By Nightfall

No, she’s always on your mind. How can this conversation feel like a date that isn’t going well?

“You’re up late,” she says. “Are you outside? It sounds like you’re outside.”

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep, I’m out for a walk.”

Where he’s walking now it’s just warehouses and shuttered, unprospering shops, wan streetlight shining down onto puddled cobblestones, so silent you can hear a rat browsing through a paper bag on the sidewalk; our own nighttown… no, we’ve got no nighttown, the true squalor, the tranny hookers and the serious drug dealers (not those sad X, coke, smoke? guys you pass in the parks) have been run out, by Giuliani, by the rich; New York still has its desolate stretches but you’re rarely in real danger anymore, no one’s selling heroin out of that gutted building over there, no misshapen beauty with gassed-out eyes is going to offer to blow you for twenty. This is no nighttown and you, sir, are no Leopold Bloom.

“We’re both insomniacs,” she says. “I got that from you.”

Does she mean that as a gesture of affinity, or is she reciting a curse?

“I do wonder why you called me tonight,” she adds.

Oh, Bea, cut me some slack, I’m penitant, I’m penniless, I’m at your mercy. The ratty desolation through which Peter walks builds rather quickly into the outskirts of Chinatown, Manhattan’s only thriving nation-state, the only one that’s growing without the intercession of coffeehouses or cool little bars.

“I told you,” he says. “I was thinking about you. I wanted to leave a message.”

“Are you upset about something?”

“No more than usual.”

“Because you sound like you’re upset about something.”

Peter fights an urge to hang up on her. Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can’t. Still, impulses run rampant: You’re plain, you’re not that bright, you’re a disappointment. He can’t. He’d never.

“I’m just upset about the usual things. Money, and the end of the world.”

He can’t get flippant with her, won’t even try his seductive wit. This is his daughter he’s talking to.

She says, “Do you need me to send you a check?”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s joking. He snorts out a laugh. If she laughs back, he can’t hear it for the traffic.

He’s crossing Canal now, headed into the lurid neon and fluorescence of Chinatown proper, all gaudy reds and yellows; it’s as if blue isn’t in the spectrum here at all. They never turn the lights off, they don’t take the dangling, stretch-necked cooked ducks out of the windows; as if it possesses a continuing, unquenchable place-life that can be populated or not. A yellow sign says good, just that, and offers by way of demonstration a murky tank full of sluggish, mud brown catfish.

“And, okay,” he says, “your mother’s brother is kind of a big dose.”

“Oh, right, Dizzy. He’s a spoiled brat.”

“That he is.”

“So you thought it would be a nice contrast to talk to your happy, well-adjusted daughter.”

Please, Bea. Please have mercy.

Children don’t. Do they? Did you, Peter, have mercy on your own parents?

Even he doesn’t buy the low chuckle he forces out. “I’d never ask anything as impossible as happy or well- adjusted from you,” he says.

“So it’s a comfort to you, to think of me as unhappy.”

What’s up with you?

“How’s Claire?” The roommate.

“She’s out. It’s just me and the cats.”

He says, “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Bea. I just don’t want to be one of those parents who insist that their kid be, you know, happy all the time.”

“Are we going to have a serious talk?” she says. “Do you want to have a serious talk?”

No. It’s the last thing I want.

“Sure,” he says. “If you want to.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She says, “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Our Town.”

“Your senior play.”

She’d played the mother. Not Emily. Banish that thought.

Bea in high school—a solid and ironic girl with two close girlfriends (now at Brown and Berkeley), no visible boys, a young life not devoid of pleasure but not in any way voluptuous, not even a little bit reckless. Long, earnest talks with the friends, then homework and bed. She and the friends (their names were Sarah and Elliott, solid and ironic as well, Peter liked them, will he ever see them again?) went to movies on the weekends, shopped sometimes for the heavy sweaters and lace-up boots to which they were devoted. They went skating once, at Wollman Rink, but never again.

“You seemed so unconcerned about it,” she says.

“No. I thought you were great.”

“You didn’t tell me that. You were talking on your phone the whole time. Some sort of deal you had to make.”

Didn’t he? Was he? No. She’s inventing this. He did tell her she was great, he used that exact word, and he wasn’t talking on his phone after the play, what kind of man would do that?

She says, “I know it’s sort of pathetic, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

“I do. I remember it perfectly.”

This is a false memory, Bea. Do you believe, do you actually believe, that I’d go backstage after my daughter’s senior play and talk to some client on my cell phone?

“Wow” is the best he can do. “Hey, if I didn’t say the right thing, I’m sorry. I did think you were great.”

“I wasn’t. That’s the thing. I couldn’t act, and we both knew it.”

“No, no,” Peter says. “I think you can do anything.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Daddy. I don’t need you to.”

It is true? Of course she can’t do anything, no one can do anything, and yeah, of course, you see your child’s limitations, you’ve had parent-teacher conferences about her limitations, fatherhood doesn’t render you blind, but you love her, you truly do, and you encourage her, you tell her (I did, I swear I did) that she was great as the mother in Our Town.

She saw through it, didn’t she? She was smarter than she let on.

How do you tell her that her quote unquote limitations don’t matter to you?

He says, “I love you. I love whatever you do.”

She answers, “I think you did your very best to love me. I think you had limitations of your own.”

Fuck.

Is that why you’re so maidenly, is that why your bed remains narrow? Is that why you seem to want so little?

Chinatown dissipates, and is replaced by the brooding brown bulk of Tribeca, the solemn quiet of its streets.

Unlike Chinatown, Tribeca’s nocturnal quiet doesn’t feel anticipatory. If, for a few hours every day, it’s possible to get a haircut or buy a lamp or have a three-hundred-dollar dinner, that doesn’t appear to matter much, not to the broad light-bleached streets or the brown-and-gray rectitude of the buildings, which have been cutting exactly these shapes out of the New York sky since before your grandfather was born.

He says, “I’m sure I did. I’m sure I do.”

He is taken by a strange, almost luxuriant desire for her to scream at him, to let him have it, nail him and abuse him, accuse him of every known crime, so he doesn’t have to keep responding, doesn’t have to struggle for