This Is Not the End

by Caleb Hildenbrandt

  He picked me up at my house, and after getting back on the main road he turned up the volume on the radio.

  “Why do you even listen to that stuff?” I asked. It was schlock-rock, simple and unadorned wailing backed by incessantly grating guitars.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t actually like it, do you?” I knew he didn’t; I knew what he preferred. His apartment walls were lined with recordings of classical, even archaic music, European folk instrumentals. Maybe rock, once in a while, but he had had something amplified and pitch-altered on every time we’d been together lately.

  “I think we listen to pop music to punish ourselves,” he said. “An aural bed of nails to compensate for our sins.”

  “Those sins being…?”

  “I don’t know… sometimes, don’t you ever get so sick of everything you just want to cram your ears full of garbage to spite it all?”

  This was not normal second-date dialogue, but Phillip and I had known each other for a long time.

  “It’s like you’d rather inflict pain,” he said, “like you want to inflict pain on yourself, just for pure spite against… the stuff around us.”

  “You’d choke on garbage to get back at a culture who would do it for you anyway?”

  “Yeah, kind of. Does that make sense?”

  “In a very cliched, pop-psychology sort of way, yes.” I turned down the volume, then shut the radio off entirely.

  “Don’t you ever want to hurt like that?” he asked. “It’s why you read some thriller instead of a classic, it’s why you watch TV instead of reading a book, it’s why you watch a sitcom instead of PBS, it’s why you watch Family Guy instead of the Simpsons.” (I might have snorted at this point.) “Because you have to do the bad thing.”

  I said nothing. We’d known each other since high school, but it was only now, as we both neared the completion of our undergrads, that we had decided we had more to offer each other. We were headed to dinner; at this date and the one previous, we had self-consciously avoided any places we had been to together before, as if trying to disassociate ourselves from those earlier social identities.

  “I’ll tell you why I really listen to it.” he said. I waited. “It’s because it hurts too much to listen to classical music. Or anything good.”

  “You still like it? Your tastes haven’t changed, you just have this imp of the perverse changing the presets on the radio?”

  “No, I love the same stuff I’ve always loved. And it’s not a perverse impulse, not like that. It’s because I love it that I can’t stand to listen to it, here, now, in the middle of my job and school and everything. It keeps telling me I should be living something better, and I know I can’t leave this. It tells me to live the way I really want to live, the right way to live.”

  We were at the restaurant now, parked and with the engine off, but he kept talking.

  “There’s a better way, with peace and balance, and, and, just, rightness, and it’s a crime to bring music that talks about that to a place like this, and it hurts me too badly to know that I can’t do what’s right.”

  “You want to live in some dirt-floored cottage in the Lake District.” I said. “Or in Bertie Wooster’s drawing room.”

  “Yes! You get it? You get how either, both, are the same to me?”

  “They’re both lives of leisure.”

  “Leisure to do what’s important.”

  “Such as?” But I already knew the answer.

  “To appreciate stuff.”

  “’What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare’?” I asked.

  “Exactly! You--you’re not making fun of me?”

  I loved him for the way he was, like this--to even acknowledge his sincerity imbues a certain cynicism to me, and my examination of him, but I loved him.

  “No,” I said. “I wish we could do it--be the kind of people who go on Sunday drives, and picnics without a scrap of styrofoam in sight, and play cricket, or watch people play cricket, or croquet, and wear all those clothes--”

  “And wear dressing gowns in the evening, and pour a tumbler of scotch and read a book in a wingback chair, and go for walks carrying a blackthorn stick--”

  “Do you even know what a blackthorn stick looks like?”

  “No! I mean, it’s a big gnarly stick but I don’t know what a blackthorn really looks like, and that’s what the problem is.”

  “You can still pour yourself a glass of scotch.” I said. “There’s a Walgreens on the corner.”

  “But I don’t have a dressing gown. I’d just squat on my futon and read Newsweek and glug the scotch down too hurriedly. I’d be thinking about having to get up for work tomorrow, and having to get to bed so I can wake back up again.”

  I don’t consider myself the voice of reason and don’t make a habit of putting myself in that position, but I said it anyway:

  “You’re talking about having money, hereditary money, having a castle that could never be bought in today’s dollars no matter how much you had, about servants, so you can enjoy dressing for dinner because someone else’s doing your laundry and laying out your neckties. That motorcar’s waiting on the gravel drive outside the door because someone already warmed it up and drove it around from the garage a quarter-mile away.”

  “The fireplace is nice because someone else hauls the ashes away, I know. But listen, Mary, really, listen…”

  I listened. I really listened. I could hear the music he was talking about. I saw the trees silhouetted against the sky, I could see the dear streams and ponds, I could, dear God, see the towers of Oxford. I saw homely dirt roads and the ditches on the sides, I could see a house, with a thatch roof, with the sod outside coming halfway up the walls. I wanted it as badly as he did.

