yes you are. You’re with Bobby now. I’ve got to find somebody of my own, and I don’t feel like I have all the time in the world anymore. I mean, Clare, what if I’m sick?”
I paused. “You’re not sick,” I said.
“You don’t know that. We may not know for years.”
“Jonathan, sweetheart, you’re being melodramatic.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. You’re fine, I can just tell. You’re perfectly healthy. Now don’t move out, you’ll break up the family.”
“You and Bobby are the family,” he said. “Just the two of you.” And he turned back to the window, where across the air shaft a young Puerto Rican woman was hanging boys’ briefs and men’s black socks on a laundry line.
I thought I’d be pregnant soon. I’d stopped taking precautions. But I couldn’t seem to tell anyone, not Bobby or Jonathan. I suppose I was ashamed of my own motives. I didn’t like the idea of myself as calculating or underhanded. All I wanted, really, was to get pregnant by accident. The unexpected disadvantage of modern life is our victory over our own fates. We’re called on to decide so much, almost everything, and we’re thoroughly informed about repercussions. In another era I’d have had babies in my twenties, when I was married to Denny. I’d have become a mother without quite deciding to. Without weighing the consequences. But Denny and I had at first been too sensible—we were living on my trust money, and he had big ambitions—and then too furious to let ourselves give birth. I did get pregnant accidentally, by a member of Denny’s dance troupe who’d told me he was gay. But I’d had it taken care of. At that age, during that time, you skimmed away the extraneous. You kept yourself lean and unencumbered, ready to travel.
Now I wanted a baby, and I wanted to raise it with Jonathan. We could be a new kind of family. A big disjointed one, with aunts and uncles all over town. But I couldn’t bring myself to confess what I was after. I was trying to stage my own accident. I just needed more time.
In an effort to cheer Jonathan up, I got him to bring Erich home for dinner. He didn’t want to. He had to be nagged into it. It took more than a week. I wouldn’t give in, though, because I believed in what I was doing. My theory of Jonathan’s trouble was simple. He had let his life get divided up into too many different compartments. There was his job, and his life with Bobby and me. There were a few friends from college, and a random sexual life with strangers, and an ongoing affair with a man none of us had ever met. I believed he needed more areas of overlap.
“Why don’t you want to bring Erich over for dinner?” I asked on a dim morning that would not quite settle into rain. “Are you ashamed of us?”
I had on a pink chenille bathrobe, and had tied my hair up in a zebra-print bandanna. For a moment I could see myself as somebody’s shrewish wife, hands fisted on her bony hips. It was far from a flattering image. But I didn’t mind it entirely. At least a woman like that knew what she wanted. Ambiguity and indecision didn’t swarm around her like flies.
“Of course not,” Jonathan said. “I’ve told you. He and the Hendersons wouldn’t get along.”
He was trying to leave for work. He had one shoe on. He was sipping at a mug of coffee while Bobby buttered a bagel for him.
“We won’t invite the Hendersons,” I said. “It can just be the four of us, regular civilians too worried about our own shortcomings to notice anybody else’s.”
“He and I don’t have that kind of relationship,” Jonathan said.
“What kind?”
“The ‘Come on over and meet the roommates’ kind. It’d just be uncomfortable. For everyone.”
“How do you know, if you’ve never done it?” I asked. “Honey, to be perfectly honest with you, I think you set limits on your relationships by deciding in advance and entirely on your own what they can and cannot involve.”
Bobby brought Jonathan his bagel, and gave me an affectionate pat on the rump. I thought fearfully of the quiet nights we’d have together. The unvarying domestic routines we’d develop.
“Maybe you’re right,” Jonathan said. “Got to go now, bye.”
I followed him into the hallway. “We wouldn’t tell him any of your secrets,” I called. “We wouldn’t make stupid jokes, or show slides of our trip to a national park.”
I finally got my way through ordinary persistence. My persistence, though it worked more often than not, was hard to count as a virtue, since I had no patience to back it up. My own doggish determination had led me, in the face of all reasonable counsel, to marry a Messianic dancer and then fall in love with a renowned woman who said she’d teach me to stop hating myself. It had led me into the used-clothes business, to hairdressing school, to Buddhism and modern dance. Bulldogs must experience a similar kind of trouble. Once they lock their jaws onto a bull’s ear or tail they probably believe they’ve concluded their business with the whole animal.
Erich came to dinner on a Friday night. Bobby and I were making the kind of sparse, crisp dinner that was fashionable then: pasta with fresh herbs, roast chicken, vegetables from three continents. We were looking to impress. As we fixed dinner, we speculated over what Erich might be like.
“Brooding, I think,” I said. “One of those silent, temperamental types people say are ‘difficult’ when what they really mean is ‘an asshole.’”
“You think Jonathan would, like, go for somebody like that?” Bobby said.
“I think he could be attracted to somebody like that,” I said. “Remember, this is somebody he hasn’t introduced to any of his friends.”
Bobby was dicing a yellow pepper. I stood with my back pressed against his, washing arugula. We had gotten used to working in that minuscule kitchen together. We’d learned to move in concert.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, maybe you’re right. I picture him more like a criminal type.”
“A criminal ? Really?”
“Not like a murderer. Not a bad criminal. More of a drug-dealer type. You know. Somebody who works scams.”
“But he’s an actor,” I said. “We know that much.”
“Oh, I think a lot of those guys deal drugs. Don’t you think so? I mean, how else could they support themselves?”
“What do you imagine him looking like?”
“Well, dark,” he said. “Not so much handsome as interesting-looking. Sort of hip, in, like, a natty way. I picture him having a little ponytail.”
“Hmm. I imagine him very young. You know, one of those squeaky-clean blonds who pour in out of the Midwest and end up in toothpaste commercials.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Bobby said. And half an hour later, we did.
Jonathan and Erich arrived together. They brought yellow hothouse tulips, and a bottle of red wine. Jonathan let Erich in ahead of him. He lingered near the door as if he might slip away and leave the three of us together.
Erich shook my hand, then shook Bobby’s. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.
He was thin, and balding. He wore jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt with a Ralph Lauren insignia—the polo pony—stitched in red at the breast.
“Erich,” I said. “The mystery man.”
His high forehead darkened. He had a sharp face, with a small sharp chin and a sharp nose and small bright eyes set close together. It was a squeezed, panicky face. Erich might have been a man with his head caught between a pair of elevator doors. He nodded.
“I’m not really a mystery,” he said. “Oh no, not a mystery at all. I’m sorry we haven’t met before. I’m, well, just very glad to be here.”
He laughed in a way that suggested he had been punched in the stomach.
“How about a drink?” I said. He said a seltzer would be nice, and Jonathan jumped to get the drinks. We sat down in the living room.
“This is a nice apartment,” Erich said.
“It’s a dump,” I answered. “But thank you. You didn’t have to step over any dead bodies in the hallway, did you?”
“Oh no,” he said. “No. Why? Has that happened here?”
I couldn’t tell if he was repelled or excited by the idea of hallway murders. He had one of those enthusiastic, unreadable voices.
“Not lately,” I said. “So. You’re an actor?”
“Yes. Well, I don’t know anymore. Lately I’m just sort of a bartender. What do you do?”
He had seated himself in the armchair I’d found on First Avenue. A fan-backed old monster covered in green brocade. He sat as if he’d been assigned to occupy as little space as possible, with his legs crossed at the knee and his hands folded on his thigh.
“Junk dealer,” I said. “I make earrings out of old garbage.”
He nodded. “And you can make a living at that?” he said.
“In a fashion,” I answered.
I never told strangers about my trust money. I felt too trivial and spoiled, having an unearned income while everyone around me struggled to pay the rent. I always had jobs, but not the awful, unrelenting ones people take when they’re paying all their own expenses.
Now I felt, obscurely, that I’d given away something incriminating. Erich could have been a plant from the CIA. An undercover agent so obvious and undisguised that people blurted their petty deceits out of social discomfort.
Jonathan brought our drinks. “Here’s to the end of the mystery,” I said, and we all drank to that.
“Do you, um, like any special kind of music?” Bobby asked.
Erich blinked in his direction. “I love music,” he said. “I love all kinds.”
“I’m going to put a record on,” Bobby said, standing up. “Is there, like, anything special you’d like to hear?”
“Let me see what you have,” Erich said. And with surprising grace he sprang up from the derelict chair and followed Bobby to the cassette player.
Jonathan and I had our first opportunity to make eye contact. He mouthed the words “I told you so.”
Bobby squatted before the shelves where the cassettes were kept. “We’ve sort of got a little of everything,” he said. “We’re sort of, you know, all over the map.”
“You have Coltrane,” Erich said. “Oh, look here, you have the Doors.”
“You like the Doors?” Bobby asked.
“When I was younger I wanted to be Jim Morrison,” Erich said. “I used to practice his moves in the back yard. Every day, I used to practice, and lip-sync. But then I realized I lacked some of the basic equipment.” He laughed, that same astonished outrush of air.
“Let’s put him on right now,” Bobby said, and punched his Doors tape into the player.
“Do you like Bob Dylan?” he asked Erich.
“Oh, sure. I wanted to be him, too.”
“I brought some records out from Ohio,” Bobby said. “I’ve got some, you know, pretty rare ones. You like Hendrix?”
“I love Hendrix. He was, you know, the greatest.”
“Some of the records I could get cassettes of. But some are just too rare. You want to see them?”
“Okay. Sure. Sure I do.”
“We can’t listen to them,” Bobby said. “We haven’t got a turntable yet. We’ve got to buy one. Even though they’re, you know, going out of style.”
“I have a turntable,” Erich said. “If you want to, you could come over sometime and play your records at my place. If you want to.”
“Oh, great. That’d be great. Come here, the records are stored away in Clare’s and my room.”
Erich said to Jonathan and me, “Would you excuse us for a minute?” And suddenly I could see him as he must have been at the age of eight or nine: polite and overenthusiastic, prone to tears, a mystery to his parents.
“Of course,” I said. After they were gone I said to Jonathan in a low voice, “Well, the kids seem to be getting along all right.”
He shook his head. “I told you this would be a disaster. You wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Nonsense. It’s not a disaster. Bobby’s in love with him.”
“And you think he’s a twerp and a bore.”
“Jonathan. I’ve known him about five minutes.”
“Five minutes is enough. You’d have to sleep with him for him to make any more sense than he does right now.”
“I don’t know why you’ve kept seeing him all these years if you dislike him this much,” I said.
“Sex,” Jonathan said. “And my own craziness. Oh, I guess I’m fond of him in an unromantic way. I just never wanted to mix him in with the rest of my life, and I was right about that.”
“You’re a very strange man.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
When Bobby and Erich came back, I suggested we take our drinks up to the roof to watch the sunset. The important thing was to keep this dinner party moving, physically if necessary. It was a freakishly warm late-March evening. The kind of weather that implies either an early spring or the effects of nuclear testing.
