By Nightfall (28 page)

Peter would love to sleep right now. To sleep and sleep and sleep.

Or cry. Crying would be good, might be good, cleansing, but he’s dry inside, what he feels more nearly resembles indigestion than it does despair.

He is a poor, funny little man, isn’t he?

He lingers a little with the show, which will sell or not sell. Which will come down again, and be replaced by another show. Groff, if he’s lucky, Lahkti if he’s . . . less lucky. Not that Lahkti is a booby prize, those painstakingly intricate little paintings of Calcutta, Peter does love them (he loves them enough) and really, although Lahkti isn’t a sensation (small paintings just don’t sell the way big ones do) it would be a relief not to have to bump him to make room for Groff. Peter could continue to feel honorable that way, he could live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared. Get Groff and he graduates (maybe) to the first rank; fail to get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.

Victoria’s five ordinary citizens loop and loop and loop. Beethoven blares triumphally. Mizzy is in all likelihood flying, right now, across the continent, over the light-strands of nocturnal America.

It would be good to sleep here, right here, on the gallery floor, as five random strangers live, over and over and over again, through brief interludes of what are by now their unremembered pasts.

Time to shut them down, turn off the music, kill the lights, and go home.

And yet he remains. This may not be great art but it’s perfectly good art and he is consoled by it, he is accompanied by it, and it will never feel as immaculate as it does tonight, before the shoppers come to look it over.

He picks up one of the action figures, the black man with the battered briefcase. The figure is intentionally shoddy—its painted-on eyes slightly off-kilter, its skin a lifeless cocoa color, its suit indifferently made of a shiny, gunmetal-gray synthetic. Idolatry tends to involve demotion, doesn’t it? Even those polychromed, glass-eyed Virgin Mothers, even those gilded Buddhas. Flesh, the true and living thing, trumps every effort at representation.

What artist would be the likeliest choice to render Peter now? It would have to be Francis Bacon, wouldn’t it? One of those pink fleshy middle-aged male nudes, in tortured repose. And he’d actually imagined himself in bronze. He’d been that vain.

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

It’s something, though—it isn’t nothing—to have a tub to dance to. Not if you’re a bear.

When Peter gets home, he finds Rebecca in bed. It’s only a little after 9:30.

She is curled up, facing the wall, wrapped in a quilt. Peter thinks briefly of an Indian wife, swaddled for the pyre.

She knows. Mizzy has told her everything. Peter loses his balance for a moment, as if the floor had tilted under him. Will he deny it? That would be easy enough. Mizzy is an inveterate liar, Peter could so plausibly proclaim his innocence. But if he lies he will always have lied, Mizzy for all his transgressions will always have been falsely accused. Peter fights an impulse to simply turn and go, to leave the apartment, to escape into . . . what, exactly? What’s out there for him?

He steps into the room. Here are the lamps they bought years ago, at the Paris flea market. Here, hanging over the bed, are the three Terry Winters drawings.

“Hey,” Peter manages to say. “You feeling sick?

“I’m just tired. Mizzy left today.”

“Did he?”

Is it too horribly transparent to play dumb like this? Can Rebecca smell the deceit wafting off him?

She does not turn to face him.

“San Francisco,” she says. “Somebody’s giving him a job out there, it seems.”

Peter struggles to sound and act like himself, though he’s having trouble remembering what he sounds like, how he acts.

“What kind of job?”

“Computer graphics. Don’t ask me what that is, exactly. In terms of how it could actually be a job.”

“Why do you think he suddenly wants to do that?” Peter asks, and feels a prickle up his spine. Kill me now, Rebecca. Lower the boom. We both know why he’s suddenly gone to San Francisco. I stand before you, a true piece of shit. Scream at me. Throw me out. It might be a relief, for both of us.

Rebecca says, “I thought he was going to change this time. I really did.”

“Maybe it’s time to accept the possibility that he never will,” Peter says tentatively.

“Maybe it is.”

There is such sorrow in her voice. Peter goes and sits on the edge of the mattress. Gently, gently, he puts a hand on her covered shoulder.

