By Nightfall

AN OBJECT OF INCALCULABLE WORTH

When Peter awakens the next morning he’s alone in bed. Rebecca is up already. He rises, sleep-smeared, slips into the pajama bottoms he ordinarily doesn’t wear but he’s not going to walk out there naked with Mizzy around (never mind about Mizzy’s own policies in that department).

In the kitchen, Rebecca has just finished making a pot of coffee. She, too, is dressed, in a white cotton robe she’d not ordinarily wear (they aren’t modest at home, or anyway they haven’t been since Bea left for college).

Mizzy, it seems, is still asleep.

“I thought I’d let you sleep in,” Rebecca says. “Are you feeling better?”

He goes to her, kisses her affectionately. “Yeah,” he says. “It has to have been food poisoning.”

She pours two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for him. She is standing more or less exactly where Mizzy stood last night. She’s slack-faced from sleep, a bit sallow. She does this semimiraculous early-morning thing whereby at a certain point in her preparations for the waking day she… snaps into herself. It’s not a question of putting on makeup (she doesn’t wear much) but of a summoning of energy and will that brightens and tautens her, gives color to her skin and depth to her eyes. It’s as if, during sleep, some fundamental capacity of hers to be handsome and lively drifts away; as if in sleep she releases all the faculties she doesn’t need, and prominent among them is her vitality. For these brief interludes in the mornings, she not only looks ten years older, she looks ever so slightly like the old woman she will probably be. She will in all likelihood be thin and erect, a bit formal with others (as if dignity in old age required a certain cordial distance), cultured, beautifully dressed. For Rebecca, a certain part of not becoming her mother involves the eschewing of eccentricity.

He says, “I called Bea last night.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. We’ve got this faux child on our hands, I suddenly wanted to talk to our actual child.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s mad at me.”

“Stop the presses.”

“She specifically chewed me out for talking on my cell during Our Town.”

Please, Rebecca, stand with me on this.

“I don’t remember that.”

Bless you, my love.

She lifts a coffee cup to her lips, standing where her brother stood, almost as if to demonstrate the likeness and the un. Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that’s never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that’s the source and the opposite of art.

“She swears I did. She won’t be talked out of it. I didn’t, right?”

“No.”

Thank you.

“I know it’s a little early in the morning for this conversation,” he says.

“No, it’s fine.”

“I just. I didn’t know what to say. How do I tell her that this memory she’s holding on to never happened?”

“I guess she has an idea that you were capable of talking on your phone while she was in a play.”

“Do you think I was?”

Rebecca sips contemplatively at her coffee. She’s not going to reassure him, is she? He can’t help noticing her sallowness, the wiry white-threaded unruliness of her morning hair.

Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya’s Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet’s Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet’s whore; although there’s every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She’s immortal now, she’s a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can’t help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world.

Rebecca says, “It’s hard to be a parent.”

“Meaning?”

“How do you think Mizzy is doing?” she asks.

Mizzy?

“All right, I guess. Weren’t we talking about Bea?”

“Yes. Sorry. I just have this feeling that this is some sort of last chance for Mizzy.”

“He’s not our daughter.”

“Bea is stronger than Mizzy.”

“Is she?”

“Oh, Peter, it probably is too early for this conversation after all. I’ve got to get dressed, I’ve got that conference call today.”

Blue Light is going under. Some conquistador from Montana, of all places, is considering bailing it out.

“Ugh.”

“I know.”

They have, of course, discussed this. Is it better to just fold, or decide to believe this out-of-nowhere benefactor when he says he doesn’t want the magazine to change? Consider history. How many wealthy nations have taken over smaller ones and left them unmauled?

Still, one wants things to live on. Still, one doesn’t want to be a forty-year-old unemployed editor in this market.

And what’s to like about having the phrase “in this market” rattling around in your head?

“What do you think?” he asks her.

“I know we’re going to say yes, if he’s really and truly interested. It would feel too strange to let it die.”

“Yeah.”

They sip their coffee. Here they are, hardworking middle-aged people with decisions to make.

If he’s going to tell her about Mizzy, now would be a logical time, wouldn’t it?

He says, “I’m going out to look at the Groffs today.”

“It’s a lucky break.”

“Is. I still feel a little… funny about it, though.”

“Mm.”

She’s not the biggest fan of his aesthetic squeamishness. She’s on his side, but she’s not an art nut, she appreciates it, she gets it (most of the time) but can’t—doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to—edit out a certain pragmatism; a certain sense (like Uta’s) that Peter can be too delicate for his own good, that he is unambiguously in the art business, and, maybe more to the point, is too goddamned hard on himself, he has never taken on an artist for purely cynical or commercial reasons. Do you understand, crazy old Peter Harris, do you understand that genius is rare, I mean by definition, and it’s one thing (a good thing) to search ardently and earnestly for the Real Deal but it’s another (a less-good thing) to obsess over it, to roll through your forties still nursing the suspicion that no one’s great enough, no artist or object can be forgiven for being, well, human in the first case and intractably thing-like in the second. Remember, how often the great art of the past didn’t look great at first, how often it didn’t look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it’s still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that’s survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

“Anyway,” he says, “there are worse crimes than trying to sell a Groff urn to Carole Potter.”

