A Home at the End of the World

patterns, so that the ingredients we ran out of one week would spoil on our shelves the next. The profits, though steady, were small, and it seemed that literally every hour it was time to bake more pies, cut more potatoes, haggle with the vegetable man about a carton of wilted lettuce. Sometimes I’d walk into the dining room and see, with a certain astonishment, that people sat at every table eating without concern or particular attention, talking to one another about the facts of their lives. They believed this was a restaurant, they found it unextraordinary that we’d fought decay and parasites, the endless petty dishonesty of suppliers, to get this simple food onto these white ceramic plates. On the rare occasions when a customer complained that his eggs were overcooked or his bacon underdone, I had to force myself not to scream, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are that we do this at all? Don’t you get it? Where’s your gratitude, for God’s sake?” I’d begun to better understand the appeal of the flash-frozen, the freeze-dried or microwavable. This tastes almost as good, and it’s predictable. It’s already diced or kneaded, already rolled or chopped. It can’t rot. It will keep until the customers decide they want to order it again. Less than two years ago, the proprietors of all those brightly lit, desolate roadside cafes had seemed like our enemies, selling corrupted food out of greed and laziness. Now I saw them as victims of a more practical, seductive kind of defeat.

Gert asked Erich and me if we’d like anything. The coffee was still on, she said, and when last she checked there were still two pieces of blueberry pie. Did she know Erich was sick? Was that the true cause of her solicitude? I could tell Erich was charmed by Gert, for she was in fact charming, a strong-faced, ruddy woman with long gray hair who had left a good job in publishing to live up here with Marlys. She dressed like a farm wife, in print dresses and cardigan sweaters, but she spoke Russian and had edited the work of a great poet. After we’d said no thank you to coffee and pie and she’d returned to the customers, I had to work to keep from whispering, “We think she’s stealing from the register.”

Erich said in his new, overanimated voice, “This place looks so sweet.”

“Part of the package,” I said. “An integral aspect of our appeal to our target audience.”

“Who are all these children?” he asked, meaning the photographs on the walls.

“Strangers,” I said. “Five for a dollar at a junk store up the Hudson. Half of them are alcoholics or Jesus freaks or inmates at the state penitentiary by now. The other half live in trailer parks with their six kids.”

He nodded approvingly, as if those were good ends for grown children. Bobby came out of the kitchen followed by Marlys, a hefty, freckled woman with apricot hair. “I think the dishwasher may be shot,” he said. “It looks, you know, pretty bad.”

“Great,” I said. “It’ll take them weeks to get a new dishwasher up here. You know how they are.”

Marlys threw me a shadow punch. “Hey, butch,” she said.

I threw my hands up over my head. “Ooh, don’t hurt me,” I answered. This was the method Marlys and I worked out for threading our way through the maze of sexuality and power. She earned good money at our restaurant and was constantly pummeling us, pinching our cheeks too hard or slapping our asses. I was her boss, and I feigned a physical terror not wholly unrelated to my actual feelings. Marlys was broad and calm and competent in worldly matters. She had repaired the dishwasher in the midst of the morning rush. She was an expert sailor and skier, and she knew the names of trees.

“Well, we’ll have to manage with this one until it breaks down completely,” Bobby said. “You and I may have to be back there washing dishes by hand for a while. And hope the health inspector doesn’t stop by.”

“The glamorous life of a restaurant owner,” I said to Erich, who nodded agreeably.

We had dinner at home, and talked mainly about the baby. Clare and I used Erich as an audience for our own interest in the minutiae of child-rearing. As we passed around the corn and the hamburgers and the tomato salad we clamored over each other to tell the next story of Rebecca’s peculiarities, our own shock at the various moral and bodily issues of parenthood, and our assorted resolutions about how to usher her, relatively undamaged, into a life of love and wages. Erich, whose good manners might have been imprinted on his genes, feigned or actually felt ardent, blinking interest in our talk. There was no telling.

