By Nightfall

NIGHTTOWN

After the fact, Peter passes through a wave of nausea over what it is he’s done—who does this make him, exactly? How can Mizzy, alone among the realm of men, excite him so? Is it possible to be gay for one man only?

What’s wrong with him? Has his whole fucking life been a lie?

Still, the bigger surprise for Peter is how tender he feels now, how strangely solicitous, toward Mizzy. Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.

Mizzy has spent the afternoon in his sister’s fancy loft, getting high and beating off. And, yes, it’s more compelling to Peter than any determination to sit in a mountain garden, contemplating rocks. Now he can begin to love Mizzy, now that he no longer feels the need to protect or admire him.

There is (was, it’s past eleven now) a slightly awkward interlude when Rebecca got home, because Peter had to feign having been deeply asleep for hours, which implied faking an illness far more acute than the one he’s actually suffering, which meant just a bowl of soup for dinner, and no alcohol. (By the way, is the drinking becoming a problem, how exactly are we supposed to know?) The fact that Mizzy was clearly more than a little discomfited, as who wouldn’t be, suddenly learning that someone had been on the premises the whole time, even if he hadn’t bought drugs and masturbated… Peter gave what he hoped was a convincing portrayal of a man so brought down by a stomach bug that he’d been comatose, zeroed out, dead to the proverbial, and once he’d been resurrected by Rebecca he was like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, all doddering ephemerality, must have been the mayo in that turkey wrap, yes, he’ll have Uta call them first thing in the morning, right now it’s a cup of broth for the poor old wretch and then back to bed at, like, eight thirty, where he’ll continue to feign malediction (he feels almost entirely fine, by the way, the actual intestinal episode has subsided to its ordinary, ongoing condition of minor queasiness) while watching old episodes of Lost. On his way out of the room he takes a good short look at Mizzy, who does not seem entirely reassured; who sits at the table with a glass of wine looking so young and guilty and… what?… tragic, tragic in a way that’s available only to the young, the young and self-immolating (how is Peter going to tell Rebecca that Mizzy is using again?), anyone young enough, that is, to be going down ahead of the curve; it’s different entirely from the tragedies of age, even of middle age, when any hint of downfall is shaded by gravity, by wounds, by the simple, maddening failure to stay young. Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It’s James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it’s Marilyn heading off to bed.

By midnight Peter has been prone for so many hours as a faux convalescent he suspects he’s getting bedsores, which is, of course, ridiculous, but he may in fact be developing some subtle form of brainsores, it’s hard enough for him to take care of himself when he actually is sick; a half day of lying-in when he’s (relatively) healthy is pretty close to intolerable. Rebecca is asleep beside him now, Mizzy has retired to his room. Peter lies with his breathing wife. On the opposite side of the flimsy wall, Mizzy makes no sound of any kind. Peter wonders: Is Mizzy lying there in a similar state, wide awake but stock still, nervous about what Peter might have heard regardless of Peter’s insistence that he was deep-sixed? Peter briefly imagines them, Mizzy and himself, as two medieval tomb effigies, brothers in arms; if Mizzy looked earlier like an idealized, sculpted warrior, Peter now sees them both, laid in their sarcophagi side by side, safe as only the dead can be, the older and the younger man, fallen together in some battle fought on a piece of contested land that is now, in all likelihood, a parking lot or a strip mall, though he and Mizzy remain just as they were when the land was a prize beyond measure and the monks laid the two of them down, new members of eternity, inhabitants of a vanished world that was not easier than the current one but was neither shoddy nor tawdry; a world of woods and fens, sparsely peopled, in which men slashed and grappled and beat their shields over possession of turf that could still grow crops, of forests where gods and monsters still watched from the shadows. There’s something about Mizzy that suggests the Middle Ages, it’s that pallid, fine-boned prettiness, the sorrowful eyes, the sense (Peter can’t stop thinking about this) that he’s ephemeral, he’s the Mistake, he’s the ghost child who can’t attach to the world as firmly as most people do.

