Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

“Shut up .”

“Can I tell you a secret fact about girls?”

“No.”

“They like kindness. You’d be surprised how far you can get with a lot of girls if you just walk up to them and say, ‘I think you’re great, I think you’re beautiful.’ Because they’re all afraid that they’re not.”

“Like you’d know.”

“I have my sources.”

“Right. Did, like, Joanna tell you that?”

“Mm-hm. She did.”

Joanna Hurst. Light of the northern sky.

A more impossible object is difficult to imagine. She is slender and graceful and heartbreakingly modest; she has long, roan-colored hair which she flicks occasionally out of her eyes. She has a way of lowering her head when she listens to others, as if she knows that her beauty—her wide-set eyes and lush lower lip, the creamy glow of her—must be withdrawn slightly if anyone else is to have any chance at all. She has recently begun dating a senior boy so popular and athletic and generally accomplished he doesn’t need to be cruel, and their union is as celebrated as would be the betrothal of an heir apparent to a young princess from a powerful, wealthy nation of uncertain loyalties. Joanna would be out of Peter’s league even if she weren’t three years older, and already taken.

And yet. And still. She’s Matthew’s best friend; surely she could, if given a chance, see in Peter some of what she sees in his brother. Surely the boy she’s dating (who bears the ludicrous name Benton) is at least a little insipid for her, a little obvious, one of those bland, hunky local heroes who never prevails in the movies; who always loses out to someone plainer but smarter, someone with rounder depths of soul, someone like, well, Peter.

“Are you in love with Joanna?” he asks Matthew.

“No.”

“Do you think she’s in love with Benton?”

“She isn’t sure. Which means she’s not.”

Peter has, poised on the tip of his tongue, the impossible, unaskable questions. Do you think maybe… Is it remotely possible that…

He can’t. A no would be too unbearable. He has already, at twelve, grown all too accustomed to the idea that the main chance will never be offered him; that he’s one of the people who pick their way through whatever the warriors and marauders have left behind.

He doesn’t pursue the subject. He contents himself, over the next three years, with making sure he’s home, and attractively arrayed, on the relatively rare occasions when Joanna comes over (he and Matthew have long understood that their friends are never eager to spend much time at their house—there’s nothing to eat, and their mother seems to believe that their friends will steal if not carefully supervised). Peter will tell Emily Dawson that she’s beautiful, which will result in a hand job several nights later under the bleachers at a football game, after which she will never speak to him again. He will find himself, at odd moments, acting studly and seductive around Matthew, in the hope that Matthew will convey it to Joanna: You know, my little brother’s getting kind of hot.

As months pass, however, and Matthew fails utterly to remark on Peter’s new manliness, Peter is driven to greater extremes. He starts simply by sitting (a much-practiced, cowboyish slinging of his elbows across the backs of sofas and chairs, legs spread wide with knees slightly bent, as if he might be called at any moment to spring into action), and by speaking in a slightly slurred, sporadically faltering baritone, which he pulls up, to the best of his ability, from deep within his diaphragm. Receiving no recognition, Peter steps up the campaign. He abandons his habitual shyness and strips immediately to his briefs whenever he and Matthew are alone in their room together ( You know, my little brother’s got a really tight little body ); he takes to singing, very softly and as if a bit absentmindedly, a few of Matthew’s favorite Cat Stevens songs ( You know, my brother’s a pretty soulful guy, and he’s got a great voice ); and finally, with his thirteenth birthday looming, takes to looking deeply into Matthew’s eyes whenever they speak, marshaling to the best of his ability a softness and a sober probingness in his own eyes, a sense of profound, questioning attention ( You know, my brother is really compassionate, he’s a very tender guy ).

In retrospect, Peter can’t imagine how or why it never occurred to him that Matthew would believe these little come-ons to be directed at him. Later on, this singularity of purpose will make Peter good at business, and terrible at poker and chess. At twelve, pushing hard on thirteen, he will suddenly, one winter night, realize that the entire sustained performance has, at best, not been relayed to Joanna at all, and, at worst, has been conveyed in disastrous form ( You know, I think my little brother has the hots for me ).

On that February night (Milwaukee February, dark since just after three in the afternoon, the windows pelted by hard little balls of sleet-hail that might as well be particles of frozen oxygen) as Peter and Matthew lie side by side in their twin beds, talking as they usually do before Matthew turns out the light; as Matthew is going on about some foolish fumble on the part of Benton the boyfriend, Peter will get up out of his bed (wearing only his briefs and, as a concession to the cold, a pair of woolen socks) and sit on the edge of Matthew’s, wearing his deep-souled listening face.

Matthew is saying, “… he’s a decent guy, I mean, he’s nice and all, but you don’t have to be a doctor of romance to know you don’t get your girlfriend hockey tickets for her birthday…”

He stops, and looks in surprise at Peter, as if Peter has appeared magically on his, Matthew’s, bed. The gesture is so without precedent that it’s taken Matthew a few seconds to apprehend it at all.

He speaks into Peter’s softened, tell-me-everything face. He says, “You okay?”

“Sure.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m listening to you.”

“Petey…”

“Peter.”

“ Peter. I’m gonna go out on a limb here, okay?”

“Okay.”

Go out on a limb here and… TELL YOU JOANNA HURST IS IN LOVE WITH YOU.

Matthew says, “Have you been having some… this is embarrassing… feelings lately?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.”

Sorry, Benton, should have gotten her a better gift, I guess.

“It’s okay. I understand.”

“You do?”

“I think so. You want to tell me a little about it?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“I understand that, too. Hey, brothers. DNA, what can you do?”

“Uh-huh.”

A silence passes. Peter summons himself.

He manages to say, “So you love her, too.”

Another silence passes, a terrible one. Frozen air particles fling against the window glass as if they are being hurled by a giant.

Peter understands. Not fully, but. He understands in an inchoate, stomach-swirling way that an error has been made, a wrong door opened. Matthew looks at him with exactly the same soft-eyed expression Peter has been practicing these past couple of months. Peter, it seems, did not invent the gesture at all—he merely picked it up from Matthew. DNA, what can you do?

“No,” Matthew says. “I’m not in love with Joanna. You are, huh?”

“Please please please please don’t tell her.”

“I won’t.”

And that, implausibly, is the end of the conversation, not just for the night but forever. Peter gets up, returns to his own bed, and pulls the covers high. Matthew turns out the light.

Peter falls into… something… love?… with Matthew on a beach in Michigan, a month before Matthew’s sixteenth birthday.