By Nightfall

A PARTY

The Mistake is coming to stay for a while.

“Are you mad about Mizzy?” Rebecca says.

“Of course not,” Peter answers.

One of the inscrutable old horses that pull tourist carriages has been hit by a car somewhere up on Broadway, which has stopped traffic all the way down to the Port Authority, which is making Peter and Rebecca late.

“Maybe it’s time to start calling him Ethan,” Rebecca says. “I’ll bet nobody calls him Mizzy anymore but us.”

Mizzy is short for the Mistake.

Outside the cab, pigeons clatter up across the blinking blue of a Sony sign. An elderly bearded man in a soiled, full-length down coat, grand in his way (stately, plump Buck Mulligan?), pushes a grocery cart full of various somethings in various trash bags, going faster than any of the cars.

Inside the cab, the air is full of drowsily potent air freshener, vaguely floral but not really suggestive of anything beyond a chemical compound that must be called “sweet.”

“Did he tell you how long he wants to stay?” Peter asks.

“I’m not sure.”

Her eyes go soft. Worrying overmuch about Mizzy (Ethan) is a habit she can’t break.

Peter doesn’t pursue it. Who wants to go to a party in mid-argument?

He has a queasy stomach, and a song looping through his head. I’m sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea… Where would that have come from? He hasn’t listened to Styx since he was in college.

“We should set a limit,” he says.

She sighs, settles her hand lightly on his knee, looks out the window at Eighth Avenue, up which they are now not moving at all. Rebecca is a strong-featured woman—who is often referred to as beautiful but never as pretty. She may or may not notice these small gestures of hers, by which she consoles Peter for his own stinginess.

A gathering of angels appeared above my head.

Peter turns to look out his own window. The cars in the lane beside theirs are inching forward. A slightly battered blue Toyotaish something creeps abreast, full of young men; raucous twenty-something boys blaring music loudly enough that Peter feels the thump-thump of it enter the cab’s frame as they approach. There are six, no, seven of them crammed into the car, all inaudibly shouting or singing; brawny boys tarted up for Saturday night, hair gelled into tines, flickers of silver studs or chains here and there as they roughhouse and bitch-slap. The traffic in their lane picks up speed, and as they pull ahead Peter sees, thinks he sees, that one of them, one of the four clamoring in the backseat, is actually an old man, wearing what must be a spiky black wig, shouting and shoving right along with the others but thin-lipped and hollow-cheeked. He noodles the head of the boy stuffed in next to him, shouts into the boy’s ear (flashing nuclear white veneers?), and then they’re gone, moving with traffic. A moment later, the nimbus of sound they make has been pulled along with them. Now it’s the brown bulk of a delivery truck that offers, in burnished gold, the wing-footed god of FTD. Flowers. Someone is getting flowers.

Peter turns back to Rebecca. An old man in young-guy drag is something to have observed together; it’s not really a story to tell her, is it? Besides, aren’t they in the middle of some kind of edgy pre-argument? In a long marriage, you learn to identify a multitude of different atmospheres and weathers.

Rebecca has felt his attention reenter the cab. She looks at him blankly, as if she hadn’t fully expected to see him.

If he dies before she does, will she be able to sense his disembodied presence in a room?

“Don’t worry,” he says. “We won’t throw him out on the street.”

Her lips fold in primly. “No, really, we should set some limits with him,” she says. “It’s not a good idea to always just give him whatever he thinks he wants.”

What’s this? All of a sudden, she’s chiding him about her lost little brother?

“What seems like a reasonable amount of time?” he asks, and is astonished that she does not seem to notice the exasperation in his voice. How can they know each other so little, after all this time?

She pauses, considering, and then, as if she’s forgotten an errand, leans urgently forward and asks the driver, “How do you know it’s an accident involving a horse?”

Even in his spasm of irritation, Peter is able to marvel at women’s ability to ask direct questions of men without seeming to pick a fight.

“Call from the dispatcher,” the driver says, waggling a finger at his earphone. His bald head sits solemnly on the brown plinth of his neck. He, of course, has his own story, and it does not in any way involve the well-dressed middle-aged couple in the back of his cab. His name, according to the plate on the back of the front seat, is Rana Saleem. India? Iran? He might have been a doctor where he comes from. Or a laborer. Or a thief. There’s no way of knowing.

Rebecca nods, settles back in her seat. “I’m thinking more about other kinds of limits,” she says.

“What kinds?”

“He can’t just rely on other people forever. And, you know. We all still worry about that other thing.”