Peter will, of course, tell Rebecca that Little Brother had a drug dealer over. How could he not? He’d have told her tonight but… what? But there was his charade, playing ill like that, getting fussed over, and it was seductive, being treated as an invalid without the inconvenience of being actually sick. And so it seems he’s permitted himself to put off, for one night, the long, anguished conversation with his wife, all those questions about what to do. They can’t (they’ve looked into it) have Mizzy committed to a halfway house against his will and they can’t kick him out, can they, now that he’s using again, that would be like sending a child alone into the woods, but they can’t let him stay either, can they, not if he’s giving their address to dealers. And Mizzy, of course, like any addict, has no relationship to the truth in any form, he might swear that he’d never ever buy drugs out of the loft again, he might tremble and weep and beg forgiveness, and it wouldn’t mean anything at all. Fucking Taylors. Because, let’s be honest here, they live for this, they love fretting over Mizzy, it’s the family pastime, and really, having granted himself this false affliction, who could blame Peter for wanting to put off, if only for a night, the depths of Rebecca’s disappointment and worry, the frantic calls to Rose and Julie, the appeals to Peter for his opinion about what to do and the likelihood that his opinion, whatever it is, will be deemed too harsh or too lenient, because he can’t be right about Mizzy, ever, because he is not a member of the congregation.

Peter slips off into sleep, wakes again. Dream blips dissipate: he has a secret house in Munich (Munich?), some doctor has left a message there. Then he’s returned entirely, it’s his bedroom, Rebecca is sleeping beside him.

And he is now utterly, hopelessly awake, at twenty-three minutes after midnight.

He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca’s living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in… something. Something viable, something living, that’s surprised when he wakes at this hour, that’s neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal, inchoate musings.

Time for a vodka and a sleeping pill.

He gets out of bed. Rebecca does that sleep-move thing, that subtle but palpable drawing into herself, the little flutter of her fingers, the resettling of her mouth, by which he knows that although he has not awakened her she understands, somehow, in her sleep, that he’s leaving their bed.

He leaves the bedroom. He’s halfway across the living room before he sees it: Mizzy, standing naked in the kitchen, looking out the window.

Mizzy turns. He’s heard Peter approach. He stands squarely on both feet, with his arms at his sides, and Peter thinks briefly of the Visible Man, that clear plastic model with the colored organs inside, which he had lovingly built at ten and which, to his ten-year-old brain, seemed touched by the divine. It had seemed to him that angels might look like this, forget robes and billows of hair, an angel would be immaculately transparent, an angel would stand before you as the Visible Man did, as Mizzy does now, offering himself, neither imploring nor standoffish, simply present, and naked, and real.

“Hey,” Mizzy says softly.

“Hey,” Peter answers. He keeps approaching. Mizzy is as motionless and unabashed as a model in a life-drawing class.

Okay, this is strange, isn’t it? Peter keeps walking, what else can he do? But something’s going on, right? There’s this sense (can’t be true, but nevertheless) that Mizzy has been waiting for him.

Peter gets to the kitchen. Mizzy is standing in the middle but it’s a big enough space that Peter can get around him, just barely, without either touching him or making an elaborate effort to avoid touching him. He pours himself a glass of water at the sink, because he has to do something.

“How you feeling?” Mizzy asks.

“Better. Thanks.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“No. You, too?”

“No.”

“I have some Klonopin in the bathroom. I am, frankly, a big fan of a vodka and a Klonopin at times like this. You want one? I mean, you want both?”

Oops, wait a minute, he’s just offered drugs to an addict.

“Are you going to tell her?” Mizzy asks.

“Tell her what?”

Mizzy doesn’t answer. Peter steps back, sipping his tap water, and appraises this naked boy who seems to be standing in his kitchen—the modest cords of vein, one apiece, that lazily span each biceps; the hairless, pale pink slats of the abdomen, and, jutting out from its modest tangle of chestnut-colored pubic hair, the thing itself, respectable, big enough but not pornographically huge, its tip purpled by the dim light. Here are the sinewy young legs that can run up a mountainside with ease, and here are the surprisingly square, vaguely ursine feet.

Tell her what?

Mizzy has the good sense to let a silence settle, and Peter has neither the skill nor the inclination, after a few seconds worth of quiet, to insist on ignorance. To be truthful, he hasn’t got the strength.

“I think I have to,” he says.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Of course you do.”

“Not for my own sake. Not only for that. You know as well as I do. My sisters get crazy, and it doesn’t make any difference.”

