Michael Cunningham: By Nightfall

He looks at her.

She is radiant in her sorrow, gauntly fabulous, present in all her particulars, in the broad, pale expanse of her forehead and the Athena-like jut of her brows, in the gray livingness of her eyes, the firm line of her decisive mouth, the prominent bulb of her almost-masculine chin. She is here, right here; she looks exactly like this. She is no failed copy of her younger self. She is herself, exactly that, rapt and ravaged-looking, incomparable, singular.

“What do you think?” she says.

This is her voice, deep for a woman, with a little rasp to it, an undercurrent of burr, like a stick drawing on sand. She still retains, if you listen carefully, a trace to the old Richmond lilt, burnished by her years away to a soft, astonished rise that makes hard music of the world “think.”

Here is Peter’s art, then. Here is his life (though his wife may leave him, though he’s faltered in so many ways). Here is a woman who keeps changing and changing, impossible to cast in metal because she’s already not who she was when he walked through the door, not who she’ll be ten minutes from now.

Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe all of Peter’s chances are not yet squandered.

He kisses Rebecca, lightly, on her chapped lips.

“Yes,” he says. “I think we could try. I do. Yes.”

He begins to tell her everything that has happened.

I would be little more than a figment of my own imagination without my agent, Gail Hochman; my editor, Jonathan Galassi; and the love of my life, Ken Corbett.

If the depictions of the art world contained herein are in any way accurate, it’s due to Jack Shainman and Joe Sheftel.

I would know far too little about Greenwich, Connecticut, without the generous help of Constance Gibb.

I would know far too little about almost everything without the assistance of Meg Giles.

I’m enormously indebted as well to Amy Bloom, Frances Coady, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Stacey D’Erasmo, Elliott Holt, David Hopson, Marie Howe, Daniel Kaizer, James Lecesne, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, Seth Pybas, Sal Randolph, and Tom Grattan.

A Home at the End of the World

Flesh and Blood

The Hours

Laws for Creations (editor)

Specimen Days

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2010 by Mare Vaporum Corp.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cunningham, Michael, 1952–

By nightfall / Michael Cunningham.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-374-29908-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

I. Title

PS3553.U484 B9 2010

813'.54—dc22

2010012614

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

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