More e-mails. More voice mails.
And then, the long-dreaded: the sound of an accident out in the gallery. A clatter, a thump, Tyler shouting, “Fuck.”
Peter runs. There in the middle of the gallery stand Tyler, Uta, and Tyler’s assistants, Branch and Carl. There on the floor is the victim: one of the wrapped paintings, slashed on a diagonal, a cut six or seven inches long.
“What the fuck?” Peter says.
“I can’t believe it” is all Tyler has to offer.
Uta, Branch, and Carl have arranged themselves like mourners around the canvas. Peter gets up close, squats to survey the damage. It is neither more nor less than a slit, about seven inches, running from a corner of the canvas toward the center. It is surgically precise.
“How did this happen?” Peter asks.
“Lost my grip,” Tyler answers. He is not particularly contrite. If anything, he’s peevish—why would the goddamn thing want to get ripped like this?
“He had a box cutter in his pocket,” Uta says. She’s hanging back. Although she’s perfectly capable of righteous fury when the occasion demands it, this kind of thing is Peter’s job. She’s already thinking about the terms of the insurance coverage.
“You were taking down the show with a box cutter in your pocket?”
“I wasn’t thinking. I just stuck it in my pocket for a second, and I sort of forgot about it.”
“Right,” Peter says, and is surprised by the calm in his own voice. It seems briefly that this can be made to unhappen, because it was so obviously going to happen. Bette Rice does in fact have cancer, terminal cancer, and Tyler has in fact been walking around with a box cutter in his pocket because Peter refuses to appreciate his assemblages and collages. It’s Peter’s fault, he saw this coming. No, it’s Rex’s fault. Rex and his goddamned endless parade of young geniuses who are invariably slender, tattooed young men, and are never actual geniuses, though Rex continues to insist, continues to “mentor” them, and it’s ruining his career, it’s turning him into a joke.
Uta says, “It’s one of the ones that didn’t sell.”
Peter nods. That’s better, of course. But there’s nothing good about word going out that art gets destroyed on Peter’s premises.
Tyler says, “Man, I’m really sorry.”
Peter nods again. Yelling won’t help. And really, he can’t fire Tyler on the spot. The show has to come down today.
“Get back to work,” Peter says quietly. “Try to remember not to put anything sharp in your pockets.”
He’s going to fucking kill Rex. Lecherous old queen.
Uta says, “Let’s take this one to the back.”
Peter, however, is not quite ready to abandon the corpse. Cautiously, very very gently, he slips his finger under the waxy paper, and lifts it.
All Peter can see is a triangle of clotted color. A swirl of ochre dotted with black.
Carefully, he fingers the paper another fraction of an inch away from the canvas.
“Peter,” Uta cries.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but what Peter thinks he sees is a standard-issue abstract, clumsily painted. Student work.
That’s what’s under the sealed, pristine wrapping? That’s the shrouded relic?
Peter’s stomach lurches. What the fuck? Is he… yeah, he’s going to…
He retches. By the time he’s standing his mouth has already filled with vomit, but he makes it to the bathroom, where he expels it into the toilet and then stands, heaving, as it comes up again, and again.
Uta stands behind him. “Darling,” she says.
“I’m okay. You don’t have to see this.”
“Fuck off, I’ll be changing your diapers one day. It’s not the worst thing in the world. You know we’re covered.”
Peter still leans over the toilet bowl. Is it over? Hard to tell.
“It’s not the fucking painting. I don’t know, I’ve been queasy for a while. Maybe the turkey was a little off.”
“Go home.”
“No way.”
“Come back later if you want to. Go home now, for an hour, even. I’ll keep an eye on the idiots out there.”
“Maybe for an hour.”
“Absolutely for an hour.”
All right, then. He’s strangely embarrassed by having to walk past Tyler and his assistants—some vague sense of defeat. The young and destructive have won this one; the old guy, grown delicate, saw the carnage and fell on his sword.
He gets a cab on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. He’s light-headed but is done (please, God) being sick. How awful it’d be to throw up in the backseat of Zoltan Kravchenko’s cab. Zoltan would of course be furious, he’d eject Peter and speed off to clean up the mess. You can’t be sick in public, not in New York. It renders you impoverished, no matter how well you’re dressed.
Peter makes it home, gives Zoltan a big tip because Peter didn’t throw up in his cab but might have. He lets himself into the building, gets into the elevator. There is, in all this, a certain nausea-tinged unreality. He’s hardly ever sick, and he’s never home at two o’clock on a Monday. Now that he’s ascending in the elevator, though—now that he’s entered that short interlude of floaty nowhere—he’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.
