By Nightfall (24 page)

“I hope I’ll pass,” she says.

“I can pretty much guarantee that you will.”

She turns to look at the urn. “It’s so beautiful and nasty,” she says.

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation. He picks a sprig of lavender, holds it to his nose.

Carole insists that Gus drive them back to the city, and Peter accepts gratefully, after the briefest show of false reluctance. He, Cowardly Peter, is eager to be relieved of the train ride back with Mizzy. What would they talk about?

Gus’s presence will enforce a silence that would be too uncomfortable on the train. Thank you, Carole and Gus.

And so he and Mizzy sit side by side in the backseat of the BMW, driving along the consoling normalcy of I-95, surrounded by other people in other cars, most of whom have, in all likelihood, never kissed their brothers-in-law.

Does Peter envy them, or pity them?

Both, really.

A fury rises up in him, quick as panic, fury at his thick-ankled daughter and his comradely, distant wife and Uta and Carole fucking Potter and everyone, everything, Gus’s faux-hawk and his little red Irish ears; everyone and everything except the lost boy sitting beside him, the only person with whom he actually
should
be angry, the boy who invited an impossible kiss
(did
he invite it?) and followed it with implausible flattery (that’s what it was, right?). There’s no telling how much of Mizzy is deceitful, how much deluded, and how much (God help you, Peter Harris) genuine. Because, all right, he wants it to be true, and it might, it might conceivably be true, that Mizzy has been mooning over him since Peter read Babar to him when he was four. Peter doesn’t think of himself, never has, as someone to be mooned over. Yes, he’s seductive and he’s decent-looking but he’s the guy, he’s always been the guy, looking up at the balcony from the garden below. He’s the servant of beauty, he’s not beauty itself, that’s Mizzy’s job, just as it once was Rebecca’s.

As it once was Rebecca’s.

The anger subsides as quickly as it announced itself, and in its place a sorrow wells up, a wave of gut sorrow, as he glances (unobtrusively, he hopes) at Mizzy’s solemn profile, his aristocratically hooked nose, the shock of dark hair that trembles on his pale forehead.

This is what Peter wants from art. Isn’t it? This soul sickness; this sense of himself in the presence of something gorgeous and evanescent, something (someone) that shines through the frailty of flesh, yes, like Manet’s whore-goddess, a beauty cleansed of sentimentality because Mizzy is (isn’t he?) a whore-god in his own way, he’d be less compelling if he were the benign, brilliant, spiritual entity he says he’d like to be.

Beauty—the beauty Peter craves—is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn’t shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he’s young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it’s something the old tend to forget. Here he is, Ethan aka the Mistake, shameless and wanton, addicted, unable to want whatever it is he believes he’s supposed to want. This would be the moment to do him in bronze, to try to capture the aching raw nerves of him, the all-but-unbearable final stages of his youth shimmer, as he begins to understand that his condition, like everybody’s, is serious, but before he begins to take the necessary steps to live semipeaceably in the actual world.

In the meantime, he needs not to die.

Gus drops them in front of the loft. Goodbyes and thank-yous. Gus motors off. Peter and Mizzy stand on the sidewalk together.

“Well,” Peter says.

Mizzy grins, a satyr now. Where did the damp-eyed, ardent version go?

He says, “Just act like nothing happened.”

“What did happen?”

“You tell me.”

Fuck you, man-child.

“We can’t have an affair.”

“I know that. You’re my sister’s husband.”

And how exactly, Mizzy, have you suddenly become the voice of rectitude?

“I like you,” Peter says. Lame, lame.

“I like you, too. Obviously.”

“Do you think you could tell me what you want? I mean, to the best of your ability.”

“I want to have kissed you on a beach. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Dramatic?
Who’s the
dramatic
one here?

Peter says, “I don’t think I can pretend it was nothing.”

“Well, you don’t have to marry me, either.”

Youth. Heartless, cynical, despairing youth. It always wins, doesn’t it? We revere Manet, but we don’t see him naked in a painting. He’s the bearded guy behind the easel, paying homage.

“Well. Let’s go in, then.”

“After you.”

How did
this
happen? How can Peter be standing in front of his own building, wishing with all his might that Mizzy would protest his love one more time, so that Peter could scold him for it. Was he too abrupt back there on the Potters’ lawn? Did he miss some crucial chance?

