A Home At The End Of The World Part 24

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 pa.s.sed 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 Vogue and and Interview Interview and and Rolling Stone Rolling Stone . "The thing I love best about car trips," she said, "is the way you're ent.i.tled 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 . "The thing I love best about car trips," she said, "is the way you're ent.i.tled 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 Interview without guilt? That's rare." 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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.

"s.h.i.t," 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude more ecstatic than solemn. I don't imagine the carver intended her look of triumphant s.e.xuality.

"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 gra.s.s 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, a.s.suming 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 racc.o.o.n that had been mummified by the pa.s.sing seasons. We kept up, flanking her.

"Clare," I said, "what is it? Just what in the h.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.k up. I don't want to have any G.o.dd.a.m.n baby."

"Yes you do."

"No. Oh, h.e.l.l. 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. " are not having anything," she said. "I may be having a baby. Or I may not." 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 embarra.s.sed. I feel like such a fool. What would we do, sign up for birthing cla.s.ses 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.

PART III.

BOBBY.

T HE CITY'S HE CITY'S pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure-she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease. pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure-she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease.

"What if it turns out to be some sort of Heidi?" she said. "I don't want any child of mine growing up too too good. I couldn't stand it." good. I couldn't stand it."

I reminded her of what New York has ready for anyone too small or uninformed to do battle for a body-sized patch of air rights. I invented probability numbers about small-town schools and the effects of the color green on psychological development.

"And listen, growing up in the country doesn't doom anybody to good behavior anymore," Jonathan said. "Most of the really interesting murderers come from derelict farms and trailer parks."

"Well, all right," Clare finally said. "I guess everybody needs New York to escape to to . If we raise the kid here, it'll just move to the country when it grows up." . If we raise the kid here, it'll just move to the country when it grows up."

And so we started making phone calls. We started driving upstate to look at property so strange or desolate we could afford it with Clare's inheritance money. Shopping for cheap real estate, you get an insider's look at daily human defeat. You smell the dank, vegetable smell of the outdoors working its way in through soggy wallboards, see ceilings and floors in a slow-motion state of ongoing collapse. You see how weather and decay win just by continuing, day after day, until the money runs out.

"We can't stop too long to think," Clare kept saying. "We have to keep looking. If we stop and think too long, I'm afraid I'll come to my senses."

After three weeks we found a two-story brown house five miles out of Woodstock, a place with a motherly, slightly insane dignity whose advantages mostly balanced its faults. Its walls stood on a solid foundation. The price was low-a desperation sale. Light from an alfalfa field floated through the rooms as if the pa.s.sage of time was man's silliest delusion. Well water clear and cold as virtue itself flowed from the taps.

On the debit side, the wiring had disintegrated and the pipes had gone lacy with rust. The old pine floors were alive with dry rot and carpenter ants.

"At least this one has a soul," Jonathan said. "You know what I mean? I feel like it's not too late. This one isn't dead in the water yet."

Clare nodded. She ran her thumb along a doorjamb, and looked with critical uncertainty at her thumb.

"It feels right," I said. "Don't you get a feeling from this place?"

"Mm-hm," Clare said. "Nausea. Vertigo. Panic." She kept looking at her thumb.

We argued for a week, and bought the house. We bought the well and the afternoon light. We bought fifteen oaks, eight pines, a blackberry thicket, and a pair of graves so old the markers had been worn smooth as chalk. As Clare sat pregnant on a green vinyl chair signing the papers she said, "So long, Paris and Istanbul."