By Nightfall

by Michael Cunningham

  And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.

  No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.

  He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.

  And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.

  That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”

  “What?”

  “All of it. Every single person and object.”

  “It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”

  She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.

  He said, “You have no idea…”

  “What?”

  “How normal most families are.”

  “Do you think my family is abnormal?”

  “No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”

  “I don’t think anyone is prosaic. I mean, some people are more eccentric than others.”

  Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can’t at least in theory actually have. If you were young lank-haired, pustule-plagued Pete Harris you felt like you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.

  Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?

  No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.

  Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”

  “Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”

  “He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”

  “I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first time around. When I was little, it was Rose and Julie who read me stories and helped me with my homework and stuff like that.”

  “Julie doesn’t like me, does she?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. A feeling, I guess.”

  “She’s protective, is all. Which is funny. She’s the wild one.”

  “She is, huh?”

  “Oh, probably not so much anymore. But in high school…”

  “She was wild.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How wild?”

  “I don’t know. Regular wild. She had sex with different boys, that’s all.”

  “Tell me a story or two.”

  “Is this turning you on?”

  “A little.”

  “This is my sister we’re talking about.”

  “Just tell me one story.”

  “Men are such perverts.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Okay, Charlie. One story.”

  “Charlie?”

  “I have no idea why I called you that.”

  “One story, come on.”

  She lay on her back with her head cradled in her hands, slim and tomboyish. They were in what the Taylors called the junk room, because it was the only room except Cyrus and Beverly’s that had a double bed. It had once been a guest room but, the Taylors having more use for junk than they did for guests, had long been devoted to storage, with the understanding that the occasional guest could always be installed there, with apologies. At the room’s far end, wan Virginia moonlight partly illuminated a shrouded sewing machine, three pairs of skis, a pile of cardboard cartons marked “Xmas,” and the Taylors’ collection of objects that would be repaired whenever someone had time: an improbably pink bureau missing its drawer pulls, a stack of ancient quilts, a chipped plaster St. Francis meant to stand on a lawn, a mounted marlin (where in the world would that have come from, and why would they want to keep it?), and, sitting on a high shelf, like an extinguished moon, a world globe that would light up just as soon as someone remembered to pick up the special bulb it required. There was more, considerably more, waiting like a troop of souls in purgatory, in the deeper dark beyond the window’s tentative beam.

  Some—many—would have found this room disheartening, would in fact have been unnerved by the Taylors’ whole house and the Taylors’ entire lives. Peter was enchanted. Here he was among people too busy (with students, with patients, with books) to keep it all in perfect running order; people who’d rather have lawn parties and game nights than clean the tile grout with a toothbrush (although the Taylors’ grout could, undeniably, have used at least minor attention). Here was the living opposite of his own childhood, all those frozen nights, dinner finished by six thirty and at least another four hours before anyone could reasonably go to bed.

  Here was Rebecca, lying next to him. Rebecca who inhabited this house as unthinkingly as a mermaid inhabits a sunken treasure ship.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s see… One night, when I was a sophomore…”

  “And Julie was a senior.”

  “Yeah. One night Mom and Dad were out, and I was off with Joe…”

  “Your boyfriend.”

  “Mm-hm. He and I had had a fight…”

  “Did you and Joe have sex?”

  She said, with mock indignity, “We were in love.”

  “So you did.”

  “Yes. Starting the summer after freshman year.”

  “Did you discuss it with your girlfriends before you slept with your boyfriend?”

  “Of course I did. Would you rather hear that story?”

  “Mm, no. Back to Julie.”

  “Okay. Julie thought she had the house to herself. I have no idea what Joe and I had fought about but it seemed huge at the time, I’d stormed off, I thought we were really and truly breaking up and that at sixteen I had already wasted the best years of my life on this moron. And I let myself in and right away, I heard this noise.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  “Like, this thumping. Coming from the garden room. Like somebody stomping his foot.”

  “Really?”

