Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Yes, she is in fact irritated with him, for… agreeing to come? For thriving (relatively speaking)?

“It’s fine,” he says, because nothing cleverer comes to mind.

“You’re a kind man. Not a nice man, people tend to get the two mixed up.”

He sits opposite her. Bette Rice: a force. Silver crew cut, austere black-rimmed glasses, Nefertiti profile. She was born to it. Jewish daughter of Brooklyn leftists, may or may not have dated Brian Eno, has a good story about how Rauschenberg gave her her first Diet Coke. When he’s with Bette, Peter can feel like the not-quite-bright high school jock putting moves on the smart, tough girl. Can he help having been born in Milwaukee?

She laser-eyes a waitress, says “Coffee,” doesn’t care that her voice is louder than it needs to be, that a sixtyish Perfect Blonde glances over from the next table.

Peter says, “I hope you’re willing to talk about Elena Petrova’s glasses.”

She holds up a slender hand. One of the three silver rings she wears is taloned, like an obscure torture implement.

“Angel, it’s sweet of you, but I’m not going to put you through the preliminary chitchat. I have breast cancer.”

Did he think that by anticipating it, he’d protected her from it?

“Bette—”

“No, no, they got it.”

“Thank God.”

“What I really want to tell you is, I’m closing the gallery. Right now.”

“Oh.”

Bette offers him a slip of a smile, consoling, maternal even, and he’s reminded that she has two grown sons, neither of whom is particularly screwed up.

Bette says, “They got it this time, and if it comes back, they’ll probably get it next time, too. I’m not dying, not even close to it. But there was a moment. When I first heard what it was, and you know, my mother—”

“I know.”

She gives him a level, sobering look. Don’t be too eager to be good about this , okay?

She says, “I wasn’t so much terrified as I was pissed off. The gallery’s been my whole life for the last forty years, and frankly I’ve been sick of it for the last ten. And now that it’s all going to hell, and everybody’s broke… Anyway. One of my first thoughts was, If this doesn’t kill me, Jack and I are going to change our lives.”

“And so—”

“We’re going to go live in Spain. The boys are fine, we’re going to find a little whitewashed house somewhere and grow tomatoes.”

“You’re kidding.”

She laughs, a dense, throaty sound. She is one of the last living American smokers.

“I know,” she says. “I know . Maybe we’ll be bored out of our minds. Then we’ll sell the goddamned little whitewashed house and go do something else. I just don’t want to do this anymore. Jack is sick of Columbia, too.”

“Blessings on your journey, then.”

The waitress brings Peter’s coffee, asks if they’ve had time to consider the menu, which they haven’t. She says she’ll check back. She is a sweet-faced, sturdy girl with a Georgia accent, somebody’s much-loved daughter, probably newly arrived in New York, determined to sing or act or whatever, extragenial, eager to seem as much like a waitress as she possibly can, not to mention the fact that anyone who can afford to come to a place like JoJo at this moment in history is something of a celebrity by definition.

Bette says, “I want to love art again.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Who doesn’t? The money thing—”

“I know. And now, all of a sudden, there isn’t any more. Money, I mean.”

“There’s still some.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I hope that’s true…”

“And it seems we’ve all gone directly from struggling to survive to being semi-established and beside the point.”

Very briefly, an inner careen. We all? Back off, bitch angel of death. I’m not infected by failure.

She says, “I don’t mean you, Peter.”

What must have passed across his face just then?

“Don’t you?”

“I’m being clumsy, aren’t I? I’m beside the point. You’re one of the very few decent, serious people out there. Everyone else is, you know. Either a nineteen-year-old selling his friends’ stuff out of his apartment in Bed-Stuy, or they’re fucking Mobil Oil.”

“Well, yeah. I do know.”

“Aren’t you even a little bit sick of it?”

“Some days,” he says.

“You’re still young.”

“Forty isn’t young.”

Hm, shaved a few years off, didn’t you?

“I haven’t told anyone yet,” she says. “About quitting, I mean. I called you because I thought you might want to take Groff. And maybe one or two of the others. But you like Groff, right?”

Rupert Groff. Not exactly Peter’s thing, but young, and on the cusp. Bette lucked into him two years ago, when she went to give the talk at Yale. Once she’s made the announcement about closing her gallery, he’s the one they’ll all be after.

“I do,” Peter says.

He likes Groff well enough, and really, this is someone who could bring in some serious money.

“I think you’re the best match for him,” Bette says. “I’m afraid one of the giants will snatch him up and ruin him.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“A thousand pardons.”

“They’ll pressure him to do the work in gold, they’ll overpromote him, and in all likelihood he’ll be finished by the time he’s thirty.”

“Or having his retrospective at the Whitney.”

“Some of these kids are ready early. He’s not. He’s developing. He needs someone who’ll push him, but in the right ways.”

“And you think I’m that guy.”

“What I’m saying is, I don’t think you’re an asshole.”

I don’t know, Bette. I’m not as big as some of them, I’m not as rich, and if that means I’m not an asshole, fine.

“I like to think I’m not,” he says. “What makes you think Groff will want to go with me?”

“I’ll talk to him. Then you can talk to him.”

“What’s he like?”

“Sweet. A little oafish. Not the sharpest tack in the box.”

The waitress returns to ask again if they’ve had time to consider the menu. They promise apologetically to look, to decide in a couple of minutes, and they do exactly that. Who wouldn’t want to help this lovely, earnest girl, who’s so far from home, feel like she’s succeeding at posing as a New York waitress?

An hour later, Peter and Bette walk together through the Great Hall at the Met, grand, somnolent portal into the civilized world. Why deny its satisfactions—its elephantine poise, its capacity to excite the very molecules of its own air with a sense of reverent occasion and queenly glamour and the centuries-long looting of five continents? The Hall receives with a vast patience. It’s the mother who will never die, and right up front are her votaries, the women of the central kiosk, elderly for the most part, kind-looking, waiting to offer information from under the enormous floral arrangement (cherry blossoms, just now) that festoons the air over their heads with petal and leaf.

Peter pays the admissions (Bette paid for lunch). They clip on the small metal circles (these things must have a name, what would it be?), he to his jacket and she to the scoop neck of her black cotton sweater, which for a moment draws both their attention to her prominent, freckled clavicle and the miniature gathering of wrinkles, like a puckering of cloth, that have settled into the skin between her breasts. Bette knows that Peter is looking, gives him back a look of what he can only call haggard flirtation—a furious sensuality, not directly sexual but charged with some quality made up of sex and defiance, the sort of look Helen must have aimed at the Trojans. Bette Rice, a queen kidnapped by age and illness.