Jonathan agreed enthusiastically, Bobby and Erich less so. I knew what they were thinking. If we went up to the roof, they’d miss the next cut of Strange Days.
“Boys, we can start the music again when we come back down,” I said, and was surprised at how much like a mother I could sound.
We went up the stairs to the roof, a tarred plateau bound at the edges with patterned concrete pediments. The orange sun hovered over the New Jersey horizon. Television aerials threw intricate, birdlike shadows. The windows of the tall buildings uptown flashed amber and bronze. A fat pink-stained cloud, its every billow and furl distinct as carved ivory, hung soaking up the last light over Brooklyn. Frilled curtains and salsa music blew out of an open window across the alley. We stood facing west, trailing twenty-foot shadows.
“Beautiful,” Jonathan said. “Just when you think you’re going to move to the country, the city does something like this.”
“I adore the roof,” I said. I was surprised, again, at the sound of my own voice. When had I turned into such a hostess?
“You don’t hear music like this in my neighborhood,” Erich said. “Never this kind of Mexican stuff, no.”
“I sort of like it,” Bobby said.
“So do I,” Erich answered.
Bobby swayed his hips in rhythm, and soon began to dance. Watching him in his cheerful, slightly baffled progress through the day, you could forget what a dancer he was. It was one of his surprises. The moment a note of music sounded he could move with such grace and buoyancy. He appeared to shed some interior weight. A ghost of the flesh, all gristle and bone, that dissolved at a guitar’s strum or the first bleat of a horn. On the record, a woman backed by maracas and guitars sang full-throated in Spanish, with shamelessly simple passion. Bobby, who loved all music, good and bad, danced as the last of the sun disappeared.
Erich glanced at Jonathan and me. I knew what he was thinking. I said, “Go ahead.” And with a shy smile, he started dancing with Bobby.
He was not nearly the dancer Bobby was, but he moved his feet in time to the music and made little twitching movements with his arms. Bobby turned to him as the sky gave up its last bit of blue and a faint star appeared in the growing violet to the east.
Jonathan and I stood watching, with our drinks in our hands. Jonathan said, “I don’t think I want to just be the chaperon at this party. Do you?”
“No,” I said. “Not especially.”
Jonathan set his drink on the parapet, and started dancing with Bobby and Erich. He was an elegant if contained dancer. He moved within a small column of air, the exact boundaries of which he never overstepped. I watched. For a moment—a moment—I felt the world spinning away from me. I saw myself standing in the last light, aging in a bright purple thrift-store dress as a group of younger men danced together. It was far from an ordinary moment. And yet I felt as if I’d lived it before.
To get myself back into real life, I started dancing. What else could I do? The heels of my shoes stuck in the tar, making soft pock sounds until I stepped out of them and danced in my stocking feet.
Jonathan said, “Okay, the rooftop number from West Side Story. Are you ready?”
“How does it start?” I asked.
“Let’s see. ‘I like to be in America.’”
“‘Okay by me in America.’”
“‘Everything free in America.’”
“‘For a small fee in America.’”
We whooped and clapped. When the number was finished I turned three perfect cartwheels in a row. I hadn’t done it in at least fifteen years. I felt my legs flashing straight and clean as knives.
“I used to want to be a cheerleader,” I told them. “Before I decided to just go to hell.”
Something took hold of us up there. I remembered the sensation from childhood, when a game gathered momentum. Bobby unbuttoned his shirt, which bellied in the wind. We all danced exaggeratedly, like members of a Broadway chorus, with leaps and twirls. When the salsa music went off, we started singing. We sang as much as we could remember of the Jets song and “Officer Krupke.” We sang every number from Hair.
Bobby said, “My brother used to play that record ten times a day. Till our mother threw it out. He just got another one. So then she threw his stereo out.”
“One of my cousins was in Hair,” I said. “A couple of years ago, at a dinner theater in Florida.”
We sang a few numbers from South Pacific, and all the My Fair Lady we could come up with. We danced to the sound of our own voices. When we couldn’t dance any longer we sat down on the sun-warmed tar, inhaling its mingled smell of sour earth and chemicals. We kept singing. Once, while we were singing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” I glanced at Jonathan and caught him staring at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It was an injured, glowering look, something between anger and sorrow. When our eyes met, he looked quickly back at the sky. We sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and we sang “Norwegian Wood.” Bobby and Jonathan sang a couple of Laura Nyro songs together, until I made them switch back to something we all knew. We sat singing on that roof until darkness proper had set in, and the city blazed around us with the light of ten million parties.
THE DAY after we danced on the roof together, Jonathan slipped through the fabric of his life. He left nothing behind but a few words on a piece of notebook paper anchored to the table by the pepper shaker. “Dear B. and C, I wish you great happiness together. That sounds so corny, doesn’t it? Anyway, I’m starting again somewhere else, I honestly don’t know where. I’ll call eventually. Give away whatever of mine you can’t use yourselves. Love, J.”
Clare and I read those lines over and over, as if they were code for another, more sensible message. She called the newspaper and found he had quit his job that morning, without notice. He had left no forwarding address. His room was as white and uninhabited-looking as it had always been. As far as we could tell, only a few of his clothes were missing.
“Fuck,” Clare said. “That motherfucker. How could he do this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he just did it.”
Clare was furious and I was stupefied. Departures brought out my blankness—I could feel my brain cloud over. When someone left I lost track of everything. I was filled with a dense, prickly confusion strong as the effect of a drug. It was a kind of retardation, I suppose. A missing neural connection. Somebody who was here isn’t here anymore. I couldn’t seem to get it.
“Jonathan, you asshole,” Clare said. “Just when things were starting to work out.” She balled up the note and threw it in the trash, though later she’d retrieve it, as if she thought it might be needed as evidence.
“He’ll be back?” I said. I’d thought I was telling her something but it came out as a question.
“What’s wrong with men?” Clare said. She stood on the living-room carpet with her arms folded over her breasts and her jaw gone stony. I saw that in another life she could have been a crazy schoolteacher, one of those wild spinsters who strike you as pathetic at first but end up changing your life. I didn’t answer. I was sitting on the bald velvet chair, the one we’d dragged home from the corner of Fifth and Eighteenth. My hands were squeezed between my thighs. “Really,” she said. “I’d like to know. Do you have any idea? What goes on in their heads? What do they want?”
I shrugged. It was not a question I could answer, though it seemed she expected me to. I might have been the worst student in her class, failing even the easy ones she lobbed in my direction.
“I’m going out,” she said. She threw her jacket over her shoulders, the faded leather one with the peace symbol on the back. Her earrings clicked and flashed. She went down the stairs with such heel-clattering determination that I thought she’d be back within an hour, dragging Jonathan by the ear. She’d check the train stations and the airports, stop traffic on the George Washington Bridge. She was too angry and enormous to evade. But less than an hour later she came back alone. I had hardly moved. I’d spent the hour sitting in the living room, watching it go through its own patient history. When Clare returned she stopped for a moment, staring at me in confusion.
“Did you find him?” I asked.
“Of course I didn’t find him.”
She walked up to me in a blazing, businesslike way. “Do you love me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. All I could think of was the truth.
“I don’t know if I love you either,” she said. She pulled my shirt off hard enough to rip the seams. We made love on the living-room floor. She bit my neck and nipples, pulled at my hair. She left bloodied lines running along my back and over my ass.
Jonathan had taken all his money out of the bank and bought a ticket somewhere. Clare and I spent a few weeks getting over expecting to hear from him.
“I don’t get this,” she said. “This doesn’t seem real, it’s some kind of gesture. You know how Jonathan can be.”
“I know how he can be,” I said. But in fact he had gone. Alice and Ned couldn’t tell us anything, and all we knew about Erich was his first name and the fact that he worked in a restaurant somewhere. After dinner that night we’d all congratulated each other for our ability to enjoy ourselves. We’d promised to do something just as riotous again soon. We didn’t think we’d need any particulars for getting in touch.
Jonathan might have dropped through a trapdoor. The last time we saw him he’d washed the dishes, downed a final shot of Scotch, and kissed us both good night. He’d left early for work in the morning. And when Clare and I got home that night, there was the note.
“Stupid bastard,” Clare said. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s a dramatic kind of person,” I said. “He can’t help it.”
I waited for my true feelings to arrive. I waited for all the proper reactions: rage and disappointment, a sense of betrayal. But weeks passed and the blankness held. Nothing happened; nothing at all. I felt myself slipping back to my old Cleveland mode, living a life made up of details. At work, I shredded mountains of cheese and chopped my weight in mushrooms. At home I watched television, or watched the light change outside the window, or watched time passing as I played my records. I was surprised to learn that New York could be as ordinary and windblown as Cleveland. It could take on that same feeling of disuse. Although we think of the dead inhabiting the past, I now believe they exist in an unending present. There is no hope of better things to come. There is no memory of the human progress that led to each moment.
Without Jonathan, I haunted my own life. I couldn’t make contact. I walked through the hours like a shade wandering in helpless astonishment through rooms he’d once danced and wept and made love in; rooms he’d once been alive enough to ignore.
Clare negotiated a more predictable run of feelings, and came out the other end. She taught herself to accept Jonathan’s mysteries and his nagging self-involvement. She worked up a story to tell: never trust anyone under the age of thirty. “People can’t be held accountable, not even at twenty-eight,” she said. “At that age you’re still thinking yourself up. I wish Jonathan well, I really do. I hope he gives me a call sometime after he’s developed a personality.”
For a while she hated me for being twenty-eight. After that one sweaty, clawing session on the living-room floor, she put an end to our lovemaking and sent me to sleep in Jonathan’s bed, so she wouldn’t feel the lack when I, too, turned up missing one day. Then, after almost a month, she slipped into bed with me at midnight. “I’ve been a real asshole, haven’t I?” she whispered. “Please forgive me, sweetheart. I’ve got a sort of soft spot about abandonment. What do you think? Do you think we could manage together, just the two of us?”
I told her I thought we probably could. We were in a kind of love, as far as we knew. I liked making love to her; I liked the heat and unexpectedness of her body. I liked the trail of tiny gold hairs scattered from her navel to her crotch, and I liked the creases her ass made when it met her thighs. We made love that night, for the first time in a month, and though all the moves came off, the central point was missing. I’d suspected it would be that way. Now sex was a succession of details, with a sweet implosion at the end. It was another feature of the regular day.
After that, we slept in the same bed again. We made love once or twice a week. But Jonathan took something out of the air when he left—a next thing kept failing to happen. Clare and I got stuck in the present. According to current wisdom, that was the right place to be. But when it happened—when we lost our sense of the past and the future—we started to drift. Clare felt it, too. She called me “sweetheart” and “honey” more often. She looked at me with a certain mild kindliness that was the living opposite of desire. I began to notice how the cords of her neck jumped when she talked. I became more conscious of the way she scratched invisible pictures on a tabletop as she spoke, and of how her mascara sometimes hardened into gluey clumps on her eyelashes.
