Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

When Peter awakens the next morning he’s alone in bed. Rebecca is up already. He rises, sleep-smeared, slips into the pajama bottoms he ordinarily doesn’t wear but he’s not going to walk out there naked with Mizzy around (never mind about Mizzy’s own policies in that department).

In the kitchen, Rebecca has just finished making a pot of coffee. She, too, is dressed, in a white cotton robe she’d not ordinarily wear (they aren’t modest at home, or anyway they haven’t been since Bea left for college).

Mizzy, it seems, is still asleep.

“I thought I’d let you sleep in,” Rebecca says. “Are you feeling better?”

He goes to her, kisses her affectionately. “Yeah,” he says. “It has to have been food poisoning.”

She pours two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for him. She is standing more or less exactly where Mizzy stood last night. She’s slack-faced from sleep, a bit sallow. She does this semimiraculous early-morning thing whereby at a certain point in her preparations for the waking day she… snaps into herself. It’s not a question of putting on makeup (she doesn’t wear much) but of a summoning of energy and will that brightens and tautens her, gives color to her skin and depth to her eyes. It’s as if, during sleep, some fundamental capacity of hers to be handsome and lively drifts away; as if in sleep she releases all the faculties she doesn’t need, and prominent among them is her vitality. For these brief interludes in the mornings, she not only looks ten years older, she looks ever so slightly like the old woman she will probably be. She will in all likelihood be thin and erect, a bit formal with others (as if dignity in old age required a certain cordial distance), cultured, beautifully dressed. For Rebecca, a certain part of not becoming her mother involves the eschewing of eccentricity.

He says, “I called Bea last night.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. We’ve got this faux child on our hands, I suddenly wanted to talk to our actual child.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s mad at me.”

“Stop the presses.”

“She specifically chewed me out for talking on my cell during Our Town.”

Please, Rebecca, stand with me on this.

“I don’t remember that.”

Bless you, my love.

She lifts a coffee cup to her lips, standing where her brother stood, almost as if to demonstrate the likeness and the un. Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that’s never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that’s the source and the opposite of art.

“She swears I did. She won’t be talked out of it. I didn’t, right?”

“No.”

Thank you.

“I know it’s a little early in the morning for this conversation,” he says.

“No, it’s fine.”

“I just. I didn’t know what to say. How do I tell her that this memory she’s holding on to never happened?”

“I guess she has an idea that you were capable of talking on your phone while she was in a play.”

“Do you think I was?”

Rebecca sips contemplatively at her coffee. She’s not going to reassure him, is she? He can’t help noticing her sallowness, the wiry white-threaded unruliness of her morning hair.

Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya’s Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet’s Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet’s whore; although there’s every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She’s immortal now, she’s a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can’t help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world.

Rebecca says, “It’s hard to be a parent.”

“Meaning?”

“How do you think Mizzy is doing?” she asks.

Mizzy?

“All right, I guess. Weren’t we talking about Bea?”

“Yes. Sorry. I just have this feeling that this is some sort of last chance for Mizzy.”

“He’s not our daughter.”

“Bea is stronger than Mizzy.”

“Is she?”

“Oh, Peter, it probably is too early for this conversation after all. I’ve got to get dressed, I’ve got that conference call today.”

Blue Light is going under. Some conquistador from Montana, of all places, is considering bailing it out.

“Ugh.”

“I know.”

They have, of course, discussed this. Is it better to just fold, or decide to believe this out-of-nowhere benefactor when he says he doesn’t want the magazine to change? Consider history. How many wealthy nations have taken over smaller ones and left them unmauled?

Still, one wants things to live on. Still, one doesn’t want to be a forty-year-old unemployed editor in this market.

And what’s to like about having the phrase “in this market” rattling around in your head?

“What do you think?” he asks her.

“I know we’re going to say yes, if he’s really and truly interested. It would feel too strange to let it die.”

“Yeah.”

They sip their coffee. Here they are, hardworking middle-aged people with decisions to make.

If he’s going to tell her about Mizzy, now would be a logical time, wouldn’t it?

He says, “I’m going out to look at the Groffs today.”

“It’s a lucky break.”

“Is. I still feel a little… funny about it, though.”

“Mm.”

She’s not the biggest fan of his aesthetic squeamishness. She’s on his side, but she’s not an art nut, she appreciates it, she gets it (most of the time) but can’t—doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to—edit out a certain pragmatism; a certain sense (like Uta’s) that Peter can be too delicate for his own good, that he is unambiguously in the art business, and, maybe more to the point, is too goddamned hard on himself, he has never taken on an artist for purely cynical or commercial reasons. Do you understand, crazy old Peter Harris, do you understand that genius is rare, I mean by definition, and it’s one thing (a good thing) to search ardently and earnestly for the Real Deal but it’s another (a less-good thing) to obsess over it, to roll through your forties still nursing the suspicion that no one’s great enough, no artist or object can be forgiven for being, well, human in the first case and intractably thing -like in the second. Remember, how often the great art of the past didn’t look great at first, how often it didn’t look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it’s still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that’s survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

“Anyway,” he says, “there are worse crimes than trying to sell a Groff urn to Carole Potter.”

Which is something she could just as easily have said to him, isn’t it?

What she says is, “Absolutely.” She’s not really thinking about him at the moment, and why should she? Her magazine, which she lovingly helped found and nurture, is about to either go out of business or become the property of some strange man who claims to be a patron of the arts, though he seems to live in Billings, Montana.