A Home at the End of the World - Micheal Cunningham

Date: 2023-08-14
| somnambulistic
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-08-14
| My father and mother would invent a cordial, joking relationship
| that involved neither kisses nor fights. They would commence living
| together with the easy, chaste familiarity of grown siblings.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-08-19
| Are you scared?” Carlton asks me.  I nod. I never think of lying
| to him.  “Don’t be, man,” he says. “Fear will screw you right
| up. Drugs can’t hurt you if you feel no fear.” I nod. We stand
| sheltered, passing the bottle. I lean into Carlton’s certainty
| as if it gave off heat
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-08-29
| She is a small, efficient woman who looks at things as if they give
| off a painful light. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and spent
| her girlhood tying up bean rows, worrying over the sun and rain. She
| is still trying to overcome her habit of modest expectations.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-08-29
| The cat is out of there quick as a quarter note.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-01
| He had a particular talent for investing his actions with the
| quality of randomness—his life, viewed from a distance, would
| have appeared to be little more than a series of coincidences. He
| exerted no visible will. And yet, by some vague-eyed trick, he was
| there with us in line again.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-04
| as soon as the last scabs of old snow had disappeared from the
| shadows
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-04
| 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.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-04
| mawkish
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-04
| He had a talent for adjusting his expectations to meet his
| circumstances.
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-04
| beurre blanc
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-04
| “Butter and vinegar,” I said. “Lemon, a little
| vermouth. Nothing to it, really.”
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-04
| “Worry less,” he said.  I promised to try. While he was in the
| house, it seemed possible. But as soon as he left, the possibility
| receded like light from a lantern he carried.
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-05
| “Laura Nyro,”
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-05
| Jethro Tull
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-06
| It made you giddy and pleasantly vague. It took the hard edge off
| your attention.
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-07
| We’d had other ideas in the past: we’d talked about starting
| a breakfast-in-bed catering service, and about moving to the coast
| of Spain. We always discussed the particulars of these actions in
| such detail that eventually we crossed an invisible line and began
| to feel as if we had already performed them; our talk ultimately
| took on an aspect of reverie.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-07
| This was usually my favorite moment, after the sex was finished
| and I was restored to myself, still young and viable, free to
| go everywhere. Tonight, though, I felt irritated and weightless;
| I couldn’t quite pick up my sense of myself.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-07
| thought that when he finally, fully despaired of achieving fame he
| would make himself into a fan, find a lover and cheerfully relinquish
| every vestige of his will
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-09
| The urge to do nothing and not change caught up with me; for eight
| years I squeezed roses onto birthday cakes and thought of what
| I’d make for dinner. Each day was an identical package, and the
| gorgeousness of them was their perfect resemblance, each to the
| others. Like a drug, repetition changes the size of things. A day
| when my cinnamon rolls came out just right and the sky clicked over
| from rain to snow felt full and complete.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-09
| Perdition
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-09
| I could hear my own breathing. This was a hard subject. I
| had realized by then that I didn’t feel what others called
| “desire.” Something was missing in me. I felt love—the strain
| and heat of it, the animal comfort mixed up with human fear. I felt
| it for all the Glovers, for Sammi at the bakery, for Dylan when
| he sang “Baby Blue.” But nothing built up in my groin. Nothing
| quickened, or struggled for release. I’d made a kind of love with
| Jonathan because he’d wanted to, and because I’d loved him. I’d
| had orgasms that passed through me like the spirits of people more
| devoted to the body than I was. These spirits were pleasant enough
| in passing but truly gone when they were gone. After Jonathan
| left town, I was alone inside myself. This lack was probably what
| had made it possible for me to live my bakery life in Cleveland;
| to need no sensations beyond the first feathers of November snow
| and the living hiss of a needle touching vinyl
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-09
| Lately I was bothered by desire the way a horse is bothered by
| flies. It was a minor, if persistent, irritation. It could be
| flicked away.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-10
| Since my early thirties I’d been retired from love. I’d been
| living like a child. Just hour to hour, while other women my age
| went to their own children’s recitals and school plays.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-10
| In a sense I liked the way I was aging. I’d invented a life
| of my own. I wasn’t a prim careerist living with two cats in a
| town house full of ancient maps. I wasn’t a drunk drifting from
| binges to purges and back again. I was proud of that. But still,
| I’d expected by this time of life to have developed a more general
| sense of pride in my larger self. I’d thought I’d be able to say,
| if somebody asked me, just exactly what I was doing in the world
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-10
| Steve Reich’
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-10
| I’m talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be
| perfectly frank, you don’t quite look like yourself. And if
| you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you
| could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows
| what-all. You could end up with somebody else’s whole life.”
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-10
| I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded
| the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities
| that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the
| wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or
| less the same reason.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-11
| We took to calling ourselves the Hendersons. I don’t remember
| how it started—it was part of a line tossed out by Clare or
| Jonathan, and it stuck. The Hendersons were a family with modest
| expectations and simple tastes. They liked going to the movies or
| watching TV. They liked having a few beers in a cheap little bar.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-11
| But without Uncle Jonny, the Hendersons didn’t work. Without our
| bad uncle we were too simple—just bossy Mom and the boy who always
| obeyed. We needed all three points of the triangle. We needed mild
| manners, perversity, and a voice of righteousness.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-11
| After a while he reached over and pressed his own ice cube against
| the mound of my belly. “As long as Mom’s out,” he said,
| “let old Uncle Jonny take care of you.”
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-11
| There was sex between us but we didn’t have sex—we committed
| no outright acts. It was a sweeter, more brotherly kind of
| lovemaking. It was devotion to each other’s comfort, and deep
| familiarity with our own imperfect bodies.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-11
| discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-11
| I’d thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside
| the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing
| that happened
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-11
| “And my life has been one disappointment after another ever
| since. Bobby, people make way too much of it. It was a concert. It
| was dirty and crowded. I left before it was half over, and I married
| a perfect asshole three months later.”
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-11
| I knelt on the mattress beside him, and massaged his chest and
| belly. He looked up at me uncertainly. “Shh,” I said. “Don’t
| do anything, don’t think about anything. Your big sister’s
| gonna manage fine, just close your eyes
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-11
| When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a
| shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away
| into prenatal darkness.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-11
| Thieves Like Us
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-11
| 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.
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-14
| “And you’re pretty happy out there?” he asked.  “Yes. I mean,
| I guess so. Sure.” “That’s all I care about. You can turn the
| Olds into a birdbath if you like. I just want you to be happy.” I
| drew in a breath, and at that moment, for the first time in months, I
| felt prodigally—almost obscenely—healthy. I’d been waiting most
| of my life for him to express desires more detailed and possible than
| his single overriding wish: that I be completely happy, every minute.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-15
| I did get pregnant accidentally, by a member of Denny’s dance
| troupe who’d told me he was gay. But I’d had it taken care of. At
| that age, during that time, you skimmed away the extraneous. You
| kept yourself lean and unencumbered, ready to travel.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-15
| theory of Jonathan’s trouble was simple. He had let his life
| get divided up into too many different compartments. There was his
| job, and his life with Bobby and me. There were a few friends from
| college, and a random sexual life with strangers, and an ongoing
| affair with a man none of us had ever met. I believed he needed
| more areas of overlap.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-15
| “Honey, to be perfectly honest with you, I think you set limits
| on your relationships by deciding in advance and entirely on your
| own what they can and cannot involve.”
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-15
| After that, we slept in the same bed again. We made love once or
| twice a week. But Jonathan took something out of the air when he
| left—a next thing kept failing to happen. Clare and I got stuck
| in the present. According to current wisdom, that was the right
| place to be. But when it happened—when we lost our sense of the
| past and the future—we started to drift. Clare felt it, too. She
| called me “sweetheart” and “honey” more often. She looked
| at me with a certain mild kindliness that was the living opposite of
| desire. I began to notice how the cords of her neck jumped when she
| talked. I became more conscious of the way she scratched invisible
| pictures on a tabletop as she spoke, and of how her mascara sometimes
| hardened into gluey clumps on her eyelashes.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-18
| Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions
| easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that
| we’ll always have more to give.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-18
| I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She
| looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once
| disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with
| two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness
| of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance
| to bestow dignity and direction.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-09-21
| like the house as it is, with bug-riddled floors and wood-grain
| chemical paneling that looks like sorrow and laziness made into a
| domestic fixture
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-21
| “Shit. This house isn’t going to be done until the next
| century. You know that, don’t you?” “No big rush,” Jonathan
| says. “Come here, Rebecca.” He reaches for her, but Clare
| maintains her hold. “No big rush,” she says. “So we’ll
| just keep heating water on the stove for the rest of our lives?”
| “We’re pioneers,” Jonathan says. “Can’t expect all the
| suburban comforts right off the bat.” “I think,” she says,
| “that both of you are some kind of retards. I honestly do.”
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-21
| sway to the music. There is some kind of small perfection in this,
| painting a wall together while Jimi sings. There is a knitting of
| times, the past tumbling into the future. It comes to me suddenly, in
| the form of a surprise: I’ve got what I wanted. A brother to work
| beside. A revised future shining like a light bulb over our heads.
| Here is what’s unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of
| a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. We
| adore Clare but she’s not quite on the team. Not really. What
| binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-21
| Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older
| people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already
| been set in motion.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-09-23
| You defend your vital parts with your tougher, more expendable
| ones. In that way, motherhood worked as promised. But I found that
| I loved her without a true sense of charity or goodwill. It was
| a howling, floodlit love; a frightening thing. I would shield her
| from a speeding car but I’d curse her as I did it, like a prisoner
| cursing the executioner.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| I’d been just a private, slipshod person going about my business
| and now I was on my way to becoming the central riddle in another
| person’s life.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully
| over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just
| beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still
| too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So
| I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing
| my hair
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| All right, I liked it best when the boys were gone. Once they came
| home, a sense of continuing emergency was lost. Weary as they were,
| they told me to relax while they attended to Rebecca. They were being
| good, responsible fathers. I knew I should feel appreciative. But
| I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to be stretched and beset. I
| wanted to be frantically busy with Rebecca every waking moment,
| and then fall into a sleep black and shapeless as the unlived future
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| Bobby was sweetly remote and I was too constant. Jonathan exerted
| a steady charm made perfect by his daily absence.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| But at other times I missed the violent wrongheadedness of my own
| family. We’d been difficult people, known around the neighborhood:
| Poor Amelia Stuckart and That Man She Married. I’d grown famous
| in our suburb for being Their Poor Little Girl. I’d based my early
| self-inventions on the concepts of deprivation and pride. I’d worn
| the shortest skirts, teased my hair into a brittle storm. I’d
| fucked my first skinny bass player at fourteen, in the back of a
| van. The local forces of order made it easy for me by wearing lumpy
| bras and girlish hairdos, by slathering their jowls with Aqua Velva
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-23
| Now, late in life, I’d been rescued. The boys came straight home
| every night, took care of Rebecca, cooked our dinner. Their love
| wasn’t immaculate. They may have loved one another more than they
| loved me. They may have been using me without quite knowing it. I
| could live with that. I didn’t mind touching the rough bottom of
| people’s good intentions. What I had trouble with sometimes was
| the simple friendliness of it. We lived in a world of kindness and
| domestic order. I sometimes thought of myself as Snow White living
| among the dwarfs. The dwarfs took good care of her. But how long
| would she have lasted there without the hope of meeting someone
| life-sized? How long would she have swept and mended before she
| began to see her life as composed of safe haven and subtle but
| pervasive lacks?
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-09-26
| Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and
| demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-27
| “And you spend a good deal of time with her?” I asked.
| “Of course. Of course I do. I’m her father. I’m one of her
| fathers.” I shook my head. “Maybe I don’t quite get it,”
| I said.  “What’s to get? You’ve been there, you’ve seen
| us all together. We’re three people who have a baby. What’s
| the big deal?” “No big deal,” I said. “I guess I’m
| just old-fashioned.” “You’re not old-fashioned. Not with a
| haircut like that.” “Well, all right. I worry that you’re
| being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What
| have you got?”
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-28
| “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly,
| and I conceded that I probably didn’t. We had lost track of one
| another; we were strangers in some deep, impenetrable way that ran
| like a river under our devotion and our cordiality. Perhaps that
| had always been the case.
Chapter: ALICE


