By Nightfall
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Mare Vaporum Corp 2010
The right of Michael Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007307760
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007431076 Version: 2017-05-05
This book is for Gail Hochman and Jonathan Galassi
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1 - A Party
Chapter 2 - The Bronze Age
Chapter 3 - Her Brother
Chapter 4 - Art History
Chapter 5 - Fratricide
Chapter 6 - Nighttown
Chapter 7 - An Object of Incalculable Worth
Chapter 8 - Prize Chickens
Chapter 9 - In Dreams
Acknowledgments
Also by Michael Cunningham
The Mistake is coming to stay for a while.
“Are you mad about Mizzy?” Rebecca says.
“Of course not,” Peter answers.
One of the inscrutable old horses that pull tourist carriages has been hit by a car somewhere up on Broadway, which has stopped traffic all the way down to the Port Authority, which is making Peter and Rebecca late.
“Maybe it’s time to start calling him Ethan,” Rebecca says. “I’ll bet nobody calls him Mizzy anymore but us.”
Mizzy is short for the Mistake.
Outside the cab, pigeons clatter up across the blinking blue of a Sony sign. An elderly bearded man in a soiled, full-length down coat, grand in his way (stately, plump Buck Mulligan?), pushes a grocery cart full of various somethings in various trash bags, going faster than any of the cars.
Inside the cab, the air is full of drowsily potent air freshener, vaguely floral but not really suggestive of anything beyond a chemical compound that must be called “sweet.”
“Did he tell you how long he wants to stay?” Peter asks.
“I’m not sure.”
Her eyes go soft. Worrying overmuch about Mizzy (Ethan) is a habit she can’t break.
Peter doesn’t pursue it. Who wants to go to a party in mid-argument?
He has a queasy stomach, and a song looping through his head. I’m sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea … Where would that have come from? He hasn’t listened to Styx since he was in college.
“We should set a limit,” he says.
She sighs, settles her hand lightly on his knee, looks out the window at Eighth Avenue, up which they are now not moving at all. Rebecca is a strong-featured woman—who is often referred to as beautiful but never as pretty. She may or may not notice these small gestures of hers, by which she consoles Peter for his own stinginess.
A gathering of angels appeared above my head.
Peter turns to look out his own window. The cars in the lane beside theirs are inching forward. A slightly battered blue Toyota-ish something creeps abreast, full of young men; raucous twenty-something boys blaring music loudly enough that Peter feels the thump-thump of it enter the cab’s frame as they approach. There are six, no, seven of them crammed into the car, all inaudibly shouting or singing; brawny boys tarted up for Saturday night, hair gelled into tines, flickers of silver studs or chains here and there as they roughhouse and bitch-slap. The traffic in their lane picks up speed, and as they pull ahead Peter sees, thinks he sees, that one of them, one of the four clamoring in the backseat, is actually an old man, wearing what must be a spiky black wig, shouting and shoving right along with the others but thin-lipped and hollow-cheeked. He noodles the head of the boy stuffed in next to him, shouts into the boy’s ear (flashing nuclear white veneers?), and then they’re gone, moving with traffic. A moment later, the nimbus of sound they make has been pulled along with them. Now it’s the brown bulk of a delivery truck that offers, in burnished gold, the wing-footed god of FTD. Flowers. Someone is getting flowers.
Peter turns back to Rebecca. An old man in young-guy drag is something to have observed together; it’s not really a story to tell her, is it? Besides, aren’t they in the middle of some kind of edgy pre-argument? In a long marriage, you learn to identify a multitude of different atmospheres and weathers.
Rebecca has felt his attention reenter the cab. She looks at him blankly, as if she hadn’t fully expected to see him.
If he dies before she does, will she be able to sense his disem-bodied presence in a room?
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We won’t throw him out on the street.”
Her lips fold in primly. “No, really, we should set some limits with him,” she says. “It’s not a good idea to always just give him whatever he thinks he wants.”
What’s this? All of a sudden, she’s chiding him about her lost little brother?
“What seems like a reasonable amount of time?” he asks, and