By Nightfall

PRIZE CHICKENS

The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let’s just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. Look over here, this is the Jardin du Luxembourg, and may I please present a little building we call the Blue Mosque. Pay no attention to that which encircles New York City: the fences topped with concertina-wire circles guarding factories that may or may not be out of business, the grim brick monoliths of housing projects, the scrappy little interludes of trash-strewn woods meant, it would seem, to demonstrate nature’s frailty in the face of human disregard. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.

Mizzy sits across from Peter, watching the gaunt urbanscape go by. The Magic Mountain sits open but unread on his lap. The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of sufficient reviving urgency (not at least one either of his parents could bear to broach), and so they needed to hydroplane forward together on an ever-replenished slick of remark and opinion, of ritualized disinclination (You know, I’ve never trusted that man) and long-familiar enthusiasms (I know Chinese food is filthy, but I just don’t care). As a conversationalist, Peter’s mother was grand, in her way. She man aged to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile—by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everything she did so because she’d presided over some utopia, and so knew from experience how much better we all could do. She wanted more than anything to live under a benevolent dictator who was exactly like her without being her—if she actually ruled she would relinquish her right to object, and without her right to object who and what would she be?

Peter’s father entertained his wife. He pointed out the beauty and the pathos, grabbed her hand and nibbled like a monkey at her fingertips, scoured TV Guide for old movies he knew she’d like and made sure they had dinner out once a week at a “nice” restaurant even when the money was tight. By middle age they had become a mysterious couple, one of those what’s-he-doing-with-her couples (his beauty had deepened, hers had started to pale), but Peter knew they were simply aging into what had been a common-enough youthful courtship: she was a ravishing young girl who was not easily pleased, and he a handsome but scrawny boy who outadored his league of competitors.

Yes, reader, she married him.

It was not exactly a bad marriage, but it wasn’t a good one either. She was too much the prize, he too much the grateful supplicant.

And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.

The Taylors of Richmond had no trouble with conversation, but its underlying purpose was different. Nothing was being perpetuated, nothing held at bay. This fundamental absence of nervousness seems to have affected all four of the children in that they were, each of them, many things but were, none of them, unsure. Mizzy’s got it, in spades—that Taylor way of unapologetically occupying space. It’s not so much about pride as it is simple, ordinary confidence, which is rendered extraordinary only by its paucity among the general population. Look at him, big ponderous book in his lap, watching the scenery, not aloof but calm as a prince would be about his right to be wherever he is, and if someone is responsible for providing amusement and diversion, it is clearly not he.

Peter says, “Hard to believe we’re half an hour from Cheever country.”

Mizzy says, “This must be the train he took into New York.”

“I suppose. Are you a Cheever fan?”

“Mm.”

That would be yes, and apparently there’s not much more to say on the subject. Mizzy continues watching the devastation roll past, and Peter wonders if he’s not only absorbed by the view but demonstrating, for Peter’s benefit, that firm-jawed, Roman-nosed profile. He’s, what, three years older than Bea? It might as well be thirty.

Bea—lost girl, all wised-up enmity and bitten nails, wrapped in that big cheap Peruvian sweater that promotes survival in what must be your barely heated apartment—you and I both know that you hate me in part because you came to believe I’d made you believe you weren’t beautiful enough. We haven’t told anyone, certainly not each other, but we both know, don’t we? I did my best, but yes, I frowned over the yellow tights you loved when you were four and I went chilly over the white-and-gold bedroom set you wanted at seven and yes, it’s true, I disapproved of that Nouveau-ish silver necklace you bought for yourself at a crafts fair with your own money, your first independent purchase. I turned away from what you loved and although I never said anything—I tried not to be a monster, I truly did—we had that telepathy, and you always knew. And later, when your hips broadened and your face broke out, and I swear, I swear, I loved you no less for your adolescent gawkiness, but it was too late by then, wasn’t it, I had a reputation, and there was nothing I could do, no attention I could pay, no protestation of love that would convince. If I’d hated the piss-colored tights and the white-canopied princess bed how could I possibly love the girl herself, now that her hair frizzled and her body had abruptly, at puberty, activated a hitherto-slumbering strand of DNA (mine, Bea, it’s not your mother who’s descended from dairy maids and lumberjacks) that said with terribly, fleshly finality: solid, earthbound, big womanly breasts and child-bearing hips, well before your fourteenth birthday. Your parents are slim and attractive and you, by some trick of genetics, are not.

I make you feel ugly. It’s terrible for you to so much as speak to me on the phone.