Some chance for what, exactly?

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

They go in. Neither of them says anything more.

Rebecca is home already, in the kitchen, making dinner. Peter lives through a spasm of conviction that she knows what’s up, has gotten home early for a confrontation. Which is, of course, ridiculous. She comes to the door, wiping her hands on her jeans, kisses Mizzy on the cheek and Peter on the lips.

“I’m making a little pasta,” she says. To Mizzy she adds, “Remember, I’m
not
Mom. I have some sort of domestic aptitude.”

“Even Mom wasn’t exactly Mom,” says Mizzy.

“You boys pour yourselves a glass of wine,” Rebecca says, heading back to the kitchen. “It’ll be about twenty minutes or so.”

She is a vital, capable woman whose husband and brother have kissed on a beach. Not that Peter forgot. Still, there’s something about seeing her . . .

“I’ll get the wine,” Mizzy says. Normal normal normal.

“How’d it go in Greenwich?” Rebecca asks.

You have no idea how it went in Greenwich.

“Perfecto,” Peter says.
Perfecto?
Who is he now, all of a sudden, Dean Martin? He adds, “I’m sure she’s going to buy it. I just have to get Groff up there now to approve of her.”

“Great.”

Mizzy brings a glass of wine to Peter. As he hands him the glass, as their hands touch, does Mizzy slip him a look? No. The horror of it is, he doesn’t.

Rebecca picks up her half-empty glass from the countertop. “To selling art,” she says. And for a moment Peter thinks she’s being ironic.

He raises his glass. “To paying next semester’s tuition,” he says.

“If she ever goes back to school,” Rebecca answers.

“Of course she’ll go back. Trust me. There’s nothing like slinging drinks for drunks to make college look good again.”

Normal normal normal.

Rebecca has planned an evening in. She’s not only made dinner, she’s rented a copy of
8½.
It’s a simple gesture, simple enough, though Peter knows she’s also embarking on a campaign to seduce Mizzy into the ordinary comforts. He knows, too, that she feels guilty about some largely imaginary neglect she’s meted out the last couple of days, having had her mind on the sale of the magazine.

They perform, all three of them, what Peter can only call a gorgeous imitation of the regular. Over dinner they talk about selling things (art, magazines). Mizzy does (a newly revealed talent) a spot-on imitation of Carole Potter—he gets her pneumatic little head-nods, the liquid avidity of her eyes, even the undercurrent of
mmm
sounds she makes as she listens, or appears to listen. This is a mild revelation to Peter—Mizzy is not as absorbed by full-time Mizzyness as one might think. It seems (romantic delusion?) to speak to Mizzy’s capacity for truth-telling—when he says, oh, for instance, that he’s loved Peter all his life, it’s possible that he means it. Vain Peter, you’ve always been the pursuer, how strange and wonderful it would be if you were for once in your life the pursued. Then Rebecca speculates about what sort of Big Art Thing might be engendered in Billings, Montana, to which Mizzy and Peter, suddenly a boy gang, offer only mocking suggestions: feeding poets to bears in the football stadium, commissioning ice sculptures—they’re not particularly good jokes but that isn’t the point, it’s boys versus girl, which Rebecca takes in stride, knowing, as she surely does, that she can have it out with Peter later, in bed.

They watch
8½,
which is as good as it’s always been, polishing off a third bottle of wine as they do. They are, for the duration of the movie, a family right out of a TV commercial, three people on a sofa watching raptly as the living jewel of the television screen takes them out of their lives and delivers them into new ones. Marcello Mastroianni putts off on a motorbike with Claudia Cardinale clinging to his back, Marcello Mastroianni leads a conga line of everyone he’s ever known at the base of a dead rocket ship.

When the movie is over, Rebecca goes into the kitchen to get dessert. Peter and Mizzy sit side by side on the sofa. Mizzy puts a comradely arm around Peter’s shoulders.

“Hey,” he says.

“Love that movie,” Peter says.

“Do you love me?’

“Shh.”

“Just nod, then.”

Peter hesitates, nods.

Mizzy whispers, “You’re a beautiful dude.”

A beautiful
dude?
What kind of word is
dude
for a boy like Mizzy to be using?

