By Nightfall

“It’s a perfectly good question. It just doesn’t really have an answer.”

“Do you want help quitting again?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“By all means.”

“Not right now. In a while.” He lifts his hands and cups his palms close to his face, as if he were about to drink water from them. He says, “It’s always so ridiculous to say to someone who’s never used, you can’t understand.”

Peter hesitates. “Ridiculous” is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that “someone who’s never used” is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we’ve learned how about bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. It helps, of course—let’s not get carried away—if you’re a young prince like Mizzy, and you’ve actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.

Is it any wonder that the Taylors obsess over this boy? What would they be without him? An aging academic who’s published two unremarkable books (the evolution of the dithyramb into spoken oratory, some hitherto overlooked foreshadowings of classical Greek culture in Mycenae), a woman going harmlessly dotty (obsessions with thrift and recycling, oddly paired with a complete indifference to household filth), and three lovely daughters who are doing variously well (Rebecca), slightly suspiciously too well (Julie), and neither well nor badly (Rose).

Peter says to Mizzy, “There’s not really much I can do with a statement like that.”

And by the way, what if Rebecca should come out of the bedroom right now? You understand, don’t you, that my only option would be to tell her everything. And that it would look weird, you standing out here naked like this, no matter what I told her.

Didn’t Rebecca once say, I suspect Mizzy is capable of just about anything? Didn’t she say it with a certain combination of anger and reverence?

“I know,” Mizzy answers. “Okay.”

Okay?

Mizzy places his fingertips on either side of his jawbone. Churchly. The young seeker come to proclaim his unworthiness.

He says, “I feel like I’m starting to see the world just… go along without me. And, you know, why shouldn’t it? But I don’t have. Any idea about what to do. I’ve thought for so long that if I just said no to all the, you know, obviously bad ideas, like law school, that the good idea would just sort of come along. And I begin to see that this is how sad old failures get their start. I mean, first you’re a cute young failure, and then…”

He laughs, a long, low sob of a laugh.

Peter says, “Despair seems premature.”

“I know. I do know. But this is a bad time for me. I fell into, I don’t know, some kind of pit up there in that shrine, it was exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen. I… felt like I began to see the transitory nature of all things, the serene absence in the middle of the world, but it wasn’t comforting. It made me want to kill myself.”

Again, a strain of the sob-laugh.

“That would be overreacting,” Peter says. Fuck, there it is again, that desire to be tough but compassionate that comes out sounding flip and callous.

“Don’t let me get melodramatic,” Mizzy says. “Here’s what I’m trying to say. I’m walking a line. I can’t tell myself that what I need is to go to a better shrine, or a shrine in a different country. I’m out of illusions. I need a little help getting through right now. I’m not proud of it. If I can feel okay for a little while, if I can get out of bed and get moving in the mornings, if you can possibly help me get started on a job, I’ll quit. I’ve quit before. It’s something I know I can do.”

“You’re putting me in an impossible position.”

“I’m asking you for a little help. I know, I know, but it’s too late to change that, and really, really and truly, I need a couple of months. I need a couple months of feeling okay, so I can start a life. And, well. You know what’ll happen if you tell Rebecca.”

He does.

“Will you promise not to have it delivered here anymore?” he says.

“Absolutely.”

Yeah, right.

“I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I need. Thank you.”

With that he leans over and kisses Peter, gently, at least semichastely, on the lips.

Whoa.

Mizzy pulls back, offers a charmingly abashed smile that has to have been practiced over the years.

“Sorry,” he says. “My friends and I all kiss each other, I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Got you.”

And yet. Is Mizzy offering himself?

Peter takes the Stoli bottle out of the freezer, pours them each a shot. What the hell. Then he goes to the bathroom for the Klonopin. Mizzy knows to wait in the kitchen. When Peter returns, with a little blue pill for each of them, they say “Chin chin” and down the pills with the vodka.

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn’t want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There’s the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that’s not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her very real worries on Mizzy’s behalf, also understand Mizzy’s desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that you will be healed, whether you want to be or not.

Men are united in their commonness, maybe it’s as simple as that.

And, okay, for a moment, a moment, Peter imagines that he, too, could be a Rodin, not, of course, the boy of the Bronze Age but not a Burgher of Calais either; he could be an undiscovered Rodin, the aging but unbowed, a figure of stern dignity, standing foursquare, weaponless, bare-chested (his chest is still muscular, his belly not bad), with a drape around his loins, as befits a gentleman of years (who’s not crazy about the condition of his ass).

“Thanks again,” Mizzy says. “For thinking about it.”

“Mm.”

“Night.”

“Good night.”

Mizzy returns to his room. Peter watches him go, his supple back and the small, perfect spheres of his ass. Whatever’s gay in Peter is probably mostly about ass, the place where another man is most vulnerable, childlike; the place where his physiognomy seems least built for a fight.

Go ahead. Say it silently, inside your mind. Nice ass, little brother.

And now, poor creature, to bed.

Sleep, however, will not return. After a full hour he gets out of bed, gropes for his clothes. Rebecca stirs.

“Peter?”

“Shh. Everything’s okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“I feel better.”

“Really?”

“It must have been food poisoning. I’m suddenly okay again.”