Mizzy having dated, starting at the age of twelve, the following known (never mind the unknown) people: a funny, obstreperous, Charlotte Gainsbourg–like girl who was a junior in high school when Mizzy was in the ninth grade; the strange brief period of Mizzy’s immense high school popularity at Exeter, during which he dated the most conventional pretty rich girl imaginable and was elected senior class president; the black girl at Yale who is now, supposedly, a senior aide in the Obama administration; the (rumored) affair with a young male classics professor that led to a second (more reliably rumored) affair with a studious, motorcycle-riding boy from the classics seminar; the beautiful Mexican girl from Mazatlán who spoke hardly any English and who (again, rumor) broke Mizzy’s heart in a way no one else has before or since; the rather loudly proclaimed period of celibacy when he returned to Yale (who picks up a crystal meth habit and remains celibate?); the elegant South American poet who was probably older than the forty she claimed to be; the inexplicably bland and cheerful girl followed, logically enough, by the beautiful young English psychopath who tried to burn the house down and succeeded in charring the eastern end of the porch… Those are the ones he and Rebecca know about. It’s impossible to say how many others there’ve been.
And then there’s Mizzy here, now, staying with Rebecca and Peter, out tonight with an unnamed woman friend.
“What do you think we should do?” Peter asks Rebecca.
She drains her martini. “Beyond what we are doing? You tell me.”
There’s an edge, isn’t there? How exactly has Mizzy’s waywardness become Peter’s fault?
“No idea.”
“I like to think he’s serious about working in the arts. Would you do me a favor?”
“Name it.”
“Would you take him with you to Carole Potter’s tomorrow?”
“If you want me to, sure.”
“I know how he is. He could hang around here for weeks, saying he wants to get involved in the arts, and the next thing we know, he’ll meet somebody who’s getting a crew together to sail to Martinique. It might help if you showed him a little bit of what being involved in the arts actually means.”
“Trying to sell a very expensive object to a very rich person would be indicative, no question.”
“I sort of think, the fewer illusions he has, the better. If he hates what he sees tomorrow, I can talk to him about how he might want to think about getting into something else. I mean, something other than another harebrained scheme.”
“I can’t believe you said ‘harebrained scheme.’ ”
“I’m turning into Lucy Ricardo, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I can’t really think why Mizzy wouldn’t like Carole Potter.”
“That’d be good, then. Hey, I’m having one more martini. What about you?”
“Sure.”
Rebecca starts making the second round. Maybe they’ll have a third. Maybe they both need to get drunk tonight, because their lives are at least a little bit too hard for them and because they both know Mizzy could very well be out there pursuing some small death or other.
“Rebecca?” Peter says.
“Mm?’
“Did I fuck up so completely with Bea?”
“Bea wasn’t an easy child. We both know that.”
“That isn’t the question.”
“No. You showed up for everything. You tucked her in at night.”
“To the best of my recollection.”
She pours him another drink.
“You did your very best with her. Don’t beat yourself up too much, okay?”
“Was I too hard on her?”
“No. Okay. You may have expected more from her than she was able to give.”
“I don’t remember it that way.”
Why are Bea and Rebecca so determined to make him the cause of everything that’s gone wrong?
“She’s furious at me, too, you know. Because I was late sometimes to pick her up from school. And I thought it was amazing that I was able to pick her up at all.”
“Would it be too cowardly to think of her as going through a phase?”
“I think she is going through a phase. We worry anyway.”
“Yes. We do.”
“And, okay,” she says, “I’m frankly a little tired of worrying about the young and wayward.”
No you’re not. You’re not really tired of worrying about Mizzy. Mizzy is—face it—more dramatic. What you are, what we both are, is exhausted by our daughter. You and I can, at the very least, get our fingers into Mizzy’s troubles, we can comprehend them. Bea’s determination to live such a small life, to wear a hotel uniform and live with a strange older girl who seems to be just floating along and have no (discernible) boyfriends… It’s harder, isn’t it? When she tells you nothing beyond the baldest facts.
“About Mizzy.”
“Mm-hm?”
What, exactly, does he want to say? He wants to tell her the whole story, though part of the whole story would have something to do with his worry that she and her sisters are, with every good intention, setting out to ruin Mizzy, to save him by normalizing him, and that… fuck… no, of course he shouldn’t be doing drugs again but he shouldn’t come to his senses, either; he shouldn’t get into something “promising,” I mean sure, that’d keep him safer, but is “safe” the best he can get from the world? Bea is safe, in her way. Mizzy is—may be, who knows?—one of those rare creatures who’s reckless and smart and complex enough to be granted, by the inscrutable Powers That Be, a life that doesn’t wear him down.
And so, Peter’s going to suggest to his wife that her beloved little brother should be permitted to keep on doing drugs? Right. That’ll go over.
