By Nightfall (27 page)

“I’m so sorry,” Peter says. And what does he mean by that? Who is he sorry for?

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Okay, I’m not. What are you going to do now?”

“I think I’m going to go to California. I have some friends in the Bay Area.”

You think you’re going to go to California. You have some friends in the Bay Area. The
Bay Area,
not even San Francisco.

“What will you do there?” Peter’s voice reaches him from a certain distance. He is standing behind himself.

“One of my friends does computer graphics, he needs a partner. I’m good with computers.”

You’re good with computers. You’re going into computer graphics with a friend in the Bay Area. You don’t want to briefly love and then abandon some older guy in a hilltop house in Greece. The possibility never entered your mind.

You just want me to keep your sisters off your ass about the drugs. You needed to put something over on me, by way of insurance.

“That sounds very sensible,” says the voice that comes from somewhere over Peter’s left shoulder.

“You promise you won’t tell Rebecca.”

“If you promise you’ll say goodbye to her before you go.”

“Of course I will. I’ll tell her I left this morning because I was ashamed about not wanting to be an art dealer after all. She’ll understand.”

She will. She will understand.

Peter says, “Whatever works.”

“You’ve been very kind to me.”

Kind. Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been so besotted that I’ve betrayed you, as lovers so often do. When exactly will we get the phone call about your Bay Area overdose?

“It was nothing,” Peter says. “You’re family, after all.”

And then, really, there’s nothing to do but leave.

They say goodbye on the windblown banality of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. A plastic bag blows by, just over their heads.

Peter says, “So, I’ll see you at home tonight, then?”

Mizzy adjusts a strap on his backpack. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll go by Rebecca’s office and say goodbye to her there.”

“Not one more night?”

The strap having been secured, Mizzy gives Peter what will in fact be the last of those damp-eyed looks.

“I can’t go through another night like last night,” he says. “Can you?”

Thank you, Mizzy, thank you for acknowledging that something,
something,
has happened. Something about which you feel an emotion as identifiable as shame.

“I suppose not. Do you think . . .”

Mizzy waits.

“Do you think it’ll seem weird to Rebecca, you taking off in such a hurry like this?”

“She’s used to it. She knows how I am.”

Does she? Does she know that, among your compelling qualities, you’re cheap and at least a little bit hollow?

Probably not. Isn’t Mizzy a work of art to Rebecca, as he is (was) to Peter? Should he not, in fact, remain like that?

“Well, then,” Peter says.

“I’ll call you from California, okay?”

“How are you getting there?”

“Bus. I don’t have much money.”

You’re not taking the bus, Mizzy. Rebecca won’t allow it. She’ll try to stop you from going at all, but when she understands that she can’t,
can’t
stop you from doing anything you want (except, of course, what she doesn’t know you’re actually doing), she’ll get on the phone and buy you a plane ticket. You and I both know that.

“Have a safe trip.”

Those are your parting words?

“Thanks.”

They shake hands. Mizzy walks away.

And so. Peter had imagined he could be swept off, could ruin the lives of others (not to mention his own) and yet retain some aspect of blamelessness because passion trumps everything, no matter how deluded, no matter how doomed. History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he’ll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him. There are no gold-leaf stars painted on lapis over his head, just the gray of an unseasonably cool April afternoon. No one would do him in bronze. He, like all the multitudes who are not remembered, is waiting politely for a train that in all likelihood is never going to come.

What can he do but go back to work?

He has this, at least—he has the finality of nothing happening. There’s a bitter relief in that. He has his life back (not that it was taken from him); he has the real hope of increased prosperity (Groff will probably join his roster, and who knows who might follow once an artist like Groff’s onboard); he has the slightly trickier hope that he and Rebecca will be happy again. Happy enough.

The trouble is . . .

The trouble is he can see all the way to the best of all possible endings. His gallery joins the first rank, he and Rebecca regain their ease together. And there he’ll be.

It’s getting colder, just as the Weather Channel predicted this morning—an unseasonable drop in temperature. Peter, however, is not so far gone—would that he had a greater capacity for self-regard—to get swoony over a chill factor in April. He’s not so far gone as to ignore the rampancy of the streets through which he walks: the various hunkered-down hurriers; the swaying, impassable row of five chattering girls
(He never, I tole her, you handbag, Rita and Dymphna and Inez);
the surprisingly well-dressed woman rummaging for cans in a trash barrel; the laughers and the window shoppers and the cell phone talkers. It’s the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

When he gets back to the gallery, Vic’s second installation is just about hung. Uta and the boys (maybe he’ll never get around to firing them, there’s always something urgent coming up, isn’t there?) are arranging the shelves for the merchandise as Vic looks on with her customary expression of girlish surprise—look what it’s turning into!

Uta says, “You’re back.” By which she means, where in the hell were you?

“I’m back,” he answers. “It looks good.”

“We were just about to break for lunch,” Uta says. “We can be finished by nine or ten tonight, I think.”

“Good. That’s good.”

He goes into his office. There’s the ruined Vincent, signifying nothing in particular. He sits at his desk, thinking he should do something. There are plenty of things for him to do.

A moment later, Uta’s there.

“Peter, what’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

Tell her. Tell somebody.

He says, “I seem to have fallen in love with my wife’s little brother.”

Uta has had a lifetime’s worth of practice in the art of appearing unsurprised. “That kid?” she says.

“How pathetic is that?” he says. “How stupid and sad and pathetic.”

She cocks her head, looks at him as if he had been suddenly obscured by smoke. “You’re telling me that you’re gay?”

A brief, swooping return to Carole Potter’s lawn, the moment Peter said to Mizzy, “So, you’re gay.” Yes and then again no. Would that it were that simple.

