By Nightfall (16 page)

“Thanks again,” Mizzy says. “For thinking about it.”

“Mm.”

“Night.”

“Good night.”

Mizzy returns to his room. Peter watches him go, his supple back and the small, perfect spheres of his ass. Whatever’s gay in Peter is probably mostly about ass, the place where another man is most vulnerable, childlike; the place where his physiognomy seems least built for a fight.

Go ahead. Say it silently, inside your mind. Nice ass, little brother.

And now, poor creature, to bed.

Sleep, however, will not return. After a full hour he gets out of bed, gropes for his clothes. Rebecca stirs.

“Peter?”

“Shh. Everything’s okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“I feel better.”

“Really?”

“It must have been food poisoning. I’m suddenly okay again.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I just want some air. Back in ten minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

He leans over, kisses her, inhales the sleepy, sweet-sweaty smell she emanates.

“Don’t go for long.”

“I won’t.”

Again, the ice pick in the chest. Someone who worries over you, tends to you, and for whom you do the same . . . Don’t couples live longer than single people, because they’re better cared for? Didn’t somebody do a study?

He’s eavesdropped on his wife’s brother as he whacked off, there’s probably no way to tell her that, ever, is there?

He does have to tell her that the precious little brother is using again. How and when does he do that?

Dressed, he steps out into the semidark of the big room. There’s no line of light under the door to Mizzy’s room.

Time to go out, just out, into the nocturnal world.

And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world’s richest, best-dressed refugees.

Mercer Street is empty late at night. Peter turns uptown, then heads east on Prince, toward Broadway, going nowhere in particular but generally toward the more raucous, younger part of downtown, away from the filtered Jamesian slumber of the West Village. He’s aware of his own reflection skating silently alongside him in the dark windows of closed shops. The semiquiet of Prince Street holds for less than a block and then he’s crossing Broadway, which, of course, is never quiet, though this particular stretch is a
Blade Runner
strip mall, with its mammoth suburban chain stores, its Navy and Banana and Etcetera, which have reproduced themselves as perfectly here as they would anywhere, though here they display their wares to an endless riot of horn-blasting traffic; here their doorways are makeshift nocturnal homes that the resident sleepers have rigged up out of cardboard and blankets. Peter waits for the light, crosses among a small congregation of those nighttime pedestrians of lower Broadway, the couples and quartets (they’re always paired) who are neither old nor young, who are clearly prosperous, who are Out for the Night and seem to be having a good-enough time, having driven in, he supposes, from somewhere nearby, parked in a public garage, had dinner, and are now headed . . . where? To retrieve their cars, to go home. Where else? These are not people with inscrutable assignations. They’re not tourists, either, they’re nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don’t live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they’re burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they’re creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom
they
consider burghers because they don’t like driving in New York, because they’d rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it’s almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you’re too constantly confronted by the rampant
other
ness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you’ve got a house and lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you’ll get a second’s more existence because the bomb won’t be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you’re not anybody’s main target, you’ve removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor’s son will break in and steal a few prescription bottles from your medicine cabinet.

Now that he’s on the other side of Broadway, now that Cowboy Boots and his laughing wife have veered south, isn’t he moving step by step closer to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in which he himself is every bit as
bourgeois;
every bit as pompously, cluelessly dressed? He lives in a goddamned loft in SoHo (how eighties is
that?),
he has
employees,
and up ahead, mere blocks away, there are gaggles of young headbangers who live in walk-ups, who are buying beer with their actual last dimes. Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy’s Tony Lamas do to you? There’s a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.

Head downtown, then. Toward Tribeca.

What is Bea doing tonight?

Her life has been, for more than a year now, a mystery, and Peter and Rebecca have decided (wrongly?) not to press her for more details than she cares to volunteer. Why did she leave Tufts? She wanted some time off, she’d been in school all her life. Okay, that made sense. Why, of all the places there are to go and the things there are to do, has she elected to work in a hotel bar in Boston, and to live with a strange, older woman who seems to have no occupation at all? That question has been neither asked nor answered. They have faith in her, they’ve elected to have faith in her, though faith can be thin and unsustaining, over time. Worry, of course they worry, but worse than that, they’ve begun to wonder what mistake they made, how they infected their daughter with some virus of the spirit that’s taken twenty-one years to bloom.

The thing with Mizzy has got Peter hopped up.

He takes out his BlackBerry and speed-dials Bea’s number.

He’ll get her voice mail. She picks up for Rebecca on Sundays, she still harbors a fondness for her mother, or at any rate a sense of duty toward her. Otherwise, she never answers. They leave messages occasionally, wait for the Sunday connections.

Tonight, he needs to leave her a message. He needs to leave a bouquet at her doorstep, knowing the flowers will wilt and die there.

Her phone rings five times. And then, as expected:

“Hello, it’s Bea, please leave a message.”

“Darling, it’s your father. I’m just calling to say hey, really. And to tell you . . .”

Before he can say I love you, she picks up.

“Daddy?”

My God.

“Hey. Hey there. I thought you’d probably be working.”

“They sent me home. It was slow tonight.”

“Well. Hey.”

He’s as nervous as he was the first time he called Rebecca to ask her out. What’s going on here? Bea hasn’t accepted a call from him since she left for college.

