By Nightfall Read online

  This family of women really ruined the poor kid, didn’t they? Who could survive having been so desperately loved?

  Rebecca turns to him, arms still folded across her breasts. “Does it seem ridiculous to you sometimes?”

  “What?”

  “These parties and dinners, all those awful people.”

  “They’re not all awful.”

  “I know. I just get tired of asking all the questions. Half those people don’t even know what I do.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Well, maybe it’s a little bit true. Blue Light, Rebecca’s arts and culture magazine, is not a heavy-hitter among people like these, I mean it’s no Artforum or Art in America. There’s art, sure, but there’s also poetry and fiction and—horror of horrors—the occasional fashion spread.

  She says, “If you’d rather Mizzy not stay with us, I’ll find another place for him.”

  Oh, it’s still about Mizzy, isn’t it? Little brother, the love of her life.

  “No, it’s totally okay. I haven’t even seen him in, what? Five years? Six?”

  “That’s right. You didn’t come to that thing in California.”

  Suddenly, a pained and unexpected silence. Had she been angry about him not going to California? Had he been angry with her for being angry? No recollection. Something bad about California, though. What?

  She leans forward and kisses him, sweetly, on the lips.

  “Hey,” he whispers.

  She burrows her face into his neck. He wraps an arm over her.

  “The world is exhausting sometimes, isn’t it?” she says.

  Peace made. And yet. Rebecca is capable of remembering every slight, and of trotting out months’ worth of Peter’s crimes when an argument heats up. Has he committed some infraction tonight, something he’ll hear about in June or July?

  “Mm-hm,” he says. “You know, I think we can definitively say that Elena is serious about the hair and glasses, et cetera.”

  “I told you she was.”

  “You never did.”

  “You just don’t remember.”

  The cab stops for the light at Sixty-fifth Street.

  Here they are: a middle-aged couple in the back of a cab (this driver’s name is Abel Hibbert, he’s young and jumpy, silent, fuming). Here are Peter and his wife, married for twenty-one (almost twenty-two) years, companionable by now, prone to banter, not much sex anymore but not no sex, not like other long-married couples he could name, and yeah, at a certain age you can imagine bigger accomplishments, a more potent and inextinguishable satisfaction, but what you’ve made for yourself isn’t bad, it’s not bad at all. Peter Harris, hostile child, horrible adolescent, winner of various second prizes, has arrived at this ordinary moment, connected, engaged, loved, his wife’s breath warm on his neck, going home.

  Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, doop doop de doop…

  That song again.

  The light changes. The driver accelerates.

  The point of the sex is…

  Sex doesn’t have a point.

  It’s just that it can get complicated, after all these years. Some nights you feel a little… Well. You don’t exactly want to have sex but you don’t want to be half of a couple with a grown daughter, a private trove of worries, and a good-natured if slightly prickly ongoing friendship that doesn’t any longer seem to involve sex on a Saturday night, after a party, semitipsy on Elena Petrova’s much-vaunted private-stock vodka, plus a bottle of wine at dinner afterward.

  He’s forty-four. Only forty-four. She’s not even forty-one yet.

  Your queasy stomach doesn’t help you feel sexy. What’s up with that? What are the early symptoms of an ulcer?

  In bed, she wears panties, a V-necked Hanes T-shirt, and cotton socks (her feet get cold until the height of summer). He wears white briefs. They spend ten minutes with CNN (car bomb in Pakistan, thirty-seven people; church torched in Kenya with undetermined number inside; man who’s just thrown his four young children off an eighty-foot-high bridge in Alabama—nothing about the horse, but that’d be local news, if anything), then flip around, linger for a while with Vertigo, the scene in which James Stewart takes Kim Novak (Madeleine version) to the mission to convince her that she’s not the reincarnation of a dead courtesan.

  “We can’t get hooked on this,” Rebecca says.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “I haven’t seen this in years.”

  “The horse is still there.”

  “What?”

  “The horse.”

  A moment later, James Stewart and Kim Novak are in fact sitting in a vintage carriage behind a life-size plastic-or-something horse.

  “I thought you meant the horse from earlier,” Peter says.

  “Oh. No. Funny how these things crop up, isn’t it? What’s the word?”

  “Synchronicity. How do you know the horse is still there?’

  “I went there. To that mission. In college. It’s all exactly the way it looks in the movie.”

  “Though, of course, the horse might be gone by now.”

  “We can’t get hooked on this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”

  “You know how it turns out.”

  “How what turns out?”

  “The movie.”

  “Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”

  “Watch it, if you want.”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”

  “You can’t sleep with the TV on.”

  “I can try.”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  They stay with the movie until James Stewart sees—thinks he sees—Kim Novak fall from the tower. Then they turn it off, and turn out the lights.

  “We should rent it sometime,” Rebecca says.

  “We should. It’s great. I’d sort of forgotten how great it is.”

  “It’s even better than Rear Window.”

  “You think?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen either of them in so long.”

