Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Ground floor. You’ve survived the elevator. Take your queasy stomach and go out into South Williamsburg, take yourself back to your life.

Rebecca meets Peter at the door that evening, has an unusually passionate kiss for him.

“How’d it go?” Peter asks. Fuck, he forgot to call her during the day. Then again, she didn’t call him either, did she?

“Not bad,” she says. As she speaks she goes into the kitchen, to make their postworkday martinis. She’s still dressed for work. She did, in fact, go back to the black pencil skirt and the brown cashmere.

“I think he’s going to make an offer,” she says. “I think we’re going to accept it.”

Peter, according to habit, starts undressing as he wanders around the living room. Shoes kicked off, jacket shed and slung over the back of the sofa.

Wait a minute.

“Is Mizzy here?” he asks.

She drops the ice cubes into the shaker. Lovely, comforting sound.

“No. He’s having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know.”

“Are we… concerned about that?”

“We’re a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time.”

He’s doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.

“Funnier than usual?” he asks.

“I can’t tell.” She pours vodka into the shaker, and a medium-size dollop of vermouth. Lately they’ve both gone heavier on the vermouth—they’ve taken to actual, fifties-style martinis.

She says, “He left me a voice mail, he said he was having dinner with an old girlfriend, and he wouldn’t be late.”

“That doesn’t sound suspicious.”

“I know. And still, I keep thinking, is ‘old girlfriend’ some kind of code word? For you-know-what. But really, I’ve got to stop this, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Was I like this with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t doing drugs.”

“Do we even know that? I mean, how would we?”

“Well. Bea is alive and well.”

“Bea is alive. I pray every single day that she’ll get well.”

“Well- er. ”

“Mm-hm.”

Rebecca shakes the ice and liquor and is briefly a rough-and-ready goddess working in a roadhouse somewhere, she’d need a change of outfit, but look at her, look at the butch assurance with which she shakes those drinks, imagine how she could take you into the back room of some bar and fuck you on top of the beer cases, coolly passionate and dazzlingly practiced, and then after you’d both come she’d get right back to work, she’d slip you a quick sly wink from behind the bar and tell you the next one’s on the house.

She pours the martinis into two stemmed glasses. Peter comes into the kitchen for his, unbuttoning his shirt.

“You know what really pisses me off about Mizzy?” she says.

“What?”

“That I’ve been talking about him for the last five minutes, and I haven’t told you anything about the deal.”

“Tell me about the deal.”

He takes a glass from the countertop. They click their glasses together, sip. God, it’s delicious.

“The main thing is, this Jack Rath character sounded so much better over the phone than we’d expected him to. It’s terrible, I know, but I think we’d all expected him to sound a little like John Huston in Chinatown.”

“And instead he sounded like…”

“Instead he sounded like an intelligent, articulate man who’s lived in New York and London and Zurich, and, you know, Jupiter, and has now gone back to his home town of Billings, Montana.”

“Because…”

“Because it’s beautiful and people are kind and his mother is starting to go out in public with three hats on.”

“Convincing.”

“He did sound convincing. I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.”

“Do we know why he wants to buy the magazine?”

“He wants Billings to become a remote but plausible arts center. Like Marfa.”

Uh-oh.

“So,” Peter says, “let me guess. He wants to move the operation to Billings.”

“ No. That didn’t come up, I’m sure he knows how impossible that would be. No. In exchange for keeping us alive, he wants us to advise him about culture and, oh, you know. Help him figure out how to start something.”

She eyes him warily, sips at her drink. Peter, don’t get pissy about this.

“What does he want you to start?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” She is patient, she is calm. And, all right, she’s handling him, because she knows how he can be about the whole idea of “starting something cultural” in Billings or anywhere, all that calculation, that whiff of the corporate. Shouldn’t “something cultural” start itself?

But Rebecca doesn’t want a battle, not now, not tonight.

She says, “It can’t be a film festival or a biennial or anything like that. It’s an interesting challenge. We’ve all decided to think of it as an interesting challenge.”

Peter laughs, she laughs back, they take big hearty slugs of their drinks.

She says, “It seems a small enough price to pay. Don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“Did you go to that guy’s studio?”

“Yeah. The work is nice.”

“Nice?”

“Let’s order something, I’m starving.”

“Chinese or Thai?”

“You pick.”

“Okay, Chinese.”

“Why not Thai?”

“Fuck you.”

She hits speed dial on her cell, orders the usual. Ginger chicken, prawns with black bean sauce, dry-fried string beans, brown rice.

“So,” she says, after she’s clicked off. “Nice?”

“No, no, much better than that. They look amazing. They have a presence that doesn’t really show up in the photographs.”

Peter drops his pants, steps out of them, leaves them puddled on the floor. He’ll pick his clothes up later, it’s not something he expects his wife to do, but he loves just throwing them anywhere, for the time being. He is now a man with reservations, who is wearing white briefs (small pee stain, barely noticeable).

“Do you think Carole Potter will want one?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t be half surprised. She should buy one. Groff’ll be around for quite a while, I think.”

“Peter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Never mind.”

“Don’t do that.”

She sips at her drink, pauses, breathes, sips again. She’s thinking of something to say, isn’t she? Is it something other than what she’d meant to say?

“I have this terrible feeling about Mizzy,” she says. “And I’m afraid I’m exhausting your patience.”

Sometimes when she talks about Mizzy, her long-vanished Virginia lilt comes back. Ah’m afrayd ah’m exhausting yer pay-shunce.

“I’ll let you know.”

“It’s just… I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it or not. But I swear I had a feeling like this back when he. Had the accident.”

You Taylors. You’re never going to let go of the word “accident,” are you?

“What kind of feeling?” Peter asks.

“A feeling. Don’t make me pull woman on you.”

“Describe it. I’m curious. As, you know, a scientist.”

“Hm. Well, Mizzy’s always had this sort of air about him when he’s about to do something he thinks is a good idea and everybody else knows is a really, really bad idea. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like those auras people with migraines see. I can see one around him.”

“And you’re seeing one now?”

“I think so. Yes.”

Peter knows the litany. Mizzy getting himself to Paris at the age of sixteen because he had to meet Derrida. Mizzy starting on heroin soon after he’d been brought back from Paris, and subsequently slipping out of rehab to go to New York to do God knows what. Mizzy, after a year in Manhattan, rounded up and sent for his (repeated) junior year and his senior year to Exeter, where he abruptly became a model student, and then went on to Yale, where he continued to do wonderfully for his first two years but then, without warning, dropped out to work on a farm in Oregon. Mizzy back at Yale again, and back on drugs, crystal this time. Mizzy having the “accident” in his friend’s Honda Civic. Mizzy unhappy at Yale, refusing to graduate. Mizzy walking the Camino de Santiago. Mizzy moving back to Richmond, where he stayed in his old room for almost five months. Mizzy off crystal (or so he said). Mizzy going to Japan, to sit with five stones.