A Home at the End of the World

breathing.

Quickly, because I lacked the nerve for deliberation, I moved my hand to his thigh. He twitched and grimaced, but did not retreat. I burrowed my hand in under the towel he wore. I watched expressions of fear and pleasure skate across his eyes. Because I had no idea what to do, I replicated the strokes I’d used on myself. When he stiffened in my hand it seemed like a gesture of forgiveness.

Then he put out a hand and, with surprising delicacy, touched me, too. We did not kiss. We did not embrace. Jimi sang “Purple Haze.” The furnace rumbled from deep in the house. Steam hissed through the pipes.

We mopped up with Kleenexes afterward, and dressed in silence. Once we were dressed, however, Bobby relit the joint and began talking in his usual voice about usual things: the Dead’s next concert tour, our plan to get jobs and buy a car together. We passed the joint and sat on the floor of my room like any two American teenagers, in an ordinary house surrounded by the boredom and struggling green of an Ohio spring. Here was another lesson in my continuing education: like other illegal practices, love between boys was best treated as a commonplace. Courtesy demanded that one’s fumbling, awkward performance be no occasion for remark, as if in fact one had acted with the calm expertise of a born criminal.

ALICE

OUR SON Jonathan brought him home. They were both thirteen then. He looked hungry as a stray dog, and just that sly and dangerous. He sat at our table, wolfing roast chicken.

“Bobby,” I asked, “have you been in town long?”

His hair was an electrified nest. He wore boots, and a leather jacket decorated with a human eye worked in faded cobalt thread.

“All my life,” he answered, gnawing on a legbone. “It’s just that I’ve been invisible. I only lately decided to let myself be seen.”

I wondered if his parents fed him. He kept glancing around the dining room with such appetite that I felt for a moment like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. As a child in New Orleans, I had watched termites browsing the wooden scrollwork under our parlor window, and found that the intricate carving broke away in my hands like sugar.

“Well, welcome to the material world,” I said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

He did not smile. He bit down on that bone hard enough to crack it.

After he’d gone I said to Jonathan, “He’s a character, isn’t he? Where did you find him?”

“He found me,” Jonathan said with the exaggerated patience that was a particular feature of his adolescence. Although his skin was still smooth and his voice sweet, he had devised a brusque knowingness by way of entry into manhood.

“And how did he find you?” I asked mildly. I could still work Southern innocence to my advantage, even after all those years in Ohio.

“He came up to me the first day of school and just started hanging around.”

“Well, I think he’s peculiar,” I said. “He gives me the creeps just a little, to tell you the truth.”

“I think he’s cool,” Jonathan said with finality. “He had an older brother who was murdered.”

In New Orleans we’d had a term for people like Bobby, unprosperous-looking people whose relations were more than usually prone to violent ends. Still, I allowed as how he was quite evidently a cool customer.

“What would you say to a game of hearts before bed?” I asked.

“No, Mom. I’m tired of playing cards.”

“Just one game,” I said. “You’ve got to give me a chance to recoup my losses.”

“Well, okay. One game.”

We cleared the table, and I dealt the cards. I played badly, though. My mind kept straying to that boy. He had looked at our house with such open, avid greed. Jonathan took trick after trick. I went upstairs for a sweater and still could not seem to get warm.

Jonathan shot the moon. “Look out,” he said. “I’m hot tonight.”

He took such simple, boyish delight in winning that he forgot about his new peevishness. I could not imagine why he wasn’t more popular at school. He was clever, and better-looking than most of the boys I saw around town. Perhaps my Southern influence had rendered him too gentle and articulate, too little the brute for that hard Midwestern city. But of course I was no judge. What mother isn’t a bit in love with her own son?

Ned got home late, after midnight. I was upstairs reading when I heard his key in the door. I resisted an urge to snap out the bedside light and feign sleep. Soon I would turn thirty-five. I had made some promises to myself regarding our marriage.

I could hear his breathing as he mounted the stairs. I sat up a bit straighter on the pillow, adjusted the strap of my nightgown. He stood in the bedroom doorway, a man of forty-three, still handsome by ordinary standards. His hair was going gray at the sides, in movie-star fashion.

“You’re still up,” he said. Was he pleased or annoyed?

“I’m a slave to this,” I said, gesturing at the book. No, wrong already. I waited up for you. That was the proper response. Still, the book had in fact been what kept me awake. I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths.

He came into the room, unbuttoning his shirt. A V of chest appeared, the dark hair flecked with gray. “Looks like Deliverance is a little too strong for Cleveland,” he said. “Three sets of parents called to complain tonight.”

“I don’t know why you booked it,” I said.

He peeled off his shirt and wadded it into the clothes hamper. Sweat glistened under his arms. When he turned I could see the hair, like a symmetrical map of Africa, that had sprouted on his back.

No. Focus on his kindness, his gentle humor. Focus on the shape of his flanks, still lean, in his gabardine slacks.

“I’m lucky to have it,” he said. “It’ll be a hit. The seven o’clock was three-quarters full.”

“Good,” I said. I put my book down on the night table. It made a soft but surprisingly audible sound against the wood.

He took his slacks off. If I’d been a different sort of person I could have said, humorously, “Sweetheart, take your socks off first. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s the sight of a man in nothing but his Jockey shorts and a pair of black socks.”

I wasn’t that sort of person. Ned hung his pants up neatly and stood for a moment in the lamplight, wearing briefs and the slick dark socks he insisted on buying. They had rubbed the hair off his shins. When he removed them, they would leave the imprint of their weave on the hairless flesh.

He put his pajama bottoms on over his shorts, then sat on the bed to remove his socks. Outside of the shower, Ned was rarely stark naked.

“Whew,” he said. “I’m beat.”

I reached over to stroke his back, which was moist with perspiration. He startled.

“Don’t you worry,” I said. “I mean you no harm.”

He smiled. “Nervous Nellie,” he said.

“Jonathan had a new friend over tonight. You should see him.”

“Worse than Adam?” he asked.

“Oh, much. Of a different order entirely. This one’s a little, well, frightening.”

“How so?”

“Grubby,” I said. “Silent. Sort of hungry-looking.”

Ned shook his head. “Leave it to Jonny,” he said. “He can pick ’em.”

I felt a twinge of annoyance. Ned was away so much of the time. Whatever took place in his absence became a domestic comedy of sorts; a pleasant little movie playing to a sparse house across town. I continued stroking his back.

“But this boy seems frightening in a more adult way,” I said. “Adam and the