  They both hesitate. Would she be just as glad to go right to sleep, too? Maybe. One is always kissing, the other is always being kissed. Thank you, Proust. He can tell she’d be just as glad to skip the sex. Why is she cooling toward him? Okay, he’s wearing a few extra pounds around his waist, and yeah, his ass isn’t headed north. What if she is in fact falling out of love with him? Would it be tragic, or liberating? What would it be like if she set him free?

  It would be unthinkable. Whom would he talk to, how would he shop for groceries or watch television?

  Tonight, Peter will be the one who kisses. Once they get into it, she’ll be glad. Won’t she?

  He kisses her. She willingly returns the kiss. Seems willing, anyway.

  By now, he couldn’t describe the sensation of kissing her, the taste of her mouth—it’s too contiguous with the taste inside his own. He touches her hair, takes a handful of it and gently pulls. He was a little rougher with her the first few years, until he understood that she didn’t like it anymore, and possibly never had. There are still these remnant gestures, mild reenactments of old ones when they were newer together, when they fucked all the time, though Peter knew even then that his desire for her was part of a bigger picture; that he had had more intense (if less wondrous) sex with exactly three other women: one who was smitten with his roommate, one who was smitten with the Fauvists, and one who was simply ridiculous. Sex with Rebecca was extraordinary right from the start because it was sex with Rebecca; with her avid mind and her wised-up tenderness and the intimations, as they got to know each other, of what he can only call her beingness.

  She runs her hand lightly down his spine, rests it on his ass. He lets go of her hair, encircles her shoulders in the crook of his arm,
which he knows she likes—that sense of being strongly held (one of his fantasies about her fantasies: he’s holding her aloft, the bed has vanished). With his free hand, with her help, he pulls the T-shirt up. Her breasts are round and small (when did he press that champagne glass over one of them, to demonstrate the fit—was it in the summer cottage in Truro, or the B and B in Marin?). Her nipples may have thickened and darkened a little—they are now precisely the size of the tip of his little finger, and the color of pencil erasers. Were they once slightly smaller, a little pinker? Probably. He is actually one of the few men who doesn’t obsess about younger women, which she refuses to believe.

  We always worry about the wrong things, don’t we?

  He puts his lips to her left nipple, flicks it with his tongue. She murmurs. It’s become singular, his mouth on her breast and her response to it, the exhaled murmur, the miniature seizure he can feel along her body, as if she can’t quite believe that this, this, is happening again. He has a hard-on now. He can’t always tell, he doesn’t really care, when he’s excited on his own and when he’s excited because she is. She clutches his back, she can’t reach his ass anymore, he loves it that she likes his ass. He circles her stiffening nipple with his tongue-tip, taps the other one lightly with a finger. Tonight it will be mainly about getting her off. This often happens, has for years—it reveals its form, on any given night (when did they last fuck anyplace but at night, in bed?), usually decided up front, by who kisses whom. This one’s for her, then. That’s the sexiness of it.

  She has a fold of flesh at her belly, a heaviness in her haunches. Okay. Peter, you’re not exactly a porn star, either.

  He moves his mouth down over her stomach, still stroking, a little harder now, with his finger at her nipple. She makes a small, astonished sound. She gets it; they both get it; they both know; that’s the miracle. He stops stroking with his finger, starts circling. He bites at the elastic of her panties, then slips his tongue under the elastic, laps not hard but not gently at her pubic hair. Her hips cant forward. Her fingers browse through his hair.

  Now it’s time to break formation, and take off their clothes. A pleasure of marriage—it doesn’t have to be seamless anymore. The slow strip is no longer necessary. You can just stop, remove what needs removing, and continue. He eases his briefs off over his hard-on, tosses them. Because this is Rebecca’s night he dives right back in before she’s had time to take off her socks, which makes her laugh. He goes back to where he was, tonguing her pubic hair, circling her right nipple. It’s a stop-action photo—suddenly, they’re nude (except for the socks, old white cotton slightly yellow along the soles, she should get new ones). She presses his head on both sides with her thighs as he kiss-walks down her V of hair, and there he is, he knows precisely, he’s a clit expert, and that’s sexy, his hawklike exactitude about it and her ecstatic drawing-in, it’s too much for a moment, and then her release, it could never be too much. Her thighs relax, rest more solidly on his shoulders, and she whispers oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Here the smell is her own, that faint hint of fresh shrimp; here’s where he’s most in love with her body and most fascinated by it, maybe a little frightened as well, she probably feels that way about his dick, too, though they’ve never talked about it, maybe they should but it’s too late to start that now, isn’t it? He’s got her going, tweaking her nipple with thumb and forefinger, lapping with his tongue at her clit, insistent, insistent, he knows (he just knows) that the relentlessness matters, the tongue and lips and fingers that won’t stop no matter what, that will find her wherever she goes; it’s that (and who knows what else?) that’ll put her over—something about admitting there’s nowhere to go, it’s too late, no point in arguing, it will not stop. She says oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, louder, no more whispering, she’s on her way, it always works (Does she ever fake it? Better not to know), he’ll get her off this way tonight, they’re too tired to actually fuck, and then she’ll take care of him, she’s an expert at that, too; they’re both on their way, they’re on their way, and then they can sleep, and then it will be Sunday.

