By Nightfall

THE BRONZE AGE

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.”

“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.”

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.

He times his ascent of the staircase with that of Bette, who climbs at a smoker’s pace. She’s just had a Marlboro Light in front of the museum, and said, in response to the skeptical glance Peter had decided against, “Trust me, a cancer scare is not the time to give up smoking.”

At the top of the stairs, Tiepolo’s Marius continues to triumph. The boy continues banging on his tambourine.

On the way to the contemporary galleries, Peter pauses before the Rodin at the entrance to Nineteenth-Century European. Bette gets a few paces ahead, turns, and comes back.

“Still here,” she says. They came for the Hirst, why is Peter stopping? Hasn’t he seen the Rodin a thousand times?

Peter says, “You know how…”

“Yes?”

“How something pops out at you sometimes?”

“Today, Rodin pops out?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why.”

Bette settles beside Peter with that aspect of mother-alligator calm she can summon. This is probably how she was with her sons when they were small, when they were fascinated by something that bored her—this attitude of informed but charitable willingness. This would be part of why they turned out okay.

She says, “No denying its merits.”

“No.”

Here, as always, is Auguste Neyt, aka The Vanquished, aka The Bronze Age: perfect bronze man-child, exactly life-size, trim and lithe, holding his invisible spear. Rodin was still unknown when he sculpted and cast this naked man, sans Ancient Greek musculature or French devotion to allegory; Rodin a minor figure then but proven right by time—the heroic was dying out, the real was arriving for a long, long stay. Now Rodin has been and gone and yes, of course, he’s part of history, but new artists don’t revere him, no one makes a pilgrimage, you learn about him in school, you pass his sculptures and maquettes on your way to see the Damien Hirst.

Still. It’s fucking bronze, it could last forever (didn’t the Koenig sphere survive 9/11?). Alien archeologists might unearth it one day and really, would it be such bad evidence of who and what we were? Auguste Neyt, centuries dead by then, his name lost but his form preserved, nude, unidealized, merely young and healthy, with his life ahead of him.

“Okay?” Bette says.

“Okay.”

They walk quietly and with purpose by the Carrière and Puvis de Chavannes, past Gérôme’s Pygmalion kissing Galatea. At the gallery’s far end they turn, pass the books-and-gifts kiosk, turn again.

And there it is, the shark, suspended in its pale blue, strangely lovely formaldehyde; there is the lethal perfection of its shape and here is its maw, jagged, big as a barrelhead, the business end—is there any other creature so clearly intended to be a mouth propelled by a body?

It remains a jolt; it still produces that prickle of animal panic along the surface of Peter’s skin. Which is, of course, one of the questions. Who isn’t going to be moved by a thirteen-foot-long dead shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde?

Peter’s stomach lurches. The queasiness is worse after he eats. He should probably go to the doctor.

“Hm,” Bette says.

“Hm.”

It has to do with the immaculate packaging, Peter thinks—the hefty but pristine white steel tank (twenty-two tons), the azure solution in which the creature floats. The shark is so entirely contained, so utterly dead, its eyes opaque, its hide hoarily wrinkled. And yet…

“It’s something, seeing it here,” Bette says.

“It is something.”

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Yes. It’s something.

Three girls and a boy, fourteen or fifteen, circle nervously around the tank, appalled, deciding how exactly to mock it. A little boy holds his father’s hand and says, “This is scary?”—posed as a question. A middle-aged couple stands by the shark’s tail, huddled, conferring gravely in what sounds like Spanish, consulting each other, as if they’ve been sent to do something painful but necessary, for the greater good.

Bette says, “This one’s a female.”

“Do you think they should have kept the first one?”

“There was no way Steve Cohen was going to have paid eight million bucks and just watch the goddamned thing disintegrate.”

“No. No way.”

“It’s a little hard to see it at this point,” Bette says. “I mean, there’s the object, and then there’s Hirst’s career, not to mention Hirst himself, and there’s Cohen’s eight million and the Met thinking it’s daring to show something that’s been around almost twenty years…”

The high school kids gather before the shark’s midsection, all but trembling with fear and sexuality and disdain, speaking softly in a private language (Peter catches bits: “—you’re such a handbag—” (handbag, no, he must have misheard) “—never have—” “—Thomas and Esme and Prue—”). One of the girls puts a hand on the glass, pulls it quickly away again. The other two girls shriek and run from the gallery as if their friend has set off an alarm.

Bette strides up to the front of the tank, bends over slightly to see into the shark’s open maw. The girl who touched the glass remains, the boy beside her. She fingers the seam of the boy’s jeans. Young lovers, then. The girl’s face is resolute, small-mouthed, something pious about it—she could be Amish, never mind the Courtney Love T-shirt and green leather jacket. She is a handsome and probably intelligent girl contemplating a shark alongside her boyfriend (who is gay, anyone can see it, does he know that yet, does she?), and Peter is briefly in love with her, or anyway with who and what she’ll become (there she is ten years from now, in a tight little sparkly dress, laughing, at a party somewhere), and then the boy whispers to her and they leave, and Peter will never see her again.

