Peter enters the storage room where the coffee and tea things are kept, turns the electric kettle on. Here are the storage bins, in which are kept various pieces by various gallery artists, ready to show to any interested client, all carefully shrouded in plastic, all labeled. Peter and Uta run a tight ship.
This, too, is not a metaphor. Is it? Artists produce art and some of it lies in wait, in a room, until someone expresses interest. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing sad.
And yet, Peter needs to get out of there.
He is able, he’s not that far gone, to wait until the water boils, and fix a cup of green tea for Victoria.
In the gallery, Vic and Uta are in mid-discussion about the second installation, which will go in the north corner. Peter takes Victoria her tea. She accepts it with both hands, as if it were an offering.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Peter says, “I’ve got to go out for a little while, I’ll be right back.”
He ducks Uta’s questioning glance—Peter never “goes out for a little while,” not on any errand that’s mysterious to Uta. They have no mysteries.
“See you in a while, then,” Uta says.
Poor fuck, stop in the bathroom and check your hair before you go. Make sure you’ve got nothing stuck in your teeth.
And leave, then. What if he didn’t come back? Can he picture Uta saying to people, He didn’t even tell me where he was going? Yes. He can.
* * *
He forces himself to be exactly seven minutes late, because he can’t bear the idea of being found waiting, though of course Mizzy might be later than seven minutes and of course Peter wonders, in the back of his mind, if by arriving even seven minutes late he will have missed Mizzy entirely, that Mizzy has been and gone already, and mixed in with that particular spasm of crazy panic, as he approaches the familiarity of the Starbucks doors, is a sense of the painful gorgeousness of caring that much. For how many years has he actually hoped, in some remote reach of his brain, that whatever meeting will not in fact take place, that he’ll be set free, that he will be regranted the hour allotted for some business thing or a friend (well, actually, he has no real friends, unless he counts Uta—how exactly did that happen?—he had a whole crew of friends when he was younger).
He tries one of the double glass doors, finds it locked (why in New York City is one of the two doors always kept locked?), survives the small embarrassment, steps in through the unlocked one. In mid-morning the Starbucks is about half full, some women in pairs, two separate younger guys with laptops in front of them, it’s the best deal in town, four-forty for a coffee and you can sit all day.
And there, at a window table toward the rear, is Mizzy.
“Hey,” says Mizzy. Because really, what else would he say?
Peter says, “Nice to see you.” Does the sarcasm register?
Mizzy’s got a coffee already (a Grande cappuccino, impossible not to harbor such information). He says, “You want a coffee?”
Peter does. Actually he does not, but it seems too strange to sit across from Mizzy beverageless. He goes and stands in line (two people ahead of him, a fleshy black girl and a guy with a comb-over, wearing a pilly sweater, two of the multitudes who, by happenstance, have not been depicted on Victoria’s T-shirts and lunch boxes, but easily could be). Peter manages to the best of his ability the terrible, usual interlude of standing in line waiting to order coffee.
Then he’s back at Mizzy’s table, fighting the absurd notion that a Venti skim latte is somehow the wrong thing to have ordered.
Mizzy is unaltered. If anything his pale, princely beauty is accentuated by this ordinary place. Here is the Roman complexity of his nose, the big brown eyes out of Disney. Here is the forelock of sable hair that bisects his forehead.
Here, propped on the floor beside the table, is the backpack he brought with him to New York.
Peter forges ahead. He’ll have that dignity, at least.
He says, “You’ve scared the fuck out of Rebecca.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call her today.”
“Shall we start with why you left?”
“Why do you think?”
“I asked you,” Peter says.
“I can’t just stay there and go about my business like nothing has happened.”
“Wait a minute. Weren’t you the one who insisted that nothing really has happened?”
“I was being defensive. For God’s sake, Peter, we were about to go inside and have dinner with my sister. I couldn’t exactly fall into your arms on your doorstep, could I?”
A terrible, intoxicatingly poisonous sensation rises at the back of Peter’s throat. A druggy bile. It’s happening, then. This boy, this new version of young Rebecca, this graceful and yearning Bea, this living work of art, is declaring his love.
“No,” Peter says. “You couldn’t.” Is there a tremble in his voice? Probably.
A brief silence passes. For a moment, a moment, Peter relents. He can’t do this. Rebecca and Bea have done nothing to deserve it, and how will Rebecca ever recover? (Bea, in all likelihood, will embark on a lifelong career of hating her father, which will be some consolation to her, plus she’s had a lot of practice already.) A dizzy tingling rises to his head. He is on the verge of committing an unspeakable act. He will never be able to think of himself as a good man again.
“Did you tell her?” Mizzy asks.
What?
“Of course I didn’t.”
“And you won’t tell her. Right?”
“Well. That’s something we should talk about, don’t you think?”
“Please don’t tell her.”
And then, it seems, Peter says this:
“Mizzy, I have feelings for you. I think about you. I dream about you”—Not true, you dream about piss and about being pursued, but still. “I don’t know if I’m in love with you but I’m in something with you and I honestly don’t think I can just go back to my life.”
