on Peter’s premises.
Tyler says, “Man, I’m really sorry.”
Peter nods again. Yelling won’t help. And really, he can’t fire Tyler on the spot. The show has to come down today.
“Get back to work,” Peter says quietly. “Try to remember not to put anything sharp in your pockets.”
He’s going to fucking kill Rex. Lecherous old queen.
Uta says, “Let’s take this one to the back.”
Peter, however, is not quite ready to abandon the corpse. Cautiously, very very gently, he slips his finger under the waxy paper, and lifts it.
All Peter can see is a triangle of clotted color. A swirl of ochre dotted with black.
Carefully, he fingers the paper another fraction of an inch away from the canvas.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but what Peter thinks he sees is a standard-issue abstract, clumsily painted. Student work.
That’s what’s under the sealed, pristine wrapping? That’s the shrouded relic?
Peter’s stomach lurches. What the fuck? Is he… yeah, he’s going to…
He retches. By the time he’s standing his mouth has already filled with vomit, but he makes it to the bathroom, where he expels it into the toilet and then stands, heaving, as it comes up again, and again.
Uta stands behind him. “Darling,” she says.
“I’m okay. You don’t have to see this.”
“Fuck off, I’ll be changing your diapers one day. It’s not the worst thing in the world. You know we’re covered.”
Peter still leans over the toilet bowl. Is it over? Hard to tell.
“It’s not the fucking painting. I don’t know, I’ve been queasy for a while. Maybe the turkey was a little off.”
“Go home.”
“No way.”
“Come back later if you want to. Go home now, for an hour, even. I’ll keep an eye on the idiots out there.”
“Maybe for an hour.”
“Absolutely for an hour.”
All right, then. He’s strangely embarrassed by having to walk past Tyler and his assistants—some vague sense of defeat. The young and destructive have won this one; the old guy, grown delicate, saw the carnage and fell on his sword.
He gets a cab on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. He’s light-headed but is done (please, God) being sick. How awful it’d be to throw up in the backseat of Zoltan Kravchenko’s cab. Zoltan would of course be furious, he’d eject Peter and speed off to clean up the mess. You can’t be sick in public, not in New York. It renders you impoverished, no matter how well you’re dressed.
Peter makes it home, gives Zoltan a big tip because Peter didn’t throw up in his cab but might have. He lets himself into the building, gets into the elevator. There is, in all this, a certain nausea-tinged unreality. He’s hardly ever sick, and he’s never home at two o’clock on a Monday. Now that he’s ascending in the elevator, though—now that he’s entered that short interlude of floaty nowhere—he’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.
When he enters the loft, he’s aware of… what? A presence? Some small perturbation of the ordinary air…
It’s Mizzy, asleep on the sofa. He’s shirtless again, wearing only his cargo shorts and a bronze amulet hung from a leather thong around his neck. His face, in repose, is settled into a youthfulness that isn’t as apparent when his troubled, inquisitive eyes are open. Asleep, he looks remarkably like a bas-relief on the sarcophagus of a medieval soldier—he’s even got his hands crossed over his chest. Like a medieval bas-relief, he possesses a certain aspect of what Peter can only think of as youth personified, the sense of a young hero who in life was probably not so beautiful and quite possibly not all that heroic and was certainly mauled into bloody bits in the battle in which he died, but afterward—after life—some anonymous artisan has granted him impeccable features and put him to perfect sleep, under the painted eyes of saints and martyrs, as generation after generation of the temporarily living light candles for their dead.
Peter kneels beside the sofa, to look more closely at Mizzy’s face. It’s only after he’s knelt down that he realizes it’s a funny gesture—penitential, reverent. And how will he explain it if Mizzy wakes up? Mizzy’s breath whistles softly, steadily, though—the imperturbable sleep of youth. Peter remains another moment. It’s clear now. Mizzy is Rebecca, incarnated: the young Rebecca, the bright and clean-faced girl who’d walked into Peter’s seminar at Columbia all those years ago and seemed… familiar, in some ineffable way. It hadn’t been love at first sight, it’d been recognition at first sight. Mizzy’s resemblance to her hasn’t been clear until now because Rebecca has changed—Peter sees how much. She’s given up (as, of course, she would) a pristine nascency, that not-quite- formed quality that’s gone by our midtwenties at the latest.
Peter has a terrible urge to touch the boy’s face. Just to touch it.
Whoa. What’s that about?
Okay, there’s gay DNA in the family, and he whacked off with his friend Rick throughout junior high, and sure, he can see the beauty of men, there’ve been moments (a teenage boy in a pool in South Beach, a young Italian waiter at Babbo), but nothing’s happened and he hasn’t, as far as he can tell, been suppressing it. Men are great (well, some of them) but they’re not sexy.
Still, he wants to touch Mizzy’s face. It isn’t erotic; not exactly erotic. He wants to touch this slumbering perfection that won’t last, can’t last, but is here, right now, on his couch. Just to make contact with it, the way the faithful want to touch the robe of a saint.
Of course, he doesn’t do it. As he stands, his knees crack. Mizzy, mercifully, sleeps on. Peter goes into the bedroom, closes the curtains, doesn’t turn on the light. He takes his clothes off and lies down on the bed. To his surprise he falls almost immediately into a deep, dark slumber, during which he dreams of armored men, standing at attention in the snow.
FRATRICIDE
Peter tried to murder his brother only once, which, by the standards of brothers, is modest. He was seven, which would have made Matthew ten.
Most little boys are girlish; Matthew’s… Matthew-ness wasn’t fully apparent until he got a bit older. By the age of ten he could sing (badly) every song ever recorded by Cat Stevens. He insisted on a paisley bathrobe, which he wore constantly around the house. He seemed, at times, to be developing an English accent. He was a fine- featured boy walking through the rooms of a stolid beige-brick house in Milwaukee, dressed in a green paisley robe that fell just above his ankles, singing “Morning Has Broken” or “Wild World,” softly, wistfully, clearly meant to be overheard.
Their parents—Lutherans, Republicans, members of various clubs—did not torment Matthew, maybe because they suspected the world would torment him sufficiently on its own, or maybe because they weren’t yet ready to abandon the notion that their older son was a prodigy, expressing random if rather peculiar enthusiasms that would solidify, over time, into a significant, remunerative career. Their mother was a handsome, hefty, big-jawed woman, pure Swede, whose profoundest fear was of being cheated and whose deepest conviction was that everyone was trying to cheat her. Their father, handsome but a little blank, unfinished-looking, vaguely Finnish, never fully adapted to his good fortune in marrying their mother, and lived in his marriage the way an impoverished relation might live in the spare room. It’s possible that their mother refused to be cheated out of two healthy, unalarming Wisconsin sons, and that their father simply went along with her. For whatever reasons, they were uncensorious with Matthew. They did not object when he started wearing knickers to school, or when he declared his intention to take up figure skating.
