“Yeah,” he says laughingly, which is not the answer Peter had anticipated. Peter has the good sense, for once, to keep quiet.
“I’m fucked up,” Mizzy says. He is no longer laughing, but he’s kept a rueful smile on his face that imparts a new seriousness, a veracity, to what he’s saying.
“I’m a little crazy,” he continues. “You know that. Everybody knows that. The thing is.”
He looks out the window as if searching for some anticipated landmark. He turns back to Peter again.
“The thing is, it’s getting worse. I can feel it. It got very bad in Japan. It’s like a virus. It’s not so much in my head as it is in my body, like I’ve got a fever or something, like I’ve got some kind of flu but it makes you jumpy instead of tired. And, you know. What nobody understands, what nobody who really and truly loves me understands, is that right now I know what I need better than anyone else does. It’s not like I don’t appreciate their position. My family and all. But if I let them, I’m afraid they’ll kill me. With the very very best of intentions.”
“Can I be honest with you?” Peter asks.
“By all means.”
“This sounds delusional. This sounds like an addict talking.”
Again, the low musical laugh.
“That’s what everybody but the addict thinks,” Mizzy answers. “Can I tell you something?”
“By all means.”
“Every time I’ve been doing well, I mean every time I’ve been that bright shiny guy, I’ve been doing drugs. When I was at Exeter, when I was at Yale. I’m clear and focused and compassionate and if I may say so I am fucking smart. It’s when I stop that I decide it’d be better to go dig for truffles with a bunch of potheads in Oregon.”
“What about the kind of drugs a doctor would give you?”
“I’ve tried all those. You know that, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, sort of,” Peter answers.
“Don’t you think I wish I had a prescription for something that would make me into Good Ethan forever?”
How can he seem so persuasive, and so wrong? What should Peter say to him now?
“Do you think you’ve really tried?” is what he says.
Wrong response. He can tell by the way something recedes in Mizzy’s face—some urgent light goes dim.
“I may be fooling myself,” Mizzy says. His voice is flatter now, more ordinary. He’s gone a little businesslike. “But I really and truly believe, I feel like I know, that I’m ready to be an adult. I want a job, I want an apartment, I want a regular girlfriend. I just. I just need to get there in the way I know will work for me. If Becka and Julie and Rose start staging interventions and sign me up at some clinic, I’m sure I’ll go off again. Those clinics are horrible, by the way. Maybe there are ones for rich people that’re better, but the ones we can afford to send me to… well, you’d want to escape them, too.”
“So you believe…”
“I believe that I’m ready in a way I’ve never been before to have an actual life, and everybody just needs to let me go about it in my own way.”
Is he lying? Is he delusional? Is it possible that he’s right, and everyone else is wrong?
They disembark at Greenwich and there’s Gus the driver, an avid-eyed man around thirty, small-town guy (Peter guesses) from one of those Connecticut hamlets that supply the local gentry with, well, people like Gus. The world is full of Guses—good-looking boys and girls who’ve been dealt the best possible genetic hand by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who have been doing neither well nor badly for generations; who engender these decent kids and give them just enough to survive in the world but no more—no spectacular beauty, no uncontainable brilliance, no kingly, unstoppable ambition.
Isn’t it the task of art to acclaim these people, to ennoble them? Consider Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity.
And here, standing beside the Potters’ navy blue BMW, is Gus, scarlet-faced, jug-eared, grinning, impossible to dislike. Didn’t Carole say he was engaged to what she referred to as “a lovely local girl”? All right, it’s condescending, that inclusion of the word “local.” But at the same time it must be said that the Potters pay their staff better than custom requires, that they give them proper vacations and don’t expect them to work overhard or overlong without extra compensation. The Potters are of the “our staff is like family” school, which is grotesque in its way, but really, how can anyone have a staff and not behave at least a little grotesquely?
“Welcome, Mr. Harris,” Gus says, marching forward with a square red hand held out.
“Thanks, Gus. This is Ethan.”