“Nothing,” Peter says. “It’ll be good to have Mizzy along tomorrow. Carole will love him, she’s a huge fan of smart, handsome young men.”
“Who isn’t?”
She drops a handful of ice cubes into the shaker.
And so, Peter knows. He’s not going to be the sober responsible one. He’s not going to tell Rebecca that her fears are at least to some extent justified.
Rebecca, forgive me, if you can. I’m drowning in my own culpability. I’m afraid I could die of it.
Peter is, naturally, awake in bed when Mizzy gets in. Two forty-three. Not early but not late, not by the standards of the New York young. He listens to Mizzy’s soft, careful footfalls as he, Mizzy, walks through the front of the loft to his own room.
Where have you been?
Who have you been with?
Are you walking on little cat’s feet because you don’t want to wake us, or because you’re high? Are you putting each foot down in wonder onto electrified, glowing floorboards?
Mizzy goes into his room. Before he undresses for bed, he starts speaking, too softly to be heard. For a moment Peter imagines he’s brought someone with him, but no, he’s just calling somebody on his cell. Peter can hear the rise and fall of Mizzy’s voice but even through the cardboard wall can’t hear what he’s actually saying. He is, however, calling someone at… 2:58 a.m.
Peter lies mortified, abed. Who is it, Mizzy? Your dealer? Have you run out, are you going to meet him on the corner in twenty minutes? Or is it some girl you fucked, are you trying to make her less unhappy about the fact that you left her alone in her bed?
Okay. All right. He’d rather it was the dealer. He doesn’t want Mizzy to be seeing some girl. He doesn’t want that because, say it, he wants to own Mizzy, the way he wants to own art. He wants Mizzy’s sharp fucked-up mind and he wants his self-destruction and he wants his… being to be here, all here, he doesn’t want him squandering it on anybody else, certainly not a girl who can give him something Peter can’t. Mizzy is becoming—Peter’s not stupid, he’s crazy but he’s not stupid—his favorite work of art, a performance piece if you will, and Peter wants to collect him, he wants to be his master and his confidant (remember, Mizzy, I could blow the whistle at any time), Peter doesn’t want him t
o die (he really and truly doesn’t), but he wants to curate Mizzy, he wants to be his only… his only. That will do, really.
Matthew is in a grave in Wisconsin. Bea is in all likelihood shaking a cocktail for some leering businessman.
Better take two of those blue pills tonight.
PRIZE CHICKENS
The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let’s just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. Look over here, this is the Jardin du Luxembourg, and may I please present a little building we call the Blue Mosque. Pay no attention to that which encircles New York City: the fences topped with concertina-wire circles guarding factories that may or may not be out of business, the grim brick monoliths of housing projects, the scrappy little interludes of trash-strewn woods meant, it would seem, to demonstrate nature’s frailty in the face of human disregard. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.
Mizzy sits across from Peter, watching the gaunt urbanscape go by. The Magic Mountain sits open but unread on his lap. The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of sufficient reviving urgency (not at least one either of his parents could bear to broach), and so they needed to hydroplane forward together on an ever-replenished slick of remark and opinion, of ritualized disinclination (You know, I’ve never trusted that man) and long-familiar enthusiasms (I know Chinese food is filthy, but I just don’t care). As a conversationalist, Peter’s mother was grand, in her way. She man aged to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile—by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everything she did so because she’d presided over some utopia, and so knew from experience how much better we all could do. She wanted more than anything to live under a benevolent dictator who was exactly like her without being her—if she actually ruled she would relinquish her right to object, and without her right to object who and what would she be?
Peter’s father entertained his wife. He pointed out the beauty and the pathos, grabbed her hand and nibbled like a monkey at her fingertips, scoured TV Guide for old movies he knew she’d like and made sure they had dinner out once a week at a “nice” restaurant even when the money was tight. By middle age they had become a mysterious couple, one of those what’s-he-doing-with-her couples (his beauty had deepened, hers had started to pale), but Peter knew they were simply aging into what had been a common-enough youthful courtship: she was a ravishing young girl who was not easily pleased, and he a handsome but scrawny boy who outadored his league of competitors.
Yes, reader, she married him.
It was not exactly a bad marriage, but it wasn’t a good one either. She was too much the prize, he too much the grateful supplicant.
And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.
The Taylors of Richmond had no trouble with conversation, but its underlying purpose was different. Nothing was being perpetuated, nothing held at bay. This fundamental absence of nervousness seems to have affected all four of the children in that they were, each of them, many things but were, none of them, unsure. Mizzy’s got it, in spades—that Taylor way of unapologetically occupying space. It’s not so much about pride as it is simple, ordinary confidence, which is rendered extraordinary only by its paucity among the general population. Look at him, big ponderous book in his lap, watching the scenery, not aloof but calm as a prince would be about his right to be wherever he is, and if someone is responsible for providing amusement and diversion, it is clearly not he.