“When did you start again?”

“In Copenhagen.”

Skip over, for now, the unthinkable privilege of this boy, whose parents continue to send the checks, who breezily stops off in Copenhagen on his way back from Japan. Try not to hate him for that.

“Would the word ‘why’ be entirely absurd?” Peter says.

Mizzy sighs, a sweet reedy sound, not unlike the particular royal sigh Matthew perfected all those years ago.

“It’s a perfectly good question. It just doesn’t really have an answer.”

“Do you want help quitting again?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“By all means.”

“Not right now. In a while.” He lifts his hands and cups his palms close to his face, as if he were about to drink water from them. He says, “It’s always so ridiculous to say to someone who’s never used, you can’t understand.”

Peter hesitates. “Ridiculous” is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that “someone who’s never used” is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we’ve learned how about bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. It helps, of course—let’s not get carried away—if you’re a young prince like Mizzy, and you’ve actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.

Is it any wonder that the Taylors obsess over this boy? What would they be without him? An aging academic who’s published two unremarkable books (the evolution of the dithyramb into spoken oratory, some hitherto overlooked foreshadowings of classical Greek culture in Mycenae), a woman going harmlessly dotty (obsessions with thrift and recycling, oddly paired with a complete indifference to household filth), and three lovely daughters who are doing variously well (Rebecca), slightly suspiciously too well (Julie), and neither well nor badly (Rose).

Peter says to Mizzy, “There’s not really much I can do with a statement like that.”

And by the way, what if Rebecca should come out of the bedroom right now? You understand, don’t you, that my only option would be to tell her everything. And that it would look weird, you standing out here naked like this, no matter what I told her.

Didn’t Rebecca once say, I suspect Mizzy is capable of just about anything? Didn’t she say it with a certain combination of anger and reverence?

“I know,” Mizzy answers. “Okay.”

Okay?

Mizzy places his fingertips on either side of his jawbone. Churchly. The young seeker come to proclaim his unworthiness.

He says, “I feel like I’m starting to see the world just… go along without me. And, you know, why shouldn’t it? But I don’t have. Any idea about what to do. I’ve thought for so long that if I just said no to all the, you know, obviously bad ideas, like law school, that the good idea would just sort of come along. And I begin to see that this is how sad old failures get their start. I mean, first you’re a cute young failure, and then…”

He laughs, a long, low sob of a laugh.

Peter says, “Despair seems premature.”

“I know. I do know. But this is a bad time for me. I fell into, I don’t know, some kind of pit up there in that shrine, it was exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen. I… felt like I began to see the transitory nature of all things, the serene absence in the middle of the world, but it wasn’t comforting. It made me want to kill myself.”

Again, a strain of the sob-laugh.

“That would be overreacting,” Peter says. Fuck, there it is again, that desire to be tough but compassionate that comes out sounding flip and callous.

“Don’t let me get melodramatic,” Mizzy says. “Here’s what I’m trying to say. I’m walking a line. I can’t tell myself that what I need is to go to a better shrine, or a shrine in a different country. I’m out of illusions. I need a little help getting through right now. I’m not proud of it. If I can feel okay for a little while, if I can get out of bed and get moving in the mornings, if you can possibly help me get started on a job, I’ll quit. I’ve quit before. It’s something I know I can do.”

“You’re putting me in an impossible position.”

“I’m asking you for a little help. I know, I know, but it’s too late to change that, and really, really and truly, I need a couple of months. I need a couple months of feeling okay, so I can start a life. And, well. You know what’ll happen if you tell Rebecca.”

He does.

“Will you promise not to have it delivered here anymore?” he says.

“Absolutely.”

Yeah, right.

“I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I need. Thank you.”

With that he leans over and kisses Peter, gently, at least semichastely, on the lips.

Whoa.

Mizzy pulls back, offers a charmingly abashed smile that has to have been practiced over the years.

“Sorry,” he says. “My friends and I all kiss each other, I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Got you.”

And yet. Is Mizzy offering himself?

Peter takes the Stoli bottle out of the freezer, pours them each a shot. What the hell. Then he goes to the bathroom for the Klonopin. Mizzy knows to wait in the kitchen. When Peter returns, with a little blue pill for each of them, they say “Chin chin” and down the pills with the vodka.

