Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

If he lands Groff…

How shitty would it be to reschedule the Lahkti show? Or ask him to take the back gallery? Peter could free up the back gallery by encouraging Glen to grab the offer from this start-up in Williamsburg, I mean, Glen, you’re on the fucking cusp, you should be with someone edgier than me…

It would be shitty. Word would get around, too.

And the word would be…

That Peter Harris turns out to be a man who can make things happen. Peter Harris can pluck a young star from Bette Rice’s defunct operation and give him what would in all likelihood be one of the fall’s more spectacular shows. Yes, it would hurt Peter’s reputation among some artists. Some artists. Others, some of the more ambitious ones (Groff, surely, among them), would be impressed. If you’re hot, if you’ve got potential, Peter can do what it takes to get you out there now .

This funky stomach just won’t quit. What are the symptoms of stomach cancer? Does stomach cancer exist at all? Okay, take it a step at a time. All you’ve got from Groff at the moment is a studio visit and a dinner date.

More e-mails. More voice mails.

And then, the long-dreaded: the sound of an accident out in the gallery. A clatter, a thump, Tyler shouting, “Fuck.”

Peter runs. There in the middle of the gallery stand Tyler, Uta, and Tyler’s assistants, Branch and Carl. There on the floor is the victim: one of the wrapped paintings, slashed on a diagonal, a cut six or seven inches long.

“What the fuck?” Peter says.

“I can’t believe it” is all Tyler has to offer.

Uta, Branch, and Carl have arranged themselves like mourners around the canvas. Peter gets up close, squats to survey the damage. It is neither more nor less than a slit, about seven inches, running from a corner of the canvas toward the center. It is surgically precise.

“How did this happen?” Peter asks.

“Lost my grip,” Tyler answers. He is not particularly contrite. If anything, he’s peevish—why would the goddamn thing want to get ripped like this?

“He had a box cutter in his pocket,” Uta says. She’s hanging back. Although she’s perfectly capable of righteous fury when the occasion demands it, this kind of thing is Peter’s job. She’s already thinking about the terms of the insurance coverage.

“You were taking down the show with a box cutter in your pocket ?”

“I wasn’t thinking. I just stuck it in my pocket for a second, and I sort of forgot about it.”

“Right,” Peter says, and is surprised by the calm in his own voice. It seems briefly that this can be made to unhappen, because it was so obviously going to happen. Bette Rice does in fact have cancer, terminal cancer, and Tyler has in fact been walking around with a box cutter in his pocket because Peter refuses to appreciate his assemblages and collages. It’s Peter’s fault, he saw this coming. No, it’s Rex’s fault. Rex and his goddamned endless parade of young geniuses who are invariably slender, tattooed young men, and are never actual geniuses, though Rex continues to insist, continues to “mentor” them, and it’s ruining his career, it’s turning him into a joke.

Uta says, “It’s one of the ones that didn’t sell.”

Peter nods. That’s better, of course. But there’s nothing good about word going out that art gets destroyed on Peter’s premises.

Tyler says, “Man, I’m really sorry.”

Peter nods again. Yelling won’t help. And really, he can’t fire Tyler on the spot. The show has to come down today.

“Get back to work,” Peter says quietly. “Try to remember not to put anything sharp in your pockets.”

He’s going to fucking kill Rex. Lecherous old queen.

Uta says, “Let’s take this one to the back.”

Peter, however, is not quite ready to abandon the corpse. Cautiously, very very gently, he slips his finger under the waxy paper, and lifts it.

All Peter can see is a triangle of clotted color. A swirl of ochre dotted with black.

Carefully, he fingers the paper another fraction of an inch away from the canvas.

“Peter , ” Uta cries.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but what Peter thinks he sees is a standard-issue abstract, clumsily painted. Student work.

That’s what’s under the sealed, pristine wrapping? That’s the shrouded relic?

Peter’s stomach lurches. What the fuck? Is he… yeah, he’s going to…

He retches. By the time he’s standing his mouth has already filled with vomit, but he makes it to the bathroom, where he expels it into the toilet and then stands, heaving, as it comes up again, and again.

Uta stands behind him. “Darling,” she says.

“I’m okay. You don’t have to see this.”

“Fuck off, I’ll be changing your diapers one day. It’s not the worst thing in the world. You know we’re covered.”

Peter still leans over the toilet bowl. Is it over? Hard to tell.

“It’s not the fucking painting. I don’t know, I’ve been queasy for a while. Maybe the turkey was a little off.”

“Go home.”

“No way.”

“Come back later if you want to. Go home now, for an hour, even. I’ll keep an eye on the idiots out there.”

“Maybe for an hour.”

“Absolutely for an hour.”

All right, then. He’s strangely embarrassed by having to walk past Tyler and his assistants—some vague sense of defeat. The young and destructive have won this one; the old guy, grown delicate, saw the carnage and fell on his sword.

He gets a cab on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. He’s light-headed but is done (please, God) being sick. How awful it’d be to throw up in the backseat of Zoltan Kravchenko’s cab. Zoltan would of course be furious, he’d eject Peter and speed off to clean up the mess. You can’t be sick in public, not in New York. It renders you impoverished, no matter how well you’re dressed.

Peter makes it home, gives Zoltan a big tip because Peter didn’t throw up in his cab but might have. He lets himself into the building, gets into the elevator. There is, in all this, a certain nausea-tinged unreality. He’s hardly ever sick, and he’s never home at two o’clock on a Monday. Now that he’s ascending in the elevator, though—now that he’s entered that short interlude of floaty nowhere—he’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.

When he enters the loft, he’s aware of… what? A presence? Some small perturbation of the ordinary air…

It’s Mizzy, asleep on the sofa. He’s shirtless again, wearing only his cargo shorts and a bronze amulet hung from a leather thong around his neck. His face, in repose, is settled into a youthfulness that isn’t as apparent when his troubled, inquisitive eyes are open. Asleep, he looks remarkably like a bas-relief on the sarcophagus of a medieval soldier—he’s even got his hands crossed over his chest. Like a medieval bas-relief, he possesses a certain aspect of what Peter can only think of as youth personified, the sense of a young hero who in life was probably not so beautiful and quite possibly not all that heroic and was certainly mauled into bloody bits in the battle in which he died, but afterward—after life—some anonymous artisan has granted him impeccable features and put him to perfect sleep, under the painted eyes of saints and martyrs, as generation after generation of the temporarily living light candles for their dead.

Peter kneels beside the sofa, to look more closely at Mizzy’s face. It’s only after he’s knelt down that he realizes it’s a funny gesture—penitential, reverent. And how will he explain it if Mizzy wakes up? Mizzy’s breath whistles softly, steadily, though—the imperturbable sleep of youth. Peter remains another moment. It’s clear now. Mizzy is Rebecca, incarnated: the young Rebecca, the bright and clean-faced girl who’d walked into Peter’s seminar at Columbia all those years ago and seemed… familiar, in some ineffable way. It hadn’t been love at first sight, it’d been recognition at first sight. Mizzy’s resemblance to her hasn’t been clear until now because Rebecca has changed—Peter sees how much. She’s given up (as, of course, she would) a pristine nascency, that not-quite-formed quality that’s gone by our midtwenties at the latest.