  * * *

  They have two cats, named Lucy and Berlin.

  What?

  Dreaming. Where is this? Bedroom. His own. Rebecca’s beside him, breathing steadily.

  It’s 3:10. He knows what that means.

  He slips out of bed, careful not to wake her. It’s the fatal hour. He’ll be awake at least until five.

  He slides the bedroom door shut, pours himself a vodka in the kitchen (no, he can’t tell the difference between what he keeps in his freezer and what Elena has smuggled in at great expense from some mountain glade in the Urals). He’s a naked man drinking vodka from a juice glass, and he lives here. He goes into the bathroom for one of the blue pills, then wanders into the living room, the part of the loft they call the living room, though it’s all really just one big room, with two bedrooms and a bathroom sectioned off.

  It’s a great space, as people say. They’re lucky they got in before the market went crazy. As people say.

  He’s got a nocturnal hard-on, and it’s not going away. Tell me, Mr. Harris, how long has your real estate affected you this way?

  The Chris Lehrecke daybed, the Eames coffee table, the austerely perfect nineteenth-century rocking chair, the Sputnik-inspired fifties chandelier that keeps (they hope) the rest of it from seeming too solemn and self-important. The books and the candlesticks and the rugs. The art.

  Right now, two paintings and a photograph. A beautiful Bock Vincent (the show’s only half sold, what’s the matter with people?) wrapped in paper and cord. A Lahkti, an exquisitely painted scene of Calcutta squalor (those sold, who can ever figure?). A Howard smoke painting, set for next fall, back gallery, helps to have something that costs a little less, especially these days. All the money’s gone, lord, where’d it go? Which Beatles song is that?

  He walks to the window, pulls up the shade. Nobody’s on Mercer at three-plus in the morning, just that pallid orangey street light on the cobbles, looks like it rained a little. This window, like many New York windows, doesn’t offer much in the way of view: a patch of Mercer Street mid-block between Spring and Broome, the taciturn brown-brick facade of the building opposite (some nights there’s a light on in the fourth floor, he imagines a fellow skittish sleeper, hopes—and worries—that that person will come to the window and see him); a pile of black trash bags thrown out onto the sidewalk, and two glittery dresses, one green and one oxblood, in the window of the stratospherically expensive little shop that will probably be out of business soon; Mercer is still a little back alley for that level of trade. Like most windows in New York, Peter’s is a living portrait. By day, you can see the pedestrians through about thirty-five feet worth of their life’s journey. By night the street could be a high-definition picture of itself. If you watch it long enough it can start to feel like a Nauman, like Mapping the Studio—the strange fascination that announces itself, gradually, as you watch a cat, a moth, a mouse flit quickly through those supposedly empty nighttime rooms; the growing sense that rooms are never empty, not only of furtive animal life but of their inanimate selves, their piles of paper and half-empty coffee cups, all of which would remain, not cognizant but not exactly unconscious, either—haunted, you might say—if humans suddenly vanished and the rooms remained just as they were the moment everyone got up to leave. If he himself died, or if he just got dressed and walked away right now and never came back, this room would retain something of him, some mix of portrait and essence.

  Wouldn’t it? For a while, anyway?

  No wonder the Victorians made wreaths of their dead lovers’ hair.

  What would a stranger think, coming into this room after Peter was gone? A dealer would think he made some shrewd investments. An artist, most artists, would think he had all the wrong art. Most other people would think, What’s this, a painting wrapped and tied, why don’t you just open it up?

  Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

 
Hold me, darkness. What’s that? An old rock lyric, or a feeling?

  The trouble is…

  There’s no trouble. How could he, how could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled? Who said to Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?” You don’t have to be a vicious right-wing zealot to entertain the question.

  Still.

  It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

  The trouble is…

  He can feel something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan’s treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity. Although he isn’t religious, he adores those pre-Renaissance icons, those gilded saints and jeweled reliquaries, not to mention Bellini’s milky Madonnas and Michelangelo’s hottie angels. In another era he might have been an acolyte to art; a monk whose life’s work would have consisted of producing a single illuminated page, the Flight into Egypt, say, in which two small people and an infant are frozen in eternal mid-step under a lapis blue vault studded with brilliant gold stars. He can feel it sometimes—he can feel it tonight—that medieval world of sinners and the occasional saint conducting their travels under a painted celestial infinitude. He’s an art history guy, maybe he should have become… what?… a conservator, say, one of those museum-basement people who spend their lives swabbing away the varnish and overpaint, reminding themselves (and, eventually, the world) that the past was garish and bright—the Parthenon was gilded, Seurat used blinding colors but his cheap paint has faded into the classically crepuscular.

  Peter, however, didn’t want to live in basements. He wanted to be a wheeler and dealer (as some would call him), a denizen of the present, though he can’t quite live in the present; he can’t stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn’t say which world exactly but someplace that isn’t this, isn’t streetside piles of black garbage bags and shrill little boutiques that come and go. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.