By Nightfall

IN DREAMS

The kiss didn’t last long. It was passionate, passionate enough, but not exactly, not entirely, sexual. Can two men kissing have been comradely? That’s how it felt, to Peter. There was no tongue, no groping. They merely kissed, not briefly, but still. Mizzy’s breath was clear and a little sweet, and Peter was not so lost in it as to abandon the worry that he had raspy, middle-aged-guy breath.

They parted lips at the same moment—neither of them was the one to break it off first—and smiled at each other, simply smiled.

Peter doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t even feel entirely like he’s transgressed, though it would be hard to convince anyone watching (a quick check—no one was) that it wasn’t lascivious. He is besotted and exultant and not ashamed.

After the kiss he noodled Mizzy’s head, as if they’d just engaged in some kind of innocent, wrestling shenanigans. Then they turned and splashed back onto the beach.

It’s Mizzy who speaks, as they walk barefoot back up the lawn. Peter would have preferred silence, for once.

“And so, Peter Harris,” Mizzy says. “Am I your first?”

“Uh, yeah. I bet I’m not your first, am I?”

“I’ve kissed three other guys. This makes you my fourth.”

Mizzy stops. Peter gets two paces ahead, realizes, steps back. Mizzy looks at him with that wet-eyed depth.

“I’ve had a thing for you since I was a little kid,” he says.

Don’t tell me this.

“You have not,” Peter says.

“The very first time you came to the house. I sat in your lap and you read Babar to me. Did you think it was completely innocent?”

“Of course I did. For God’s sake, you were four years old.”

“And I had this deep warm feeling I didn’t understand.”

“So. You’re gay.”

Mizzy sighs. “I think I’m gay for you,” he says.

“Come on.”

“This is too much, isn’t it?”

“A little, yeah.”

Mizzy says, “I just want to say it. And then we can, I don’t know. Never talk about it again, if you don’t want to.”

Peter waits. Let’s talk about everything, even though I have to feign reticence.

Mizzy says, “With those other guys, I was thinking about you.”

“This is some kind of father thing,” Peter says, though it hurts him to say it.

“Does that make it nothing?”

“It makes it… I don’t know. It makes it what it is.”

“I’ll never kiss you again, if you don’t want me to.”

What is it I want? Lord, I wish I knew.

He says, “We can’t. I’m probably the only man in the world you can’t make out with. Well, me and your actual father.”

Is that what makes it compelling for Mizzy? Is his professed desire in any way personal?

Mizzy nods. Impossible to say whether he agrees or is acquiescing.

What kind of man would go after his sister’s husband?

A desperate man.

What kind of man would have let it get this far? What kind of man would have held the kiss as long as Peter did?

A desperate man.

He and Mizzy continue up to the house in silence.

Carole greets them in the garden with such avid, nervous enthusiasm that Peter thinks, for a moment, she must have been watching. She wasn’t watching. It’s her manner to greet everyone enthusiastically, all the time.

“I think it’s a keeper,” she says.

“Great,” Peter answers. He adds, “You know it’s on loan for the moment, right? For the sake of the Chens. Groff will want to come see it in situ.”

Carole listens, blinking and nodding. She’s not a neophyte—she knows that with certain artists, the collector is subject to audition.

“I hope I’ll pass,” she says.

“I can pretty much guarantee that you will.”

She turns to look at the urn. “It’s so beautiful and nasty,” she says.

Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation. He picks a sprig of lavender, holds it to his nose.

Carole insists that Gus drive them back to the city, and Peter accepts gratefully, after the briefest show of false reluctance. He, Cowardly Peter, is eager to be relieved of the train ride back with Mizzy. What would they talk about?

Gus’s presence will enforce a silence that would be too uncomfortable on the train. Thank you, Carole and Gus.

And so he and Mizzy sit side by side in the backseat of the BMW, driving along the consoling normalcy of I-95, surrounded by other people in other cars, most of whom have, in all likelihood, never kissed their brothers-in-law.

Does Peter envy them, or pity them?

Both, really.

A fury rises up in him, quick as panic, fury at his thick-ankled daughter and his comradely, distant wife and Uta and Carole fucking Potter and everyone, everything, Gus’s faux-hawk and his little red Irish ears; everyone and everything except the lost boy sitting beside him, the only person with whom he actually should be angry, the boy who invited an impossible kiss (did he invite it?) and followed it with implausible flattery (that’s what it was, right?). There’s no telling how much of Mizzy is deceitful, how much deluded, and how much (God help you, Peter Harris) genuine. Because, all right, he wants it to be true, and it might, it might conceivably be true, that Mizzy has been mooning over him since Peter read Babar to him when he was four. Peter doesn’t think of himself, never has, as someone to be mooned over. Yes, he’s seductive and he’s decent-looking but he’s the guy, he’s always been the guy, looking up at the balcony from the garden below. He’s the servant of beauty, he’s not beauty itself, that’s Mizzy’s job, just as it once was Rebecca’s.

As it once was Rebecca’s.

The anger subsides as quickly as it announced itself, and in its place a sorrow wells up, a wave of gut sorrow, as he glances (unobtrusively, he hopes) at Mizzy’s solemn profile, his aristocratically hooked nose, the shock of dark hair that trembles on his pale forehead.

This is what Peter wants from art. Isn’t it? This soul sickness; this sense of himself in the presence of something gorgeous and evanescent, something (someone) that shines through the frailty of flesh, yes, like Manet’s whore-goddess, a beauty cleansed of sentimentality because Mizzy is (isn’t he?) a whore-god in his own way, he’d be less compelling if he were the benign, brilliant, spiritual entity he says he’d like to be.

Beauty—the beauty Peter craves—is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn’t shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he’s young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it’s something the old tend to forget. Here he is, Ethan aka the Mistake, shameless and wanton, addicted, unable to want whatever it is he believes he’s supposed to want. This would be the moment to do him in bronze, to try to capture the aching raw nerves of him, the all-but-unbearable final stages of his youth shimmer, as he begins to understand that his condition, like everybody’s, is serious, but before he begins to take the necessary steps to live semipeaceably in the actual world.

In the meantime, he needs not to die.

Gus drops them in front of the loft. Goodbyes and thank-yous. Gus motors off. Peter and Mizzy stand on the sidewalk together.

“Well,” Peter says.

Mizzy grins, a satyr now. Where did the damp-eyed, ardent version go?

He says, “Just act like nothing happened.”

“What did happen?”

“You tell me.”

Fuck you, man-child.

“We can’t have an affair.”

“I know that. You’re my sister’s husband.”

And how exactly, Mizzy, have you suddenly become the voice of rectitude?

“I like you,” Peter says. Lame, lame.

“I like you, too. Obviously.”

“Do you think you could tell me what you want? I mean, to the best of your ability.”

“I want to have kissed you on a beach. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Dramatic? Who’s the dramatic one here?

Peter says, “I don’t think I can pretend it was nothing.”

“Well, you don’t have to marry me, either.”

Youth. Heartless, cynical, despairing youth. It always wins, doesn’t it? We revere Manet, but we don’t see him naked in a painting. He’s the bearded guy behind the easel, paying homage.

“Well. Let’s go in, then.”

“After you.”

How did this happen? How can Peter be standing in front of his own building, wishing with all his might that Mizzy would protest his love one more time, so that Peter could scold him for it. Was he too abrupt back there on the Potters’ lawn? Did he miss some crucial chance?

Some chance for what, exactly?

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

They go in. Neither of them says anything more.

Rebecca is home already, in the kitchen, making dinner. Peter lives through a spasm of conviction that she knows what’s up, has gotten home early for a confrontation. Which is, of course, ridiculous. She comes to the door, wiping her hands on her jeans, kisses Mizzy on the cheek and Peter on the lips.

“I’m making a little pasta,” she says. To Mizzy she adds, “Remember, I’m not Mom. I have some sort of domestic aptitude.”

“Even Mom wasn’t exactly Mom,” says Mizzy.

“You boys pour yourselves a glass of wine,” Rebecca says, heading back to the kitchen. “It’ll be about twenty minutes or so.”

She is a vital, capable woman whose husband and brother have kissed on a beach. Not that Peter forgot. Still, there’s something about seeing her…

“I’ll get the wine,” Mizzy says. Normal normal normal.