“You think that’s something his big sister can help him with?”

She closes her eyes, offended now, now, when he’d meant to be compassionate.

“What I mean,” Peter says, “is, well. You probably can’t help him change his life, if he doesn’t want to himself. I mean, a drug addict is a sort of bottomless pit.”

She keeps her eyes closed. “He’s been clean for a whole year. When do we stop calling him a drug addict?”

“I’m not sure if we ever do.”

Is he getting sanctimonious? Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where?

The problem with the truth is, it’s so often mild and clichéd.

She says, “Maybe he’s ready for some actual stability.”

Yeah, maybe. Mizzy has informed them, via e-mail, that he’s decided he wants to do something in the arts. That would be Something in the Arts, an occupation toward which he seems to have no cogent intentions. Doesn’t matter. People (some people) are glad when Mizzy expresses any productive inclinations at all.

Peter says, “Then we’ll do what we can to give him some stability.”

Rebecca squeezes his knee, affectionately. He has been good.

Behind them, somebody blasts his horn. What exactly does he think that’s going to do?

“Maybe we should get out here and take the train,” she says.

“We have such a perfect excuse for being late.”

“Do you think that means we have to stay late?”

“Absolutely not. I promise to get you out of there before Mike is drunk enough to start harassing you.”

“That would be so lovely.”

Finally they reach the corner of Eighth Avenue and Central Park South, where the remains of the accident have not yet been entirely cleared away. There, behind the flares and portable stanchions, behind the two cops redirecting traffic into Columbus Circle, is the bashed-up car, a white Mercedes canted at an angle on Fifty-ninth, luridly pink in the flare light. There is what must be the body of the horse, covered by a black tarp. The tarp, tarrily heavy, offers the rise of the horse’s rump. The rest of the body could be anything.

“My God,” Rebecca whispers.

Peter knows: any accident, any reminder of the world’s capacity to cause harm, makes her, makes both of them, panic briefly about Bea. Has she somehow come to New York without telling them? Could she conceivably have been riding in a horse carriage, even though that’s something she’d never do?

Parenthood, it seems, makes you nervous for the rest of your life. Even when your daughter is twenty and full of cheerful, impenetrable rage and not doing all that well in Boston, 240 miles away. Especially then.

He says, “You never think of those horses getting hit by cars. You hardly think of them as animals.”

“There’s a whole… cause. About the way those horses are treated.”

Of course there is. Rana Saleem drives a night-shift cab here. Destitute men and women walk the streets with their feet bound in rags. The carriage horses must have dismal lives, their hooves are probably cracked and split from the concrete. How monstrous is it, to go about your business anyway?

“This’ll be good for the pro-horse people, then,” he says.

Why does he sound so callous? He means to be rigorous, not hard; he himself is appalled by how he can sound. He feels at times as if he hasn’t quite mastered the dialect of his own language—that he’s a less-than-fluent speaker of Peter-ese, at the age of forty-four.

No, he’s still only forty-three. Why does he keep wanting to add a year?

No, wait, he turned forty-four last month.

“So maybe the poor thing didn’t die in vain,” Rebecca says. She runs a fingertip consolingly along Peter’s jaw.

What marriage doesn’t involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn’t unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?

“A mess,” the driver says.

“Yeah.”

And yet, of course, Peter is mesmerized by the ruined car and the horse’s body. Isn’t this the bitter pleasure of New York City? It’s a mess, like Courbet’s Paris was. It’s squalid and smelly; it’s harmful. It stinks of mortality.

If anything, he’s sorry the horse has been covered up. He wants to see it: yellow teeth bared, tongue lolling, blood black on the pavement. For the traditional ghoulish reasons, but also for… evidence. For the sense that he and Rebecca have not only been inconvenienced by an animal’s death but have also been in some small way a part of it; that the horse’s demise includes them, their willingness to mark it. Don’t we always want to see the body? When he and Dan washed Matthew’s corpse (my God, it was almost twenty-five years ago), hadn’t he felt a certain exhilaration he didn’t mention afterward to Dan or, for that matter, to anyone, ever?

The cab creeps into Columbus Circle, and accelerates. At the top of the granite column, the figure of Christopher Columbus (who as it turns out was some kind of mass murderer, right?) wears the faintest hint of pink from the flares that attend the body of the horse.

I tbought that they were angels, but to my surprise, we something something something, and headed for the skies…

The point of the party is having gone to the party. The reward is going to dinner afterward, the two of them, and then home again.

