By Nightfall (20 page)

“Peter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Never mind.”

“Don’t do that.”

She sips at her drink, pauses, breathes, sips again. She’s thinking of something to say, isn’t she? Is it something other than what she’d meant to say?

“I have this terrible feeling about Mizzy,” she says. “And I’m afraid I’m exhausting your patience.”

Sometimes when she talks about Mizzy, her long-vanished Virginia lilt comes back.
Ah’m afrayd ah’m exhausting yer pay-shunce.

“I’ll let you know.”

“It’s just . . . I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it or not. But I swear I had a feeling like this back when he. Had the accident.”

You Taylors. You’re never going to let go of the word “accident,” are you?

“What kind of feeling?” Peter asks.

“A feeling. Don’t make me pull
woman
on you.”

“Describe it. I’m curious. As, you know, a scientist.”

“Hm. Well, Mizzy’s always had this sort of
air
about him when he’s about to do something he thinks is a good idea and everybody else knows is a really, really bad idea. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like those auras people with migraines see. I can see one around him.”

“And you’re seeing one now?”

“I think so. Yes.”

Peter knows the litany. Mizzy getting himself to Paris at the age of sixteen because he had to meet Derrida. Mizzy starting on heroin soon after he’d been brought back from Paris, and subsequently slipping out of rehab to go to New York to do God knows what. Mizzy, after a year in Manhattan, rounded up and sent for his (repeated) junior year and his senior year to Exeter, where he abruptly became a model student, and then went on to Yale, where he continued to do wonderfully for his first two years but then, without warning, dropped out to work on a farm in Oregon. Mizzy back at Yale again, and back on drugs, crystal this time. Mizzy having the “accident” in his friend’s Honda Civic. Mizzy unhappy at Yale, refusing to graduate. Mizzy walking the Camino de Santiago. Mizzy moving back to Richmond, where he stayed in his old room for almost five months. Mizzy off crystal (or so he said). Mizzy going to Japan, to sit with five stones.

Mizzy having dated, starting at the age of twelve, the following known (never mind the unknown) people: a funny, obstreperous, Charlotte Gainsbourg–like girl who was a junior in high school when Mizzy was in the ninth grade; the strange brief period of Mizzy’s immense high school popularity at Exeter, during which he dated the most conventional pretty rich girl imaginable and was elected senior class president; the black girl at Yale who is now, supposedly, a senior aide in the Obama administration; the (rumored) affair with a young male classics professor that led to a second (more reliably rumored) affair with a studious, motorcycle-riding boy from the classics seminar; the beautiful Mexican girl from Mazatlán who spoke hardly any English and who (again, rumor) broke Mizzy’s heart in a way no one else has before or since; the rather loudly proclaimed period of celibacy when he returned to Yale (who picks up a crystal meth habit and remains celibate?); the elegant South American poet who was probably older than the forty she claimed to be; the inexplicably bland and cheerful girl followed, logically enough, by the beautiful young English psychopath who tried to burn the house down and succeeded in charring the eastern end of the porch . . . Those are the ones he and Rebecca know about. It’s impossible to say how many others there’ve been.

And then there’s Mizzy here, now, staying with Rebecca and Peter, out tonight with an unnamed woman friend.

“What do you think we should do?” Peter asks Rebecca.

She drains her martini. “Beyond what we
are
doing? You tell me.”

There’s an edge, isn’t there? How exactly has Mizzy’s waywardness become Peter’s fault?

“No idea.”

“I like to think he’s serious about working in the arts. Would you do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you take him with you to Carole Potter’s tomorrow?”

“If you want me to, sure.”

“I know how he is. He could hang around here for weeks, saying he wants to get involved in the arts, and the next thing we know, he’ll meet somebody who’s getting a crew together to sail to Martinique. It might help if you showed him a little bit of what being involved in the arts actually means.”

“Trying to sell a very expensive object to a very rich person would be indicative, no question.”

