Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Wouldn’t it? For a while, anyway?

No wonder the Victorians made wreaths of their dead lovers’ hair.

What would a stranger think, coming into this room after Peter was gone? A dealer would think he made some shrewd investments. An artist, most artists, would think he had all the wrong art. Most other people would think, What’s this, a painting wrapped and tied, why don’t you just open it up ?

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

Hold me, darkness. What’s that? An old rock lyric, or a feeling?

The trouble is…

There’s no trouble. How could he, how could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled? Who said to Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?” You don’t have to be a vicious right-wing zealot to entertain the question.

Still.

It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

The trouble is…

He can feel something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan’s treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity. Although he isn’t religious, he adores those pre-Renaissance icons, those gilded saints and jeweled reliquaries, not to mention Bellini’s milky Madonnas and Michelangelo’s hottie angels. In another era he might have been an acolyte to art; a monk whose life’s work would have consisted of producing a single illuminated page, the Flight into Egypt, say, in which two small people and an infant are frozen in eternal mid-step under a lapis blue vault studded with brilliant gold stars. He can feel it sometimes—he can feel it tonight—that medieval world of sinners and the occasional saint conducting their travels under a painted celestial infinitude. He’s an art history guy, maybe he should have become… what?… a conservator, say, one of those museum-basement people who spend their lives swabbing away the varnish and overpaint, reminding themselves (and, eventually, the world) that the past was garish and bright—the Parthenon was gilded, Seurat used blinding colors but his cheap paint has faded into the classically crepuscular.

Peter, however, didn’t want to live in basements. He wanted to be a wheeler and dealer (as some would call him), a denizen of the present, though he can’t quite live in the present; he can’t stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn’t say which world exactly but someplace that isn’t this, isn’t streetside piles of black garbage bags and shrill little boutiques that come and go. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.

The bedroom is full of the gray semilight particular to New York, an effusion, seemingly sourceless; a steady shadowless illumination that might just as well be emanating up from the streets as falling down from the sky. Peter and Rebecca are in bed with coffee and the Times .

They do not lie close to each other. Rebecca is absorbed in the book review. Here she is, grown from a tough, wise girl to a savvy and rather cool-hearted woman, weary of reassuring Peter about, well, almost everything; grown to be a severe if affectionate critic. Here is her no-nonsense girlhood transmogrified into a womanly capacity for icy, calmly delivered judgments.

Peter’s BlackBerry pipes out its soft, flutey tone. He and Rebecca trade looks—who’d call on a Sunday morning?

“Hello.”

“Peter? It’s Bette. I hope I’m not calling too early.”

“No, we’re up.”

He glances at Rebecca, mouths the word “Bette.”

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m okay. Are you by any remote chance free for lunch today?”

A second glance at Rebecca. Sunday is supposed to be their day together.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “I think so.”

“I can come downtown.”

“Okay. Sure. What, like, one-ish?”

“One-ish is good.”

“Where would you like to go?”

“I can never think of a place.”

“Me neither.”

“Doesn’t it always seem like there’s some perfect, obvious restaurant and you just can’t think of it?” she says.

“Plus, on a Sunday, there’s a lot of places we won’t be able to get into. Like Prune. Or the Little Owl. I mean, we could try.”

“It’s my fault. Who calls to make a lunch date at the last minute on a Sunday?”

“You want to tell me what’s up?”

“I’d rather tell you in person.”

“What if I come uptown?”

“I’d never ask you to do that.”

“I’ve been wanting to see the Hirst at the Met.”

“Me, too. But really, how could I live with myself if I not only call you on your day off, but make you schlep uptown, too?”

“I’ve done more for people I care less about.”

“Payard’s will be packed. I could probably get us a table at JoJo. It’s not as, you know. Brunchy up here.”

“Fine.”

“Do you mind JoJo? The food’s good, and there’s nothing really close to the Met…”

“JoJo’s okay.”

“You, Peter Harris, are a mensch.”

“So true.”

“I’ll call. If they can’t take us at one, I’ll call you back.”

“Okay. Great.”

He clicks off, wipes a smudge from the face of his BlackBerry on the edge of the sheet.

“That was Bette,” he says.

Is it a betrayal, making a lunch date on a Sunday? It would help if he knew how serious Bette’s… situation is.

“Did she say what it is?” Rebecca asks.

“She wants to have lunch.”

“But she didn’t say.”

“No.”

They both hesitate. Of course, it can’t be good. Bette is in her midsixties. Her mother died of breast cancer, what, ten or so years ago.

Rebecca says, “You know, if we say, I hope it’s not cancer, that won’t affect anything one way or the other.”

“You’re right.”

At this moment, he adores her. The cloudy ambivalence burns away. Look at her: the strong-jawed, sensible, slightly archaic lines of her face (her profile could be on a coin)—behind it, how many generations of pale Irish beauties married to wealthy, stolid men?—the graying tumble of her dark hair.

He says, “I wonder why she called me .”

“You’re her friend.”

“But we’re not friend friends.”

“Maybe she wants to practice. You know, try telling somebody she’s not that close to.”

“We don’t know it’s that. Maybe… she wants to confess her love for me.”

“Do you think she’d call you at home about that?”

“I’d say cell phones have made that a moot question.”

“Do you really think?”

“Of course not.”

“Elena’s in love with you.”

“Then I wish she’d fucking buy something.”

“Are you meeting Bette uptown?”

“Yeah. JoJo.”

“Mm.”

“We can go to the Met after, and see the Hirst. I keep wondering how it looks in there.”

“Bette. What is she, sixty-five?”

“Thereabouts. When did you get checked last?”

“I don’t have breast cancer.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It really and truly doesn’t make any difference if you say it or you don’t.”