By Nightfall

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” She is patient, she is calm. And, all right, she’s handling him, because she knows how he can be about the whole idea of “starting something cultural” in Billings or anywhere, all that calculation, that whiff of the corporate. Shouldn’t “something cultural” start itself?

But Rebecca doesn’t want a battle, not now, not tonight.

She says, “It can’t be a film festival or a biennial or anything like that. It’s an interesting challenge. We’ve all decided to think of it as an interesting challenge.”

Peter laughs, she laughs back, they take big hearty slugs of their drinks.

She says, “It seems a small enough price to pay. Don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“Did you go to that guy’s studio?”

“Yeah. The work is nice.”

“Nice?”

“Let’s order something, I’m starving.”

“Chinese or Thai?”

“You pick.”

“Okay, Chinese.”

“Why not Thai?”

“Fuck you.”

She hits speed dial on her cell, orders the usual. Ginger chicken, prawns with black bean sauce, dry-fried string beans, brown rice.

“So,” she says, after she’s clicked off. “Nice?”

“No, no, much better than that. They look amazing. They have a presence that doesn’t really show up in the photographs.”

Peter drops his pants, steps out of them, leaves them puddled on the floor. He’ll pick his clothes up later, it’s not something he expects his wife to do, but he loves just throwing them anywhere, for the time being. He is now a man with reservations, who is wearing white briefs (small pee stain, barely noticeable).

“Do you think Carole Potter will want one?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t be half surprised. She should buy one. Groff’ll be around for quite a while, I think.”

“Peter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Never mind.”

“Don’t do that.”

She sips at her drink, pauses, breathes, sips again. She’s thinking of something to say, isn’t she? Is it something other than what she’d meant to say?

“I have this terrible feeling about Mizzy,” she says. “And I’m afraid I’m exhausting your patience.”

Sometimes when she talks about Mizzy, her long-vanished Virginia lilt comes back. Ah’m afrayd ah’m exhausting yer pay-shunce.

“I’ll let you know.”

“It’s just… I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it or not. But I swear I had a feeling like this back when he. Had the accident.”

You Taylors. You’re never going to let go of the word “accident,” are you?

“What kind of feeling?” Peter asks.

“A feeling. Don’t make me pull woman on you.”

“Describe it. I’m curious. As, you know, a scientist.”

“Hm. Well, Mizzy’s always had this sort of air about him when he’s about to do something he thinks is a good idea and everybody else knows is a really, really bad idea. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost like those auras people with migraines see. I can see one around him.”

“And you’re seeing one now?”

“I think so. Yes.”

Peter knows the litany. Mizzy getting himself to Paris at the age of sixteen because he had to meet Derrida. Mizzy starting on heroin soon after he’d been brought back from Paris, and subsequently slipping out of rehab to go to New York to do God knows what. Mizzy, after a year in Manhattan, rounded up and sent for his (repeated) junior year and his senior year to Exeter, where he abruptly became a model student, and then went on to Yale, where he continued to do wonderfully for his first two years but then, without warning, dropped out to work on a farm in Oregon. Mizzy back at Yale again, and back on drugs, crystal this time. Mizzy having the “accident” in his friend’s Honda Civic. Mizzy unhappy at Yale, refusing to graduate. Mizzy walking the Camino de Santiago. Mizzy moving back to Richmond, where he stayed in his old room for almost five months. Mizzy off crystal (or so he said). Mizzy going to Japan, to sit with five stones.

Mizzy having dated, starting at the age of twelve, the following known (never mind the unknown) people: a funny, obstreperous, Charlotte Gainsbourg–like girl who was a junior in high school when Mizzy was in the ninth grade; the strange brief period of Mizzy’s immense high school popularity at Exeter, during which he dated the most conventional pretty rich girl imaginable and was elected senior class president; the black girl at Yale who is now, supposedly, a senior aide in the Obama administration; the (rumored) affair with a young male classics professor that led to a second (more reliably rumored) affair with a studious, motorcycle-riding boy from the classics seminar; the beautiful Mexican girl from Mazatlan who spoke hardly any English and who (again, rumor) broke Mizzy’s heart in a way no one else has before or since; the rather loudly proclaimed period of celibacy when he returned to Yale (who picks up a crystal meth habit and remains celibate?); the elegant South American poet who was probably older than the forty she claimed to be; the inexplicably bland and cheerful girl followed, logically enough, by the beautiful young English psychopath who tried to burn the house down and succeeded in charring the eastern end of the porch… Those are the ones he and Rebecca know about. It’s impossible to say how many others there’ve been.

And then there’s Mizzy here, now, staying with Rebecca and Peter, out tonight with an unnamed woman friend.

“What do you think we should do?” Peter asks Rebecca.

She drains her martini. “Beyond what we are doing? You tell me.”

There’s an edge, isn’t there? How exactly has Mizzy’s waywardness become Peter’s fault?

“No idea.”

“I like to think he’s serious about working in the arts. Would you do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you take him with you to Carole Potter’s tomorrow?”

“If you want me to, sure.”

“I know how he is. He could hang around here for weeks, saying he wants to get involved in the arts, and the next thing we know, he’ll meet somebody who’s getting a crew together to sail to Martinique. It might help if you showed him a little bit of what being involved in the arts actually means.”

“Trying to sell a very expensive object to a very rich person would be indicative, no question.”

“I sort of think, the fewer illusions he has, the better. If he hates what he sees tomorrow, I can talk to him about how he might want to think about getting into something else. I mean, something other than another harebrained scheme.”

“I can’t believe you said ‘harebrained scheme.’ ”

“I’m turning into Lucy Ricardo, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I can’t really think why Mizzy wouldn’t like Carole Potter.”

“That’d be good, then. Hey, I’m having one more martini. What about you?”

“Sure.”

Rebecca starts making the second round. Maybe they’ll have a third. Maybe they both need to get drunk tonight, because their lives are at least a little bit too hard for them and because they both know Mizzy could very well be out there pursuing some small death or other.

“Rebecca?” Peter says.

“Mm?’