By Nightfall (23 page)

“Peter Harris. No one, man or woman,
pushes
me into just about anything.”

She offers him a surprisingly lovely, tough-ironic smile. For a moment he sees her young, a rich girl whose rich parents (the money comes from the grandparents) had succeeded in one of the many American dreams: they’d raised a girl who was born to it, who knew how to ride horses and play tennis and flirt just enough with just the right men. In only three generations (the grandparents were the Grigs, of Croatia) they’d created a solid, pretty, capable girl who radiated athletic vivacity. Carole would have been pretty and fresh and lively and smart. She’d have had, as they say, her pick. Bill Potter, sixty-two now, had offered her a track star’s body and what the local gentry must refer to as a good name (presto, a Grig becomes a Potter), and just enough Brahmin stupidity to make it clear that Carole would always get to run the show.

“I want all my clients to be like you,” Peter says, which is probably not the shrewdest of comments (“client” isn’t a word to bandy about), but fuck it, he actually means it, he likes Carole Potter, he respects Carole Potter; he spends far too much time with clients who have money and ambition and nothing else.

Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, “Lovely boy.”

“My wife’s insanely younger brother. He’s one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters’ story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who’s tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing and getting stoned by way of occupations, currently in Australia.

A shadow passes over Carole’s face. Who could decipher the depths and nature of her sorrows? She has to be bored by Bill (who must have some Myrtle Wilson stashed away somewhere), she’s probably pleased with the daughter (mothers and daughters, though, who knows?) and increasingly worried about the son, as his Wanderjahr has become a Wander
life.
She’s enviable, she’s a force, she’s got
all this
and she’s on the boards of about a dozen charities and Peter happens to know that those frilly blouses come from annual shopping trips to Paris, but can this be what she’d hoped for, when she was a handsome, clever girl who was invited everywhere? The semidim, painfully uncomplicated husband, who was a god at twenty-five (right out of those Abercrombie and Fitch ads, Peter’s seen the pictures) but feels considerably less divine as an aging securities analyst at the local branch of Smith Barney; the busy but solitary days up here on the hill, gardening and raising exotic chickens.

How much good will it do her, after the dinner for the Chens has come and gone, to have a bronze urn inscribed with obscenities meant, in part at least (how thoroughly does she understand this?), to insult her?

Of course she understands it. That’s part of the attraction, isn’t it?

And Bill will be baffled and annoyed by it. That’s probably part of the attraction, too.

Peter and Carole stand for a moment in silence, watching Mizzy wander along the gravel path. Paint this, motherfucker: two figures of a certain age standing with the artwork at their backs, their attention fixed on the young man walking among the grasses and the herbs.

Carole says, “Why don’t you show him around a little? I wouldn’t mind having a bit of time with the urn.”

There is, Peter thinks, something ever so slightly strange about this offer of Carole’s. Does she suspect he’d like to be alone with Mizzy? Does she actually imagine that he’s not a brother-in-law at all, but a boyfriend Peter keeps on the sly?

He and Carole exchange brief glances. Hard to say what she suspects, but it seems clear that she’s accustomed to discreet arrangements. If Bill’s got some girl somewhere, maybe Carole has something of her own going on. Peter hopes so.

“Okay,” he says, and for a moment he feels like his life is entirely populated by women of a certain age, brilliant women, rigorous but generous, much more sisters than mothers, and it seems that all of them, even poor dying Bette and yes, even Rebecca, want something for him that he can’t seem to get on his own.

Is it Mizzy? Is it possible that even Rebecca would like, in her deepest heart, to be blamelessly rid of Peter, to be abandoned in a way so shocking, so, as they say,
inappropriate,
that no one could possibly fault her, for anything?

“Commune with your art,” he says. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

He says a brief, feigned-friendly goodbye and thanks to Tyler and Branch, who’ve done what they came to do and are now about to return the Krim to the gallery. He goes down the path to Mizzy.

Peter says, “And so, you find yourself in a garden again.”

“This one’s not so demanding,” Mizzy answers.