“How are you liking Thomas Mann?” Peter asks Mizzy. As a Harris, he can’t bear too much silence. He seems to believe he’ll disappear.

“I love him. Well, ‘love’ may not quite be the word for Mann. I admire him.”

“Are you reading The Magic Mountain for the first time?”

“Yes and no. There’s all these books I read in about five hours in college, just to keep up. I’m going back and reading them for real now.”

Peter says, “I never would have graduated without coffee and speed.”

And now, finally, Mizzy turns from the window and looks at Peter. Mizzy and Peter both wonder, silently: Why would Peter say something like that? Is he redeclaring his allegiance to keeping Mizzy’s secret? Is he just trying to be cool?

Consider the rouged and wigged old man Peter saw the other night on Eighth Avenue. Consider Aschenbach himself, rouged and dyed, dead in a beach chaise as Tadzio wades in the shallows.

No. This is my life, it’s not Death in Goddamned Venice (funny, though, that Mizzy has brought Mann along for the trip). Yes, I am an older guy who harbors a certain fascination for a much younger man, but Mizzy’s not a child like Tadzio was, and I’m not obsessed like Aschenbach (hey, didn’t I just the other day refuse to let Bobby dye my hair?).

Peter adds, lamely, “That was college, of course.”

“You’re going to tell her, aren’t you?” Mizzy says.

“Why do you think that?”

“She’s your wife.”

“Married people don’t tell each other every single thing.”

“This isn’t an ordinary thing. She’s hysterical on the subject.”

“Which is the main reason I haven’t told her yet.”

“Yet.”

“If I haven’t told her yet, it seems pretty likely that I’m probably not going to tell her at all. Why are you so het up about this?”

Mizzy emits another of those low oboe sighs, no denying that they remind Peter of Matthew.

He says, “I can’t have my family jumping all over me right now. I can’t. They think it’d be the right thing, they mean nothing but good, but really, I’m afraid it’d kill me.”

“That’s dramatic.”

A long, dark-eyed look. Practiced?

“Frankly, I’m feeling a little dramatic.”

Practiced. Absolutely. And yet, effective.

“Are you?”

Thanks, Mr. Diffident.

Mizzy cracks up. He does have this way of undercutting himself—he’s like a cartoon character who runs off a cliff and goes a half dozen strides in midair before he stops, looks down, looks back up at the audience with a mortified expression, and drops. He says something ponderous, then laughs at himself. It helps, too, that his smile is what it is, and that his laugh has that throaty, woodwind quality. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, a laugh deeper than his speaking voice, richer, as if it emanated from some core of humor that was, might be, his truest nature. As if all this tortured-young-man shit is a hoax, and the actual, inner Mizzy finds the whole enterprise hilarious. As if the actual Mizzy is goat-footed, horned, playing a set of pipes.

“Yeah,” he says laughingly, which is not the answer Peter had anticipated. Peter has the good sense, for once, to keep quiet.

“I’m fucked up,” Mizzy says. He is no longer laughing, but he’s kept a rueful smile on his face that imparts a new seriousness, a veracity, to what he’s saying.

“I’m a little crazy,” he continues. “You know that. Everybody knows that. The thing is.”

He looks out the window as if searching for some anticipated landmark. He turns back to Peter again.

“The thing is, it’s getting worse. I can feel it. It got very bad in Japan. It’s like a virus. It’s not so much in my head as it is in my body, like I’ve got a fever or something, like I’ve got some kind of flu but it makes you jumpy instead of tired. And, you know. What nobody understands, what nobody who really and truly loves me understands, is that right now I know what I need better than anyone else does. It’s not like I don’t appreciate their position. My family and all. But if I let them, I’m afraid they’ll kill me. With the very very best of intentions.”

“Can I be honest with you?” Peter asks.

“By all means.”

“This sounds delusional. This sounds like an addict talking.”

Again, the low musical laugh.

“That’s what everybody but the addict thinks,” Mizzy answers. “Can I tell you something?”

“By all means.”

“Every time I’ve been doing well, I mean every time I’ve been that bright shiny guy, I’ve been doing drugs. When I was at Exeter, when I was at Yale. I’m clear and focused and compassionate and if I may say so I am fucking smart. It’s when I stop that I decide it’d be better to go dig for truffles with a bunch of potheads in Oregon.”

“What about the kind of drugs a doctor would give you?”

“I’ve tried all those. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, sort of,” Peter answers.

“Don’t you think I wish I had a prescription for something that would make me into Good Ethan forever?”

How can he seem so persuasive, and so wrong? What should Peter say to him now?

