By Nightfall (15 page)

By midnight Peter has been prone for so many hours as a faux convalescent he suspects he’s getting bedsores, which is, of course, ridiculous, but he may in fact be developing some subtle form of
brain
sores, it’s hard enough for him to take care of himself when he actually
is
sick; a half day of lying-in when he’s (relatively) healthy is pretty close to intolerable. Rebecca is asleep beside him now, Mizzy has retired to his room. Peter lies with his breathing wife. On the opposite side of the flimsy wall, Mizzy makes no sound of any kind. Peter wonders: Is Mizzy lying there in a similar state, wide awake but stock still, nervous about what Peter might have heard regardless of Peter’s insistence that he was deep-sixed? Peter briefly imagines them, Mizzy and himself, as two medieval tomb effigies, brothers in arms; if Mizzy looked earlier like an idealized, sculpted warrior, Peter now sees them both, laid in their sarcophagi side by side, safe as only the dead can be, the older and the younger man, fallen together in some battle fought on a piece of contested land that is now, in all likelihood, a parking lot or a strip mall, though he and Mizzy remain just as they were when the land was a prize beyond measure and the monks laid the two of them down, new members of eternity, inhabitants of a vanished world that was not easier than the current one but was neither shoddy nor tawdry; a world of woods and fens, sparsely peopled, in which men slashed and grappled and beat their shields over possession of turf that could still grow crops, of forests where gods and monsters still watched from the shadows. There’s something about Mizzy that suggests the Middle Ages, it’s that pallid, fine-boned prettiness, the sorrowful eyes, the sense (Peter can’t stop thinking about this) that he’s ephemeral, he’s the Mistake, he’s the ghost child who can’t attach to the world as firmly as most people do.

Peter will, of course, tell Rebecca that Little Brother had a drug dealer over. How could he not? He’d have told her tonight but . . . what? But there was his charade, playing ill like that, getting fussed over, and it was seductive, being treated as an invalid without the inconvenience of being actually sick. And so it seems he’s permitted himself to put off, for one night, the long, anguished conversation with his wife, all those questions about what to do. They can’t (they’ve looked into it) have Mizzy committed to a halfway house against his will and they can’t kick him out, can they, now that he’s using again, that would be like sending a child alone into the woods, but they can’t let him stay either, can they, not if he’s giving their address to dealers. And Mizzy, of course, like any addict, has no relationship to the truth in any form, he might swear that he’d never ever buy drugs out of the loft again, he might tremble and weep and beg forgiveness, and it wouldn’t mean anything at all. Fucking Taylors. Because, let’s be honest here, they live for this, they love fretting over Mizzy, it’s the family pastime, and really, having granted himself this false affliction, who could blame Peter for wanting to put off, if only for a night, the depths of Rebecca’s disappointment and worry, the frantic calls to Rose and Julie, the appeals to Peter for his opinion about what to do and the likelihood that his opinion, whatever it is, will be deemed too harsh or too lenient, because he can’t be right about Mizzy, ever, because he is not a member of the congregation.

Peter slips off into sleep, wakes again. Dream blips dissipate: he has a secret house in Munich
(Munich?),
some doctor has left a message there. Then he’s returned entirely, it’s his bedroom, Rebecca is sleeping beside him.

And he is now utterly, hopelessly awake, at twenty-three minutes after midnight.

He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca’s living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in . . . something. Something viable, something living, that’s surprised when he wakes at this hour, that’s neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal, inchoate musings.

Time for a vodka and a sleeping pill.

He gets out of bed. Rebecca does that sleep-move thing, that subtle but palpable drawing into herself, the little flutter of her fingers, the resettling of her mouth, by which he knows that although he has not awakened her she understands, somehow, in her sleep, that he’s leaving their bed.

He leaves the bedroom. He’s halfway across the living room before he sees it: Mizzy, standing naked in the kitchen, looking out the window.

Mizzy turns. He’s heard Peter approach. He stands squarely on both feet, with his arms at his sides, and Peter thinks briefly of the Visible Man, that clear plastic model with the colored organs inside, which he had lovingly built at ten and which, to his ten-year-old brain, seemed touched by the divine. It had seemed to him that angels might look like this, forget robes and billows of hair, an angel would be immaculately transparent, an angel would stand before you as the Visible Man did, as Mizzy does now, offering himself, neither imploring nor standoffish, simply present, and naked, and real.

“Hey,” Mizzy says softly.

“Hey,” Peter answers. He keeps approaching. Mizzy is as motionless and unabashed as a model in a life-drawing class.

Okay, this is strange, isn’t it? Peter keeps walking, what else can he do? But something’s going on, right? There’s this sense (can’t be true, but nevertheless) that Mizzy has been waiting for him.

Peter gets to the kitchen. Mizzy is standing in the middle but it’s a big enough space that Peter can get around him, just barely, without either touching him or making an elaborate effort to avoid touching him. He pours himself a glass of water at the sink, because he has to do something.

“How you feeling?” Mizzy asks.

“Better. Thanks.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“No. You, too?”

“No.”

“I have some Klonopin in the bathroom. I am, frankly, a big fan of a vodka and a Klonopin at times like this. You want one? I mean, you want both?”

Oops, wait a minute, he’s just offered drugs to an addict.

“Are you going to tell her?” Mizzy asks.

“Tell her what?”

