A Home at the End of the World

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