By Nightfall

“Did I fuck up so completely with Bea?”

“Bea wasn’t an easy child. We both know that.”

“That isn’t the question.”

“No. You showed up for everything. You tucked her in at night.”

“To the best of my recollection.”

She pours him another drink.

“You did your very best with her. Don’t beat yourself up too much, okay?”

“Was I too hard on her?”

“No. Okay. You may have expected more from her than she was able to give.”

“I don’t remember it that way.”

Why are Bea and Rebecca so determined to make him the cause of everything that’s gone wrong?

“She’s furious at me, too, you know. Because I was late sometimes to pick her up from school. And I thought it was amazing that I was able to pick her up at all.”

“Would it be too cowardly to think of her as going through a phase?”

“I think she is going through a phase. We worry anyway.”

“Yes. We do.”

“And, okay,” she says, “I’m frankly a little tired of worrying about the young and wayward.”

No you’re not. You’re not really tired of worrying about Mizzy. Mizzy is—face it—more dramatic. What you are, what we both are, is exhausted by our daughter. You and I can, at the very least, get our fingers into Mizzy’s troubles, we can comprehend them. Bea’s determination to live such a small life, to wear a hotel uniform and live with a strange older girl who seems to be just floating along and have no (discernible) boyfriends… It’s harder, isn’t it? When she tells you nothing beyond the baldest facts.

“About Mizzy.”

“Mm-hm?”

What, exactly, does he want to say? He wants to tell her the whole story, though part of the whole story would have something to do with his worry that she and her sisters are, with every good intention, setting out to ruin Mizzy, to save him by normalizing him, and that… fuck… no, of course he shouldn’t be doing drugs again but he shouldn’t come to his senses, either; he shouldn’t get into something “promising,” I mean sure, that’d keep him safer, but is “safe” the best he can get from the world? Bea is safe, in her way. Mizzy is—may be, who knows?—one of those rare creatures who’s reckless and smart and complex enough to be granted, by the inscrutable Powers That Be, a life that doesn’t wear him down.

And so, Peter’s going to suggest to his wife that her beloved little brother should be permitted to keep on doing drugs? Right. That’ll go over.

“Nothing,” Peter says. “It’ll be good to have Mizzy along tomorrow. Carole will love him, she’s a huge fan of smart, handsome young men.”

“Who isn’t?”

She drops a handful of ice cubes into the shaker.

And so, Peter knows. He’s not going to be the sober responsible one. He’s not going to tell Rebecca that her fears are at least to some extent justified.

Rebecca, forgive me, if you can. I’m drowning in my own culpability. I’m afraid I could die of it.

Peter is, naturally, awake in bed when Mizzy gets in. Two forty-three. Not early but not late, not by the standards of the New York young. He listens to Mizzy’s soft, careful footfalls as he, Mizzy, walks through the front of the loft to his own room.

Where have you been?

Who have you been with?

Are you walking on little cat’s feet because you don’t want to wake us, or because you’re high? Are you putting each foot down in wonder onto electrified, glowing floorboards?

Mizzy goes into his room. Before he undresses for bed, he starts speaking, too softly to be heard. For a moment Peter imagines he’s brought someone with him, but no, he’s just calling somebody on his cell. Peter can hear the rise and fall of Mizzy’s voice but even through the cardboard wall can’t hear what he’s actually saying. He is, however, calling someone at… 2:58 a.m.

Peter lies mortified, abed. Who is it, Mizzy? Your dealer? Have you run out, are you going to meet him on the corner in twenty minutes? Or is it some girl you fucked, are you trying to make her less unhappy about the fact that you left her alone in her bed?

Okay. All right. He’d rather it was the dealer. He doesn’t want Mizzy to be seeing some girl. He doesn’t want that because, say it, he wants to own Mizzy, the way he wants to own art. He wants Mizzy’s sharp fucked-up mind and he wants his self-destruction and he wants his… being to be here, all here, he doesn’t want him squandering it on anybody else, certainly not a girl who can give him something Peter can’t. Mizzy is becoming—Peter’s not stupid, he’s crazy but he’s not stupid—his favorite work of art, a performance piece if you will, and Peter wants to collect him, he wants to be his master and his confidant (remember, Mizzy, I could blow the whistle at any time), Peter doesn’t want him to die (he really and truly doesn’t), but he wants to curate Mizzy, he wants to be his only… his only. That will do, really.

Matthew is in a grave in Wisconsin. Bea is in all likelihood shaking a cocktail for some leering businessman.

Better take two of those blue pills tonight.

PRIZE CHICKENS

The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let’s just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. Look over here, this is the Jardin du Luxembourg, and may I please present a little building we call the Blue Mosque. Pay no attention to that which encircles New York City: the fences topped with concertina-wire circles guarding factories that may or may not be out of business, the grim brick monoliths of housing projects, the scrappy little interludes of trash-strewn woods meant, it would seem, to demonstrate nature’s frailty in the face of human disregard. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.

Mizzy sits across from Peter, watching the gaunt urbanscape go by. The Magic Mountain sits open but unread on his lap. The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of sufficient reviving urgency (not at least one either of his parents could bear to broach), and so they needed to hydroplane forward together on an ever-replenished slick of remark and opinion, of ritualized disinclination (You know, I’ve never trusted that man) and long-familiar enthusiasms (I know Chinese food is filthy, but I just don’t care). As a conversationalist, Peter’s mother was grand, in her way. She man aged to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile—by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everything she did so because she’d presided over some utopia, and so knew from experience how much better we all could do. She wanted more than anything to live under a benevolent dictator who was exactly like her without being her—if she actually ruled she would relinquish her right to object, and without her right to object who and what would she be?

Peter’s father entertained his wife. He pointed out the beauty and the pathos, grabbed her hand and nibbled like a monkey at her fingertips, scoured TV Guide for old movies he knew she’d like and made sure they had dinner out once a week at a “nice” restaurant even when the money was tight. By middle age they had become a mysterious couple, one of those what’s-he-doing-with-her couples