Mizzy doesn’t answer. Peter steps back, sipping his tap water, and appraises this naked boy who seems to be standing in his kitchen—the modest cords of vein, one apiece, that lazily span each biceps; the hairless, pale pink slats of the abdomen, and, jutting out from its modest tangle of chestnut-colored pubic hair, the thing itself, respectable, big enough but not pornographically huge, its tip purpled by the dim light. Here are the sinewy young legs that can run up a mountainside with ease, and here are the surprisingly square, vaguely ursine feet.

Tell her what?

Mizzy has the good sense to let a silence settle, and Peter has neither the skill nor the inclination, after a few seconds worth of quiet, to insist on ignorance. To be truthful, he hasn’t got the strength.

“I think I have to,” he says.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Of course you do.”

“Not for my own sake. Not only for that. You know as well as I do. My sisters get crazy, and it doesn’t make any difference.”

“When did you start again?”

“In Copenhagen.”

Skip over, for now, the unthinkable privilege of this boy, whose parents continue to send the checks, who breezily stops off in Copenhagen on his way back from Japan. Try not to hate him for that.

“Would the word ‘why’ be entirely absurd?” Peter says.

Mizzy sighs, a sweet reedy sound, not unlike the particular royal sigh Matthew perfected all those years ago.

“It’s a perfectly good question. It just doesn’t really have an answer.”

“Do you want help quitting again?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“By all means.”

“Not right now. In a while.” He lifts his hands and cups his palms close to his face, as if he were about to drink water from them. He says, “It’s always so ridiculous to say to someone who’s never used, you can’t understand.”

Peter hesitates. “Ridiculous” is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that “someone who’s never used” is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we’ve learned how about bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still,
still,
the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. It helps, of course—let’s not get carried away—if you’re a young prince like Mizzy, and you’ve actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.

Is it any wonder that the Taylors obsess over this boy? What would they be without him? An aging academic who’s published two unremarkable books (the evolution of the dithyramb into spoken oratory, some hitherto overlooked foreshadowings of classical Greek culture in Mycenae), a woman going harmlessly dotty (obsessions with thrift and recycling, oddly paired with a complete indifference to household filth), and three lovely daughters who are doing variously well (Rebecca), slightly suspiciously
too
well (Julie), and neither well nor badly (Rose).

Peter says to Mizzy, “There’s not really much I can do with a statement like that.”

And by the way, what if Rebecca should come out of the bedroom right now? You understand, don’t you, that my only option would be to tell her everything. And that it would look weird, you standing out here naked like this, no matter what I told her.

Didn’t Rebecca once say,
I suspect Mizzy is capable of just about anything?
Didn’t she say it with a certain combination of anger and reverence?

“I know,” Mizzy answers. “Okay.”

Okay?

Mizzy places his fingertips on either side of his jawbone. Churchly. The young seeker come to proclaim his unworthiness.

He says, “I feel like I’m starting to see the world just . . . go along without me. And, you know, why shouldn’t it? But I don’t have. Any idea about what to do. I’ve thought for so long that if I just said no to all the, you know, obviously bad ideas, like law school, that the good idea would just sort of come along. And I begin to see that this is how sad old failures get their start. I mean, first you’re a cute young failure, and then . . .”

He laughs, a long, low sob of a laugh.

Peter says, “Despair seems premature.”

“I know. I do know. But this is a bad time for me. I fell into, I don’t know, some kind of pit up there in that shrine, it was exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen. I . . . felt like I began to see the transitory nature of all things, the serene absence in the middle of the world, but it wasn’t comforting. It made me want to kill myself.”

Again, a strain of the sob-laugh.

“That would be overreacting,” Peter says. Fuck, there it is again, that desire to be tough but compassionate that comes out sounding flip and callous.

“Don’t let me get melodramatic,” Mizzy says. “Here’s what I’m trying to say. I’m walking a line. I can’t tell myself that what I need is to go to a better shrine, or a shrine in a different country. I’m out of illusions. I need a little help getting through right now. I’m not proud of it. If I can feel okay for a little while, if I can get out of bed and get moving in the mornings, if you can possibly help me get started on a job, I’ll quit. I’ve quit before. It’s something I know I can do.”

“You’re putting me in an impossible position.”

“I’m asking you for a little help. I know, I
know,
but it’s too late to change that, and really, really and truly, I need a couple of months. I need a couple months of feeling okay, so I can start a life. And, well. You know what’ll happen if you tell Rebecca.”

He does.

“Will you promise not to have it delivered here anymore?” he says.

“Absolutely.”

Yeah, right.

“I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I need. Thank you.”

With that he leans over and kisses Peter, gently, at least semichastely, on the lips.

Whoa.

Mizzy pulls back, offers a charmingly abashed smile that has to have been practiced over the years.

“Sorry,” he says. “My friends and I all kiss each other, I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Got you.”

And yet. Is Mizzy offering himself?

Peter takes the Stoli bottle out of the freezer, pours them each a shot. What the hell. Then he goes to the bathroom for the Klonopin. Mizzy knows to wait in the kitchen. When Peter returns, with a little blue pill for each of them, they say “Chin chin” and down the pills with the vodka.

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn’t want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There’s the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that’s not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her
very real
worries on Mizzy’s behalf, also understand Mizzy’s desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that
you will be healed,
whether you want to be or not.

Men are united in their commonness, maybe it’s as simple as that.

And, okay, for a moment, a moment, Peter imagines that he, too, could be a Rodin, not, of course, the boy of the Bronze Age but not a Burgher of Calais either; he could be an undiscovered Rodin, the aging but unbowed, a figure of stern dignity, standing foursquare, weaponless, bare-chested (his chest is still muscular, his belly not bad), with a drape around his loins, as befits a gentleman of years (who’s not crazy about the condition of his ass).