By Nightfall (7 page)

“She and I talked about that, after.”

“And?”

“She said it had been her idea.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I wanted to. I mean, it was her senior year, she’d made the national finals and she was going to Barnard. She seemed sort of . . . heroic, to me.”

“So?”

“I still didn’t buy it. She was the most competitive person I’d ever known. And really, I figured out how it must have gone. Even dumb old Beau Baxter was capable of understanding that after a few drinks, she wouldn’t turn down a dare. I knew she’d have to think of it afterward as having been her idea. She’d have to tell herself she’d been the one in power. Which sort of made it worse.”

“You were a nice girl.”

“I was
not
.”

“Nicer than Julie.”

“Not really.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I had sex with Beau two days later. Correction. I fucked Beau two days later.”

“You’re joking.”

“He came up to me at a party to apologize, supposedly embarrassed but actually so damned pleased with himself.”

“And you . . .”

“I told him to follow me.”

“Where’d you take him?”

“Into the garden. It was this big house where they had a lot of parties, and there was a garden.”

“And . . .”

“I told him to fuck me. Right there, on the wet grass.”

“No way.”

“I’d had it. I’d had it with my asshole boyfriend and I’d had it with my slutty sister who thought she had to win every single contest and I’d had it with being the innocent younger sister who got hysterical when she saw people fucking in the garden room. That night I still thought I’d left my boyfriend forever, plus I’d drunk almost a full pint of cheap vodka and I just wanted to straddle the dick of that big stupid boy who’d humiliated my sister. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life.”

“Wow.”

“You like that, huh?”

“Uh, what happened next?”

“He was scared. As I’d suspected he’d be. He was all, Um, hey, Rebecca, I dunno . . . So I gave him a little shove on the chest with both hands and told him to lie down.”

“Did he?”

“You bet he did. He’d never seen the power of a girl, possessed.”

“Go on.”

“I pulled down his pants and pulled up his shirt. I didn’t need him to be naked. I got down on his dick and I showed him exactly what he was to do with his fingertip on my clitoris. It wasn’t clear that, until that moment, he knew what a clitoris
was
.”

“You’re making this up.”

“You’re right. I am.”

“No.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Really and truly?”

“Do you care?”

“Sure I do.”

“It’s a sexy story whether it’s true or not, right?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“Men are such perverts.”

“You’re right. We are.”

“Anyway, story time’s over for tonight. Come here, Charlie.”

“What’s with
Charlie
?”

“I really and truly don’t know. Just come here.”

“Where?”

“Here. Right here.”

“Here?”

“Mm-hm.”

Six months later, he married her.

Twenty years later, he is sitting at his dining room table across from Mizzy, who’s fresh from the shower, wearing cargo shorts. He hasn’t put on a shirt. There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze—the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition, and not the rarest of mutations. Mizzy has dark pink nipples (there’s some sort of Mediterranean blood in these Taylors, somewhere) about the size of quarters. Between his neatly square pectorals, a single medallion of sable-colored hair.

Is he being seductive, or is it just his regular carnal heedlessness? There’s no reason for him to think Peter might be interested, and even if there were, he wouldn’t get sexy around his sister’s husband. Would he? (When was it that Rebecca said, “I think Mizzy is capable of just about anything”?) There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody.

Peter says, “How was Japan?”

“Beautiful. Inconclusive.” Mizzy has retained the soft Virginia burr Rebecca lost years ago.
Bee-oo-tiful. In-con-cloo-sive.

Out of the shower, Mizzy looks less like Rebecca. He has his own version of the Taylor face: hawklike thrust of feature, jutting nose and big, attentive eyes (which, in Mizzy, are ever so slightly crossed, giving his face a stunned, ever-questioning quality); that vaguely Ancient Egyptian aspect they share, apparent in neither Cyrus nor Beverly, evidence of some insistently repeating snarl in their combined DNA. The Taylor brood, three girls and one boy, variations on a theme, profiles that would not be entirely surprising on millennia-old pottery shards.

Peter is staring, isn’t he?

“Can a whole country be inconclusive?” he asks.

“I didn’t mean Japan. I meant me. I was just a tourist there. I couldn’t connect.”

He has that Taylor presence, that
thing
they all do (with the possible exception of Cyrus), without quite realizing it. That ability to . . . command a room. Be the person about whom others ask, Who’s that?

Mizzy went to Japan for a purpose, didn’t he? To visit some relic?

Where the hell is Rebecca?

“Japan is a very foreign country,” Peter says.

“So is this one.”

Score one for undeluded youth.

“Didn’t you go there to see some kind of holy rock?” Peter says.

Mizzy grins. Okay, he’s not as self-important as he might be.

“A garden,” he answers. “In a shrine in the mountains in the north. Five stones that were put there by priests six hundred years ago. I sat and looked at those stones for almost a month.”

“Really?”

Mizzy, don’t kid a kidder. I was once a self-dramatizing young romantic, too. A
month
?

“And I got what I should have expected. Which was nothing.”

And now: the lecture on the superiority of Eastern culture.

“Nothing at all?”

“A garden like that is part of a practice. It’s part of a life of contemplation. As it turns out you can’t just go and, I don’t know. Pay it a visit.”

“Would you want a life of contemplation?”

“Ah’m
contemplating
it.”

This is a Southern gift, isn’t it—tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That’s what they mean by Southern charm, right?

Peter expects a story, but no story, it seems, is forthcoming. A silence catches, and holds. Peter and Mizzy sit looking at the tabletop. The silence takes on a certain decisiveness, like the interlude during which it becomes apparent that a date is not going well; that nothing promising is going to happen after all. Soon, if this awkwardness doesn’t resolve itself, it will be established that Peter and Mizzy—
this
Mizzy, anyway, this troubled, world-scavenging boy who has supposedly been clean for over a year—don’t get along; that Mizzy is here to stay with his sister and that his sister’s husband will tolerate it as best he can.

