A home at the end of the world - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,45
it all felt logical at the time, but sitting here at this moment, it all seems so impossible.”
“Well,” said Burt, swallowing smoke. I could still hear my fingernail tapping the glass.
“We just set out to be a family,” I told him. “We had every good intention.”
“Well,” said Burt. “Things will work out. You’ve got to have faith.”
“Faith is something the young can afford. I’ve read all the great books, and I’m not pretty anymore.”
“Whoa there,” Ned said. “If you’re not pretty I don’t know what half the men in the room have been staring at.”
“Don’t you patronize me,” I told him. “Don’t you dare. You’re welcome to resent me or despise me or feel bored silly by me, but don’t patronize me like I was some kind of little wife . It’s the one thing I won’t have. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Ned, without speaking, put his hand over mine to silence the tapping of my nail against the glass. I looked at his face.
“Ned.”
I said only that, his name.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll pay for the drinks and go home.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he assured me. “We’ve had an emotional day. Our only son just graduated from high school.”
He kept his hand on mine. I looked across the table at Burt, who had fixed upon me a look of direct, dreadful understanding.
After Jonathan left for New York, Bobby got his own apartment in an austere limestone building across town. He enrolled in culinary school and worked nights as a waiter. He began to talk of our opening a restaurant together.
“A family place,” he said. “I think a restaurant would be a good business to go into, don’t you? We could all work there.”
I allowed as how I might make a passable dishwasher.
“You’ll be the head cook,” he said. “It’ll be, like, the only true Southern-style place in Ohio?”
Soon he was making dinners for Ned and me at our house. He did become a good cook, and seemed to have some cogent ideas about financing a restaurant.
I told him if he wanted to open a place on his own, I’d be his first customer, but to count me out as head cook. He smiled as he had when we first met years before—a smile that implied I had just switched over to a language he didn’t speak.
That winter I found a job myself, as a secretary in a real estate office. We needed the money. Ned’s theater was faring worse than ever, now that so many malls had established themselves on the outskirts. People avoided downtown after dark. The theater flashed its pink neon on an avenue where streetlights offered only small puddles of illumination; where nude mannequins smiled behind the dark glass of an extinct department store.
Although my secretarial job was nothing exalted or even especially interesting, I enjoyed having a daily destination so much that I began to dread the weekends. In my spare time I started an herb garden in the back yard.
Bobby met me occasionally for lunch downtown, since his cooking school was not far from the office in which I worked. He had grown rather handsome, in a conventional fine-featured way, and I must admit I took pleasure in meeting him at crowded restaurants, where the din of all those hungry wage-earners put an edge on the air.
Over our lunches, Bobby spoke with great animation about the restaurant business. At some undeterminable point he had ceased imitating a clean, personable young man and had actually become one, save for odd moments when his eyes glowed a bit too brightly and his skin took on a sweaty sheen. At those times he put me in mind of a Bible salesman, one of the excruciatingly cordial Southern zealots I knew well enough from my girlhood. In his excitement Bobby could take on that quality but he always caught himself, laughed apologetically, and lowered his voice, actually appeared to retract the sweat back into his pores, so that the effect finally was boyish and charming, a young dangerousness being brought under control.
I confessed my worries to him, and indulged myself every now and then in a complaint or two about my own situation, since I hated to burden Ned. His asthma had grown much worse as business declined, and he had started drinking a bit.