Particulars vary. Tonight there is Elena Petrova, their hostess (her husband is always away somewhere, probably best not to ask what he’s doing), smart and noisy and defiantly vulgar (an ongoing debate between Peter and Rebecca—does she know about the jewelry and the lipstick and the glasses, is she making a statement, how could she be this rich and intelligent and not know?); there is the small, very good Artschwager and the large, pretty good Marden and the Gober sink, into which some guest—never identified—once emptied an ashtray; there is Jack Johnson seated in waxy majesty on a loveseat beside Linda Neilson, who speaks animatedly into the arctic topography of Jack’s face; there is the first drink (vodka on the rocks; Elena serves a famously obscure brand she has shipped in from Moscow—really, can Peter or anyone tell the difference?), followed by the second drink, but not a third; there is the insistent glittery buzz of the party, of enormous wealth, always a little intoxicating no matter how familiar it becomes; there is the quick check on Rebecca (she’s fine, she’s talking to Mona and Amy, thank God for a wife who can manage on her own at these things); there is the inevitable conversation with Bette Rice (sorry he had to miss the opening, he hears the Inksys are fantastic, he’ll come by this week) and with Doug Petrie (lunch, a week from Monday, absolutely) and with the other Linda Neilson (yeah, sure, I’ll come talk to your students, call me at the gallery and we’ll figure out a date); there is peeing under a Kelly drawing newly hung in the powder room (Elena can’t know, can she—if she’d hang this in a bathroom she’s got to be serious about her eyeglasses, too); there is the decision to have that third vodka after all; there is the flirtation with Elena—Hey, love the vodka; Angel, you know you can get it here anytime you like (he knows he is known, and probably scorned, for working it, the whole hey-I’d-do-you-if-I-had-the-chance thing); there is scrawny, hysterical Mike Forth, standing with Emmett near the Terence Koh, getting drunk enough to start homing in on Rebecca (Peter sympathizes with Mike, can’t help it, he’s been there—thirty years later he’s still amazed that Joanna Hurst did not love him, not even a little); there is a glimpse of the improbably handsome hired waiter talking surreptitiously on his cell in the kitchen (boyfriend, girlfriend, sex for hire—at least the kids who serve at these things have a little mystery about them); then back to the living room where—oops—Mike has managed to corner Rebecca after all, he’s talking furiously to her and she’s nodding, searching for the rescue Peter promised her; there is Peter’s quick check to make sure no one has been ignored; there is the goodbye conversation with Elena, who’s sorry she missed seeing the Vincents (Call me, there are a few other things I’d love to show you); there is the strangely ardent goodbye from Bette Rice (something’s up); the claiming of Rebecca (Sorry, I’ve got to take her away now, see you soon, I hope); the panicky parting grin from Mike, and goodbye goodbye, thank you, see you next week, yeah, absolutely, call me, okay, goodbye.

Another cab, back downtown. Peter thinks sometimes that at the end, whenever it comes, he will remember riding in cabs as vividly as he recalls anything else from his earthly career. However noxious the smells (no air freshener this time, just a minor undercurrent of bile and crankcase oil) or how aggressively inept the driving (one of those accelerate-and-brake guys, this time), there is that sense of enclosed flotation; of moving unassaulted through the streets of this improbable city.

They are crossing Central Park along Seventy-ninth Street, one of the finest of all nocturnal taxi rides, the park sunk in its green-black dream of itself, its little green-gold lights marking circles of grass and pavement at their bases. There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.

Rebecca says, “You didn’t save me from Hurricane Mike.”

“Hey, I wrested you away the second I saw you with him.”

She’s sitting inwardly, hugging her own shoulders though there’s not even a hint of cold.

She says, “I know you did.”

But still, he has failed her, hasn’t he?

He says, “Something seems to be going on with Bette.”

“Rice?”

How many other Bettes were at the party? How much of his life is devoted to answering these obvious little questions; how much closer does he move to a someday stroke with every fit of mini-rage over the fact that Rebecca has not been paying attention, has not been with the goddamned program?

“Mm-hm.”

“What, do you think?”

“I have no idea. Something about when she said goodbye. I felt something. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

“Bette’s at an age.”

“As in, menopause?”

“Among other things.”

They thrill him, these little demonstrations of womanly certainty. They’re right out of James and Eliot, aren’t they? We are in fact made of the same material as Isabel Archer, as Dorothea Brooke.

The cab reaches Fifth Avenue, turns right. From Fifth Avenue the park regains its aspect of dormant nocturnal threat, of black trees and a waiting, gathering something. Do the billionaires who live in these buildings ever feel it? When their drivers bring them home at night, do they ever glance across the avenue and imagine themselves safe, just barely, for now, from a wildness that watches with long and hungry patience from under the trees?

