By Nightfall (2 page)

Particulars vary. Tonight there is Elena Petrova, their hostess (her husband is always away somewhere, probably best not to ask what he’s doing), smart and noisy and defiantly vulgar (an ongoing debate between Peter and Rebecca—does she
know
about the jewelry and the lipstick and the glasses, is she making a
statement
, how could she be this rich and intelligent and
not
know?); there is the small, very good Artschwager and the large, pretty good Marden and the Gober sink, into which some guest—never identified—once emptied an ashtray; there is Jack Johnson seated in waxy majesty on a loveseat beside Linda Neilson, who speaks animatedly into the arctic topography of Jack’s face; there is the first drink (vodka on the rocks; Elena serves a famously obscure brand she has shipped in from Moscow—really, can Peter or anyone tell the difference?), followed by the second drink, but not a third; there is the insistent glittery buzz of the party, of enormous wealth, always a little intoxicating no matter how familiar it becomes; there is the quick check on Rebecca (she’s fine, she’s talking to Mona and Amy, thank God for a wife who can manage on her own at these things); there is the inevitable conversation with Bette Rice (sorry he had to miss the opening, he hears the Inksys are fantastic, he’ll come by this week) and with Doug Petrie (lunch, a week from Monday, absolutely) and with the
other
Linda Neilson (yeah, sure, I’ll come talk to your students, call me at the gallery and we’ll figure out a date); there is peeing under a Kelly drawing newly hung in the powder room (Elena
can’t
know, can she—if she’d hang this in a bathroom she’s got to be serious about her eyeglasses, too); there is the decision to have that third vodka after all; there is the flirtation with Elena—
Hey, love the vodka; Angel, you know you can get it here anytime you like
(he knows he is known, and probably scorned, for working it, the whole hey-I’d-do-you-if-I-had-the-chance thing); there is scrawny, hysterical Mike Forth, standing with Emmett near the Terence Koh, getting drunk enough to start homing in on Rebecca (Peter sympathizes with Mike, can’t help it, he’s been there—thirty years later he’s still amazed that Joanna Hurst
did not love him, not even a little
); there is a glimpse of the improbably handsome hired waiter talking surreptitiously on his cell in the kitchen (boyfriend, girlfriend, sex for hire—at least the kids who serve at these things have a little mystery about them); then back to the living room where—oops—Mike has managed to corner Rebecca after all, he’s talking furiously to her and she’s nodding, searching for the rescue Peter promised her; there is Peter’s quick check to make sure no one has been ignored; there is the goodbye conversation with Elena, who’s sorry she missed seeing the Vincents (
Call me, there are a few other things I’d love to show you
); there is the strangely ardent goodbye from Bette Rice (something’s up); the claiming of Rebecca (
Sorry, I’ve got to take her away now, see you soon, I hope
); the panicky parting grin from Mike, and goodbye goodbye, thank you, see you next week, yeah, absolutely, call me, okay, goodbye.

Another cab, back downtown. Peter thinks sometimes that at the end, whenever it comes, he will remember riding in cabs as vividly as he recalls anything else from his earthly career. However noxious the smells (no air freshener this time, just a minor undercurrent of bile and crankcase oil) or how aggressively inept the driving (one of those accelerate-and-brake guys, this time), there is that sense of enclosed flotation; of moving unassaulted through the streets of this improbable city.

They are crossing Central Park along Seventy-ninth Street, one of the finest of all nocturnal taxi rides, the park sunk in its green-black dream of itself, its little green-gold lights marking circles of grass and pavement at their bases. There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.

Rebecca says, “You didn’t save me from Hurricane Mike.”

“Hey, I wrested you away the second I saw you with him.”

She’s sitting inwardly, hugging her own shoulders though there’s not even a hint of cold.

She says, “I know you did.”

But still, he has failed her, hasn’t he?

He says, “Something seems to be going on with Bette.”

“Rice?”

How many
other
Bettes were at the party? How much of his life is devoted to answering these obvious little questions; how much closer does he move to a someday stroke with every fit of mini-rage over the fact that Rebecca has not been paying attention, has not been
with the goddamned program
?