“Don’t tell Carole that.”

“It seems like she’s going to buy that thing.”

“That
thing?
Do you dislike it that much?”

“I’ll bet I dislike it exactly as much as you do.”

“I don’t dislike it at all.”

“I don’t either.”

Something passes between them. Peter understands that Mizzy understands that they are both doing the best they can, and are both failing—Mizzy has failed to be moved by the sacred stones and Peter has failed to find the artist who can annihilate and redeem. They’ve both come close, they’ve tried—God knows they’ve tried—but here they are, two men standing in a rich lady’s garden, a little unsure about how exactly they got here and entirely unsure about what to do next, except return to what they were doing before, which feels, at the moment, intolerable.

He could probably talk to Mizzy, at whatever length, about his doubts, couldn’t he? Mizzy is the one who’d willingly have that conversation.

Peter says, “The art question is tricky.”

“Is it?”

“Well. Let’s just say you don’t get a Raphael every day. Think about, oh, those Cellini saltcellars. They matter way beyond their capacity to hold salt.”

“But Cellini did the Ganymede, too.”

Okay, Mizzy, you know a little too much for old Uncle Peter’s spiel, don’t you?

“Let’s walk down to the beach,” Peter says, because someone’s got to suggest something.

They start together down the long slope of grass that leads to the sound, which is all sails and sun spangles, with its two green islands afloat on the bronzed blue shimmer. Carole’s house looks out over a smallish harborlike configuration, which has deposited, at the bottom of her big lawn, a modest U-shaped beach of putty-colored sand strewn with stones and kelp strands.

As they walk toward the beach, Peter says to Mizzy, “I don’t sell any art I dislike. It’s just that. Well. Genius, I mean
genius
genius, is rare.”

“I know that.”

“Maybe it’s not really what you want to do.”

“What?”

“Something in the arts.”

“I do. I really and truly do.”

They reach the sand. Mizzy slips off his shoes (ratty old Adidas, no socks), Peter leaves his (Prada loafers) on. They walk slowly toward the water.

“Can I tell you something?” Mizzy says.

“Sure.”

“I’m ashamed.”

“Why?”

Mizzy laughs. “Why do you think?”

There’s something hard, suddenly, something hustlerish about his voice. It could be the voice of a rent boy, prematurely cynical.

They get to the edge of the water, where the tide is moving in modest, all but silent pleats that advance and retract and advance again. Mizzy rolls up the legs of his jeans, wades out to just above his ankles. Peter speaks to him in a slightly raised voice, from several feet behind.

“I don’t suppose shame is ever helpful.”

“I don’t want to do
nothing.
But I seem not to have some faculty other people have. Something that tells them to do
this
or
that.
To go to medical school or join the Peace Corps or teach English as a second language. Everything seems perfectly plausible to me. And I can’t quite see myself doing any of it.”

Has he started getting weepy, or is the sun just in his eyes?

What, exactly, should Peter tell him?

“You’ll find something” is his lame-ass best. “Even if it doesn’t turn out to be selling art. Or curating it. Or whatever.”

Clearly, Mizzy can’t even pretend to be consoled by that. He turns away, looks out over the sound.

“You know what I am?” he says.

“What?”

“I’m an ordinary person.”

“Come on.”

“I know. Who isn’t an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I’ve been treated as something special for so long and I’ve tried my hardest to
be
something special but I’m not, I’m not exceptional, I’m smart enough, but I’m not brilliant and I’m not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I’m not sure if the people around me can.”

And Peter knows—Mizzy is going to die. Peter knows this at some deep level of his being. It’s like the conviction he has about Bette Rice. It’s as if he can smell mortality, though its odor is far more detectable on an aging woman with breast cancer than on a young man in good health. Did Peter know that Matthew was going to die? Yes, probably, though he was too young to acknowledge it, even to himself. Wasn’t that the true message that day, decades ago, when Matthew and Joanna waded out into Lake Michigan and looked to Peter like beauty incarnate? Why that moment? Because they were doomed lovers, because they were standing at the edge of something, Joanna on her way to a gated community and Matthew to a hospital bed in St. Vincent’s. How had the desperate, horny twelve-year-old Peter sussed out the fact that he was getting his first true vision of mortality, and that it was the most moving and fabulous thing he’d ever seen? Hasn’t he been looking for another such moment ever since?

