Michael Cunningham: By Nightfall

“I know. But still.”

“If I die, I give you permission to remarry. After a suitable period of mourning.”

“Ditto.”

“Ditto?”

They both laugh.

He says, “Matthew left such elaborate instructions. We knew about the music, we knew about the flowers. We knew which suit to put him in.”

“He didn’t trust your parents and his nineteen-year-old straight brother. Can you blame him?”

“He didn’t even trust Dan.”

“Oh, I bet he trusted Dan. He just wanted to make the decisions himself. Why wouldn’t he?”

Peter nods. Dan Weissman. Twenty-one-year-old boy from Yonkers, working as a waiter, saving to go to Europe for a few months, thinking he’d finish up at NYU when he got back. He believed, he must have believed, at least briefly, that the world was showering bounty on him. He was making good money at the new café-of-the-moment. He and Matthew Harris, his improbably fabulous new boyfriend, would walk together through Berlin and Amsterdam. Madonna had left him fifty-seven dollars on a forty-three-dollar check.

Rebecca says, “I think I want Schubert.”

“Hm?”

“At the memorial. Cremation. Schubert. And please, everybody get drunk afterward. A little Schubert, a little sorrow, and then have drinks and tell funny stories about me.”

“Which Schubert?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think maybe Coltrane for me. Would that be pretentious?”

“No more than Schubert. Do you think Schubert is too pretentious?”

“It’s a funeral. We’re allowed.”

“Maybe Bette’s okay,” she says.

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“Shouldn’t you get in the shower?”

Is she eager for him to go?

He says, “You sure you don’t mind?”

“No, it’s fine. Bette wouldn’t call at the last minute like this if it wasn’t something important.”

Right. Of course. And yet. Sunday really is their day, their only day, shouldn’t she be a little more conflicted about releasing him, no matter how noble the cause?

He glances at the bedside clock, its beautiful aqua numerals. “Shower in twenty minutes,” he says.

And so. Twenty minutes in bed with your wife, reading the Sunday paper: this little cup of time. Black holes are expanding; a section of Arctic ice bigger than Connecticut has just melted away; someone in Darfur who wants desperately to live, who’d let himself believe he’d be one of the survivors, has just been cut open by a machete and for an instant sees his own viscera, the wet red of it darker than he’d imagined. Amid all that, Peter can probably rely on twenty minutes of simple domestic comfort.

Bette Rice has beamed something into the room, though. Call it mortal urgency.

Who ever expected heroism from little Dan Weissman, handsome in his avid-eyed, narrow-faced way, something of the antelope about him; no extravagant passions; Dan who was so clearly meant to be one of the boys Matthew used to date?… Who could possibly have imagined him learning more than some of the doctors knew, facing down the most terrifying nurses, staying with Matthew when he was home and getting him into the protocol they said was closed and being at the hospital those last days and… ? Yes, the list goes on… and no, Dan didn’t mention his own first symptoms until after Matthew was gone. Who expected Matthew and this more or less random boy to become Tristan and fucking Isolde?

You could panic in the face of it all—your brother dead at twenty-two (he’d be forty-seven now), along with his erstwhile boyfriend and every other friend he’d had; slaughters in other countries that might give pause to Attila the Hun; children killing their teachers with guns their fathers left lying around; and by the way, do you think it’ll be another building next time, or will it be a subway or a bridge?

“Have you got the Metro?” he asks Rebecca.

She hands the section over to him, returns to the book review.

“The Martin Puryear is closing in three weeks,” she says. “Please kick me if I miss it.”

“Mm.”

He has twenty minutes. Nineteen, now. He is impossibly fortunate; frighteningly fortunate. Your troubles, little man? Think of them as an appetizer that didn’t turn out quite right. You should sing and frolic, you should make obeisance to any god you can think of, because no one has put a tire over your shoulders and set it on fire, at least not today.

Rebecca says, “Should we call Bea before you go?”

What kind of father would want to put off calling his daughter?

No one has hacked you to death with a machete. But still.

“Let’s call her when I get back,” he says.

“Okay.”

Hard to deny it: Rebecca is just as happy to have a few hours at home without him. One of those long-marriage things, right? You want to be home alone sometimes.

It’s a warm April afternoon suffused with bright gray glow. Peter walks the few blocks to the Spring Street IRT. He’s wearing beat-up suede boots and dark blue jeans and a light blue unironed shirt under a pewter-colored leather jacket. You try not to look too calculated but you are in fact meeting someone at a fancy restaurant uptown and you want—poor fucker—you want to look neither defiantly “downtown” (pathetic, in a man your age) nor like you’ve nicened it up for the dowagers. Peter has gotten better over the years at dressing as the man who’s impersonating the man he actually is. Still, there are days when he can’t shake the feeling that he’s gotten it wrong. And of course it’s grotesque to care about how you look, yet almost impossible not to.

Still, always, there’s the world, which conspires constantly to remind you: no one cares about your boots, pilgrim. There’s Spring Street on this spring day—is it a false spring, though? New York has a habit of squeezing out one last snowfall even after the crocuses are out—the sky so blank you can imagine God forming it with His hands like snowballs and tossing them out, saying, Time, Light, Matter . There’s New York, one of the goddamnedest perturbations ever to ride the shifting surface of the earth. It’s medieval, really, all ramparts and ziggurats and spikes and steeples, entirely possible to see a hunchback cloaked in a Hefty bag stumping along beside a woman carrying a twenty-thousand-dollar purse. And at the same time, overlaid, is a vast nineteenth-century boomtown, raucously alive, eager for the future but nothing rubberized or air-cushioned about it, no hydraulic hush; trains rumbling the pavement, carved limestone women and men—not gods—looking heftily down from cornices as if from a heaven of work and hard-won prosperity, car horns bleating as some citizen in Dockers passes by telling his cell phone “that’s how they’re supposed to be.”

Peter descends the stairs into the roar of an oncoming train.

Bette is already seated when he arrives. Peter follows the hostess through the dark red faux Victoriana of JoJo. When Bette sees Peter she offers a nod and an ironic smile (Bette, a serious person, would wave only if she were drowning). The smile is ironic, Peter suspects, because, well, here they are, at her behest, and sure, the food is good but then there’s the fringe and the little bandy-legged tables. It’s a stage set, it’s whimsical , for God’s sake; but Bette and her husband, Jack, have had their inherited six-room prewar on York and Eighty-fifth forever, he makes a professor’s salary and she makes mid-range art-dealer money and fuck anybody who sneers at her for failing to live downtown in a loft on Mercer Street in a neighborhood where the restaurants are cooler.

When Peter reaches the table, she says, “I can’t believe I’ve dragged you up here.”