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn’t want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There’s the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that’s not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her very real worries on Mizzy’s behalf, also understand Mizzy’s desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that you will be healed, whether you want to be or not.

Men are united in their commonness, maybe it’s as simple as that.

And, okay, for a moment, a moment, Peter imagines that he, too, could be a Rodin, not, of course, the boy of the Bronze Age but not a Burgher of Calais either; he could be an undiscovered Rodin, the aging but unbowed, a figure of stern dignity, standing foursquare, weaponless, bare-chested (his chest is still muscular, his belly not bad), with a drape around his loins, as befits a gentleman of years (who’s not crazy about the condition of his ass).

“Thanks again,” Mizzy says. “For thinking about it.”

“Mm.”

“Night.”

“Good night.”

Mizzy returns to his room. Peter watches him go, his supple back and the small, perfect spheres of his ass. Whatever’s gay in Peter is probably mostly about ass, the place where another man is most vulnerable, childlike; the place where his physiognomy seems least built for a fight.

Go ahead. Say it silently, inside your mind. Nice ass, little brother.

And now, poor creature, to bed.

Sleep, however, will not return. After a full hour he gets out of bed, gropes for his clothes. Rebecca stirs.

“Peter?”

“Shh. Everything’s okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“I feel better.”

“Really?”

“It must have been food poisoning. I’m suddenly okay again.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I just want some air. Back in ten minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

He leans over, kisses her, inhales the sleepy, sweet-sweaty smell she emanates.

“Don’t go for long.”

“I won’t.”

Again, the ice pick in the chest. Someone who worries over you, tends to you, and for whom you do the same… Don’t couples live longer than single people, because they’re better cared for? Didn’t somebody do a study?

He’s eavesdropped on his wife’s brother as he whacked off, there’s probably no way to tell her that, ever, is there?

He does have to tell her that the precious little brother is using again. How and when does he do that?

Dressed, he steps out into the semidark of the big room. There’s no line of light under the door to Mizzy’s room.

Time to go out, just out, into the nocturnal world.

And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world’s richest, best-dressed refugees.

Mercer Street is empty late at night. Peter turns uptown, then heads east on Prince, toward Broadway, going nowhere in particular but generally toward the more raucous, younger part of downtown, away from the filtered Jamesian slumber of the West Village. He’s aware of his own reflection skating silently alongside him in the dark windows of closed shops. The semiquiet of Prince Street holds for less than a block and then he’s crossing Broadway, which, of course, is never quiet, though this particular stretch is a Blade Runner strip mall, with its mammoth suburban chain stores, its Navy and Banana and Etcetera, which have reproduced themselves as perfectly here as they would anywhere, though here they display their wares to an endless riot of horn-blasting traffic; here their doorways are makeshift nocturnal homes that the resident sleepers have rigged up out of cardboard and blankets. Peter waits for the light, crosses among a small congregation of those nighttime pedestrians of lower Broadway, the couples and quartets (they’re always paired) who are neither old nor young, who are clearly prosperous, who are Out for the Night and seem to be having a good-enough time, having driven in, he supposes, from somewhere nearby, parked in a public garage, had dinner, and are now headed… where? To retrieve their cars, to go home. Where else? These are not people with inscrutable assignations. They’re not tourists, either, they’re nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don’t live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they’re burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they’re creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don’t like driving in New York, because they’d rather stay home (right now, the woman in the fringed pashmina shawl, the one walking arm-in-arm with Cowboy Boots, explodes in laughter, a great smacking hoot of a laugh, a three-martinis laugh, audible for a block or so), while the residents of downtown Manhattan, the ones who survive the days here, walk more modestly, certainly more quietly, more like penitents, because it’s almost impossible to maintain a sense of hubris when you live here, you’re too constantly confronted by the rampant otherness of others; hubris is surely much more attainable when you’ve got a house and lawn and an Audi, when you understand that at the end of the world you’ll get a second’s more existence because the bomb won’t be aimed at you, the shock wave will take you out but you’re not anybody’s main target, you’ve removed yourself from the kill zone, no one gets shot where you live, no one gets stabbed by a random psychopath, the biggest threat to your personal, ongoing security is the possibility that the neighbor’s son will break in and steal a few prescription bottles from your medicine cabinet.