  “I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what sex sounded like, and if I’d thought I heard Julie having sex with some boy in the garden room, I’d have left her alone.”

  “But somebody was stomping a foot in there.”

  “I couldn’t tell what it was. I didn’t know Ju
lie was even home. I think if I hadn’t just had this huge fight with Joe, I might have been scared. But I was so furious. I sort of thought, All right, if you’re an escaped lunatic and you’ve got an axe and you’re sitting in my house stomping your foot, you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

  “You investigated.”

  “I did.”

  “And found?”

  “Julie with Beau Baxter, who she’d been dating, and Beau’s best friend, Tom Reeves.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “They were having sex.”

  “All three of them?”

  “More like, the two boys with Julie.”

  “Details.”

  “Are you touching yourself?”

  “Maybe.”

  “This is so wrong.”

  “That’s part of what’s sexy about it.”

  “I feel like I’m betraying her.”

  “This is making me love Julie, if that makes any difference.”

  “If you put a move on my sister…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Just tell me what you saw when you walked into the room.”

  “This was a mistake.”

  “Okay. Tell me what the thumping was.”

  “Hm? Oh. Beau was kicking the floor.”

  “Why?”

  “He just was.”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay. Because he was… screwing her. From behind. And, I don’t know, I guess when he got excited he was a foot-thumper.”

  “Where was the other guy?”

  “Guess.”

  “Julie was sucking his dick. Right?”

  “I’m not saying another word.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I left.”

  “Do you want to make up a version where you stayed?”

  “Not for all the money in the world.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you saw your sister having group sex.”

  “Not just that.”

  “What, then?”

  “It all seemed so… ugly. Joe had been an asshole to me and here was my sister just sort of servicing these two idiots…”

  “You don’t think they were servicing her?”

  “She and I talked about that, after.”

  “And?”

  “She said it had been her idea.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “I wanted to. I mean, it was her senior year, she’d made the national finals and she was going to Barnard. She seemed sort of… heroic, to me.”

  “So?”

  “I still didn’t buy it. She was the most competitive person I’d ever known. And really, I figured out how it must have gone. Even dumb old Beau Baxter was capable of understanding that after a few drinks, she wouldn’t turn down a dare. I knew she’d have to think of it afterward as having been her idea. She’d have to tell herself she’d been the one in power. Which sort of made it worse.”

  “You were a nice girl.”

  “I was not.”

  “Nicer than Julie.”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I had sex with Beau two days later. Correction. I fucked Beau two days later.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “He came up to me at a party to apologize, supposedly embarrassed but actually so damned pleased with himself.”

  “And you…”

  “I told him to follow me.”

  “Where’d you take him?”

  “Into the garden. It was this big house where they had a lot of parties, and there was a garden.”

  “And…”

  “I told him to fuck me. Right there, on the wet grass.”

  “No way.”

  “I’d had it. I’d had it with my asshole boyfriend and I’d had it with my slutty sister who thought she had to win every single contest and I’d had it with being the innocent younger sister who got hysterical when she saw people fucking in the garden room. That night I still thought I’d left my boyfriend forever, plus I’d drunk almost a full pint of cheap vodka and I just wanted to straddle the dick of that big stupid boy who’d humiliated my sister. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life.”

  “Wow.”

  “You like that, huh?”

  “Uh, what happened next?”

  “He was scared. As I’d suspected he’d be. He was all, Um, hey, Rebecca, I dunno… So I gave him a little shove on the chest with both hands and told him to lie down.”

  “Did he?”

  “You bet he did. He’d never seen the power of a girl, possessed.”

  “Go on.”

  “I pulled down his pants and pulled up his shirt. I didn’t need him to be naked. I got down on his dick and I showed him exactly what he was to do with his fingertip on my clitoris. It wasn’t clear that, until that moment, he knew what a clitoris was.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “You’re right. I am.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Really and truly?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “It’s a sexy story whether it’s true or not, right?”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “Men are such perverts.”

