A home at the end of the world (33 page)

Erich said in his new, overanimated voice, “This place looks so sweet.”

“Part of the package,” I said. “An integral aspect of our appeal to our target audience.”

“Who are all these children?” he asked, meaning the photographs on the walls.

“Strangers,” I said. “Five for a dollar at a junk store up the Hudson. Half of them are alcoholics or Jesus freaks or inmates at the state penitentiary by now. The other half live in trailer parks with their six kids.”

He nodded approvingly, as if those were good ends for grown children. Bobby came out of the kitchen followed by Marlys, a hefty, freckled woman with apricot hair. “I think the dishwasher may be shot,” he said. “It looks, you know, pretty bad.”

“Great,” I said. “It’ll take them weeks to get a new dishwasher up here. You know how they are.”

Marlys threw me a shadow punch. “Hey, butch,” she said.

I threw my hands up over my head. “Ooh, don’t hurt me,” I answered. This was the method Marlys and I worked out for threading our way through the maze of sexuality and power. She earned good money at our restaurant and was constantly pummeling us, pinching our cheeks too hard or slapping our asses. I was her boss, and I feigned a physical terror not wholly unrelated to my actual feelings. Marlys was broad and calm and competent in worldly matters. She had repaired the dishwasher in the midst of the morning rush. She was an expert sailor and skier, and she knew the names of trees.

“Well, we’ll have to manage with this one until it breaks down completely,” Bobby said. “You and I may have to be back there washing dishes by hand for a while. And hope the health inspector doesn’t stop by.”

“The glamorous life of a restaurant owner,” I said to Erich, who nodded agreeably.

We had dinner at home, and talked mainly about the baby. Clare and I used Erich as an audience for our own interest in the minutiae of child-rearing. As we passed around the corn and the hamburgers and the tomato salad we clamored over each other to tell the next story of Rebecca’s peculiarities, our own shock at the various moral and bodily issues of parenthood, and our assorted resolutions about how to usher her, relatively undamaged, into a life of love and wages. Erich, whose good manners might have been imprinted on his genes, feigned or actually felt ardent, blinking interest in our talk. There was no telling.

After dinner, we put Rebecca to bed and watched one of the movies Clare had rented. (“We are
not
,” she’d said, “relying on conversation alone this weekend. I’m laying in movies, games, whatever. I’d hire a dog act if I knew where to find one around here.”) After the movie, we stretched and yawned and talked of how weary we were—a partial truth. Yes, we agreed, it was just about time for bed. Erich sat folded into his chair, with his hands slipped between his knees as if the room was freezing. He was so small, and so determined to be a good, unobtrusive guest—one who agreed to everything, who insisted that his hosts’ desires exactly matched his own. Almost before I knew I’d do it, I said, “Erich, how long have you been like this?”

He looked at me with a mingled expression of surprise and disappointment, blinking rapidly. It occurred to me that he might consider me the source of his illness. As in fact I might have been.

“I wasn’t sure if it showed,” he said. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His voice was mild as a radiator’s hiss. But he blinked furiously, and pressed his thighs tighter around his hands. “I’ve been feeling
better
,” he said. “I mean, well, I thought I looked all right.”

“How long has it been?” Clare asked. Before I’d spoken she had stood, on the pretext of making herb tea, and she remained standing, fixed in place beside the sofa. Bobby, still seated, watched in silence.

Erich hesitated, as if struggling to remember. “Well, I’d been feeling sick for more than a year,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, I mean it seemed so strange to have imagined these symptoms so clearly and then start having them. I thought for a while that maybe I was just being a hypochondriac. But then, well. I got the diagnosis about five months ago.”

“And you didn’t call me?” I said.

“What good would it have done?” he said. Now his voice cut through the air cleanly as a cable through fog. His voice had lost its polite, enthusiastic tone and taken on a bitterness I’d never heard from him. “It’s not like there’s a cure,” he said. “It’s not like you could do anything but worry about it.”

“I’ve seen you when you were sick,” I said. “You didn’t mention it.”

But at the same time I remembered: we have no relationship to speak of. Our exchange is based primarily on sex and shared loneliness.

He looked at me. His eyes were terrible. “To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed,” he said. “When I thought about something like this happening, when I thought and, you know,
imagined
it, I knew I’d be afraid and angry. And, well, guilty. None of those things surprises me very much. But I’m surprised to be feeling this embarrassed about it.”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Clare said.

Erich nodded. “Of course it’s okay,” he said. “What else could it be but okay?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I thought I was working my way toward something like this house,” he said. “You know, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I’d make money somehow and end up somewhere like this.”

“The nights get long out here,” Clare said.

“It’s paradise,” he said. “Don’t try to kid me. It’s fucking paradise, and you know it is.”

We remained where we were, with the lights on and the clock ticking. All I could think of was Rebecca. Just as I had wanted, earlier, to disappear into the tall grass, now I wanted only to go to her room, wake her up, and comfort her. I thought of her perfect feet, and of the way she clutched at her hair with one hand as she sucked the thumb of the other. I wondered if, at twenty-five, some vestige of the habit would remain. Would she, as a young woman, tend to play with her hair when she grew anxious or tired? Would someone love that about her—the brown hair being twirled and untwirled and twirled again around an unconscious finger? Would someone be irritated by it? Would someone someday look at her in her exhaustion, her fingers working busily, and think, “I’ve had enough of this”?