Which is something she could just as easily have said to him, isn’t it?

What she says is, “Absolutely.” She’s not really thinking about him at the moment, and why should she? Her magazine, which she lovingly helped found and nurture, is about to either go out of business or become the property of some strange man who claims to be a patron of the arts, though he seems to live in Billings, Montana.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“Will you tell me I wasn’t the worst father in the world?”

“No. You were nothing like the worst father in the world. You did the best you could.”

She kisses him chastely on the cheek. And that’s that.

They perform their morning ablutions like the dance team they’ve become. He shaves while she showers, and when she’s done showering she leaves the water on for him because it takes him exactly as long to shave as it does her to shower. Impossible not to see it sometimes as a film montage, Scenes from a Marriage (oh, our corrupted imaginations), the synchronized washings and brushings and putting-on of clothes. Peter is the faster and more decisive dresser, which is funny, because he’s more vain and nervous than she is, but for workdays he’s got that man thing in his favor, just pick one of the four suits and one of the ten shirts, all of which go with any of the four suits. Rebecca puts on the dark pencil skirt (Prada, almost immorally expensive, but she was right, she’s worn it for years) and the thin mocha-colored cashmere sweater, asks him if it looks okay, he tells her yes but she changes anyway. He understands—although it’s just a conference call she’s looking for the lucky outfit, the one that’ll make her feel as forcefully herself as it’s possible for her to feel. He leaves her going through the closet, does a quick check of the kitchen for something breakfastlike, decides he’ll just grab a Starbucks sandwich en route, goes back into the bedroom, where Rebecca has switched to the navy blue sheath dress which, as he can tell immediately by her face, isn’t going to feel right either.

“Good luck today,” he says. “Call me after you’ve had the conference.”

“You know I will.”

A quick kiss and he’s off, past the closed door behind which Mizzy sleeps, or pretends to sleep.

The next couple of hours at the gallery are taken up with what Peter and Rebecca have come to call the Ten Thousand Things (as in, over the phone, “What are you doing?” “Oh, you know, the Ten Thousand Things”), their shorthand for the ongoing avalanche of e-mails and phone calls and meetings, their way of conveying to each other that they’re busy but you don’t want to know the particulars, they don’t even interest me. All Uta offers regarding Groff is what Peter calls her German look, a Teutonic hauteur that implies precisely what it’s meant to imply: Little guy, it’s a big world, why don’t you consider agonizing over things that actually matter? He’d like to have the conversation with Uta that he’d like to have had with Rebecca, the one about compromise and his refusal to dismiss the question as trivial; he’d like, in fact, to have talked to Uta about the idea of closing the gallery and doing… something else. No idea what, of course. And why would Uta, who likes her job just fine, who’s happy enough with good-enough art—why does he think she’d want to have that particular conversation with him?

Still. It’d be nice to have that conversation with someone, and although Bette is the likeliest candidate he can’t really have it with Bette. He’s not at all convinced that her sense of discouragement with the world of art sales isn’t a defense—who wants to leave a party when it’s going strong? If Bette pretends to be disgusted with commerce, doesn’t it cede less power to her illness? Does he really want to be a healthy younger man complaining about staying at the very same party she’s being compelled to leave?

He takes the L out to Bushwick (the limo days are over, even if you could still afford them it wouldn’t look good, pulling up in front of an artist’s studio like the king of fucking England, not now, not when you’re asking your artists to understand that despite your best efforts the work just might not sell, because, as you may have heard, the international economy has collapsed). Peter still wears the suits because, well, he’s already got them, and he’s become known for a certain Tom Ford suavity. It’s a balancing act, really. You want to reassure the artists that you’re not frittering money away at their expense and you want at the same time to let them know that you’re doing okay, that you’re not asking them to stay aboard a sinking ship. So. You sit reading the Times on the L train, Bushwick-bound, in your black suit and your charcoal gray polo shirt.

And then, at the Myrtle Avenue stop, up the stairs among the sparse crowd of the trudging and the beleagured. Eleven forty a.m. on the Canarsie-bound L is not a time or destination for those who are prospering in the world and out into Bushwick proper, which could be the outskirts of Cracow (where, admittedly, he’s never been), or any one of a number of formerly Soviet Eastern European cities that were grimly industrial under the Soviets and remain not only grim and industrial but increasingly decrepit. Like an Eastern European city, Bushwick has sprouted, here and there, struggling signs of new life—a grocery store, a coffeehouse—intermingled with the dying embers of the old new life, a dim and faded bridal shop, a dry cleaner’s where they seem to believe a window that displays a pile of folded shirts under a yellowing spider plant will be good for business.