After dinner, we put Rebecca to bed and watched one of the movies Clare had rented. (“We are not,” she’d said, “relying on conversation alone this weekend. I’m laying in movies, games, whatever. I’d hire a dog act if I knew where to find one around here.”) After the movie, we stretched and yawned and talked of how weary we were—a partial truth. Yes, we agreed, it was just about time for bed. Erich sat folded into his chair, with his hands slipped between his knees as if the room was freezing. He was so small, and so determined to be a good, unobtrusive guest—one who agreed to everything, who insisted that his hosts’ desires exactly matched his own. Almost before I knew I’d do it, I said, “Erich, how long have you been like this?”

He looked at me with a mingled expression of surprise and disappointment, blinking rapidly. It occurred to me that he might consider me the source of his illness. As in fact I might have been.

“I wasn’t sure if it showed,” he said. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His voice was mild as a radiator’s hiss. But he blinked furiously, and pressed his thighs tighter around his hands. “I’ve been feeling better,” he said. “I mean, well, I thought I looked all right.”

“How long has it been?” Clare asked. Before I’d spoken she had stood, on the pretext of making herb tea, and she remained standing, fixed in place beside the sofa. Bobby, still seated, watched in silence.

Erich hesitated, as if struggling to remember. “Well, I’d been feeling sick for more than a year,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, I mean it seemed so strange to have imagined these symptoms so clearly and then start having them. I thought for a while that maybe I was just being a hypochondriac. But then, well. I got the diagnosis about five months ago.”

“And you didn’t call me?” I said.

“What good would it have done?” he said. Now his voice cut through the air cleanly as a cable through fog. His voice had lost its polite, enthusiastic tone and taken on a bitterness I’d never heard from him. “It’s not like there’s a cure,” he said. “It’s not like you could do anything but worry about it.”

“I’ve seen you when you were sick,” I said. “You didn’t mention it.”

But at the same time I remembered: we have no relationship to speak of. Our exchange is based primarily on sex and shared loneliness.

He looked at me. His eyes were terrible. “To tell you the truth, I was embarrassed,” he said. “When I thought about something like this happening, when I thought and, you know, imagined it, I knew I’d be afraid and angry. And, well, guilty. None of those things surprises me very much. But I’m surprised to be feeling this embarrassed about it.”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Clare said.

Erich nodded. “Of course it’s okay,” he said. “What else could it be but okay?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I thought I was working my way toward something like this house,” he said. “You know, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I’d make money somehow and end up somewhere like this.”

“The nights get long out here,” Clare said.

“It’s paradise,” he said. “Don’t try to kid me. It’s fucking paradise, and you know it is.”

We remained where we were, with the lights on and the clock ticking. All I could think of was Rebecca. Just as I had wanted, earlier, to disappear into the tall grass, now I wanted only to go to her room, wake her up, and comfort her. I thought of her perfect feet, and of the way she clutched at her hair with one hand as she sucked the thumb of the other. I wondered if, at twenty-five, some vestige of the habit would remain. Would she, as a young woman, tend to play with her hair when she grew anxious or tired? Would someone love that about her—the brown hair being twirled and untwirled and twirled again around an unconscious finger? Would someone be irritated by it? Would someone someday look at her in her exhaustion, her fingers working busily, and think, “I’ve had enough of this”?

I said, “I’m going up to check on the baby.”

“She’s fine,” Clare said. “She hasn’t made a sound.”

“Still, can’t hurt to check.”

“Jonathan, she’s fine,” Clare said. “Really. She is.”

Erich slept alone in my bed that night. Although I’d claimed I was going to sleep on the futon downstairs, I ended up with Bobby and Clare in their bed. I lay between them, with my arms folded over my chest.

“What I feel really shitty about,” I said, “is how worried I am for myself. Erich is sick, and I feel sorry for him, but in this sort of remote way. It’s like my self-concern is a Sousa march, and Erich’s actual illness is this piccolo playing in the background.”