I said, “I’m going up to check on the baby.”

“She’s fine,” Clare said. “She hasn’t made a sound.”

“Still, can’t hurt to check.”

“Jonathan, she’s fine,” Clare said. “Really. She is.”

Erich slept alone in my bed that night. Although I’d claimed I was going to sleep on the futon downstairs, I ended up with Bobby and Clare in their bed. I lay between them, with my arms folded over my chest.

“What I feel really shitty about,” I said, “is how worried I am for myself. Erich is
sick
, and I feel sorry for him, but in this sort of remote way. It’s like my self-concern is a Sousa march, and Erich’s actual illness is this piccolo playing in the background.”

“That’s natural enough,” she said. “But listen, you’re probably fine. You’ve been healthy for, what, over a year since the last time you and Erich…”

“It can incubate for at least five years,” I said. “Lately they’ve been thinking it could be as long as ten.”

She nodded. Something was wrong; she wasn’t responding the way I’d expected her to, with Clare-like grit and flippancy. She seemed to have fallen out of character.

Bobby lay in silence on my other side. He had barely spoken since dinner. “Bobby?” I said.

“Uh-huh?”

“What’s going on over there? You’re so damn quiet.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”

Clare squeezed my elbow. I knew what she meant: leave him alone until he’s had time to settle into his own reaction. Bobby negotiated the world’s surprises with a deliberateness that was almost somnolent. Clare and I had decided privately that if the house caught fire, one of us would take responsibility for helping him decide which window to jump out of.

“I just feel so…strange,” I said. “How am I going to get through the days from now on without checking myself for symptoms every five minutes?”

“Honey, you’re probably fine,” Clare said, but her voice lacked conviction. By way of compensation, she patted my chest. Since the baby was born, Clare had become more prone to physical contact, though her caresses were still flighty and vague, as if she suspected the flesh of others might burn her hands.

“What do you think, Bobby?” I asked.

“I think you’re okay,” he answered.

“Well, that’s good. I’m glad you think so.”

Clare said, “I wonder how Erich is going to manage this. I have a feeling he hasn’t got a lot of friends.”

“He has friends,” I said. “What do you think, he lives in a vacuum? You think he’s just some sort of bit player with no life of his own?”

“How would I know?” Clare said.

I realized, from the sound of her voice, that she blamed me in some way for failing to love Erich. Since the baby was born she’d discarded a measure of her old cynicism, and held the world more accountable to standards of unfaltering affection.

“Please don’t get peevish with me,” I said. “Not now. You can get doubly peevish with me another time.”

“I’m not being peevish,” she said. It was a habit of hers to disavow her actions even as she performed them. I believed, at that moment, that by being herself she could do serious harm to the baby. How would it affect Rebecca to grow up with a mother who screamed, “I’m not screaming”?

“Right,” I said. “You’re not. You always know exactly what’s coming out of your own mouth, and whatever anybody else thinks he hears is an illusion.”

“We don’t need to have a fight right now,” she said. “Unless you really want to.”

“Maybe I do. You’re pissed off at me for not being in love with Erich, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m not. How could I be mad about something like that? Either you’re in love with somebody or you’re not.”

“Oh, we three are more used to ambiguity than that,” I said. “Aren’t we? Tell me this. Do you think I’ve fucked up my life? Do you think there’s been something wrong about my being in love with you and Bobby and having a strictly sexual relationship with Erich?”

“You’re saying that,” she said.

“But I want to hear what
you
think. You think there’s something unfinished about me. Don’t you? You think Bobby and I are each half a man. That’s why you ended up with the two of us. Together we add up to one person in your eyes. Right?”

“Stop this. You’re just upset, this isn’t a good time to try and talk.”

“This isn’t what I asked for,” I said. “It’s just what happened. I don’t want you turning on me all of a sudden because of it. Clare, for God’s sake, I’m too scared.”

She started to say, “I’m not—” but caught herself. “Oh, maybe I am,” she said. “I’m scared, too.”

“I don’t have to love Erich just because he’s sick,” I said. “I don’t have to suddenly take responsibility for him.”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

“Shit, why did I have to invite him?”

“Jonathan, honey,” she said. “Erich’s being here doesn’t make any difference. You sound as if you think he’s brought some sort of germ with him.”

“Hasn’t he? I could go a full day without thinking about it before. Now I’ve lost that.”

“You’re not making sense,” she said. “Well, you’re making crazy sense. I know what you’re saying. But don’t blame him. It isn’t his fault.”

“I know,” I said miserably. “I know that.”

My limitation was my own rationality. I was too balanced, too well behaved. Had I been a different sort of person I could have stormed through the house, shattering crockery and ripping pictures off the walls. It would not of course have solved anything, but there’d have been a voluptuous release in it—the only pleasure I could imagine just then. The idea of sex revolted me, as did the comfort of friends who knew their blood was sound. My one desire was to run screaming through the house, tearing down the curtains and splintering the furniture, smashing every pane of glass.

