By Nightfall (3 page)

We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?

He puts his lips to her left nipple, flicks it with his tongue. She murmurs. It’s become singular, his mouth on her breast and her response to it, the exhaled murmur, the miniature seizure he can feel along her body, as if she can’t quite believe that this,
this
, is happening again. He has a hard-on now. He can’t always tell, he doesn’t really care, when he’s excited on his own and when he’s excited because she is. She clutches his back, she can’t reach his ass anymore, he loves it that she likes his ass. He circles her stiffening nipple with his tongue-tip, taps the other one lightly with a finger. Tonight it will be mainly about getting her off. This often happens, has for years—it reveals its form, on any given night (when did they last fuck anyplace but at night, in bed?), usually decided up front, by who kisses whom. This one’s for her, then. That’s the sexiness of it.

She has a fold of flesh at her belly, a heaviness in her haunches. Okay. Peter, you’re not exactly a porn star, either.

He moves his mouth down over her stomach, still stroking, a little harder now, with his finger at her nipple. She makes a small, astonished sound. She gets it; they both get it; they both know; that’s the miracle. He stops stroking with his finger, starts circling. He bites at the elastic of her panties, then slips his tongue under the elastic, laps not hard but not gently at her pubic hair. Her hips cant forward. Her fingers browse through his hair.

Now it’s time to break formation, and take off their clothes. A pleasure of marriage—it doesn’t have to be seamless anymore. The slow strip is no longer necessary. You can just stop, remove what needs removing, and continue. He eases his briefs off over his hard-on, tosses them. Because this is Rebecca’s night he dives right back in before she’s had time to take off her socks, which makes her laugh. He goes back to where he was, tonguing her pubic hair, circling her right nipple. It’s a stop-action photo—suddenly, they’re nude (except for the socks, old white cotton slightly yellow along the soles, she should get new ones). She presses his head on both sides with her thighs as he kiss-walks down her V of hair, and there he is, he knows precisely, he’s a clit expert, and that’s sexy, his hawklike exactitude about it and her ecstatic drawing-in, it’s too much for a moment, and then her release, it could never be too much. Her thighs relax, rest more solidly on his shoulders, and she whispers oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Here the smell is her own, that faint hint of fresh shrimp; here’s where he’s most in love with her body and most fascinated by it, maybe a little frightened as well, she probably feels that way about his dick, too, though they’ve never talked about it, maybe they should but it’s too late to start that now, isn’t it? He’s got her going, tweaking her nipple with thumb and forefinger, lapping with his tongue at her clit, insistent, insistent, he knows (he just knows) that the relentlessness matters, the tongue and lips and fingers that won’t stop no matter what, that will find her wherever she goes; it’s that (and who knows what else?) that’ll put her over—something about admitting there’s nowhere to go, it’s too late, no point in arguing, it
will not stop
. She says oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, louder, no more whispering, she’s on her way, it always works (Does she ever fake it? Better not to know), he’ll get her off this way tonight, they’re too tired to actually fuck, and then she’ll take care of him, she’s an expert at that, too; they’re both on their way, they’re on their way, and then they can sleep, and then it will be Sunday.

They have two cats, named Lucy and Berlin.

What?

Dreaming. Where is this? Bedroom. His own. Rebecca’s beside him, breathing steadily.

It’s 3:10. He knows what that means.

He slips out of bed, careful not to wake her. It’s the fatal hour. He’ll be awake at least until five.

He slides the bedroom door shut, pours himself a vodka in the kitchen (no, he can’t tell the difference between what he keeps in his freezer and what Elena has smuggled in at great expense from some mountain glade in the Urals). He’s a naked man drinking vodka from a juice glass, and he lives here. He goes into the bathroom for one of the blue pills, then wanders into the living room, the part of the loft they call the living room, though it’s all really just one big room, with two bedrooms and a bathroom sectioned off.

It’s a great space, as people say. They’re lucky they got in before the market went crazy. As people say.

He’s got a nocturnal hard-on, and it’s not going away. Tell me, Mr. Harris, how long has your real estate affected you this way?

The Chris Lehrecke daybed, the Eames coffee table, the austerely perfect nineteenth-century rocking chair, the Sputnik-inspired fifties chandelier that keeps (they hope) the rest of it from seeming too solemn and self-important. The books and the candlesticks and the rugs. The art.

Right now, two paintings and a photograph. A beautiful Bock Vincent (the show’s only half sold, what’s the matter with people?) wrapped in paper and cord. A Lahkti, an exquisitely painted scene of Calcutta squalor (
those
sold, who can ever figure?). A Howard smoke painting, set for next fall, back gallery, helps to have something that costs a little less, especially these days.
All the money’s gone, lord, where’d it go?
Which Beatles song is that?