When he enters the loft, he’s aware of… what? A presence? Some small perturbation of the ordinary air…
It’s Mizzy, asleep on the sofa. He’s shirtless again, wearing only his cargo shorts and a bronze amulet hung from a leather thong around his neck. His face, in repose, is settled into a youthfulness that isn’t as apparent when his troubled, inquisitive eyes are open. Asleep, he looks remarkably like a bas-relief on the sarcophagus of a medieval soldier—he’s even got his hands crossed over his chest. Like a medieval bas-relief, he possesses a certain aspect of what Peter can only think of as youth personified, the sense of a young hero who in life was probably not so beautiful and quite possibly not all that heroic and was certainly mauled into bloody bits in the battle in which he died, but afterward—after life—some anonymous artisan has granted him impeccable features and put him to perfect sleep, under the painted eyes of saints and martyrs, as generation after generation of the temporarily living light candles for their dead.
Peter kneels beside the sofa, to look more closely at Mizzy’s face. It’s only after he’s knelt down that he realizes it’s a funny gesture—penitential, reverent. And how will he explain it if Mizzy wakes up? Mizzy’s breath whistles softly, steadily, though—the imperturbable sleep of youth. Peter remains another moment. It’s clear now. Mizzy is Rebecca, incarnated: the young Rebecca, the bright and clean-faced girl who’d walked into Peter’s seminar at Columbia all those years ago and seemed… familiar, in some ineffable way. It hadn’t been love at first sight, it’d been recognition at first sight. Mizzy’s resemblance to her hasn’t been clear until now because Rebecca has changed—Peter sees how much. She’s given up (as, of course, she would) a pristine nascency, that not-quite-formed quality that’s gone by our midtwenties at the latest.
Peter has a terrible urge to touch the boy’s face. Just to touch it.
Whoa. What’s that about?
Okay, there’s gay DNA in the family, and he whacked off with his friend Rick throughout junior high, and sure, he can see the beauty of men, there’ve been moments (a teenage boy in a pool in South Beach, a young Italian waiter at Babbo), but nothing’s happened and he hasn’t, as far as he can tell, been suppressing it. Men are great (well, some of them) but they’re not sexy.
Still, he wants to touch Mizzy’s face. It isn’t erotic; not exactly erotic. He wants to touch this slumbering perfection that won’t last, can’t last, but is here, right now, on his couch. Just to make contact with it, the way the faithful want to touch the robe of a saint.
Of course, he doesn’t do it. As he stands, his knees crack. Mizzy, mercifully, sleeps on. Peter goes into the
bedroom, closes the curtains, doesn’t turn on the light. He takes his clothes off and lies down on the bed. To his surprise he falls almost immediately into a deep, dark slumber, during which he dreams of armored men, standing at attention in the snow.
FRATRICIDE
Peter tried to murder his brother only once, which, by the standards of brothers, is modest. He was seven, which would have made Matthew ten.
Most little boys are girlish; Matthew’s… Matthew-ness wasn’t fully apparent until he got a bit older. By the age of ten he could sing (badly) every song ever recorded by Cat Stevens. He insisted on a paisley bathrobe, which he wore constantly around the house. He seemed, at times, to be developing an English accent. He was a fine-featured boy walking through the rooms of a stolid beige-brick house in Milwaukee, dressed in a green paisley robe that fell just above his ankles, singing “Morning Has Broken” or “Wild World,” softly, wistfully, clearly meant to be overheard.
Their parents—Lutherans, Republicans, members of various clubs—did not torment Matthew, maybe because they suspected the world would torment him sufficiently on its own, or maybe because they weren’t yet ready to abandon the notion that their older son was a prodigy, expressing random if rather peculiar enthusiasms that would solidify, over time, into a significant, remunerative career. Their mother was a handsome, hefty, big-jawed woman, pure Swede, whose profoundest fear was of being cheated and whose deepest conviction was that everyone was trying to cheat her. Their father, handsome but a little blank, unfinished-looking, vaguely Finnish, never fully adapted to his good fortune in marrying their mother, and lived in his marriage the way an impoverished relation might live in the spare room. It’s possible that their mother refused to be cheated out of two healthy, unalarming Wisconsin sons, and that their father simply went along with her. For whatever reasons, they were uncensorious with Matthew. They did not object when he started wearing knickers to school, or when he declared his intention to take up figure skating.