Answer: it’s a young word, it’s a young
man
word, and for a moment Peter can see how they’d be together—teasing, knowing, fractious in a (mostly) good-natured way, a wised-up and roughhousing pair out of some romantic and implausible ancient Greece. Mizzy is heedless, unashamed about declaring his love on his sister’s sofa. Could they be happy together? It’s not out of the question.

Peter says, softly, “I am not a dude.”

“Okay, you’re just beautiful.”

Peter is, to his embarrassment, happy to be told he’s beautiful.

And then, Rebecca appears with the desserts. Coffee and chocolate gelato.

They finish the gelato, talking desultorily, and then they go to bed. Peter and Rebecca do. Mizzy says he’s going to go into his room and stay up a little longer, reading
The Magic Mountain,
and so with mild unyearning good nights he trudges off with his heavy tome, old Thomas Mann himself, the patron saint of impossible loves.

Once they’re in bed together, Peter and Rebecca lie chastely side by side, on their backs. They keep their voices low.

Rebecca says, “Do you think he had a good time today?”

You have no idea.

“Hard to say,” Peter answers.

“It’s sweet of you.”

“What is?”

“To put up with him like this.”

Oh, God, don’t thank me.

“He’s a good kid.”

“I’m not honestly so sure that he’s a good kid. He has a good heart. And, you know. I’m stuck with him.”

Yeah. Tell me about it.

Now is probably the time—now is quite possibly the last time—to tell her he’s doing drugs again. That would, in its way, solve the problem, wouldn’t it? He could have Mizzy shipped off to rehab, just by saying the word. He knows how it would go. Mizzy is exhausting the local patience, and Rebecca is thoroughly capable of decisive action. Peter could effect—just by saying the right thing, right now—a benign assassination of sorts: Peter could join the adults, and be rid of Mizzy, who would have two choices only; who could submit to his sisters’ ministrations (Julie would be on the next train from Washington, hard to say whether or not Rose would fly in from California) or run off and live or die on his own. There is, clearly, no room for compromise anymore. The girls have had it.

Peter says, “We’re both stuck with him.”

And so, he knows. He wants, he needs, to do the immoral, irresponsible thing. He wants to let this boy court his own destruction. He wants to commit that cruelty. Or (kinder, gentler version) he doesn’t want to reconfirm his allegiance to the realm of the sensible, all the good people who take responsibility, who go to the right and necessary parties, who sell art made of two-by-fours and carpet remnants. He wants, for at least a little while, to live in that other, darker world—Blake’s London, Courbet’s Paris; raucous, unsanitary places where good behavior was the province of decent, ordinary people who produced no works of genius. God knows, Peter is no genius, and Mizzy isn’t, either, but maybe the two of them could wander off the map a little, maybe it’s what he’s been waiting for, and because life is, as they say, full of surprises, it’s arrived not in the form of a great young artist but in the form of a young male version of Peter’s wife, his wife when she was by all accounts the most sought-after girl in Richmond; a girl who could throw down the lunk who’d humiliated her sister and have her way with him. She is wonderful, but she is no longer that girl. Here, practically cupped in Peter’s outstretched hands, is youth, wanton and self-immolating and scared to death; here is Matthew fucking half the men in New York; here is the Rebecca who no longer exists. Here is the terrible, cleansing fire. Peter has been too long in mourning, for the people who’ve disappeared, for the sense of dangerous inspiration his life refuses to provide. So, yes, he’ll do it, yes. He and Mizzy will not, cannot, lock lips again, but he’ll see where this takes him, this dreadful fascination, this chance (if “chance” is the word for it) to upend his own life.

Rebecca says, “I just want to be sure you know I’m grateful. You didn’t sign up for this when you married me.”

“I did, though. I did sign up for it when I married you. This is your family.”

And, really, Peter married her family, didn’t he? That was part of the attraction, not only Rebecca but her past, her lovely Fitzgeraldian history, her eccentric and peculiar people.

“Good night,” she says.

She settles in for sleep. There is no denying her beauty, or the force of her being. Peter is struck by a pang of envy. Sure she has her worries, but she inhabits herself so fully, she worries over the real questions and ignores the theoretical ones; she slices through the world. Look at her pale, aristocratic forehead and the firmness of her brow. Look at the modest parentheses of lines that bracket her mouth—she’d laugh at the idea of collagen. She will age bravely and do good work in the difficult world and love the people she loves with direct, unwavering ferocity.