Bea is angry with him in a way that feels permanent, but hey, she’s only twenty years old. Still. She’s diminishing, up there in Boston; she’s thin and pale and tightly wound, no boyfriends, no discernible passions beyond her determination to do something practical with her life, her conviction that art is ridiculous, by which she means Peter is ridiculous, by which she means he seduced her, all those years, into loving him too much and Rebecca too little, which she has recently come to understand is the source of her persistent loneliness and intermittent depression, her disappointment in men and her trouble connecting with women.

“It’s impressive,” Bette says, of the shark. “You let yourself think, oh, it’s a gesture, it’s just a dead shark, every natural history museum is full of them, but then you stand in a gallery with it, and, well…”

Bette has grown bottom-heavy with age. She is wearing black Reeboks. As she leans unafraid toward the mouth of the shark, she is touching but not heroic—no, she is perhaps heroic in her way but she is not potent, she does not possess even Ahab’s doomed and fanatic grandeur though she has, in her life, had some measure of his crazy conviction (think of the artists she’s taken on). But now, on a Sunday afternoon at the Met, she is an old woman looking into the mouth of a dead shark.

Peter goes and stands beside her. “It’s an impressive gesture,” he says.

Behind Peter’s and Bette’s dim reflections on the glass, the shark’s jaws gape—there are the rows of lethal, serrated teeth, and beyond, pickled white, is the orifice itself, which takes on the shade of the solution’s blue, grayed and deepened, as it recedes into the shark’s own inner darkness.

Bette has not told Peter the truth. Not the whole truth. The surgeon didn’t get all the cancer, she’s not going to be all right. Peter knows this with a tingling immediacy that’s like the creaturely alertness produced by the shark itself. An infinitesimal length of tape self-erases in his brain, and he’ll never know if he understood at JoJo’s or later that Bette is, in fact, dying, and will do so sooner rather than later. That’s why she’s closing the gallery right now. That’s why Jack is leaving Columbia.

Peter reaches over and takes her hand. It’s more or less involuntary, and only after he’s touched her does he pause to wonder, is this ridiculous, is it melodramatic? Will she rebuke him? Her fingers are surprisingly soft and crepey, an old woman’s. She squeezes his hand with hers, gently and quickly. They hold hands for a few seconds, then part. If the gesture was excessive or false, if it was self-dramatizing on Peter’s part, Bette doesn’t seem to mind, not now, not in front of the shark.

Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he’s picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up. As his ears adjust to the particular sing-silence of home, he hears the shower. Rebecca’s here. Good. He’s often as grateful as Rebecca is for a little solitude when he comes home but not now, not today. It’s hard to say what he feels. He wishes it were as simple as sorrow for Bette. It’s hollower than sorrow. It’s a deep loneliness muddled up with some underlayer of jittery fear, who knows what to call it, but he wants to see his wife, he wants to curl up with her, maybe watch something stupid on TV, let the world go dark for the night, let it fall.

Peter walks through the bedroom to the bathroom. There she is, the pink blur of her behind the frosted glass shower door. There’s mortality in the air and sharks in the water but there’s this, too, Rebecca taking a shower, the vanity mirror fogged by steam, the bathroom smelling of soap and that other undersmell Peter can only call clean.

He opens the shower door.

Rebecca is young again. She stands in the stall facing away from Peter, her hair short, her back strong and straight from swimming; she is half hidden by steam and for an instant it all makes impossible sense: Bette’s hand in Peter’s and the Rodin boy-man waiting for the centuries to bury him and Rebecca in the shower sluicing away the last twenty years, a girl again.

She turns, surprised.

It isn’t Rebecca. It’s Mizzy. It’s the Mistake.

Right. The solid square plates of his pectorals, the V of his hips; here is the small dark bristle of pubic hair, the pink-brown jut of his dick.

“Hey,” he says cordially to Peter. Being seen naked by Peter does not, apparently, render Mizzy even remotely uncomfortable.

“Hey,” Peter answers. “Sorry.”

He steps back, closes the shower door. Mizzy has always been shameless, no, more like shame-free, satyrlike, so unembarrassed by nakedness or by biological functions that he makes almost everyone else seem like a Victorian aunt. With the shower door closed Peter can see only the fleshly pink silhouette, and although Peter knows it’s Mizzy (Ethan) he finds himself pausing, thinking of the young Rebecca (striding into the surf, slipping out of a white cotton dress, standing on the balcony of that cheap hotel in Zurich), until he realizes he’s lingered there a second or two longer than he should—Mizzy, don’t get the wrong idea—and he turns to leave. As he does he catches sight of his own ghostly image, the blur of him, skating across the steam-fogged mirror.