A Home at the End of the World

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