Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

“You want to hear about it?”

“Of course I do.”

Okay, then. Go.

“Nothing happened. One kiss.”

“A kiss is something.”

Amen, sister.

“To be perfectly honest, I think I fell in love with… I don’t know if I can say this with a straight face. Beauty itself. I mean, as manifested in this boy.”

“You’ve always been in love with beauty itself. You’re funny that way.”

“I am. Funny. That way.”

“And you know, Peter…”

Her accent, her beloved Uta-esque heavy never-ceasing accent, seems to have grown if anything heavier with the gravity of the moment. Ant yoo no, Peder…

“…you know, it would have been simpler for you to fall in love with some young girl. Poor fuck, you never take the simple way out.”

Yoo nefer take de zimple vay out. Oh, God, Uta, how I love you.

“Do you think I want out of something?”

“Don’t you?”

“I love Rebecca.”

“That’s not the point.”

“And what would you say the point is?”

She pauses, readjusts those glasses.

“Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”

“You ready for the punch line?” Peter says.

“I’m always ready for a punch line.”

“He was just fucking with me.”

“Sure he was. He’s a kid, right?”

“It gets better.”

“I’m listening.”

“He blackmailed me.”

“That’s very nineteenth century,” she says.

“I found out he was using drugs again, and he seduced me so I wouldn’t tell Rebecca.”

“Wow. That’s ballsy.”

Is there an undercurrent of admiration in her voice?

Whether there is or not, Peter understands: he, Peter, is a comic character. How had it happened that he’d imagined, even briefly, otherwise? He’s the capering fool on whom others play tricks. He’s an easy mark, all vanity and pomade.

Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

“I’m a fool,” he says.

“You are,” she answers.

Uta comes around to his side of the desk, puts an arm over his shoulders. Just an arm, perched lightly, but still, it’s something for Uta. She is not a hugger.

“And you’re not the first fool for love,” she says.

Thank you, Uta. Thank you, friend. But it won’t do, will it? I have, it seems, gone beyond consolation, there’s not much for me in the image of myself, however true, as another sad citizen doing the little dance.

It might be better if I could howl and weep with you. Can’t, though, even if I wanted to, even if I thought you could bear the spectacle. I’m dry inside. There’s a ball of hair and tar lodged in my belly.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.” Because really, what else can he say?

The rest of the day passes, somehow. By a quarter past nine, the show’s been hung. Tyler, Branch, and Carl have gone home. Peter stands in the middle of the gallery with Uta and Victoria.

“It’s good,” Uta says. “It’s a good show.”

Arrayed around them on the gallery’s walls and floors are five of Victoria’s superheroes: the black man in the overcoat; a middle-aged woman searching her purse for change to feed a parking meter; a sharp-faced, portly young woman emerging from a bakery with a little white bag in her hand (her lunch bagel, no doubt); a ratty-looking Asian kid, twelve or so, whizzing along on a skateboard; and a Hispanic girl pushing a double stroller in which both of her twins are bawling mightily. The videos play simultaneously as the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth booms over and over from three discreet black speakers. The worshipful merchandise is on the shelves: the T-shirts, the action figures, the lunch boxes, and the Halloween costumes.

“It’s okay, right?” Victoria asks.

“It’s more than okay,” Peter tells her, though that’s what he’d say to any artist.

Time to turn it all off, douse the lights and go home. The curators are coming tomorrow, along with a few of the gallery’s more prominent clients. The story in Artforum comes out early next week. Blessings on you, Victoria, in your art-world ascension. If I do manage to nail down Rupert Groff, maybe you won’t leave me after all.

Try to care about it. Do your best to act as if it matters.

What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?

You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television.

You are Brueghel’s tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.

Uta says, “Why don’t we get some dinner someplace?”

Hm. Can’t, really. Not tonight. Can’t sit in a restaurant and talk the talk, not even with the sweet and self-effacing Victoria Hwang.

He says, “Why don’t you two go?” To Victoria he adds, “I’ve been a little sickish lately, and I have to be very brilliant tomorrow with all your clamoring fans.”

How can she balk at that?

Uta gives him the teacherly look. Should he be excused?

She says, “We can just get something quick and sleazy, you know.”

“ I’m quick and sleazy,” Peter answers. Ha ha ha. “Really, we’ll have a big drunken dinner the night of the opening. I need to go home to bed now.”

“If you say so,” Uta answers.

“Off with you then,” Peter says. “I’m going to stay here a few more minutes. I’d like to have a little time alone with the show.”

How can anyone balk at that?

Uta and Victoria get their coats and stand with Peter at the door.

Victoria says, “Thanks for everything, Peter. You’re great.”

Thank you, Victoria, for being a kind and decent person. Funny how the simple virtues matter.

Uta says, “Call me if you need to, all right?”

“Of course I will.”

She squeezes his hand. As he did Bette’s, when they stood in front of the shark.

Thank you, Uta. And good night.

So here he is, alone with five ordinary citizens passing through brief interludes of their regular days as the London Symphony Orchestra negotiates, over and over and over, the opening strains of the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven loops on and on.

How have these people been rescued and disappointed? What will happen to them, what’s happening to them now? Nothing much, probably. Errands and trudging work-hours, school for the boy, everybody’s nightly television. Or something else. Who knows? They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery); that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skateboard or looking for coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

Peter would love to sleep right now. To sleep and sleep and sleep.

Or cry. Crying would be good, might be good, cleansing, but he’s dry inside, what he feels more nearly resembles indigestion than it does despair.

He is a poor, funny little man, isn’t he?

He lingers a little with the show, which will sell or not sell. Which will come down again, and be replaced by another show. Groff, if he’s lucky, Lahkti if he’s… less lucky. Not that Lahkti is a booby prize, those painstakingly intricate little paintings of Calcutta, Peter does love them (he loves them enough) and really, although Lahkti isn’t a sensation (small paintings just don’t sell the way big ones do) it would be a relief not to have to bump him to make room for Groff. Peter could continue to feel honorable that way, he could live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared. Get Groff and he graduates (maybe) to the first rank; fail to get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.