“Do you think you’ve really tried?” is what he says.

Wrong response. He can tell by the way something recedes in Mizzy’s face—some urgent light goes dim.

“I may be fooling myself,” Mizzy says. His voice is flatter now, more ordinary. He’s gone a little businesslike. “But I really and truly believe, I feel like I know, that I’m ready to be an adult. I want a job, I want an apartment, I want a regular girlfriend. I just. I just need to get there in the way I know will work for me. If Becka and Julie and Rose start staging interventions and sign me up at some clinic, I’m sure I’ll go off again. Those clinics are horrible, by the way. Maybe there are ones for rich people that’re better, but the ones we can afford to send me to… well, you’d want to escape them, too.”

“So you believe…”

“I believe that I’m ready in a way I’ve never been before to have an actual life, and everybody just needs to let me go about it in my own way.”

Is he lying? Is he delusional? Is it possible that he’s right, and everyone else is wrong?

They disembark at Greenwich and there’s Gus the driver, an avid-eyed man around thirty, small-town guy (Peter guesses) from one of those Connecticut hamlets that supply the local gentry with, well, people like Gus. The world is full of Guses—good-looking boys and girls who’ve been dealt the best possible genetic hand by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who have been doing neither well nor badly for generations; who engender these decent kids and give them just enough to survive in the world but no more—no spectacular beauty, no uncontainable brilliance, no kingly, unstoppable ambition.

Isn’t it the task of art to acclaim these people, to ennoble them? Consider Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity.

And here, standing beside the Potters’ navy blue BMW, is Gus, scarlet-faced, jug-eared, grinning, impossible to dislike. Didn’t Carole say he was engaged to what she referred to as “a lovely local girl”? All right, it’s condescending, that inclusion of the word “local.” But at the same time it must be said that the Potters pay their staff better than custom requires, that they give them proper vacations and don’t expect them to work overhard or overlong without extra compensation. The Potters are of the “our staff is like family” school, which is grotesque in its way, but really, how can anyone have a staff and not behave at least a little grotesquely?

“Welcome, Mr. Harris,” Gus says, marching forward with a square red hand held out.

“Thanks, Gus. This is Ethan.”

Gus pumps Peter’s hand, then Mizzy’s, says, “Welcome, welcome,” pivots to open the back doors of the BMW for Peter and Mizzy. Gus the driver, about to marry a lovely local girl. Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus’s but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor, and Peter strongly suspects he’s just not that kind of guy, which is not to say he lacks soul or depths but that you’d have to perform major surgery to get beneath the happy chap, the good guy who likes his job just fine, likes his car and his apartment and whatever hobbies or pursuits occupy his weekends, who is already thickening, shedding without visible regret the beauty of youth (when he came to work for the Potters five years ago he was like a young farmhand) because he’s had his fun and hey, what’re you going to do, plus of course at thirty, which is by no means a desperate age, he’s about to marry a lovely local girl.

Gus pilots them through the verdant and prosperous Greenwich streets. Ah, Greenwich, Connecticut, the wealthy reasonableness of you. These treed streets that offer their ornate Victorians, true American classics, maintained like the museum pieces they are, and farther off, apart from public view, the truly vast piles of stone and lumber, discreet behind gates and hedges, invisible for the most part save for a gable here, a chimney there. The money is quiet, nothing like the Hamptons or the Hills, and although, sure, it’s a posture it is, to Peter at least, a more agreeable one, and it has the effect, on Peter at least, of conferring a sense not so much of enormous, horrific privilege as of improved reality. In Greenwich, one has simply slipped over into a parallel dimension in which people are doing better, and no one here in this dimension finds that fact in any way remarkable. Making a fortune? What’s so hard about that?

The car mounts the hillock from which the Potter house rises. The Potters are rich, even by Greenwich standards, but not mega-rich, not private plane rich, not five houses rich, and so their house is obscure but not entirely concealed—you can see more than half of its north facade from the street.

