By Nightfall

spontaneous, he had been since the fifth grade the friend and confidant of a powerful, desired girl, and so somehow, in the admittedly rather rudimentary local estimation, was able to pass as an athlete (skating, but still) and a boyfriend (no scintilla of sex between them, but still). If Matthew was quite possibly the most effeminate person in Milwaukee, he was increasingly possessed of what Peter can only call a precocious grandeur. Peter’s aspect of nascent threat, unsupported by any further attacks, had by then solidified into what was generally regarded as cantankerousness, which his mother further diminished by calling him Mr. Grumpy whenever he was in a mood. His skin erupted, his hair went lank, and he found himself, to his surprise, a member of a small boy-band of malcontents, geekily devoted to rock music and Star Trek, neither admired nor derided, simply left alone. Matthew, on the other hand, was prominent. Glamorous, even. He was clever, rarely argumentative, never snippy or petulant, and even the most dour and threatening boys seemed to find him entertaining. He became a school mascot, of sorts. As he swanned his way through adolescence he treated the other members of the family, including Peter, with a sweet-tempered if occasionally weary, wised-up patience, like a noble child sent to live with common folk until he was ready to assume his true position. As he grew into himself it became possible, in his presence, to feel like a crusty but good-hearted dwarf, or a kindly old badger.

With an uneasy truce declared between them, once Peter had been stripped of his dangerousness, he and Matthew began having brotherly talks at night. Their conversations were wide-ranging but oddly consistent. Decades later, Peter can patch together a meta-conversation, made up of bits and pieces from hundreds of them.

“I think Mom’s just about had it,” Matthew says.

“With what?”

“Everything. Her life.”

This is semiplausible. Their mother can be brusque and short-tempered, she carries about her an almost constant air of incipient exasperation, but she’s always seemed, to Peter, to have “had it” not with her life but with endless particulars: her sons’ domestic lassitude, the dishonest and incompetent mailman, taxes, governments, all her friends, the price of just about everything.

“Why do you think that?”

Matthew sighs. He’s invented a long, low, sloughing sigh; something of woodwind about it.

“She’s stuck here,” he says.

“Yeah…”

I mean, we’re all stuck here, right?

“She’s still a beautiful woman. There’s nothing for her here. She’s like Madame Bovary.”

“Really?”

Peter at the time had no idea who Madame Bovary was, but imagined her to be an infamous figure who presaged doom—he had in all likelihood mixed her up with Madame Defarge.

“Do you think you could talk to her about her hair? She won’t listen to me.”

“No. I can’t talk to Mom about her hair.”

“How’s it going with Emily?”

“How’s what going?”

“Come on.”

“I don’t like Emily.”

“Why not?” Matthew says. “She’s cute.”

“She’s not my type.”

“You’re too young to have a type. Emily likes you.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“And it would be a bad thing if she did? You’ve got to stop underestimating your own charms.”

“Shut up.”

“Can I tell you a secret fact about girls?”

“No.”

“They like kindness. You’d be surprised how far you can get with a lot of girls if you just walk up to them and say, ‘I think you’re great, I think you’re beautiful.’ Because they’re all afraid that they’re not.”

“Like you’d know.”

“I have my sources.”

“Right. Did, like, Joanna tell you that?”

“Mm-hm. She did.”

Joanna Hurst. Light of the northern sky.

A more impossible object is difficult to imagine. She is slender and graceful and heartbreakingly modest; she has long, roan-colored hair which she flicks occasionally out of her eyes. She has a way of lowering her head when she listens to others, as if she knows that her beauty—her wide-set eyes and lush lower lip, the creamy glow of her—must be withdrawn slightly if anyone else is to have any chance at all. She has recently begun dating a senior boy so popular and athletic and generally accomplished he doesn’t need to be cruel, and their union is as celebrated as would be the betrothal of an heir apparent to a young princess from a powerful, wealthy nation of uncertain loyalties. Joanna would be out of Peter’s league even if she weren’t three years older, and already taken.

And yet. And still. She’s Matthew’s best friend; surely she could, if given a chance, see in Peter some of what she sees in his brother. Surely the boy she’s dating (who bears the ludicrous name Benton) is at least a little insipid for her, a little obvious, one of those bland, hunky local heroes who never prevails in the movies; who always loses out to someone plainer but smarter, someone with rounder depths of soul, someone like, well, Peter.

“Are you in love with Joanna?” he asks Matthew.

“No.”

“Do you think she’s in love with Benton?”

“She isn’t sure. Which means she’s not.”

Peter has, poised on the tip of his tongue, the impossible, unaskable questions. Do you think maybe… Is it remotely possible that…

He can’t. A no would be too unbearable. He has already, at twelve, grown all too accustomed to the idea that the main chance will never be offered him; that he’s one of the people who pick their way through whatever the warriors and marauders have left behind.

He doesn’t pursue the subject. He contents himself, over the next three years, with making sure he’s home, and attractively arrayed, on the relatively rare occasions when Joanna comes over (he and Matthew have long understood that their friends are never eager to spend much time at their house—there’s nothing to eat, and their mother seems to believe that their friends will steal if not carefully supervised). Peter will tell Emily Dawson that she’s beautiful, which will result in a hand job several nights later under the bleachers at a football game, after which she will never speak to him again. He will find himself, at odd moments, acting studly and seductive around Matthew, in the hope that Matthew will convey it to Joanna: You know, my little brother’s getting kind of hot.

As months pass, however, and Matthew fails utterly to remark on Peter’s new manliness, Peter is driven to greater extremes. He starts simply by sitting (a much-practiced, cowboyish slinging of his elbows across the backs of sofas and chairs, legs spread wide with knees slightly bent, as if he might be called at any moment to spring into action), and by speaking in a slightly slurred, sporadically faltering baritone, which he pulls up, to the best of his ability, from deep within his diaphragm. Receiving no recognition, Peter steps up the campaign. He abandons his habitual shyness and strips immediately to his briefs whenever he and Matthew are alone in their room together (You know, my little brother’s got a really tight little body); he takes to singing, very softly and as if a bit absentmindedly, a few of Matthew’s favorite Cat Stevens songs (You know, my brother’s a pretty soulful guy, and he’s got a great voice); and finally, with his thirteenth birthday looming, takes to looking deeply into Matthew’s eyes whenever they speak, marshaling to the best of his ability a softness and a sober probingness in his own eyes, a sense of profound, questioning attention (You know, my brother is really compassionate, he’s a very tender guy).

In retrospect, Peter can’t imagine how or why it never occurred to him that Matthew would believe these little come-ons to be directed at him. Later on, this singularity of purpose will make Peter good at business, and terrible at poker and chess. At twelve, pushing hard on thirteen, he will suddenly, one winter night, realize that the entire sustained performance has, at best, not been relayed to Joanna at all, and, at worst, has been conveyed in