A Home at the End of the World

to the car with the impassive certainty of an old family retainer. Erich could walk well enough, though there was palpable caution in his step, an elderly deliberateness, as if his bones were soft and brittle as wax.

“Did you have a good trip?” I asked.

“Fine. Oh, yes, fine. The train goes through some beautiful parts, it really is, well, just beautiful up here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “If you like this sort of thing.”

He blinked uncertainly. Erich understood formal jokes, but lost track of small ironies.

“We like it here,” I said. “It’s every bit as restful, satisfying, and dull as you ever imagined the country would be.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, good. That’s good.”

We got into the car and started for home. Bobby drove, and Erich sat in the front seat. I sat in back, the child’s place. As we drove over the familiar road, I looked out at the fields of wild grass and could not stop thinking of hiding myself in it; of burrowing deep into a grassy field until I was completely hidden among the yellow-green blades, which were blanching with the coming season. Fourteen months ago, when Erich and I last made love, we’d been careful with one another. But less than a year before that, we had practiced no caution. I ran my fingertips lightly over my chest, and watched the leaves of grass sway under the sky.

Erich said, “Bobby, did you bring your record collection here with you?”

“Oh, sure,” Bobby said. “You know me. We got a turntable and everything.”

“I brought you some presents from the city,” Erich said. “There’s a great record store down in the financial district, if you can believe that.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Bobby said. “Yeah. I used to go there.”

We drove home, managing our conversation in spasms. I found, to my surprise, that I felt a distinctly social aversion to asking Erich about his health. It was not horror but embarrassment that prevented me from mentioning it; he might have come back from a war missing his arms or legs. From where I sat, I could see the patch of unprosperous skin that showed through his thin hair—both skin and hair had lost a luster that was perceptible only by its absence. Although Erich had never been robust, his hair now looked as if it would break off in your hands. The scalp underneath was hard and dry; juiceless. What I did, faced with his evident decline, was point out my favorite views, discuss the eccentricities of the local population, and tell of our recent visit to the county fair, where prize cucumbers and 4-H piglets had been proudly displayed. I could not stop stroking my chest. We crossed the Hudson. Beneath us, barges cut through the sparkling brown water. The trees on the far bank were going yellow and red from the first frosty nights. Among the trees, the crumbling mansions of dead millionaires looked blindly out at the cooling, ice-blue sky.

When we reached the gravel drive that led up to the house, Erich gasped and said, “Oh, this is wonderful. I can’t believe this is yours.”

I had never heard this note of excitement in his voice—this undertone of quivering wonder. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. It had a false, gushing quality. He might have been the wife of an ambitious man, taken to the boss’s country house.

“Wait till you see the inside,” I said. “It’s got a long way to go.”

“Oh, no, it’s perfect. It’s just perfect,” he said. “Whatever it looks like inside.”

“Just you wait,” I said.

Clare met us on the porch with the baby. Rebecca, recently bathed, looked at us with buggishly astonished eyes, as if she had never seen anything like us before—three men getting out of a car and mounting the porch stairs. Clare called, “Hello, boys.”

“Hello,” Erich said. “Oh, it’s, well, it’s very good to see you again. Oh, look at the baby.”

I could tell from Clare’s face that she suspected something. I could almost see the interior process she went through, struggling to match this Erich with the Erich she’d met years ago. Had he always been so ashen and thin? Had his skin been so opaque?

“This is her,” Clare said after a moment. “You’re catching her on a good day, she’s been angelic from the moment she opened her eyes this morning. Better admire her quick, because things could change at any moment.”

Erich, uncertain about small children, stood several feet away and said, “Hi, baby. Hello there.” Rebecca gawked at him or at the empty air in his vicinity, a string of saliva dangling voluptuously from her chin. She’d been talking for months by then. In private she could babble for hours, mixing actual words with her own private vocabulary, but when faced with strangers she retreated, staring with unabashed and slightly fearful fascination, committing herself to nothing, waiting to see what would happen next. When she was uncertain she still claimed the infant’s privilege, and in her boggled fixations there was a quality of self-abandonment that was almost sexual. I’d already learned one lesson about fatherhood—you love your child, in part, because you see her utterly naked. A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks. In a year and a half I’d learned that while I could imagine Rebecca growing up to make me angry, to hurt or disappoint me, I did not see how she could ever make herself strange. Not if she came to weigh three hundred pounds. Not if she preached the ascendancy of an insect god, or committed murder for personal gain. We were connected; we’d established an intimacy that couldn’t be undone while we both lived.

“How about giving me a squeeze?” I said. Clare reluctantly passed her over. As I took her in my arms she looked at me with unflinching amazement. I said, “Hey, Miss Rebecca,” and she laughed abruptly and ecstatically, as if I had just popped out of a box.

I held her close to my chest. I put my nose to her fat shoulder and inhaled.

Erich said, “This is really interesting. What you all are doing out here. I mean, it’s just very very interesting.”

“Putting it mildly,” Clare said. “Come on inside, I’ll show you to your room. Ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that to somebody.”

Clare led Erich into the house, and Bobby followed with the suitcase. I stayed outside with Rebecca for a moment. Afternoon light, which had taken on the golden weight of October, picked out each individual tree on the mountainside. A fat speckled spider sat motionless in the exact middle of a web that described a taut hexagon between two posts and the porch rail. As quickly as we swept the webs away with a broom, these country spiders—some gaily colored, some pale as dust—rebuilt them. Rebecca murmured. She started batting her hands in the frantic, exasperated way that preceded her sourceless fits of crying. I stroked her hair, waiting for the tears to start. I thought of walking away with her, just taking her into the mountains with me.

“There’s so much still to do,” I whispered. “The floors have still got dry rot. And we haven’t even started on the kitchen yet.”

We took Erich to see the restaurant, which was doing well enough by then for Bobby and me to have left it for a few hours in the charge of Marlys, our prep cook, and her lover Gert, the new waitress. When we started the restaurant we’d set out to simulate the kind of place we’d hoped to find on the drive back from Arizona—an eccentric little cafe that served honest food made by human hands. As it turned out, we weren’t alone in our desire for that simple, elusive cafe. Our place was always full, and on weekends the customers lined up halfway down the block. It was gratifying and slightly uncomfortable to see people so avid for such ordinary food: bread and hash browns made from scratch, soups and stews, two different pies every day. I sometimes felt we were deceiving them by pretending to be simple—we’d led convoluted, neurotic lives and now we were earning our living by arranging lattice crusts over apples from an orchard less than ten miles away and contracting with a local grandmother for homemade preserves. Still, half our customers wore country clothes they’d ordered from catalogues and rustic sweaters knitted in Hong Kong or Guatemala. I don’t suppose anyone was fooled.

“Oh, this is won derful,” Erich cried. The restaurant had closed for the day, although half the tables were still full of customers finishing up. Marlys and Gert greeted us with their particular mix of comradely good cheer and fleeting, untraceable hatred. I found that I was vaguely embarrassed by Erich’s pallor and thinness—it seemed I had brought some perversity of mine, some unpleasant secret, into the place where I had effectively simulated innocence.

Marlys took Bobby into the kitchen to show him what needed reordering, and to point out the leak she had managed, temporarily, to plug in the dishwasher. I’d learned that even a small, successful restaurant operated in a continual state of crisis. The machinery broke down, caught fire, failed when it was needed most. Produce arrived bruised or unripe, mealworms tunneled into the flour. The customers’ appetites followed distinct but unpredictable