meant to (as in fact Joanna does) marry a handsome, luggish boy she meets at the local junior college, have three children in quick succession, and live quietly enough and happily enough in what will be called a planned community.
He will recall vividly on his deathbed (or, more specifically, on the stretch of pavement onto which he will collapse when his heart implodes) the following episode on an indolent Saturday afternoon.
He, Matthew, and Joanna have gone to the beach—where else is there for them to go?—and Peter sits on the coarse sand as Matthew and Joanna wade aimlessly in the shallows of the lake, speaking to each other in low but urgent-sounding tones. Joanna is demonstrating the concept of desire by way of rounded buttocks half covered by the V of her cantaloupe-colored bikini bottom. Matthew is taut and muscular from skating; his dark blond hair curls almost to the nape of his neck. The two of them stand in the blue-black water with their backs to Peter, looking out at the milky haze of the horizon, and as Peter watches from the sand he is taken by a sea-swell of feeling, utterly unexpected, a sensation that starts in his bowels and fluoresces through his body, dizzying, giddying. It’s not lust, not precisely lust, though it has lust in it. It’s a pure, thrilling, and slightly terrifying apprehension of what he will later call beauty, though the word is insufficient. It’s a tingling sense of divine presence, of the unspeakable perfection of everything that exists now and will exist in the future, embodied by Joanna and his brother (there’s no denying that his brother is part of it) standing ankle deep in lakewater, under a pallid gray sky that will soon produce a scattering of rain. Time fails. Out of Joanna and Matthew and the lake and sky emanates the sense memory of the bathing suit Joanna is wearing right now, along with the smell of balsam pine that’s currently in Peter’s nose; their father’s helpless ardor and their mother’s ravenous attention and how they will both age and fade (he embittered, she gentled, liberated, by having less and less to lose); Emily making Peter come under the bleachers and his flirtations with sly, red-haired Carol, who will be his girlfriend until just before graduation; the school clock lit like a harvest moon under a twilight sky and the powder-scented air-conditioning at Hendrix Pharmacy and more and more and more. Matthew and Joanna have waded into Lake Michigan on a listless Saturday afternoon and summoned the vast, astonishing world. In another moment they’ll both turn, walk back up the beach, sit next to Peter. Joanna will tie her hair back with a coated rubber band, Matthew will examine a blister on his left foot. The local will reestablish itself, though Peter will put a hand, gently, on the back of Matthew’s neck, and Matthew will let go of his own blistered foot and reach over to squeeze Peter’s right knee, as if he understands (as he could not possibly have understood) that Peter has had a vision. Peter will never fully understand why, at that ordinary moment, the world decided to reveal itself, briefly, to him, but he will associate it with Matthew and Joanna together, an enchanted couple, mythic, perfect and eternal and chaste as Dante and Beatrice.
Peter has been lying in his darkened bedroom for over half an hour, which, after a two-hour nap, is unconscionable. He should be back at the gallery. He seems, though, to have passed into some condition of semiparalysis, something Snow White–ish, a condition of waking slumber, waiting for… true love’s first kiss isn’t going to do much at this point, is it?
He can hear Mizzy moving around in the living room.
He’s not a fool. He knows that Mizzy is in some way his brother, resurrected.
The funny thing is, knowing it doesn’t seem to make much difference. He’s learned this from years of psychoanalysis. Okay. You can be overbearing because you feel insecure, and you feel insecure because your parents preferred your older brother. You love your wife for many reasons, among them her resemblance (which you exaggerate in your own mind) to the unattainable girl of your adolescence, who preferred your older brother, and you (fuck you) love her ever so slightly less now that she’s not that girl any longer. You’re drawn (erotically?) to her little brother because on one hand he reminds you of Matthew and, on the other, allows you for the first time in your life to
All this is useful information. Now what?
Lying here on the bed he finds himself thinking about Dan Weissman, whom Peter saw only that once, in Matthew’s hospital room (Matthew’s body was shipped to Milwaukee for burial, Dan wasn’t at the service, Peter could never bring himself to ask his parents whether they’d invited him or not). Dan, who died a little over a year after Matthew did. Whose entire life, as far as Peter is concerned, was devoted to that twenty minutes in St. Vincent’s in 1985, when he helped Peter say goodbye.
On the other side of the wall, Peter hears Mizzy walk into the kitchen. He probably doesn’t know Peter is here. How would he? There is something subtly delicious about being unapprehended and, better still, about hiding without culpability. If discovered, he can simply tell Mizzy the truth. He got sick, came home to lie down.
Mizzy returns to the living room. The walls, being non-load-bearing, are thin. Peter can hear pretty much everything. Which is, of course, part of what drove poor Bea crazy when they moved here, when she was eleven. What exactly had possessed them to think that living in such close proximity to her parents would be a good idea for an adolescent girl? Well, okay. The loft had been such an amazingly good deal, it would have been crazy to pass it up. And, right, at the time they didn’t have the money to put in thicker walls.
A brief interlude of silence—Mizzy has probably sat down on the sofa. And then, faintly, his voice. He’s called someone on his cell.
Peter should not, of course, be listening. He should get up right now, and let Mizzy know that he’s here. The temptation, however, is too great. And in the age of cell phones, all our conversations are public, aren’t they? Besides, Peter can always pretend to have been asleep.
Mizzy’s voice is barely intelligible.
“Hey. It’s Ethan.”
“Yeah, I
“A while, I’m not sure. Yeah.”
“Like, just a gram? I’m not so
“Okay. Great.”
“Mercer Street.
“Great. See you in a little bit.”
Okay. He’s using again.
What now, Polonius?
Peter lies in mortified, fascinated silence.
At seven past four, he hears Mizzy buzz the dealer in, buy the drugs, and close the door—it’s a quick and almost silent transaction. It is, of course, outrageous that Mizzy has given their address to a drug dealer, and let him into the loft, however briefly, but at the same time… it’s not as if Peter has never bought drugs before (the occasional gram of cocaine, the odd half dozen hits of Ecstasy), and he knows well enough who it is who sells drugs in small quantities to people like Mizzy (or himself). Somewhere along that unimaginable chain of supply and demand there are dangerous, desperate men, men who are capable of just about anything, but the guy who hops into a cab to sell you a little coke or crystal or a few hits of X is likely to be a young or, even likelier, a no-longer- young actor/model/waiter, who needs the extra cash. Peter could simulate righteous fury at Mizzy, and really, Mizzy should have arranged to meet this guy somewhere else (yes, he’s spoiled and entitled, no denying it), but a fit of anger would be at least something of an act.
And so, he remains.
He hears Mizzy move around in the other room, the soft slide of his footsteps as he goes into the kitchen, goes back to put on a CD (Sigur Ros), returns to the kitchen. Then it’s twenty-three minutes of quiet, only the low tones and ghost voice of the music. Is Mizzy doing the crystal? Uh, what do you think? Finally, more footfalls, coming through the living room, getting closer… for a moment it seems that Mizzy is going to come into Peter’s room. Peter’s skin prickles with fear (he’ll have to pretend to be asleep) and anger (