Would it be more manly to confess? Of course it would. He could have that dignity, at least.

He says, “Mizzy provokes people. People respond to him.”

A weak introduction. But something. Continue.

She says, “Too much for his own good.”

Ready? Go.

“What did he tell you this afternoon?”

Peter does not know whether he will lie or not. He can’t see that far into his own future. He can only wait, helplessly, to see what he’ll do.

“He did tell me something,” she says.

Oh. Here it comes. Goodbye, my life. Goodbye to the lamps and the drawings.

Peter works to keep his voice steady.

“I think I know. Do I know?”

The truth, then. He’ll tell the truth. He’ll have that, at least.

She says, “He told me that he loves me, but he’s got to stay away from me for a while. It seems I inhibit his growth by doting on him the way I do.”

Really? Wait a minute. Really and truly? That’s
it?

“Well, maybe he’s right,” Peter says. Is it possible that she can’t hear the sway in his voice?

“The thing is . . .”

Peter hesitates. He feels more than hears a minute susurration at the window, the tiniest of taps. Snow. A light windblown veil of it, as the weatherman predicted.

Rebecca says, “He adores me and blah, blah, blah, but he needs to be on his own.”

Oh.

Maybe Mizzy has not needed to blackmail Peter, then. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t have been believed. Or maybe—worse—he’s taken a certain satisfaction in bringing everybody down and then just moving on. Maybe he’s been toying with them both, seeing how much he can get away with.

Rebecca turns to face Peter. Her face is pallid, with a dull sweaty sheen.

She says, “I’ve realized something.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been living in some kind of fucked-up fantasy.”

Here it comes, then, after all. She’s been living with the illusion of an honorable husband, a man who has his failings but would not, would never, do what Peter has done.

“Mm?” he says.

“I thought that if I could make Mizzy happy, something magic would happen.”

“What magic?”

“That I’d be happy, too.”

His stomach lurches.

He’d thought she
was
happy.

“I think you’re upset right now,” he tells her.

She draws a ragged breath. She doesn’t cry.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m upset. And you know what?”

He remains silent.

She says, “When Mizzy told me he was going to San Francisco for some nonexistent job, and hit me up for an airplane ticket, I wasn’t mad. Well, I was mad, of course I was, but I was something else, too.”

“What?” Peter has never felt so stupid.

“I was envious. I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to be some mature, levelheaded person who could cut him a check. I wanted to be young and fucked up and, I don’t know. Free.”

No, Rebecca, you do not want that. You want continuance.
I’m
the one who wants to be free. I’m the one who’d do unspeakable things.

“Free,” he says. His voice is hollow, strange to him.

Rebecca, you can’t have this fantasy. This fantasy is mine.

A silence passes. He can hear snow tapping at the window. He feels as if he could lose consciousness, just faint away.

He hears himself say, “Do you want to be free of us?”

“Yes,” she answers. “I think I do.”

What?
What?
No. You, Rebecca, are the happy one—the happy-enough one. You’re the one who’s satisfied with our brisk (if occasionally arid) lives; you’re the one who I, Peter, was thinking of fleeing from; you’re the one I didn’t want to harm.

“Darling,” he says. Only that.

“You’re unhappy, too, aren’t you?” she says.

He doesn’t answer.
Yes, yes, of course he’s unhappy,
but unhappiness is
his
realm, she has no right to it, she is staunch and formidable, she is capable of being wounded but she is not unhappy in her own right. She is the one who, with every good intention, is holding him back.

He says, “Are you telling me you want to separate?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

How long?
How long have you been impersonating satisfaction?

“I don’t know what to say.”

She sits up, faces him squarely. Her eyes are dull. She says, “I seem to have had some unspoken deal with myself, where if I could make Mizzy happy, I’d be able to be happy myself.”

“Do you think that’s a little . . .”

She laughs, a hollow sound. “Crazy? Yes.”

“And you’d really leave me because Mizzy has moved to San Francisco?”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” she says. “We’d call it quits, you and I. We’d say farewell.”

