By Nightfall Page 6

  Peter looks back at Mizzy. Mizzy smiles mildly, helplessly.

  Peter says, “I was in Kyoto, years ago.”

  And really, that’s all it takes. Just a tiny declaration of one’s willingness to dance.

  “The gardens in Kyoto are amazing,” Mizzy says. “I got fixated on this particular shrine because it was far away. As if, you know. It was going to be holier because there were no convenient nearby hotels.”

  Something about the released tension makes him love Mizzy, briefly, soaringly, the way he imagines men love their comrades in battle.

  “And it wasn’t,” Peter says.

  “I thought it was, at first. It’s insanely beautiful. It’s way up in the mountains, they have snow more than half the year.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “There’s a dumpy rooming house kind of thing in the town. I’d hike up the mountain every morning, and stay till just before dark. The priests let me sit there. They were so sweet. I was like their foolish child.”

  “You went every day and sat in the garden.”

  “Not in. It’s a dry garden. It’s raked gravel. You sit to one side and look at it.”

  Yew set to one sad and look et it. No denying the musky sweetness of that Virginia tone.

  “For a whole month,” Peter says.

  “At first, I thought something amazing was happening. It turns out there’s this noise in our heads, we’re all so used to it we don’t hear it. This sort of static of information and misinformation and what-all. And after about a week of just looking at five rocks and some gravel, it starts to go away.”

  “And is replaced by?”

  “Boredom.”

  It is so not what Peter expected that he emits a strange, phlegmy little snort-laugh.

  Mizzy says, “And other things. I don’t mean to be flippant about it. But I… this’ll sound corny.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Huh. As it turns out, I don’t really want to wear a robe and sit on some mountain halfway across the planet looking at rocks. But I also. I don’t want to just say, okay, that was my spiritual phase, now it’s time to apply to law school.”

  The mystery of Mizzy: Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he’s considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

  Peter says, “Would it be too horrible and embarrassing if I asked what you think you want to do?”

  Mizzy frowns, but amusedly. “I think I’d like to be king of the underworld.”

  “Hard job to get.”

  “Don’t let me get all cryptic. I need to shape up a little. People have been telling me that for years, and I’m finally starting to believe them. I can’t really go to one more shrine in Japan. I can’t drive to Los Angeles just to see what happens along the way.”

  “Rebecca thinks you think you’d like to do something in, um, the art world, is that right?”

  Mizzy’s face colors with embarrassment. “Well, it seems to be the thing I care most about. I don’t know if I have anything, exactly, to offer.”

  It’s a pose, isn’t it, all this boyish abashment? How could it not be? Mizzy, why do you refuse to summon up your gifts?

  “Do you know what you want to do, exactly?” Peter says. “In the arts, I mean.”

  That was a little Dad-like, wasn’t it?

  Mizzy says, “Honestly?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I think I’d like to go back to school, and maybe become a curator.”

  “That’s about the same odds as becoming king of the underworld.”

  “But somebody has to do it, right?”

  “Sure. It’s just. It’s a little like setting out to become a movie star.”

  “And some people get to be movie stars.”

  Here it is, then—the armature of hubris over which this skin of uncertainty is stretched. Then again, why should a smart, beautiful boy pursue modest ambitions?

  “Sure they do,” Peter says.

  “And, well. I’m sort of… Thank you for taking me in like this.”

  “Egyptian” isn’t quite right for the Taylor face, is it? There’s too much pink-tinged Irish pallor about them, and too much strong Creole chin. El Greco? No, they’re not that gaunt or severe.

  “We’re glad to have you.”

  “I won’t stay long. I promise.”

  “Stay as long as you need to,” Peter says. Which he does not exactly mean. What can he do, though? He’s a sucker for the whole damned family. Rose is selling real estate in California, Julie quit her practice to spend more time with her kids. Those are not terrible fates. Neither Rose nor Julie has come to a tragic end, but they are, both of them, living unexpectedly usual lives. And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter’s care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylors’ grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost—to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world’s most promising children.

  He must have been desperate to be born.

  “That’s kind of you,” Mizzy says. The rinsing formality of the South…

  “Rebecca should take you to see the Puryear show. At the Modern.”

  “I’d like that.”

  He looks at Peter with those off-kilter eyes, which somehow manage not to render him foolish-looking, though they do produce an effect of slightly crazy intensity.

  “Do you know his work?” Peter says.

  “I do.”

  “It’s a beautiful show.”

  And then, now, Rebecca is back. Peter startles slightly when he hears her key in the lock, as if she’s caught him at something.

  “Hello, boys.” She walks in with the milk Mizzy will need in his morning coffee and the two bottles of extravagant cabernet they’ll all drink tonight. She brings the vitality of herself—her offhand sense of her own consequence; her perfectly careless jeans and pale aqua sweater and the nape-length tangle of her hair, which is going wiry with its infusion of gray. She still carries herself like the pretty girl she was.

  Is it the Taylor curse to peak early, is there some magic in that decrepit old house that fades the moment they leave it?