Peter shifts on his chair, looks aimlessly into the kitchen. Okay. They won’t be friends. They have to get along though, don’t they? It’ll be too hard on Rebecca if they don’t. He can feel the stillness turning from failed affinity to combat. Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversational gambit so that everything can be okay.

Peter looks back at Mizzy. Mizzy smiles mildly, helplessly.

Peter says, “I was in Kyoto, years ago.”

And really, that’s all it takes. Just a tiny declaration of one’s willingness to dance.

“The gardens in Kyoto are amazing,” Mizzy says. “I got fixated on this particular shrine because it was far away. As if, you know. It was going to be holier because there were no convenient nearby hotels.”

Something about the released tension makes him love Mizzy, briefly, soaringly, the way he imagines men love their comrades in battle.

“And it wasn’t,” Peter says.

“I thought it was, at first. It’s insanely beautiful. It’s way up in the mountains, they have snow more than half the year.”

“Where did you stay?”

“There’s a dumpy rooming house kind of thing in the town. I’d hike up the mountain every morning, and stay till just before dark. The priests let me sit there. They were so sweet. I was like their foolish child.”

“You went every day and sat in the garden.”

“Not
in.
It’s a dry garden. It’s raked gravel. You sit to one side and look at it.”

Yew set to one sad and look et it.
No denying the musky sweetness of that Virginia tone.

“For a whole month,” Peter says.

“At first, I thought something amazing was happening. It turns out there’s this noise in our heads, we’re all so used to it we don’t hear it. This sort of static of information and misinformation and what-all. And after about a week of just looking at five rocks and some gravel, it starts to go away.”

“And is replaced by?”

“Boredom.”

It is so not what Peter expected that he emits a strange, phlegmy little snort-laugh.

Mizzy says, “And other things. I don’t mean to be flippant about it. But I . . . this’ll sound corny.”

“Go ahead.”

“Huh. As it turns out, I don’t really want to wear a robe and sit on some mountain halfway across the planet looking at rocks. But I also. I don’t want to just say, okay, that was my spiritual phase, now it’s time to apply to law school.”

The mystery of Mizzy: Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he’s considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

Peter says, “Would it be too horrible and embarrassing if I asked what you think you want to do?”

Mizzy frowns, but amusedly. “I think I’d like to be king of the underworld.”

“Hard job to get.”

“Don’t let me get all cryptic. I need to shape up a little. People have been telling me that for years, and I’m finally starting to believe them. I can’t really go to one more shrine in Japan. I can’t drive to Los Angeles just to see what happens along the way.”

“Rebecca thinks you think you’d like to do something in, um, the art world, is that right?”

Mizzy’s face colors with embarrassment. “Well, it seems to be the thing I care most about. I don’t know if I have anything, exactly, to
offer
.”

It’s a pose, isn’t it, all this boyish abashment? How could it not be? Mizzy, why do you refuse to summon up your gifts?

“Do you know what you want to
do
, exactly?” Peter says. “In the arts, I mean.”

That
was a little Dad-like, wasn’t it?

Mizzy says, “Honestly?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I think I’d like to go back to school, and maybe become a curator.”

“That’s about the same odds as becoming king of the underworld.”

“But somebody has to do it, right?”

“Sure. It’s just. It’s a little like setting out to become a movie star.”

“And some people get to be movie stars.”

Here it is, then—the armature of hubris over which this skin of uncertainty is stretched. Then again, why should a smart, beautiful boy pursue
modest
ambitions?

“Sure they do,” Peter says.

“And, well. I’m sort of . . . Thank you for taking me in like this.”

“Egyptian” isn’t quite right for the Taylor face, is it? There’s too much pink-tinged Irish pallor about them, and too much strong Creole chin. El Greco? No, they’re not that gaunt or severe.

“We’re glad to have you.”

“I won’t stay long. I promise.”

“Stay as long as you need to,” Peter says. Which he does not exactly mean. What can he do, though? He’s a sucker for the whole damned family. Rose is selling real estate in California, Julie quit her practice to spend more time with her kids. Those are not terrible fates. Neither Rose nor Julie has come to a tragic end, but they are, both of them, living unexpectedly usual lives. And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter’s care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylors’ grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost—to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world’s most promising children.

He must have been desperate to be born.

“That’s kind of you,” Mizzy says. The rinsing formality of the South . . .

“Rebecca should take you to see the Puryear show. At the Modern.”

“I’d like that.”

He looks at Peter with those off-kilter eyes, which somehow manage not to render him foolish-looking, though they do produce an effect of slightly crazy intensity.

“Do you know his work?” Peter says.

“I do.”

“It’s a beautiful show.”

And then, now, Rebecca is back. Peter startles slightly when he hears her key in the lock, as if she’s caught him at something.

“Hello, boys.” She walks in with the milk Mizzy will need in his morning coffee and the two bottles of extravagant cabernet they’ll all drink tonight. She brings the vitality of herself—her offhand sense of her own consequence; her perfectly careless jeans and pale aqua sweater and the nape-length tangle of her hair, which is going wiry with its infusion of gray. She still carries herself like the pretty girl she was.

Is it the Taylor curse to peak early, is there some magic in that decrepit old house that fades the moment they leave it?

Kisses and greetings are exchanged, one of the wine bottles is opened. (Should Rebecca be serving wine to a drug addict, what’s up with that?) They go and sit in the living room with wineglasses.

“I’m going to ask Julie to come up next weekend,” Rebecca says.

“She won’t,” Mizzy answers.

“She can leave the children for one night. They’re not babies anymore.”