Mizzy has the good taste not to answer.
It’s blackmail, then. He’s been set up. Neither more nor less than that. You, Peter, keep mum about the drugs and I, Mizzy, won’t say anything about the kiss.
Now Peter seems to be saying, “Did you make all that up, then? The stuff about…”
Don’t cry, motherfucker. Don’t weep in a Starbucks in front of this heartless boy.
“Oh, no,” Mizzy says. “I’ve always had a crush on you, I wouldn’t lie about that. But hey. You’re my sister’s husband.”
I am, in fact, your sister’s husband. What did I think was going to happen?
He thought that a force beyond his own powers was going to sweep him out of this life and into another. He believed that.
“I’m so sorry,” Peter says. And what does he mean by that? Who is he sorry for?
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Okay, I’m not. What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go to California. I have some friends in the Bay Area.”
You think you’re going to go to California. You have some friends in the Bay Area. The
“What will you do there?” Peter’s voice reaches him from a certain distance. He is standing behind himself.
“One of my friends does computer graphics, he needs a partner. I’m good with computers.”
You’re good with computers. You’re going into computer graphics with a friend in the Bay Area. You don’t want to briefly love and then abandon some older guy in a hilltop house in Greece. The possibility never entered your mind.
You just want me to keep your sisters off your ass about the drugs. You needed to put something over on me, by way of insurance.
“That sounds very sensible,” says the voice that comes from somewhere over Peter’s left shoulder.
“You promise you won’t tell Rebecca.”
“If you promise you’ll say goodbye to her before you go.”
“Of course I will. I’ll tell her I left this morning because I was ashamed about not wanting to be an art dealer after all. She’ll understand.”
She will. She will understand.
Peter says, “Whatever works.”
“You’ve been very kind to me.”
Kind. Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been so besotted that I’ve betrayed you, as lovers so often do. When exactly will we get the phone call about your Bay Area overdose?
“It was nothing,” Peter says. “You’re family, after all.”
And then, really, there’s nothing to do but leave.
They say goodbye on the windblown banality of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. A plastic bag blows by, just over their heads.
Peter says, “So, I’ll see you at home tonight, then?”
Mizzy adjusts a strap on his backpack. “If it’s okay with you, I think I’ll go by Rebecca’s office and say goodbye to her there.”
“Not one more night?”
The strap having been secured, Mizzy gives Peter what will in fact be the last of those damp-eyed looks.
“I can’t go through another night like last night,” he says. “Can you?”
Thank you, Mizzy, thank you for acknowledging that something,
“I suppose not. Do you think…”
Mizzy waits.
“Do you think it’ll seem weird to Rebecca, you taking off in such a hurry like this?”
“She’s used to it. She knows how I am.”
Does she? Does she know that, among your compelling qualities, you’re cheap and at least a little bit hollow?
Probably not. Isn’t Mizzy a work of art to Rebecca, as he is (was) to Peter? Should he not, in fact, remain like that?
“Well, then,” Peter says.
“I’ll call you from California, okay?”
“How are you getting there?”
“Bus. I don’t have much money.”
You’re not taking the bus, Mizzy. Rebecca won’t allow it. She’ll try to stop you from going at all, but when she understands that she can’t,
“Have a safe trip.”
Those are your parting words?
“Thanks.”
They shake hands. Mizzy walks away.
And so. Peter had imagined he could be swept off, could ruin the lives of others (not to mention his own) and yet retain some aspect of blamelessness because passion trumps everything, no matter how deluded, no matter how doomed. History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he’ll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him. There are no gold-leaf stars painted on lapis over his head, just the gray of an unseasonably cool April afternoon. No one would do him in bronze. He, like all the multitudes who are not remembered, is waiting politely for a train that in all likelihood is never going to come.
What can he do but go back to work?
He has this, at least—he has the finality of nothing happening. There’s a bitter relief in that. He has his life back (not that it was taken from him); he has the real hope of increased prosperity (Groff will probably join his roster, and who knows who might follow once an artist like Groff’s onboard); he has the slightly trickier hope that he and Rebecca will be happy again. Happy enough.
The trouble is…
The trouble is he can see all the way to the best of all possible endings. His gallery joins the first rank, he and Rebecca regain their ease together. And there he’ll be.
It’s getting colder, just as the Weather Channel predicted this morning—an unseasonable drop in temperature. Peter, however, is not so far gone—would that he had a greater capacity for self-regard—to get swoony over a chill factor in April. He’s not so far gone as to ignore the rampancy of the streets through which he walks: the various hunkered-down hurriers; the swaying, impassable row of five chattering girls
When he gets back to the gallery, Vic’s second installation is just about hung. Uta and the boys (maybe he’ll never get around to firing them, there’s always something urgent coming up, isn’t there?) are arranging the shelves for the merchandise as Vic looks on with her customary expression of girlish surprise—look what it’s turning into!
Uta says, “You’re back.” By which she means, where in the hell were you?
“I’m back,” he answers. “It looks good.”
“We were just about to break for lunch,” Uta says. “We can be finished by nine or ten tonight, I think.”
“Good. That’s good.”
He goes into his office. There’s the ruined Vincent, signifying nothing in particular. He sits at his desk,