  Kisses and greetings are exchanged, one of the wine bottles is opened. (Should Rebecca be serving wine to a drug addict, what’s up with that?) They go and sit in the living room with wineglasses.

  “I’m going to ask Julie to come up next weekend,” Rebecca says.

  “She won’t,” Mizzy answers.

  “She can leave the children for one night. They’re not babies anymore.”

  “I’m just saying. She won’t do it.”

  “Let me work on her.”

  “I don’t want you to have to work on her.”

  “She’s going to drive them crazy. Those kids. It’s not even about them, it’s about Julie being the greatest mother who’s ever lived.”

  “Please don’t force Julie to come to New York. I’ll go see her.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “One day I will.”

  Mizzy sits cross-legged on the sofa, holding his glass in his lap as if it were an alms bowl. He is, no denying it, another Rebecca, but it’s more about incarnation than it is about resemblance. He’s got her youngest-one ease, that sense of unquestioning self-possession—Behold me, the promised child. He’s got her tilt of the head, her fingers, her laugh. He isn’t tall—five nine, probably—and his body is compact, sinewy. It’s not hard to picture him sitting disciple-ishly at the edge of a holy garden. He does, in fact, look a little like one of the swoony Renaissance Sebastians. He has those waves of mocha-colored hair, those pinkish white, sinewy arms and legs.

  Peter hears his name.

  “What?”

  Rebecca says, “When did we go see Julie and Bob?”

 
“I don’t know. Eight or nine months ago, I guess.”

  “Has it been that long?”

  “Yeah. At least.”

  “It’s hard to feel all that enthusiastic about going down to D.C.,” she says to Mizzy. “And spending the weekend stuck with them in that monster house.”

  “I’m a little scared of the house, too,” he answers.

  “Are you? It isn’t just me, then.”

  Peter drifts out again. It’s catch-up, it’s Taylor-talk, he can’t be expected to stay tuned. He watches Rebecca lean in toward Mizzy as if she were cold and he gave off heat. All three sisters insist on Mizzy as their familiar, their daemon, the one in whom they can confide about the irregularities and infelicities of the other two.

  Mizzy does, in fact, possess a certain aspect of disembodiment. He’s a little spectral; he feels like a fantasy he’s having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others. That’s surely due, in part at least, to a childhood spent alone with Beverly and Cyrus in that big house, as Beverly grew worryingly neglectful of domestic particulars and Cyrus, who turned sixty the same month Mizzy turned ten, lived increasingly in his study, the only refuge from the amassing evidence that his wife’s eccentricities were hardening, with age, into something darker. The girls came when they could, but they were starting lives of their own. Rebecca was at Columbia and Julie was in medical school and Rose was engaged in her epic battle with her first husband out in San Diego. What must it have been like for Mizzy, who came too late to the party; who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms (thrift having become one of Beverly’s fixations) among the leavings and artifacts? On a visit there when Mizzy was sixteen, Peter wrote his name in the dust on a windowsill. He found a very old dead mouse behind the ficus in a corner of the living room, scooped it into a dustpan, and disposed of it secretively, as if he hoped to protect the Taylors from some feared diagnosis.

  Mizzy. It’s hardly beyond understanding, neither the straight A’s that led to Yale nor the drugs that led elsewhere.

  If anything, he looks to have come through surprisingly well, in the fleshly sense at least. When he was a little kid he was slightly odd-looking, but as he grew older a sharp-faced handsomeness manifested itself almost as if it had been called down for protection, as a fairy godmother might bestow an enchanted cloak on a troubled prince. Girls, or so rumor has it, started calling before he’d turned eleven.

  Rebecca is saying, “… and into the great room, which is what she calls it, with a perfectly straight face.”

  Mizzy smiles sadly. He does not, it seems, take the same sour pleasure in Julie’s bourgeois tumble, her uncritical embrace of things enormous and immaculate.

  “I suppose she feels safe there,” Mizzy says.

  Rebecca isn’t having it. “Safe from what?” she says.

  Mizzy simply looks at her, questioningly, as if he’s waiting for her to resume her natural form. His color is deepened by discomfort (Rebecca really is on a tear about Julie, hard to say why), his eyes gone glisteny and black-brown.

  Peter says, “From everything in the world, I guess.”

  “Why would you want to be safe from the world?” Rebecca asks.

  Rebecca, why would you be looking for a fight?

  “Pick up a newspaper. Turn on CNN.”

  “A castle in the suburbs isn’t going to save her.”

  “I know,” Peter says. “We know.”

  Rebecca pauses, gathering herself. She’s obscurely angry—she herself probably doesn’t know why. Mizzy has upset her, reminded her, made her feel guilty of some crime.

  Peter risks a glance at Mizzy. Here it is again, that flash of secret affinity. We—we men—are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Rebecca sighs. “I just hate it that she’s gotten like this.”

  “Most people do,” Peter says. “Most people end up wanting children and nice houses.”

  “Julie is not most people.”

  Hm. Another of those impossible marriage-moments. Feign agreement, or risk implosion.

  “Most people think they’re not most people,” Peter says.

  “It’s different when they’re your sister.”

