By Nightfall (8 page)

“I’m just saying. She won’t do it.”

“Let me work on her.”

“I don’t want you to have to
work
on her.”

“She’s going to drive them crazy. Those kids. It’s not even about them, it’s about Julie being the greatest mother who’s ever lived.”

“Please don’t force Julie to come to New York. I’ll go see her.”

“No, you won’t.”

“One day I will.”

Mizzy sits cross-legged on the sofa, holding his glass in his lap as if it were an alms bowl. He is, no denying it, another Rebecca, but it’s more about incarnation than it is about resemblance. He’s got her youngest-one ease, that sense of unquestioning self-possession—
Behold me, the promised child.
He’s got her tilt of the head, her fingers, her laugh. He isn’t tall—five nine, probably—and his body is compact, sinewy. It’s not hard to picture him sitting disciple-ishly at the edge of a holy garden. He does, in fact, look a little like one of the swoony Renaissance Sebastians. He has those waves of mocha-colored hair, those pinkish white, sinewy arms and legs.

Peter hears his name.

“What?”

Rebecca says, “When did we go see Julie and Bob?”

“I don’t know. Eight or nine months ago, I guess.”

“Has it been that long?”

“Yeah. At least.”

“It’s hard to feel all that enthusiastic about going down to D.C.,” she says to Mizzy. “And spending the weekend stuck with them in that monster house.”

“I’m a little scared of the house, too,” he answers.

“Are you? It isn’t just me, then.”

Peter drifts out again. It’s catch-up, it’s Taylor-talk, he can’t be expected to stay tuned. He watches Rebecca lean in toward Mizzy as if she were cold and he gave off heat. All three sisters insist on Mizzy as their familiar, their daemon, the one in whom they can confide about the irregularities and infelicities of the other two.

Mizzy does, in fact, possess a certain aspect of disembodiment. He’s a little spectral; he feels like a fantasy he’s having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others. That’s surely due, in part at least, to a childhood spent alone with Beverly and Cyrus in that big house, as Beverly grew worryingly neglectful of domestic particulars and Cyrus, who turned sixty the same month Mizzy turned ten, lived increasingly in his study, the only refuge from the amassing evidence that his wife’s eccentricities were hardening, with age, into something darker. The girls came when they could, but they were starting lives of their own. Rebecca was at Columbia and Julie was in medical school and Rose was engaged in her epic battle with her first husband out in San Diego. What must it have been like for Mizzy, who came too late to the party; who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms (thrift having become one of Beverly’s fixations) among the leavings and artifacts? On a visit there when Mizzy was sixteen, Peter wrote his name in the dust on a windowsill. He found a very old dead mouse behind the ficus in a corner of the living room, scooped it into a dustpan, and disposed of it secretively, as if he hoped to protect the Taylors from some feared diagnosis.

Mizzy. It’s hardly beyond understanding, neither the straight A’s that led to Yale nor the drugs that led elsewhere.

If anything, he looks to have come through surprisingly well, in the fleshly sense at least. When he was a little kid he was slightly odd-looking, but as he grew older a sharp-faced handsomeness manifested itself almost as if it had been called down for protection, as a fairy godmother might bestow an enchanted cloak on a troubled prince. Girls, or so rumor has it, started calling before he’d turned eleven.

Rebecca is saying, “. . . and into the
great room
, which is what she calls it, with a perfectly straight face.”

Mizzy smiles sadly. He does not, it seems, take the same sour pleasure in Julie’s bourgeois tumble, her uncritical embrace of things enormous and immaculate.

“I suppose she feels safe there,” Mizzy says.

Rebecca isn’t having it. “Safe from what?” she says.

Mizzy simply looks at her, questioningly, as if he’s waiting for her to resume her natural form. His color is deepened by discomfort (Rebecca really is on a tear about Julie, hard to say why), his eyes gone glisteny and black-brown.

Peter says, “From everything in the world, I guess.”

“Why would you want to be safe from the world?” Rebecca asks.

Rebecca, why would you be looking for a fight?

“Pick up a newspaper. Turn on CNN.”

