By Nightfall

He says, “Just act like nothing happened.”

“What did happen?”

“You tell me.”

Fuck you, man-child.

“We can’t have an affair.”

“I know that. You’re my sister’s husband.”

And how exactly, Mizzy, have you suddenly become the voice of rectitude?

“I like you,” Peter says. Lame, lame.

“I like you, too. Obviously.”

“Do you think you could tell me what you want? I mean, to the best of your ability.”

“I want to have kissed you on a beach. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Dramatic? Who’s the dramatic one here?

Peter says, “I don’t think I can pretend it was nothing.”

“Well, you don’t have to marry me, either.”

Youth. Heartless, cynical, despairing youth. It always wins, doesn’t it? We revere Manet, but we don’t see him naked in a painting. He’s the bearded guy behind the easel, paying homage.

“Well. Let’s go in, then.”

“After you.”

How did this happen? How can Peter be standing in front of his own building, wishing with all his might that Mizzy would protest his love one more time, so that Peter could scold him for it. Was he too abrupt back there on the Potters’ lawn? Did he miss some crucial chance?

Some chance for what, exactly?

Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

They go in. Neither of them says anything more.

Rebecca is home already, in the kitchen, making dinner. Peter lives through a spasm of conviction that she knows what’s up, has gotten home early for a confrontation. Which is, of course, ridiculous. She comes to the door, wiping her hands on her jeans, kisses Mizzy on the cheek and Peter on the lips.

“I’m making a little pasta,” she says. To Mizzy she adds, “Remember, I’m not Mom. I have some sort of domestic aptitude.”

“Even Mom wasn’t exactly Mom,” says Mizzy.

“You boys pour yourselves a glass of wine,” Rebecca says, heading back to the kitchen. “It’ll be about twenty minutes or so.”

She is a vital, capable woman whose husband and brother have kissed on a beach. Not that Peter forgot. Still, there’s something about seeing her…

“I’ll get the wine,” Mizzy says. Normal normal normal.

“How’d it go in Greenwich?” Rebecca asks.

You have no idea how it went in Greenwich.

“Perfecto,” Peter says. Perfecto? Who is he now, all of a sudden, Dean Martin? He adds, “I’m sure she’s going to buy it. I just have to get Groff up there now to approve of her.”

“Great.”

Mizzy brings a glass of wine to Peter. As he hands him the glass, as their hands touch, does Mizzy slip him a look? No. The horror of it is, he doesn’t.

Rebecca picks up her half-empty glass from the countertop. “To selling art,” she says. And for a moment Peter thinks she’s being ironic.

He raises his glass. “To paying next semester’s tuition,” he says.

“If she ever goes back to school,” Rebecca answers.

“Of course she’ll go back. Trust me. There’s nothing like slinging drinks for drunks to make college look good again.”

Normal normal normal.

Rebecca has planned an evening in. She’s not only made dinner, she’s rented a copy of 8?. It’s a simple gesture, simple enough, though Peter knows she’s also embarking on a campaign to seduce Mizzy into the ordinary comforts. He knows, too, that she feels guilty about some largely imaginary neglect she’s meted out the last couple of days, having had her mind on the sale of the magazine.

They perform, all three of them, what Peter can only call a gorgeous imitation of the regular. Over dinner they talk about selling things (art, magazines). Mizzy does (a newly revealed talent) a spot-on imitation of Carole Potter—he gets her pneumatic little head-nods, the liquid avidity of her eyes, even the undercurrent of mmm sounds she makes as she listens, or appears to listen. This is a mild revelation to Peter—Mizzy is not as absorbed by full-time Mizzyness as one might think. It seems (romantic delusion?) to speak to Mizzy’s capacity for truth-telling—when he says, oh, for instance, that he’s loved Peter all his life, it’s possible that he means it. Vain Peter, you’ve always been the pursuer, how strange and wonderful it would be if you were for once in your life the pursued. Then Rebecca speculates about what sort of Big Art Thing might be engendered in Billings, Montana, to which Mizzy and Peter, suddenly a boy gang, offer only mocking suggestions: feeding poets to bears in the football stadium, commissioning ice sculptures—they’re not particularly good jokes but that isn’t the point, it’s boys versus girl, which Rebecca takes in stride, knowing, as she surely does, that she can have it out with Peter later, in bed.

They watch 8?, which is as good as it’s always been, polishing off a third bottle of wine as they do. They are, for the duration of the movie, a family right out of a TV commercial, three people on a sofa watching raptly as the living jewel of the television screen takes them out of their lives and delivers them into new ones. Marcello Mastroianni putts off on a motorbike with Claudia Cardinale clinging to his back, Marcello Mastroianni leads a conga line of everyone he’s ever known at the base of a dead rocket ship.

When the movie is over, Rebecca goes into the kitchen to get dessert. Peter and Mizzy sit side by side on the sofa. Mizzy puts a comradely arm around Peter’s shoulders.

“Hey,” he says.

“Love that movie,” Peter says.

“Do you love me?’

“Shh.”

“Just nod, then.”

Peter hesitates, nods.

Mizzy whispers, “You’re a beautiful dude.”

A beautiful dude? What kind of word is dude for a boy like Mizzy to be using?

Answer: it’s a young word, it’s a young man word, and for a moment Peter can see how they’d be together—teasing, knowing, fractious in a (mostly) good-natured way, a wised-up and roughhousing pair out of some romantic and implausible ancient Greece. Mizzy is heedless, unashamed about declaring his love on his sister’s sofa. Could they be happy together? It’s not out of the question.

Peter says, softly, “I am not a dude.”

“Okay, you’re just beautiful.”

Peter is, to his embarrassment, happy to be told he’s beautiful.

And then, Rebecca appears with the desserts. Coffee and chocolate gelato.

They finish the gelato, talking desultorily, and then they go to bed. Peter and Rebecca do. Mizzy says he’s going to go into his room and stay up a little longer, reading The Magic Mountain, and so with mild unyearning good nights he trudges off with his heavy tome, old Thomas Mann himself, the patron saint of impossible loves.

Once they’re in bed together, Peter and Rebecca lie chastely side by side, on their backs. They keep their voices low.

Rebecca says, “Do you think he had a good time today?”

You have no idea.

“Hard to say,” Peter answers.