Peter doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t even feel entirely like he’s transgressed, though it would be hard to convince anyone watching (a quick check—no one was) that it wasn’t lascivious. He is besotted and exultant and not ashamed.
After the kiss he noodled Mizzy’s head, as if they’d just engaged in some kind of innocent, wrestling shenanigans. Then they turned and splashed back onto the beach.
It’s Mizzy who speaks, as they walk barefoot back up the lawn. Peter would have preferred silence, for once.
“And so, Peter Harris,” Mizzy says. “Am I your first?”
“Uh, yeah. I bet I’m not your first, am I?”
“I’ve kissed three other guys. This makes you my fourth.”
Mizzy stops. Peter gets two paces ahead, realizes, steps back. Mizzy looks at him with that wet-eyed depth.
“I’ve had a thing for you since I was a little kid,” he says.
Don’t tell me this.
“You have not,” Peter says.
“The very first time you came to the house. I sat in your lap and you read Babar to me. Did you think it was completely innocent?”
“Of course I did. For God’s sake, you were four years old.”
“And I had this deep warm feeling I didn’t understand.”
“So. You’re gay.”
Mizzy sighs. “I think I’m gay for you,” he says.
“Come on.”
“This is too much, isn’t it?”
“A little, yeah.”
Mizzy says, “I just want to say it. And then we can, I don’t know. Never talk about it again, if you don’t want to.”
Peter waits. Let’s talk about everything, even though I have to feign reticence.
Mizzy says, “With those other guys, I was thinking about you.”
“This is some kind of father thing,” Peter says, though it hurts him to say it.
“Does that make it nothing?”
“It makes it… I don’t know. It makes it what it is.”
“I’ll never kiss you again, if you don’t want me to.”
What is it I want? Lord, I wish I knew.
He says, “We can’t. I’m probably the only man in the world you can’t make out with. Well, me and your actual father.”
Is that what makes it compelling for Mizzy? Is his professed desire in any way personal?
Mizzy nods. Impossible to say whether he agrees or is acquiescing.
What kind of man would go after his sister’s husband?
A desperate man.
What kind of man would have let it get this far? What kind of man would have held the kiss as long as Peter did?
A desperate man.
He and Mizzy continue up to the house in silence.
Carole greets them in the garden with such avid, nervous enthusiasm that Peter thinks, for a moment, she must have been watching. She wasn’t watching. It’s her manner to greet everyone enthusiastically, all the time.
“I think it’s a keeper,” she says.
“Great,” Peter answers. He adds, “You know it’s on loan for the moment, right? For the sake of the Chens. Groff will want to come see it in situ.”
Carole listens, blinking and nodding. She’s not a neophyte—she knows that with certain artists, the collector is subject to audition.
“I hope I’ll pass,” she says.
“I can pretty much guarantee that you will.”
She turns to look at the urn. “It’s so beautiful and nasty,” she says.
Mizzy has, again, wandered into the garden, like a child who feels no fealty to adult conversation. He picks a sprig of lavender, holds it to his nose.
Carole insists that Gus drive them back to the city, and Peter accepts gratefully, after the briefest show of false reluctance. He, Cowardly Peter, is eager to be relieved of the train ride back with Mizzy. What would they talk about?
Gus’s presence will enforce a silence that would be too uncomfortable on the train. Thank you, Carole and Gus.
And so he and Mizzy sit side by side in the backseat of the BMW, driving along the consoling normalcy of I-95, surrounded by other people in other cars, most of whom have, in all likelihood, never kissed their brothers-in- law.
Does Peter envy them, or pity them?
Both, really.
A fury rises up in him, quick as panic, fury at his thick-ankled daughter and his comradely, distant wife and Uta and Carole fucking Potter and everyone, everything, Gus’s faux-hawk and his little red Irish ears; everyone and everything except the lost boy sitting beside him, the only person with whom he actually
As it once was Rebecca’s.
The anger subsides as quickly as it announced itself, and in its place a sorrow wells up, a wave of gut sorrow, as he glances (unobtrusively, he hopes) at Mizzy’s solemn profile, his aristocratically hooked nose, the shock of dark hair that trembles on his pale forehead.
This is what Peter wants from art. Isn’t it? This soul sickness; this sense of himself in the presence of something gorgeous and evanescent, something (someone) that shines through the frailty of flesh, yes, like Manet’s whore-goddess, a beauty cleansed of sentimentality because Mizzy is (isn’t he?) a whore-god in his own way, he’d be less compelling if he were the benign, brilliant, spiritual entity he says he’d like to be.
Beauty—the beauty Peter craves—is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn’t shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he’s young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it’s something the old tend to forget. Here he is, Ethan aka the Mistake, shameless and wanton, addicted, unable to want whatever it is he believes he’s supposed to want. This would be the moment to do him in bronze, to try to capture the aching raw nerves of him, the all-but- unbearable final stages of his youth shimmer, as he begins to understand that his condition, like everybody’s, is serious, but before he begins to take the necessary steps to live semipeaceably in the actual world.
In the meantime, he needs not to die.
Gus drops them in front of the loft. Goodbyes and thank-yous. Gus motors off. Peter and Mizzy stand on the sidewalk together.
“Well,” Peter says.
Mizzy grins, a satyr now. Where did the damp-eyed, ardent version go?