It’s not Gatsby’s house, it’s Daisy Buchanan’s; it’s the source of the green light across the water. If Fitzgerald described Daisy’s house, Peter doesn’t remember it, but it was clearly not Gatsby’s turreted, ivy-covered pile. Whether this comes from Fitzgerald or from Peter’s imagination, the house Tom bought for Daisy had to have been at least a little like the Potters’ place, a house Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood, big, of course, but neither faux castle nor limestone monument (consider all those solemn, sepulchral monsters in Newport); more than anything an enormous rambling house, all fieldstone and gables, girded on three of its four sides by verandas; contrived, somehow, with a sense of absolute authenticity, to seem to have been variously added-on-to over the years, when in fact it was built entirely, just as it is, in the mid-1920s. Standing placidly but lightly (all those mullioned windows, the vast maternal wingspans of its eaves) on its miniature inland sea of perfectly tended grass, it resembles nothing so much as a sanitarium, like the place they sent Bette Davis in… hm, was it Now, Voyager or Dark Victory… anyway it’s like some mythical nervous-breakdown millionaires’ hideaway, a perfect sanctuary of the sort that surely doesn’t exist now and probably didn’t when they made the Bette Davis movie, either. Were there really ever places like the Alpine clinic in The Magic Mountain? (That’s probably why Peter’s thinking of sanitariums just now.)

And it’s absolutely, positively not where Mizzy would be sent for a new round of rehabilitation. He’d be sent to a hospital, replete with brown floor tiles and raggedy, stained chairs. Peter can picture it all too clearly. Why would anyone volunteer for that?

Gus parks, and look, praise Jesus, there’s Tyler’s van. As Peter walks to the entrance, with Mizzy at his side (Gus has opened the car doors for them and vanished into some obscure Gus realm), Peter checks through the van’s rear window. Yes, oh yes, there’s a crate inside, let it contain the rejected Krim, let Tyler and Branch be installing the Groff right now.

Svenka answers the door. She is a wide-faced, surprised-looking woman in her early thirties, something stretched about her (not surgically produced); some hint of a curse hurled into her bassinet (The child will grow too big for her skin). If this were the nineteenth-century English manor house it aspires to resemble, Svenka would be the housekeeper, but this being twenty-first-century America she is called the… what?… concierge or something, anyway, she runs the place, oversees the staff (three in the off seasons, seven in summer), knows how to have decent flowers delivered in Darfur, can arrange for a helicopter into the city on twenty minutes’ notice. She’s got an MBA, she earns real money doing this. She confided once to Peter that she proved to be too domestic for her management consultant job (“alvays airports and hotels, no life”), insists she does not consider this job in any way less than that one; and yet because the Potters consider their staff to be “part of the family,” because they approve of marriages to “nice local girls,” Svenka is willing (or compelled to be willing) to answer the door if she happens to be closest to it when somebody arrives. At other such houses, the Svenkas and Ivans and Grishas (they tend to be well-educated Eastern Europeans) would never deign to answer the door. A maid would do it.

“Helloo, Peter,” she says, grinning with what Peter once thought was lasciviousness but which, as he has come to realize, is actually a sense of complicity, because Svenka knows that although Peter gets picked up by Gus at the station, although he’s invited to dinner parties, he is in fact a servant, just as she is.

“Hello, Svenka. This is Ethan.”

“Hellloo, Ethan. Do come in.”

The foyer of the Potter house, like the rest of the Potter house, is a perfect imitation of itself. What the foyer most immediately offers is a low, black-lacquered Chinese cabinet. Peter doesn’t know Chinese antiquities but you don’t need formal training to see that this thing is ancient, this thing is from some revered dynasty or other and was 240 grand minimum. It supports a pair of chunky French candelabra, brass or bronze, early twentieth century, patinaed to a rich brown-black, and an unornamented Roseville ceramic vase, cream-colored, full always of flowers from Carole’s garden—big blowsy white gardenias, just now. And so, the house announces itself: eclectic but fiendishly edited, prosperous but not ornate, gilt-free, beautiful in a way that will probably charm you if you’re ignorant about furniture and art but will dazzle and humble you if you know your shit.

As Svenka leads them into the living room, Peter glances surreptitiously at Mizzy, to see how he’s taking it, but there’s nothing much on Mizzy’s face at all, and it occurs to Peter that Mizzy may in fact feel a certain sense of homecoming here—it’s probably been a long time since that threshold was crossed by anyone as exquisite and well-made as the objects within.

Still, he wonders: Is Mizzy impressed by all this quiet splendor, or put off by it? It would, of course, speak more compellingly of Mizzy’s character if he was put off (I mean really, sure, it’s beautiful, they’re passing the foyer Ryman now, one of the Potters’ true prizes, almost heart-stoppingly perfect to the left of the Chinese cabinet, but still, but yet, the preciousness of everything, the exhausting preciousness… ), though Peter hopes Mizzy is impressed, at least a little—Mizzy, this is my world, I deal routinely with people who’ve got this much money and power, and if it interests you even a little then you’re interested in me as well; whereas if you think it’s all even slightly ridiculous… hm, do I have to be ridiculous along with it? It’s just business, after all. I can still cavort on a moonshone lane. I can still dance to the pipes.

