By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
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They walk quietly and with purpose by the Carrière and Puvis de Chavannes, past Gérôme’s Pygmalion kissing Galatea. At the gallery’s far end they turn, pass the books-and-gifts kiosk, turn again.
And there it is, the shark, suspended in its pale blue, strangely lovely formaldehyde; there is the lethal perfection of its shape and here is its maw, jagged, big as a barrelhead, the business end—is there any other creature so clearly intended to be a mouth propelled by a body?
It remains a jolt; it still produces that prickle of animal panic along the surface of Peter’s skin. Which is, of course, one of the questions. Who isn’t going to be moved by a thirteen-foot-long dead shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde?
Peter’s stomach lurches. The queasiness is worse after he eats. He should probably go to the doctor.
“Hm,” Bette says.
“Hm.”
It has to do with the immaculate packaging, Peter thinks—the hefty but pristine white steel tank (twenty-two tons), the azure solution in which the creature floats. The shark is so entirely contained, so utterly dead, its eyes opaque, its hide hoarily wrinkled. And yet …
“It’s something, seeing it here,” Bette says.
“It is something.”
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Yes. It’s something.
Three girls and a boy, fourteen or fifteen, circle nervously around the tank, appalled, deciding how exactly to mock it. A little boy holds his father’s hand and says, “This is scary?”—posed as a question. A middle-aged couple stands by the shark’s tail, huddled, conferring gravely in what sounds like Spanish, consulting each other, as if they’ve been sent to do something painful but necessary, for the greater good.
Bette says, “This one’s a female.”
“Do you think they should have kept the first one?”
“There was no way Steve Cohen was going to have paid eight million bucks and just watch the goddamned thing disintegrate.”
“No. No way.”
“It’s a little hard to see it at this point,” Bette says. “I mean, there’s the object, and then there’s Hirst’s career, not to mention Hirst himself, and there’s Cohen’s eight million and the Met thinking it’s daring to show something that’s been around almost twenty years …”
The high school kids gather before the shark’s midsection, all but trembling with fear and sexuality and disdain, speaking softly in a private language (Peter catches bits: “—you’re such a handbag—” (handbag, no, he must have misheard) “—never have—” “—Thomas and Esme and Prue—”). One of the girls puts a hand on the glass, pulls it quickly away again. The other two girls shriek and run from the gallery as if their friend has set off an alarm.
Bette strides up to the front of the tank, bends over slightly to see into the shark’s open maw. The girl who touched the glass remains, the boy beside her. She fingers the seam of the boy’s jeans. Young lovers, then. The girl’s face is resolute, small-mouthed, something pious about it—the could be Amish, never mind the Courtney Love T-shirt and green leather jacket. She is a handsome and probably intelligent girl contemplating a shark alongside her boyfriend (who is gay, anyone can see it, does he know that yet, does she?), and Peter is briefly in love with her, or anyway with who and what she’ll become (there she is ten years from now, in a tight little sparkly dress, laughing, at a party somewhere), and then the boy whispers to her and they leave, and Peter will never see her again.
Bea is angry with him in a way that feels permanent, but hey, she’s only twenty years old. Still. She’s diminishing, up there in Boston; she’s thin and pale and tightly wound, no boyfriends, no discernible passions beyond her determination to do something practical with her life, her conviction that art is ridiculous, by which she means Peter is ridiculous, by which she means he seduced her, all those years, into loving him too much and Rebecca too little, which she has recently come to understand is the source of her persistent loneliness and intermittent depression, her disappointment in men and her trouble connecting with women.
“It’s impressive,” Bette says, of the shark. “You let yourself think, oh, it’s a gesture, it’s just a dead shark, every natural history museum is full of them, but then you stand in a gallery with it, and, well …”
Bette has grown bottom-heavy with age. She is wearing black Reeboks. As she leans unafraid toward the mouth of the shark, she is touching but not heroic—no, she is perhaps heroic in her way but she is not potent, she does not possess even Ahab’s doomed and fanatic grandeur though she has, in her life, had some measure of his crazy conviction (think of the artists she’s taken on). But now, on a Sunday afternoon at the Met, she is an old woman looking into the mouth of a dead shark.
Peter goes and stands beside her. “It’s an impressive gesture,” he says.
Behind Peter’s and Bette’s dim reflections on the glass, the shark’s jaws gape—there are the rows of lethal, serrated teeth, and beyond, pickled white, is the orifice itself, which takes on the shade of the solution’s blue, grayed and deepened, as it recedes into the shark’s own inner darkness.
Bette has not told Peter the truth. Not the whole truth. The surgeon didn’t get all the cancer, she’s not going to be all right. Peter knows this with a tingling immediacy that’s like the creaturely alertness produced by the shark itself. An infinitesimal length of tape self-erases in his brain, and he’ll never know if he understood at JoJo’s or later that Bette is, in fact, dying, and will do so sooner rather than later. That’s why she’s closing the gallery right now. That’s why Jack is leaving Columbia.
Peter reaches over and takes her hand. It’s more or less involuntary, and only after he’s touched her does he pause to wonder, is this ridiculous, is it melodramatic? Will she rebuke him? Her fingers are surprisingly soft and crepey, an old woman’s. She squeezes his hand with hers, gently and quickly. They hold hands for a few seconds, then part. If the gesture was excessive or false, if it was self-dramatizing on Peter’s part, Bette doesn’t seem to mind, not now, not in front of the shark.
Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he’s picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up. As his ears adjust to the particular sing-silence of home, he hears the shower. Rebecca’s here. Good. He’s often as grateful as Rebecca is for a little solitude when he comes home but not now, not today. It’s hard to say what he feels. He wishes it were as simple as sorrow for Bette. It’s hollower than sorrow. It’s a deep loneliness muddled up with some underlayer of jittery fear, who knows what to call it, but he wants to see his wife, he wants to curl up with her, maybe watch something stupid on TV, let the world go dark for the night, let it fall.
Peter walks through the bedroom to the bathroom. There she is, the pink blur of her behind the frosted glass shower door. There’s mortality in the air and sharks in the water but there’s this, too, Rebecca taking a shower, the vanity mirror fogged by steam, the bathroom smelling of soap and that other undersmell Peter can only call clean.
He opens the shower door.
Rebecca is young again. She stands in the stall facing away from Peter, her hair short, her back strong and straight from swimming; she is half hidden by steam and for an instant it all makes impossible sense: Bette’s hand in Peter’s and the Rodin boy-man waiting for the centuries to bury him and Rebecca in the shower sluicing away the last twenty years, a girl again.
She turns, surprised.
It isn’t Rebecca. It’s Mizzy. It’s the Mistake.
Right. The solid square plates of his pectorals, the V of his hips; here is the small dark bristle of pubic hair, the pink-brown jut of his dick.
“Hey,” he says cordially to Peter.