He walks to the window, pulls up the shade. Nobody’s on Mercer at three-plus in the morning, just that pallid orangey street light on the cobbles, looks like it rained a little. This window, like many New York windows, doesn’t offer much in the way of view: a patch of Mercer Street mid-block between Spring and Broome, the taciturn brown-brick facade of the building opposite (some nights there’s a light on in the fourth floor, he imagines a fellow skittish sleeper, hopes—and worries—that that person will come to the window and see him); a pile of black trash bags thrown out onto the sidewalk, and two glittery dresses, one green and one oxblood, in the window of the stratospherically expensive little shop that will probably be out of business soon; Mercer is still a little back alley for that level of trade. Like most windows in New York, Peter’s is a living portrait. By day, you can see the pedestrians through about thirty-five feet worth of their life’s journey. By night the street could be a high-definition picture of itself. If you watch it long enough it can start to feel like a Nauman, like
Mapping the Studio
—the strange fascination that announces itself, gradually, as you watch a cat, a moth, a mouse flit quickly through those supposedly empty nighttime rooms; the growing sense that rooms are never empty, not only of furtive animal life but of their inanimate selves, their piles of paper and half-empty coffee cups, all of which would remain, not cognizant but not exactly unconscious, either—haunted, you might say—if humans suddenly vanished and the rooms remained just as they were the moment everyone got up to leave. If he himself died, or if he just got dressed and walked away right now and never came back, this room would retain something of him, some mix of portrait and essence.

Wouldn’t it? For a while, anyway?

No wonder the Victorians made wreaths of their dead lovers’ hair.

What would a stranger think, coming into this room after Peter was gone? A dealer would think he made some shrewd investments. An artist, most artists, would think he had all the wrong art. Most other people would think, What’s this, a painting wrapped and tied, why don’t you just open it
up
?

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

Hold me, darkness. What’s that? An old rock lyric, or a feeling?

The trouble is . . .

There’s no trouble. How could he, how could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled? Who said to Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?” You don’t have to be a vicious right-wing zealot to entertain the question.

Still.

It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

The trouble is . . .

He can
feel
something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan’s treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity. Although he isn’t religious, he adores those pre-Renaissance icons, those gilded saints and jeweled reliquaries, not to mention Bellini’s milky Madonnas and Michelangelo’s hottie angels. In another era he might have been an acolyte to art; a monk whose life’s work would have consisted of producing a single illuminated page, the Flight into Egypt, say, in which two small people and an infant are frozen in eternal mid-step under a lapis blue vault studded with brilliant gold stars. He can feel it sometimes—he can feel it tonight—that medieval world of sinners and the occasional saint conducting their travels under a painted celestial infinitude. He’s an art history guy, maybe he should have become . . . what? . . . a conservator, say, one of those museum-basement people who spend their lives swabbing away the varnish and overpaint, reminding themselves (and, eventually, the world) that the past was garish and bright—the Parthenon was gilded, Seurat used blinding colors but his cheap paint has faded into the classically crepuscular.

Peter, however, didn’t want to live in basements. He wanted to be a wheeler and dealer (as some would call him), a denizen of the present, though he can’t quite live in the present; he can’t stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn’t say
which
world exactly but someplace that isn’t this, isn’t streetside piles of black garbage bags and shrill little boutiques that come and go. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.

THE BRONZE AGE

The bedroom is full of the gray semilight particular to New York, an effusion, seemingly sourceless; a steady shadowless illumination that might just as well be emanating up from the streets as falling down from the sky. Peter and Rebecca are in bed with coffee and the
Times
.

They do not lie close to each other. Rebecca is absorbed in the book review. Here she is, grown from a tough, wise girl to a savvy and rather cool-hearted woman, weary of reassuring Peter about, well, almost everything; grown to be a severe if affectionate critic. Here is her no-nonsense girlhood transmogrified into a womanly capacity for icy, calmly delivered judgments.

Peter’s BlackBerry pipes out its soft, flutey tone. He and Rebecca trade looks—who’d call on a Sunday morning?

“Hello.”

“Peter? It’s Bette. I hope I’m not calling too early.”

“No, we’re up.”

He glances at Rebecca, mouths the word “Bette.”

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m okay. Are you by any remote chance free for lunch today?”

A second glance at Rebecca. Sunday is supposed to be their day together.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “I think so.”

“I can come downtown.”

“Okay. Sure. What, like, one-ish?”

“One-ish is good.”

“Where would you like to go?”

“I can never think of a place.”

“Me neither.”

“Doesn’t it always seem like there’s some perfect, obvious restaurant and you just can’t think of it?” she says.

“Plus, on a Sunday, there’s a lot of places we won’t be able to get into. Like Prune. Or the Little Owl. I mean, we could try.”

“It’s my fault. Who calls to make a lunch date at the last minute on a Sunday?”

“You want to tell me what’s up?”

“I’d rather tell you in person.”

“What if I come uptown?”

“I’d never ask you to do that.”

“I’ve been wanting to see the Hirst at the Met.”

“Me, too. But really, how could I live with myself if I not only call you on your day off, but make you schlep uptown, too?”

“I’ve done more for people I care less about.”

“Payard’s will be packed. I could probably get us a table at JoJo. It’s not as, you know. Brunchy up here.”

“Fine.”

“Do you mind JoJo? The food’s good, and there’s nothing really close to the Met . . .”

“JoJo’s okay.”

“You, Peter Harris, are a mensch.”

“So true.”

“I’ll call. If they can’t take us at one, I’ll call you back.”

“Okay. Great.”

He clicks off, wipes a smudge from the face of his BlackBerry on the edge of the sheet.

“That was Bette,” he says.

Is it a betrayal, making a lunch date on a Sunday? It would help if he knew how serious Bette’s . . . situation is.

“Did she say what it is?” Rebecca asks.

“She wants to have lunch.”

“But she didn’t say.”

“No.”