A Home at the End of the World

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?”