We did the things we’d always done. We watched television and went to the movies, bought old clothes and took long walks through the changing neighborhoods. We went to clubs and parties sometimes. But our own occasion kept slipping away from us. We didn’t find necessary things to say to each other. I was no talker. I took things in, but couldn’t give them back again, transformed, as language. Jonathan had had enough voice for both of us. Now there were silences that reached no logical ends. No one but Clare and me was ever coming home. We had no one to gossip about or worry over, except one another.
I thought of my own parents. I thought of Alice and Ned.
This was love between a man and a woman. I’d made that much more progress in my continuing education.
Summer passed, fall came. I didn’t see Jonathan until late November, and then only by accident. I had gone to a chiropractor on the Upper West Side, for the damage I did to my back lifting a case of champagne at work. The Upper West Side might have been a different city—we lived a downtown life. Walking along Central Park West to the subway, I gawked tourist-like at the autumn yellows of Central Park and the trim little dogs clipping alongside their masters’ glossy shoes. I got so absorbed in the rich otherness of the place I nearly walked past Jonathan.
He was leaning against the brick flank of an apartment building, reading The Village Voice. I stared at him as if he was a particularity of the neighborhood. He might have been a photograph come to life, the way the details of Paris must look if you barrel through it on a three-day package tour.
I said, “Jonathan?”
He looked up, and said my name.
“Jonathan, I—this is you, right?”
He nodded. “It’s me. I got into town a couple of weeks ago.”
“I, wow, man. I don’t know what to say. Um, are you all right?”
I was as confused by his reappearance as I’d been by his departure. Once again, my circuits shut down and left me floating in space.
“I’m okay. Bobby, I didn’t mean for us to meet like this.”
“Uh-huh. I mean, can you tell me what’s going on?”
He sighed. “I’m sorry about the way I left. That was sort of ridiculous, wasn’t it? I just…I knew I wouldn’t do it any other way. I’d just stay around being the uncle until you and Clare moved out and left me alone in that awful apartment. How’s Clare?”
“She’s okay. She’s, like, pretty much the same. I guess we’re both pretty much the same.”
“You make it sound like a terrible fate,” he said.
I shrugged, and he nodded again. He was too familiar to see. His face and clothes kept blurring. It seemed possible that I’d crossed a mental line, and was in fact talking to someone who only looked like Jonathan. New York is full of people who’ve caved in under their particular losses, and decided they have business with everyone on the street.
“You want to go for a drink or something?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
We went to the first place we saw, an Irish bar that sold corned beef from a steam table. It was the uptown version of the Village bars we used to frequent on our nights with the Hendersons. Crepe-paper Christmas decorations had become year-round fixtures there, and the television showed a wavering, too-bright soap opera to the single old woman who sat at the bar waiting to scream at anyone who interfered with her.
Jonathan ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, and I had a beer. He clicked his glass softly against mine. “Did you think you’d ever see me again?” he said.
“I didn’t know. How would I have known?”
“Right. How would you?”
“Where did you go?” I asked him. I still lacked any sense of the real. I thought fleetingly of excusing myself, going to the pay phone in back, and calling the police. But what would I tell them?
“Well, I didn’t have a whole lot of money in the bank. I mean, if I’d had thousands I’d probably have gone to Florence or Tokyo or someplace. But with what I had, I just went out to California. Remember Donna Lee from college? She lives in San Francisco now, with a woman named Cristina. I went out there and slept on their sofa for a while and just sort of tried to concoct a San Francisco life for myself.”
He sipped at his drink, and sucked in an ice cube at exactly the moment I knew he was going to. He still wore the silver Navajo ring he’d bought in Cleveland when we were fifteen. Details whirled and racketed inside my head.
“I don’t really, you know, understand all this,” I told him. “I haven’t understood it since you left that note. We had a great time, the dinner with Erich was fine, and then you just left. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly make sense to me either. You know, I turned twenty-nine a month ago. I feel like I’ll be thirty in about five minutes.”
“Um, happy birthday.”
“You’ll be twenty-nine too, in another few weeks.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well. Listen, I’ve got to go. They’re still debating about whether to take me back at the newspaper, I’m supposed to go meet Fred and Georgeanne in half an hour. It seems they haven’t decided yet whether I’m a high-strung romantic genius or just plain irresponsible. Drinks are on me.”
He tossed a pile of bills onto the table. I reached over and put my hand on top of his.
“Do you want to come over tonight?” I asked. “Clare’ll want to see you.”
He looked at our two hands. “No, Bobby,” he said. “I don’t want to come over. This was just an accident. I mean, you never come uptown. I figured I might as well have been in Michigan.”
“You don’t want to see us?”
Now he looked into my face. He pulled his hand out from under mine.
“Bobby, the fact is, I seem to have fallen in love with both of you. That sounds strange, I know. I never expected anything like this to happen. I mean—Well. It’s not what you prepare yourself for. I seem to have fallen in love with you and Clare together. I saw it that night on the roof. I didn’t want Erich to be my date, or anybody else. It’s just hopeless. As long as I know you, I can’t seem to fall in love with anybody else.”
He stood up. “Wait,” I told him. “Just wait a minute.”
“Give my love to Clare,” he said. “If and when I pull myself together, I’ll call you.”
He walked out of the bar. In my confusion, I lost track of what would be reasonable to do or say. I let him walk away into the November afternoon, and by the time I got out to the sidewalk he was gone.
He did as he said. He lived a life apart. Although we were in the same city, I never ran into him again, and he didn’t call. He let the fall and winter pass. And then in the spring he left a message on our answering machine.
“Hi, Bobby and Clare. This is such a weird thing to say on a tape like this. Bobby. My father died this morning. I thought I should let you know.”
His voice was followed by a mechanical click and whir, as the machine moved along to the next message.
WE WERE flying two thousand miles to the funeral of a man I’d never met. Through the airplane window I watched fat clouds throw shadows onto Texas. Texas was flat and one-colored as a manila envelope. Down there, in whatever farmhouses had chosen to attach themselves to the endless beige earth, people might be looking up at the airplane. They might be wondering, as I myself sometimes did, what rich interesting lives were being passed along to their next incident.
“Sure you don’t want some wine?” Bobby asked. I shook my head.
“I’m going on the wagon for a little while,” I said. “Maybe she could bring me a club soda or something.”
Bobby leaned over to signal for the stewardess. The stream of cold air blowing from the overhead nozzle disarranged his hair, which he’d taken to wearing longer, slicked back with gel. I smoothed his hair into place. Then I changed my mind and messed it up again.
I was over two months’ pregnant. I hadn’t told anyone. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it.
“I’m really, like, glad you’re here,” he said.
“Well, I hate to miss a funeral.”
“You know what I was thinking?” he said. “I was thinking the three of us could rent a car and drive back. We could, you know, see the country.”
“I guess we could,” I said.
“We could go to Carlsbad Caverns. We could see the Grand Canyon.”
“Mmm, I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”
“Sure,” he said. “We could probably rent hiking boots and backpacks. We could camp overnight.”
“Bobby. They don’t rent things like that. People own them. Some people have camping lives. You and I are more the nightclub type.”
I had only imagined seeing the Grand Canyon. Not hiking in it.
“You don’t want to,” he said.
“I only brought funeral clothes,” I said. “Can you see me tottering along some trail in a black dress and heels?”
Bobby nodded. He smoothed his hair with his fingers. The light over Texas shone silver on his square face and his heavy, intricately veined hands. Despite the glossy Italian hair and the earring, his face was innocent as an empty bowl. It was still the face of a man who believed human differences could be resolved by a pilgrimage to famous geological phenomena.
“Just, you know, an idea,” he said.
“I know. Let’s leave it for another time.”
He nodded again. The baby coalescing inside me was following the dictates of his genes as well as my own. Tiny nails were being driven into the passing moments. Bobby sipped his wine. We stared out the window at the emptiness passing below.
Jonathan met us at the airport. He looked physically diminished, as if some air or vital fluid had leaked out of him. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Had he always been so small and wan? Sunburned, brightly dressed people crowded around him in the waiting area. He might have been a refugee, in his pallor and his black T-shirt. Someone newly arrived from a grim, impoverished place. When Bobby and I got off the plane he gave us stiff, formal embraces, like the ones French politicians exchange.
“How’s Alice, Jon?” Bobby asked.
“Made of stern stuff,” he said. “Much sterner than me.”
“And how are you?” I asked.
“Hysterical,” he said calmly. “A mess.”
We drove to Jonathan’s parents’ condominium in Jonathan’s father’s car, an enormous blue Oldsmobile. I had never seen Jonathan drive before. He looked both childlike and paternal behind the wheel of that big car. He held the wheel with both hands, as if he was steering a ship.
On the way he told us how his father’s heart attack had struck him on his way to the mailbox. He explained that fact in particular. His father had had asthma and then emphysema. So his death by heart failure seemed to make everyone feel as cheated as they would have had he been in faultless health. Bobby asked, “On his way back from the mail box?” as if that were the most appalling thing about it.
I put on my sunglasses and watched the shopping centers pass. They shimmered in the heat. Between them lay open country, reddish-gray, studded with cacti. Arizona was the first place I had ever been that turned out to look exactly as I’d pictured it. As we drove along the blindingly bright highway I felt powerful and competent. I was an older woman in sunglasses who’d come to help a couple of confused men contend with their grief. I thought at that moment that I would leave Bobby and have the child by myself.
“I’d written him a letter,” Jonathan said. “The first one in at least a year. I hadn’t gotten around to mailing it, though. It was still in my jacket pocket when I heard.”
Jonathan’s parents’ condominium was part of a sprawling, mud-colored complex several miles from a shopping mall called Teepee Town. A sign beside the entrance said “Choice Units Still Available” in faded blue letters. Jonathan parked. He led us up a crushed-gravel walk to one of the buildings, past the mailbox, a conventional one painted brown to match the adobe-like substance. I suspected the adobe had been sprayed on with a hydraulic gun. I wondered what sort of people would want to live in a place like that.
The inside of the condominium was dark and cool. Instead of Indian rugs and pottery, there were wing chairs, ferns, family photographs in chrome frames. The only evidence of death was the flowers. There were a half-dozen arrangements in vases and foil-wrapped pots. A white porcelain shepherdess stood on a round polished table between two bouquets, serene and alarming as a bone. Before we had had a chance to acclimate ourselves to the interior darkness, a small, deeply tanned woman came out of what must have been the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her jeans.
“The prodigal returns,” she said with a hint of a Southern drawl. “Welcome to the reservation.”
“Hello, Alice,” Bobby said.
