outlandish hat and too much makeup, telling the well-rehearsed story of her romantic downfall, while Bobby, potbellied and balding, sat blushingly alongside, murmuring, “Aw, Clare.” We become the stories we tell about ourselves.
“I guess this is the end of the Hendersons as we know them,” she said.
“Yes, I guess it is.”
We stood for a moment in an abrupt state of social discomfort, as if we were houseguests left alone together by a mutual friend. Bobby said, “Dinner’s just about ready. Do you want to, like, eat something?”
I said I was hungry, because eating would be a next thing to do. My head seemed to be floating somewhere above my body. Numbed by gin, I felt my own emotions like radio transmissions being broadcast by my own disembodied head. I was angry and envious. I wanted Bobby. In another sense, I wanted Clare.
We ate, and talked of other things. After dinner we went to see
I begged off on drinks after the movie, though it had become our habit to finish our evenings together at a bar, no matter how late the hour. Clare put her palm to my forehead and asked, “Honey, are you sick?” I told her no, just exhausted, and claimed to have to be in the office by dawn to make up for what I hadn’t done tonight. Bobby and Clare said they’d come home with me, but I told them to go have a drink by themselves. I kissed them both. As I walked home the air was so clear and frozen that the Big Dipper penetrated the lights of Manhattan, angling faintly off the roof of Cooper Union. Frigid air sparkled around the window lights. Even on a night like that, blank-eyed boys walked the streets with black, boxy radios, their music chipping away at the cold.
At home, I rolled up Bobby’s sleeping bag and put it in the closet. I knew that, as of tonight, he would be sleeping in Clare’s room. I made myself another martini for a nightcap. A light snow began to fall, meandering flakes that seemed little more than the air itself coalesced into hard gray pellets. I drank the martini in my room, and imagined Bobby and Clare embarking on a future together. They were an unlikely couple. They would probably reach the limits of their novelty together, and their affair would wind down into an anecdote. But possibly, just possibly, it would not. If they stayed together, by some combination of attraction, cussedness, and plain good luck, they would have a home of some sort. They would probably have children. They would have unexceptional jobs and find themselves pushing a cart through the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket. They would have all that.
ALICE
NED AND I packed up the home we’d made for ourselves and established a new one in the Arizona desert, under doctor’s orders. We bought a condominium less than half the size of our old house, in a complex that had not lived up to its developer’s expectations. Nearly half the units stood empty three years after their construction, and strings of multicolored pennants, some of them torn, still festooned the entrance gates. The buildings were done up as pueblos, their concrete walls stained a reddish mud color and the ends of poles protruding above the aluminum-framed windows. We were able to get a good price on a one-bedroom, our means being limited. Neither our house nor the theater had sold for much.
“Hacienda Glover,” Ned called it. And, in what passed in him for the darker moods, “Tobacco Road, 1987.”
He didn’t permit himself much in the way of gloom or pessimism. Perhaps he was incapable. His demonstrated emotions ran the gamut from rueful acceptance to mild disapproval, and as I bid my own farewells to the Cleveland kitchen and the pear tree in the back yard I realized I had always planned, in some uncertain way, on leaving him. Or, rather, I had planned on someday having a life beyond our mild domestic comedy, the cordial good cheer of our evening feedings and our chaste, dreamless sleep. The trouble with an even-tempered union is that it refuses to crack—at no point does injustice or hardheartedness provide an opening through which you could walk blamelessly into another way of being. You live in the details: a kitchen arranged just the way you want it, tomatoes ripening on vines you’ve staked and tied with your own hands. Now Ned was ill, banished to an unfamiliar place, and I could not summon the anger or self-interest I’d have needed to send him there alone. As I packed my knives into a cardboard carton, I contemplated the rising divorce rate—how did so many manage it? The movies and novels of our childhoods don’t adequately prepare some of us for the impression our future homes will make; we are not warned of the seductive powers exerted by our own south-facing living-room windows, or by hollyhocks edging a set of French doors.
And now Ned and I were disassembling it, just like that, because his lungs couldn’t negotiate the sodden Ohio air. It was almost shockingly easy. We listed our property with a rouged woman in toreador pants who took less than a month to sell it at a bargain rate to a pair of young computer programmers willing to gamble on a neighborhood that might or might not improve. The theater would be torn down for a parking structure. Less than eight months after the doctor’s pronouncement, we lived in a place I had never even imagined visiting.
The desert proved to have its own wild beauty; its odd mix of emptiness and moment and its searing, bottomless sky. Between the time we closed escrow and the day we arrived with our belongings, the cactus in front of our unit had produced a single ivory-colored flower, which it wore like an extravagant hat. Few fates are wholly disagreeable. If they were, we might do a better job of evading them. Ned and I set up housekeeping in those small white-painted rooms, hung curtains and set the copper pans against a new kitchen wall, where they shone just as brightly in the desert light. I realized that in no time this place would take on its own inevitability. Indeed, it was assuming that quality even as we debated the arrangement of chairs and pictures. Ned put a comradely arm around me as we paused in our work, cupping my shoulder in the same firm, gentle manner he’d used as a man of twenty- six, when I’d gotten into a convertible with him and driven into the Louisiana bayous. He said, “This won’t be so bad. What do you think, kiddo?”
I told him no, it would be fine, and I did not experience the statement as a lie. We are adaptable creatures. It’s the source of our earthly comfort and, I suppose, of our silent rage. Ned held me in what would be our living room. The familiar curtains were parted, and beyond them lay a lovely, desolate landscape in which an unprotected traveler would not last so much as a single day.
JONATHAN
SOMETHING was wrong with me. I lacked some central ability to connect, and I worried that it might be an early indicator of disease. First you felt a floating sensation, as if your hours didn’t add up to whole days and your presence—in an airplane, on the streets—didn’t affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily do. Then dark sores and fevers, a cough that wouldn’t stop. Maybe this was how death announced itself, by breaking up your sense of participation in your own affairs.
The plane taxied, climbed through tumbling whiteness to a blue sky as bright and featureless as the primmest notions of heavenly reward. I sat quietly, flying across the country in a state of dislocation that was almost lulling—almost like going to the movies. I watched myself as a man of twenty-seven, strapped in against the predicted turbulence, pouring Scotch into a clear plastic glass, on his way to visit his parents in a house he’d never seen.
In Arizona, for the first time, my father spoke to me about death. A second doctor had confirmed the diagnosis—emphysema—but insisted that with precautions another thirty years were possible. Still, it was time to talk of certain things.
What my father said was “Son, when it gets down to it, you bury me wherever you want to.” He and I were sitting at the dinette table, where we had been playing Yahtzee while my mother made dinner.
“It won’t really matter to me,” he added. “I’ll be dead.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to decide something like that.”
“Well, you should decide,” he said. “It’s the place you’re going to have to visit for the next fifty years. Or the