“How’d it go in Greenwich?” Rebecca asks.

You have no idea how it went in Greenwich.

“Perfecto,” Peter says. Perfecto? Who is he now, all of a sudden, Dean Martin? He adds, “I’m sure she’s going to buy it. I just have to get Groff up there now to approve of her.”

“Great.”

Mizzy brings a glass of wine to Peter. As he hands him the glass, as their hands touch, does Mizzy slip him a look? No. The horror of it is, he doesn’t.

Rebecca picks up her half-empty glass from the countertop. “To selling art,” she says. And for a moment Peter thinks she’s being ironic.

He raises his glass. “To paying next semester’s tuition,” he says.

“If she ever goes back to school,” Rebecca answers.

“Of course she’ll go back. Trust me. There’s nothing like slinging drinks for drunks to make college look good again.”

Normal normal normal.

Rebecca has planned an evening in. She’s not only made dinner, she’s rented a copy of 8½. It’s a simple gesture, simple enough, though Peter knows she’s also embarking on a campaign to seduce Mizzy into the ordinary comforts. He knows, too, that she feels guilty about some largely imaginary neglect she’s meted out the last couple of days, having had her mind on the sale of the magazine.

They perform, all three of them, what Peter can only call a gorgeous imitation of the regular. Over dinner they talk about selling things (art, magazines). Mizzy does (a newly revealed talent) a spot-on imitation of Carole Potter—he gets her pneumatic little head-nods, the liquid avidity of her eyes, even the undercurrent of mmm sounds she makes as she listens, or appears to listen. This is a mild revelation to Peter—Mizzy is not as absorbed by full-time Mizzyness as one might think. It seems (romantic delusion?) to speak to Mizzy’s capacity for truth-telling—when he says, oh, for instance, that he’s loved Peter all his life, it’s possible that he means it. Vain Peter, you’ve always been the pursuer, how strange and wonderful it would be if you were for once in your life the pursued. Then Rebecca speculates about what sort of Big Art Thing might be engendered in Billings, Montana, to which Mizzy and Peter, suddenly a boy gang, offer only mocking suggestions: feeding poets to bears in the football stadium, commissioning ice sculptures—they’re not particularly good jokes but that isn’t the point, it’s boys versus girl, which Rebecca takes in stride, knowing, as she surely does, that she can have it out with Peter later, in bed.

They watch 8½, which is as good as it’s always been, polishing off a third bottle of wine as they do. They are, for the duration of the movie, a family right out of a TV commercial, three people on a sofa watching raptly as the living jewel of the television screen takes them out of their lives and delivers them into new ones. Marcello Mastroianni putts off on a motorbike with Claudia Cardinale clinging to his back, Marcello Mastroianni leads a conga line of everyone he’s ever known at the base of a dead rocket ship.

When the movie is over, Rebecca goes into the kitchen to get dessert. Peter and Mizzy sit side by side on the sofa. Mizzy puts a comradely arm around Peter’s shoulders.

“Hey,” he says.

“Love that movie,” Peter says.

“Do you love me?’

“Shh.”

“Just nod, then.”

Peter hesitates, nods.

Mizzy whispers, “You’re a beautiful dude.”

A beautiful dude? What kind of word is dude for a boy like Mizzy to be using?

Answer: it’s a young word, it’s a young man word, and for a moment Peter can see how they’d be together—teasing, knowing, fractious in a (mostly) good-natured way, a wised-up and roughhousing pair out of some romantic and implausible ancient Greece. Mizzy is heedless, unashamed about declaring his love on his sister’s sofa. Could they be happy together? It’s not out of the question.

Peter says, softly, “I am not a dude.”

“Okay, you’re just beautiful.”

Peter is, to his embarrassment, happy to be told he’s beautiful.

And then, Rebecca appears with the desserts. Coffee and chocolate gelato.

They finish the gelato, talking desultorily, and then they go to bed. Peter and Rebecca do. Mizzy says he’s going to go into his room and stay up a little longer, reading The Magic Mountain, and so with mild unyearning good nights he trudges off with his heavy tome, old Thomas Mann himself, the patron saint of impossible loves.

Once they’re in bed together, Peter and Rebecca lie chastely side by side, on their backs. They keep their voices low.

Rebecca says, “Do you think he had a good time today?”

You have no idea.

“Hard to say,” Peter answers.

“It’s sweet of you.”

“What is?”

“To put up with him like this.”

Oh, God, don’t thank me.

“He’s a good kid.”

“I’m not honestly so sure that he’s a good kid. He has a good heart. And, you know. I’m stuck with him.”

Yeah. Tell me about it.

Now is probably the time—now is quite possibly the last time—to tell her he’s doing drugs again. That would, in its way, solve the problem, wouldn’t it? He could have Mizzy shipped off to rehab, just by saying the word. He knows how it would go. Mizzy is exhausting the local patience, and Rebecca is thoroughly capable of decisive action. Peter could effect—just by saying the right thing, right now—a benign assassination of sorts: Peter could join the adults, and be rid of Mizzy, who would have two choices only; who could submit to his sisters’ ministrations (Julie would be on the next train from Washington, hard to say whether or not Rose would fly in from California) or run off and live or die on his own. There is, clearly, no room for compromise anymore. The girls have had it.

Peter says, “We’re both stuck with him.”

And so, he knows. He wants, he needs, to do the immoral, irresponsible thing. He wants to let this boy court his own destruction. He wants to commit that cruelty. Or (kinder, gentler version) he doesn’t want to reconfirm his allegiance to the realm of the sensible, all the good people who take responsibility, who go to the right and necessary parties, who sell art made of two-by-fours and carpet remnants. He wants, for at least a little while, to live in that other, darker world—Blake’s London, Courbet’s Paris; raucous, unsanitary places where good behavior was the province of decent, ordinary people who produced no works of genius. God knows, Peter is no genius, and Mizzy isn’t, either, but maybe the two of them could wander off the map a little, maybe it’s what he’s been waiting for, and because life is, as they say, full of surprises, it’s arrived not in the form of a great young artist but in the form of a young male version of Peter’s wife, his wife when she was by all accounts the most sought-after girl in Richmond; a girl who could throw down the lunk who’d humiliated her sister and have her way with him. She is wonderful, but she is no longer that girl. Here, practically cupped in Peter’s outstretched hands, is youth, wanton and self-immolating and scared to death; here is Matthew fucking half the men in New York; here is the Rebecca who no longer exists. Here is the terrible, cleansing fire. Peter has been too long in mourning, for the people who’ve disappeared, for the sense of dangerous inspiration his life refuses to provide. So, yes, he’ll do it, yes. He and Mizzy will not, cannot, lock lips again, but he’ll see where this takes him, this dreadful fascination, this chance (if “chance” is the word for it) to upend his own life.

Rebecca says, “I just want to be sure you know I’m grateful. You didn’t sign up for this when you married me.”

“I did, though. I did sign up for it when I married you. This is your family.”

And, really, Peter married her family, didn’t he? That was part of the attraction, not only Rebecca but her past, her lovely Fitzgeraldian history, her eccentric and peculiar people.

“Good night,” she says.

She settles in for sleep. There is no denying her beauty, or the force of her being. Peter is struck by a pang of envy. Sure she has her worries, but she inhabits herself so fully, she worries over the real questions and ignores the theoretical ones; she slices through the world. Look at her pale, aristocratic forehead and the firmness of her brow. Look at the modest parentheses of lines that bracket her mouth—she’d laugh at the idea of collagen. She will age bravely and do good work in the difficult world and love the people she loves with direct, unwavering ferocity.

So it seems there will be no comeuppance for his modest betrayal at dinner, the little flurry of juvenile jokes about art in Montana. She is (is she?) sniffing around at a betrayal of far greater magnitude.

“Good night,” replies Peter.