Peter says, “Hard to believe we’re half an hour from Cheever country.”
Mizzy says, “This must be the train he took into New York.”
“I suppose. Are you a Cheever fan?”
“Mm.”
That would be yes, and apparently there’s not much more to say on the subject. Mizzy continues watching the devastation roll past, and Peter wonders if he’s not only absorbed by the view but demonstrating, for Peter’s benefit, that firm-jawed, Roman-nosed profile. He’s, what, three years older than Bea? It might as well be thirty.
Bea—lost girl, all wised-up enmity and bitten nails, wrapped in that big cheap Peruvian sweater that promotes survival in what must be your barely heated apartment—you and I both know that you hate me in part because you came to believe I’d made you believe you weren’t beautiful enough. We haven’t told anyone, certainly not each other, but we both know, don’t we? I did my best, but yes, I frowned over the yellow tights you loved when you were four and I went chilly over the white-and-gold bedroom set you wanted at seven and yes, it’s true, I disapproved of that Nouveau-ish silver necklace you bought for yourself at a crafts fair with your own money, your first independent purchase. I turned away from what you loved and although I never said anything—I tried not to be a monster, I truly did—we had that telepathy, and you always knew. And later, when your hips broadened and your face broke out, and I swear, I swear, I loved you no less for your adolescent gawkiness, but it was too late by then, wasn’t it, I had a reputation, and there was nothing I could do, no attention I could pay, no protestation of love that would convince. If I’d hated the piss-colored tights and the white-canopied princess bed how could I possibly love the girl herself, now that her hair frizzled and her body had abruptly, at puberty, activated a hitherto-slumbering strand of DNA (mine, Bea, it’s not your mother who’s descended from dairy maids and lumberjacks) that said with terribly, fleshly finality: solid, earthbound, big womanly breasts and child-bearing hips, well before your fourteenth birthday. Your parents are slim and attractive and you, by some trick of genetics, are not.
I make you feel ugly. It’s terrible for you to so much as speak to me on the phone.
“How are you liking Thomas Mann?” Peter asks Mizzy. As a Harris, he can’t bear too much silence. He seems to believe he’ll disappear.
“I love him. Well, ‘love’ may not quite be the word for Mann. I admire him.”
“Are you reading The Magic Mountain for the first time?”
“Yes and no. There’s all these books I read in about five hours in college, just to keep up. I’m going back and reading them for real now.”
Peter says, “I never would have graduated without coffee and speed.”
And now, finally, Mizzy turns from the window and looks at Peter. Mizzy and Peter both wonder, silently: Why would Peter say something like that? Is he redeclaring his allegiance to keeping Mizzy’s secret? Is he just trying to be cool?
Consider the rouged and wigged old man Peter saw the other night on Eighth Avenue. Consider Aschenbach himself, rouged and dyed, dead in a beach chaise as Tadzio wades in the shallows.
No. This is my life, it’s not Death in Goddamned Venice (funny, though, that Mizzy has brought Mann along for the trip). Yes, I am an older guy who harbors a certain fascination for a much younger man, but Mizzy’s not a child like Tadzio was, and I’m not obsessed like Aschenbach (hey, didn’t I just the other day refuse to let Bobby dye my hair?).
Peter adds, lamely, “That was college, of course.”
“You’re going to tell her, aren’t you?” Mizzy says.
�
��Why do you think that?”
“She’s your wife.”
“Married people don’t tell each other every single thing.”
“This isn’t an ordinary thing. She’s hysterical on the subject.”
“Which is the main reason I haven’t told her yet.”
“Yet.”
“If I haven’t told her yet, it seems pretty likely that I’m probably not going to tell her at all. Why are you so het up about this?”
Mizzy emits another of those low oboe sighs, no denying that they remind Peter of Matthew.
He says, “I can’t have my family jumping all over me right now. I can’t. They think it’d be the right thing, they mean nothing but good, but really, I’m afraid it’d kill me.”
“That’s dramatic.”
A long, dark-eyed look. Practiced?
“Frankly, I’m feeling a little dramatic.”
Practiced. Absolutely. And yet, effective.
“Are you?”
Thanks, Mr. Diffident.
Mizzy cracks up. He does have this way of undercutting himself—he’s like a cartoon character who runs off a cliff and goes a half dozen strides in midair before he stops, looks down, looks back up at the audience with a mortified expression, and drops. He says something ponderous, then laughs at himself. It helps, too, that his smile is what it is, and that his laugh has that throaty, woodwind quality. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, a laugh deeper than his speaking voice, richer, as if it emanated from some core of humor that was, might be, his truest nature. As if all this tortured-young-man shit is a hoax, and the actual, inner Mizzy finds the whole enterprise hilarious. As if the actual Mizzy is goat-footed, horned, playing a set of pipes.
By Nightfall Page 16