Peter heads up Myrtle, looking for Groff’s address. Bushwick is bleak, no denying it. Bushwick clearly never intended to be anything but bleak. It was always peripheral and utilitarian. The people who built these warehouses and garages and storage buildings surely didn’t imagine that anyone would ever actually live here. Here in the outer boroughs, this one anyway, we find ourselves in the presence of a different set of founding intentions. If Manhattan rose fundamentally out of the grander ambitions of the Industrial Age, all those muscled worker-gods bearing columns, all those ziggurat-topped buildings rising toward a heaven that had never seemed so near, Bushwick (God knows how old it is) is inherently modest and plain, meant (it seems) from the beginning to be outlying, meant for the making of small parts, the warehousing of goods, like the sturdy but limited old uncle in an illustrious family, a decent man without beauty or imagination who does some small job and never married, who is known but not exactly loved.

And yet, behind some of these casemented warehouse windows, artists are at work.

Peter wonders: Does the fringey urban semi-exile in which most artists live affect their output? Sure, young artists are expected to be poor, they’re supposed to be poor, but the poor artists of other generations lived in Paris or Berlin or London, they lived in Greenwich Village. To what extent do the Impressionists exist at all because it was suddenly so much cheaper to leave Paris and go to Provence? Yes, they lived meagerly, but they lived in places of real if sometimes decaying beauty; they lived in cities or villages that could be rough but had no doubts about their ancient profundity, their queenly rights not only to exist but to exult in their own habits and particulars. Bushwick, on the other hand, is pretty close to nowhere. Its founders didn’t take much trouble with it; even the oldest of the buildings were obviously put up as quickly and cheaply as possible. In a place like this, wouldn’t it seem a little… silly to think about producing earnest work that aspired, however imperfectly, to the profound? I mean, hello, Bushwick, hello, America, hello, mega-malls and feed lots. Here’s my attempt to slit the skin of mortality and see what glitters on the other side. How embarrassing would that be?

Who was it who said a country gets the government it deserves? Does America get the art it deserves?

And here, now, is Groff’s building, halfway down an industrial block on Wilson. Peter hits the buzzer.

“Hey, man.” A deep cello of a voice, potent.

“Hey.” Peter Harris, cool dude.

The buzzer buzzes and he’s inside the lobby, if lobby is the word for it—he’s inside the flickering fluorescence of the beige-linoleumed entranceway, devoid of distinguishing features save for a faded black board behind cracked glass on which, in intermittently missing white stick-on letters, are listed the names of small companies that have probably been dead for at least twenty years.

Peter gets into the elevator, which smells, oddly, of grape bubble gum. The door shuts asthmatically and Peter thinks briefly about getting stuck in the thing, or worse, getting just short of the sixth floor, where Groff’s studio is, and falling. Try not to think about the rat-gnawed cables that are hauling your ass upward, please God (or whatever tentative deity Peter turns to at nervous moments), don’t let me die in an elevator on my way to see work I’m not sure about, it would be too horribly fitting—Peter Harris meets his end as he endeavors to see an artist whose work is neither protean nor seminal, who is producing something pretty good that Peter thinks he can sell.

When the elevator reaches the sixth floor it pauses, trembling slightly, door still shut, and Peter is embarrassed to realize that he’s actually gone sweaty-palmed by the time the doors wheeze open.

They open directly onto Groff’s studio. Motherfucker has the whole goddamned floor. This would be family money. Even a young hotshot like Groff doesn’t make this much, this fast.

Peter steps out of the elevator into a crepuscular columned vastness, like the grand foyer of some grimy dilapidated palace, all but empty (except for a slightly surreal parlor arrangement, a ratty old sofa and two Windsor chairs, various shades of putty and bone), dirty light slanting in through the sooted windows. And here, preceded by the sound of his boot heels on the splintery floorboards, is the artist himself. Peter knows the drill—they never stand right by the elevator, waiting to greet you. The worst sin, in their world, is overeagerness and a desire to please, though of course most of the ones who succeed are riddled with and riven by both. The ones who really and truly don’t care usually end up as small-town eccentrics somewhere along the Hudson Valley, arguing with whomever will listen about integrity as the only virtue that means a goddamn thing, perpetually preparing for their annual show at some local gallery.

And now, Rupert Groff.

He’s got it down. Pale and pudgy in a rock star way (how do some of these kids do it, how are they ragged and out of shape and yet ineffably cool?), shock of disheveled dark red hair, big doughy endearing face, like a young Charles Laughton. Wearing a tissue-thin T-shirt that bears the Oscar Mayer logo, gray Dickies work pants.

“Hey-ho,” he says. He has, no denying it, a marvelous, rich, musical voice. In another life, he could probably sing.

“Peter Harris. A pleasure.”

He extends his hand, which Groff pumps. Peter is a man in a suit, at least twenty years older than this boy, there’s a limit to how hey-ho he’s willing to be.