He dreams that he’s pissed somewhere in the gallery (oh, the shameless unconscious) and he’s trying to clean it up before anyone sees it, but of course he can’t find the piss, he just knows it’s there. Somewhere. He wakes, settles back into a semidream in which a strange woman whom he understands to be Bette Rice tells him, They all left years ago, which when he returns to wakefulness feels less like a dream than a rampant, unanchored thought. It’s only two fifteen, not even the insomnia hour. Still, he gets up for his drink and his pill. In the living room… Crazy to have wondered even briefly if Mizzy might be waiting for him, naked, and how gay is it, how gay isn’t it, for Peter to want to see him that way again, as Rodin would have done him, the muscular springiness of that young body, the blue traceries of vein under pale pink skin, the wonky eyes and stubby feet. No, Mizzy’s in bed. On the other side of the door… What? No sound, can Mizzy sleep? Fuck him if he can. Should Peter go in? Of course he shouldn’t. He pours himself the vodka, gets the pill from the medicine cabinet, goes to the window, and there, how can it be, is the guy on the fourth floor across the street, the one he’s never seen, at his fucking window, this must be his hour. He’s fully visible, lights on in his living room. He’s an older man, maybe seventy-five, with a cloud of white hair wafting around his pink skull. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt and what appears to be (he’s cut off just below the waist) pajama bottoms. Not a heroic figure, jut of gut almost pressed against the window glass, drinking from a big ceramic mug. Is there, could there be, some plan here, some goddamned design, I mean why tonight of all nights has Peter finally come face-to-face in a manner of speaking with his wakefulness mate? No, Peter’s just up and at the window earlier than usual, he’s crossed over into the other guy’s insomnia pattern. He can’t tell if the older man sees him, how could he not, but there’s no acknowledgment, Peter wouldn’t expect a wave (not in New York, not between two men in states of partial undress) but a nod maybe, or a minor repositioning that would signify recognition. Nothing, it’s as if Peter isn’t here at all, and it occurs to him (is this the pill taking effect already?) that he may in fact be invisible, that he may be his own ghost, dead in his sleep, risen invisibly to watch himself at seventy-plus, still standing at a window in the deep of the night. Maybe the dead don’t understand that they’re dead. That, of course, is just a fantasy, would that the pills provided waking dreams or anything but their drowsy pull… But still, here he is, finally, after how many years, the other, the doppelganger, awake in his own world, maybe he, too, has a wife who’s an Olympian sleeper, and Peter can’t help wondering—old age attained, and you’re still looking out a window onto the orangey emptiness of Mercer Street? Shouldn’t you be… where? In Paris? In a yurt on the northern Pacific coast? And what, in either of those places, would prevent you from looking out longingly (does he long, and if so, for what?) into the night?

Peter turns from the window. If that was supposed to be some kind of epiphany, it didn’t take.

And then, maybe because he’s had no epiphany, even though he’s finally seen the sad-looking man across the street (it’s not Peter’s older self, it’s not as tidy as that), he goes to the door to Mizzy’s room and quietly, so quietly, edges it open.

How crazy is this?

Not so very crazy. If Rebecca wakes up, there are a hundred reasons he might be in Mizzy’s room. I heard him moaning, I thought maybe he was sick, just a nightmare, though, everybody back to sleep.

The door opens silently, too flimsy to creak. Inside: Mizzy’s slumber breath, and his smell, the latter a now-familiar mix of some herbal shampoo and a hint of cedar and an underlayer of boy sweat, part acrid, part chlorine. Yes, he’s sound asleep, dreaming of God knows what. There’s his dark form under the blankets.

Peter has stood here before, when it was Bea’s room. He has, in fact, checked up on Bea when she cried out in the night (she was eleven when they moved here, no memories of her as an infant in this room), and it occurs to him—is this actually a lost-child thing? It is possible that Mizzy is not Rebecca reincarnated, but Bea; Mizzy the child Peter could have managed better, Mizzy the graceful and sensitive—could Peter have rescued him from the druggy aimlessness he derived (maybe, who knows) by coming too late to the Taylor family, by growing up as his parents grew out of their youthful eccentricities and aged into low-grade insanity? Because Bea, let’s face it, was a challenging child, willful but strangely uncurious, not particularly interested in school or, really, in much of anything. Is Peter meant not to be Mizzy’s platonic lover but his lost father?

How exactly did he fail with Bea? Why does he so ardently want to present his case to some heavenly tribunal? How reprehensible is it that he’d like his daughter to share some of the blame?

Children don’t. They don’t share blame. Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.

He closes the door and goes back to bed.

In bed, more dreams. Only fragments remain when he wakes for the second time: he’s wandering through Chelsea, can’t remember where the gallery is; he’s being sought by, not the police, someone more frightening than the police. This second time, he’s right on schedule—4:01. Rebecca stirs and mutters beside him. Will she wake up, too? No. Does she sense that something’s going on? How could she not?

A dilemma: the only thing worse than Rebecca suspecting is Rebecca not suspecting; Rebecca that oblivious to his agitation and unhappiness. Has she grown so accustomed to Peter’s agitation and unhappiness that it no longer registers? Has it become, to Rebecca, simply his nature?

A fantasy, unbidden: he and Mizzy in a house somewhere, maybe it’s Greece (oh, humble little imagination), reading together, just that, no sex, they’d manage sex with whomever, they’d be platonic lovers, faux father and son, without the rancor of lovers or the fury of family.

Okay, stay with that fantasy a minute. Where does it lead? Does Mizzy, sooner or later, fall in love with some girl (or some boy) and leave? You bet he does. There’s no other plausible outcome.

The question: Would it be so bad to be abandoned in that hillside house with its view of grove and water, old but not old old, your life flattened and evacuated, with nothing to do but take a new step into the unknown?

The answer: no. He would be someone to whom something large and strange and scandalous had happened. He would be able—he would be compelled—to surprise himself.

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they’re so eager to get to the light on the other side.

He gets up and goes to the bathroom for another pill. The loft continues to be inhabited by the sleep of his two loved ones and by the restless, still-living ghost of Peter, who for the moment could easily have died without knowing it, could be at the beginning of his life as a wandering shade.

Back to bed, then.

Ten minutes, more or less, of obdurate wakefulness, and then the tidal pull of pill number two.

Mizzy is gone the next morning. There’s just his neatly made bed and the absence of his clothes and backpack.

“That little shit,” Rebecca says.

She has gotten up before Peter, whose double dose has done its work. When he rises he finds her sitting disconsolately on Mizzy’s bed, as if she were waiting for a bus to take her somewhere she doesn’t particularly want to go.

“Gone?” Peter says from the doorway.

“So it would seem,” she answers.

He must have crept out during the night, after they were both asleep.

Yep, those pills did the trick. If Peter had been undrugged, he’d have heard Mizzy leaving.

And what, if he’d heard, does he think he’d have done?

He and Rebecca search desultorily for a note, knowing there isn’t one.

Rebecca stands helplessly in the middle of the living room, hands at her sides.

“The little shit,” she says again.

“He’s a big boy” is the best that Peter can do.

“What he is is a fucked-up little boy whose body somehow grew up.”

“Can you let him go?”

“Do you think I have a choice?”

“No. I don’t think you do. Have you called him?”

“Yeah. Do you think he picked up?”

Here it is, then: the solution. Mizzy has ducked out. Better all around. Thank you, Miz.

And, of course, Peter is heartbroken.

Of course, Peter wants nothing more than for Mizzy to return.

Sadness and disquiet crackle through him like electric shock.

Rebecca says, “Did something happen yesterday?”

Crackle. A vertiginous swoop of blood to his head.

“Not particularly,” he answers.

Rebecca goes and sits stiffly on the sofa. She could be a patient in a waiting room. There’s no denying it—it’s like losing Bea all over again. It’s like coming home after they drove her to Tufts, that numbed emptiness mingled (neither of them could say this) with a certain relief. No more sulks and accusations. A new form of worry, sharper because she’s out of their sight but at the same time muffled, separated. She’s on her own now.

“Maybe it really and truly is time to give up on him,” she says.

Peter can scarcely hear her for the racket of blood in his ears. How is it possible that she doesn’t know? He is briefly, murderously angry with her. For knowing him so little. For failing to understand that he’s been, all along, the object of a fixation; that a beautiful boy has been fantasizing about him for the last two decades. (Peter has decided, for now, that Mizzy’s love is genuine, and that every word he said on Carole Potter’s lawn was true.) Peter the Skeptical has vanished along with Mizzy himself.