  “Got you,” Peter says. He knows how to arrange his face.

  Your sisters and brother are all still alive, aren’t they? Don’t you think I’d love to be able to sit here and complain about fat old Matthew and his not-very-bright boyfriend and the bratty adopted Korean child they refuse to discipline?

  It’s unfair. Of course it’s unfair; unseemly, even, to stop an argument by trotting out your dead-brother credentials. But there shouldn’t be a squabble, not on Mizzy’s first night.

  Question: Does Rebecca want a fight precisely because she knows Peter’s unhappy about the visit? They can take that up later. Also the question about serving wine to a former addict. Or they can just get tipsy on the cabernet, and go to sleep.

  Rebecca says, “I forget, was it a Shinto or a Zen shrine?”

  Mizzy blinks, twice, in the glare of the beam that’s been aimed at him. “Um, Shinto,” he answers.

  And there, on his face, is the clearest of convictions: I don’t want to be a monk and I don’t want to be a lawyer but more than anything I don’t want to end up like these two.

  Dinner passes, Mizzy is put to bed in Bea’s old room (which has been more or less preserved as she left it, for when she comes home, if she comes home). Peter and Rebecca, in their bedroom, call Bea. No, Rebecca calls Bea with the understanding that Bea will agree to speak to Peter, however briefly.

  Peter waits beside Rebecca on the bed as the phone rings up in Boston. Forgive me for hoping she isn’t home, for wanting to just leave a message.

  “Hello, darling,” Rebecca says.

  “Mm-hm. Yes, we’re fine. Ethan’s here. Yes, Mizzy. I know, it’s been years since you saw him. What are you doing?”

  “Right. Sure. I guess they’ll give you better nights when you’ve been there longer, don’t you think?”

  “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Well, don’t panic, you know your obsessive mother is always good for a few bucks if you’ll deign to take them.”

  Apparently, Bea laughs on the other end. Rebecca laughs in response.

  Bea, love of my goddamned life. How did you get to be a sad, lonely girl working at a hotel bar in Boston, wearing a red jacket, making martinis for tourists and conventioneers? Did we commit our first mistake in utero, was the name Beatrice too much for you to bear? Why did you leave school to take a job like this? If I drove you there, I’m sorry with my whole heart. With whatever’s left of my heart. I loved you. I love you. I have no idea how or when I fucked it up. If I were a better person, I suppose I’d know.

  Rebecca says, dutifully, “How’s Claire?”

  Claire is the roommate, a girl with an armload of tattoos and no discernible occupation.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Rebecca says. “I guess April really is the cruelest month. I’m going to put your father on, okay?”

  She hands him the phone. What can he do but accept it?

  “Hey, Bea,” he says.

  “Hi.”

  This is how she’s been with him lately. She’s gone from open resentment to bland friendliness, like a stewardess talking to a needy passenger. It’s worse.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, really. Staying in tonight.”

  There is a spiky blossoming in his chest. He’s seen this girl’s soul, he’s seen the tiny flickering essence of her when she was brand new. He’s seen her driven to paroxysms of delight by snow, by the neighbors’ stinky Lhasa apso, by a pair of
red rubber sandals. He’s consoled her over uncountable injuries, disappointments, expired pets. The fact that they are now slightly awkward acquaintances, making small talk, means the world is too strange and mysterious, too dreadful, for his own minor heart.

  “Well, that’s what we’re doing, too. Of course, we’re elderly.”

  Silence. Okay.

  “We love you,” Peter says helplessly.

  “Thanks. Bye.”

  She clicks off. Peter continues to hold the phone in his hand.

  Rebecca says, “It’s a phase. Really.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She has to separate from you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

  “I’m getting worried about her. I mean, worried worried.”

  “I know. I am too, a little.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let her be, I think. For now, anyway. Call her every Sunday.”

  Gently, Rebecca takes the phone out of Peter’s hand, puts it back on the night table.

  She says, “We seem to be a halfway house for confused children, don’t we?”

  Oh.

  The idea arrives suddenly—Rebecca prefers Mizzy. Mizzy has had the good sense to be elusive, and charming, and repentant, and (say it) beautiful. Rebecca and Peter did their best with Bea but she’d arrived so early (yes, there had been talk of an abortion, has Rebecca ever forgiven him for pressuring her?), and almost as if Bea sensed that she was not quite wanted, she was always prone to wounded solitude, to the sporadic little-girl tantrums that were replaced, during adolescence, by peevishness and outright rancor, by long condescending diatribes about the plight of the poor and the crimes of America, made extra strange by the fact that Peter and Rebecca gave to charities, and agreed with all but Bea’s most paranoid convictions, about AIDS as a government experiment, about secret prisons into which she herself might disappear some day, because she was so vocal about the conspiracies we were meant to ignore.

  How did that happen? It seems that at one moment she was a child squealing ecstatically in his arms, and the next she was a tough, sharp-faced girl with machete and pistol, come down from her village to confront him with his crimes. He was indifferent to the needs of her people, he grew fat at their expense, his glasses were pretentious, he forgot to pick up her dress at the cleaner’s.