Date: 2023-09-30
| His voice was mild as a radiator’s hiss.
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-10-01
| time.” “I’m not being peevish,” she said. It was a habit of
| hers to disavow her actions even as she performed them. I believed,
| at that moment, that by being herself she could do serious harm to
| the baby. How would it affect Rebecca to grow up with a mother who
| screamed, “I’m not screaming”?
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-10-01
| I left the room, and closed the door behind me. I felt a weight in
| my arms and legs, a stodgy sense of disappointment and nameless,
| floating embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to intrude on his
| privacy. I’d only wanted to hold him for a while, to guide his
| head to my chest. I’d only wanted to hold on to him as his body
| went through the long work of giving itself up to the past.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-10-01
| But lately I’ve been wondering, you know. I’ve been wondering,
| what were we waiting for?” “I suppose we were waiting for our
| real lives to start. I think we probably made a mistake.”
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-10-01
| Sins of omission.”
Chapter: JONATHAN


Date: 2023-10-01
| He seemed to have taken on a project: never to show this little girl
| any unpleasant or mean-spirited behavior, never to be anything but
| pliant and companionable in her presence. He was different from
| Jonathan. He didn’t love her. He liked her well enough. Being
| good with her was one of the organizing principles around which he
| built his days. He made it his job
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-10-01
| At first I felt it as a vague unrest that fluttered around in my
| belly, halfway between nausea and pain. I believed at times that
| I was developing an ulcer, or worse, though the doctor told me
| it was just anxiety. Finally, after several months, I realized. I
| was coming to a decision. Or a decision was coming to me. It was
| growing inside me, almost against my conscious will.
Chapter: CLARE


Date: 2023-10-01
| Van Morrison sings “Madame George.”
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-10-01
| Clare has taken Rebecca to the world of the living—its noise and
| surprises, its risk of disappointment. She’s probably right to
| have done that. It’s where Rebecca should be. We here are in the
| other world, a quieter place, more prone to forgiveness. I followed
| my brother into this world and I’ve never left it, not really.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-10-01
| As the blue silhouette of the house appears ahead of us I remember
| that home is also a place to escape. This is ours; we have it to
| run from and we have it to return to.
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-10-01
| Jonathan and I are here to maintain a present, so people can return
| to it when their futures thin out on them. We’ve been on our way
| here for a long time
Chapter: BOBBY


Date: 2023-10-01
| Only through his unprosperous presence do you realize how much your
| own wealth has to do with almost everything you do and say
Chapter: JONATHAN