He goes and sits beside her, drapes an arm over her shoulders, wonders how she can’t smell the deceit in him, how she can’t hear the buzz of it.

“You can’t save his life for him. You know that, right?” he says.

“I do. I do know. Still. He’s never just disappeared like this. He’s always told me where he is.”

Oh, right. Part of it, for her, is the idea that she’s his special friend. That he prefers her to Julie and Rose.

Silly humans.

They sit quietly together for a while. And then, because there’s nothing else to do, they get dressed and go to work.

The Victoria Hwangs are halfway installed, thank you, Uta. Peter stands with his morning Starbucks among what’s gone up (Uta is in her office, doing her own Ten Thousand Things). It’s more of the same—now is not the time for Vic to be changing directions. One of the installations (there will be five) has been entirely put up: a monitor (dark now) that when turned on will be a ten-second video of a portly middle-aged black man, hurrying somewhere, dressed for success, his hair clipped close, wearing a presentable but inexpensive charcoal gray suit under the ubiquitous man-coat, a beige trench, on which he clearly spent a little extra, carrying a surprisingly battered attaché, doesn’t he know that’s a giveaway, you can’t show up for a meeting with your briefcase all dinged and scratched like that, does he believe it’s cool and uncaring (it’s not) or is it simply too expensive to replace it right now? The man crosses a street in Philadelphia among other businesslike pedestrians, athletically dodges a windblown plastic bag, and that’s it. That’s the movie.

Vic has arranged, on well-lighted shelves, the ancillary merchandise, beamed in from some parallel dimension in which this guy is a superstar. The action figure (she’s got somebody who makes them in China), the T-shirts, the key chains, the lunch boxes. And, new this season, a Halloween costume for kids.

It’s good. It’s ironic but humane, the whole notion of arbitrary stardom that might, in the Warholian sense, be conferred on literally anybody. It’s adroit. Sure it has elements of irony and condescension but it is at heart (this is especially clear when you know Vic Hwang) an homage. Everybody is a star, on his or her home planet. The actual stars, the people on whom they do in fact model action figures and lunch boxes, are peripheral—we know plenty about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but our sense of them pales beside a quick leap to avoid a plastic bag while we’re on our way to a morning meeting in Philadelphia.

And yet, it gives Peter nothing. Not now. Not today. Not when he needs… more. More than this well-executed idea. More than the shark in the tank meant to frighten, more than the guy on the street meant to say something pithy about celebrity. More than this.

Best to go into his office, probably, and e-mail people. Make some calls.

Where are you, Mizzy?

Eighteen new e-mails, all from people who believe their business to be urgent. The only necessary act: call Groff about yesterday.

“Hey, it’s Groff, you know what to do.”

He is another of those people who never picks up his phone.

“Hey, Rupert, Peter Harris. Carole Potter loves the piece and, as far as I can tell, she’s sold. Call me and let’s figure out a time for me to take you up there.”

And then, okay, leave a message for Victoria.

“Hey, Vic, Peter Harris. The work looks amazing. You’re coming in around noon to hang the rest, right? Can’t wait to see you. Congratulations. It’s a beautiful show.”

He can’t answer the e-mails. He can’t call anyone else.

Propped against a wall in his office—the ruined Vincent. The gash droops a little, showing a line of muddied canvas. Peter goes to the painting and carefully, as if it could feel pain, takes hold of the torn flap of waxed brown paper and tears it further (it’s wrecked, there’s no fixing it, it’s in the hands of the insurance company now). The heavily waxed paper is slow to tear. The sound it makes as it tears is wet, vaguely fleshy.

What he uncovers is an ordinary painting. Philip Guston colors, a smear-and-scrape technique stolen directly from Gerhard Richter. Derivative, and inept.

Peter goes into Uta’s office. She’s frowning at her computer, mug of black coffee at her right hand.

She says, “How do you like the Hwangs so far?”

“They’re nice. Can I tell you what I just did?”

“I’m all ears.”

“I peeled all the paper off the fucked-up Vincent.”

She looks at him darkly. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s destroyed anyway. It’s not like he was going to fix it.”

“It’ll make it harder to explain to the insurance people, you know how they are. Would you like to tell me why you did that?”

“Curious.”

“And what did you find, Mr. Curious?”

“Just a shitty student painting.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope.”

“Well. That little fucker.”

Are Uta and Rebecca the same woman, at heart? Is he doubly married?

“Changes things, don’t you think?” he says.

“I suppose.”

“Suppose?”

“They’re conceptual. If you believe there’s something wonderful underneath, but you never see it…”

“Like Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“I don’t think we can represent him anymore.”

“We can’t represent him anymore,” says Uta, “because the work doesn’t sell.”

Peter’s cell plays its interlude of Brahms. Caller Unknown. “I’m going to take this,” he says, and steps out into the narrow hallway.

Could it be? Is it possible?

“Hello.”

“Hey.”

It is.

“Where are you?”

“With a friend.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m staying with a friend. His name is Billy, he lives in Williamsburg, I’m not in some basement drug den.”

And really, Mizzy, why are we supposed to give a damn whether you are or not?

What Peter says is “You’re all right, then?”

“I don’t know if I’d say all right. I’m perfectly fine, if you know what I mean. How are you?”

Why, thanks for asking.

“I’ve been better.”

“I want to see you.”

“And?”

“We should talk.”

“Yeah, I guess we should. Do you know how freaked-out Rebecca is?”

A brief, breathy silence on the other end.

“Of course I do,” Mizzy says. “Do you think I wanted to make her feel bad?”

“A note of some kind would have gone a long way toward making her feel less bad.”

“What would I have said in a note?”

Fuck you, you spoiled brat.

“You’re right,” Peter says, “we should talk. You want to come to the gallery?”

“How about if we meet someplace else?”

“Got anyplace in mind?”

“There’s a Starbucks on Ninth Avenue.”

Right. Starbucks. There’s no misty field for them to meet in, is there? There’s no castle keep. Starbucks, why not?

“Okay. When?”

“Like, forty-five minutes?

“See you there.”

“Right.”

He clicks off.

“Was that Victoria?” Uta calls from her office.

“Nope. It was nobody.”

Peter goes back into his office, where the Vincent still stands, haloed by its scraps of torn paper.

It would be romantic, wouldn’t it, for Peter to stare long and hard at the earnest ineptitude, but Peter can’t summon the concentration. If it’s a metaphor, it’s a lame one. What it is is a trick played by a second-tier artist. Neither more nor less than that.

Peter has other things to think about.

What does Mizzy have in mind? What scene is about to play out, in forty-two minutes, in the goddamned Starbucks on fucking Ninth Avenue? Has Mizzy prepared a riff about how he can’t bear the subterfuge? Is he going to ask Peter to go off with him, to heedlessly leave the carnage behind, to go to… that house in Greece, or an apartment in Berlin? What will Peter say if Mizzy wants that?

Yes. God help him, he will in all likelihood say yes. With not even the ghost of an illusion about how it’ll turn out in the end. He’s ready, with the merest encouragement, to destroy his life, and no one, not one single person he knows, will sympathize.

Peter answers his e-mails. Normal, normal. He tries to ignore the passing of time but of course the time is displayed in the upper-right-hand corner of his computer screen, every flipping minute. And then, with twenty-six minutes to go, Victoria arrives. He hears Uta letting her in, goes to the gallery to greet her.

Smiles. All smiles.

Victoria is an ardent eccentric, a tall Chinese woman with a buzz cut, prone to saucer-size earrings and vast, tendriled scarves.

“Hey, Genius,” Peter says. “It looks amazing.”

He and Victoria exchange one of the swift, wiry little hugs Victoria will permit. Lips do not touch flesh.

She says, “Do you think I’m getting predictable?”

Uta, a true professional, says, “You’re still working something out. These are variations. You’ll know when it’s time for a bigger change.”

“You’d tell me, right?” Victoria says to Peter. She hates women.

“We would,” Peter answers. “You’re doing exactly the right thing right now, and by the way, you’re about to be a huge hit. Trust me on this.”