She took Bobby’s chin in her hand and turned his face one way and another. She examined it as keenly as an anthropologist checking the completeness of a skull. Suddenly I knew where Jonathan had picked up that stiff, politician’s embrace.
“Hello, beautiful,” she said. She planted a tight little kiss on his lips.
Bobby stood with his arms at his sides, as if struck dumb by her. Jonathan had to introduce me. Alice scanned me with a scientific eye and shook my hand. “Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Thank you for having me,” I said. It seemed like the stupidest possible thing to say to a woman whose husband had just died.
“I’m so sorry about Ned, Alice,” Bobby said. He had put one of his arms uncertainly over Jonathan’s shoulders.
“I know,” she said. “I am, too.”
“Are we the first ones to get here?” I asked.
“Well, we’re not making a big party of it,” Alice said. “I’m expecting Ned’s brother from Muncie, and a few of the people from around here. We decided to keep it intimate.”
“Oh,” I said. I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice. New widow or no.
“How about a drink?” Jonathan said. “Does anybody want a drink?”
Everybody agreed to want a drink. Jonathan made himself busy, getting them. I realized that was probably how he grew up, ushering things along, proposing drinks or Scrabble games or walks in the park. I could picture him at two, frantically interrupting with a new word he’d never spoken before, to draw his mother’s attention away from herself. Now, at thirty, he was turning into her. He administered dry kisses in airports. He was cultivating a life as orderly and cut off as his mother’s Early American living room.
After we’d had drinks and dinner, Alice announced that she was spending the night in a motel. Bobby and Jonathan objected. But she had made up her mind. “There’s not enough room to swing a cat in here,” she said. “The last thing anybody needs in quarters this close is to have to try and respect the privacy of an old lady.”
Bobby insisted that he and I should be the ones to go to a motel, but Alice wouldn’t budge. “My bag is already packed,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning, before any of you are up.”
“But it isn’t right,” Bobby said. “We don’t want to put you out of your own house.”
I gave his knee what I hoped was a discreet squeeze. Couldn’t he see how much Alice wanted to spend the night alone? I knew just what she’d do. She’d step into the scoured motel room, turn the air-conditioning on high, and lie down on an impersonal bed. She’d have a few hours outside her life. I’d done that myself, when a romance ended and my own apartment seemed suddenly too personal. Whether or not Bobby caught the meaning of the squeeze, he soon gave up on his protests. Alice got herself out of the house, promising to have Belgian waffles made before anyone stirred in the morning. I said a brisk unapologetic goodbye, which might or might not have telegraphed the fact that I knew Alice wasn’t doing anybody any favors. That although I understood the impulse it didn’t make me like her any better.
Then she was gone. Then we were alone together, with no idea of what to say or do. Although I’d been through plenty of departures, I hadn’t had any direct experience with the death of the body. My parents were still alive. My grandparents had all died discreetly, in other states, when I was very young. Whatever sense of competence I’d felt in the back seat of the Oldsmobile had evaporated. In its place was nothing but a feeling of vague stupidity, and irritation at the prospect of sleeping in an unfamiliar house and going to a stranger’s funeral.
“Anybody want another drink?” Jonathan asked.
We had another drink. We arranged ourselves in the wing chairs and on the ugly colonial sofa. If I’d ever imagined the process of mourning I’d pictured it as an untrammeled exchange, flowing freely as tapwater between people who either loved one another without reservation or were so depleted by their loss that the little daily differences and old grudges spiraled down the drain. But here, sipping tonic in a cheaply furnished, formal little parlor, I didn’t forget my ordinary meanness and vanity. I couldn’t feel the shock of the father’s death. I couldn’t make the desolate condominium complex seem like anything other than a place where death was logical and somehow appropriate. A mild surprise the residents were only too well prepared for.
Jonathan said, “I’m sorry we have to be seeing each other like this. I suspected I’d see you two again, but I’d imagined different circumstances.”
I knew he had to strain to make a direct statement like that without adopting someone else’s gestures and inflection. It was Jonathan’s overriding instinct to act as if all were well. As if we were having the time of our lives.
“It’s not what I pictured either,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t at all sure if I should come. I’m still not sure I should have.”
He nodded. He didn’t reassure me.
Nearly beside myself with nervousness and bile, I said, “I’m sure your father was a wonderful man.”
Bobby said, “Ned was great. He was really, you know, great. I’m sorry you never got to meet him, Clare. You’d’ve liked him a lot.”
“Well, I’m sure I would have.”
A silence passed. The ice cracked in Jonathan’s glass.
I said, “Listen, Jonathan, I don’t know why you did what you did. I suppose you needed to. We should probably just try to forget about it as long as we’re here.”
“I told Bobby,” he said. “I tried to tell you, too. I can’t seem to have a life around you.”
“Do you have a life now?”
“A sort of one. They wouldn’t take me back at the paper, but they helped me get an editorial thing at Esquire. I’m working my way back up. Unexplained disappearances don’t go over all that well, even in the magazine business.”
“Well, I hope you’re happier than you were,” I said.
“Not really,” he said. “But I could start getting happier at any moment.”
“Good.”
He looked around the room as if he couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten there—as if a moment earlier he’d been in his bed in New York.
He said, “I keep telling myself, ‘My father is dead.’ I can’t seem to make it feel like a fact. It keeps feeling like something that would happen on television. I mean, you’d think it would be so dramatic, but actually I feel sort of minor. Like this makes me less important. More of a bit player. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Bobby said, “Ned was, you know. A really good man. Clare, you’d have been crazy about him. Really, you would.”
I could hear the possibility of tears in his voice.
Jonathan said, “Oh, Bobby, please just shut up.”
“That isn’t called for,” I said. I got up from my chair and went to sit beside Bobby on the sofa. I massaged his neck. It felt as if it had steel cables running through it.
“He was like my father,” Bobby said. “I mean, that’s what he was like. More than my own father was, I guess.”
Jonathan sighed, a thin dry whistling sound that reminded me of his mother. “Bobby, if you want my family, you can have it,” he said. “I hereby give you my entire former life. You can decide where to bury my father. You can worry over the fact that, without him, my mother won’t know what to do with herself. If you want all that, you’re more than welcome to it.”
Jonathan sat in his oversized chair like a polite, furious child. His face was pale and his eyes glowed. I had never heard him speak in this voice but I knew somehow that it was his true voice, clear and calm and crackling with anger. It seemed at that moment that his loving, generous side had been another characterization. It had been his most successful, an elaborate system of kindly gestures that had covered all traces of the coldly raging, dwarfed little boy who faced us now. His head seemed too large for his body. His feet seemed barely to touch the floor.
“Stop it,” I said. “This is no time to talk like that.”
“Jon,” Bobby said. “Jonny, I—”
“Just go on being me,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know how to, you’re better at it than I am. Tomorrow when they put my father’s body in the oven you be the son and I’ll be the best friend. I’ll shed a few tears and feel awful for a while and then go back to my regular life.”
“Jon,” Bobby said. He was not crying, but his throat was clotted, his voice thick and phlegmy.
“You’re a better son, anyway,” Jonathan said. “You bring girlfriends home and you’ll have babies someday. You wouldn’t have just kept turning up alone at the holidays. Some sort of peculiar bachelor character with a job and no other life worthy of mention. You make more sense. It’s too late for my father but you can still be my mother’s son. You can rustle up some grandchildren for her so she doesn’t have to just sit alone in this condominium watching the tumbleweeds blow by.”
“You little shit,” I said to Jonathan. I was standing, without having decided to. “All he’s ever done to you is worship you. And all you’ve ever done is walk out on him. You have no right to talk to him like that.”
“Oh, you’re a fine one,” he said. “You let me fall in love with you and then you start sleeping with my best friend. You’re a fine one to tell me what I’ve got a right to do.”
“Wait a minute. Let you fall in love with me? Who ever said you were in love with me?”
“I did. I’m saying it. With both of you. Now I just want you to leave me alone.”
“Jon,” Bobby said. “Aw, Jon—”
“I’ve got to go,” Jonathan said. “I feel like I’m losing my mind in here. I’ll see you later.”
“Your mother took the car,” I said.
“Then I’ll walk.”
He got up from his chair and went out the front door. It made a pathetically small sound as it closed behind him—cheap wood clicking into an aluminum doorframe.
“I’m going after him,” Bobby said.
“No. Let him go, let him cool off. He’ll be back.”
“Uh-uh. I’ve got to talk to him. I’ve been sitting here not saying anything.”
“His father just died,” I said. “He’s not in his right mind. He needs to be alone.”
“No, he’s been alone too much,” Bobby said. “He needs me to go after him.”
Bobby got around me and out the door. I couldn’t have held him if I’d wanted to. I should probably have just stayed inside by myself, but I couldn’t imagine sitting there with the funeral flowers and the ticking clock. I followed Bobby and Jonathan. Not to intervene, but because I didn’t want to wait for them, alone, in that immaculate house.
By the time I got outside, Jonathan was already a block away. He was a ridiculous little figure walking hunched and hurried under a streetlamp. I reached the street in time to hear Bobby call him. At the sound of his name, without looking back, Jonathan started to run. Bobby ran after him. And I, nervous about being left alone in a haunted condominium, ran after Bobby.
He was the fastest of us. I never exercised, I was pregnant, and I had on heels that made me run like the heroine in a thriller. A tiny-footed, curvaceous woman who needs to be rescued over and over again. As I skittered breathlessly down the block I saw Bobby close the distance between himself and Jonathan. Around us the absurd condominiums stood floodlighted behind their white gravel lawns. Some had lighted windows. Most were dark, uncurtained, deserted. Over the sound of my breath I could hear the dry nocturnal rumble of the desert, a racket of dust and wind.
I was almost two full blocks behind when Bobby caught up with Jonathan. I saw him take hold of Jonathan’s shirt, pull him up short. I saw Jonathan’s legs keep churning for a moment, like a cartoon character’s. And then I saw Jonathan rear back and punch Bobby. It was a wild inefficient punch that caught Bobby in the stomach and doubled him over, more from surprise, it seemed, than force. Jonathan turned and ran again but Bobby was on top of him with a howl. Then they fell together, gouging at one another with their fists.
“Stop it,” I screamed. “You assholes. Stop, do you hear me?”
When I reached them they were rolling in the street, kicking awkwardly and trying to get a purchase on one another’s bodies. A line of blood flashed on Jonathan’s cheek. I bent over. After a moment I was able to grab both of them by the hair and pull it hard.
“Stop,” I said. “Stop. Right now.”
They stopped. I didn’t let go of their hair until they had separated and were sitting face to face on the velvety blacktop. Jonathan bled from the gash in his cheek. His shirtsleeve flapped raggedly off the yoke, exposing a crescent of pale shoulder. Bobby, the larger and stronger, had a smudge on his forehead and a rip in the knee of his slacks.