Mizzy will die of an overdose. He’s essentially said as much, not only to Peter but to the water and sky. He’s available to the forces of mortality. He can’t—he won’t—find anything that can attach him sufficiently to life.

Peter has waited on shores and stood beside sharks with people in mortal conditions. This time he takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his slacks, wades out to stand beside Mizzy. Mizzy is in fact weeping, softly, looking toward the horizon.

Peter stands quietly beside Mizzy. Mizzy turns to him, offers a wet-eyed smile.

And then, it seems, they are kissing.

IN DREAMS

The kiss didn’t last long. It was passionate, passionate enough, but not exactly, not entirely, sexual. Can two men kissing have been comradely? That’s how it felt, to Peter. There was no tongue, no groping. They merely kissed, not briefly, but still. Mizzy’s breath was clear and a little sweet, and Peter was not so lost in it as to abandon the worry that he had raspy, middle-aged-guy breath.

They parted lips at the same moment—neither of them was the one to break it off first—and smiled at each other, simply smiled.

Peter doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t even feel entirely like he’s transgressed, though it would be hard to convince anyone watching (a quick check—no one was) that it wasn’t lascivious. He is besotted and exultant and not ashamed.

After the kiss he noodled Mizzy’s head, as if they’d just engaged in some kind of innocent, wrestling shenanigans. Then they turned and splashed back onto the beach.

It’s Mizzy who speaks, as they walk barefoot back up the lawn. Peter would have preferred silence, for once.

“And so, Peter Harris,” Mizzy says. “Am I your first?”

“Uh, yeah. I bet I’m not your first, am I?”

“I’ve kissed three other guys. This makes you my fourth.”

Mizzy stops. Peter gets two paces ahead, realizes, steps back. Mizzy looks at him with that wet-eyed depth.

“I’ve had a thing for you since I was a little kid,” he says.

Don’t tell me this.

“You have not,” Peter says.

“The very first time you came to the house. I sat in your lap and you read Babar to me. Did you think it was completely innocent?”

“Of course I did. For God’s sake, you were four years old.”

“And I had this deep warm feeling I didn’t understand.”

“So. You’re gay.”

Mizzy sighs. “I think I’m gay for you,” he says.

“Come on.”

“This is too much, isn’t it?”

“A little, yeah.”

Mizzy says, “I just want to say it. And then we can, I don’t know. Never talk about it again, if you don’t want to.”

Peter waits. Let’s talk about everything, even though I have to feign reticence.

Mizzy says, “With those other guys, I was thinking about you.”

“This is some kind of father thing,” Peter says, though it hurts him to say it.

“Does that make it nothing?”

“It makes it . . . I don’t know. It makes it what it is.”

“I’ll never kiss you again, if you don’t want me to.”

What is it I want? Lord, I wish I knew.

He says, “We can’t. I’m probably the only man in the world you can’t make out with. Well, me and your actual father.”

Is that what makes it compelling for Mizzy? Is his professed desire in any way personal?

Mizzy nods. Impossible to say whether he agrees or is acquiescing.

What kind of man would go after his sister’s husband?

A desperate man.

What kind of man would have let it get this far? What kind of man would have held the kiss as long as Peter did?

A desperate man.

He and Mizzy continue up to the house in silence.

Carole greets them in the garden with such avid, nervous enthusiasm that Peter thinks, for a moment, she must have been watching. She wasn’t watching. It’s her manner to greet everyone enthusiastically, all the time.

“I think it’s a keeper,” she says.

“Great,” Peter answers. He adds, “You know it’s on loan for the moment, right? For the sake of the Chens. Groff will want to come see it in situ.”

Carole listens, blinking and nodding. She’s not a neophyte—she knows that with certain artists, the collector is subject to audition.