“Thanks for coming by,” Groff says. Okay, he’s not arrogant, or at any rate not insufferably arrogant. Or is at any rate waiting to let his arrogance show later.

“Thanks for having me.”

Groff turns and heads into the loft’s inner dimness. Peter follows.

“So,” Groff says. “Like I said over the phone, I’ve only got a couple of bronzes right now, but they’re nice ones. They’re… they were for my show at Bette’s.”

We’re not going to touch that subject, not yet.

Peter says, “And as I told you, I have a great client, I think she’d be perfect for one of the bronzes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Carole Potter.”

“I don’t know her. What’s she like?”

Shrewd. Even for ready money, you don’t want to sell your work to just anyone.

“She lives in Greenwich. She’s eclectic, and she’s not prim. She’s got a Currin and a Gonzalez-Torres and the most exquisite Ryman she bought back when you could still get them.”

Best not to mention the older stuff, the Agnes Martin, the Oldenburg sculpture in the north garden. Most of the new kids worship some of the older masters and despise others, and there’s no way of guessing which venerable figure will turn out to be a young artist’s godhead, and which the devil incarnate.

“Do you think I’m a little edgy for her?” Groff says.

“The collection needs more edge, and she knows it. Frankly, your piece would be replacing a Sasha Krim.”

“That shit is nasty.”

“Too nasty for Carole Potter.”

Toward the rear of this dim vastness hangs an old mouse-colored curtain from a long iron rod. Groff pulls back the curtain, and they enter the studio proper. He’s decided, it seems, for reasons Peter can’t begin to decipher, to give the loft an absurdly large entrance—a lobby, if you will. Maybe it’s a Wizard of Oz trick, meant primarily for visitors like Peter—a wait-till-you-see-what’s-behind-the-curtain strategy.

Behind the curtain is the studio, a jerry-rigged roomlike room maybe fifteen feet square. Groff is more orderly than some. He’s put up a pegboard wall from which various tools hang, some of them quite lovely, assorted wire scrapers and long wooden paddles and wood-handled awl-like implements, all meant for the shaping of wax and clay. The studio is filled with the smell of warm wax, which is not only lovely but strangely soothing, as if it linked up with a childhood memory, though Peter can’t imagine what infantile ministrations could conceivably have involved hot wax. The first oracle at Delphi was a hut made of beeswax and birds’ wings—maybe it’s racial sense memory.

And here, on a heavy-legged industrial steel table: the object itself. A four-foot-tall bronze urn, beautifully burnished to that green-ochre particular to bronze, with a foot and handles, classical at heart but given pomo proportions, the base smaller and the great looping handles bigger than any artisan in the fifth century B.C. would have considered; that hint of cartoonishness, of animal jauntiness, that rescues it not only from imitation but from any hint of the tomb.

Okay. At first glance, it passes the context test. It has gravity and charisma. Although gallery people don’t like to talk about it, even among themselves, this is one of the problems that can arise—the simple fact that in a hushed white room with polished concrete floors, almost anything looks like art. There can’t be a dealer in New York, or anywhere, who hasn’t gotten variations on that phone call: loved it in the gallery, but now it seems all wrong in our living room. There’s a standard response: art is sensitive to its environment, let me come over and if we can’t make it work I will of course take it back… But really, more often than not, what happens to the piece when it arrives in a living room is, it lacks the potency to stand up to an actual room, even if the room itself is awful (as these rooms so often are—the rich tend to love their gilt and granite, their garish upholstery fabric that cost three forty a yard). Most of Peter’s cohorts blame the rooms, and Peter understands—the rooms are often not only gaudy and overdone, they have that sense of the conqueror about them, and the painting or sculpture in question usually enters such rooms as the latest capture. Peter, however, has other feelings. He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can’t be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again?

The Groff urn, it must be said, feels like an object that could hold its own. It has that most vital and least describable of the fundamental qualities—authority. You know it when you see it. Certain pieces occupy space with an assertiveness that’s related to but not exactly contingent upon their observable, listable merits. It’s part of the mystery; it’s part of why we love it so (those of us who do). The Sistine Chapel isn’t just brilliantly painted, it’s like an orchestra. It fills the chapel in ways a flat painted surface cannot, in terms of the ordinary laws of physics.

Peter gets up close. Here on the urn’s side are the inscribed rants and atrocities, orderly as hieroglyphics, done in a controlled, slightly feminine, cursive hand. On the side facing Peter: at least forty repulsive slang terms for the female sex organ; the lyrics to a truly vile, misogynist and homophobic hip-hop song (Peter doesn’t recognize it, he’s nowhere near that hip); a section from Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto (he does recognize that); something reprehensible from a website about some guy’s search for lactating women who’ll squirt into his mouth.