Victoria puts out a thinly optimistic, skeptical smile. She is in fact one of the least deluded of Peter’s artists. There’s something of the little girl about her, she’s serious but nervous, hopeful, in the way of a girl dressing dolls and arranging them in tableaux, showing them to the adults with a mix of pride and embarrassment, afraid every single time that she won’t get the lavish (slightly condescending?) praise she’s learned to count on. Would that Peter loved her work just a little bit more, or felt for Victoria just a little bit less.

“Ready to get to work?” Peter says.

“Mm-hm.”

“You want some tea?” She drinks tea.

“That would be nice, yes.”

Peter goes to get it, receives a quick grateful glance from Uta. Why should Uta have to fetch beverages for a woman who ignores her?

Peter enters the storage room where the coffee and tea things are kept, turns the electric kettle on. Here are the storage bins, in which are kept various pieces by various gallery artists, ready to show to any interested client, all carefully shrouded in plastic, all labeled. Peter and Uta run a tight ship.

This, too, is not a metaphor. Is it? Artists produce art and some of it lies in wait, in a room, until someone expresses interest. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing sad.

And yet, Peter needs to get out of there.

He is able, he’s not that far gone, to wait until the water boils, and fix a cup of green tea for Victoria.

In the gallery, Vic and Uta are in mid-discussion about the second installation, which will go in the north corner. Peter takes Victoria her tea. She accepts it with both hands, as if it were an offering.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Peter says, “I’ve got to go out for a little while, I’ll be right back.”

He ducks Uta’s questioning glance—Peter never “goes out for a little while,” not on any errand that’s mysterious to Uta. They have no mysteries.

“See you in a while, then,” Uta says.

Poor fuck, stop in the bathroom and check your hair before you go. Make sure you’ve got nothing stuck in your teeth.

And leave, then. What if he didn’t come back? Can he picture Uta saying to people, He didn’t even tell me where he was going? Yes. He can.

He forces himself to be exactly seven minutes late, because he can’t bear the idea of being found waiting, though of course Mizzy might be later than seven minutes and of course Peter wonders, in the back of his mind, if by arriving even seven minutes late he will have missed Mizzy entirely, that Mizzy has been and gone already, and mixed in with that particular spasm of crazy panic, as he approaches the familiarity of the Starbucks doors, is a sense of the painful gorgeousness of caring that much. For how many years has he actually hoped, in some remote reach of his brain, that whatever meeting will not in fact take place, that he’ll be set free, that he will be regranted the hour allotted for some business thing or a friend (well, actually, he has no real friends, unless he counts Uta—how exactly did that happen?—he had a whole crew of friends when he was younger).

He tries one of the double glass doors, finds it locked (why in New York City is one of the two doors always kept locked?), survives the small embarrassment, steps in through the unlocked one. In mid-morning the Starbucks is about half full, some women in pairs, two separate younger guys with laptops in front of them, it’s the best deal in town, four-forty for a coffee and you can sit all day.

And there, at a window table toward the rear, is Mizzy.

“Hey,” says Mizzy. Because really, what else would he say?

Peter says, “Nice to see you.” Does the sarcasm register?

Mizzy’s got a coffee already (a Grande cappuccino, impossible not to harbor such information). He says, “You want a coffee?”

Peter does. Actually he does not, but it seems too strange to sit across from Mizzy beverageless. He goes and stands in line (two people ahead of him, a fleshy black girl and a guy with a comb-over, wearing a pilly sweater, two of the multitudes who, by happenstance, have not been depicted on Victoria’s T-shirts and lunch boxes, but easily could be). Peter manages to the best of his ability the terrible, usual interlude of standing in line waiting to order coffee.

Then he’s back at Mizzy’s table, fighting the absurd notion that a Venti skim latte is somehow the wrong thing to have ordered.

Mizzy is unaltered. If anything his pale, princely beauty is accentuated by this ordinary place. Here is the Roman complexity of his nose, the big brown eyes out of Disney. Here is the forelock of sable hair that bisects his forehead.

Here, propped on the floor beside the table, is the backpack he brought with him to New York.

Peter forges ahead. He’ll have that dignity, at least.

He says, “You’ve scared the fuck out of Rebecca.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call her today.”

“Shall we start with why you left?”

“Why do you think?”

“I asked you,” Peter says.

“I can’t just stay there and go about my business like nothing has happened.”

“Wait a minute. Weren’t you the one who insisted that nothing really has happened?”

“I was being defensive. For God’s sake, Peter, we were about to go inside and have dinner with my sister. I couldn’t exactly fall into your arms on your doorstep, could I?”

A terrible, intoxicatingly poisonous sensation rises at the back of Peter’s throat. A druggy bile. It’s happening, then. This boy, this new version of young Rebecca, this graceful and yearning Bea, this living work of art, is declaring his love.

“No,” Peter says. “You couldn’t.” Is there a tremble in his voice? Probably.

A brief silence passes. For a moment, a moment, Peter relents. He can’t do this. Rebecca and Bea have done nothing to deserve it, and how will Rebecca ever recover? (Bea, in all likelihood, will embark on a lifelong career of hating her father, which will be some consolation to her, plus she’s had a lot of practice already.) A dizzy tingling rises to his head. He is on the verge of committing an unspeakable act. He will never be able to think of himself as a good man again.

“Did you tell her?” Mizzy asks.

What?

“Of course I didn’t.”

“And you won’t tell her. Right?”

“Well. That’s something we should talk about, don’t you think?”

“Please don’t tell her.”

And then, it seems, Peter says this:

“Mizzy, I have feelings for you. I think about you. I dream about you”—Not true, you dream about piss and about being pursued, but still. “I don’t know if I’m in love with you but I’m in something with you and I honestly don’t think I can just go back to my life.”

Mizzy receives this with a peculiar impassivity. Only his eyes show anything. They take on that wettish shine. Now, for the first time, his slightly crossed eyes render him foolish-looking.

He says, “I mean, about the drugs.”

Oh.

A dreadful realization hovers, but does not quite descend. Peter’s skin prickles. Heat rises to his head, and it seems, for a moment, that he’s going to be sick again.

He hears himself saying, “What you’re worried about is me telling her you’re doing drugs again.”

Mizzy has the good taste not to answer.

It’s blackmail, then. He’s been set up. Neither more nor less than that. You, Peter, keep mum about the drugs and I, Mizzy, won’t say anything about the kiss.

Now Peter seems to be saying, “Did you make all that up, then? The stuff about…”

Don’t cry, motherfucker. Don’t weep in a Starbucks in front of this heartless boy.

“Oh, no,” Mizzy says. “I’ve always had a crush on you, I wouldn’t lie about that. But hey. You’re my sister’s husband.”

I am, in fact, your sister’s husband. What did I think was going to happen?

He thought that a force beyond his own powers was going to sweep him out of this life and into another. He believed that.

“I’m so sorry,” Peter says. And what does he mean by that? Who is he sorry for?

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Okay, I’m not. What are you going to do now?”

“I think I’m going to go to California. I have some friends in the Bay Area.”

You think you’re going to go to California. You have some friends in the Bay Area. The Bay Area, not even San Francisco.

“What will you do there?” Peter’s voice reaches him from a certain distance. He is standing behind himself.

“One of my friends does computer graphics, he needs a partner. I’m good with computers.”

You’re good with computers. You’re going into computer graphics with a friend in the Bay Area. You don’t want to briefly love and then abandon some older guy in a hilltop house in Greece. The possibility never entered your mind.

You just want me to keep your sisters off your ass about the drugs. You needed to put something over on me, by way of insurance.

“That sounds very sensible,” says the voice that comes from somewhere over Peter’s left shoulder.

“You promise you won’t tell Rebecca.”

“If you promise you’ll say goodbye to her before you go.”

“Of course I will. I’ll tell her I left this morning because I was ashamed about not wanting to be an art dealer after all. She’ll understand.”

She will. She will understand.

Peter says, “Whatever works.”

“You’ve been very kind to me.”

Kind. Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been so besotted that I’ve betrayed you, as lovers so often do. When exactly will we get the phone call about your Bay Area overdose?

“It was nothing,” Peter says. “You’re family, after all.”

And then, really, there’s nothing to do but leave.

They say goodbye on the windblown banality of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. A plastic bag blows by, just over their heads.