It was left to Peter, then, to torment him.
Peter lacked the focus and ambition of a true sadist. Nor did he hate Matthew, at least not in the purest sense. He did, however, spend most of his early years in an almost constant state of apology. He was loved but he could not, at the age of six, read aloud from their parents’ Collected Poetry of Ogden Nash, and did not, at the age of seven, write, direct, and star in a neighborhood children’s production of a play, with music, entitled Man Overboard, which made their mother weep with laughter. From the very beginning, Matthew absorbed whatever stray molecules of eccentricity or accomplishment might reside in odd corners of the house; whatever wasn’t Matthew was just dark furniture and ticking clocks and a collection of antique cast-iron banks their mother had been accumulating since before she met their father.
Most infuriating to Peter, though, was Matthew’s innocent and untroubled affection for him. Matthew, it seemed, considered Peter to be a kind of pet, trainable but limited. One can teach a dog to sit, fetch, and stay; it would be silly to try to teach it to play chess. When Peter was a toddler, Matthew made outfits for him and paraded him around in them. Peter can’t remember any of that, but there are photographs: little Peter in a bee suit, with goggles and antennae; in a toga made from a pillowcase, with a circle of ivy obscuring his eyes. When Peter was a bit older (he has fleeting memories of this), Matthew devised for him an alter ego: Giles the manservant who, despite his humble origins, was determined to prosper in the world by dint of hard work, which generally involved keeping his and Matthew’s room tidy, performing household tasks for their mother, and running errands for Matthew.
What Peter found most appalling: he liked being Giles. He liked fulfilling modest expectations. He went about his assigned tasks with prim satisfaction, and actually believed he would prosper (at what?) if he obeyed cheerfully and uncomplainingly. In fact, though he can’t quite remember, it’s possible that Giles the manservant had been his idea to begin with.
It wasn’t until around the time he turned seven that he began to fully understand that he was the lowest member of the household, and always had been. He was the reliable, unexceptional one; the good-enough boy.
The attempted murder took place unexpectedly, on a bright, cold day in March. Peter was crouched on the flagstone patio in the winter-browned backyard, a tiny figure in a red plaid jacket under an ice blue sky. He had illicitly taken one of his father’s screwdrivers out of the garage, in order to work unsupervised on the gift he was making for his mother’s birthday: a birdhouse from a kit. He was hopeful, but troubled. He suspected his mother didn’t want a birdhouse (she’d never expressed any interest in birds), but he’d been at the hobby shop with his father and had seen the box, which depicted a perfect little gabled house on a field of pale turquoise, encircled by ecstatic cardinals and bluebirds and finches. It seemed to Peter a vision of heavenly reward, and he was struck—he was transported, really—by the notion that he could convey this sliver of perfection to his mother and that in some way both he and she would be changed, he into a boy who could guess her secret desires and she into someone who ardently wanted what he had to give. Peter’s father frowned over the fact that it was meant to be assembled by children ten or older, and before agreeing to buy it extracted from Peter the promise that the two of them would build it together.
Which vow Peter disregarded, as soon as he was home alone. He needed to produce something marvelous, by his own hand. His mother would tear up with joy and his father would nod, judiciously and affectionately—sure enough, our younger boy is capable beyond his years.
Naturally, the birdhouse, when taken from the box, proved to be made of dull brown fiberboard. It came with exactly the required number of silver screws, a single sheet of instructions printed on pale green paper, and—somehow, most dispiriting of all—a small cellophane packet of birdseed.
Squatting over the pieces, which he’d laid out on the flagstones, Peter struggled to retain his optimism. He would paint it some brilliant color. He might decorate it with pictures of birds. Still, at the moment, the components—two gabled ends and various rectangles meant to be walls, floor, and roof—were so inert and unpromising he found himself fighting off the urge to go inside and take a nap. The pale, biscuity brown of the fiberboard might have been the color of discouragement itself.
Nothing to do, though, but begin. Peter matched a gabled end with a wall piece, put a screw into the predrilled hole, and turned it.
“What are you making?” Delivered from above and behind, with the faintest hint of an Oxford accent.
It couldn’t be. No one was home.
Peter said, without looking up, “What’re you doing here?”
“Mrs. Fletcher is sick. What are you making?”
“It’s a surprise.”
He glanced back at Matthew. Matthew’s face was flushed with the cold, which gave it a cherubic incandescence. He wore a bright green scarf knotted around his neck.