“I sort of think, the fewer illusions he has, the better. If he hates what he sees tomorrow, I can talk to him about how he might want to think about
getting into
something else. I mean, something other than another harebrained scheme.”

“I can’t believe you said ‘harebrained scheme.’ ”

“I’m turning into Lucy Ricardo, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I can’t really think why Mizzy wouldn’t like Carole Potter.”

“That’d be good, then. Hey, I’m having one more martini. What about you?”

“Sure.”

Rebecca starts making the second round. Maybe they’ll have a third. Maybe they both need to get drunk tonight, because their lives are at least a little bit too hard for them and because they both know Mizzy could very well be out there pursuing some small death or other.

“Rebecca?” Peter says.

“Mm?’

“Did I fuck up so completely with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t an easy child. We both know that.”

“That isn’t the question.”

“No. You showed up for everything. You tucked her in at night.”

“To the best of my recollection.”

She pours him another drink.

“You did your very best with her. Don’t beat yourself up too much, okay?”

“Was I too hard on her?”

“No. Okay. You may have expected more from her than she was able to give.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

Why are Bea and Rebecca so determined to make him the cause of everything that’s gone wrong?

“She’s furious at me, too, you know. Because I was late sometimes to pick her up from school. And I thought it was amazing that I was able to pick her up at all.”

“Would it be too cowardly to think of her as going through a phase?”

“I think she is going through a phase. We worry anyway.”

“Yes. We do.”

“And, okay,” she says, “I’m frankly a little tired of worrying about the young and wayward.”

No you’re not. You’re not really tired of worrying about Mizzy. Mizzy is—face it—more dramatic. What you are, what we both are, is exhausted by our daughter. You and I can, at the very least, get our fingers into Mizzy’s troubles, we can comprehend them. Bea’s determination to live such a small life, to wear a hotel uniform and live with a strange older girl who seems to be just floating along and have no (discernible) boyfriends . . . It’s harder, isn’t it? When she tells you nothing beyond the baldest facts.

“About Mizzy.”

“Mm-hm?”

What, exactly, does he want to say? He wants to tell her the whole story, though part of the
whole story
would have something to do with his worry that she and her sisters are, with every good intention, setting out to ruin Mizzy, to save him by normalizing him, and that . . . fuck . . . no, of course he shouldn’t be doing drugs again but he shouldn’t come to his senses, either; he shouldn’t
get into
something “promising,” I mean sure, that’d keep him safer, but is “safe” the best he can get from the world? Bea is safe, in her way. Mizzy is—may be, who knows?—one of those rare creatures who’s reckless and smart and complex enough to be granted, by the inscrutable Powers That Be, a life that doesn’t wear him down.

And so, Peter’s going to suggest to his wife that her beloved little brother should be permitted to keep on doing drugs? Right. That’ll go over.

“Nothing,” Peter says. “It’ll be good to have Mizzy along tomorrow. Carole will love him, she’s a huge fan of smart, handsome young men.”

“Who isn’t?”

She drops a handful of ice cubes into the shaker.

And so, Peter knows. He’s not going to be the sober responsible one. He’s not going to tell Rebecca that her fears are at least to some extent justified.

Rebecca, forgive me, if you can. I’m drowning in my own culpability. I’m afraid I could die of it.

Peter is, naturally, awake in bed when Mizzy gets in. Two forty-three. Not early but not late, not by the standards of the New York young. He listens to Mizzy’s soft, careful footfalls as he, Mizzy, walks through the front of the loft to his own room.

Where have you been?

Who have you been with?

Are you walking on little cat’s feet because you don’t want to wake us, or because you’re high? Are you putting each foot down in wonder onto electrified, glowing floorboards?

Mizzy goes into his room. Before he undresses for bed, he starts speaking, too softly to be heard. For a moment Peter imagines he’s brought someone with him, but no, he’s just calling somebody on his cell. Peter can hear the rise and fall of Mizzy’s voice but even through the cardboard wall can’t hear what he’s actually saying. He is, however, calling someone at . . . 2:58 a.m.

