By Nightfall

Peter hesitates. He feels more than hears a minute susurration at the window, the tiniest of taps. Snow. A light windblown veil of it, as the weatherman predicted.

Rebecca says, “He adores me and blah, blah, blah, but he needs to be on his own.”

Oh.

Maybe Mizzy has not needed to blackmail Peter, then. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t have been believed. Or maybe—worse—he’s taken a certain satisfaction in bringing everybody down and then just moving on. Maybe he’s been toying with them both, seeing how much he can get away with.

Rebecca turns to face Peter. Her face is pallid, with a dull sweaty sheen.

She says, “I’ve realized something.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been living in some kind of fucked-up fantasy.”

Here it comes, then, after all. She’s been living with the illusion of an honorable husband, a man who has his failings but would not, would never, do what Peter has done.

“Mm?” he says.

“I thought that if I could make Mizzy happy, something magic would happen.”

“What magic?”

“That I’d be happy, too.”

His stomach lurches.

He’d thought she was happy.

“I think you’re upset right now,” he tells her.

She draws a ragged breath. She doesn’t cry.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m upset. And you know what?”

He remains silent.

She says, “When Mizzy told me he was going to San Francisco for some nonexistent job, and hit me up for an airplane ticket, I wasn’t mad. Well, I was mad, of course I was, but I was something else, too.”

“What?” Peter has never felt so stupid.

“I was envious. I didn’t want to be myself. I didn’t want to be some mature, levelheaded person who could cut him a check. I wanted to be young and fucked up and, I don’t know. Free.”

No, Rebecca, you do not want that. You want continuance. I’m the one who wants to be free. I’m the one who’d do unspeakable things.

“Free,” he says. His voice is hollow, strange to him.

Rebecca, you can’t have this fantasy. This fantasy is mine.

A silence passes. He can hear snow tapping at the window. He feels as if he could lose consciousness, just faint away.

He hears himself say, “Do you want to be free of us?”

“Yes,” she answers. “I think I do.”

What? What? No. You, Rebecca, are the happy one—the happy-enough one. You’re the one who’s satisfied with our brisk (if occasionally arid) lives; you’re the one who I, Peter, was thinking of fleeing from; you’re the one I didn’t want to harm.

“Darling,” he says. Only that.

“You’re unhappy, too, aren’t you?” she says.

He doesn’t answer. Yes, yes, of course he’s unhappy, but unhappiness is his realm, she has no right to it, she is staunch and formidable, she is capable of being wounded but she is not unhappy in her own right. She is the one who, with every good intention, is holding him back.

He says, “Are you telling me you want to separate?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

How long? How long have you been impersonating satisfaction?

“I don’t know what to say.”

She sits up, faces him squarely. Her eyes are dull. She says, “I seem to have had some unspoken deal with myself, where if I could make Mizzy happy, I’d be able to be happy myself.”

“Do you think that’s a little…”

She laughs, a hollow sound. “Crazy? Yes.”

“And you’d really leave me because Mizzy has moved to San Francisco?”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” she says. “We’d call it quits, you and I. We’d say farewell.”

Is it possible that this monolith Peter has called his marriage is, has always been, so flimsy? Is it possible that all his secrets, his second-guesses, his cajolings and seductions, have been unnecessary? Did one of them simply have to… call it off, and poof?

His face has gone clammy. He struggles for a breath.

“Rebecca,” he says. “Explain this to me. You’re telling me you’ve decided we should split up because your feckless brother has moved to San Francisco to work in computer graphics.”

“He’s not going to work in computer graphics,” she says. “He’s just going to do drugs in a new place.”

“Be that as it may.”

She examines her fingertips. And then suddenly, violently, she puts her index finger into her mouth and bites down on it.

“I’m a complete idiot,” she says.

“Stop. Don’t say that.”

Her face has taken on a panicked, feral look.

“I always thought I was building a place Mizzy could come to,” she says. “Since he was a lost little boy. I knew our family couldn’t handle him, I mean they look romantic from a certain distance but they can’t really manage much of anything. And now it seems that’s not really what I wanted at all. I wanted to be Mizzy. I wanted to be the troubled one. I wanted to be the one somebody has to take care of.”

Peter wants to slap her. He wants to do that.

He says, “Don’t I take care of you?”

“I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m sorry.”

It is all Peter can do to say, “No, tell me more.”

“I feel like a stranger here, Peter. I come home sometimes and think, who lives here? I do love you. I did love you.”

“You did.”

What about all those dinners together, what about our Sundays?

“No, I do, I do love you, but I’m… I’m all messed up. I feel like I’m falling away from everything.”

She bites down on her finger again.

“Don’t do that,” Peter says.

“I’m a rotten mother. To everybody. I couldn’t help Bea, I couldn’t help Mizzy. I’m just a child who’s learned to impersonate an adult.”

Peter works to stay conscious. What should he say to her, what does he want to say to her? That all her efforts to produce a sanctuary for her little lost brother were undone by her besotted husband, who drove Mizzy away not with love but by keeping a secret? Should he tell her that in all likelihood she’s been wrong all these years, the young prince is, sad to say, just a cheap hustler, who was happy enough to run scams out of the temple she’d built for him?

Isn’t it the way? We build palaces so that younger people can break them up, pillage the wine cellars and pee off the tapestry-draped balconies.

Look at Bea. Didn’t they think that she’d love to live in SoHo; that she’d want to grow up wearing tight little Chanel skirts and playing in a band? Did they imagine that their desire to make her happy would prove to be the monster scratching at her window?

Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?

How did he forget that Rebecca has a life of her own, and that the ongoing work of being Rebecca doesn’t always hinge on him?

“You’re not rotten,” he says. “You’re human.”