Mizzy receives this with a peculiar impassivity. Only his eyes show anything. They take on that wettish shine. Now, for the first time, his slightly crossed eyes render him foolish-looking.
He says, “I mean, about the drugs.”
Oh.
A dreadful realization hovers, but does not quite descend. Peter’s skin prickles. Heat rises to his head, and it seems, for a moment, that he’s going to be sick again.
He hears himself saying, “What you’re worried about is me telling her you’re doing drugs again.”
Mizzy has the good taste not to answer.
It’s blackmail, then. He’s been set up. Neither more nor less than that. You, Peter, keep mum about the drugs and I, Mizzy, won’t say anything about the kiss.
Now Peter seems to be saying, “Did you make all that up, then? The stuff about…”
Don’t cry, motherfucker. Don’t weep in a Starbucks in front of this heartless boy.
“Oh, no,” Mizzy says. “I’ve always had a crush on you, I wouldn’t lie about that. But hey. You’re my sister’s husband.”
I am, in fact, your sister’s husband. What did I think was going to happen?
He thought that a force beyond his own powers was going to sweep him out of this life and into another. He believed that.
“I’m so sorry,” Peter says. And what does he mean by that? Who is he sorry for?
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Okay, I’m not. What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go to California. I have some friends in the Bay Area.”
You think you’re going to go to California. You have some friends in the Bay Area. The Bay Area, not even San Francisco.
“What will you do there?” Peter’s voice reaches him from a certain distance. He is standing behind himself.
“One of my friends does computer graphics, he needs a partner. I’m good with computers.”
You’re good with computers. You’re going into computer graphics with a fri
end in the Bay Area. You don’t want to briefly love and then abandon some older guy in a hilltop house in Greece. The possibility never entered your mind.
You just want me to keep your sisters off your ass about the drugs. You needed to put something over on me, by way of insurance.
“That sounds very sensible,” says the voice that comes from somewhere over Peter’s left shoulder.
“You promise you won’t tell Rebecca.”
“If you promise you’ll say goodbye to her before you go.”
“Of course I will. I’ll tell her I left this morning because I was ashamed about not wanting to be an art dealer after all. She’ll understand.”
She will. She will understand.
Peter says, “Whatever works.”
“You’ve been very kind to me.”
Kind. Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been so besotted that I’ve betrayed you, as lovers so often do. When exactly will we get the phone call about your Bay Area overdose?
“It was nothing,” Peter says. “You’re family, after all.”
And then, really, there’s nothing to do but leave.
They say goodbye on the windblown banality of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. A plastic bag blows by, just over their heads.
Peter says, “So, I’ll see you at home tonight, then?”
Mizzy adjusts a strap on his backpack. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll go by Rebecca’s office and say goodbye to her there.”
“Not one more night?”
The strap having been secured, Mizzy gives Peter what will in fact be the last of those damp-eyed looks.
“I can’t go through another night like last night,” he says. “Can you?”
Thank you, Mizzy, thank you for acknowledging that something, something, has happened. Something about which you feel an emotion as identifiable as shame.
“I suppose not. Do you think…”
Mizzy waits.
“Do you think it’ll seem weird to Rebecca, you taking off in such a hurry like this?”
“She’s used to it. She knows how I am.”
Does she? Does she know that, among your compelling qualities, you’re cheap and at least a little bit hollow?
Probably not. Isn’t Mizzy a work of art to Rebecca, as he is (was) to Peter? Should he not, in fact, remain like that?
“Well, then,” Peter says.
“I’ll call you from California, okay?”
“How are you getting there?”
“Bus. I don’t have much money.”
You’re not taking the bus, Mizzy. Rebecca won’t allow it. She’ll try to stop you from going at all, but when she understands that she can’t, can’t stop you from doing anything you want (except, of course, what she doesn’t know you’re actually doing), she’ll get on the phone and buy you a plane ticket. You and I both know that.
“Have a safe trip.”
Those are your parting words?
“Thanks.”
They shake hands. Mizzy walks away.
And so. Peter had imagined he could be swept off, could ruin the lives of others (not to mention his own) and yet retain some aspect of blamelessness because passion trumps everything, no matter how deluded, no matter how doomed. History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he’ll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him. There are no gold-leaf stars painted on lapis over his head, just the gray of an unseasonably cool April afternoon. No one would do him in bronze. He, like all the multitudes who are not remembered, is waiting politely for a train that in all likelihood is never going to come.
What can he do but go back to work?
He has this, at least—he has the finality of nothing happening. There’s a bitter relief in that. He has his life back (not that it was taken from him); he has the real hope of increased prosperity (Groff will probably join his roster, and who knows who might follow once an artist like Groff’s onboard); he has the slightly trickier hope that he and Rebecca will be happy again. Happy enough.
The trouble is…
The trouble is he can see all the way to the best of all possible endings. His gallery joins the first rank, he and Rebecca regain their ease together. And there he’ll be.