Peter lies mortified, abed. Who is it, Mizzy? Your dealer? Have you run out, are you going to meet him on the corner in twenty minutes? Or is it some girl you fucked, are you trying to make her less unhappy about the fact that you left her alone in her bed?

Okay. All right. He’d rather it was the dealer. He doesn’t want Mizzy to be seeing some girl. He doesn’t want that because, say it, he wants to own Mizzy, the way he wants to own art. He wants Mizzy’s sharp fucked-up mind and he wants his self-destruction and he wants his . . .
being
to be here, all here, he doesn’t want him squandering it on anybody else, certainly not a girl who can give him something Peter can’t. Mizzy is becoming—Peter’s not stupid, he’s crazy but he’s not stupid—his favorite work of art, a performance piece if you will, and Peter wants to collect him, he wants to be his master and his confidant (remember, Mizzy, I could blow the whistle at any time), Peter doesn’t want him to die (he really and truly doesn’t), but he wants to curate Mizzy, he wants to be his only . . . his only. That will do, really.

Matthew is in a grave in Wisconsin. Bea is in all likelihood shaking a cocktail for some leering businessman.

Better take two of those blue pills tonight.

PRIZE CHICKENS

The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let’s just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. Look over here, this is the Jardin du Luxembourg, and may I please present a little building we call the Blue Mosque. Pay no attention to that which encircles New York City: the fences topped with concertina-wire circles guarding factories that may or may not be out of business, the grim brick monoliths of housing projects, the scrappy little interludes of trash-strewn woods meant, it would seem, to demonstrate nature’s frailty in the face of human disregard. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.

Mizzy sits across from Peter, watching the gaunt urbanscape go by.
The Magic Mountain
sits open but unread on his lap. The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of sufficient reviving urgency (not at least one either of his parents could bear to broach), and so they needed to hydroplane forward together on an ever-replenished slick of remark and opinion, of ritualized disinclination (
You know, I’ve never trusted that man)
and long-familiar enthusiasms
(I know Chinese food is filthy, but I just don’t care).
As a conversationalist, Peter’s mother was grand, in her way. She man aged to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile—by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everything she did so because she’d presided over some utopia, and so knew from experience how much better we all could do. She wanted more than anything to live under a benevolent dictator who was exactly like her without being her—if she actually ruled she would relinquish her right to object, and without her right to object who and what would she be?

Peter’s father entertained his wife. He pointed out the beauty and the pathos, grabbed her hand and nibbled like a monkey at her fingertips, scoured
TV Guide
for old movies he knew she’d like and made sure they had dinner out once a week at a “nice” restaurant even when the money was tight. By middle age they had become a mysterious couple, one of those what’s-he-doing-with-
her
couples (his beauty had deepened, hers had started to pale), but Peter knew they were simply aging into what had been a common-enough youthful courtship: she was a ravishing young girl who was not easily pleased, and he a handsome but scrawny boy who outadored his league of competitors.

Yes, reader, she married him.

It was not exactly a bad marriage, but it wasn’t a good one either. She was too much the prize, he too much the grateful supplicant.

And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.

The Taylors of Richmond had no trouble with conversation, but its underlying purpose was different. Nothing was being perpetuated, nothing held at bay. This fundamental absence of nervousness seems to have affected all four of the children in that they were, each of them, many things but were, none of them, unsure. Mizzy’s got it, in spades—that Taylor way of unapologetically occupying space. It’s not so much about pride as it is simple, ordinary confidence, which is rendered
extra
ordinary only by its paucity among the general population. Look at him, big ponderous book in his lap, watching the scenery, not aloof but calm as a prince would be about his right to be wherever he is, and if someone is responsible for providing amusement and diversion, it is clearly not he.