And then: the Potters’ living room.

It’s a great room, and it should properly be entered to a flourish of trumpets, maybe Bach—anyway something small but perfect and imperishable in the way of Bach. The whole house is perfect, and ever so slightly creepy because of that, save for this, the living room, which is so magnificent it transcends its own pretensions, with its wall of French doors that open onto the square of grass bordered by a rose thicket (the views of Long Island Sound are elsewhere), as if nature itself (okay, the better parts of nature) were a series of rooms not unlike the one you’re standing in—outdoor rooms with viridian carpets and ceiling clouds by Michelangelo and blossoming dark green rustling walls. And then, of course, on this side of the glass-paned doors the garden is answered by twin Jean-Michel Frank sofas upholstered in pewter-colored velvet on either side of a Diego Giacometti table that really should be in a museum; by spindly lamps and massive lamps and a clouded old wood-framed mirror (no gold, gold is forbidden here) propped on, not hung over, the austere limestone mantle top; and on the one windowless wall the Big Kahuna, the Agnes Martin, presiding over the room like the visiting god it is, satisfied, it would seem, by these offerings of sofas and tables created by geniuses, by these stacks of books and this gaggle of glass-eyed wooden saints and these Japanese vases full of roses (yellow for the living room) and these shelves full of various collections (Deco pottery, carved wooden Dogon figures, old cast-iron banks) and this enormous ebony bowl filled, just now, with persimmons. In this room, even in daylight, there is a sense of candles flickering just outside your range of vision. There is (for real, it’s a spray) the scent of lavender.

“I take it my guys are here,” Peter says.

“Yes, they’re putting the urn up now.”

Peter can tell she disapproves—something tight happens around her chin. Does she dislike the Groff urn, or art in general? Or, okay, remember—you, Peter, are the one who tried (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to sell her boss a ball of tar and hair for a small fortune. Svenka, can I really blame you?

“I’ll tell Carole you’re here,” she says, and withdraws.

“Nice room,” Mizzy says, after she’s gone. He’s not being ironic, is he? No. Peter has probably lived too long among fluent speakers of irony.

“The Potters are very good at what they do.”

“What do they do, exactly?”

“Well, really, their main job as far as anyone can tell is being the Potters. The money comes from washers and dryers, but Carole and her husband don’t have anything to do with that. They just, you know. Get the checks.”

Carole enters (oh, God, she didn’t hear that, did she?), with a ritualized air of slightly rushed apology. This, Peter has learned, is one of the customs. She is never immediately available, even if the visitor in question has arrived at precisely the appointed hour. The visitor is always ushered in by Svenka or some other member of the family, and made to wait, briefly, in this spectacular room, for Carole to appear. (How much of his life does Peter spend waiting for someone to make an entrance?) In Carole’s case this is done, as far as Peter can tell, for several reasons. There’s the simple element of theater—and now, the lady of the house! And it must be made apparent that Carole is busy, that she is with some difficulty making time for even the most anticipated of guests.

“Hello, Peter, sorry, I was out watching your men put up the urn.”

Carole is a pale, freckled, blinking woman who seems always to have something small and wonderful in her mouth, a round pebble from the Himalayas, a pearl, that makes it ever so slightly difficult for her to speak clearly but conveys, at the same time, that she has gratefully sacrificed precise diction for the tiny precious object that resides on the back of her tongue. She is prone (she’s wearing one now) to white, rather frilly blouses, vaguely reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck, which is not exactly the sartorial inclination you’d expect of someone who has this art, these sofas.

Peter gives her his hand. “I’m glad they got it here. What do you think?”

“I like it. I think I might like it a great deal.”

Bingo.

“Carole, this is my brother-in-law, Ethan. He’s thinking of entering the family business, God help him.”

“Nice to meet you, Ethan. Thanks for coming.”

Carole would, with just this queenly feigned sincerity, thank anyone for coming, up to and including the shah of Iran. It is what one does.

Mizzy says, “Hope you don’t mind. I’m just tagging along, really.”

“And Peter,” Carole says, “wanted you to meet one of the last living Americans who buys the occasional work of art. This is what one looks like.”

She does a quick turn, showing herself in her entirety. She can be charming, no denying it. What’s she got on her feet, some kind of green rubber miniboots, must be her gardening shoes.

