Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Victoria puts out a thinly optimistic, skeptical smile. She is in fact one of the least deluded of Peter’s artists. There’s something of the little girl about her, she’s serious but nervous, hopeful, in the way of a girl dressing dolls and arranging them in tableaux, showing them to the adults with a mix of pride and embarrassment, afraid every single time that she won’t get the lavish (slightly condescending?) praise she’s learned to count on. Would that Peter loved her work just a little bit more, or felt for Victoria just a little bit less.

“Ready to get to work?” Peter says.

“Mm-hm.”

“You want some tea?” She drinks tea.

“That would be nice, yes.”

Peter goes to get it, receives a quick grateful glance from Uta. Why should Uta have to fetch beverages for a woman who ignores her?

Peter enters the storage room where the coffee and tea things are kept, turns the electric kettle on. Here are the storage bins, in which are kept various pieces by various gallery artists, ready to show to any interested client, all carefully shrouded in plastic, all labeled. Peter and Uta run a tight ship.

This, too, is not a metaphor. Is it? Artists produce art and some of it lies in wait, in a room, until someone expresses interest. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing sad.

And yet, Peter needs to get out of there.

He is able, he’s not that far gone, to wait until the water boils, and fix a cup of green tea for Victoria.

In the gallery, Vic and Uta are in mid-discussion about the second installation, which will go in the north corner. Peter takes Victoria her tea. She accepts it with both hands, as if it were an offering.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Peter says, “I’ve got to go out for a little while, I’ll be right back.”

He ducks Uta’s questioning glance—Peter never “goes out for a little while,” not on any errand that’s mysterious to Uta. They have no mysteries.

“See you in a while, then,” Uta says.

Poor fuck, stop in the bathroom and check your hair before you go. Make sure you’ve got nothing stuck in your teeth.

And leave, then. What if he didn’t come back? Can he picture Uta saying to people, He didn’t even tell me where he was going? Yes. He can.

He forces himself to be exactly seven minutes late, because he can’t bear the idea of being found waiting, though of course Mizzy might be later than seven minutes and of course Peter wonders, in the back of his mind, if by arriving even seven minutes late he will have missed Mizzy entirely, that Mizzy has been and gone already, and mixed in with that particular spasm of crazy panic, as he approaches the familiarity of the Starbucks doors, is a sense of the painful gorgeousness of caring that much. For how many years has he actually hoped, in some remote reach of his brain, that whatever meeting will not in fact take place, that he’ll be set free, that he will be regranted the hour allotted for some business thing or a friend (well, actually, he has no real friends, unless he counts Uta—how exactly did that happen?—he had a whole crew of friends when he was younger).

He tries one of the double glass doors, finds it locked (why in New York City is one of the two doors always kept locked?), survives the small embarrassment, steps in through the unlocked one. In mid-morning the Starbucks is about half full, some women in pairs, two separate younger guys with laptops in front of them, it’s the best deal in town, four-forty for a coffee and you can sit all day.

And there, at a window table toward the rear, is Mizzy.

“Hey,” says Mizzy. Because really, what else would he say?

Peter says, “Nice to see you.” Does the sarcasm register?

Mizzy’s got a coffee already (a Grande cappuccino, impossible not to harbor such information). He says, “You want a coffee?”

Peter does. Actually he does not, but it seems too strange to sit across from Mizzy beverageless. He goes and stands in line (two people ahead of him, a fleshy black girl and a guy with a comb-over, wearing a pilly sweater, two of the multitudes who, by happenstance, have not been depicted on Victoria’s T-shirts and lunch boxes, but easily could be). Peter manages to the best of his ability the terrible, usual interlude of standing in line waiting to order coffee.

Then he’s back at Mizzy’s table, fighting the absurd notion that a Venti skim latte is somehow the wrong thing to have ordered.

Mizzy is unaltered. If anything his pale, princely beauty is accentuated by this ordinary place. Here is the Roman complexity of his nose, the big brown eyes out of Disney. Here is the forelock of sable hair that bisects his forehead.

Here, propped on the floor beside the table, is the backpack he brought with him to New York.

Peter forges ahead. He’ll have that dignity, at least.

He says, “You’ve scared the fuck out of Rebecca.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call her today.”

“Shall we start with why you left?”

“Why do you think?”

“I asked you,” Peter says.

“I can’t just stay there and go about my business like nothing has happened.”

“Wait a minute. Weren’t you the one who insisted that nothing really has happened?”

“I was being defensive. For God’s sake, Peter, we were about to go inside and have dinner with my sister. I couldn’t exactly fall into your arms on your doorstep, could I?”

A terrible, intoxicatingly poisonous sensation rises at the back of Peter’s throat. A druggy bile. It’s happening, then. This boy, this new version of young Rebecca, this graceful and yearning Bea, this living work of art, is declaring his love.

“No,” Peter says. “You couldn’t.” Is there a tremble in his voice? Probably.

A brief silence passes. For a moment, a moment, Peter relents. He can’t do this. Rebecca and Bea have done nothing to deserve it, and how will Rebecca ever recover? (Bea, in all likelihood, will embark on a lifelong career of hating her father, which will be some consolation to her, plus she’s had a lot of practice already.) A dizzy tingling rises to his head. He is on the verge of committing an unspeakable act. He will never be able to think of himself as a good man again.

“Did you tell her?” Mizzy asks.

What?

“Of course I didn’t.”

“And you won’t tell her. Right?”

“Well. That’s something we should talk about, don’t you think?”

“Please don’t tell her.”

And then, it seems, Peter says this:

“Mizzy, I have feelings for you. I think about you. I dream about you”— Not true, you dream about piss and about being pursued, but still. “I don’t know if I’m in love with you but I’m in something with you and I honestly don’t think I can just go back to my life.”

Mizzy receives this with a peculiar impassivity. Only his eyes show anything. They take on that wettish shine. Now, for the first time, his slightly crossed eyes render him foolish-looking.

He says, “I mean, about the drugs.”

Oh.

A dreadful realization hovers, but does not quite descend. Peter’s skin prickles. Heat rises to his head, and it seems, for a moment, that he’s going to be sick again.

He hears himself saying, “What you’re worried about is me telling her you’re doing drugs again.”

Mizzy has the good taste not to answer.

It’s blackmail, then. He’s been set up. Neither more nor less than that. You, Peter, keep mum about the drugs and I, Mizzy, won’t say anything about the kiss.

Now Peter seems to be saying, “Did you make all that up, then? The stuff about…”

Don’t cry, motherfucker. Don’t weep in a Starbucks in front of this heartless boy.