It’s getting colder, just as the Weather Channel predicted this morning—an unseasonable drop in temperature. Peter, however, is not so far gone—would that he had a greater capacity for self-regard—to get swoony over a chill factor in April. He’s not so far gone as to ignore the rampancy of the streets through which he walks: the various hunkered-down hurriers; the swaying, impassable row of five chattering girls (He never, I tole her, you handbag, Rita and Dymphna and Inez); the surprisingly well-dressed woman rummaging for cans in a trash barrel; the laughers and the window shoppers and the cell phone talkers. It’s the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
When he gets back to the gallery, Vic’s second installation is just about hung. Uta and the boys (maybe he’ll never get around to firing them, there’s always something urgent coming up, isn’t there?) are arranging the shelves for the merchandise as Vic looks on with her customary expression of girlish surprise—look what it’s turning into!
Uta says, “You’re back.” By which she means, where in the hell were you?
“I’m back,” he answers. “It looks good.”
“We were just about to break for lunch,” Uta says. “We can be finished by nine or ten tonight, I think.”
“Good. That’s good.”
He goes into his office. There’s the ruined Vincent, signifying nothing in particular. He sits at his desk, thinking he should do something. There are plenty of things for him to do.
A moment later, Uta’s there.
“Peter, what’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
Tell her. Tell somebody.
He says, “I seem to have fallen in love with my wife’s little brother.”
Uta has had a lifetime’s worth of practice in the art of appearing unsurprised. “That kid?” she says.
“How pathetic is that?” he says. “How stupid and sad and pathetic.”
She cocks her head, looks at him as if he had been suddenly obscured by smoke. “You’re telling me that you’re gay?”
A brief, swooping return to Carole Potter’s lawn, the moment Peter said to Mizzy, “So, you’re gay.” Yes and then again no. Would that it were that simple.
He says to Uta, “I don’t know. I mean, how could I love another guy and not be gay?”
“Easy,” says Uta.
She settles her weight onto one hip, adjusts her glasses. Time to begin class.
She says, “You want to tell me about it?”
“You want to hear about it?”
“Of course I do.”
Okay, then. Go.
“Nothing happened. One kiss.”
“A kiss is something.”
Amen, sister.
“To be perfectly honest, I think I fell in love with… I don’t know if I can say this with a straight face. Beauty itself. I mean, as manifested in this boy.”
“You’ve always been in love with beauty itself. You’re funny that way.”
“I am. Funny. That way.”
“And you know, Peter…”
Her accent, her beloved Uta-esque heavy never-ceasing accent, seems to have grown if anything heavier with the gravity of the moment. Ant yoo no, Peder…
“…you know, it would have been simpler for you to fall in love with some young girl. Poor fuck, you never take the simple way out.”
Yoo nefer take de zimple vay out. Oh, God, Uta, how I love you.
“Do you think I want out of something?”
“Don’t you?”
“I love Rebecca.”
“That’s not the point.”
“And what would you
say the point is?”
She pauses, readjusts those glasses.
“Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.”
“You ready for the punch line?” Peter says.
“I’m always ready for a punch line.”
“He was just fucking with me.”
“Sure he was. He’s a kid, right?”
“It gets better.”
“I’m listening.”
“He blackmailed me.”
“That’s very nineteenth century,” she says.
“I found out he was using drugs again, and he seduced me so I wouldn’t tell Rebecca.”
“Wow. That’s ballsy.”
Is there an undercurrent of admiration in her voice?
Whether there is or not, Peter understands: he, Peter, is a comic character. How had it happened that he’d imagined, even briefly, otherwise? He’s the capering fool on whom others play tricks. He’s an easy mark, all vanity and pomade.
Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
“I’m a fool,” he says.
“You are,” she answers.
Uta comes around to his side of the desk, puts an arm over his shoulders. Just an arm, perched lightly, but still, it’s something for Uta. She is not a hugger.
“And you’re not the first fool for love,” she says.
Thank you, Uta. Thank you, friend. But it won’t do, will it? I have, it seems, gone beyond consolation, there’s not much for me in the image of myself, however true, as another sad citizen doing the little dance.
It might be better if I could howl and weep with you. Can’t, though, even if I wanted to, even if I thought you could bear the spectacle. I’m dry inside. There’s a ball of hair and tar lodged in my belly.
“No,” he says. “I’m not.” Because really, what else can he say?
The rest of the day passes, somehow. By a quarter past nine, the show’s been hung. Tyler, Branch, and Carl have gone home. Peter stands in the middle of the gallery with Uta and Victoria.
“It’s good,” Uta says. “It’s a good show.”
Arrayed around them on the gallery’s walls and floors are five of Victoria’s superheroes: the black man in the overcoat; a middle-aged woman searching her purse for change to feed a parking meter; a sharp-faced, portly young woman emerging from a bakery with a little white bag in her hand (her lunch bagel, no doubt); a ratty-looking Asian kid, twelve or so, whizzing along on a skateboard; and a Hispanic girl pushing a double stroller in which both of her twins are bawling mightily. The videos play simultaneously as the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth booms over and over from three discreet black speakers. The worshipful merchandise is on the shelves: the T-shirts, the action figures, the lunch boxes, and the Halloween costumes.
By Nightfall Page 21