“A castle in the suburbs isn’t going to save her.”

“I know,” Peter says. “We know.”

Rebecca pauses, gathering herself. She’s obscurely angry—she herself probably doesn’t know why. Mizzy has upset her, reminded her, made her feel guilty of some crime.

Peter risks a glance at Mizzy. Here it is again, that flash of secret affinity. We—we men—are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re
wrong
in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rebecca sighs. “I just hate it that she’s
gotten
like this.”

“Most people do,” Peter says. “Most people end up wanting children and nice houses.”

“Julie is not
most people
.”

Hm. Another of those impossible marriage-moments. Feign agreement, or risk implosion.

“Most people think they’re not most people,” Peter says.

“It’s different when they’re your sister.”

“Got you,” Peter says. He knows how to arrange his face.

Your sisters and brother are all still alive, aren’t they? Don’t you think I’d love to be able to sit here and complain about fat old Matthew and his not-very-bright boyfriend and the bratty adopted Korean child they refuse to discipline?

It’s unfair. Of course it’s unfair; unseemly, even, to stop an argument by trotting out your dead-brother credentials. But there shouldn’t be a squabble, not on Mizzy’s first night.

Question: Does Rebecca want a fight precisely
because
she knows Peter’s unhappy about the visit? They can take that up later. Also the question about serving wine to a former addict. Or they can just get tipsy on the cabernet, and go to sleep.

Rebecca says, “I forget, was it a Shinto or a Zen shrine?”

Mizzy blinks, twice, in the glare of the beam that’s been aimed at him. “Um, Shinto,” he answers.

And there, on his face, is the clearest of convictions: I don’t want to be a monk and I don’t want to be a lawyer but more than anything I don’t want to end up like these two.

Dinner passes, Mizzy is put to bed in Bea’s old room (which has been more or less preserved as she left it, for when she comes home, if she comes home). Peter and Rebecca, in their bedroom, call Bea. No, Rebecca calls Bea with the understanding that Bea will agree to speak to Peter, however briefly.

Peter waits beside Rebecca on the bed as the phone rings up in Boston. Forgive me for hoping she isn’t home, for wanting to just leave a message.

“Hello, darling,” Rebecca says.

“Mm-hm. Yes, we’re fine. Ethan’s here. Yes, Mizzy. I know, it’s been years since you saw him. What are you doing?”

“Right. Sure. I guess they’ll give you better nights when you’ve been there longer, don’t you think?”

“Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Well, don’t panic, you know your obsessive mother is always good for a few bucks if you’ll deign to take them.”

Apparently, Bea laughs on the other end. Rebecca laughs in response.

Bea, love of my goddamned life. How did you get to be a sad, lonely girl working at a hotel bar in Boston, wearing a red jacket, making martinis for tourists and conventioneers? Did we commit our first mistake in utero, was the name Beatrice too much for you to bear? Why did you leave school to take a job like this? If I drove you there, I’m sorry with my whole heart. With whatever’s left of my heart. I loved you. I love you. I have no idea how or when I fucked it up. If I were a better person, I suppose I’d know.

Rebecca says, dutifully, “How’s Claire?”

Claire is the roommate, a girl with an armload of tattoos and no discernible occupation.

“Sorry to hear that,” Rebecca says. “I guess April really is the cruelest month. I’m going to put your father on, okay?”

She hands him the phone. What can he do but accept it?

“Hey, Bea,” he says.

“Hi.”

This is how she’s been with him lately. She’s gone from open resentment to bland friendliness, like a stewardess talking to a needy passenger. It’s worse.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, really. Staying in tonight.”

There is a spiky blossoming in his chest. He’s seen this girl’s soul, he’s seen the tiny flickering essence of her when she was brand new. He’s seen her driven to paroxysms of delight by snow, by the neighbors’ stinky Lhasa apso, by a pair of red rubber sandals. He’s consoled her over uncountable injuries, disappointments, expired pets. The fact that they are now slightly awkward acquaintances, making small talk, means the world is too strange and mysterious, too dreadful, for his own minor heart.