Peter says, “So, I’ll see you at home tonight, then?”

Mizzy adjusts a strap on his backpack. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll go by Rebecca’s office and say goodbye to her there.”

“Not one more night?”

The strap having been secured, Mizzy gives Peter what will in fact be the last of those damp-eyed looks.

“I can’t go through another night like last night,” he says. “Can you?”

Thank you, Mizzy, thank you for acknowledging that something, something, has happened. Something about which you feel an emotion as identifiable as shame.

“I suppose not. Do you think…”

Mizzy waits.

“Do you think it’ll seem weird to Rebecca, you taking off in such a hurry like this?”

“She’s used to it. She knows how I am.”

Does she? Does she know that, among your compelling qualities, you’re cheap and at least a little bit hollow?

Probably not. Isn’t Mizzy a work of art to Rebecca, as he is (was) to Peter? Should he not, in fact, remain like that?

“Well, then,” Peter says.

“I’ll call you from California, okay?”

“How are you getting there?”

“Bus. I don’t have much money.”

You’re not taking the bus, Mizzy. Rebecca won’t allow it. She’ll try to stop you from going at all, but when she understands that she can’t, can’t stop you from doing anything you want (except, of course, what she doesn’t know you’re actually doing), she’ll get on the phone and buy you a plane ticket. You and I both know that.

“Have a safe trip.”

Those are your parting words?

“Thanks.”

They shake hands. Mizzy walks away.

And so. Peter had imagined he could be swept off, could ruin the lives of others (not to mention his own) and yet retain some aspect of blamelessness because passion trumps everything, no matter how deluded, no matter how doomed. History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he’ll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him. There are no gold-leaf stars painted on lapis over his head, just the gray of an unseasonably cool April afternoon. No one would do him in bronze. He, like all the multitudes who are not remembered, is waiting politely for a train that in all likelihood is never going to come.

What can he do but go back to work?

He has this, at least—he has the finality of nothing happening. There’s a bitter relief in that. He has his life back (not that it was taken from him); he has the real hope of increased prosperity (Groff will probably join his roster, and who knows who might follow once an artist like Groff’s onboard); he has the slightly trickier hope that he and Rebecca will be happy again. Happy enough.

The trouble is…

The trouble is he can see all the way to the best of all possible endings. His gallery joins the first rank, he and Rebecca regain their ease together. And there he’ll be.

It’s getting colder, just as the Weather Channel predicted this morning—an unseasonable drop in temperature. Peter, however, is not so far gone—would that he had a greater capacity for self-regard—to get swoony over a chill factor in April. He’s not so far gone as to ignore the rampancy of the streets through which he walks: the various hunkered-down hurriers; the swaying, impassable row of five chattering girls (He never, I tole her, you handbag, Rita and Dymphna and Inez); the surprisingly well-dressed woman rummaging for cans in a trash barrel; the laughers and the window shoppers and the cell phone talkers. It’s the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.

When he gets back to the gallery, Vic’s second installation is just about hung. Uta and the boys (maybe he’ll never get around to firing them, there’s always something urgent coming up, isn’t there?) are arranging the shelves for the merchandise as Vic looks on with her customary expression of girlish surprise—look what it’s turning into!

Uta says, “You’re back.” By which she means, where in the hell were you?

“I’m back,” he answers. “It looks good.”

“We were just about to break for lunch,” Uta says. “We can be finished by nine or ten tonight, I think.”

“Good. That’s good.”

He goes into his office. There’s the ruined Vincent, signifying nothing in particular. He sits at his desk, thinking he should do something. There are plenty of things for him to do.

A moment later, Uta’s there.

“Peter, what’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

Tell her. Tell somebody.

He says, “I seem to have fallen in love with my wife’s little brother.”

Uta has had a lifetime’s worth of practice in the art of appearing unsurprised. “That kid?” she says.

“How pathetic is that?” he says. “How stupid and sad and pathetic.”

She cocks her head, looks at him as if he had been suddenly obscured by smoke. “You’re telling me that you’re gay?”

A brief, swooping return to Carole Potter’s lawn, the moment Peter said to Mizzy, “So, you’re gay.” Yes and then again no. Would that it were that simple.

He says to Uta, “I don’t know. I mean, how could I love another guy and not be gay?”

“Easy,” says Uta.

She settles her weight onto one hip, adjusts her glasses. Time to begin class.

She says, “You want to tell me about it?”

“You want to hear about it?”

“Of course I do.”

Okay, then. Go.

“Nothing happened. One kiss.”

“A kiss is something.”

Amen, sister.

“To be perfectly honest, I think I fell in love with… I don’t know if I can say this with a straight face. Beauty itself. I mean, as manifested in this boy.”

“You’ve always been in love with beauty itself. You’re funny that way.”

“I am. Funny. That way.”

“And you know, Peter…”

Her accent, her beloved Uta-esque heavy never-ceasing accent, seems to have grown if anything heavier with the gravity of the moment. Ant yoo no, Peder…

“…you know, it would have been simpler for you to fall in love with some young girl. Poor fuck, you never take the simple way out.”

Yoo nefer take de zimple vay out. Oh, God, Uta, how I love you.

“Do you think I want out of something?”

“Don’t you?”

“I love Rebecca.”

“That’s not the point.”

“And what would you say the point is?”

She pauses, readjusts those glasses.

“Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”

“You ready for the punch line?” Peter says.

“I’m always ready for a punch line.”

“He was just fucking with me.”

“Sure he was. He’s a kid, right?”

“It gets better.”

“I’m listening.”

“He blackmailed me.”

“That’s very nineteenth century,” she says.

“I found out he was using drugs again, and he seduced me so I wouldn’t tell Rebecca.”

“Wow. That’s ballsy.”

Is there an undercurrent of admiration in her voice?

Whether there is or not, Peter understands: he, Peter, is a comic character. How had it happened that he’d imagined, even briefly, otherwise? He’s the capering fool on whom others play tricks. He’s an easy mark, all vanity and pomade.

Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

“I’m a fool,” he says.

“You are,” she answers.

Uta comes around to his side of the desk, puts an arm over his shoulders. Just an arm, perched lightly, but still, it’s something for Uta. She is not a hugger.

“And you’re not the first fool for love,” she says.

Thank you, Uta. Thank you, friend. But it won’t do, will it? I have, it seems, gone beyond consolation, there’s not much for me in the image of myself, however true, as another sad citizen doing the little dance.

It might be better if I could howl and weep with you. Can’t, though, even if I wanted to, even if I thought you could bear the spectacle. I’m dry inside. There’s a ball of hair and tar lodged in my belly.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.” Because really, what else can he say?

The rest of the day passes, somehow. By a quarter past nine, the show’s been hung. Tyler, Branch, and Carl have gone home. Peter stands in the middle of the gallery with Uta and Victoria.

“It’s good,” Uta says. “It’s a good show.”

Arrayed around them on the gallery’s walls and floors are five of Victoria’s superheroes: the black man in the overcoat; a middle-aged woman searching her purse for change to feed a parking meter; a sharp-faced, portly young woman emerging from a bakery with a little white bag in her hand (her lunch bagel, no doubt); a ratty-looking Asian kid, twelve or so, whizzing along on a skateboard; and a Hispanic girl pushing a double stroller in which both of her twins are bawling mightily. The videos play simultaneously as the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth booms over and over from three discreet black speakers. The worshipful merchandise is on the shelves: the T-shirts, the action figures, the lunch boxes, and the Halloween costumes.

“It’s okay, right?” Victoria asks.

“It’s more than okay,” Peter tells her, though that’s what he’d say to any artist.

Time to turn it all off, douse the lights and go home. The curators are coming tomorrow, along with a few of the gallery’s more prominent clients. The story in Artforum comes out early next week. Blessings on you, Victoria, in your art-world ascension. If I do manage to nail down Rupert Groff, maybe you won’t leave me after all.

Try to care about it. Do your best to act as if it matters.

What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?

You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television.

You are Brueghel’s tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.

Uta says, “Why don’t we get some dinner someplace?”

Hm. Can’t, really. Not tonight. Can’t sit in a restaurant and talk the talk, not even with the sweet and self-effacing Victoria Hwang.