It’s good. It’s fucked up, but it’s good. It not only has presence as an object, it has actual content, which is rare these days—content, that is, beyond a fragment of a fragment of a simple idea. It refers simultaneously to all the glossed-over history we’ve grown up with, all those artistic tributes to Great Monuments and Hard-Won Victories that fail to note the grunty human suffering involved, and at the same time presents itself as a thing that could in theory at least survive into the distant future, one in which (sez Groff) different home truths will be told.

Maybe Peter’s been too hard on himself. And on Groff.

And yes, Peter is already preparing his spiel for Carole. In fact, in truth, it’s more than good enough. It’s an embodied idea, a single idea, that may lead nowhere in particular but is not, on the surface, a naïve or jejune idea. Plus, rare these days, it’s a pretty thing. These are assets.

“This is a great one,” Peter says.

“Thanks.”

Carole will (probably) be tickled by the feminism implied by all this vicious misogyny. She’s no fan of shock for shock’s sake (what was he thinking of, trying to sell her the Krim?), but this serene and poisonous object will give her something to talk about, something to explain to the Chens and the Rinxes and the whomevers.

“I’d love to show it to Carole. Does that still seem like a good idea to you?”

“Yeah. It does.”

“And I told you about how she’d like to see it at her place, like, now.”

“Miz Potter is used to getting what she wants, huh?”

“Well, yeah. But she’s really and truly not an asshole. And if we can get it installed in her garden by tomorrow, the next day Zhi and Hong Chen will see it. As you probably know, the Chens are huge buyers.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Let’s.”

They stand together for a moment, looking at the urn.

“My guys are going up there tomorrow to take down the Krim,” Peter says. “They could take the urn with them when they go.”

“What does Krim put in those things?” Groff asks.

“Tar. Resin. Horsehair.”

“And…”

“Frankly he’s a little private about some of his materials. I respect that.”

“I heard one of them dripped all over the floor at MoMA.”

“That’s why the floors are concrete. So. What if I got here with my team at noon tomorrow?”

“You work fast, Peter Harris.”

“I do. And I can promise you Carole won’t haggle about the price. Not when we’re doing her a favor like this.”

“Good. And noon is fine,” Groff says.

“I’ll bring papers and things with me tomorrow, I don’t expect you to just loan me the piece.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Okay, then,” Peter says. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

They shake hands, head back to the elevator. Groff must live in a relatively tiny place behind the studio—the loft can’t possibly be that big. It’s a fetish, of sorts, especially with these young guys—the work space is impeccable and the living area tends slightly toward an adolescent’s bedroom. Ratty mattress on the floor, clothes tossed everywhere, toaster oven and minifridge, a truly shockingly dirty, cramped little bathroom. Peter wonders sometimes if it’s compensation for the hint of effeminacy implied by declaring oneself an artist.

Groff rings for the elevator. And now, a brief awkwardness. They’ve said what they have to say, and this elevator is slooow.

Peter: “If Carole decides to commit to the piece, I’m sure she’d love for you to come up and see it in situ.”

“I always insist on that, actually. This is on trial for both of us, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Garden, right?”

“Yeah, an English garden, a little wild and overgrown. As opposed to, you know, a French garden.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It’s really nice. You can’t see the water from the garden, but you can hear it.”

Groff nods. What is it about this transaction, why does it feel… why does it feel like what? This is how they always go.

It’s the business thing, of course it’s that, Velázquez and Leonardo and everyone struck deals. Still, there’s something about Groff’s, about most artists’, levelheadedness, regarding the buyer and the work. A certain proprietary calm. And would Peter rather work with hysterics, would he prefer nut jobs who demand shows of reverence, who take crazy offense at innocent remarks, who refuse at the last minute to part with the work after all? Of course he wouldn’t.

But still. And yet.

As the elevator groans its way up, Peter realizes: in historical terms, most of these people, Groff and so many others, are the guildsmen, the carvers and casters; they’re the ones who paint the backgrounds and apply the gold leaf. They feel pride in and detachment from their work. They have the customary array of louche habits but they’re not nut jobs, they’re laborers, they have to be in this economy. They put in their hours. They sleep at night.

Where are the visionaries, then? Have they all been lost to drugs and discouragement?

The elevator doors grumble open, and he gets in.

“See you tomorrow at twelve, then,” he says.

“Yep. See you then.”

The elevator makes its whining way down to level one.

