Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

They are on their annual family summer vacation, a week in a musky pine-paneled cabin on Mackinac Island. Matthew is by now, and Peter is about to be, too old to delight in these trips. The cabin is no longer a repository of familiar wonders (the beds still shrouded in mosquito netting, all the board games still there!) but a dreary and tedious exile, a full week of their mother’s quiet fury over the fun they don’t seem to be having and their father’s dogged attempts to provide it; spiders in the bathrooms and cold little wavelets plashing and plashing against the gravelly beach.

This summer, however—marvel of marvels—Joanna has been permitted to come up for the weekend.

There’s no accounting, in retrospect, for this lapse in the Harris tradition. Until Matthew graduated from high school, the Harrises maintained an almost patriotic devotion to what they called family time—sacrosanct periods of four-member isolation that were insisted on with increasing fervor as it became more and more apparent that no one particularly enjoyed them. None of Peter’s or Matthew’s friends was ever invited to stay for dinner or spend the night, and so Joanna’s presence for three entire days of the annual week on Mackinac was a true enigma. Now, as an adult, Peter suspects that their parents had belatedly begun to apprehend Matthew’s true inclinations, and were, at the last minute, eager to become, or at least to impersonate, parents whose handsome, popular older boy might just get some girl into trouble if he wasn’t carefully watched, and he could only, of course, be carefully watched if the girl was actually present. Peter had overheard a telephone conversation between his mother and Joanna’s, in which his mother assured the other that Matthew’s and Joanna’s movements would be strictly accounted for, and that Joanna would sleep in a room right next to her own.

Was it possible that either of these women believed precautions to be necessary?

And why, as a matter of fact, did no one seem concerned about Peter’s behavior? He was the one who, without question or hesitation, would put his eye to the doorcrack when Joanna was in the bathroom, would sniff any bathing suit or towel left out to dry, and who, if he had the nerve (which he clearly did not) would creep into the virginal little alcove bedroom next to the one his parents used, and risk everything—Joanna’s screams, his parents’ mortification—just to get the briefest look at her, asleep, partially covered by a moon-gray sheet.

It was a case of mistaken identity. It was another of the apparently infinite mysteries.

Of Peter’s excitement, there is too much and too little to say. He vomited twice from nervousness, once during the days before the five of them left for Mackinac, and again (surreptitiously, he hoped) in a gas station men’s room along the way. He felt the inner spasm, but did not vomit, after they’d reached the cabin and Joanna stood, amid her scent and the other emanations of her personhood, in the until-then-familiar knotty-pine-paneled living room, rendering it profound and eternal: its smoke-blackened stone fireplace, its swaybacked sofa and fiendishly uncomfortable rattan armchairs, its ineradicable underlying aspect of long winter disuse, its smells of weedy damp and faint mothball and something Peter had never smelled before and has never smelled since, a feral odor like that which he imagines must reside in a raccoon’s pelt.

“This is so sweet,” Joanna says. Peter still swears, decades later, that she put out a faint, scented pinkish illumination in that sad brown room.

Yes, he masturbated five or six times a day. Yes, he not only sniffed the bikini bottoms she’d slung over the porch rail to dry (not much smell to them, lakewater and something clean, elusive, and vaguely metallic, like an iron fence on a winter day) but, with the queasy disregard of an alcoholic at a dinner party, put them over his head. Yes, he felt life cracking open all around him and yes, there were times when he wished Joanna would go away because he wasn’t certain he could bear his own deep knowledge, which he disavowed with every fiber, that he would never have any more of her than this, that he was and would always be a little boy with a bikini bottom stretched over his head, and that as intoxicating as these days of Joanna were they were also the beginning of a lifelong, congenital disappointment. Some god had seen fit to bring him this close to what he meant by happiness (Joanna biting delicately but with real appetite—she wasn’t prissy—into a cheeseburger; Joanna sitting on the porch steps in cutoffs and a white tank top, painting her toenails pink; Joanna laughing, like any mortal, at an old episode of I Love Lucy on the decrepit black-and-white TV), in order to show him what he would always want and never get.

He will be in love with Joanna all his life, though as time goes on he will augment and supplant and reimagine her, enough so that, years later, when he is going through Matthew’s things in Milwaukee and finds his old yearbook, he will not at first recognize Joanna in her senior photo—a kind-looking, round-faced, conventional Midwestern beauty, with lovely full lips but rather narrow eyes, her hair lustrous and abundant but curtained down over her face so that it all but obscures her forehead and right eye, a style of the time that has been wisely abandoned for decades now. This is not the Lady of the Lake, not even close, and for a moment Peter will actually believe that Joanna’s photo must have gotten mixed up with someone else’s, some sturdy, reliable Milwaukee girl meant to (as in fact Joanna does) marry a handsome, luggish boy she meets at the local junior college, have three children in quick succession, and live quietly enough and happily enough in what will be called a planned community.

He will recall vividly on his deathbed (or, more specifically, on the stretch of pavement onto which he will collapse when his heart implodes) the following episode on an indolent Saturday afternoon.

He, Matthew, and Joanna have gone to the beach—where else is there for them to go?—and Peter sits on the coarse sand as Matthew and Joanna wade aimlessly in the shallows of the lake, speaking to each other in low but urgent-sounding tones. Joanna is demonstrating the concept of desire by way of rounded buttocks half covered by the V of her cantaloupe-colored bikini bottom. Matthew is taut and muscular from skating; his dark blond hair curls almost to the nape of his neck. The two of them stand in the blue-black water with their backs to Peter, looking out at the milky haze of the horizon, and as Peter watches from the sand he is taken by a sea-swell of feeling, utterly unexpected, a sensation that starts in his bowels and fluoresces through his body, dizzying, giddying. It’s not lust, not precisely lust, though it has lust in it. It’s a pure, thrilling, and slightly terrifying apprehension of what he will later call beauty, though the word is insufficient. It’s a tingling sense of divine presence, of the unspeakable perfection of everything that exists now and will exist in the future, embodied by Joanna and his brother (there’s no denying that his brother is part of it) standing ankle deep in lakewater, under a pallid gray sky that will soon produce a scattering of rain. Time fails. Out of Joanna and Matthew and the lake and sky emanates the sense memory of the bathing suit Joanna is wearing right now, along with the smell of balsam pine that’s currently in Peter’s nose; their father’s helpless ardor and their mother’s ravenous attention and how they will both age and fade (he embittered, she gentled, liberated, by having less and less to lose); Emily making Peter come under the bleachers and his flirtations with sly, red-haired Carol, who will be his girlfriend until just before graduation; the school clock lit like a harvest moon under a twilight sky and the powder-scented air-conditioning at Hendrix Pharmacy and more and more and more. Matthew and Joanna have waded into Lake Michigan on a listless Saturday afternoon and summoned the vast, astonishing world. In another moment they’ll both turn, walk back up the beach, sit next to Peter. Joanna will tie her hair back with a coated rubber band, Matthew will examine a blister on his left foot. The local will reestablish itself, though Peter will put a hand, gently, on the back of Matthew’s neck, and Matthew will let go of his own blistered foot and reach over to squeeze Peter’s right knee, as if he understands (as he could not possibly have understood) that Peter has had a vision. Peter will never fully understand why, at that ordinary moment, the world decided to reveal itself, briefly, to him, but he will associate it with Matthew and Joanna together, an enchanted couple, mythic, perfect and eternal and chaste as Dante and Beatrice.