“If you say so,” Uta answers.
“Off with you then,” Peter says. “I’m going to stay here a few more minutes. I’d like to have a little time alone with the show.”
How can anyone balk at that?
Uta and Victoria get their coats and stand with Peter at the door.
Victoria says, “Thanks for everything, Peter. You’re great.”
Thank you, Victoria, for being a kind and decent person. Funny how the simple virtues matter.
Uta says, “Call me if you need to, all right?”
“Of course I will.”
She squeezes his hand. As he did Bette’s, when they stood in front of the shark.
Thank you, Uta. And good night.
So here he is, alone with five ordinary citizens passing through brief interludes of their regular days as the London Symphony Orchestra negotiates, over and over and over, the opening strains of the Ninth Symphony. Beethoven loops on and on.
How have these people been rescued and disappointed? What will happen to them, what’s happening to them now? Nothing much, probably. Errands and trudging work-hours, school for the boy, everybody’s nightly television. Or something else. Who knows? They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery); that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skateboard or looking for coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.
Peter would love to sleep right now. To sleep and sleep and sleep.
Or cry. Crying would be good, might be good, cleansing, but he’s dry inside, what he feels more nearly resembles indigestion than it does despair.
He is a poor, funny little man, isn’t he?
He lingers a little with the show, which will sell or not sell. Which will come down again, and be replaced by another show. Groff, if he’s lucky, Lahkti if he’s… less lucky. Not that Lahkti is a booby prize, those painstakingly intricate little paintings of Calcutta, Peter does love them (he loves them enough) and really, although Lahkti isn’t a sensation (small paintings just don’t sell the way big ones do) it would be a relief not to have to bump him to make room for Groff. Peter could continue to feel honorable that way, he could live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared. Get Groff and he graduates (maybe) to the first rank; fail to get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.
Victoria’s five ordinary citizens loop and loop and loop. Beethoven blares triumphally. Mizzy is in all likelihood flying, right now, across the continent, over the light-strands of nocturnal America.
It would be good to sleep here, right here, on the gallery floor, as five random strangers live, over and over and over again, through brief interludes of what are by now their unremembered pasts.
Time to shut them down, turn off the music, kill the lights, and go home.
And yet he remains. This may not be great art but it’s perfectly good art and he is consoled by it, he is accompanied by it, and it will never feel as immaculate as it does tonight, before the shoppers come to look it over.
He picks up one of the action figures, the black man with the battered briefcase. The figure is intentionally shoddy—its painted-on eyes slightly off-kilter, its skin a lifeless cocoa color, its suit indifferently made of a shiny, gunmetal-gray synthetic. Idolatry tends to involve demotion, doesn’t it? Even those polychromed, glass-eyed Virgin Mothers, even those gilded Buddhas. Flesh, the true and living thing, trumps every effort at representation.
What artist would be the likeliest choice to render Peter now? It would have to be Francis Bacon, wouldn’t it? One of those pink fleshy middle-aged male nudes, in tortured repose. And he’d actually imagined himself in bronze. He’d been that vain.
Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
It’s something, though—it isn’t nothing—to have a tub to dance to. Not if you’re a bear.
When Peter gets home, he finds Rebecca in bed. It’s only a little after 9:30.
She is curled up, facing the wall, wrapped in a quilt. Peter thinks briefly of an Indian wife, swaddled for the pyre.
She knows. Mizzy has told her everything. Peter loses his balance for a moment, as if the floor had tilted under him. Will he deny it? That would be easy enough. Mizzy is an inveterate liar, Peter could so plausibly proclaim his innocence. But if he lies he will always have lied, Mizzy for all his transgressions will always have been falsely accused. Peter fights an impulse to simply turn and go, to leave the apartment, to escape into… what, exactly? What’s out there for him?
He steps into the room. Here are the lamps they bought years ago, at the Paris flea market. Here, hanging over the bed, are the three Terry Winters drawings.
“Hey,” Peter manages to say. “You feeling sick?
“I’m just tired. Mizzy left today.”
“Did he?”
Is it too horribly transparent to play dumb like this? Can Rebecca smell the deceit wafting off him?
She does not turn to face him.
“San Francisco,” she says. “Somebody’s giving him a job out there, it seems.”
Peter struggles to sound and act like himself, though he’s having trouble remembering what he sounds like, how he acts.
“What kind of job?”
“Computer graphics. Don’t ask me what that is, exactly. In terms of how it could actually be a job.”
“Why do you think he suddenly wants to do that?” Peter asks, and feels a prickle up his spine. Kill me now, Rebecca. Lower the boom. We both know why he’s suddenly gone to San Francisco. I stand before you, a true piece of shit. Scream at me. Throw me out. It might be a relief, for both of us.
Rebecca says, “I thought he was going to change this time. I really did.”
“Maybe it’s time to accept the possibility that he never will,” Peter says tentatively.
“Maybe it is.”
There is such sorrow in her voice. Peter goes and sits on the edge of the mattress. Gently, gently, he puts a hand on her covered shoulder.
Would it be more manly to confess? Of course it would. He could have that dignity, at least.
He says, “Mizzy provokes people. People respond to him.”
A weak introduction. But something. Continue.
She says, “Too much for his own good.”
Ready? Go.
“What did he tell you this afternoon?”
Peter does not know whether he will lie or not. He can’t see that far into his own future. He can only wait, helplessly, to see what he’ll do.
“He did tell me something,” she says.
Oh. Here it comes. Goodbye, my life. Goodbye to the lamps and the drawings.
Peter works to keep his voice steady.
“I think I know. Do I know?”
The truth, then. He’ll tell the truth. He’ll have that, at least.
She says, “He told me that he loves me, but he’s got to stay away from me for a while. It seems I inhibit his growth by doting on him the way I do.”
Really? Wait a minute. Really and truly? That’s
“Well, maybe he’s right,” Peter says. Is it possible that she can’t hear the sway in his voice?
“The thing is…”