Peter’s gut heaves. Fuck, is he going to be sick again? He touches the corpse-colored Formica elevator wall to steady himself. And thinks, suddenly, unbidden, of Matthew, bone now and scraps of burial suit under the still-hard ground of a Milwaukee cemetery (April is still winter out there). It’s too much, isn’t it, all these young men and women doing well or doing badly but alive, alive, when Matthew was (okay, maybe he was) handsomer and smarter and more gifted than any of them; Matthew, whose comeliness and grace not only didn’t save him but (terrible thought) helped to annihilate him; Matthew, who lies entombed now a thousand miles from Daniel (wherever Daniel is buried, it must be somewhere on the East Coast), who as it turns out was Matthew’s true and lasting love; his actual Beatrice (is that why Peter insisted on the name?), two young men erased from the world still unaccomplished, still nascent; and who knows what it means, if it means anything, that Peter can hardly bear it, the nothing that Matthew’s life came to, who knows what if anything it has to do with Peter’s need to help, if help he can, in the procreation of something marvelous, something that will endure, something that will tell the world (poor forgetful world) that evanescence is not all; that someone someday (alien archeologists?) must know that our striving and our charms existed, that we were loved, that we mattered not only in what we left behind but in our proud if perishable flesh?

Ground floor. You’ve survived the elevator. Take your queasy stomach and go out into South Williamsburg, take yourself back to your life.

Rebecca meets Peter at the door that evening, has an unusually passionate kiss for him.

“How’d it go?” Peter asks. Fuck, he forgot to call her during the day. Then again, she didn’t call him either, did she?

“Not bad,” she says. As she speaks she goes into the kitchen, to make their postworkday martinis. She’s still dressed for work. She did, in fact, go back to the black pencil skirt and the brown cashmere.

“I think he’s going to make an offer,” she says. “I think we’re going to accept it.”

Peter, according to habit, starts undressing as he wanders around the living room. Shoes kicked off, jacket shed and slung over the back of the sofa.

Wait a minute.

“Is Mizzy here?” he asks.

She drops the ice cubes into the shaker. Lovely, comforting sound.

“No. He’s having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know.”

“Are we… concerned about that?”

“We’re a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time.”

He’s doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.

“Funnier than usual?” he asks.

“I can’t tell.” She pours vodka into the shaker, and a medium-size dollop of vermouth. Lately they’ve both gone heavier on the vermouth—they’ve taken to actual, fifties-style martinis.

She says, “He left me a voice mail, he said he was having dinner with an old girlfriend, and he wouldn’t be late.”

“That doesn’t sound suspicious.”

“I know. And still, I keep thinking, is ‘old girlfriend’ some kind of code word? For you-know-what. But really, I’ve got to stop this, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Was I like this with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t doing drugs.”

“Do we even know that? I mean, how would we?”

“Well. Bea is alive and well.”

“Bea is alive. I pray every single day that she’ll get well.”

“Well-er.”

“Mm-hm.”

Rebecca shakes the ice and liquor and is briefly a rough-and-ready goddess working in a roadhouse somewhere, she’d need a change of outfit, but look at her, look at the butch assurance with which she shakes those drinks, imagine how she could take you into the back room of some bar and fuck you on top of the beer cases, coolly passionate and dazzlingly practiced, and then after you’d both come she’d get right back to work, she’d slip you a quick sly wink from behind the bar and tell you the next one’s on the house.

She pours the martinis into two stemmed glasses. Peter comes into the kitchen for his, unbuttoning his shirt.

“You know what really pisses me off about Mizzy?” she says.

“What?”

“That I’ve been talking about him for the last five minutes, and I haven’t told you anything about the deal.”

“Tell me about the deal.”

He takes a glass from the countertop. They click their glasses together, sip. God, it’s delicious.

“The main thing is, this Jack Rath character sounded so much better over the phone than we’d expected him to. It’s terrible, I know, but I think we’d all expected him to sound a little like John Huston in Chinatown.”

“And instead he sounded like…”

“Instead he sounded like an intelligent, articulate man who’s lived in New York and London and Zurich, and, you know, Jupiter, and has now gone back to his home town of Billings, Montana.”

“Because…”

“Because it’s beautiful and people are kind and his mother is starting to go out in public with three hats on.”

“Convincing.”

“He did sound convincing. I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.”

“Do we know why he wants to buy the magazine?”

“He wants Billings to become a remote but plausible arts center. Like Marfa.”

Uh-oh.

“So,” Peter says, “let me guess. He wants to move the operation to Billings.”

“No. That didn’t come up, I’m sure he knows how impossible that would be. No. In exchange for keeping us alive, he wants us to advise him about culture and, oh, you know. Help him figure out how to start something.”

She eyes him warily, sips at her drink. Peter, don’t get pissy about this.

“What does he want you to start?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” She is patient, she is calm. And, all right, she’s handling him, because she knows how he can be about the whole idea of “starting something cultural” in Billings or anywhere, all that calculation, that whiff of the corporate. Shouldn’t “something cultural” start itself?

But Rebecca doesn’t want a battle, not now, not tonight.

She says, “It can’t be a film festival or a biennial or anything like that. It’s an interesting challenge. We’ve all decided to think of it as an interesting challenge.”

Peter laughs, she laughs back, they take big hearty slugs of their drinks.

She says, “It seems a small enough price to pay. Don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“Did you go to that guy’s studio?”

“Yeah. The work is nice.”

“Nice?”

“Let’s order something, I’m starving.”