“You motherfuckers,” I said. “You really are crazy, aren’t you? Both of you.”
“Uh-huh,” Bobby said. And at the same moment, they both started to laugh.
“Are you all right?” Jonathan asked. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. I’m okay, I mean I’m fine. You?”
“I think so.” He dabbed at the cut on his cheek, looked with surprise and satisfaction at his bloodied fingertips. “Oh, look,” he said. “Blood.”
“It’s not bad,” Bobby said. “It’s just, you know, a little cut.”
“I never had a real fight before,” Jonathan said. “I never punched anybody in my life.”
“I used to when I was a kid,” Bobby said. “I used to punch my brother. But he was so much bigger than me. He’d just, like, laugh and push me away.”
“I hope you both know what assholes you sound like,” I said.
“Well, I guess I know,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah. I guess I do, too,” Bobby answered.
They stood up and we walked back to the condominium. On the way Jonathan said, “I’m sorry about how I’ve acted. I mean, tonight and for about the past year.”
“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “I mean, I think I get it. I think I understand.”
Jonathan linked his arm in Bobby’s. They walked along stolid and pleased with themselves as two burghers strolling through the village they controlled. Jonathan offered his other elbow to me, but I declined. I walked alone, at a distance. I figured I’d get through the funeral, get back on a plane, and never see either of them again.
Ned’s funeral took place the next day at four o’clock. His brother, a furniture salesman named Eddie, flew in from Indiana that morning. Eddie’s cigarette smoke crept out of his nose and into his watery eyes the same way my father’s had. I knew I could never like him. I didn’t seem to like anybody at this funeral. Also present were a big, white-haired woman named Mrs. Cohen, and a small white-haired one named Mrs. Black. I felt nothing particular about them but my observations edged over to the unfavorable (a handbag full of wadded Kleenex, pink powder caught flaking in the folds around a mouth) because that was the drift of things.
We all drove out to the crematorium in a short string of cars: the Oldsmobile, a Honda, and a Plymouth. We duplicated the car order when we walked from the parking lot toward the chapel: Jonathan, Alice, and Eddie first, followed by Bobby and me, followed by the two women. On the way I whispered to Bobby, “Why do you think Alice wanted to keep the funeral so small?”
“I think this is just all the people who came,” he whispered back. We were moving along a blinding concrete walk bordered by flowering hedges. Pink trumpet-shaped flowers protruded from among waxy green leaves. Bobby sweated in a dark jacket. I had forgotten to bring any sunglasses but the triangular ones with the scarlet frames, which I couldn’t very well wear to a funeral.
“He must have known other people,” I said. I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow, so I wouldn’t step off the path in the dizzying light. I found I liked holding on to his arm. It had nothing to do with affection for Bobby. Holding somebody’s arm made me feel more like a real mourner, less like a funeral-crasher.
“He just ran a theater in Cleveland,” Bobby said. “I mean, who’s going to come, ushers from ten years ago?”
“Well, some one,” I said. We had nearly reached the chapel. It was a gabled building that seemed to be made of stained glass and mirrors. The crematorium was in back. When we first pulled up I had checked for chimneys, but all that was visible behind the church was a flat-roofed cement building with grooves running along its sides, as if it had been combed with a giant comb while the cement was still wet. Of course, it would be too technologically advanced to have chimneys sticking up.
We seated ourselves in the front pews, in the air-conditioned hush. Ned’s casket, dark wood with a dry sheen, was displayed under a hanging Lucite cross. On the casket was a single wreath of hollyhocks. It reminded me of the lei Donna Reed threw overboard at the end of From Here to Eternity. I thought Ned, a former theater-owner, would probably have liked that.
I sat at the far end of the pew, with Bobby on my right and nothing on my left. Jonathan sat on Bobby’s other side, and Alice sat next to Jonathan. Jonathan was crying, quietly but without reserve. Today he had quit being dryly courageous. The cut on his cheek bore a brown hairline scab. A single tear, stained by the light from the colored glass, trembled on his chin. I touched my own chin, and tears started to leak out of my eyes as if I’d pushed a button. I thought about my own father. Once, during a drunken argument with my mother, he had dropped me in a snowbank. I believe that was my first memory. My mother had reached for me, and in their jostling I’d fallen into the snow. My father had had a sure grip, even drunk. He wouldn’t have dropped me if my mother hadn’t grabbed. The snow had been white and cold and silent as death itself. I had sunk down deep. The two of them dug me out, cursing one another. If Ned had been my father, I’d have made sure he didn’t end up with a sparse little funeral in the middle of the desert. The tears flowed. Bobby pressed my hand. For a moment I felt as if Jonathan and I were brother and sister, being comforted by a mutual friend. Then I remembered I was crying for myself and my little sorrows, not the big sorrow of someone actually dead. That reminder only seemed to make me cry harder.
After the funeral the casket was wheeled out to be cremated. We mourners got back in our cars and went home. The ashes would be ready the following day. They worked fast. I wondered if they used some new vaporizing process. Once we were out of the chapel I put my sunglasses on, which helped hide my red eyes.
Everyone started back to Alice’s house, what was now Alice’s house, what had been Alice and Ned’s. I thought of how much Alice must hate that house, with the muddy sprayed-on cement walls and air conditioners humming under the little raw poles that stuck out over the windows. I suspected Ned had probably learned to like it. In a humorous sort of way. People who went to a lot of movies were usually able to see the irony in a wider variety of situations.
Bobby didn’t speak the whole way back. He is respecting my grief, I thought with surprise. My grief over a stranger, over my own memories, while he himself had known the living person. My face burned. I had lost track of things. I reached over and stroked his hair, then let my hand drop down to his chest, the soft squarish mounds of muscle and fat. I suddenly desired him fiercely. I desired his kindliness and self-sacrifice as if they comprised a different person, a handsome capable stranger I’d just met. It wasn’t lust for the Bobby I knew. I’d have liked this compassionate stranger to pull out of line and onto a side street where we could make screaming, axle-rocking love. I made up for that ghoulishness by kissing Bobby on the ear and whispering, “It’s all right, sweetheart.”
He smiled. His own eyes were unreadable as mine behind the smoky oval mirrors of his glasses. He didn’t say anything.
Bobby and I and Jonathan and I—our mingled love and friendship, the lopsided family we’d tried to form—had come to seem like just another foolish episode. Another sprayed-concrete house with twigs over the windows. Now, unexpectedly, the weight of the moment filled that rented Honda. Bobby and I were driving on a desert highway, second in a makeshift funeral procession. I was pregnant. He was the baby’s father. Jonathan, who’d broken both our hearts in some obscure way I couldn’t quite name, sat in the car ahead of us, beside his unflinching mother. The radio, playing an old Fleetwood Mac song, glowed orange in the relentless white light of mid-afternoon.
Back at the house, the two old women went straight to the kitchen to do things to the casseroles and desserts they had brought. That human preoccupation with food in the face of death. I felt a little better about my urge for a wild, hot fuck at about the same time Ned’s casket must have been sliding into the oven.
Ned’s brother Eddie sat smoking in a wing chair. He smelled of flowery cologne and everything the cologne was intended to cover up. I wondered where his wife was, and if he had children. How could he help but have a wife and children? I was always astonished at how simple and inevitable those facts were for most people.
“It was a nice service,” he said.
“I suppose,” Alice said. The old women had banished her from her own kitchen. She paced around the room, making minor adjustments. She straightened a picture that had not been crooked. She was wearing a black cocktail dress that must have dated back to Cleveland. She would certainly have had no use for a dress like that in the desert. Years ago, when she packed up and moved, she had probably decided to keep the dress for today.
At that moment I could picture her in an Ohio bedroom, packing to move to a foolish house in the desert. I could see her sorting through her things, making bundles for the Salvation Army. I could see her coming upon this particular dress. She would have known she’d need it one day. She would have sat down on the bed, holding the slick dark fabric with a certain disbelief. A dress she’d bought offhandedly in a mall, not too expensive, no big thing. She would have sat for a while on a white chenille bedspread, in jeans, with the black fabric spread over her lap. Then, in an efficient and scientific manner, she would have folded the dress in tissue and packed it along with her sun suits and Bermuda shorts.
I could see her so perfectly. I gave my head a little shake, to clear it.
“Now there’s no one,” Eddie said. “Except the people in this room. How did we get to be such a small family, anyway?”
“You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world,” Alice said. She licked her thumb and rubbed a spot off a philodendron leaf. “You do your work and raise your kids and live in your house and that’s that. Neither Ned nor I was ever much of a joiner.”
“You always seemed to have friends in Cleveland,” Eddie said.
“Neighborhood people,” Alice said. “Some of them were very nice. But we moved out of the neighborhood. They all sent flowers.”
She crossed the room briskly, and opened the drapes. Light exploded into the room like a flashbulb. Jonathan gasped, then said, “Excuse me,” as if he had committed some minor bodily embarrassment. I figured Alice and Ned must have been one of those everybody-loves-him-but-nobody-can-stand-her couples. I thought that if I’d been married to Ned, he’d have had some friends who thought enough of him to buy a plane ticket to Arizona. I felt the tears rising again, and clenched my fists to stop them. I settled in closer to Bobby. I’m sorry, Ned, I said silently. For a moment, Bobby and Ned seemed to get confused in my mind. I might have been sixty-five, sitting there with Bobby, my dead husband, who had come back from the grave to point out my inadequacies and mistakes.
The old women kept up a skittish conversation in the kitchen, occasionally striking a series of notes with a spoon against a pot. I questioned Eddie about his life, just to keep things going. His wife was dead. He had two married daughters, who, he explained, could not get away for the funeral. He was the veteran of an orderly life, a sequence of births and deaths in Muncie, Indiana. Memories kept intruding on my attention as I listened to Eddie. My father had stood me on a bartop when I was four years old, to the applause of men. He’d bought frilly dresses my mother didn’t want me to wear. “She looks like a hooker,” my mother had said, and for years I’d believed a hooker was someone who hooked men’s hearts. I’d thought it was a grudging form of flattery. My father was fun and indulgent. My mother believed in a life of work. It was only as I grew older that I began to see her side. My father cursed and wept, fell down the back stairs. He wrecked cars, and began to accuse me of conspiring with my mother. He grew too big and noisy, too dangerous, and if Mother had been any fun at all I’d have joined up with her. My father stumbled naked down the hall. He said something to me I couldn’t understand, and soon after that he was gone. Mother repapered her bedroom in bright sexless daisies. She said, “Things will be better now.”
Eddie sat smoking, his eyes dim and yellowed from fifty years of absorbing his own smoke. “I never expected to outlive him,” he said. “He was the oldest, you know. But still.”
“Yes,” Alice said softly. “I know.”
Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Black came out of the kitchen. One of them, I couldn’t remember which was which, dried her hands with a striped dishrag. “Rest in peace,” the other one said.
“He didn’t have a bad life, though,” Eddie said. “He always loved the movies, and he ended up owning a movie theater. Not bad.”
“He was a very kind man,” said the old woman with the dish towel, Mrs. Cohen or Mrs. Black. “I always slept better at night, knowing I could call him and he’d come right away. I never did have to call him, thank the Lord, but I always knew I could.”
“A very kind man,” the other one said.
Jonathan had shuffled over to a chair. Bobby went and sat close to him, with one haunch hung over the chair arm. If they could have fused into one being they’d have done fine in the world.
“Thank you for making dinner,” Alice said to the two women. “It must be after five o’clock. Why don’t we all have a drink, or two or three?”
“Oh, I never drink,” said the woman with the dish towel. “I had a kidney operation. I have only one kidney, and that’s my sister’s.”
“That’s right,” said the other.
I wondered if the two women were sisters.
After dinner, they went home. Eddie went back to his hotel room “to freshen up,” promising to return “for a nightcap.”
Alice said, “Maybe you boys should have some time alone together. Why don’t you go out for a drink?”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “Should we?” He checked with Bobby for an answer. Bobby glanced at me. I wondered how the decision could possibly have come around to me. I nodded imperceptibly, yes.
Jonathan asked if he should take a jacket. Bobby told him he probably should. “You two,” said Alice, “are a pair.” I had never seen anyone as lost as Jonathan, as anxious to be told what to do.
Bobby kissed me on his way out, a moist peck on the cheek. “We won’t, you know, be gone too long,” he whispered. I swatted him away as if shooing a fly. My sense of the real had evaporated. I was back in an arbitrary place, being left alone with a mean-spirited woman I scarcely knew. This episode would end. It would be just another small story in my life.
Jonathan lingered at the doorway. “Bye,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”
“Go,” I said. If I’d been his sister, I could have kept Alice from drawing the juice out of him. I’d have put Alice in her place, and inspired Jonathan to stand up for himself.
“Goodbye, Mom,” he said.
Alice took hold of his chin in her direct, scientific way. She looked straight into his eyes. “Goodbye, son,” she said. “I love you.”
After they had gone, Alice asked, “Can I get you anything?” in a sunny, hostess’s tone, reminding me that I was only a guest.
“Nothing, thanks,” I said. “Can I do anything for you?”
“No. I’m going to spruce up the kitchen a bit, I think.”
“I’ll help.”
“No, thank you,” she said, with a firm smile. “I’d really rather do it alone. You just make yourself comfortable out here.”
That was fine with me. Now neither of us would have to think of things to say. After Alice had gone into the kitchen I turned on the television, with the volume all the way down, so as not to intrude on her thoughts.
I stared at the screen. I didn’t recognize the show, and didn’t care. If I watched television at all, I only watched it for the feeling of something happening. At home I usually turned the sound down and turned up the stereo, so I didn’t have to listen to what one unfamiliar character was saying to another.
Alice stayed in the kitchen for a long time. One show ended, and another. I alternated between watching TV and flipping through magazines. Just killing the time. I figured Bobby and Jonathan were out at some roadhouse, getting drunk and talking about themselves and Alice and me. I felt jealous—not of their devotion to one another so much as their history together. The simple, neurotic fact of their bond. I, a more reasonable and complete person, would fly back to New York and go on to something else. I’d have my baby alone. There was nothing inevitable, no element of fate or doom, about my attachment to anyone here. I leafed through Arizona Highways and National Geographic.
Then I heard something break in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if I should go in there or not. Maybe Alice was having some kind of temporary breakdown, and would rather not be bothered. I didn’t want to butt in. On TV, a thousand children sang soundlessly about Coke. I knew the song. It was an old commercial, being mysteriously revived. I decided on second thought that it would probably be rude not to check on Alice.
In the kitchen, she was holding two halves of a plate. “Dropped it,” she said. She said it with a peculiar smile, as if dropping it had been an accomplishment.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“It wasn’t anything, though,” she told me. “They sell for a dollar ninety-eight at the K mart. No trouble at all to replace it.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” She was still holding the two halves of the plate, which were perfect as two half-moons. After a moment she dropped them again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly sorry. You go on in the other room and watch TV. I’ll be just fine.” She turned and walked out the screen door. It banged behind her, with the flimsy sound of lightweight aluminum.
I bent over and picked up the plate. It had broken into several pieces this time, thick triangular shards. I picked them all up and dropped them carefully into the trash. I was afraid of breaking them any further. I stood for a while in the silent kitchen, wishing Bobby and Jonathan would get home. I almost went back into the living room and sat down as I’d been told, but I just couldn’t picture myself doing it. I made up my mind to follow Alice and offer whatever help I could, being careful not to make a pest of myself. I was, after all, only a guest.
I opened the door and stepped out into the rectangle of light it made. Stars were visible even through the brightness of the condominium complex. The back yard wasn’t much. Just a plot of spongy grass with a flower bed and two lawn chairs, surrounded by an adobe-like wall. Alice stood in the middle of the grass, facing away from the house. She held her hair with both hands, and rocked from side to side. As I started toward her she let out what began as a moan but collapsed into itself and became a sigh, a long slow hissing exhalation. With one hand she took hold of and tore a piece of hair from her head. I could hear the sound it made, ripping out.
“Alice?” I said.
She turned, holding the hair in her fist. It hung down almost a foot, kinky strands in the electric light. “You shouldn’t see this,” she said. “This isn’t your life. You should go back in the house.”
“Can I do anything for you?” I asked.
She laughed. “Yes, dear,” she said. “Run down to the K mart for a new plate. And a new husband.”
We stood facing one another. I believed she was waiting for me to go back into the house, offended. I didn’t go back into the house. Maybe because I was offended, and refused to give her the satisfaction.
After a minute she looked down at the handful of hair. “This is all I have,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move.
“I don’t want the boys to see me this way,” she said. “I don’t want Jonathan to. I don’t think he could stand it, seeing me like this.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said.
“I do, though. I suppose you can see me this way. You’ve never really known me any other. Yes, you can see me like this. It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it’s all right.”
She reached up with her free hand and grabbed at her hair. I took hold of her wrist. “Don’t,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
I hadn’t expected to touch her.
“Don’t I?” she asked. “Don’t I have to do something?”
“No,” I said. “No, nothing.”
She sighed. I kept hold of her wrist. I held on tight. A part of me waited to see what Alice would do next and a part of me thought of my own child, grown up, bound to me by an endless snarl of love and hatred. I could hear the children in the commercial, singing their song to Coke. All those voices. It was like having a loudspeaker in my head.
“You see, I’m more than this,” she said. “We all are. No, I don’t really mean that. I’m just feeling sorry for myself right now, not for the whole damn race. Not even for Ned. I’m more than this. And what am I going to do with poor Ned? How are we not going to be a joke?”
“You’re not a joke,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me. Do you want to know a secret?”
I kept my mouth shut. I held Alice’s thin wrist.
“I was going to leave Ned,” she said. “I’d made up my mind. I was thinking about how to tell him, and then he dropped over dead on his way to the mailbox.”
“Oh, honey,” I said. It was all I could think of to say.
“The funny thing is, I’d been planning on leaving for most of the last thirty years. But I couldn’t think of where to go, or what to do. I seemed to have lost track of what it was possible for a woman to do on her own. And our house, the old one in Cleveland, just seemed so permanent.”
“You could have kicked him out,” I said.
“Oh, but I didn’t want to stay in Cleveland on my own. It was a dreadful place. And I kept thinking, ‘If I leave, this won’t be my kitchen anymore. I won’t have my plates stacked in this corner cupboard, or light coming in at just this angle.’ I could imagine the larger parts. The lonely nights and working a job. What I couldn’t seem to relinquish was those little daily things. And then it would be time to make dinner, and another day would go by.”
“Well, I actually admire you for staying,” I said. “My father left, and I don’t know if I’ve ever quite gotten over it.”
“Really, I think staying is the cowardly thing,” she said. “I pressured Jonathan to keep me company, and when I saw that he was falling in love with Bobby, I drove a wedge between them. I packed Ned off to his theater because, well, as you might imagine, nothing much went on between us in bed. And he wasn’t the type for affairs. He just got lost in the movies. Now I’m an old woman, and Ned’s gone, and poor Jonathan doesn’t know what to do with himself.”
I noticed a plane flying silently overhead. “I don’t know what to say,” I said finally.
“There’s nothing to say. You could loosen up on my wrist a little. You’re cutting off the blood.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I let go and was surprised when Alice took my hand.
“We’re not friends,” she said. “We don’t even like each other all that much. Maybe it’s lucky for me, to have someone here who isn’t a friend. I couldn’t tell this to anyone but a stranger. Thank you for not running away.”
“Keep quiet,” I said. I hadn’t expected to hear that much vehemence in my own voice. “If you start getting grateful, we won’t be able to look at each other after this. I’m not doing anything for you that anybody wouldn’t do.”
“But you’re here,” she said. “You came two thousand miles to stand out here with me. That’s all I’m grateful for.”
“It’s damn little,” I said.
“It’s a great deal,” she answered.
“Well,” I said, and the two of us stood in silence, holding hands like shy kids on a date.
After a minute Alice said, “I wonder if you could do something for me. It’s going to sound very strange.”
“What?”
“I wonder if you’d take hold of me and squeeze me, hard. I mean hard.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Please.”
I put my arms awkwardly around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. I didn’t know her well enough to refuse. I inhaled the crisp odor of her hair.
“Harder, please,” she said. “Please don’t be careful with me. I want to be held one last time by someone who isn’t treating me delicately.”
I breathed deeply and pressed Alice to my breasts. I could feel her smaller breasts in their brassiere, and her ribs and spine. I could tell she had a skeleton.
“Good,” she said. “Even harder.”
I held one of my own wrists with the opposite hand, like a wrestler, and squeezed until I heard her gasp for breath. I realized she had taken hold of me, too.
“Oh Lord,” she whispered. “Hold me tighter. Don’t let go.”
I was still holding her when a car pulled up in front. “Bobby and Jonathan are back,” I said, relaxing my grip.
“Oh no,” she said. “I need a little longer without them.”
The car door slammed. “Now, now. It’ll be all right,” I said helplessly.
“I’m not ready,” she said. “I need a little longer.”
The front door opened. There was no place to go. The wall ran all around the yard, chest high, and on the other side were more buildings exactly like this one. “Come on,” I said. I led her by the hand to the farthest corner of the yard, where the brightness was less intense.
“Just stand here,” I said, setting her in the curve of the wall. I could hear Jonathan calling for his mother. A window blazed with light.
“I’m not crying,” she said. “Am I?”
“No. Stand right here,” I said. I placed myself in front of her, with my back to the house, blocking the light.
