By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
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are expanding; a section of Arctic ice bigger than Connecticut has just melted away; someone in Darfur who wants desperately to live, who’d let himself believe he’d be one of the survivors, has just been cut open by a machete and for an instant sees his own viscera, the wet red of it darker than he’d imagined. Amid all that, Peter can probably rely on twenty minutes of simple domestic comfort.
Bette Rice has beamed something into the room, though. Call it mortal urgency.
Who ever expected heroism from little Dan Weissman, handsome in his avid-eyed, narrow-faced way, something of the antelope about him; no extravagant passions; Dan who was so clearly meant to be one of the boys Matthew used to date? … Who could possibly have imagined him learning more than some of the doctors knew, facing down the most terrifying nurses, staying with Matthew when he was home and getting him into the protocol they said was closed and being at the hospital those last days and …? Yes, the list goes on … and no, Dan didn’t mention his own first symptoms until after Matthew was gone. Who expected Matthew and this more or less random boy to become Tristan and fucking Isolde?
You could panic in the face of it all—your brother dead at twenty-two (he’d be forty-seven now), along with his erstwhile boyfriend and every other friend he’d had; slaughters in other countries that might give pause to Attila the Hun; children killing their teachers with guns their fathers left lying around; and by the way, do you think it’ll be another building next time, or will it be a subway or a bridge?
“Have you got the Metro?” he asks Rebecca.
She hands the section over to him, returns to the book review. “The Martin Puryear is closing in three weeks,” she says. “Please kick me if I miss it.”
“Mm.”
He has twenty minutes. Nineteen, now. He is impossibly fortunate; frighteningly fortunate. Your troubles, little man? Think of them as an appetizer that didn’t turn out quite right. You should sing and frolic, you should make obeisance to any god you can think of, because no one has put a tire over your shoulders and set it on fire, at least not today.
Rebecca says, “Should we call Bea before you go?”
What kind of father would want to put off calling his daughter?
No one has hacked you to death with a machete. But still. “Let’s call her when I get back,” he says.
“Okay.”
Hard to deny it: Rebecca is just as happy to have a few hours at home without him. One of those long-marriage things, right? You want to be home alone sometimes.
It’s a warm April afternoon suffused with bright gray glow. Peter walks the few blocks to the Spring Street IRT. He’s wearing beat-up suede boots and dark blue jeans and a light blue unironed shirt under a pewter-colored leather jacket. You try not to look too calculated but you are in fact meeting someone at a fancy restaurant uptown and you want—poor fucker—you want to look neither defiantly “downtown” (pathetic, in a man your age) nor like you’ve nicened it up for the dowagers. Peter has gotten better over the years at dressing as the man who’s impersonating the man he actually is. Still, there are days when he can’t shake the feeling that he’s gotten it wrong. And of course it’s grotesque to care about how you look, yet almost impossible not to.
Still, always, there’s the world, which conspires constantly to remind you: no one cares about your boots, pilgrim. There’s Spring Street on this spring day—is it a false spring, though? New York has a habit of squeezing out one last snowfall even after the crocuses are out—the sky so blank you can imagine God forming it with His hands like snowballs and tossing them out, saying, Time, Light, Matter. There’s New York, one of the goddamnedest perturbations ever to ride the shifting surface of the earth. It’s medieval, really, all ramparts and ziggurats and spikes and steeples, entirely possible to see a hunchback cloaked in a Hefty bag stumping along beside a woman carrying a twenty-thousand-dollar purse. And at the same time, overlaid, is a vast nineteenth-century boomtown, raucously alive, eager for the future but nothing rubberized or air-cushioned about it, no hydraulic hush; trains rumbling the pavement, carved limestone women and men—not gods—looking heftily down from cornices as if from a heaven of work and hard-won prosperity, car horns bleating as some citizen in Dockers passes by telling his cell phone “that’s how they’re supposed to be.”
Peter descends the stairs into the roar of an oncoming train.
Bette is already seated when he arrives. Peter follows the hostess through the dark red faux Victoriana of JoJo. When Bette sees Peter she offers a nod and an ironic smile (Bette, a serious person, would wave only if she were drowning). The smile is ironic, Peter suspects, because, well, here they are, at her behest, and sure, the food is good but then there’s the fringe and the little bandy-legged tables. It’s a stage set, it’s whimsical, for God’s sake; but Bette and her husband, Jack, have had their inherited six-room prewar on York and Eighty-fifth forever, he makes a professor’s salary and she makes mid-range art-dealer money and fuck anybody who sneers at her for failing to live downtown in a loft on Mercer Street in a neighborhood where the restaurants are cooler.
When Peter reaches the table, she says, “I can’t believe I’ve dragged you up here.”
Yes, she is in fact irritated with him, for … agreeing to come? For thriving (relatively speaking)?
“It’s fine,” he says, because nothing cleverer comes to mind. “You’re a kind man. Not a nice man, people tend to get the two mixed up.”
He sits opposite her. Bette Rice: a force. Silver crew cut, austere black-rimmed glasses, Nefertiti profile. She was born to it. Jewish daughter of Brooklyn leftists, may or may not have dated Brian Eno, has a good story about how Rauschenberg gave her her first Diet Coke. When he’s with Bette, Peter can feel like the not-quite-bright high school jock putting moves on the smart, tough girl. Can he help having been born in Milwaukee?
She laser-eyes a waitress, says “Coffee,” doesn’t care that her voice is louder than it needs to be, that a sixtyish Perfect Blonde glances over from the next table.
Peter says, “I hope you’re willing to talk about Elena Petrova’s glasses.”
She holds up a slender hand. One of the three silver rings she wears is taloned, like an obscure torture implement.
“Angel, it’s sweet of you, but I’m not going to put you through the preliminary chitchat. I have breast cancer.”
Did he think that by anticipating it, he’d protected her from it?
“Bette—”
“No, no, they got it.”
“Thank God.”
“What I really want to tell you is, I’m closing the gallery. Right now.”
“Oh.”
Bette offers him a slip of a smile, consoling, maternal even, and he’s reminded that she has two grown sons, neither of whom is particularly screwed up.
Bette says, “They got it this time, and if it comes back, they’ll probably get it next time, too. I’m not dying, not even close to it. But there was a moment. When I first heard what it was, and you know, my mother—”
“I know.”
She gives him a level, sobering look. Don’t be too eager to be good about this, okay?
She says, “I wasn’t so much terrified as I was pissed off. The gallery’s been my whole life for the last forty years, and frankly I’ve been sick of it for the last ten. And now that it’s all going to hell, and everybody’s broke … Anyway. One of my first thoughts was, If this doesn’t kill me, Jack and I are going to change our lives.”
“And so—”
“We’re going to go live in Spain. The boys are fine, we’re going to find a little whitewashed house somewhere and grow tomatoes.”
“You’re kidding.”
She laughs, a