Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

“Mm-hm.”

“What, do you think?”

“I have no idea. Something about when she said goodbye. I felt something. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

“Bette’s at an age.”

“As in, menopause?”

“Among other things.”

They thrill him, these little demonstrations of womanly certainty. They’re right out of James and Eliot, aren’t they? We are in fact made of the same material as Isabel Archer, as Dorothea Brooke.

The cab reaches Fifth Avenue, turns right. From Fifth Avenue the park regains its aspect of dormant nocturnal threat, of black trees and a waiting, gathering something. Do the billionaires who live in these buildings ever feel it? When their drivers bring them home at night, do they ever glance across the avenue and imagine themselves safe, just barely, for now, from a wildness that watches with long and hungry patience from under the trees?

“When is Mizzy coming?” he asks.

“He said sometime next week. You know how he is.”

“Mm.”

Peter does, in fact, know how he is. He’s one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won’t, possibly can’t, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

This family of women really ruined the poor kid, didn’t they? Who could survive having been so desperately loved?

Rebecca turns to him, arms still folded across her breasts. “Does it seem ridiculous to you sometimes?”

“What?”

“These parties and dinners, all those awful people.”

“They’re not all awful.”

“I know. I just get tired of asking all the questions. Half those people don’t even know what I do.”

“That’s not true.”

Well, maybe it’s a little bit true. Blue Light , Rebecca’s arts and culture magazine, is not a heavy-hitter among people like these, I mean it’s no Artforum or Art in America. There’s art, sure, but there’s also poetry and fiction and—horror of horrors—the occasional fashion spread.

She says, “If you’d rather Mizzy not stay with us, I’ll find another place for him.”

Oh, it’s still about Mizzy, isn’t it? Little brother, the love of her life.

“No, it’s totally okay. I haven’t even seen him in, what? Five years? Six?”

“That’s right. You didn’t come to that thing in California.”

Suddenly, a pained and unexpected silence. Had she been angry about him not going to California? Had he been angry with her for being angry? No recollection. Something bad about California, though. What?

She leans forward and kisses him, sweetly, on the lips.

“Hey,” he whispers.

She burrows her face into his neck. He wraps an arm over her.

“The world is exhausting sometimes, isn’t it?” she says.

Peace made. And yet. Rebecca is capable of remembering every slight, and of trotting out months’ worth of Peter’s crimes when an argument heats up. Has he committed some infraction tonight, something he’ll hear about in June or July?

“Mm-hm,” he says. “You know, I think we can definitively say that Elena is serious about the hair and glasses, et cetera.”

“I told you she was.”

“You never did.”

“You just don’t remember.”

The cab stops for the light at Sixty-fifth Street.

Here they are: a middle-aged couple in the back of a cab (this driver’s name is Abel Hibbert, he’s young and jumpy, silent, fuming). Here are Peter and his wife, married for twenty-one (almost twenty-two) years, companionable by now, prone to banter, not much sex anymore but not no sex, not like other long-married couples he could name, and yeah, at a certain age you can imagine bigger accomplishments, a more potent and inextinguishable satisfaction, but what you’ve made for yourself isn’t bad, it’s not bad at all. Peter Harris, hostile child, horrible adolescent, winner of various second prizes, has arrived at this ordinary moment, connected, engaged, loved, his wife’s breath warm on his neck, going home.

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, doop doop de doop…

That song again.

The light changes. The driver accelerates.

The point of the sex is…

Sex doesn’t have a point.

It’s just that it can get complicated, after all these years. Some nights you feel a little… Well. You don’t exactly want to have sex but you don’t want to be half of a couple with a grown daughter, a private trove of worries, and a good-natured if slightly prickly ongoing friendship that doesn’t any longer seem to involve sex on a Saturday night, after a party, semitipsy on Elena Petrova’s much-vaunted private-stock vodka, plus a bottle of wine at dinner afterward.

He’s forty-four. Only forty-four. She’s not even forty-one yet.

Your queasy stomach doesn’t help you feel sexy. What’s up with that? What are the early symptoms of an ulcer?

In bed, she wears panties, a V-necked Hanes T-shirt, and cotton socks (her feet get cold until the height of summer). He wears white briefs. They spend ten minutes with CNN (car bomb in Pakistan, thirty-seven people; church torched in Kenya with undetermined number inside; man who’s just thrown his four young children off an eighty-foot-high bridge in Alabama—nothing about the horse, but that’d be local news, if anything), then flip around, linger for a while with Vertigo , the scene in which James Stewart takes Kim Novak (Madeleine version) to the mission to convince her that she’s not the reincarnation of a dead courtesan.

“We can’t get hooked on this,” Rebecca says.

“What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight.”

“I haven’t seen this in years.”

“The horse is still there.”

“What?”

“The horse.”

A moment later, James Stewart and Kim Novak are in fact sitting in a vintage carriage behind a life-size plastic-or-something horse.

“I thought you meant the horse from earlier,” Peter says.

“Oh. No. Funny how these things crop up, isn’t it? What’s the word?”

“Synchronicity. How do you know the horse is still there?’

“I went there. To that mission. In college. It’s all exactly the way it looks in the movie.”

“Though, of course, the horse might be gone by now.”

“We can’t get hooked on this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too tired.”

“Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”

“You know how it turns out.”

“How what turns out?”

“The movie.”

“Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”

“Watch it, if you want.”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”

“You can’t sleep with the TV on.”

“I can try.”

“No. It’s okay.”

They stay with the movie until James Stewart sees—thinks he sees—Kim Novak fall from the tower. Then they turn it off, and turn out the lights.

“We should rent it sometime,” Rebecca says.

“We should. It’s great. I’d sort of forgotten how great it is.”

“It’s even better than Rear Window .”

“You think?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen either of them in so long.”

They both hesitate. Would she be just as glad to go right to sleep, too? Maybe. One is always kissing, the other is always being kissed. Thank you, Proust. He can tell she’d be just as glad to skip the sex. Why is she cooling toward him? Okay, he’s wearing a few extra pounds around his waist, and yeah, his ass isn’t headed north. What if she is in fact falling out of love with him? Would it be tragic, or liberating? What would it be like if she set him free?