“When is Mizzy coming?” he asks.

“He said sometime next week. You know how he is.”

“Mm.”

Peter does, in fact, know how he is. He’s one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won’t, possibly can’t, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

This family of women really ruined the poor kid, didn’t they? Who could survive having been so desperately loved?

Rebecca turns to him, arms still folded across her breasts. “Does it seem ridiculous to you sometimes?”

“What?”

“These parties and dinners, all those awful people.”

“They’re not all awful.”

“I know. I just get tired of asking all the questions. Half those people don’t even know what I do.”

“That’s not true.”

Well, maybe it’s a little bit true. Blue Light, Rebecca’s arts and culture magazine, is not a heavy-hitter among people like these, I mean it’s no Artforum or Art in America. There’s art, sure, but there’s also poetry and fiction and—horror of horrors—the occasional fashion spread.

She says, “If you’d rather Mizzy not stay with us, I’ll find another place for him.”

Oh, it’s still about Mizzy, isn’t it? Little brother, the love of her life.

“No, it’s totally okay. I haven’t even seen him in, what? Five years? Six?”

“That’s right. You didn’t come to that thing in California.”

Suddenly, a pained and unexpected silence. Had she been angry about him not going to California? Had he been angry with her for being angry? No recollection. Something bad about California, though. What?

She leans forward and kisses him, sweetly, on the lips.

“Hey,” he whispers.

She burrows her face into his neck. He wraps an arm over her.

“The world is exhausting sometimes, isn’t it?” she says.

Peace made. And yet. Rebecca is capable of remembering every slight, and of trotting out months’ worth of Peter’s crimes when an argument heats up. Has he committed some infraction tonight, something he’ll hear about in June or July?

“Mm-hm,” he says. “You know, I think we can definitively say that Elena is serious about the hair and glasses, et cetera.”

“I told you she was.”

“You never did.”

“You just don’t remember.”

The cab stops for the light at Sixty-fifth Street.

Here they are: a middle-aged couple in the back of a cab (this driver’s name is Abel Hibbert, he’s young and jumpy, silent, fuming). Here are Peter and his wife, married for twenty-one (almost twenty-two) years, companionable by now, prone to banter, not much sex anymore but not no sex, not like other long-married couples he could name, and yeah, at a certain age you can imagine bigger accomplishments, a more potent and inextinguishable satisfaction, but what you’ve made for yourself isn’t bad, it’s not bad at all. Peter Harris, hostile child, horrible adolescent, winner of various second prizes, has arrived at this ordinary moment, connected, engaged, loved, his wife’s breath warm on his neck, going home.

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, doop doop de doop…

That song again.

The light changes. The driver accelerates.

The point of the sex is…

Sex doesn’t have a point.

It’s just that it can get complicated, after all these years. Some nights you feel a little… Well. You don’t exactly want to have sex but you don’t want to be half of a couple with a grown daughter, a private trove of worries, and a good-natured if slightly prickly ongoing friendship that doesn’t any longer seem to involve sex on a Saturday night, after a party, semitipsy on Elena Petrova’s much-vaunted private-stock vodka, plus a bottle of wine at dinner afterward.

He’s forty-four. Only forty-four. She’s not even forty-one yet.

Your queasy stomach doesn’t help you feel sexy. What’s up with that? What are the early symptoms of an ulcer?

In bed, she wears panties, a V-necked Hanes T-shirt, and cotton socks (her feet get cold until the height of summer). He wears white briefs. They spend ten minutes with CNN (car bomb in Pakistan, thirty-seven people; church torched in Kenya with undetermined number inside; man who’s just thrown his four young children off an eighty-foot-high bridge in Alabama—nothing about the horse, but that’d be local news, if anything), then flip around, linger for a while with Vertigo, the scene in which James Stewart takes Kim Novak (Madeleine version) to the mission to convince her that she’s not the reincarnation of a dead courtesan.

“We can’t get hooked on this,” Rebecca says.

“What time is it?”

“It’s after midnight.”

“I haven’t seen this in years.”

“The horse is still there.”

“What?”

“The horse.”

A moment later, James Stewart and Kim Novak are in fact sitting in a vintage carriage behind a life-size plastic-or-something horse.

“I thought you meant the horse from earlier,” Peter says.

“Oh. No. Funny how these things crop up, isn’t it? What’s the word?”