Now that he’s on the other side of Broadway, now that Cowboy Boots and his laughing wife have veered south, isn’t he moving step by step closer to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in which he himself is every bit as bourgeois; every bit as pompously, cluelessly dressed? He lives in a goddamned loft in SoHo (how eighties is that?), he has employees, and up ahead, mere blocks away, there are gaggles of young headbangers who live in walk-ups, who are buying beer with their actual last dimes. Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy’s Tony Lamas do to you? There’s a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon.

Head downtown, then. Toward Tribeca.

What is Bea doing tonight?

Her life has been, for more than a year now, a mystery, and Peter and Rebecca have decided (wrongly?) not to press her for more details than she cares to volunteer. Why did she leave Tufts? She wanted some time off, she’d been in school all her life. Okay, that made sense. Why, of all the places there are to go and the things there are to do, has she elected to work in a hotel bar in Boston, and to live with a strange, older woman who seems to have no occupation at all? That question has been neither asked nor answered. They have faith in her, they’ve elected to have faith in her, though faith can be thin and unsustaining, over time. Worry, of course they worry, but worse than that, they’ve begun to wonder what mistake they made, how they infected their daughter with some virus of the spirit that’s taken twenty-one years to bloom.

The thing with Mizzy has got Peter hopped up.

He takes out his BlackBerry and speed-dials Bea’s number.

He’ll get her voice mail. She picks up for Rebecca on Sundays, she still harbors a fondness for her mother, or at any rate a sense of duty toward her. Otherwise, she never answers. They leave messages occasionally, wait for the Sunday connections.

Tonight, he needs to leave her a message. He needs to leave a bouquet at her doorstep, knowing the flowers will wilt and die there.

Her phone rings five times. And then, as expected:

“Hello, it’s Bea, please leave a message.”

“Darling, it’s your father. I’m just calling to say hey, really. And to tell you…”

Before he can say I love you, she picks up.

“Daddy?”

My God.

“Hey. Hey there. I thought you’d probably be working.”

“They sent me home. It was slow tonight.”

“Well. Hey.”

He’s as nervous as he was the first time he called Rebecca to ask her out. What’s going on here? Bea hasn’t accepted a call from him since she left for college.

“So I’m just home,” she says. “Watching TV.”

He’s on Bowery by now. Where is Bea? In some Boston apartment he’s never seen—she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to be visited. Impossible not to imagine elderly shag carpeting and stains on the ceiling. Bea doesn’t make much money (refuses help from her parents), and she, the true child of aesthetes, rarely does more to a room than tack up a poster or two. (Does she still put up Flannery O’Connor posing with a peacock, and Kafka’s mild handsome face, or has she moved on to other passions?)

“I’m sorry for calling so late,” he says. “I thought you’d be at work.”

“You called because you thought I wouldn’t answer.”

Think fast.

“I guess I thought I’d just leave a little love note for you.”

“Why tonight?”

He walks down Bowery toward the nameless strip that isn’t quite Chinatown and isn’t Little Italy either.

“I could call any night, sweetheart,” he says. “I guess you’re on my mind tonight.”

No, she’s always on your mind. How can this conversation feel like a date that isn’t going well?

“You’re up late,” she says. “Are you outside? It sounds like you’re outside.”

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep, I’m out for a walk.”

Where he’s walking now it’s just warehouses and shuttered, unprospering shops, wan streetlight shining down onto puddled cobblestones, so silent you can hear a rat browsing through a paper bag on the sidewalk; our own nighttown… no, we’ve got no nighttown, the true squalor, the tranny hookers and the serious drug dealers (not those sad X, coke, smoke? guys you pass in the parks) have been run out, by Giuliani, by the rich; New York still has its desolate stretches but you’re rarely in real danger anymore, no one’s selling heroin out of that gutted building over there, no misshapen beauty with gassed-out eyes is going to offer to blow you for twenty. This is no nighttown and you, sir, are no Leopold Bloom.

“We’re both insomniacs,” she says. “I got that from you.”

Does she mean that as a gesture of affinity, or is she reciting a curse?

“I do wonder why you called me tonight,” she adds.