  I leaned over to him.

  “Screw dinner.” I said. “Let’s go.”

  #

  We started small. Well, let me clarify small. We both got out of our leases and found a run-down farmhouse. We bought it and moved in together.

  There never seemed to be any question that we’d move in together. We were in this together. We’d still have separate bedrooms, but this was only tacitly acknowledged as we inspected the property before buying; it was as much a given that we would be sleeping separately, for now, as it was that we would be eating breakfast together. We pooled our money; for the time being we kept our jobs.

  The house was equidistant between two of the smaller towns in our county; the illusion of isolation was permitted only via the particular lay of the land. In front of our house, separated by a few dozen yards of brush, was a state route, and on the other side of that was a sharply rising slope of rock, in fact the exposed interior of the hill through which the road cut. Behind us lay field upon field which did not belong to us, through which ran the giant trestles of power lines. Our neighbors were not far off on either side, but they, as we, followed the highway, which curved away from us; brush and trees blocked whatever view might still have been visible around the bend.

  The backyard was riot with wildflowers. The garden patch to the side was overgrown, and the brief fields on either side of us were completely given over as well. The house itself, a beautiful brick building, rambled, but was small enough. It was perfect, our own piece of Thomas Hardy created by perfect accident in the heart of the American Midwest. It was a real fixer-upper. There were weeds, seriously weeds, growing in the sun room, which of course only made Phillip more convinced than ever that we were supposed to be here.

  There was some furniture already there, some mismatched chairs that we thought might have been some mid-century Victorian revival pieces, but when we flipped them over to clean them we saw the stickers saying “Everyday Interiors Collection” from Target. They weren’t vintage, just really beat up.

  So we had to buy new furniture. New kitchen towels, new dishes and cutlery, new everything, really. Phillip insisted we had to st
art new and I agreed with him. I bought a bench at an antique store, something to put in the hallway, and Phillip asked what was I doing buying a piece of furniture we didn’t need. I said it looked fine in the hall, he asked why would anyone sit down in a hallway--we were here to live free of superfluous stuff.

  “This isn’t Walden Pond, Phil.”

  “I’m not saying it is, I’m just saying, we’re trying to start new, let’s not encumber ourselves with stuff we don’t really want, I mean really want, things that we appreciate.”

  “I appreciate this bench. Look how beautiful it is.”

  “You impulse-bought it.”

  The bench stayed, and Phillip hardly bought anything after that, for a while.

  He liked the tea towels I brought in--imported from England, bought at a tea shop downtown that sold postcards and cans of Bovril.

  Phillip brought his vinyl record player along, and I bought a manual typewriter, for my thesis. (We both stayed in school, Phillip at his English degree, me with my anthropology. We wanted to finish this before embracing the appreciative life completely--our last kiss to our parents before slaughtering the oxen.) I found a cathedral-style radio at an antique shop. It only picked up a few frequencies, but it brought in the classical station, which is all we’d be listening to anyway.

  #

  In a way we were an almost unbearable indie cliché--your worst possible amalgam of twee and mumblecore and whatever buzzword the New Yorker’s pushing this week. I guess we were distinguished from the whole “authenticity” thing by our decadence--we were dandies without a trace of irony. I mean we adopted this lifestyle without irony, and we sought to emulate those irony-less dandies, whoever they may be.

  We did indeed buy the croquet set, and cleared a place in the back yard for it. (I’d suggested we put in a bocce court, on the grounds that there was a bocce scene in Portrait of a Lady, but Phillip didn’t remember that part. A quick google search would have told us if any such scene existed, but neither of us wanted to use that.) By the time we got it all the wickets set up, it was too dark to play, but we agreed we’d soon have friends over and have a regular game, with all the women carrying parasols and the guys in waistcoats. I said we should get a Victrola.

  #

  I came down and he had breakfast out already, new silverware on crisp linen napkins laid with grace on the kitchen table, toast made and on white plates, a dish of yogurt--not the plastic tub it came in--waiting to be spooned into bowls.

  Yogurt was a thing with Phil. He couldn’t come up with a good basis for it, but he loved to sprinkle oats and slivered almonds and blueberries over the top of plain yogurt, with a drizzle of honey. I liked it too, and brought in pita bread and hummus. But of course we had the stopping and staring foods, too, jam and chutney in the fridge--the icebox, as I had taken to calling it--and artisanal bread in an actual breadbox. We carefully avoided calling it “artisanal”--it was just bread to us, of course this was the kind of bread we ate, what other kind was there? And buying artisanal bread would have been gauche--not that we would know that, because we never set foot inside a Panera, didn’t know what they served there. We made soup, lots of soup, because we weren’t really sure of anything else E. M. Forster ate. It was late in the year, and it was then that we decided that we would eat only seasonal foods--nothing frozen and shipped from Argentina, just what we might really be eating had we lived a hundred years before. We decided that we would make cucumber sandwiches in the spring.

