Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

“I know that.”

“Maybe it’s not really what you want to do.”

“What?”

“Something in the arts.”

“I do. I really and truly do.”

They reach the sand. Mizzy slips off his shoes (ratty old Adidas, no socks), Peter leaves his (Prada loafers) on. They walk slowly toward the water.

“Can I tell you something?” Mizzy says.

“Sure.”

“I’m ashamed.”

“Why?”

Mizzy laughs. “Why do you think?”

There’s something hard, suddenly, something hustlerish about his voice. It could be the voice of a rent boy, prematurely cynical.

They get to the edge of the water, where the tide is moving in modest, all but silent pleats that advance and retract and advance again. Mizzy rolls up the legs of his jeans, wades out to just above his ankles. Peter speaks to him in a slightly raised voice, from several feet behind.

“I don’t suppose shame is ever helpful.”

“I don’t want to do nothing. But I seem not to have some faculty other people have. Something that tells them to do this or that. To go to medical school or join the Peace Corps or teach English as a second language. Everything seems perfectly plausible to me. And I can’t quite see myself doing any of it.”

Has he started getting weepy, or is the sun just in his eyes?

What, exactly, should Peter tell him?

“You’ll find something” is his lame-ass best. “Even if it doesn’t turn out to be selling art. Or curating it. Or whatever.”

Clearly, Mizzy can’t even pretend to be consoled by that. He turns away, looks out over the sound.

“You know what I am?” he says.

“What?”

“I’m an ordinary person.”

“Come on.”

“I know. Who isn’t an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I’ve been treated as something special for so long and I’ve tried my hardest to be something special but I’m not, I’m not exceptional, I’m smart enough, but I’m not brilliant and I’m not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I’m not sure if the people around me can.”

And Peter knows—Mizzy is going to die. Peter knows this at some deep level of his being. It’s like the conviction he has about Bette Rice. It’s as if he can smell mortality, though its odor is far more detectable on an aging woman with breast cancer than on a young man in good health. Did Peter know that Matthew was going to die? Yes, probably, though he was too young to acknowledge it, even to himself. Wasn’t that the true message that day, decades ago, when Matthew and Joanna waded out into Lake Michigan and looked to Peter like beauty incarnate? Why that moment? Because they were doomed lovers, because they were standing at the edge of something, Joanna on her way to a gated community and Matthew to a hospital bed in St. Vincent’s. How had the desperate, horny twelve-year-old Peter sussed out the fact that he was getting his first true vision of mortality, and that it was the most moving and fabulous thing he’d ever seen? Hasn’t he been looking for another such moment ever since?

Mizzy will die of an overdose. He’s essentially said as much, not only to Peter but to the water and sky. He’s available to the forces of mortality. He can’t—he won’t—find anything that can attach him sufficiently to life.

Peter has waited on shores and stood beside sharks with people in mortal conditions. This time he takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his slacks, wades out to stand beside Mizzy. Mizzy is in fact weeping, softly, looking toward the horizon.

Peter stands quietly beside Mizzy. Mizzy turns to him, offers a wet-eyed smile.

And then, it seems, they are kissing.

The kiss didn’t last long. It was passionate, passionate enough, but not exactly, not entirely, sexual. Can two men kissing have been comradely? That’s how it felt, to Peter. There was no tongue, no groping. They merely kissed, not briefly, but still. Mizzy’s breath was clear and a little sweet, and Peter was not so lost in it as to abandon the worry that he had raspy, middle-aged-guy breath.

They parted lips at the same moment—neither of them was the one to break it off first—and smiled at each other, simply smiled.

Peter doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t even feel entirely like he’s transgressed, though it would be hard to convince anyone watching (a quick check—no one was) that it wasn’t lascivious. He is besotted and exultant and not ashamed.

After the kiss he noodled Mizzy’s head, as if they’d just engaged in some kind of innocent, wrestling shenanigans. Then they turned and splashed back onto the beach.

It’s Mizzy who speaks, as they walk barefoot back up the lawn. Peter would have preferred silence, for once.

“And so, Peter Harris,” Mizzy says. “Am I your first?”

“Uh, yeah. I bet I’m not your first, am I?”

“I’ve kissed three other guys. This makes you my fourth.”

Mizzy stops. Peter gets two paces ahead, realizes, steps back. Mizzy looks at him with that wet-eyed depth.

“I’ve had a thing for you since I was a little kid,” he says.

Don’t tell me this.

“You have not,” Peter says.

“The very first time you came to the house. I sat in your lap and you read Babar to me. Did you think it was completely innocent?”

“Of course I did. For God’s sake, you were four years old.”

“And I had this deep warm feeling I didn’t understand.”

“So. You’re gay.”

Mizzy sighs. “I think I’m gay for you,” he says.

“Come on.”

“This is too much, isn’t it?”

“A little, yeah.”

Mizzy says, “I just want to say it. And then we can, I don’t know. Never talk about it again, if you don’t want to.”

Peter waits. Let’s talk about everything, even though I have to feign reticence.

Mizzy says, “With those other guys, I was thinking about you.”

“This is some kind of father thing,” Peter says, though it hurts him to say it.

“Does that make it nothing?”

“It makes it… I don’t know. It makes it what it is.”

“I’ll never kiss you again, if you don’t want me to.”

What is it I want? Lord, I wish I knew.

He says, “We can’t. I’m probably the only man in the world you can’t make out with. Well, me and your actual father.”

Is that what makes it compelling for Mizzy? Is his professed desire in any way personal?

Mizzy nods. Impossible to say whether he agrees or is acquiescing.

What kind of man would go after his sister’s husband?

A desperate man.

What kind of man would have let it get this far? What kind of man would have held the kiss as long as Peter did?

A desperate man.

He and Mizzy continue up to the house in silence.

Carole greets them in the garden with such avid, nervous enthusiasm that Peter thinks, for a moment, she must have been watching. She wasn’t watching. It’s her manner to greet everyone enthusiastically, all the time.

“I think it’s a keeper,” she says.

“Great,” Peter answers. He adds, “You know it’s on loan for the moment, right? For the sake of the Chens. Groff will want to come see it in situ.”

Carole listens, blinking and nodding. She’s not a neophyte—she knows that with certain artists, the collector is subject to audition.

“I hope I’ll pass,” she says.

“I can pretty much guarantee that you will.”

She turns to look at the urn. “It’s so beautiful and nasty,” she says.

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation. He picks a sprig of lavender, holds it to his nose.