“Mm-hm.”

“What, do you think?”

“I have no idea. Something about when she said goodbye. I felt something. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

“Bette’s at an age.”

“As in, menopause?”

“Among other things.”

They thrill him, these little demonstrations of womanly certainty. They’re right out of James and Eliot, aren’t they? We are in fact made of the same material as Isabel Archer, as Dorothea Brooke.

The cab reaches Fifth Avenue, turns right. From Fifth Avenue the park regains its aspect of dormant nocturnal threat, of black trees and a waiting, gathering
something.
Do the billionaires who live in these buildings ever feel it? When their drivers bring them home at night, do they ever glance across the avenue and imagine themselves safe, just barely, for now, from a wildness that watches with long and hungry patience from under the trees?

“When is Mizzy coming?” he asks.

“He said sometime next week. You know how he is.”

“Mm.”

Peter does, in fact, know how he is. He’s one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won’t, possibly can’t, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

This family of women really ruined the poor kid, didn’t they? Who could survive having been so desperately loved?

Rebecca turns to him, arms still folded across her breasts. “Does it seem ridiculous to you sometimes?”

“What?”

“These parties and dinners, all those awful people.”

“They’re not all awful.”

“I know. I just get tired of asking all the questions. Half those people don’t even know what I do.”

“That’s not true.”

Well, maybe it’s a little bit true.
Blue Light
, Rebecca’s arts and culture magazine, is not a heavy-hitter among people like these, I mean it’s no
Artforum
or
Art in America.
There’s art, sure, but there’s also poetry and fiction and—horror of horrors—the occasional fashion spread.

She says, “If you’d rather Mizzy not stay with us, I’ll find another place for him.”

Oh, it’s still about Mizzy, isn’t it? Little brother, the love of her life.

“No, it’s totally okay. I haven’t even seen him in, what? Five years? Six?”

“That’s right. You didn’t come to that thing in California.”

Suddenly, a pained and unexpected silence. Had she been angry about him not going to California? Had he been angry with her for being angry? No recollection. Something bad about California, though. What?

She leans forward and kisses him, sweetly, on the lips.

“Hey,” he whispers.

She burrows her face into his neck. He wraps an arm over her.

“The world is exhausting sometimes, isn’t it?” she says.

Peace made. And yet. Rebecca is capable of remembering every slight, and of trotting out months’ worth of Peter’s crimes when an argument heats up. Has he committed some infraction tonight, something he’ll hear about in June or July?

“Mm-hm,” he says. “You know, I think we can definitively say that Elena is serious about the hair and glasses, et cetera.”

“I told you she was.”

“You never did.”

“You just don’t remember.”

The cab stops for the light at Sixty-fifth Street.

Here they are: a middle-aged couple in the back of a cab (this driver’s name is Abel Hibbert, he’s young and jumpy, silent, fuming). Here are Peter and his wife, married for twenty-one (almost twenty-two) years, companionable by now, prone to banter, not much sex anymore but not
no
sex, not like other long-married couples he could name, and yeah, at a certain age you can imagine bigger accomplishments, a more potent and inextinguishable satisfaction, but what you’ve made for yourself isn’t bad, it’s not bad at all. Peter Harris, hostile child, horrible adolescent, winner of various second prizes, has arrived at this ordinary moment, connected, engaged, loved, his wife’s breath warm on his neck, going home.

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me,
doop doop de doop . . .

That song again.

The light changes. The driver accelerates.

The point of the sex is . . .

Sex doesn’t have a point.

It’s just that it can get complicated, after all these years. Some nights you feel a little . . . Well. You don’t exactly want to have sex but you don’t want to be half of a couple with a grown daughter, a private trove of worries, and a good-natured if slightly prickly ongoing friendship that doesn’t any longer seem to involve sex on a Saturday night, after a party, semitipsy on Elena Petrova’s much-vaunted private-stock vodka, plus a bottle of wine at dinner afterward.