  “You’re right. We are.”

  “Anyway, story time’s over for tonight. Come here, Charlie.”

  “What’s with Charlie?”

  “I really and truly don’t know. Just come here.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. Right here.”

  “Here?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  Six months later, he married her.

  Twenty years later, he is sitting at his dining room table across from Mizzy, who’s fresh from the shower, wearing cargo shorts. He hasn’t put on a shirt. There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze—the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition, and not the rarest of mutations. Mizzy has dark pink nipples (there’s some sort of Mediterranean blood in these Taylors, somewhere) about the size of quarters. Between his neatly square pectorals, a single medallion of sable-colored hair.

  Is he being seductive, or is it just his regular carnal heedlessness? There’s no reason for him to think Peter might be interested, and even if there were, he wouldn’t get sexy around his sister’s husband. Would he? (When was it that Rebecca said, “I think Mizzy is capable of just about anything”?) There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody.

  Peter says, “How was Japan?”

  “Beautiful. Inconclusive.” Mizzy has retained the soft Virginia burr Rebecca lost years ago. Bee-oo-tiful. In-con-cloo-sive.

  Out of the shower, Mizzy looks less like Rebecca. He has his own version of the Taylor face: hawklike thrust of feature, jutting nose and big, attentive eyes (which, in Mizzy, are ever so slightly crossed, giving his face a stunned, ever-questioning quality); that vaguely Ancient Egyptian aspect they share, apparent in neither Cyrus nor Beverly, evidence of some insistently repeating snarl in their combined DNA. The Taylor brood, three girls and one boy, variations on a theme, profiles that would not be entirely surprising on millennia-old pottery shards.

  Peter is staring, isn’t he?

  “Can a whole country be inconclusive?” he asks.

  “I didn’t mean Japan. I meant me. I was just a tourist there. I couldn’t connect.”

  He has that Taylor presence, that thing they all do (with the possible exception of Cyrus), without quite realizing it. That ability to… command a room. Be the person about whom others ask, Who’s that?

  Mizzy went to Japan for a purpose, didn’t he? To visit some relic?

  Where the hell is Rebecca?

  “Japan is a very foreign country,” Peter says.

  “So is thi
s one.”

  Score one for undeluded youth.

  “Didn’t you go there to see some kind of holy rock?” Peter says.

  Mizzy grins. Okay, he’s not as self-important as he might be.

  “A garden,” he answers. “In a shrine in the mountains in the north. Five stones that were put there by priests six hundred years ago. I sat and looked at those stones for almost a month.”

  “Really?”

  Mizzy, don’t kid a kidder. I was once a self-dramatizing young romantic, too. A month?

  “And I got what I should have expected. Which was nothing.”

  And now: the lecture on the superiority of Eastern culture.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “A garden like that is part of a practice. It’s part of a life of contemplation. As it turns out you can’t just go and, I don’t know. Pay it a visit.”

  “Would you want a life of contemplation?”

  “Ah’m contemplating it.”

  This is a Southern gift, isn’t it—tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That’s what they mean by Southern charm, right?

  Peter expects a story, but no story, it seems, is forthcoming. A silence catches, and holds. Peter and Mizzy sit looking at the tabletop. The silence takes on a certain decisiveness, like the interlude during which it becomes apparent that a date is not going well; that nothing promising is going to happen after all. Soon, if this awkwardness doesn’t resolve itself, it will be established that Peter and Mizzy—this Mizzy, anyway, this troubled, world-scavenging boy who has supposedly been clean for over a year—don’t get along; that Mizzy is here to stay with his sister and that his sister’s husband will tolerate it as best he can.

  Peter shifts on his chair, looks aimlessly into the kitchen. Okay. They won’t be friends. They have to get along though, don’t they? It’ll be too hard on Rebecca if they don’t. He can feel the stillness turning from failed affinity to combat. Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversational gambit so that everything can be okay.