“Is it a present for Mom?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Peter returned his attention to the pieces of birdhouse.
Matthew leaned in close, behind him. “Look,” he said, “it’s a little house.”
It’s a little house. Four innocent words. But when Matthew pronounced them, with lilting precision, some vortex came whirling down around Peter, some funnel of soured air that sucked the breath out of him. He was trapped here, pinned to these cold stones and this sad little project; there was no chance for him, no hope, he who enjoyed being a manservant, who was without brilliance, who contentedly ran the most trivial errands. He had been caught by Matthew in the act of making a little house and he was humiliated forever, he was a foolish small thing and would always be.
He will prefer, later, to remember it as an act of pure rage, unthinking, barely conscious, but in fact he passed over into a state of white-hot clarity in which he understood that he could not be there at that moment, he couldn’t survive Matthew watching him and saying, “Look, it’s a little house,�
�� but there was no way to escape and so he needed to take the screwdriver and gouge a hole in the air around Matthew, through which Matthew would disappear. Peter turned and leaped up with the screwdriver in his hand. He caught Matthew on the temple, an inch above his left eye. He would be grateful for the rest of his life that he had only scarred his brother, and not blinded him.
Although nothing as dramatic as the screwdriver attack ever occurred again, it did seem to subtly but permanently alter Peter’s domestic reputation. It established him as dangerous, possibly unstable, which was on one hand discomfiting and on the other an improvement. He had, at the very least, demonstrated to everyone that he was a bad pet. The game of Giles the manservant was abandoned without comment.
He and Matthew lived together for several years afterward as a supposedly tame fox might live with a peacock. Matthew was for the most part nervously gracious to Peter. Peter for the most part pressed his new advantage. It had not occurred to him until then that a single act of brute violence—with a screwdriver, something anyone could do—might inspire in his brother, in anyone, a lasting attitude of fearful and grudging respect. Peter became by slow degrees a seven-year-old general, friendly in a knowing, cheerfully threatening, almost courtly way, as if friendliness were a temporary concession he made to a brutal and duplicitous world.
Three years passed in the reign of Peter the Terrible.
Matthew at fifteen.
Tall fey figure walking with ardent steps past the brick and stone housefronts of Milwaukee, books held to his chest. Inexplicably optimistic, much of the time, though as he grew from childhood to adolescence he had the good sense to develop irony. Taunted by the local goons but not with the venom and devotion you might expect. Peter has always believed that Matthew possessed some aspect of the immaculate. Although there was nothing in any way saintly about him he did have an innocence of purpose that must have been evident in the more modest saints. Matthew was so entirely himself, so enraptured by his interests (by age fifteen: movies, the novels of Charles Dickens, skating, and the acoustic guitar), so harmless, so cordially indifferent to everyone but the two girls who were his only friends, that although he was teased occasionally and smacked around exactly once, by a gaggle of seventh-grade boys looking to establish a reputation, he was never the object of the prolonged campaigns of annihilation some of the boys waged against the handful of true unfortunates. Matthew was also, surely, kept at least relatively safe by his skater’s body, with its implication of coiled power (though he’d have had no idea how to punch anyone), and by his friendship with Joanna Hurst, a celebrated beauty. Whether it was calculated or spontaneous, he had been since the fifth grade the friend and confidant of a powerful, desired girl, and so somehow, in the admittedly rather rudimentary local estimation, was able to pass as an athlete (skating, but still) and a boyfriend (no scintilla of sex between them, but still). If Matthew was quite possibly the most effeminate person in Milwaukee, he was increasingly possessed of what Peter can only call a precocious grandeur. Peter’s aspect of nascent threat, unsupported by any further attacks, had by then solidified into what was generally regarded as cantankerousness, which his mother further diminished by calling him Mr. Grumpy whenever he was in a mood. His skin erupted, his hair went lank, and he found himself, to his surprise, a member of a small boy-band of malcontents, geekily devoted to rock music and Star Trek, neither admired nor derided, simply left alone. Matthew, on the other hand, was prominent. Glamorous, even. He was clever, rarely argumentative, never snippy or petulant, and even the most dour and threatening boys seemed to find him entertaining. He became a school mascot, of sorts. As he swanned his way through adolescence he treated the other members of the family, including Peter, with a sweet-tempered if occasionally weary, wised-up patience, like a noble child sent to live with common folk until he was ready to assume his true position. As he grew into himself it became possible, in his presence, to feel like a crusty but good-hearted dwarf, or a kindly old badger.
By Nightfall Page 9