He says, “Why don’t you two go?” To Victoria he adds, “I’ve been a little sickish lately, and I have to be very brilliant tomorrow with all your clamoring fans.”

How can she balk at that?

Uta gives him the teacherly look. Should he be excused?

She says, “We can just get something quick and sleazy, you know.”

“I’m quick and sleazy,” Peter answers. Ha ha ha. “Really, we’ll have a big drunken dinner the night of the opening. I need to go home to bed now.”

“If you say so,” Uta answers.

“Off with you then,” Peter says. “I’m going to stay here a few more minutes. I’d like to have a little time alone with the show.”

How can anyone balk at that?

Uta and Victoria get their coats and stand with Peter at the door.

Victoria says, “Thanks for everything, Peter. You’re great.”

Thank you, Victoria, for being a kind and decent person. Funny how the simple virtues matter.

Uta says, “Call me if you need to, all right?”

“Of course I will.”

She squeezes his hand. As he did Bette’s, when they stood in front of the shark.

Thank you, Uta. And good night.

So here he is, alone with five ordinary citizens passing through brief interludes of their regular days as the London Symphony Orchestra negotiates, over and over and over, the opening strains of the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven loops on and on.

How have these people been rescued and disappointed? What will happen to them, what’s happening to them now? Nothing much, probably. Errands and trudging work-hours, school for the boy, everybody’s nightly television. Or something else. Who knows? They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery); that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skateboard or looking for coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

Peter would love to sleep right now. To sleep and sleep and sleep.

Or cry. Crying would be good, might be good, cleansing, but he’s dry inside, what he feels more nearly resembles indigestion than it does despair.

He is a poor, funny little man, isn’t he?

He lingers a little with the show, which will sell or not sell. Which will come down again, and be replaced by another show. Groff, if he’s lucky, Lahkti if he’s… less lucky. Not that Lahkti is a booby prize, those painstakingly intricate little paintings of Calcutta, Peter does love them (he loves them enough) and really, although Lahkti isn’t a sensation (small paintings just don’t sell the way big ones do) it would be a relief not to have to bump him to make room for Groff. Peter could continue to feel honorable that way, he could live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared. Get Groff and he graduates (maybe) to the first rank; fail to get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.

Victoria’s five ordinary citizens loop and loop and loop. Beethoven blares triumphally. Mizzy is in all likelihood flying, right now, across the continent, over the light-strands of nocturnal America.

It would be good to sleep here, right here, on the gallery floor, as five random strangers live, over and over and over again, through brief interludes of what are by now their unremembered pasts.

Time to shut them down, turn off the music, kill the lights, and go home.

And yet he remains. This may not be great art but it’s perfectly good art and he is consoled by it, he is accompanied by it, and it will never feel as immaculate as it does tonight, before the shoppers come to look it over.

He picks up one of the action figures, the black man with the battered briefcase. The figure is intentionally shoddy—its painted-on eyes slightly off-kilter, its skin a lifeless cocoa color, its suit indifferently made of a shiny, gunmetal-gray synthetic. Idolatry tends to involve demotion, doesn’t it? Even those polychromed, glass-eyed Virgin Mothers, even those gilded Buddhas. Flesh, the true and living thing, trumps every effort at representation.

What artist would be the likeliest choice to render Peter now? It would have to be Francis Bacon, wouldn’t it? One of those pink fleshy middle-aged male nudes, in tortured repose. And he’d actually imagined himself in bronze. He’d been that vain.

Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

It’s something, though—it isn’t nothing—to have a tub to dance to. Not if you’re a bear.

When Peter gets home, he finds Rebecca in bed. It’s only a little after 9:30.

She is curled up, facing the wall, wrapped in a quilt. Peter thinks briefly of an Indian wife, swaddled for the pyre.

She knows. Mizzy has told her everything. Peter loses his balance for a moment, as if the floor had tilted under him. Will he deny it? That would be easy enough. Mizzy is an inveterate liar, Peter could so plausibly proclaim his innocence. But if he lies he will always have lied, Mizzy for all his transgressions will always have been falsely accused. Peter fights an impulse to simply turn and go, to leave the apartment, to escape into… what, exactly? What’s out there for him?

He steps into the room. Here are the lamps they bought years ago, at the Paris flea market. Here, hanging over the bed, are the three Terry Winters drawings.

“Hey,” Peter manages to say. “You feeling sick?

“I’m just tired. Mizzy left today.”

“Did he?”

Is it too horribly transparent to play dumb like this? Can Rebecca smell the deceit wafting off him?

She does not turn to face him.

“San Francisco,” she says. “Somebody’s giving him a job out there, it seems.”

Peter struggles to sound and act like himself, though he’s having trouble remembering what he sounds like, how he acts.

“What kind of job?”

“Computer graphics. Don’t ask me what that is, exactly. In terms of how it could actually be a job.”

“Why do you think he suddenly wants to do that?” Peter asks, and feels a prickle up his spine. Kill me now, Rebecca. Lower the boom. We both know why he’s suddenly gone to San Francisco. I stand before you, a true piece of shit. Scream at me. Throw me out. It might be a relief, for both of us.

Rebecca says, “I thought he was going to change this time. I really did.”

“Maybe it’s time to accept the possibility that he never will,” Peter says tentatively.

“Maybe it is.”

There is such sorrow in her voice. Peter goes and sits on the edge of the mattress. Gently, gently, he puts a hand on her covered shoulder.

Would it be more manly to confess? Of course it would. He could have that dignity, at least.

He says, “Mizzy provokes people. People respond to him.”

A weak introduction. But something. Continue.

She says, “Too much for his own good.”

Ready? Go.

“What did he tell you this afternoon?”

Peter does not know whether he will lie or not. He can’t see that far into his own future. He can only wait, helplessly, to see what he’ll do.

“He did tell me something,” she says.

Oh. Here it comes. Goodbye, my life. Goodbye to the lamps and the drawings.

Peter works to keep his voice steady.

“I think I know. Do I know?”

The truth, then. He’ll tell the truth. He’ll have that, at least.

She says, “He told me that he loves me, but he’s got to stay away from me for a while. It seems I inhibit his growth by doting on him the way I do.”

Really? Wait a minute. Really and truly? That’s it?

“Well, maybe he’s right,” Peter says. Is it possible that she can’t hear the sway in his voice?

“The thing is…”

Peter hesitates. He feels more than hears a minute susurration at the window, the tiniest of taps. Snow. A light windblown veil of it, as the weatherman predicted.

Rebecca says, “He adores me and blah, blah, blah, but he needs to be on his own.”

Oh.

Maybe Mizzy has not needed to blackmail Peter, then. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t have been believed. Or maybe—worse—he’s taken a certain satisfaction in bringing everybody down and then just moving on. Maybe he’s been toying with them both, seeing how much he can get away with.

Rebecca turns to face Peter. Her face is pallid, with a dull sweaty sheen.

She says, “I’ve realized something.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been living in some kind of fucked-up fantasy.”

Here it comes, then, after all. She’s been living with the illusion of an honorable husband, a man who has his failings but would not, would never, do what Peter has done.

“Mm?” he says.

“I thought that if I could make Mizzy happy, something magic would happen.”

“What magic?”

“That I’d be happy, too.”

His stomach lurches.

He’d thought she was happy.

“I think you’re upset right now,” he tells her.

She draws a ragged breath. She doesn’t cry.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m upset. And you know what?”

He remains silent.

She says, “When Mizzy told me he was going to San Francisco for some nonexistent job, and hit me up for an airplane ticket, I wasn’t mad. Well, I was mad, of course I was, but I was something else, too.”

“What?” Peter has never felt so stupid.

“I was envious. I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to be some mature, levelheaded person who could cut him a check. I wanted to be young and fucked up and, I don’t know. Free.”

No, Rebecca, you do not want that. You want continuance. I’m the one who wants to be free. I’m the one who’d do unspeakable things.

“Free,” he says. His voice is hollow, strange to him.

Rebecca, you can’t have this fantasy. This fantasy is mine.

A silence passes. He can hear snow tapping at the window. He feels as if he could lose consciousness, just faint away.

He hears himself say, “Do you want to be free of us?”