Oh, Bea, cut me some slack, I’m penitant, I’m penniless, I’m at your mercy. The ratty desolation through which Peter walks builds rather quickly into the outskirts of Chinatown, Manhattan’s only thriving nation-state, the only one that’s growing without the intercession of coffeehouses or cool little bars.

“I told you,” he says. “I was thinking about you. I wanted to leave a message.”

“Are you upset about something?”

“No more than usual.”

“Because you sound like you’re upset about something.”

Peter fights an urge to hang up on her. Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t. Still, impulses run rampant: You’re plain, you’re not that bright, you’re a disappointment. He can’t. He’d never.

“I’m just upset about the usual things. Money, and the end of the world.”

He can’t get flippant with her, won’t even try his seductive wit. This is his daughter he’s talking to.

She says, “Do you need me to send you a check?”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s joking. He snorts out a laugh. If she laughs back, he can’t hear it for the traffic.

He’s crossing Canal now, headed into the lurid neon and fluorescence of Chinatown proper, all gaudy reds and yellows; it’s as if blue isn’t in the spectrum here at all. They never turn the lights off, they don’t take the dangling, stretch-necked cooked ducks out of the windows; as if it possesses a continuing, unquenchable place-life that can be populated or not. A yellow sign says good, just that, and offers by way of demonstration a murky tank full of sluggish, mud brown catfish.

“And, okay,” he says, “your mother’s brother is kind of a big dose.”

“Oh, right, Dizzy. He’s a spoiled brat.”

“That he is.”

“So you thought it would be a nice contrast to talk to your happy, well-adjusted daughter.”

Please, Bea. Please have mercy.

Children don’t. Do they? Did you, Peter, have mercy on your own parents?

Even he doesn’t buy the low chuckle he forces out. “I’d never ask anything as impossible as happy or well-adjusted from you,” he says.

“So it’s a comfort to you, to think of me as unhappy.”

What’s up with you?

“How’s Claire?” The roommate.

“She’s out. It’s just me and the cats.”

He says, “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Bea. I just don’t want to be one of those parents who insist that their kid be, you know, happy all the time.”

“Are we going to have a serious talk?” she says. “Do you want to have a serious talk?”

No. It’s the last thing I want.

“Sure,” he says. “If you want to.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She says, “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Our Town.”

“Your senior play.”

She’d played the mother. Not Emily. Banish that thought.

Bea in high school—a solid and ironic girl with two close girlfriends (now at Brown and Berkeley), no visible boys, a young life not devoid of pleasure but not in any way voluptuous, not even a little bit reckless. Long, earnest talks with the friends, then homework and bed. She and the friends (their names were Sarah and Elliott, solid and ironic as well, Peter liked them, will he ever see them again?) went to movies on the weekends, shopped sometimes for the heavy sweaters and lace-up boots to which they were devoted. They went skating once, at Wollman Rink, but never again.

“You seemed so unconcerned about it,” she says.

“No. I thought you were great.”

“You didn’t tell me that. You were talking on your phone the whole time. Some sort of deal you had to make.”

Didn’t he? Was he? No. She’s inventing this. He did tell her she was great, he used that exact word, and he wasn’t talking on his phone after the play, what kind of man would do that?

She says, “I know it’s sort of pathetic, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

“I do. I remember it perfectly.”

This is a false memory, Bea. Do you believe, do you actually believe, that I’d go backstage after my daughter’s senior play and talk to some client on my cell phone?

“Wow” is the best he can do. “Hey, if I didn’t say the right thing, I’m sorry. I did think you were great.”

“I wasn’t. That’s the thing. I couldn’t act, and we both knew it.”

“No, no,” Peter says. “I think you can do anything.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Daddy. I don’t need you to.”

It is true? Of course she can’t do anything, no one can do anything, and yeah, of course, you see your child’s limitations, you’ve had parent-teacher conferences about her limitations, fatherhood doesn’t render you blind, but you love her, you truly do, and you encourage her, you tell her (I did, I swear I did) that she was great as the mother in Our Town.

She saw through it, didn’t she? She was smarter than she let on.

How do you tell her that her quote unquote limitations don’t matter to you?

He says, “I love you. I love whatever you do.”

She answers, “I think you did your very best to love me. I think you had limitations of your own.”

Fuck.