Is it possible that this monolith Peter has called his marriage is, has always been, so flimsy? Is it possible that all his secrets, his second-guesses, his cajolings and seductions, have been unnecessary? Did one of them simply have to . . . call it off, and
poof?

His face has gone clammy. He struggles for a breath.

“Rebecca,” he says. “Explain this to me. You’re telling me you’ve decided we should split up because your feckless brother has moved to San Francisco to work in computer graphics.”

“He’s not going to work in computer graphics,” she says. “He’s just going to do drugs in a new place.”

“Be that as it may.”

She examines her fingertips. And then suddenly, violently, she puts her index finger into her mouth and bites down on it.

“I’m a complete idiot,” she says.

“Stop. Don’t say that.”

Her face has taken on a panicked, feral look.

“I always thought I was building a place Mizzy could come to,” she says. “Since he was a lost little boy. I knew our family couldn’t handle him, I mean they look romantic from a certain distance but they can’t really manage much of anything. And now it seems that’s not really what I wanted at all. I wanted to
be
Mizzy. I wanted to be the troubled one. I wanted to be the one somebody has to take care of.”

Peter wants to slap her. He wants to do that.

He says, “Don’t I take care of you?”

“I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m sorry.”

It is all Peter can do to say, “No, tell me more.”

“I feel like a stranger here, Peter. I come home sometimes and think, who lives here? I do love you. I did love you.”

“You
did.”

What about all those dinners together, what about our Sundays?

“No, I do, I do love you, but I’m . . . I’m all messed up. I feel like I’m falling away from everything.”

She bites down on her finger again.

“Don’t do that,” Peter says.

“I’m a rotten mother. To everybody. I couldn’t help Bea, I couldn’t help Mizzy. I’m just a child who’s learned to impersonate an adult.”

Peter works to stay conscious. What should he say to her, what does he
want
to say to her? That all her efforts to produce a sanctuary for her little lost brother were undone by her besotted husband, who drove Mizzy away not with love but by keeping a secret? Should he tell her that in all likelihood she’s been wrong all these years, the young prince is, sad to say, just a cheap hustler, who was happy enough to run scams out of the temple she’d built for him?

Isn’t it the way? We build palaces so that younger people can break them up, pillage the wine cellars and pee off the tapestry-draped balconies.

Look at Bea. Didn’t they think that she’d love to live in SoHo; that she’d want to grow up wearing tight little Chanel skirts and playing in a band? Did they imagine that their desire to make her happy would prove to be the monster scratching at her window?

Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?

How did he forget that Rebecca has a life of her own, and that the ongoing work of being Rebecca doesn’t always hinge on him?

“You’re not rotten,” he says. “You’re human.”

She says, “Wouldn’t you rather be free?”

“No. I don’t know. I love you.”

“In your way.”

In your way. A soul-wave rises in him, a surge of intolerable sadness. He has failed everyone. He has neither heard nor seen.

“We shouldn’t separate,” he says. “Not now.”

“You think we should just go on?”

He stops himself from saying,
Yes, that’s exactly what we should do. We should just go on.

Wouldn’t he have left
her,
if Mizzy had so much as given the nod?

What he wants. To cough up whatever is lodged in his gut, and go to bed. Wake eventually to his old impossible life. He does want that.

Finally she says, “I guess we could try.”

He nods.

Is it this, then? Is it compassion for another, is this all that actually matters? To love, to forgive, to abide?

It isn’t that simple. The ability to care for another being, to imagine what it’s like to
be
another person, is part of the tumble. It’s essential to the odd saint or two (if such creatures as saints exist) but it’s only one aspect of a life, a big ambiguous motherfucking heartbreaking life.

Still. It isn’t nothing.

Rebecca is no longer Galatea, she is no longer Olympia. Time robs us and robs us and when we beg for mercy, it robs us some more. Here is her tired face. Here is her future face, hollowed and pallid, which arrives daily, a face that will (like Peter’s) be ever less capable of arousing the ardor even of a hapless Mike Forth, or a scheming, narcissistic Mizzy. She’s got a strand of her own dark hair plastered into her pale forehead.