By Nightfall

It’s the business thing, of course it’s that, Velazquez and Leonardo and everyone struck deals. Still, there’s something about Groff’s, about most artists’, levelheadedness, regarding the buyer and the work. A certain proprietary calm. And would Peter rather work with hysterics, would he prefer nut jobs who demand shows of reverence, who take crazy offense at innocent remarks, who refuse at the last minute to part with the work after all? Of course he wouldn’t.

But still. And yet.

As the elevator groans its way up, Peter realizes: in historical terms, most of these people, Groff and so many others, are the guildsmen, the carvers and casters; they’re the ones who paint the backgrounds and apply the gold leaf. They feel pride in and detachment from their work. They have the customary array of louche habits but they’re not nut jobs, they’re laborers, they have to be in this economy. They put in their hours. They sleep at night.

Where are the visionaries, then? Have they all been lost to drugs and discouragement?

The elevator doors grumble open, and he gets in.

“See you tomorrow at twelve, then,” he says.

“Yep. See you then.”

The elevator makes its whining way down to level one.

Peter’s gut heaves. Fuck, is he going to be sick again? He touches the corpse- colored Formica elevator wall to steady himself. And thinks, suddenly, unbidden, of Matthew, bone now and scraps of burial suit under the still-hard ground of a Milwaukee cemetery (April is still winter out there). It’s too much, isn’t it, all these young men and women doing well or doing badly but alive, alive, when Matthew was (okay, maybe he was) handsomer and smarter and more gifted than any of them; Matthew, whose comeliness and grace not only didn’t save him but (terrible thought) helped to annihilate him; Matthew, who lies entombed now a thousand miles from Daniel (wherever Daniel is buried, it must be somewhere on the East Coast), who as it turns out was Matthew’s true and lasting love; his actual Beatrice (is that why Peter insisted on the name?), two young men erased from the world still unaccomplished, still nascent; and who knows what it means, if it means anything, that Peter can hardly bear it, the nothing that Matthew’s life came to, who knows what if anything it has to do with Peter’s need to help, if help he can, in the procreation of something marvelous, something that will endure, something that will tell the world (poor forgetful world) that evanescence is not all; that someone someday (alien archeologists?) must know that our striving and our charms existed, that we were loved, that we mattered not only in what we left behind but in our proud if perishable flesh?

Ground floor. You’ve survived the elevator. Take your queasy stomach and go out into South Williamsburg, take yourself back to your life.

Rebecca meets Peter at the door that evening, has an unusually passionate kiss for him.

“How’d it go?” Peter asks. Fuck, he forgot to call her during the day. Then again, she didn’t call him either, did she?

“Not bad,” she says. As she speaks she goes into the kitchen, to make their postworkday martinis. She’s still dressed for work. She did, in fact, go back to the black pencil skirt and the brown cashmere.

“I think he’s going to make an offer,” she says. “I think we’re going to accept it.”

Peter, according to habit, starts undressing as he wanders around the living room. Shoes kicked off, jacket shed and slung over the back of the sofa.

Wait a minute.

“Is Mizzy here?” he asks.

She drops the ice cubes into the shaker. Lovely, comforting sound.

“No. He’s having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know.”

“Are we… concerned about that?”

“We’re a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time.”

He’s doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.

“Funnier than usual?” he asks.

“I can’t tell.” She pours vodka into the shaker, and a medium-size dollop of vermouth. Lately they’ve both gone heavier on the vermouth—they’ve taken to actual, fifties-style martinis.

She says, “He left me a voice mail, he said he was having dinner with an old girlfriend, and he wouldn’t be late.”

“That doesn’t sound suspicious.”

“I know. And still, I keep thinking, is ‘old girlfriend’ some kind of code word? For you-know-what. But really, I’ve got to stop this, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Was I like this with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t doing drugs.”

“Do we even know that? I mean, how would we?”

“Well. Bea is alive and well.”

“Bea is alive. I pray every single day that she’ll get well.”

“Well-er.”

“Mm-hm.”

Rebecca shakes the ice and liquor and is briefly a rough-and-ready goddess working in a roadhouse somewhere, she’d need a change of outfit, but look at her, look at the butch assurance with which she shakes those drinks, imagine how she could take you into the back room of some bar and fuck you on top of the beer cases, coolly passionate and dazzlingly practiced, and then after you’d both come she’d get right back to work, she’d slip you a quick sly wink from behind the bar and tell you the next one’s on the house.

She pours the martinis into two stemmed glasses. Peter comes into the kitchen for his, unbuttoning his shirt.

“You know what really pisses me off about Mizzy?” she says.

“What?”

“That I’ve been talking about him for the last five minutes, and I haven’t told you anything about the deal.”

“Tell me about the deal.”

He takes a glass from the countertop. They click their glasses together, sip. God, it’s delicious.

“The main thing is, this Jack Rath character sounded so much better over the phone than we’d expected him to. It’s terrible, I know, but I think we’d all expected him to sound a little like John Huston in Chinatown.”

“And instead he sounded like…”

“Instead he sounded like an intelligent, articulate man who’s lived in New York and London and Zurich, and, you know, Jupiter, and has now gone back to his home town of Billings, Montana.”

“Because…”

“Because it’s beautiful and people are kind and his mother is starting to go out in public with three hats on.”

“Convincing.”

“He did sound convincing. I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.”

“Do we know why he wants to buy the magazine?”

“He wants Billings to become a remote but plausible arts center. Like Marfa.”

Uh-oh.

“So,” Peter says, “let me guess. He wants to move the operation to Billings.”

“No. That didn’t come up, I’m sure he knows how impossible that would be. No. In exchange for keeping us alive, he wants us to advise him about culture and, oh, you know. Help him figure out how to start something.”

She eyes him warily, sips at her drink. Peter, don’t get pissy about this.

“What does he want you to start?”