“Synchronicity. How do you know the horse is still there?’

“I went there. To that mission. In college. It’s all exactly the way it looks in the movie.”

“Though, of course, the horse might be gone by now.”

“We can’t get hooked on this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too tired.”

“Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”

“You know how it turns out.”

“How what turns out?”

“The movie.”

“Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”

“Watch it, if you want.”

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”

“You can’t sleep with the TV on.”

“I can try.”

“No. It’s okay.”

They stay with the movie until James Stewart sees—thinks he sees—Kim Novak fall from the tower. Then they turn it off, and turn out the lights.

“We should rent it sometime,” Rebecca says.

“We should. It’s great. I’d sort of forgotten how great it is.”

“It’s even better than Rear Window.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen either of them in so long.”

They both hesitate. Would she be just as glad to go right to sleep, too? Maybe. One is always kissing, the other is always being kissed. Thank you, Proust. He can tell she’d be just as glad to skip the sex. Why is she cooling toward him? Okay, he’s wearing a few extra pounds around his waist, and yeah, his ass isn’t headed north. What if she is in fact falling out of love with him? Would it be tragic, or liberating? What would it be like if she set him free?

It would be unthinkable. Whom would he talk to, how would he shop for groceries or watch television?

Tonight, Peter will be the one who kisses. Once they get into it, she’ll be glad. Won’t she?

He kisses her. She willingly returns the kiss. Seems willing, anyway.

By now, he couldn’t describe the sensation of kissing her, the taste of her mouth—it’s too contiguous with the taste inside his own. He touches her hair, takes a handful of it and gently pulls. He was a little rougher with her the first few years, until he understood that she didn’t like it anymore, and possibly never had. There are still these remnant gestures, mild reenactments of old ones when they were newer together, when they fucked all the time, though Peter knew even then that his desire for her was part of a bigger picture; that he had had more intense (if less wondrous) sex with exactly three other women: one who was smitten with his roommate, one who was smitten with the Fauvists, and one who was simply ridiculous. Sex with Rebecca was extraordinary right from the start because it was sex with Rebecca; with her avid mind and her wised-up tenderness and the intimations, as they got to know each other, of what he can only call her beingness.

She runs her hand lightly down his spine, rests it on his ass. He lets go of her hair, encircles her shoulders in the crook of his arm, which he knows she likes—that sense of being strongly held (one of his fantasies about her fantasies: he’s holding her aloft, the bed has vanished). With his free hand, with her help, he pulls the T-shirt up. Her breasts are round and small (when did he press that champagne glass over one of them, to demonstrate the fit—was it in the summer cottage in Truro, or the B and B in Marin?). Her nipples may have thickened and darkened a little—they are now precisely the size of the tip of his little finger, and the color of pencil erasers. Were they once slightly smaller, a little pinker? Probably. He is actually one of the few men who doesn’t obsess about younger women, which she refuses to believe.

We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?

He puts his lips to her left nipple, flicks it with his tongue. She murmurs. It’s become singular, his mouth on her breast and her response to it, the exhaled murmur, the miniature seizure he can feel along her body, as if she can’t quite believe that this, this, is happening again. He has a hard-on now. He can’t always tell, he doesn’t really care, when he’s excited on his own and when he’s excited because she is. She clutches his back, she can’t reach his ass anymore, he loves it that she likes his ass. He circles her stiffening nipple with his tongue-tip, taps the other one lightly with a finger. Tonight it will be mainly about getting her off. This often happens, has for years—it reveals its form, on any given night (when did they last fuck anyplace but at night, in bed?), usually decided up front, by who kisses whom. This one’s for her, then. That’s the sexiness of it.

She has a fold of flesh at her belly, a heaviness in her haunches. Okay. Peter, you’re not exactly a porn star, either.

He moves his mouth down over her stomach, still stroking, a little harder now, with his finger at her nipple. She makes a small, astonished sound. She gets it; they both get it; they both know; that’s the miracle. He stops stroking with his finger, starts circling. He bites at the elastic of her panties, then slips his tongue under the elastic, laps not hard but not gently at her pubic hair. Her hips cant forward. Her fingers browse through his hair.

