A Home at the End of the World

wanted to mix him in with the rest of my life, and I was right about that.”

“You’re a very strange man.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said.

When Bobby and Erich came back, I suggested we take our drinks up to the roof to watch the sunset. The important thing was to keep this dinner party moving, physically if necessary. It was a freakishly warm late-March evening. The kind of weather that implies either an early spring or the effects of nuclear testing.

Jonathan agreed enthusiastically, Bobby and Erich less so. I knew what they were thinking. If we went up to the roof, they’d miss the next cut of Strange Days.

“Boys, we can start the music again when we come back down,” I said, and was surprised at how much like a mother I could sound.

We went up the stairs to the roof, a tarred plateau bound at the edges with patterned concrete pediments. The orange sun hovered over the New Jersey horizon. Television aerials threw intricate, birdlike shadows. The windows of the tall buildings uptown flashed amber and bronze. A fat pink-stained cloud, its every billow and furl distinct as carved ivory, hung soaking up the last light over Brooklyn. Frilled curtains and salsa music blew out of an open window across the alley. We stood facing west, trailing twenty-foot shadows.

“Beautiful,” Jonathan said. “Just when you think you’re going to move to the country, the city does something like this.”

“I adore the roof,” I said. I was surprised, again, at the sound of my own voice. When had I turned into such a hostess?

“You don’t hear music like this in my neighborhood,” Erich said. “Never this kind of Mexican stuff, no.”

“I sort of like it,” Bobby said.

“So do I,” Erich answered.

Bobby swayed his hips in rhythm, and soon began to dance. Watching him in his cheerful, slightly baffled progress through the day, you could forget what a dancer he was. It was one of his surprises. The moment a note of music sounded he could move with such grace and buoyancy. He appeared to shed some interior weight. A ghost of the flesh, all gristle and bone, that dissolved at a guitar’s strum or the first bleat of a horn. On the record, a woman backed by maracas and guitars sang full-throated in Spanish, with shamelessly simple passion. Bobby, who loved all music, good and bad, danced as the last of the sun disappeared.

Erich glanced at Jonathan and me. I knew what he was thinking. I said, “Go ahead.” And with a shy smile, he started dancing with Bobby.

He was not nearly the dancer Bobby was, but he moved his feet in time to the music and made little twitching movements with his arms. Bobby turned to him as the sky gave up its last bit of blue and a faint star appeared in the growing violet to the east.

Jonathan and I stood watching, with our drinks in our hands. Jonathan said, “I don’t think I want to just be the chaperon at this party. Do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not especially.”

Jonathan set his drink on the parapet, and started dancing with Bobby and Erich. He was an elegant if contained dancer. He moved within a small column of air, the exact boundaries of which he never overstepped. I watched. For a moment—a moment—I felt the world spinning away from me. I saw myself standing in the last light, aging in a bright purple thrift-store dress as a group of younger men danced together. It was far from an ordinary moment. And yet I felt as if I’d lived it before.

To get myself back into real life, I started dancing. What else could I do? The heels of my shoes stuck in the tar, making soft pock sounds until I stepped out of them and danced in my stocking feet.

Jonathan said, “Okay, the rooftop number from West Side Story. Are you ready?”

“How does it start?” I asked.

“Let’s see. ‘I like to be in America.’”

“‘Okay by me in America.’”

“‘Everything free in America.’”

“‘For a small fee in America.’”

We whooped and clapped. When the number was finished I turned three perfect cartwheels in a row. I hadn’t done it in at least fifteen years. I felt my legs flashing straight and clean as knives.

“I used to want to be a cheerleader,” I told them. “Before I decided to just go to hell.”

Something took hold of us up there. I remembered the sensation from childhood, when a game gathered momentum. Bobby unbuttoned his shirt, which bellied in the wind. We all danced exaggeratedly, like members of a Broadway chorus, with leaps and twirls. When the salsa music went off, we started singing. We sang as much as we could remember of the Jets song and “Officer Krupke.” We sang every number from Hair.

Bobby said, “My brother used to play that record ten times a day. Till our mother threw it out. He just got another one. So then she threw his stereo out.”

“One of my cousins was in Hair,” I said. “A couple of years ago, at a dinner theater in Florida.”

We sang a few numbers from South Pacific, and all the My Fair Lady we could come up with. We danced to the sound of our own voices. When we couldn’t dance any longer we sat down on the sun-warmed tar, inhaling its mingled smell of sour earth and chemicals. We kept singing. Once, while we were singing “Get Me to the Church on Time,” I glanced at Jonathan and caught him staring at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It was an injured, glowering look, something between anger and sorrow. When our eyes met, he looked quickly back at the sky. We sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and we sang “Norwegian Wood.” Bobby and Jonathan sang a couple of Laura Nyro songs together, until I made them switch back to something we all knew. We sat singing on that roof until darkness proper had set in, and the city blazed around us with the light of ten million parties.

BOBBY

THE DAY after we danced on the roof together, Jonathan slipped through the fabric of his life. He left nothing behind but a few words on a piece of notebook paper anchored to the table by the pepper shaker. “Dear B. and C, I wish you great happiness together. That sounds so corny, doesn’t it? Anyway, I’m starting again somewhere else, I honestly don’t know where. I’ll call eventually. Give away whatever of mine you can’t use yourselves. Love, J.”

Clare and I read those lines over and over, as if they were code for another, more sensible message. She called the newspaper and found he had quit his job that morning, without notice. He had left no forwarding address. His room was as white and uninhabited-looking as it had always been. As far as we could tell, only a few of his clothes were missing.

“Fuck,” Clare said. “That motherfucker. How could he do this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he just did it.”

Clare was furious and I was stupefied. Departures brought out my blankness—I could feel my brain cloud over. When someone left I lost track of everything. I was filled with a dense, prickly confusion strong as the effect of a drug. It was a kind of retardation, I suppose. A missing neural connection. Somebody who was here isn’t here anymore. I couldn’t seem to get it.

“Jonathan, you asshole,” Clare said. “Just when things were starting to work out.” She balled up the note and threw it in the trash, though later she’d retrieve it, as if she thought it might be needed as evidence.

“He’ll be back?” I said. I’d thought I was telling her something but it came out as a question.

“What’s wrong with men?” Clare said. She stood on the living-room carpet with her arms folded over her breasts and her jaw gone stony. I saw that in another life she could have been a crazy schoolteacher, one of those wild spinsters who strike you as pathetic at first but end up changing your life. I didn’t answer. I was sitting on the bald velvet chair, the one we’d dragged home from the corner of Fifth and Eighteenth. My hands were squeezed