Soon Bobby opened the back door and stood in the doorway, a dark shape cut out of the light. “Clare?” he called. “Alice?”
“We’re all right, Bobby,” I said. “Go back in. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”
“Oh, don’t let him come out here,” Alice said.
“Nothing, darling,” I called. “We’re fine. Just go back in, please.”
“What’s wrong?” He walked out onto the grass and stood several paces away. He planted his fists on his hips, like an angry father. I felt the strongest twist of dislike I’d ever felt for him.
“What?” he said.
Alice had by that time begun to cry, from humiliation as much as grief, long dry sobs that caught in her throat and made a tearing sound. “Is that Alice?” Bobby said.
“Of course it’s Alice,” I said. “Go inside.”
He came and stood next to me. “Alice?” he said, as if he didn’t recognize her.
I put my hands on her shoulders. I didn’t try to embrace her. I just held on to her, so she wouldn’t feel like she was dropping away from everything.
“Oh, Alice, I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.”
“You didn’t do—” was all Alice could get out.
Bobby drew a noisy breath and started to cry, too. I wanted to punch him. How dare he be anything but strong at a moment like this? I actually lifted one hand to do it, to slap him out of himself. I had always wanted to make a gesture like that. But my hand stopped halfway and, following the line of least resistance, settled comfortingly on his back instead. What else could I do with my hand? I wasn’t the heroic type. I had no plan of action. Bobby trembled, and as I touched him his trembling went through me like an electric shock. My father popped into my mind. Suddenly he was there, solid as a photograph, handsome and arrogant in his winter coat. I kept one hand on Alice and one on Bobby. I could see my father so clearly, and my mother: outraged, efficient, aging in a square-shouldered red jacket. I saw Ned distinctly as if I had known him, turned away by his discontented wife, watching movies among his dwindling audience, dreaming of Faye Dunaway or Elizabeth Taylor.
I held on to Bobby and Alice. Obeying no one but myself I put my head back and laughed. Not that anything was funny. But I laughed anyway. I knew I ought to feel embarrassed, for laughing at a time like that, but things had gone too far. I decided not to be embarrassed, and wasn’t. I kept laughing. The fact that nothing was funny only seemed to make me laugh harder.
Soon a light, questioning touch landed on my shoulder. It was Jonathan, looking timid and hungry, asking by his touch to be let into the circle. I made room for him between myself and Bobby, and laid my arm across his shoulders so I could keep my hold on Bobby, too. I let myself go on laughing. I felt a weight beginning to rise inside me, something big and sodden, like a lump of dough I’d swallowed so long ago I’d forgotten it was lodged in my gut. I laughed on. I laughed at my father, a drunken boy tortured by his own devotion to sleaze and disorder, and at my tough, vengeful mother. I laughed at Ned, a dreamer reduced to ash and bone; at wimpy Jonathan; at Bobby and at myself, knocked up three months after my fortieth birthday by a man I wasn’t sure I liked. I laughed at Alice, stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard. At every lousy little thing.
CLARE got sick in seven different states. She was nauseated first at the Grand Canyon, standing wan and erect beside an unused telescope on the South Rim, looking in the direction of the view from behind dark glasses. As Bobby strained against the railing, exclaiming over the profound distances, Clare touched my elbow and said in a low voice, “Sweetheart, I don’t think I can manage it.”
“Manage what?” I asked.
“This,” she said, waving in the direction of the abyss. “All this grandeur and beauty. A great moment like this. It’s too much for me.”
I stood close to her. Although the morning was calm, I had some idea of shielding her from whatever winds might be stirred up by the canyon’s vastness. The sun had just risen. It threw a hammered, golden light onto the cliff faces, which tumbled down into an unsteady, shimmering lake of translucent purple darkness that appeared to be bottomless. Bobby danced ecstatically at the rim, hugging himself and emitting surprised little groans.
“There’s nothing to it,” I told Clare. “Just stand here and look, and when we’re through looking, we’ll go have breakfast.”
The word “breakfast” made her retch. She caught the telescope for support. It swung creakily up toward a vivid pink gash of cloud. She crouched, gagging, but did not vomit. A thread of saliva dangled from her mouth, shining in the light.
I held her shoulders. “Honey, you’re sick,” I said.
“Too goddamn beautiful,” she said. “Better put me back in that Chevy Nova.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll go get Bobby.”
“Leave him,” she said. “Don’t interrupt, he’s in a trance or something.”
She may have been right. Bobby had ceased his hopping, wound-up little dance and was now standing with both hands on the rail, like a captain commanding his ship in a storm. He was more available than Clare or I to outright fits of sentiment—he had no sense of going too far.
I helped Clare into our rented Chevrolet. She and I had agreed, with mingled feelings of irony and plain interest, to drive back to New York from Arizona. This was our first morning—we’d set out at 3 a.m. from my mother’s house to make the Grand Canyon by sunrise. In the next five days we would cross the Rockies and the Plains, pay our respects to the Ohio dead, buy Shaker boxes in Pennsylvania. It was Bobby’s trip at heart. He would drive most of the time, and insist on stopping in stores that advertised “Homemade Jam” or “Local Handicrafts,” which, three times out of four, had been made somewhere in Asia. He would, with my credit card, buy over a hundred dollars’ worth of cassette tapes: the Stones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen. He would play “Born to Run” over and over, until Clare finally threw it out the window on the road approaching Sandusky.
I settled her into the front seat. The car had an immaculate, rubberized smell and she inhaled deeply, as if the disinfected air could revive her. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “Now go. Look at the view.”
“No, I’ll stay here with you.”
“Do you think I want to be the one who made you sit in a subcompact instead of seeing the Grand Canyon? Go. For Christ’s sake.”
I went. I stood beside Bobby at the railing. At this hour, in the off-season, the observation area was empty. One crushed paper cup sat luminous on the thin lip of red earth beyond the rail. The morning light, brilliant but without warmth, washed our faces and clothes.
“Amazing,” I said.
Bobby turned to me. He couldn’t speak, and probably wished I wouldn’t either. But his politeness never failed him.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“You don’t expect this,” I said. “I mean, you’ve seen it so many times on coasters and dish towels and I don’t know what-all. I thought maybe it was going to be sort of kitschy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It actually knocked Clare out. I had to put her back in the car.”
“Hmm.” He put his arm over my shoulder, because he loved me and because he ardently wished I would shut up. I slipped my arm around his waist. Here was his smell and his solid, familiar flesh. We watched the sun come up. Bobby was warm and substantial, his brain crawling with thoughts that were at once familiar and utterly strange to me. His wrist still bore the liver-colored mole. Clare waited for us in the car, defeated by the view. I believed, at that moment, that I had never loved anyone but my parents and these two people. Perhaps we don’t fully recover from our first loves. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.
Clare was sick again the following morning, at Pikes Peak. “Maybe I’m allergic to national monuments,” she said. We got her to the women’s room in a Shell station, and waited for nearly half an hour. She emerged pallid and straight-backed, with her sunglasses on and dark red lipstick newly applied. She might have been an ancient movie star. Behind her, granite peaks stood dusted with snow.
“Honey,” I said, “should we drive straight to Denver and put you on a plane?”
“No,” she said. “I think I’m all right. I got over it yesterday, didn’t I? It’s probably just some little bug.”
She had, in fact, recovered by ten o’clock. The color returned to her face, and her body gave up its clenched, formal posture. We drove among meadows that were taking on their first green, backed by mountains covered with pine and bare white aspens. It was a verdant, uncomplicated landscape—wide open, with no underlayer of menace. Farther north, I suspected, the terrain was rougher, the peaks more jagged, and if you strayed too far from the road you could be swallowed up by the sheer fathomless distance of the land and sky. Here, in the heart of Colorado, we passed only simple manifestations of broad, unterrifying beauty. There were mountains, and fields of cattle. There were silver streams that clattered alongside the highway, studded with chocolate-colored rocks. The landscape touched you with its fertile kindliness, but didn’t change you in any way. It never threatened to break your heart.
We drove all day, and reached Nebraska before dark. Clare read Vogue and Interview and Rolling Stone. “The thing I love best about car trips,” she said, “is the way you’re entitled to read stupid magazines for hours and hours. I mean, you can look at scenery anytime, scenery’s everywhere. But the chance to read an entire Interview without guilt? That’s rare.”
We slept in a motel fifty miles west of Lincoln, and started again just after daybreak. Clare was only slightly ill that morning. We fell into a lulled rhythm of driving, reading, eating, and listening to music, with the farmland of Nebraska and Iowa and Illinois rolling by. You have to travel through the Plains to fully appreciate the emptiness of this country. Its main characteristics are not traffic and abundant store displays but a windswept solitude that lacks the dignity of true remove—no horizon is truly empty. The sun always glints on a remote water tower or silo, a billboard or a tin-roofed, temporary storehouse. Every twenty or thirty miles you pass through a struggling town which continues to exist because at some point in the past it set out to exist. We stopped for meals in some of those towns, hoping for homemade hash browns or pies baked an hour earlier by the owners’ wives, but all the food was dead, thawed and microwaved. Fields rolled by, seeded but still bare, hour after hour of blank black earth exposed to the raw sky. Clare read to us from a book of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Our car became more and more disreputable, littered with wrappers and empty bottles. By nightfall, when we stopped at a motel in Indiana, we had all but lost track of our histories and futures—it seemed we had always been driving across a vast table of farmland and would always continue doing so. That is both the horror and the marvel of long travel. You lose track of your life with astonishing speed. An interstellar traveler would be not quite identifiable as an earthling within two weeks; after six months in deep space he or she might as well not return to earth at all.
The next day we drove through Cleveland. Clare was sick in the morning, worse than Nebraska but less severe than Pikes Peak. By the time we reached the Cleveland city limits, just after 11 a.m., she was more or less recovered.
“Cleveland,” she said. “Who ever expected to visit such a remote, exotic place?”
Bobby and I were overtaken by giddy nervousness at the town line. We pointed out buildings to one another, joked about their stature. They had seemed so grand. We drove past the limestone clutter of downtown, took the familiar exit. Our itinerary was brief. First we passed the six-story brick-and-concrete parking structure that stood where my father’s theater had been. The new building was an arrangement of tiered ramps with an unintentionally beautiful blue neon arrow pointing out the entrance. It was serene and uncomplicated, utterly functional, and it had the look of something that would stand for hundreds of years. My father’s old theater, built during the Depression, had been cheaply ornamented, its yellow bricks laid in a herringbone pattern and its aluminum marquee arched and buckling like an ocean wave. Even when it was new, it must have seemed temporary, a small monument to forgetfulness and good cheer thrown up during hard times. The parking structure was more businesslike, hard and smooth as a roach.