“Yes,” she answers. “I think I do.”

What? What? No. You, Rebecca, are the happy one—the happy-enough one. You’re the one who’s satisfied with our brisk (if occasionally arid) lives; you’re the one who I, Peter, was thinking of fleeing from; you’re the one I didn’t want to harm.

“Darling,” he says. Only that.

“You’re unhappy, too, aren’t you?” she says.

He doesn’t answer. Yes, yes, of course he’s unhappy, but unhappiness is his realm, she has no right to it, she is staunch and formidable, she is capable of being wounded but she is not unhappy in her own right. She is the one who, with every good intention, is holding him back.

He says, “Are you telling me you want to separate?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

How long? How long have you been impersonating satisfaction?

“I don’t know what to say.”

She sits up, faces him squarely. Her eyes are dull. She says, “I seem to have had some unspoken deal with myself, where if I could make Mizzy happy, I’d be able to be happy myself.”

“Do you think that’s a little…”

She laughs, a hollow sound. “Crazy? Yes.”

“And you’d really leave me because Mizzy has moved to San Francisco?”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” she says. “We’d call it quits, you and I. We’d say farewell.”

Is it possible that this monolith Peter has called his marriage is, has always been, so flimsy? Is it possible that all his secrets, his second-guesses, his cajolings and seductions, have been unnecessary? Did one of them simply have to… call it off, and poof?

His face has gone clammy. He struggles for a breath.

“Rebecca,” he says. “Explain this to me. You’re telling me you’ve decided we should split up because your feckless brother has moved to San Francisco to work in computer graphics.”

“He’s not going to work in computer graphics,” she says. “He’s just going to do drugs in a new place.”

“Be that as it may.”

She examines her fingertips. And then suddenly, violently, she puts her index finger into her mouth and bites down on it.

“I’m a complete idiot,” she says.

“Stop. Don’t say that.”

Her face has taken on a panicked, feral look.

“I always thought I was building a place Mizzy could come to,” she says. “Since he was a lost little boy. I knew our family couldn’t handle him, I mean they look romantic from a certain distance but they can’t really manage much of anything. And now it seems that’s not really what I wanted at all. I wanted to be Mizzy. I wanted to be the troubled one. I wanted to be the one somebody has to take care of.”

Peter wants to slap her. He wants to do that.

He says, “Don’t I take care of you?”

“I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m sorry.”

It is all Peter can do to say, “No, tell me more.”

“I feel like a stranger here, Peter. I come home sometimes and think, who lives here? I do love you. I did love you.”

“You did.”

What about all those dinners together, what about our Sundays?

“No, I do, I do love you, but I’m… I’m all messed up. I feel like I’m falling away from everything.”

She bites down on her finger again.

“Don’t do that,” Peter says.

“I’m a rotten mother. To everybody. I couldn’t help Bea, I couldn’t help Mizzy. I’m just a child who’s learned to impersonate an adult.”

Peter works to stay conscious. What should he say to her, what does he want to say to her? That all her efforts to produce a sanctuary for her little lost brother were undone by her besotted husband, who drove Mizzy away not with love but by keeping a secret? Should he tell her that in all likelihood she’s been wrong all these years, the young prince is, sad to say, just a cheap hustler, who was happy enough to run scams out of the temple she’d built for him?

Isn’t it the way? We build palaces so that younger people can break them up, pillage the wine cellars and pee off the tapestry-draped balconies.

Look at Bea. Didn’t they think that she’d love to live in SoHo; that she’d want to grow up wearing tight little Chanel skirts and playing in a band? Did they imagine that their desire to make her happy would prove to be the monster scratching at her window?

Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?

How did he forget that Rebecca has a life of her own, and that the ongoing work of being Rebecca doesn’t always hinge on him?

“You’re not rotten,” he says. “You’re human.”

She says, “Wouldn’t you rather be free?”

“No. I don’t know. I love you.”

“In your way.”

In your way. A soul-wave rises in him, a surge of intolerable sadness. He has failed everyone. He has neither heard nor seen.

“We shouldn’t separate,” he says. “Not now.”

“You think we should just go on?”

He stops himself from saying, Yes, that’s exactly what we should do. We should just go on.

Wouldn’t he have left her, if Mizzy had so much as given the nod?

What he wants. To cough up whatever is lodged in his gut, and go to bed. Wake eventually to his old impossible life. He does want that.

Finally she says, “I guess we could try.”

He nods.

Is it this, then? Is it compassion for another, is this all that actually matters? To love, to forgive, to abide?

It isn’t that simple. The ability to care for another being, to imagine what it’s like to be another person, is part of the tumble. It’s essential to the odd saint or two (if such creatures as saints exist) but it’s only one aspect of a life, a big ambiguous motherfucking heartbreaking life.

Still. It isn’t nothing.

Rebecca is no longer Galatea, she is no longer Olympia. Time robs us and robs us and when we beg for mercy, it robs us some more. Here is her tired face. Here is her future face, hollowed and pallid, which arrives daily, a face that will (like Peter’s) be ever less capable of arousing the ardor even of a hapless Mike Forth, or a scheming, narcissistic Mizzy. She’s got a strand of her own dark hair plastered into her pale forehead.

At the moment they resemble nothing so much as an anonymous couple in a depot somewhere, huddled together, glad for the room’s warmth, if nothing else.

Small grayish snowflakes tumble and swirl, swirl and eddy and tumble against the window.

Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways—you have not imagined the lives of others.

Out there, beyond the glass, Bette Rice is laughing over a glass of wine with her husband. Mizzy is in midair, watching a romantic comedy on a miniature screen as The Magic Mountain lies open on his lap. Bea is getting ice from the cooler behind the bar, thinking she’s tired of what she’s doing, maybe she should travel, maybe she should… go someplace. Someplace else. Uta is standing at her bedroom window, smoking a cigarette and thinking about blank white canvas.

Snow is falling into the urn in Carole Potter’s garden, falling on the herb beds, into the petaled mouths of the oregano flowers. A white snow-sheet blows over the empty garden as skeins of falling snow turn and twist in the silvered dark.

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.

It’s the last snow of the year. After tonight, the days and nights will grow steadily warmer, the hard little buds on the Potters’ yew trees will burst open and bloom.

And here, on this cold night, are Peter and Rebecca, in their familiar bedroom.

Something rises in Peter, more like a plant being uprooted by an invisible hand than a levitation of soul. He can feel the hairlike roots extracting themselves from his flesh. He is being lifted out of himself, shedding the husk of self, that sad hungry man, the action figure with the indifferently painted eyes and the dashed-off polyester suit. But if he’s been a clownish figure he has also been (please God) an acolyte, a lover of love, and his little earthly cavortings were meant to appease a deity, however silly and inadequate his offering. He can see the snow falling and he can see the room from outside the window, a modest chamber worried by weather but fast for now, home for now, to him and his wife, until others take their places. If he died or if he just walked out into the dark, would Rebecca feel his ongoing presence? She would. They have come too far together. They have tried and failed and tried and failed and there’s probably, in the final analysis, nothing left for them to do but try again.

He looks at her.

She is radiant in her sorrow, gauntly fabulous, present in all her particulars, in the broad, pale expanse of her forehead and the Athena-like jut of her brows, in the gray livingness of her eyes, the firm line of her decisive mouth, the prominent bulb of her almost-masculine chin. She is here, right here; she looks exactly like this. She is no failed copy of her younger self. She is herself, exactly that, rapt and ravaged-looking, incomparable, singular.

“What do you think?” she says.

This is her voice, deep for a woman, with a little rasp to it, an undercurrent of burr, like a stick drawing on sand. She still retains, if you listen carefully, a trace to the old Richmond lilt, burnished by her years away to a soft, astonished rise that makes hard music of the world “think.”

Here is Peter’s art, then. Here is his life (though his wife may leave him, though he’s faltered in so many ways). Here is a woman who keeps changing and changing, impossible to cast in metal because she’s already not who she was when he walked through the door, not who she’ll be ten minutes from now.

Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe all of Peter’s chances are not yet squandered.

He kisses Rebecca, lightly, on her chapped lips.

“Yes,” he says. “I think we could try. I do. Yes.”

He begins to tell her everything that has happened.