He says to Uta, “I don’t know. I mean, how could I love another guy and not be gay?”

“Easy,” says Uta.

She settles her weight onto one hip, adjusts her glasses. Time to begin class.

She says, “You want to tell me about it?”

“You want to hear about it?”

“Of course I do.”

Okay, then. Go.

“Nothing happened. One kiss.”

“A kiss is something.”

Amen, sister.

“To be perfectly honest, I think I fell in love with . . . I don’t know if I can say this with a straight face. Beauty itself. I mean, as manifested in this boy.”

“You’ve always been in love with beauty itself. You’re funny that way.”

“I am. Funny. That way.”

“And you know, Peter . . .”

Her accent, her beloved Uta-esque heavy never-ceasing accent, seems to have grown if anything heavier with the gravity of the moment.
Ant yoo no, Peder . . .

“. . . you know, it would have been simpler for you to fall in love with some young girl. Poor fuck, you never take the simple way out.”

Yoo nefer take de zimple vay out.
Oh, God, Uta, how I love you.

“Do you think I want out of something?”

“Don’t you?”

“I love Rebecca.”

“That’s not the point.”

“And what would you say the point is?”

She pauses, readjusts those glasses.

“Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”

“You ready for the punch line?” Peter says.

“I’m always ready for a punch line.”

“He was just fucking with me.”

“Sure he was. He’s a kid, right?”

“It gets better.”

“I’m listening.”

“He blackmailed me.”

“That’s very nineteenth century,” she says.

“I found out he was using drugs again, and he seduced me so I wouldn’t tell Rebecca.”

“Wow. That’s ballsy.”

Is there an undercurrent of admiration in her voice?

Whether there is or not, Peter understands: he, Peter, is a comic character. How had it happened that he’d imagined, even briefly, otherwise? He’s the capering fool on whom others play tricks. He’s an easy mark, all vanity and pomade.

Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

“I’m a fool,” he says.

“You are,” she answers.

Uta comes around to his side of the desk, puts an arm over his shoulders. Just an arm, perched lightly, but still, it’s something for Uta. She is not a hugger.

“And you’re not the first fool for love,” she says.

Thank you, Uta. Thank you, friend. But it won’t do, will it? I have, it seems, gone beyond consolation, there’s not much for me in the image of myself, however true, as another sad citizen doing the little dance.

It might be better if I could howl and weep with you. Can’t, though, even if I wanted to, even if I thought you could bear the spectacle. I’m dry inside. There’s a ball of hair and tar lodged in my belly.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.” Because really, what else can he say?

The rest of the day passes, somehow. By a quarter past nine, the show’s been hung. Tyler, Branch, and Carl have gone home. Peter stands in the middle of the gallery with Uta and Victoria.

“It’s good,” Uta says. “It’s a good show.”

Arrayed around them on the gallery’s walls and floors are five of Victoria’s superheroes: the black man in the overcoat; a middle-aged woman searching her purse for change to feed a parking meter; a sharp-faced, portly young woman emerging from a bakery with a little white bag in her hand (her lunch bagel, no doubt); a ratty-looking Asian kid, twelve or so, whizzing along on a skateboard; and a Hispanic girl pushing a double stroller in which both of her twins are bawling mightily. The videos play simultaneously as the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth booms over and over from three discreet black speakers. The worshipful merchandise is on the shelves: the T-shirts, the action figures, the lunch boxes, and the Halloween costumes.

“It’s okay, right?” Victoria asks.

“It’s more than okay,” Peter tells her, though that’s what he’d say to any artist.

Time to turn it all off, douse the lights and go home. The curators are coming tomorrow, along with a few of the gallery’s more prominent clients. The story in
Artforum
comes out early next week. Blessings on you, Victoria, in your art-world ascension. If I do manage to nail down Rupert Groff, maybe you won’t leave me after all.

Try to care about it. Do your best to act as if it matters.

What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?

You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television.

You are Brueghel’s tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.

Uta says, “Why don’t we get some dinner someplace?”

Hm. Can’t, really. Not tonight. Can’t sit in a restaurant and talk the talk, not even with the sweet and self-effacing Victoria Hwang.

He says, “Why don’t you two go?” To Victoria he adds, “I’ve been a little sickish lately, and I have to be very brilliant tomorrow with all your clamoring fans.”

How can she balk at that?

Uta gives him the teacherly look. Should he be excused?

She says, “We can just get something quick and sleazy, you know.”

“
I’m
quick and sleazy,” Peter answers. Ha ha ha. “Really, we’ll have a big drunken dinner the night of the opening. I need to go home to bed now.”

“If you say so,” Uta answers.

“Off with you then,” Peter says. “I’m going to stay here a few more minutes. I’d like to have a little time alone with the show.”

How can anyone balk at that?

Uta and Victoria get their coats and stand with Peter at the door.

Victoria says, “Thanks for everything, Peter. You’re great.”

Thank you, Victoria, for being a kind and decent person. Funny how the simple virtues matter.

Uta says, “Call me if you need to, all right?”

“Of course I will.”

She squeezes his hand. As he did Bette’s, when they stood in front of the shark.

Thank you, Uta. And good night.

So here he is, alone with five ordinary citizens passing through brief interludes of their regular days as the London Symphony Orchestra negotiates, over and over and over, the opening strains of the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven loops on and on.

How have these people been rescued and disappointed? What will happen to them, what’s happening to them now? Nothing much, probably. Errands and trudging work-hours, school for the boy, everybody’s nightly television. Or something else. Who knows? They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery); that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skateboard or looking for coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.