Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Victoria’s five ordinary citizens loop and loop and loop. Beethoven blares triumphally. Mizzy is in all likelihood flying, right now, across the continent, over the light-strands of nocturnal America.

It would be good to sleep here, right here, on the gallery floor, as five random strangers live, over and over and over again, through brief interludes of what are by now their unremembered pasts.

Time to shut them down, turn off the music, kill the lights, and go home.

And yet he remains. This may not be great art but it’s perfectly good art and he is consoled by it, he is accompanied by it, and it will never feel as immaculate as it does tonight, before the shoppers come to look it over.

He picks up one of the action figures, the black man with the battered briefcase. The figure is intentionally shoddy—its painted-on eyes slightly off-kilter, its skin a lifeless cocoa color, its suit indifferently made of a shiny, gunmetal-gray synthetic. Idolatry tends to involve demotion, doesn’t it? Even those polychromed, glass-eyed Virgin Mothers, even those gilded Buddhas. Flesh, the true and living thing, trumps every effort at representation.

What artist would be the likeliest choice to render Peter now? It would have to be Francis Bacon, wouldn’t it? One of those pink fleshy middle-aged male nudes, in tortured repose. And he’d actually imagined himself in bronze. He’d been that vain.

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

It’s something, though—it isn’t nothing—to have a tub to dance to. Not if you’re a bear.

When Peter gets home, he finds Rebecca in bed. It’s only a little after 9:30.

She is curled up, facing the wall, wrapped in a quilt. Peter thinks briefly of an Indian wife, swaddled for the pyre.

She knows. Mizzy has told her everything. Peter loses his balance for a moment, as if the floor had tilted under him. Will he deny it? That would be easy enough. Mizzy is an inveterate liar, Peter could so plausibly proclaim his innocence. But if he lies he will always have lied, Mizzy for all his transgressions will always have been falsely accused. Peter fights an impulse to simply turn and go, to leave the apartment, to escape into… what, exactly? What’s out there for him?

He steps into the room. Here are the lamps they bought years ago, at the Paris flea market. Here, hanging over the bed, are the three Terry Winters drawings.

“Hey,” Peter manages to say. “You feeling sick?

“I’m just tired. Mizzy left today.”

“Did he?”

Is it too horribly transparent to play dumb like this? Can Rebecca smell the deceit wafting off him?

She does not turn to face him.

“San Francisco,” she says. “Somebody’s giving him a job out there, it seems.”

Peter struggles to sound and act like himself, though he’s having trouble remembering what he sounds like, how he acts.

“What kind of job?”

“Computer graphics. Don’t ask me what that is, exactly. In terms of how it could actually be a job.”

“Why do you think he suddenly wants to do that?” Peter asks, and feels a prickle up his spine. Kill me now, Rebecca. Lower the boom. We both know why he’s suddenly gone to San Francisco. I stand before you, a true piece of shit. Scream at me. Throw me out. It might be a relief, for both of us.

Rebecca says, “I thought he was going to change this time. I really did.”

“Maybe it’s time to accept the possibility that he never will,” Peter says tentatively.

“Maybe it is.”

There is such sorrow in her voice. Peter goes and sits on the edge of the mattress. Gently, gently, he puts a hand on her covered shoulder.

Would it be more manly to confess? Of course it would. He could have that dignity, at least.

He says, “Mizzy provokes people. People respond to him.”

A weak introduction. But something. Continue.

She says, “Too much for his own good.”

Ready? Go.

“What did he tell you this afternoon?”

Peter does not know whether he will lie or not. He can’t see that far into his own future. He can only wait, helplessly, to see what he’ll do.

“He did tell me something,” she says.

Oh. Here it comes. Goodbye, my life. Goodbye to the lamps and the drawings.

Peter works to keep his voice steady.

“I think I know. Do I know?”

The truth, then. He’ll tell the truth. He’ll have that, at least.

She says, “He told me that he loves me, but he’s got to stay away from me for a while. It seems I inhibit his growth by doting on him the way I do.”

Really? Wait a minute. Really and truly? That’s it?

“Well, maybe he’s right,” Peter says. Is it possible that she can’t hear the sway in his voice?

“The thing is…”

Peter hesitates. He feels more than hears a minute susurration at the window, the tiniest of taps. Snow. A light windblown veil of it, as the weatherman predicted.

Rebecca says, “He adores me and blah, blah, blah, but he needs to be on his own.”

Oh.

Maybe Mizzy has not needed to blackmail Peter, then. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t have been believed. Or maybe—worse—he’s taken a certain satisfaction in bringing everybody down and then just moving on. Maybe he’s been toying with them both, seeing how much he can get away with.

Rebecca turns to face Peter. Her face is pallid, with a dull sweaty sheen.

She says, “I’ve realized something.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been living in some kind of fucked-up fantasy.”

Here it comes, then, after all. She’s been living with the illusion of an honorable husband, a man who has his failings but would not, would never, do what Peter has done.

“Mm?” he says.

“I thought that if I could make Mizzy happy, something magic would happen.”

“What magic?”

“That I’d be happy, too.”

His stomach lurches.

He’d thought she was happy.

“I think you’re upset right now,” he tells her.

She draws a ragged breath. She doesn’t cry.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m upset. And you know what?”

He remains silent.

She says, “When Mizzy told me he was going to San Francisco for some nonexistent job, and hit me up for an airplane ticket, I wasn’t mad. Well, I was mad, of course I was, but I was something else, too.”

“What?” Peter has never felt so stupid.

“I was envious. I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to be some mature, levelheaded person who could cut him a check. I wanted to be young and fucked up and, I don’t know. Free.”

No, Rebecca, you do not want that. You want continuance. I’m the one who wants to be free. I’m the one who’d do unspeakable things.

“Free,” he says. His voice is hollow, strange to him.

Rebecca, you can’t have this fantasy. This fantasy is mine.

A silence passes. He can hear snow tapping at the window. He feels as if he could lose consciousness, just faint away.

He hears himself say, “Do you want to be free of us?”

“Yes,” she answers. “I think I do.”

What? What? No. You, Rebecca, are the happy one—the happy-enough one. You’re the one who’s satisfied with our brisk (if occasionally arid) lives; you’re the one who I, Peter, was thinking of fleeing from; you’re the one I didn’t want to harm.

“Darling,” he says. Only that.

“You’re unhappy, too, aren’t you?” she says.

He doesn’t answer. Yes, yes, of course he’s unhappy, but unhappiness is his realm, she has no right to it, she is staunch and formidable, she is capable of being wounded but she is not unhappy in her own right. She is the one who, with every good intention, is holding him back.