Gus pumps Peter’s hand, then Mizzy’s, says, “Welcome, welcome,” pivots to open the back doors of the BMW for Peter and Mizzy. Gus the driver, about to marry a lovely local girl. Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus’s but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor, and Peter strongly suspects he’s just not that kind of guy, which is not to say he lacks soul or depths but that you’d have to perform major surgery to get beneath the happy chap, the good guy who likes his job just fine, likes his car and his apartment and whatever hobbies or pursuits occupy his weekends, who is already thickening, shedding without visible regret the beauty of youth (when he came to work for the Potters five years ago he was like a young farmhand) because he’s had his fun and hey, what’re you going to do, plus of course at thirty, which is by no means a desperate age, he’s about to marry a lovely local girl.
Gus pilots them through the verdant and prosperous Greenwich streets. Ah, Greenwich, Connecticut, the wealthy reasonableness of you. These treed streets that offer their ornate Victorians, true American classics, maintained like the museum pieces they are, and farther off, apart from public view, the truly vast piles of stone and lumber, discreet behind gates and hedges, invisible for the most part save for a gable here, a chimney there. The money is quiet, nothing like the Hamptons or the Hills, and although, sure, it’s a posture it is, to Peter at least, a more agreeable one, and it has the effect, on Peter at least, of conferring a sense not so much of enormous, horrific privilege as of improved reality. In Greenwich, one has simply slipped over into a parallel dimension in which people are doing better, and no one here in this dimension finds that fact in any way remarkable. Making a fortune? What’s so hard about that?
The car mounts the hillock from which the Potter house rises. The Potters are rich, even by Greenwich standards, but not mega-rich, not private plane rich, not five houses rich, and so their house is obscure but not entirely concealed—you can see more than half of its north facade from the street.
It’s not Gatsby’s house, it’s Daisy Buchanan’s; it’s the source of the green light across the water. If Fitzgerald described Daisy’s house, Peter doesn’t remember it, but it was clearly not Gatsby’s turreted, ivy-covered pile. Whether this comes from Fitzgerald or from Peter’s imagination, the house Tom bought for Daisy had to have been at least a little like the Potters’ place, a house Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood, big, of course, but neither faux castle nor limestone monument (consider all those solemn, sepulchral monsters in Newport); more than anything an enormous rambling house, all fieldstone and gables, girded on three of its four sides by verandas; contrived, somehow, with a sense of absolute authenticity, to seem to have been variously added-on-to over the years, when in fact it was built entirely, just as it is, in the mid-1920s. Standing placidly but lightly (all those mullioned windows, the vast maternal wingspans of its eaves) on its miniature inland sea of perfectly tended grass, it resembles nothing so much as a sanitarium, like the place they sent Bette Davis in… hm, was it Now, Voyager or Dark Victory… anyway it’s like some mythical nervo
us-breakdown millionaires’ hideaway, a perfect sanctuary of the sort that surely doesn’t exist now and probably didn’t when they made the Bette Davis movie, either. Were there really ever places like the Alpine clinic in The Magic Mountain? (That’s probably why Peter’s thinking of sanitariums just now.)
And it’s absolutely, positively not where Mizzy would be sent for a new round of rehabilitation. He’d be sent to a hospital, replete with brown floor tiles and raggedy, stained chairs. Peter can picture it all too clearly. Why would anyone volunteer for that?
Gus parks, and look, praise Jesus, there’s Tyler’s van. As Peter walks to the entrance, with Mizzy at his side (Gus has opened the car doors for them and vanished into some obscure Gus realm), Peter checks through the van’s rear window. Yes, oh yes, there’s a crate inside, let it contain the rejected Krim, let Tyler and Branch be installing the Groff right now.