“Chinese or Thai?”

“You pick.”

“Okay, Chinese.”

“Why not Thai?”

“Fuck you.”

She hits speed dial on her cell, orders the usual. Ginger chicken, prawns with black bean sauce, dry-fried string beans, brown rice.

“So,” she says, after she’s clicked off. “Nice?”

“No, no, much better than that. They look amazing. They have a presence that doesn’t really show up in the photographs.”

Peter drops his pants, steps out of them, leaves them puddled on the floor. He’ll pick his clothes up later, it’s not something he expects his wife to do, but he loves just throwing them anywhere, for the time being. He is now a man with reservations, who is wearing white briefs (small pee stain, barely noticeable).

“Do you think Carole Potter will want one?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t be half surprised. She should buy one. Groff’ll be around for quite a while, I think.”

“Peter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Never mind.”

“Don’t do that.”

She sips at her drink, pauses, breathes, sips again. She’s thinking of something to say, isn’t she? Is it something other than what she’d meant to say?

“I have this terrible feeling about Mizzy,” she says. “And I’m afraid I’m exhausting your patience.”

Sometimes when she talks about Mizzy, her long-vanished Virginia lilt comes back. Ah’m afrayd ah’m exhausting yer pay-shunce.

“I’ll let you know.”

“It’s just… I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it or not. But I swear I had a feeling like this back when he. Had the accident.”

You Taylors. You’re never going to let go of the word “accident,” are you?

“What kind of feeling?” Peter asks.

“A feeling. Don’t make me pull woman on you.”

“Describe it. I’m curious. As, you know, a scientist.”

“Hm. Well, Mizzy’s always had this sort of air about him when he’s about to do something he thinks is a good idea and everybody else knows is a really, really bad idea. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like those auras people with migraines see. I can see one around him.”

“And you’re seeing one now?”

“I think so. Yes.”

Peter knows the litany. Mizzy getting himself to Paris at the age of sixteen because he had to meet Derrida. Mizzy starting on heroin soon after he’d been brought back from Paris, and subsequently slipping out of rehab to go to New York to do God knows what. Mizzy, after a year in Manhattan, rounded up and sent for his (repeated) junior year and his senior year to Exeter, where he abruptly became a model student, and then went on to Yale, where he continued to do wonderfully for his first two years but then, without warning, dropped out to work on a farm in Oregon. Mizzy back at Yale again, and back on drugs, crystal this time. Mizzy having the “accident” in his friend’s Honda Civic. Mizzy unhappy at Yale, refusing to graduate. Mizzy walking the Camino de Santiago. Mizzy moving back to Richmond, where he stayed in his old room for almost five months. Mizzy off crystal (or so he said). Mizzy going to Japan, to sit with five stones.

Mizzy having dated, starting at the age of twelve, the following known (never mind the unknown) people: a funny, obstreperous, Charlotte Gainsbourg–like girl who was a junior in high school when Mizzy was in the ninth grade; the strange brief period of Mizzy’s immense high school popularity at Exeter, during which he dated the most conventional pretty rich girl imaginable and was elected senior class president; the black girl at Yale who is now, supposedly, a senior aide in the Obama administration; the (rumored) affair with a young male classics professor that led to a second (more reliably rumored) affair with a studious, motorcycle-riding boy from the classics seminar; the beautiful Mexican girl from Mazatlán who spoke hardly any English and who (again, rumor) broke Mizzy’s heart in a way no one else has before or since; the rather loudly proclaimed period of celibacy when he returned to Yale (who picks up a crystal meth habit and remains celibate?); the elegant South American poet who was probably older than the forty she claimed to be; the inexplicably bland and cheerful girl followed, logically enough, by the beautiful young English psychopath who tried to burn the house down and succeeded in charring the eastern end of the porch… Those are the ones he and Rebecca know about. It’s impossible to say how many others there’ve been.

And then there’s Mizzy here, now, staying with Rebecca and Peter, out tonight with an unnamed woman friend.

“What do you think we should do?” Peter asks Rebecca.

She drains her martini. “Beyond what we are doing? You tell me.”

There’s an edge, isn’t there? How exactly has Mizzy’s waywardness become Peter’s fault?

“No idea.”

“I like to think he’s serious about working in the arts. Would you do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you take him with you to Carole Potter’s tomorrow?”

“If you want me to, sure.”

“I know how he is. He could hang around here for weeks, saying he wants to get involved in the arts, and the next thing we know, he’ll meet somebody who’s getting a crew together to sail to Martinique. It might help if you showed him a little bit of what being involved in the arts actually means.”

“Trying to sell a very expensive object to a very rich person would be indicative, no question.”

“I sort of think, the fewer illusions he has, the better. If he hates what he sees tomorrow, I can talk to him about how he might want to think about getting into something else. I mean, something other than another harebrained scheme.”