“Well, that’s what we’re doing, too. Of course, we’re elderly.”

Silence. Okay.

“We love you,” Peter says helplessly.

“Thanks. Bye.”

She clicks off. Peter continues to hold the phone in his hand.

Rebecca says, “It’s a phase. Really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She has to separate from you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

“I’m getting worried about her. I mean,
worried
worried.”

“I know. I am too, a little.”

“What should we do?”

“Let her be, I think. For now, anyway. Call her every Sunday.”

Gently, Rebecca takes the phone out of Peter’s hand, puts it back on the night table.

She says, “We seem to be a halfway house for confused children, don’t we?”

Oh.

The idea arrives suddenly—Rebecca prefers Mizzy. Mizzy has had the good sense to be elusive, and charming, and repentant, and (say it) beautiful. Rebecca and Peter did their best with Bea but she’d arrived so early (yes, there had been talk of an abortion, has Rebecca ever forgiven him for pressuring her?), and almost as if Bea sensed that she was not quite wanted, she was always prone to wounded solitude, to the sporadic little-girl tantrums that were replaced, during adolescence, by peevishness and outright rancor, by long condescending diatribes about the plight of the poor and the crimes of America, made extra strange by the fact that Peter and Rebecca gave to charities, and agreed with all but Bea’s most paranoid convictions, about AIDS as a government experiment, about secret prisons into which she herself might disappear some day, because she was so vocal about the conspiracies we were meant to ignore.

How did that happen? It seems that at one moment she was a child squealing ecstatically in his arms, and the next she was a tough, sharp-faced girl with machete and pistol, come down from her village to confront him with his crimes. He was indifferent to the needs of her people, he grew fat at their expense, his glasses were pretentious, he forgot to pick up her dress at the cleaner’s.

It seems that he missed a step. He’d been innocent and then, mysteriously, had found himself in Kafka-land, where the only questions were concerned with determining the extent of his wrongdoing, and the damages sustained.

Peter turns to Rebecca, almost says something, but thinks better of it. Instead he kisses her and settles in for sleep, knowing she’ll read for a while, glad about that, happy in a funny, childish way to be going to sleep as his wife—his perfectly cordial, increasingly remote wife—keeps her little bedside lamp lit, and turns her pages.

ART HISTORY

Monday, a little before ten. Uta is at the gallery already—you can’t get there earlier than she does. “Morning, Peter,” she calls from the back, in her exaggerated German accent.
Mawning, Pedder.
She’s been in the States more than fifteen years now, but her accent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of what seems to be a growing body of defiantly unassimilated expatriates. She on one hand disdains her country of origin (
Darling, the word “lugubrious” comes to mind
) but on the other seems to grow more German (more
not-American
) with every passing year.

Peter walks through the gallery proper—goodbye, Vincents. The crew is on its way to pack them up. Even after fifteen years, show after show after show, there’s a small sense of disappointment, a hint of actual defeat, when it’s time to bring it all down. It’s not about sales (though the Vincents did not, in fact, move the way he’d hoped they might). It’s some idea (other dealers will confess to it, too, some of them, after a few drinks) that with this show or that you might have moved something a fraction of a centimeter forward. Aesthetics? Art history? Ugh. But still. What about . . . the unending effort to find a balance between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor, and in so doing open a crack in the substance of the world through which mortal truth might shine?

Right. They’re objects, hanging on a wall. They’re for sale. They are also quite beautiful, in their way—canvases and sculptures wrapped in brown paper and bound with string and then coated in paraffin, vague reference to the shrouded Christ, made by a kind and rather feckless young man named Bock Vincent, three years out of Bard, who lives with his much older girlfriend in Rhinebeck and who is able, in a somewhat limited way, to talk about wrappings and bindings and their relationship to holiness; about how the art we anticipate is always superior to the art we can create. He insists there are images and objects under the wrappings, earnest attempts, though he won’t show or describe them, and the paper has been too thoroughly waxed to permit any kind of unveiling.

Anyhow, they’re coming down today. By Thursday, all new work.