“So I’m just home,” she says. “Watching TV.”

He’s on Bowery by now. Where is Bea? In some Boston apartment he’s never seen—she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to be visited. Impossible not to imagine elderly shag carpeting and stains on the ceiling. Bea doesn’t make much money (refuses help from her parents), and she, the true child of aesthetes, rarely does more to a room than tack up a poster or two. (Does she still put up Flannery O’Connor posing with a peacock, and Kafka’s mild handsome face, or has she moved on to other passions?)

“I’m sorry for calling so late,” he says. “I thought you’d be at work.”

“You called because you thought I wouldn’t answer.”

Think fast.

“I guess I thought I’d just leave a little love note for you.”

“Why tonight?”

He walks down Bowery toward the nameless strip that isn’t quite Chinatown and isn’t Little Italy either.

“I could call any night, sweetheart,” he says. “I guess you’re on my mind tonight.”

No, she’s
always
on your mind. How can this conversation feel like a date that isn’t going well?

“You’re up late,” she says. “Are you outside? It sounds like you’re outside.”

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep, I’m out for a walk.”

Where he’s walking now it’s just warehouses and shuttered, unprospering shops, wan streetlight shining down onto puddled cobblestones, so silent you can hear a rat browsing through a paper bag on the sidewalk; our own nighttown . . . no, we’ve got no nighttown, the true squalor, the tranny hookers and the serious drug dealers (not those sad
X, coke, smoke?
guys you pass in the parks) have been run out, by Giuliani, by the rich; New York still has its desolate stretches but you’re rarely in real danger anymore, no one’s selling heroin out of that gutted building over there, no misshapen beauty with gassed-out eyes is going to offer to blow you for twenty. This is no nighttown and you, sir, are no Leopold Bloom.

“We’re both insomniacs,” she says. “I got that from you.”

Does she mean that as a gesture of affinity, or is she reciting a curse?

“I do wonder why you called me tonight,” she adds.

Oh, Bea, cut me some slack, I’m penitant, I’m penniless, I’m at your mercy. The ratty desolation through which Peter walks builds rather quickly into the outskirts of Chinatown, Manhattan’s only thriving nation-state, the only one that’s growing without the intercession of coffeehouses or cool little bars.

“I told you,” he says. “I was thinking about you. I wanted to leave a message.”

“Are you upset about something?”

“No more than usual.”

“Because you sound like you’re upset about something.”

Peter fights an urge to hang up on her. Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t. Still, impulses run rampant:
You’re plain, you’re not that bright, you’re a disappointment.
He can’t. He’d never.

“I’m just upset about the usual things. Money, and the end of the world.”

He can’t get flippant with her, won’t even
try
his seductive wit. This is his
daughter
he’s talking to.

She says, “Do you need me to send you a check?”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s joking. He snorts out a laugh. If she laughs back, he can’t hear it for the traffic.

He’s crossing Canal now, headed into the lurid neon and fluorescence of Chinatown proper, all gaudy reds and yellows; it’s as if blue isn’t in the spectrum here at all. They never turn the lights off, they don’t take the dangling, stretch-necked cooked ducks out of the windows; as if it possesses a continuing, unquenchable place-life that can be populated or not. A yellow sign says good, just that, and offers by way of demonstration a murky tank full of sluggish, mud brown catfish.

“And, okay,” he says, “your mother’s brother is kind of a big dose.”

“Oh, right, Dizzy. He’s a spoiled brat.”

“That he is.”

“So you thought it would be a nice contrast to talk to your happy, well-adjusted daughter.”

Please, Bea. Please have mercy.

Children don’t. Do they? Did you, Peter, have mercy on your own parents?

Even he doesn’t buy the low chuckle he forces out. “I’d never ask anything as impossible as happy or well-adjusted from you,” he says.

“So it’s a comfort to you, to think of me as unhappy.”

What’s
up
with you?

“How’s Claire?” The roommate.

“She’s out. It’s just me and the cats.”

He says, “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Bea. I just don’t want to be one of those parents who insist that their kid be, you know, happy all the time.”

“Are we going to have a serious talk?” she says. “Do you want to have a serious talk?”

No. It’s the last thing I want.

“Sure,” he says. “If you want to.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She says, “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about
Our Town.”

“Your senior play.”

She’d played the mother. Not Emily. Banish that thought.

Bea in high school—a solid and ironic girl with two close girlfriends (now at Brown and Berkeley), no visible boys, a young life not devoid of pleasure but not in any way voluptuous, not even a little bit reckless. Long, earnest talks with the friends, then homework and bed. She and the friends (their names were Sarah and Elliott, solid and ironic as well, Peter liked them, will he ever see them again?) went to movies on the weekends, shopped sometimes for the heavy sweaters and lace-up boots to which they were devoted. They went skating once, at Wollman Rink, but never again.

“You seemed so unconcerned about it,” she says.

“No. I thought you were great.”

“You didn’t tell me that. You were talking on your phone the whole time. Some sort of deal you had to make.”

Didn’t he? Was he? No. She’s inventing this. He did tell her she was great, he used that exact word, and he wasn’t talking on his phone after the play, what kind of man would do that?

She says, “I know it’s sort of pathetic, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

“I do. I remember it perfectly.”