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 some
where, 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?
By Nightfall Page 20