He’s forty-four. Only forty-four. She’s not even forty-one yet.

Your queasy stomach doesn’t help you feel sexy. What’s up with that? What are the early symptoms of an ulcer?

In bed, she wears panties, a V-necked Hanes T-shirt, and cotton socks (her feet get cold until the height of summer). He wears white briefs. They spend ten minutes with CNN (car bomb in Pakistan, thirty-seven people; church torched in Kenya with undetermined number inside; man who’s just thrown his four young children off an eighty-foot-high bridge in Alabama—nothing about the horse, but that’d be local news, if anything), then flip around, linger for a while with
Vertigo
, the scene in which James Stewart takes Kim Novak (Madeleine version) to the mission to convince her that she’s not the reincarnation of a dead courtesan.

“We can’t get hooked on this,” Rebecca says.

“What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight.”

“I haven’t seen this in years.”

“The horse is still there.”

“What?”

“The horse.”

A moment later, James Stewart and Kim Novak are in fact sitting in a vintage carriage behind a life-size plastic-or-something horse.

“I thought you meant the horse from earlier,” Peter says.

“Oh. No. Funny how these things crop up, isn’t it? What’s the word?”

“Synchronicity. How do you know the horse is still there?’

“I went there. To that mission. In college. It’s all exactly the way it looks in the movie.”

“Though, of course, the horse might be gone by now.”

“We
can’t
get hooked on this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too tired.”

“Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”

“You know how it turns out.”

“How what turns out?”

“The movie.”

“Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”

“Watch it, if you want.”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”

“You can’t sleep with the TV on.”

“I can try.”

“No. It’s okay.”

They stay with the movie until James Stewart sees—thinks he sees—Kim Novak fall from the tower. Then they turn it off, and turn out the lights.

“We should rent it sometime,” Rebecca says.

“We should. It’s great. I’d sort of forgotten how great it is.”

“It’s even better than
Rear Window
.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen either of them in so long.”

They both hesitate. Would she be just as glad to go right to sleep, too? Maybe. One is always kissing, the other is always being kissed. Thank you, Proust. He can tell she’d be just as glad to skip the sex. Why is she cooling toward him? Okay, he’s wearing a few extra pounds around his waist, and yeah, his ass isn’t headed north. What if she is in fact falling out of love with him? Would it be tragic, or liberating? What would it be like if she set him free?

It would be unthinkable. Whom would he talk to, how would he shop for groceries or watch television?

Tonight, Peter will be the one who kisses. Once they get into it, she’ll be glad. Won’t she?

He kisses her. She willingly returns the kiss. Seems willing, anyway.

By now, he couldn’t describe the sensation of kissing her, the taste of her mouth—it’s too contiguous with the taste inside his own. He touches her hair, takes a handful of it and gently pulls. He was a little rougher with her the first few years, until he understood that she didn’t like it anymore, and possibly never had. There are still these remnant gestures, mild reenactments of old ones when they were newer together, when they fucked all the time, though Peter knew even then that his desire for her was part of a bigger picture; that he had had more intense (if less wondrous) sex with exactly three other women: one who was smitten with his roommate, one who was smitten with the Fauvists, and one who was simply ridiculous. Sex with Rebecca was extraordinary right from the start because it was sex with
Rebecca
; with her avid mind and her wised-up tenderness and the intimations, as they got to know each other, of what he can only call her
beingness
.

She runs her hand lightly down his spine, rests it on his ass. He lets go of her hair, encircles her shoulders in the crook of his arm, which he knows she likes—that sense of being strongly held (one of his fantasies about her fantasies: he’s holding her aloft, the bed has vanished). With his free hand, with her help, he pulls the T-shirt up. Her breasts are round and small (when did he press that champagne glass over one of them, to demonstrate the fit—was it in the summer cottage in Truro, or the B and B in Marin?). Her nipples may have thickened and darkened a little—they are now precisely the size of the tip of his little finger, and the color of pencil erasers. Were they once slightly smaller, a little pinker? Probably. He is actually one of the few men who doesn’t obsess about younger women, which she refuses to believe.