  Phillip poured himself some orange juice--from a pitcher, to which he would transfer all the juice when we bought it, throwing the carton away immediately into the growlery--our name for the basement, where we put everything we didn’t want to have to look at--our computers, paperwork, plastic bottles of shampoo. We recycled, but we didn’t want to see the bin in the laundry room, which we had outfitted with a collapsible drying rack and beautiful linen curtains.

  “I think it’s time we went to Europe.” he said.

  “Europe?” I was afraid to ask. “To visit?”

  “I used Google Earth. I found Kenneth Graham’s old home.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Street view?”

  “No, just an aerial, but--you could zoom in really close.”

  “You want to make a pilgrimage to Kenneth Graham’s house?”

  “Stop asking questions! Stop asking questions like that! Don’t you want to go?”

  “Sure, but we don’t have any money.”

  “I don’t care. We have enough for a plane ticket.”

  “And hotel fair?”

  “We’d be living there.” he said, looking into his coffee, lightened with the little pitcher of cream sitting next to his saucer.

  “We cannot just pack up and move to Europe. I still work as an office assistant.”

  “You can get out.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Phil, we cannot carry this any further! We can’t go to Europe and pretend we’re Thomas Traherne, or whatever. Can’t you be happy here?”

  “We’re just pretending here. It’s impossible to really live the right way here. The outside world doesn’t line up, it’s all imitation and derivative. I wanna go back to the source, the real stuff back of all this.”

  “Look, Phil, that England doesn’t even exist anymore. It looks just like America. They use bar code scanners in Surrey too.”

  “But do they use plastic bags?”

  For a moment I didn’t know whether he was joking or not. It was the sort of comment you were supposed to say with a twinkle in your eye, you said it to acknowledge that things had gone too far and that you wanted to bring this conversation back on a more stable, superficial footing. But I looked more closely and saw that he was really sincere, not antagonistic, not trying to refute me, just really asking with an almost hopeful set around his eyes.

  “I think they still use brown paper.” I had no idea, and I still have no idea why I thought that I did.

  “Let’s go, please?”

  We finished our breakfast without saying anything else. He unfolded the newspaper and began to read it, laid out at his side on a cleared space on the table. He’d already removed the colour comics page.

  #

  We did it. We really did it. We bought plane tickets.

  Not, of course, that we were staying. We were just tourists. We both agreed to this, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that Phillip was going to flee into a castle once we got there and barricade himself behind the door. He would decide to spend the rest of his life within that room, writing poetry on a continuous sheet of vellum and looking out the window at the surrounding wood.

  Of course no such thing happened. We toured, like most people. I thought we might get bikes and strike out on our own, stopping at ponds and streams along the way, admiring the way the grass grew while thinking quiet, calm thoughts free of internal meta-commentary, our demeanors characterized by a serenity that knew no fear of end. But we landed at Heathrow airport and boarded a bus with “Hollycroft English Countryside Tours” painted on the side.

  I wore a straw boater hat. Phillip wore a vest and a pair of spectacles--he’d thrown out his contacts when we bought the house, but had, I thought, always found glasses bothersome. That’s the word we would use have used to describe it if we were going to admit it, “bothersome.” But he liked the way they looked when he took them off and laid them across the open pages of a book he’d been reading.

  The other people on the bus with us were tacky--wearing flip-flops and carrying bottles of hand sanitizer, as if the extra-American world was infested with germs new and novel to their immune systems already rendered well-nigh impervious by the handlebars of Wal-Mart shopping carts and weakened like a lords with margaritas and french fries. You can get them, in England. Margaritas. And french fries. You can even call them that. They see the iPhone in your hand and know wha
t you’re talking about.

  It almost happened, just once. We visited an old manor house, the kind of place that George Eliot would have lived if she’d inhabited one of her own books. As our tour group left the study, Phil lingered behind, looking at a tea tray placed on a table next to a globe which omitted Antarctica and depicted northern Canada as a sprawling mass that encompassed the arctic circle. When I went back to get him, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes.

  Oh, Phillip, I thought. It’d couldn’t have been a dirty alley in Dagenham and your visions of Dickensesque chimney sweeps. Why didn’t you see a charted Thames and think of burning tigers? It had to be this--not just beautiful but decadent. It wasn’t just anglophilia, or authenticity, or anachronism--it was whatever was here in the mahogany globe.

  “There’s resin in the glass.” he said.

  “What?”

  “The glass. The tea. It’s full of resin, or something like that.”

  I looked closer. The tea cup was full of what looked like an amber liquid, with a sheen on top from the tall bay window to our left. I poked it. It was hard, an acrylic or resin that made for spillproof, insect-proof, evaporation-proof tea.