Svenka answers the door. She is a wide-faced, surprised-looking woman in her early thirties, something stretched about her (not surgically produced); some hint of a curse hurled into her bassinet (The child will grow too big for her skin). If this were the nineteenth-century English manor house it aspires to resemble, Svenka would be the housekeeper, but this being twenty-first-century America she is called the… what?… concierge or something, anyway, she runs the place, oversees the staff (three in the off seasons, seven in summer), knows how to have decent flowers delivered in Darfur, can arrange for a helicopter into the city on twenty minutes’ notice. She’s got an MBA, she earns real money doing this. She confided once to Peter that she proved to be too domestic for her management consultant job (“alvays airports and hotels, no life”), insists she does not consider this job in any way less than that one; and yet because the Potters consider their staff to be “part of the family,” because they approve of marriages to “nice local girls,” Svenka is willing (or compelled to be willing) to answer the door if she happens to be closest to it when somebody arrives. At other such houses, the Svenkas and Ivans and Grishas (they tend to be well-educated Eastern Europeans) would never deign to answer the door. A maid would do it.
“Helloo, Peter,” she says, grinning with what Peter once thought was lasciviousness but which, as he has come to realize, is actually a sense of complicity, because Svenka knows that although Peter gets picked up by Gus at the station, although he’s invited to dinner parties, he is in fact a servant, just as she is.
“Hello, Svenka. This is Ethan.”
“Hellloo, Ethan. Do come in.”
The foyer of the Potter house, like the rest of the Potter house, is a perfect imitation of itself. What the foyer most immediately offers is a low, black-lacquered Chinese cabinet. Peter doesn’t know Chinese antiquities but you don’t need formal training to see that this thing is ancient, this thing is from some revered dynasty or other and was 240 grand minimum. It supports a pair of chunky French candelabra, brass or bronze, early twentieth century, patinaed to a rich brown-black, and an unornamented Roseville ceramic vase, cream-colored, full always of flowers from Carole’s garden—big blowsy white gardenias, just now. And so, the house announces itself: eclectic but fiendishly edited, prosperous but not ornate, gilt-free, beautiful in a way that will probably charm you if you’re ignorant about furniture and art but will dazzle and humble you if you know your shit.
As Svenka leads them into the living room, Peter glances surreptitiously at Mizzy, to see how he’s taking it, but there’s nothing much on Mizzy’s face at all, and it occurs to Peter that Mizzy may in fact feel a certain sense of homecoming here—it’s probably been a long time since that threshold was crossed by anyone as exquisite and well-made as the objects within.
Still, he wonders: Is Mizzy impressed by all this quiet splendor, or put off by it? It would, of course, speak more compellingly of Mizzy’s character if he was put off (I mean really, sure, it’s beautiful, they’re passing the foyer Ryman now, one of the Potters’ true prizes, almost heart-stoppingly perfect to the left of the Chinese cabinet, but still, but yet, the preciousness of everything, the exhausting preciousness… ), though Peter hopes Mizzy is impressed, at least a little—Mizzy, this is my world, I deal routinely with people who’ve got this much money and power, and if it interests you even a little then you’re interested in me as well; whereas if you think it’s all even slightly ridiculous… hm, do I have to be ridiculous along with it? It’s just business, after all. I can still cavort on a moonshone lane. I can still dance to the pipes.
And then: the Potters’ living room.
It’s a great room, and it should properly be entered to a flourish of trumpets, maybe Bach—anyway something small but perfect and imperishable in the way of Bach. The whole house is perfect, and ever so slightly creepy because of that, save for this, the living room, which is so magnificent it transcends its own pretensions, with its wall of French doors that open onto the square of grass bordered by a rose thicket (the views of Long Island Sound are elsewhere), as if nature itself (okay, the better parts of nature) were a series of rooms not unlike the one you’re standing in—outdoor rooms with viridian carpets and ceiling clouds by Michelangelo and blossoming dark green rustling walls. And then, of course, on this side of the glass-paned doors the garden is answered by twin Jean-Michel Frank sofas upholstered in pewter-colored velvet on either side of a Diego Giacometti table that really should be in a museum; by spindly lamps and massive lamps and a clouded old wood-framed mirror (no gold, gold is forbidden here) propped on, not hung over, the austere limestone mantle top; and on the one windowless wall the Big Kahuna, the Agnes Martin, presiding over the room like the visiting god it is, satisfied, it would seem, by these offerings of sofas and tables created by geniuses, by these stacks of books and this gaggle of glass-eyed wooden saints and these Japanese vases full of roses (yellow for the living room) and these shelves full of various collections (Deco pottery, carved wooden Dogon figures, old cast-iron banks) and this enormous ebony bowl filled, just now, with persimmons. In this room, even in daylight, there is a sense of candles flickering just outside your range of vision. There is (for real, it’s a spray) the scent of lavender.