Now it’s time to break formation, and take off their clothes. A pleasure of marriage—it doesn’t have to be seamless anymore. The slow strip is no longer necessary. You can just stop, remove what needs removing, and continue. He eases his briefs off over his hard-on, tosses them. Because this is Rebecca’s night he dives right back in before she’s had time to take off her socks, which makes her laugh. He goes back to where he was, tonguing her pubic hair, circling her right nipple. It’s a stop-action photo—suddenly, they’re nude (except for the socks, old white cotton slightly yellow along the soles, she should get new ones). She presses his head on both sides with her thighs as he kiss-walks down her V of hair, and there he is, he knows precisely, he’s a clit expert, and that’s sexy, his hawklike exactitude about it and her ecstatic drawing-in, it’s too much for a moment, and then her release, it could never be too much. Her thighs relax, rest more solidly on his shoulders, and she whispers oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Here the smell is her own, that faint hint of fresh shrimp; here’s where he’s most in love with her body and most fascinated by it, maybe a little frightened as well, she probably feels that way about his dick, too, though they’ve never talked about it, maybe they should but it’s too late to start that now, isn’t it? He’s got her going, tweaking her nipple with thumb and forefinger, lapping with his tongue at her clit, insistent, insistent, he knows (he just knows) that the relentlessness matters, the tongue and lips and fingers that won’t stop no matter what, that will find her wherever she goes; it’s that (and who knows what else?) that’ll put her over—something about admitting there’s nowhere to go, it’s too late, no point in arguing, it will not stop. She says oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, louder, no more whispering, she’s on her way, it always works (Does she ever fake it? Better not to know), he’ll get her off this way tonight, they’re too tired to actually fuck, and then she’ll take care of him, she’s an expert at that, too; they’re both on their way, they’re on their way, and then they can sleep, and then it will be Sunday.

They have two cats, named Lucy and Berlin.

What?

Dreaming. Where is this? Bedroom. His own. Rebecca’s beside him, breathing steadily.

It’s 3:10. He knows what that means.

He slips out of bed, careful not to wake her. It’s the fatal hour. He’ll be awake at least until five.

He slides the bedroom door shut, pours himself a vodka in the kitchen (no, he can’t tell the difference between what he keeps in his freezer and what Elena has smuggled in at great expense from some mountain glade in the Urals). He’s a naked man drinking vodka from a juice glass, and he lives here. He goes into the bathroom for one of the blue pills, then wanders into the living room, the part of the loft they call the living room, though it’s all really just one big room, with two bedrooms and a bathroom sectioned off.

It’s a great space, as people say. They’re lucky they got in before the market went crazy. As people say.

He’s got a nocturnal hard-on, and it’s not going away. Tell me, Mr. Harris, how long has your real estate affected you this way?

The Chris Lehrecke daybed, the Eames coffee table, the austerely perfect nineteenth-century rocking chair, the Sputnik-inspired fifties chandelier that keeps (they hope) the rest of it from seeming too solemn and self-important. The books and the candlesticks and the rugs. The art.

Right now, two paintings and a photograph. A beautiful Bock Vincent (the show’s only half sold, what’s the matter with people?) wrapped in paper and cord. A Lahkti, an exquisitely painted scene of Calcutta squalor (those sold, who can ever figure?). A Howard smoke painting, set for next fall, back gallery, helps to have something that costs a little less, especially these days. All the money’s gone, lord, where’d it go? Which Beatles song is that?

He walks to the window, pulls up the shade. Nobody’s on Mercer at three-plus in the morning, just that pallid orangey street light on the cobbles, looks like it rained a little. This window, like many New York windows, doesn’t offer much in the way of view: a patch of Mercer Street mid-block between Spring and Broome, the taciturn brown-brick facade of the building opposite (some nights there’s a light on in the fourth floor, he imagines a fellow skittish sleeper, hopes—and worries—that that person will come to the window and see him); a pile of black trash bags thrown out onto the sidewalk, and two glittery dresses, one green and one oxblood, in the window of the stratospherically expensive little shop that will probably be out of business soon; Mercer is still a little back alley for that level of trade. Like most windows in New York, Peter’s is a living portrait. By day, you can see the pedestrians through about thirty-five feet worth of their life’s journey. By night the street could be a high-definition picture of itself. If you watch it long enough it can start to feel like a Nauman, like Mapping the Studio—the strange fascination that announces itself, gradually, as you watch a cat, a moth, a mouse flit quickly through those supposedly empty nighttime rooms; the growing sense that rooms are never empty, not only of furtive animal life but of their inanimate selves, their piles of paper and half-empty coffee cups, all of which would remain, not cognizant but not exactly unconscious, either—haunted, you might say—if humans suddenly vanished and the rooms remained just as they were the moment everyone got up to leave. If he himself died, or if he just got dressed and walked away right now and never came back, this room would retain something of him, some mix of portrait and essence.

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.