“I can’t believe you said ‘harebrained scheme.’ ”

“I’m turning into Lucy Ricardo, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I can’t really think why Mizzy wouldn’t like Carole Potter.”

“That’d be good, then. Hey, I’m having one more martini. What about you?”

“Sure.”

Rebecca starts making the second round. Maybe they’ll have a third. Maybe they both need to get drunk tonight, because their lives are at least a little bit too hard for them and because they both know Mizzy could very well be out there pursuing some small death or other.

“Rebecca?” Peter says.

“Mm?’

“Did I fuck up so completely with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t an easy child. We both know that.”

“That isn’t the question.”

“No. You showed up for everything. You tucked her in at night.”

“To the best of my recollection.”

She pours him another drink.

“You did your very best with her. Don’t beat yourself up too much, okay?”

“Was I too hard on her?”

“No. Okay. You may have expected more from her than she was able to give.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

Why are Bea and Rebecca so determined to make him the cause of everything that’s gone wrong?

“She’s furious at me, too, you know. Because I was late sometimes to pick her up from school. And I thought it was amazing that I was able to pick her up at all.”

“Would it be too cowardly to think of her as going through a phase?”

“I think she is going through a phase. We worry anyway.”

“Yes. We do.”

“And, okay,” she says, “I’m frankly a little tired of worrying about the young and wayward.”

No you’re not. You’re not really tired of worrying about Mizzy. Mizzy is—face it—more dramatic. What you are, what we both are, is exhausted by our daughter. You and I can, at the very least, get our fingers into Mizzy’s troubles, we can comprehend them. Bea’s determination to live such a small life, to wear a hotel uniform and live with a strange older girl who seems to be just floating along and have no (discernible) boyfriends… It’s harder, isn’t it? When she tells you nothing beyond the baldest facts.

“About Mizzy.”

“Mm-hm?”

What, exactly, does he want to say? He wants to tell her the whole story, though part of the whole story would have something to do with his worry that she and her sisters are, with every good intention, setting out to ruin Mizzy, to save him by normalizing him, and that… fuck… no, of course he shouldn’t be doing drugs again but he shouldn’t come to his senses, either; he shouldn’t get into something “promising,” I mean sure, that’d keep him safer, but is “safe” the best he can get from the world? Bea is safe, in her way. Mizzy is—may be, who knows?—one of those rare creatures who’s reckless and smart and complex enough to be granted, by the inscrutable Powers That Be, a life that doesn’t wear him down.

And so, Peter’s going to suggest to his wife that her beloved little brother should be permitted to keep on doing drugs? Right. That’ll go over.

“Nothing,” Peter says. “It’ll be good to have Mizzy along tomorrow. Carole will love him, she’s a huge fan of smart, handsome young men.”

“Who isn’t?”

She drops a handful of ice cubes into the shaker.

And so, Peter knows. He’s not going to be the sober responsible one. He’s not going to tell Rebecca that her fears are at least to some extent justified.

Rebecca, forgive me, if you can. I’m drowning in my own culpability. I’m afraid I could die of it.

Peter is, naturally, awake in bed when Mizzy gets in. Two forty-three. Not early but not late, not by the standards of the New York young. He listens to Mizzy’s soft, careful footfalls as he, Mizzy, walks through the front of the loft to his own room.

Where have you been?

Who have you been with?

Are you walking on little cat’s feet because you don’t want to wake us, or because you’re high? Are you putting each foot down in wonder onto electrified, glowing floorboards?

Mizzy goes into his room. Before he undresses for bed, he starts speaking, too softly to be heard. For a moment Peter imagines he’s brought someone with him, but no, he’s just calling somebody on his cell. Peter can hear the rise and fall of Mizzy’s voice but even through the cardboard wall can’t hear what he’s actually saying. He is, however, calling someone at… 2:58 a.m.

Peter lies mortified, abed. Who is it, Mizzy? Your dealer? Have you run out, are you going to meet him on the corner in twenty minutes? Or is it some girl you fucked, are you trying to make her less unhappy about the fact that you left her alone in her bed?

Okay. All right. He’d rather it was the dealer. He doesn’t want Mizzy to be seeing some girl. He doesn’t want that because, say it, he wants to own Mizzy, the way he wants to own art. He wants Mizzy’s sharp fucked-up mind and he wants his self-destruction and he wants his… being to be here, all here, he doesn’t want him squandering it on anybody else, certainly not a girl who can give him something Peter can’t. Mizzy is becoming—Peter’s not stupid, he’s crazy but he’s not stupid—his favorite work of art, a performance piece if you will, and Peter wants to collect him, he wants to be his master and his confidant (remember, Mizzy, I could blow the whistle at any time), Peter doesn’t want him to die (he really and truly doesn’t), but he wants to curate Mizzy, he wants to be his only… his only. That will do, really.

Matthew is in a grave in Wisconsin. Bea is in all likelihood shaking a cocktail for some leering businessman.

Better take two of those blue pills tonight.