Is that why you’re so maidenly, is that why your bed remains narrow? Is that why you seem to want so little?

Chinatown dissipates, and is replaced by the brooding brown bulk of Tribeca, the solemn quiet of its streets.

Unlike Chinatown, Tribeca’s nocturnal quiet doesn’t feel anticipatory. If, for a few hours every day, it’s possible to get a haircut or buy a lamp or have a three-hundred-dollar dinner, that doesn’t appear to matter much, not to the broad light-bleached streets or the brown-and-gray rectitude of the buildings, which have been cutting exactly these shapes out of the New York sky since before your grandfather was born.

He says, “I’m sure I did. I’m sure I do.”

He is taken by a strange, almost luxuriant desire for her to scream at him, to let him have it, nail him and abuse him, accuse him of every known crime, so he doesn’t have to keep responding, doesn’t have to struggle for the next thing to say.

She’s not going to do it, though, is she? She is, has always been, sullen and inward, prone as a child to singing soft, angry little songs she’d made up.

She does say this. “I hate being the wounded daughter who needed more attention. That’s not who I want to be.”

“How can I help you now?” he asks. “What can I do?”

Please, Bea, either forgive me or excoriate me. I can’t have this conversation much longer.

You have to have this conversation, though. For as long as she asks you to.

She says, “You can see awfully well, but I’m not sure how well you can hear.”

She’s been saving that one up, hasn’t she?

Now he’s in the Financial District, the World of Buildings, no way of knowing—except for the actual Stock Exchange—what goes on in any of them except, of course, that it’s all Something to Do with Finance, it’s like Mizzy wanting to do Something in the Arts; it’s the effect these citadels have, whether they be the New Museum or this titanic, vaguely seventies monolith he’s passing now, that purposeful inscrutability, those fortresslike heights—what wouldn’t lead the young and lost to stand at their bases and think, I’d like to do Something in There?

Mizzy has sat with the sacred stones. Now he wants to be part of something that recognizes him.

“I’m listening now,” he says. “I’m right here. Keep talking to me.”

Bea says, “I’m all right, Daddy. I’m not some kind of basket case. I have a job and a place to live.”

Hasn’t she always insisted, even as a little girl, that she was all right? Hasn’t she always gone uncomplainingly to school and had her two or three friends and lived as privately as she could behind the leaky walls of her room?

Weren’t he and Rebecca relieved that she seemed to require so little?

He says, “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s something.”

A silence follows.

Jesus, Bea. Just how guilty do you need me to be?

And now, finally, Peter reaches Battery Park. There to the left is the arctic glow of the Staten Island Ferry, up ahead are the tall black-granite pillars that bear the names of the war dead. He walks down the broad aisle formed by the memorials. Moby-Dick opens in Battery Park, first it’s “Call me Ishmael” and then—impossible to remember it beyond the vaguest paraphrase—there’s a riff about this mole assaulted by waves, that’s not it, but he does remember that the land is called a mole. There it is, up ahead, the black roil of the harbor, netted with light, he can smell it suddenly, and sure, it’s urban sea-smell, brine mingled with oil, but exciting nevertheless, that eternal, maternal wildness though compromised by all the crap that’s dumped into this particular seawater, seawater it remains, and this finger of land, this mole, is the city’s only point of contact with something bigger and more potent than itself.

“I suppose you know what’s best for you,” he says. Can she hear the impatience in his voice?

Peter stands at the railing. There it all is: Ellis Island and Miss Liberty herself, that verdigris apparition, so fraught with meaning that she’s transcended meaning. You love (if you love anything about her) her greenness and her constancy, the fact that she’s still here even though you haven’t seen her in years. Peter stands with the dark glitter-specked water rumbling in in humps—no waves, just rolls of water that break against the seawall with a deep phloom sound and send up modest tiaras of spray.

Bea doesn’t answer. Is she crying? If she is, he can’t hear it.

He says, “Why don’t you come home for a while, baby?”

“I am home.”

He stands at the railing, with the black ocean hurling itself at his feet and the little Christmas lights of Staten Island strung along the horizon as if they’d been placed there to delineate the boundary between dark opaque ocean and dark starless sky.

“I love you,” he says helplessly. He hasn’t got anything more helpful.

“Good night, Daddy.”

She clicks off.