Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Peter has been lying in his darkened bedroom for over half an hour, which, after a two-hour nap, is unconscionable. He should be back at the gallery. He seems, though, to have passed into some condition of semiparalysis, something Snow White–ish, a condition of waking slumber, waiting for… true love’s first kiss isn’t going to do much at this point, is it?

He can hear Mizzy moving around in the living room.

He’s not a fool. He knows that Mizzy is in some way his brother, resurrected.

The funny thing is, knowing it doesn’t seem to make much difference. He’s learned this from years of psychoanalysis. Okay. You can be overbearing because you feel insecure, and you feel insecure because your parents preferred your older brother. You love your wife for many reasons, among them her resemblance (which you exaggerate in your own mind) to the unattainable girl of your adolescence, who preferred your older brother, and you (fuck you) love her ever so slightly less now that she’s not that girl any longer. You’re drawn (erotically?) to her little brother because on one hand he reminds you of Matthew and, on the other, allows you for the first time in your life to be Matthew.

All this is useful information. Now what?

Lying here on the bed he finds himself thinking about Dan Weissman, whom Peter saw only that once, in Matthew’s hospital room (Matthew’s body was shipped to Milwaukee for burial, Dan wasn’t at the service, Peter could never bring himself to ask his parents whether they’d invited him or not). Dan, who died a little over a year after Matthew did. Whose entire life, as far as Peter is concerned, was devoted to that twenty minutes in St. Vincent’s in 1985, when he helped Peter say goodbye.

On the other side of the wall, Peter hears Mizzy walk into the kitchen. He probably doesn’t know Peter is here. How would he? There is something subtly delicious about being unapprehended and, better still, about hiding without culpability. If discovered, he can simply tell Mizzy the truth. He got sick, came home to lie down.

Mizzy returns to the living room. The walls, being non-load-bearing, are thin. Peter can hear pretty much everything. Which is, of course, part of what drove poor Bea crazy when they moved here, when she was eleven. What exactly had possessed them to think that living in such close proximity to her parents would be a good idea for an adolescent girl? Well, okay. The loft had been such an amazingly good deal, it would have been crazy to pass it up. And, right, at the time they didn’t have the money to put in thicker walls.

A brief interlude of silence—Mizzy has probably sat down on the sofa. And then, faintly, his voice. He’s called someone on his cell.

Peter should not, of course, be listening. He should get up right now, and let Mizzy know that he’s here. The temptation, however, is too great. And in the age of cell phones, all our conversations are public, aren’t they? Besides, Peter can always pretend to have been asleep.

Mizzy’s voice is barely intelligible.

“Hey. It’s Ethan.”

“Yeah, I something something .”

“A while, I’m not sure. Yeah.”

“Like, just a gram? I’m not so something right now.”

“Okay. Great.”

“Mercer Street. Something something . And Broome.”

“Great. See you in a little bit.”

Okay. He’s using again.

What now, Polonius?

Peter lies in mortified, fascinated silence.

At seven past four, he hears Mizzy buzz the dealer in, buy the drugs, and close the door—it’s a quick and almost silent transaction. It is, of course, outrageous that Mizzy has given their address to a drug dealer, and let him into the loft, however briefly, but at the same time… it’s not as if Peter has never bought drugs before (the occasional gram of cocaine, the odd half dozen hits of Ecstasy), and he knows well enough who it is who sells drugs in small quantities to people like Mizzy (or himself). Somewhere along that unimaginable chain of supply and demand there are dangerous, desperate men, men who are capable of just about anything, but the guy who hops into a cab to sell you a little coke or crystal or a few hits of X is likely to be a young or, even likelier, a no-longer-young actor/model/waiter, who needs the extra cash. Peter could simulate righteous fury at Mizzy, and really, Mizzy should have arranged to meet this guy somewhere else (yes, he’s spoiled and entitled, no denying it), but a fit of anger would be at least something of an act. Dammit, Mizzy (ETHAN), how dare you let a twenty-eight-year-old chorus boy named Scott or Brad or Brian into our home? Most of these “shady characters” will give up on show business (or whatever long shot brought them to New York) and be back in their hometowns within the next ten years, working as gardeners or selling real estate. Peter isn’t up to the performance; Mizzy isn’t his responsibility. And really, how could he feel anything but ridiculous, popping out of his room like some doddering uncle in an Italian farce, shaking his freckled fist and announcing that he’s heard everything.

And so, he remains.

He hears Mizzy move around in the other room, the soft slide of his footsteps as he goes into the kitchen, goes back to put on a CD (Sigur Rós), returns to the kitchen. Then it’s twenty-three minutes of quiet, only the low tones and ghost voice of the music. Is Mizzy doing the crystal? Uh, what do you think? Finally, more footfalls, coming through the living room, getting closer… for a moment it seems that Mizzy is going to come into Peter’s room. Peter’s skin prickles with fear (he’ll have to pretend to be asleep) and anger ( What the fuck are you looking for? ). But Mizzy is, of course, just going into the other bedroom, his for now. The drywall that divides the two rooms seems almost to amplify sound—Bea’s been away for long enough that Peter had forgotten. He can hear Mizzy taking off his shorts (the pull of the zipper and, almost deafening, the clank of the belt buckle as they hit the floor); he can hear the bed creak minutely as Mizzy lies down on it. He and Peter are now about four feet apart, separated by a wall made of high-tech cardboard, both prone.

And… yes. A minute passes, another minute commences, and it’s clear that Mizzy is masturbating. Peter can sense it. He thinks he can. Sex alters the air, right? And he swears he can hear Mizzy emit a soft little moan, though it might be Sigur Rós. But really. What would a twenty-three-year-old be doing in bed in mid-afternoon after a bump of crystal?

And what, Peter Harris, are you to do now?

The decent thing. Get up immediately, go loudly out of your room and announce, all sleepy and yawning, that you have been in deep slumber until moments ago. Express surprise at finding Mizzy on the premises.

The subvert thing. Get up and slip quietly away, out of your room and out of the loft. Mizzy is occupied, he probably won’t hear you (Did he close his bedroom door? Mm, didn’t hear that). Walk around the neighborhood for a while, pretend to come home at your usual hour.

The unconscionable thing. Stay where you are, and keep listening.

Right.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

Plus it’s… what?… amazing, okay, in a fucked-up way, but still, it’s amazing to slip into someone else’s privacy like this. A few feet away is that rarest of entities—another being who believes himself to be alone. I mean yes, okay, we are probably not, when alone, profoundly or maybe even noticeably different, but how can you know that, really, about anyone, save yourself? Isn’t this part of what you keep looking for in art—rescue from solitude and subjectivity; the sense of company in history and the greater world; the human mystery simultaneously illuminated and deepened: by Giotto’s expelled Adam and Eve, by Rembrandt’s final self-portraits, by Walker Evans’s photos from Hale County. The art of the past tried to give us something like what’s happening to Peter right now—a look into the depths of the human other. Videos of passersby aren’t the same. Nor are obscene urns or dead sharks or anything, really, that’s wry or detached or ironic, that’s meant to shock or provoke. It doesn’t offer anything like a beautiful messed-up boy with a drug problem spinning unknowable fantasies for himself right there, on the other side of the veil.