“Try to sleep,” Clare said. “There’s no point in staying up worrying about it.”

“I know. I’ll try.”

“Okay. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She slipped her arm over my belly, and pulled me closer into her own nimbus of warmth and perfume. Bobby breathed softly on my other side. I knew I should have felt comforted and I almost did, but the actual sensation of comfort trembled just beyond my reach. I was in a remote place with people whose lives would continue unchanged if I died. I lay between Clare and Bobby, listening for Rebecca. If she awoke and cried, I’d go to her room and console her. I’d heat a bottle and hold her while she drank it. I lay listening for the first whimper, but she slept on.

BOBBY

I
T WAS
after midnight. The clouds had rolled past on their long journey to the Atlantic from the heart of the continent. The full moon blared freely through our bedroom window. As I crossed the moon-whitened floorboards I paused to look at Jonathan and Clare, asleep in the shadow of the dormer. She released her low snores, blowing soft, breathy bubbles. He lay with his head canted away from her, as if he was dreaming pure noise and didn’t want to disturb her sleep.

I went down the hall and tapped on the door, but I didn’t wait for an answer. That room was on the moonless side of the house—it maintained a deeper darkness. I stood for a moment by the door, then whispered, “Erich?”

“Yes?”

“Are you sleeping?”

“No. Well, no. I wasn’t, really.”

“I just, you know. I wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”

“I am,” he said. “This is a good bed.”

His head was a spot of moving darkness at the edge of the bright quilt. I caught glints of him: his eyes, his domed forehead. The room didn’t smell of sickness.

“It was Clare’s old bed,” I said. “Well, Clare’s and mine, for a while. Now it’s Jonathan’s and we have, you know, this other one.”

“It’s a good bed. Not too soft. I always think they’re going to have soft beds in the country.”

“Sometimes a mouse gets in here,” I said. “We keep saying we should trap it, but we never do. I’m not sure if we’re really, you know, thorough enough to be country people.”

“The mice out here are probably cleaner,” he said. “They’re probably more like real animals.”

A silence passed. After a moment, we heard the mouse scrabbling inside the wall. We laughed.

“Do you have, like, people in New York to help take care of you?” I asked.

“Well, there are volunteers,” he said. “If I get really really sick I can call one of those agencies.”

“What about your family?”

“My family’s written me off.”

“They won’t help you?” I asked.

“They don’t
speak
to me. I’m gone. My sister calls, but she wouldn’t want to be in a room with me. She thinks her kids could catch it.”

“Do you still have your job?” I asked.

“No. No, they laid me off a few weeks ago, after I was in the hospital with pneumonia.”

“And your friends?”

“A few of them have died in the last year. They just went like
that
, three people in, like, six months. The guy I’ve always thought of as my best friend is sicker than I am, he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t recognize people unless he’s having a very very good day.”

“Are you scared?” I said.

“What do you think?”

“Yeah. Well, I would be, too.”

He sighed. “And then sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It sort of comes and goes. But every minute is different now. Even when I’m not afraid, things are different. I feel—oh, I can’t explain it. Just different. I used to lose track of myself, you know. Like I didn’t have a body, like I was just, I don’t know, like I
was
the street I was walking on. Now I never lose track of myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, you know,” he said. “If I ever really thought about it, I pictured myself as being old and having no regrets. You know? I pictured something like a famous old man in bed with people around him, and him saying ‘I have no regrets.’ That’s really pretty silly, isn’t it? It’s really very silly.”

“What do you regret, exactly?” I asked.

“Oh, well. Nothing really, I guess. I mean, I did think I’d do more with my life than this. I just thought I had more time. And like I said, I thought I’d be famous and retire to a place like this.”

“Uh-huh. Well, this wouldn’t be for everybody,” I said. “There’s only one movie theater. And no place to hear good music.”

He laughed, a low sound with a rasp to it, like scraping a potato. You could hear his illness in his laugh. “I never really did those things in New York,” he said. “I just, well, I guess you’d have to say I’ve been gambling with my life. I guess you’d have to call it that. I was thinking things would somehow work out. I thought I just needed to work hard and have faith.”

I walked over to the bed. I stood beside him, as the mouse went about its scratching inside the wall. “Um, hey, how about if I get in bed with you for a while?” I said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t seem right for you to be alone here,” I said. “How about if I just got in under the covers with you for a little while?”

“I don’t have any clothes on,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want to sleep with me because I’m sick?”

“No,” I said.

“Would you have wanted to if I wasn’t sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Will you get out of here, please? Will you just get out of here?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like, offend you.”

“I know you didn’t. But go. Please.”

“Well. Okay,” I said.

I left the room, and closed the door behind me. I felt a weight in my arms and legs, a stodgy sense of disappointment and nameless, floating embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to intrude on his privacy. I’d only wanted to hold him for a while, to guide his head to my chest. I’d only wanted to hold on to him as his body went through the long work of giving itself up to the past.