“That’s that,” I said. “Rest in peace, Dad.” I managed a brusque, flippant tone because I couldn’t bear the idea of myself gone maudlin at such an obvious moment. I didn’t mind my own sentimentality but I hated to be a sucker. I was not wholly sorry my father’s business was gone. I was vaguely ashamed and lonely, yet pleased with myself simply for being alive; for surviving into the future. Only the most dedicated nostalgist could have argued against the notion that this part of town had been generally improved. New restaurants announced their names in gilt letters, and a famous department-store chain was renovating the defunct family-owned store that had stocked drab outdated clothes and gaudy costume jewelry.
We passed my family’s old house, which looked wonderful. The new owners had painted it pine green, and had reshingled the roof. A skylight had been installed over my parents’ former bedroom. I could imagine the current state of the rooms: the woodwork would be painted white, and the carpet taken up to expose the oak floors. There would be art, and spare leather furniture.
“Shit,” Bobby said. “Look what they did to it.”
“It looks great,” I told him. “Don’t stop. It isn’t ours anymore, don’t even think about going up to the front door and asking if we can look inside.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” he said, though I knew if he’d been alone he’d have done just that. Bobby had no talent for leaving things alone.
Our last stop was the cemetery. We drove to the tract where Bobby had lived, past the low flagstone wall on which the word “Woodlawn” floated in scrolled wrought-iron letters, the final “n” broken off but its silhouette remaining, a pale shadow on the stone. We followed the serpentine street, past houses that repeated themselves in threes, and parked at the site of Bobby’s old home. The house was gone, burned almost twenty years ago and bulldozed away, but no one had built anything in its place. This subdivision was not undergoing renewal. It appeared that the residents had annexed the property without formally purchasing it: a small garden was staked out, ready for spring planting, and a swing set stood rusting among the weeds. It seemed the Morrows’ holdings had become a sort of People’s Park in the suburbs of Cleveland. The others on the block, those who still lived in the fading jerry-built ranch houses with birdbaths or plaster dwarfs on their lawns, had appropriated it. I could imagine them gathering there at dusk, their children swaying creakily on the swings as the women planted sunflower seeds and murmured over the day’s events. It was slightly criminal, an unfounded claim made by people who were not prospering but only getting by, and as such the property had passed beyond reclamation. To own this parcel of land now you would have to wrest it back from those who had learned to care for it. If you leveled their tiny works and put up a new house you would be an invader, not much different from a colonial, and the land would be tainted until your house fell down again. This suburban quarter-acre had returned to its wilder purpose, and could not be redomesticated without a fight that would leave the victor’s hands stained.
“This was it,” Bobby said. Clare looked around incredulously. She had not expected anything so ordinary, although we’d done our best to prepare her.
We got out of the car and walked onto the patch of bare ground under the singular openmouthed gaze of a red-haired boy who had been digging in the dirt with a tablespoon when we pulled up. As we walked across, Bobby said, “Here’s where the front door was. And, like, this right here would have been the living room. That was the kitchen over there.”
We stood for a moment in the phantom house, looking around. It was so utterly gone, so evaporated. Sun shone on the bare earth. Clare bent to pick up a little beige plastic man crouched with a bazooka.
“This was the den, I think,” Bobby said. “Or maybe it was over there.”
We crossed the gully that separated the property from the graveyard, jumping the trickle of brown water that ran along the bottom. Bobby looked for a moment at a stone angel balanced atop a marker, the tallest monument around. She stood canted forward, on tiptoe, her slender arms raised in an attitude more ecstatic than solemn. I don’t imagine the carver intended her look of triumphant sexuality.
“There used to be a fence here,” Bobby said in a tone of defensive pride. “Our back yard was, you know, more private than this.”
I remembered that the angel had appeared over the top of the Morrows’ fence, floating among the branches.
“Mm-hm,” Clare said. She had grown quieter since we reached Cleveland. I couldn’t tell what was on her mind.
Bobby led us straight to his family’s graves. They lay some distance from where the house had been, in a newer section of the cemetery. Rows of markers continued for some fifty feet, and beyond that we could see the line where the advancing tide of graves ended and the unbroken grass lay waiting for those who were, at that moment, still alive.
“This is it,” Bobby said. His father, mother, and brother had similar granite stones, shiny and dark gray, wet-looking, carved only with their names and dates. We stood before the graves in silence. Bobby gazed at the stones with a simple and almost impersonal respect, like a tourist visiting a shrine. By now his mourning was over and he’d fallen away from the ongoing process of his family’s demise. They had sailed off, all three of them, and left him here. After a while he said, “Sometimes I wonder if there should be, you know, some kind of message on their stones. You can’t tell anything about them, except that they were related.”
“What kind of message would you want?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just…Aw, man. I don’t know.”
I looked at Clare, who was looking at Bobby with a mingled expression of wonder and uncertainty. I think until then she had not realized he was fully, independently human, with a history of loss and great expectations. He had presented himself to her as a collection of quirks and untapped potential—she’d all but invented him. Just as the hypnotist must see his subject as a field for planting suggestions in, Clare would have seen Bobby as a project whose success or failure reflected only on her. She was the one woman he’d slept with. She selected his clothes and cut his hair. Arranged marriages might have been like this, the bride arriving so young and unformed that she appears to absorb the union into her skin, her husband’s proclivities taken on and made indistinguishable from her own. Clare, the husband, must have seen for the first time that Bobby had had a life outside her sphere. I couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or dismayed.
After a while, we left the cemetery again. It seemed there should have been more to say or do, but the dead are difficult subjects. What’s most remarkable about them is their constancy. They will be dead in just this way a thousand years from now. I was still getting used to it with my own father. The whole time he lived I had thought in terms of how we might still change in one another’s eyes. Now we could not revise ourselves. He’d taken the possibility with him into the crematorium’s fire.
We got back into the car. I touched the two silver hoops I wore in my ear, looked down at my own clothes. I was a man in cowboy boots and black jeans. I wore ten black rubber bracelets on one wrist. I could still travel, change jobs, read Turgenev. Any kind of love was possible.
“Next stop, New York City,” Bobby said from behind the wheel. If he was not quite somber, he had grown more blank—it was his old response to sorrow. His voice lost its rhythm and lilt, his face slackened. I have never seen this in anyone else. Bobby could withdraw from the surface of his skin, and when he did so you suspected that if you stuck him with a needle the point would penetrate a fraction of an inch before he cried out. In these vacant states he said and did nothing different. His speech and actions continued unimpaired. But something in him departed, the living snap went out, and he took on a slumbering quality that might have been mistaken for stupidity by someone who knew him less.
I asked if he wanted to go by the bakery to see his old boss and he said no. He said it was past time to get back on the road, as if we needed to reach New York by a particular hour. I stroked his shoulder as we pulled onto the highway. I think we both felt defeated by Cleveland, its ordinary aims and modestly rising prospects. Perhaps others have a more agreeably definitive experience when they revisit their hometowns: those who’ve escaped from industrial slums or declined from pinnacles of great wealth or happiness. Maybe they’re better able to say, “Once I was there and now I’m somewhere else.”
We were all quiet for the next hour. Clare was so withdrawn I asked her if she was feeling sick again, and she told me no in an irritated tone. Pennsylvania arrived with its long steady roll of white barns and gentle hills. We drove along in a small hothouse of sourceless gloom.
Without preamble, as we approached a sign for Jay-Dee’s Cheese Popcorn, Bobby said, “I’ve been thinking. Would you both ever want to, like, get a place out of the city? Like a house we could all live in?”
“You mean all three of us?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Clare said, “Communes are out of style.”
“We wouldn’t be a commune, exactly. I mean, we’re more like a family, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“We are nothing like a family,” Clare said.
“Like it or not,” Bobby told her. “Too late to back out now.”
In a low voice, Clare said, “Stop the car.”
“What? What is it?”
“Are you sick?”
“Stop. Just stop the car.”
Bobby pulled over to the side, assuming she was going to be sick. We were literally nowhere, in a stretch of farmland gone fallow, the fields weedy and strewn with trash. A Texaco sign shimmered at the curve of the road ahead.
“Honey,” I said. “Are you all right?”
She had opened the door almost before Bobby came to a full stop. But instead of leaning out to vomit she jumped from the car and began walking, with fierce determination, along the brushy shoulder. Bobby and I hesitated, searching for the proper response.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“We’d better go after her.”
We got out of the car and ran to catch up with her. An eighteen-wheel truck ground past, swirling grit and a windstorm of garbage around our feet.
“Hey,” Bobby said. He touched her elbow. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Please just go back to the car and leave me alone.”
She may have meant, in a disorganized way, to leave us in Pennsylvania. She may have meant to hitchhike back, or to begin a life of drifting around the country, getting waitress jobs and renting rooms in small-town hotels. I had entertained similar impulses myself.
“Clare,” I said. “Clare.” I thought the sound of my voice would calm her. I was her closest friend, her confidant. She turned. Her face was dark with rage.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Just go. The two of you.”
“What is it?” Bobby asked. “Are you, like, really sick?”
“Yes,” she said. To escape us she left the roadside and veered across the flat expanse of chalky, untended ground. Shredded tires lay around, and the matted pelt of a raccoon that had been mummified by the passing seasons. We kept up, flanking her.
“Clare,” I said, “what is it? Just what in the hell exactly is it?”
Her voice hissed. “I’m pregnant. All right?”
“Pregnant?”
“We’re having a kid?” Bobby said. “You and me?”
“Shut up,” she said. “Please just shut the fuck up. I don’t want to have any goddamn baby.”
“Yes you do.”
“No. Oh, hell. I’ve let it go over three months now. I’ve never had morning sickness before. The other time I was pregnant, I had it taken care of before anything like this happened.”
“You want to have the baby,” Bobby said.
“No. I’ve just been, I don’t know. Lazy and stupid.”
“Yes. We can have it. We can all three have it.”
“You’re crazy. Do you know how crazy you are?”
“A kid,” Bobby said to me. “Hey. We’re having a kid.”
“ We are not having anything,” she said. “ I may be having a baby. Or I may not.”
“Honey, are you sure?” I said.
“Oh, I’m very sure. I’m quite perfectly sure.”
We were halfway across the field, headed nowhere. Nothing lay ahead but a line of bare, cement-colored trees bordering a second field. Still, Clare marched forward as if the answers to all her questions waited just past the horizon. Sun shone anemically through a thin gruel of cloud.
“Clare,” Bobby said. “Stop.”
She stopped. She looked around, and appeared to realize for the first time that she was in the middle of open country, with no reasonable destination at hand.
“I can’t do it this way,” she said. “I should either be in love with one person, or I should have a baby on my own.”
“You’re just scared,” Bobby said.
“I wish I was. I’d rather be scared than furious. And embarrassed. I feel like such a fool. What would we do, sign up for birthing classes together? All three of us?”
“I guess so,” I said. “Why not?”
“I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”
She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.
“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.