“Ta-da,” Mizzy says, and he and Carole have themselves a short laugh, which Peter joins in on a moment too late. Mizzy remains, as far as Peter can tell, unintimidated by anyone. Carole may be the queen of her realm, but Mizzy is a prince in his own country, which, though currently a bit impoverished, has a rich, distinguished, and noble history.

“Would you like something to drink?” Carole says. “Coffee, tea, some sparkling water?”

Peter says, “How about a little later? I can’t wait to see how the Groff looks in the garden.”

“A man with a mission.” Does she sneak Mizzy a conspiratorial wink? “Let’s go, then.”

She leads them back out the front door, across the cobblestoned drive to the far side of the house, toward the English garden, speaking to Mizzy and not Peter as they go. Is she being hostessy, or is she dazzled? Both, probably.

She says to Mizzy, “I’m sure Peter told you. I lacked the courage for the last piece I bought from him. I hope he’s planning on introducing you to someone a little braver than I.”

Peter says, “It has nothing to do with courage. The Krim was wrong for you, that’s all.”

“The Krim,” she tells Mizzy, “gave our friends’ miniature schnauzer an actual fit of epilepsy. I can’t get a reputation for upsetting the local dogs.”

“I see the boys have already got it crated up,” Peter says.

“Those boys are good at what they do. You’ve got yourself a fine crew.”

Carole, those boys are art murderers. After today, you’ll never see them again.

“I have a great staff. I hardly do anything anymore.”

“Groff is new to you, right?”

“Yeah. He’s not actually officially one of my artists yet. We’re trying each other out.”

Never lie to these people. They hate, above all, being deceived by the help.

They turn a corner, and there it is. The English garden, as opposed to the trimmed and topiaried French garden outside the living room, is faux wild, as the English have traditionally preferred their gardens to be. The intended effect is that one simply discovered this modest tract of lavender and lilac, and added only the straight graveled path that leads to the circular, stone-ringed pond. On the far side of the pond, Tyler and Branch are jimmying the urn so that it’s centered on its low steel pedestal.

Yes. It looks amazing here.

Smart to have timed the delivery for late afternoon light. The bronze couldn’t be more burnished and green-gold than it is right now. And the shape—its balance of the classical and the cartoonish—is exactly right for this carefully “overgrown” garden, with its knee-high exotic grasses and its scatters of flowering herbs. The urn stands like Narcissus at the edge of the pond, reflected on the water’s pale green surface in a way that emphasizes its quirky but powerful symmetry, the peculiar romantic rightness of its two oversize, ear-shaped handles.

“Nice,” Peter says. “You think?”

“I do,” Carole answers.

“You’ve looked at it up close?”

“Oh, my, yes. It made me blush, and I don’t think I’ve blushed since, oh, sometime in the mideighties.”

“I hope the schnauzer can’t read,” Peter says.

That gets a laugh. Okay, time to admit that he’s feeling the tiniest bit jealous of Mizzy. How could he not feel, at least a little, like an old hack, some Willy Loman–esque figure?

Carole says, “It’s going to be fun translating choice bits for the Chens.”

I love you, Carole, for being, well, yourself. How many residents of Greenwich are this game?

Tyler and Branch are bearded and boho-clad (thank you, Tyler, for not wearing your Eat the Rich T-shirt), which is probably titillating to Carole, who would, of course, have no way of knowing how furious they both are to find themselves installing what they think of as a million-dollar piece of shit. And (of course) they’re on good behavior after the slashing incident. Peter strides up to them as if they’re the best of friends.

“Looks good, guys,” he says. They are, at the moment, edging it a centimeter to the right, so that its base is precisely centered on the square steel column.

It’s decoration, is what it is. Banish that thought.

Tyler just grunts. He surely knows he’s on his way out of this particular job, and surely believes he’ll be better off without it (mightn’t he have gone home to his girlfriend the night before last and said something like “I’ve got to find another gig, next time I’m afraid I’ll cut Peter fucking Harris and not just his crappy art”?). Branch, however, is all smile and howdy, no reason to suspect he’s any happier than Tyler (Branch makes rather Krim-like constructions out of scrap lumber and broken bits of mirror, he doesn’t seem to know or care that beauty is making a comeback), but he doesn’t want to lose his job.

Carole and Mizzy come and stand beside Peter. Carole says to Tyler and Branch, “Would you boys like some coffee and a snack when you’re finished?”

“Can’t,” Tyler answers. “We’ve gotta get right back on the road.”

“Thanks, though,” beams Branch. Odds are, he’s pissed at Tyler, too. Thanks for being rude to a rich old lady who buys art, motherfucker.

“So,” Peter says. “If you think you like it, live with it for a while, show it to the Chens, show it to some schnauzers, and we’ll talk.”

