By Nightfall

Again, the low musical laugh.

“That’s what everybody but the addict thinks,” Mizzy answers. “Can I tell you something?”

“By all means.”

“Every time I’ve been doing well, I mean every time I’ve been that bright shiny guy, I’ve been doing drugs. When I was at Exeter, when I was at Yale. I’m clear and focused and compassionate and if I may say so I am fucking smart. It’s when I stop that I decide it’d be better to go dig for truffles with a bunch of potheads in Oregon.”

“What about the kind of drugs a doctor would give you?”

“I’ve tried all those. You know that, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, sort of,” Peter answers.

“Don’t you think I wish I had a prescription for something that would make me into Good Ethan forever?”

How can he seem so persuasive, and so wrong? What should Peter say to him now?

“Do you think you’ve really tried?” is what he says.

Wrong response. He can tell by the way something recedes in Mizzy’s face—some urgent light goes dim.

“I may be fooling myself,” Mizzy says. His voice is flatter now, more ordinary. He’s gone a little businesslike. “But I really and truly believe, I feel like I know, that I’m ready to be an adult. I want a job, I want an apartment, I want a regular girlfriend. I just. I just need to get there in the way I know will work for me. If Becka and Julie and Rose start staging interventions and sign me up at some clinic, I’m sure I’ll go off again. Those clinics are horrible, by the way. Maybe there are ones for rich people that’re better, but the ones we can afford to send me to… well, you’d want to escape them, too.”

“So you believe…”

“I believe that I’m ready in a way I’ve never been before to have an actual life, and everybody just needs to let me go about it in my own way.”

Is he lying? Is he delusional? Is it possible that he’s right, and everyone else is wrong?

They disembark at Greenwich and there’s Gus the driver, an avid-eyed man around thirty, small-town guy (Peter guesses) from one of those Connecticut hamlets that supply the local gentry with, well, people like Gus. The world is full of Guses—good-looking boys and girls who’ve been dealt the best possible genetic hand by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who have been doing neither well nor badly for generations; who engender these decent kids and give them just enough to survive in the world but no more—no spectacular beauty, no uncontainable brilliance, no kingly, unstoppable ambition.

Isn’t it the task of art to acclaim these people, to ennoble them? Consider Olympia. A girl of the streets becomes a deity.

And here, standing beside the Potters’ navy blue BMW, is Gus, scarlet-faced, jug-eared, grinning, impossible to dislike. Didn’t Carole say he was engaged to what she referred to as “a lovely local girl”? All right, it’s condescending, that inclusion of the word “local.” But at the same time it must be said that the Potters pay their staff better than custom requires, that they give them proper vacations and don’t expect them to work overhard or overlong without extra compensation. The Potters are of the “our staff is like family” school, which is grotesque in its way, but really, how can anyone have a staff and not behave at least a little grotesquely?

“Welcome, Mr. Harris,” Gus says, marching forward with a square red hand held out.

“Thanks, Gus. This is Ethan.”

Gus pumps Peter’s hand, then Mizzy’s, says, “Welcome, welcome,” pivots to open the back doors of the BMW for Peter and Mizzy. Gus the driver, about to marry a lovely local girl. Gus the driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthelme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus’s but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of a Wal-Mart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor, and Peter strongly suspects he’s just not that kind of guy, which is not to say he lacks soul or depths but that you’d have to perform major surgery to get beneath the happy chap, the good guy who likes his job just fine, likes his car and his apartment and whatever hobbies or pursuits occupy his weekends, who is already thickening, shedding without visible regret the beauty of youth (when he came to work for the Potters five years ago he was like a young farmhand) because he’s had his fun and hey, what’re you going to do, plus of course at thirty, which is by no means a desperate age, he’s about to marry a lovely local girl.

Gus pilots them through the verdant and prosperous Greenwich streets. Ah, Greenwich, Connecticut, the wealthy reasonableness of you. These treed streets that offer their ornate Victorians, true American classics, maintained like the museum pieces they are, and farther off, apart from public view, the truly vast piles of stone and lumber, discreet behind gates and hedges, invisible for the most part save for a gable here, a chimney there. The money is quiet, nothing like the Hamptons or the Hills, and although, sure, it’s a posture it is, to Peter at least, a more agreeable one, and it has the effect, on Peter at least, of conferring a sense not so much of enormous, horrific privilege as of improved reality. In Greenwich, one has simply slipped over into a parallel dimension in which people are doing better, and no one here in this dimension finds that fact in any way remarkable. Making a fortune? What’s so hard about that?

The car mounts the hillock from which the Potter house rises. The Potters are rich, even by Greenwich standards, but not mega-rich, not private plane rich, not five houses rich, and so their house is obscure but not entirely concealed—you can see more than half of its north facade from the street.

It’s not Gatsby’s house, it’s Daisy Buchanan’s; it’s the source of the green light across the water. If Fitzgerald described Daisy’s house, Peter doesn’t remember it, but it was clearly not Gatsby’s turreted, ivy-covered pile. Whether this comes from Fitzgerald or from Peter’s imagination, the house Tom bought for Daisy had to have been at least a little like the Potters’ place, a house Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood, big, of course, but neither faux castle nor limestone monument (consider all those solemn, sepulchral monsters in Newport); more than anything an enormous rambling house, all fieldstone and gables, girded on three of its four sides by verandas; contrived, somehow, with a sense of absolute authenticity, to seem to have been variously added-on-to over the years, when in fact it was built entirely, just as it is, in the mid-1920s. Standing placidly but lightly (all those mullioned windows, the vast maternal wingspans of its eaves) on its miniature inland sea of perfectly tended grass, it resembles nothing so much as a sanitarium, like the place they sent Bette Davis in… hm, was it Now, Voyager or Dark Victory… anyway it’s like some mythical nervous-breakdown millionaires’ hideaway, a perfect sanctuary of the sort that surely doesn’t exist now and probably didn’t when they made the Bette Davis movie, either. Were there really ever places like the Alpine clinic in The Magic Mountain? (That’s probably why Peter’s thinking of sanitariums just now.)

And it’s absolutely, positively not where Mizzy would be sent for a new round of rehabilitation. He’d be sent to a hospital, replete with brown floor tiles and raggedy, stained chairs. Peter can picture it all too clearly. Why would anyone volunteer for that?

Gus parks, and look, praise Jesus, there’s Tyler’s van. As Peter walks to the entrance, with Mizzy at his side (Gus has opened the car doors for them and vanished into some obscure Gus realm), Peter checks through the van’s rear window. Yes, oh yes, there’s a crate inside, let it contain the rejected Krim, let Tyler and Branch be installing the Groff right now.

Svenka answers the door. She is a wide-faced, surprised-looking woman in her early thirties, something stretched about her (not surgically produced); some hint of a curse hurled into her bassinet (The child will grow too big for her skin). If this were the nineteenth-century English manor house it aspires to resemble, Svenka would be the housekeeper, but this being twenty-first-century America she is called the… what?… concierge or something, anyway, she runs the place, oversees the staff (three in the off seasons, seven in summer), knows how to have decent flowers delivered in Darfur, can arrange for a helicopter into the city on twenty minutes’ notice. She’s got an MBA, she earns real money doing this. She confided once to Peter that she proved to be too domestic for her management consultant job (“alvays airports and hotels, no life”), insists she does not consider this job in any way less than that one; and yet because the Potters consider their staff to be “part of the family,” because they approve of marriages to “nice local girls,” Svenka is willing (or compelled to be willing)