“I take it my guys are here,” Peter says.
“Yes, they’re putting the urn up now.”
Peter can tell she disapproves—something tight happens around her chin. Does she dislike the Groff urn, or art in general? Or, okay, remember—you, Peter, are the one who tried (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to sell her boss a ball of tar and hair for a small fortune. Svenka, can I really blame you?
“I’ll tell Carole you’re here,” she says, and withdraws.
“Nice room,” Mizzy says, after she’s gone. He’s not being ironic, is he? No. Peter has probably lived too long among fluent speakers of irony.
“The Potters are very good at what they do.”
“What do they do, exactly?”
“Well, really, their main job as far as anyone can tell is being the Potters. The money comes from washers and dryers, but Carole and her husband don’t have anything to do with that. They just, you know. Get the checks.”
Carole enters (oh, God, she didn’t hear that, did she?), with a ritualized air of slightly rushed apology. This, Peter has learned, is one of the customs. She is never immediately available, even if the visitor in question has arrived at precisely the appointed hour. The visitor is always ushered in by Svenka or some other member of the family, and made to wait, briefly, in this spectacular room, for Carole to appear. (How much of his life does Peter spend waiting for someone to make an entrance?) In Carole’s case this is done, as far as Peter can tell, for several reasons. There’s the simple element of theater—and now, the lady of the house! And it must be made apparent that Carole is busy, that she is with some difficulty making time for even the most anticipated of guests.
“Hello, Peter, sorry, I was out watching your men put up the urn.”
Carole is a pale, freckled, blinking woman who seems always to have something small and wonderful in her mouth, a rou
nd pebble from the Himalayas, a pearl, that makes it ever so slightly difficult for her to speak clearly but conveys, at the same time, that she has gratefully sacrificed precise diction for the tiny precious object that resides on the back of her tongue. She is prone (she’s wearing one now) to white, rather frilly blouses, vaguely reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck, which is not exactly the sartorial inclination you’d expect of someone who has this art, these sofas.
Peter gives her his hand. “I’m glad they got it here. What do you think?”
“I like it. I think I might like it a great deal.”
Bingo.
“Carole, this is my brother-in-law, Ethan. He’s thinking of entering the family business, God help him.”
“Nice to meet you, Ethan. Thanks for coming.”
Carole would, with just this queenly feigned sincerity, thank anyone for coming, up to and including the shah of Iran. It is what one does.
Mizzy says, “Hope you don’t mind. I’m just tagging along, really.”
“And Peter,” Carole says, “wanted you to meet one of the last living Americans who buys the occasional work of art. This is what one looks like.”
She does a quick turn, showing herself in her entirety. She can be charming, no denying it. What’s she got on her feet, some kind of green rubber miniboots, must be her gardening shoes.
“Ta-da,” Mizzy says, and he and Carole have themselves a short laugh, which Peter joins in on a moment too late. Mizzy remains, as far as Peter can tell, unintimidated by anyone. Carole may be the queen of her realm, but Mizzy is a prince in his own country, which, though currently a bit impoverished, has a rich, distinguished, and noble history.
“Would you like something to drink?” Carole says. “Coffee, tea, some sparkling water?”
Peter says, “How about a little later? I can’t wait to see how the Groff looks in the garden.”
By Nightfall Page 17