No pressure, not even a little.

“All right,” Carole says, “but I feel pretty sure. You know me, I’m not prone to indecision. I had doubts about the Krim from the beginning.”

“Please, please tell me I didn’t push you into it.”

“Peter Harris. No one, man or woman, pushes me into just about anything.”

She offers him a surprisingly lovely, tough-ironic smile. For a moment he sees her young, a rich girl whose rich parents (the money comes from the grandparents) had succeeded in one of the many American dreams: they’d raised a girl who was born to it, who knew how to ride horses and play tennis and flirt just enough with just the right men. In only three generations (the grandparents were the Grigs, of Croatia) they’d created a solid, pretty, capable girl who radiated athletic vivacity. Carole would have been pretty and fresh and lively and smart. She’d have had, as they say, her pick. Bill Potter, sixty-two now, had offered her a track star’s body and what the local gentry must refer to as a good name (presto, a Grig becomes a Potter), and just enough Brahmin stupidity to make it clear that Carole would always get to run the show.

“I want all my clients to be like you,” Peter says, which is probably not the shrewdest of comments (“client” isn’t a word to bandy about), but fuck it, he actually means it, he likes Carole Potter, he respects Carole Potter; he spends far too much time with clients who have money and ambition and nothing else.

Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, “Lovely boy.”

“My wife’s insanely younger brother. He’s one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters’ story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who’s tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing and getting stoned by way of occupations, currently in Australia.

A shadow passes over Carole’s face. Who could decipher the depths and nature of her sorrows? She has to be bored by Bill (who must have some Myrtle Wilson stashed away somewhere), she’s probably pleased with the daughter (mothers and daughters, though, who knows?) and increasingly worried about the son, as his Wanderjahr has become a Wanderlife. She’s enviable, she’s a force, she’s got all this and she’s on the boards of about a dozen charities and Peter happens to know that those frilly blouses come from annual shopping trips to Paris, but can this be what she’d hoped for, when she was a handsome, clever girl who was invited everywhere? The semidim, painfully uncomplicated husband, who was a god at twenty-five (right out of those Abercrombie and Fitch ads, Peter’s seen the pictures) but feels considerably less divine as an aging securities analyst at the local branch of Smith Barney; the busy but solitary days up here on the hill, gardening and raising exotic chickens.

How much good will it do her, after the dinner for the Chens has come and gone, to have a bronze urn inscribed with obscenities meant, in part at least (how thoroughly does she understand this?), to insult her?

Of course she understands it. That’s part of the attraction, isn’t it?

And Bill will be baffled and annoyed by it. That’s probably part of the attraction, too.

Peter and Carole stand for a moment in silence, watching Mizzy wander along the gravel path. Paint this, motherfucker: two figures of a certain age standing with the artwork at their backs, their attention fixed on the young man walking among the grasses and the herbs.

Carole says, “Why don’t you show him around a little? I wouldn’t mind having a bit of time with the urn.”

There is, Peter thinks, something ever so slightly strange about this offer of Carole’s. Does she suspect he’d like to be alone with Mizzy? Does she actually imagine that he’s not a brother-in-law at all, but a boyfriend Peter keeps on the sly?

He and Carole exchange brief glances. Hard to say what she suspects, but it seems clear that she’s accustomed to discreet arrangements. If Bill’s got some girl somewhere, maybe Carole has something of her own going on. Peter hopes so.

“Okay,” he says, and for a moment he feels like his life is entirely populated by women of a certain age, brilliant women, rigorous but generous, much more sisters than mothers, and it seems that all of them, even poor dying Bette and yes, even Rebecca, want something for him that he can’t seem to get on his own.

Is it Mizzy? Is it possible that even Rebecca would like, in her deepest heart, to be blamelessly rid of Peter, to be abandoned in a way so shocking, so, as they say, inappropriate, that no one could possibly fault her, for anything?

“Commune with your art,” he says. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

He says a brief, feigned-friendly goodbye and thanks to Tyler and Branch, who’ve done what they came to do and are now about to return the Krim to the gallery. He goes down the path to Mizzy.

Peter says, “And so, you find yourself in a garden again.”

“This one’s not so demanding,” Mizzy answers.

“Don’t tell Carole that.”

“It seems like she’s going to buy that thing.”

“That thing? Do you dislike it that much?”

“I’ll bet I dislike it exactly as much as you do.”

“I don’t dislike it at all.”

“I don’t either.”

Something passes between them. Peter understands that Mizzy understands that they are both doing the best they can, and are both failing—Mizzy has failed to be moved by the sacred stones and Peter has failed to find the artist who can annihilate and redeem. They’ve both come close, they’ve tried—God knows they’ve tried—but here they are, two men standing in a rich lady’s garden, a little unsure about how exactly they got here and entirely unsure about what to do next, except return to what they were doing before, which feels, at the moment, intolerable.

He could probably talk to Mizzy, at whatever length, about his doubts, couldn’t he? Mizzy is the one who’d willingly have that conversation.

Peter says, “The art question is tricky.”

“Is it?”

“Well. Let’s just say you don’t get a Raphael every day. Think about, oh, those Cellini saltcellars. They matter way beyond their capacity to hold salt.”

“But Cellini did the Ganymede, too.”

Okay, Mizzy, you know a little too much for old Uncle Peter’s spiel, don’t you?

“Let’s walk down to the beach,” Peter says, because someone’s got to suggest something.

They start together down the long slope of grass that leads to the sound, which is all sails and sun spangles, with its two green islands afloat on the bronzed blue shimmer. Carole’s house looks out over a smallish harborlike configuration, which has deposited, at the bottom of her big lawn, a modest U-shaped beach of putty-colored sand strewn with stones and kelp strands.

As they walk toward the beach, Peter says to Mizzy, “I don’t sell any art I dislike. It’s just that. Well. Genius, I mean genius genius, is rare.”

“I know that.”

“Maybe it’s not really what you want to do.”

“What?”

“Something in the arts.”

“I do. I really and truly do.”

They reach the sand. Mizzy slips off his shoes (ratty old Adidas, no socks), Peter leaves his (Prada loafers) on. They walk slowly toward the water.

“Can I tell you something?” Mizzy says.

“Sure.”

“I’m ashamed.”

“Why?”

Mizzy laughs. “Why do you think?”

There’s something hard, suddenly, something hustlerish about his voice. It could be the voice of a rent boy, prematurely cynical.

They get to the edge of the water, where the tide is moving in modest, all but silent pleats that advance and retract and advance again. Mizzy rolls up the legs of his jeans, wades out to just above his ankles. Peter speaks to him in a slightly raised voice, from several feet behind.

“I don’t suppose shame is ever helpful.”

“I don’t want to do nothing. But I seem not to have some faculty other people have. Something that tells them to do this or that. To go to medical school or join the Peace Corps or teach English as a second language. Everything seems perfectly plausible to me. And I can’t quite see myself doing any of it.”

Has he started getting weepy, or is the sun just in his eyes?

What, exactly, should Peter tell him?

“You’ll find something” is his lame-ass best. “Even if it doesn’t turn out to be selling art. Or curating it. Or whatever.”

Clearly, Mizzy can’t even pretend to be consoled by that. He turns away, looks out over the sound.

“You know what I am?” he says.

“What?”

“I’m an ordinary person.”

“Come on.”

“I know. Who isn’t an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I’ve been treated as something special for so long and I’ve tried my hardest to be something special but I’m not, I’m not exceptional, I’m smart enough, but I’m not brilliant and I’m not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I’m not sure if the people around me can.”

And Peter knows—Mizzy is going to die. Peter knows this at some deep level of his being. It’s like the conviction he has about Bette Rice. It’s as if he can smell mortality, though its odor is far more detectable on an aging woman with breast cancer than on a young man in good health. Did Peter know that Matthew was going to die? Yes, probably, though he was too young to acknowledge it, even to himself. Wasn’t that the true message that day, decades ago, when Matthew and Joanna waded out into Lake Michigan and looked to Peter like beauty incarnate? Why that moment? Because they were doomed lovers, because they were standing at the edge of something, Joanna on her way to a gated community and Matthew to a hospital bed in St. Vincent’s. How had the desperate, horny twelve-year-old Peter sussed out the fact that he was getting his first true vision of mortality, and that it was the most moving and fabulous thing he’d ever seen? Hasn’t he been looking for another such moment ever since?

Mizzy will die of an overdose. He’s essentially said as much, not only to Peter but to the water and sky. He’s available to the forces of mortality. He can’t—he won’t—find anything that can attach him sufficiently to life.

Peter has waited on shores and stood beside sharks with people in mortal conditions. This time he takes off his shoes and socks, rolls up his slacks, wades out to stand beside Mizzy. Mizzy is in fact weeping, softly, looking toward the horizon.

Peter stands quietly beside Mizzy. Mizzy turns to him, offers a wet-eyed smile.

And then, it seems, they are kissing.