By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online

fact, dying, and will do so sooner rather than later. That’s why she’s closing the gallery right now . That’s why Jack is leaving Columbia.
    Peter reaches over and takes her hand. It’s more or less involuntary, and only after he’s touched her does he pause to wonder, is this ridiculous, is it melodramatic? Will she rebuke him? Her fingers are surprisingly soft and crepey, an old woman’s. She squeezes his hand with hers, gently and quickly. They hold hands for a few seconds, then part. If the gesture was excessive or false, if it was self-dramatizing on Peter’s part, Bette doesn’t seem to mind, not now, not in front of the shark.
    Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he’s picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up. As his ears adjust to the particular sing-silence of home, he hears the shower. Rebecca’s here. Good. He’s often as grateful as Rebecca is for a little solitude when he comes home but not now, not today. It’s hard to say what he feels. He wishes it were as simple as sorrow for Bette. It’s hollower than sorrow. It’s a deep loneliness muddled up with some underlayer of jittery fear, who knows what to call it, but he wants to see his wife, he wants to curl up with her, maybe watch something stupid on TV, let the world go dark for the night, let it fall.
    Peter walks through the bedroom to the bathroom. There she is, the pink blur of her behind the frosted glass shower door. There’s mortality in the air and sharks in the water but there’s this, too, Rebecca taking a shower, the vanity mirror fogged by steam, the bathroom smelling of soap and that other undersmell Peter can only call clean .
    He opens the shower door.
    Rebecca is young again. She stands in the stall facing away from Peter, her hair short, her back strong and straight from swimming; she is half hidden by steam and for an instant it all makes impossible sense: Bette’s hand in Peter’s and the Rodin boy-man waiting for the centuries to bury him and Rebecca in the shower sluicing away the last twenty years, a girl again.
    She turns, surprised.
    It isn’t Rebecca. It’s Mizzy. It’s the Mistake.
    Right. The solid square plates of his pectorals, the V of his hips; here is the small dark bristle of pubic hair, the pink-brown jut of his dick.
    “Hey,” he says cordially to Peter. Being seen naked by Peter does not, apparently, render Mizzy even remotely uncomfortable.
    “Hey,” Peter answers. “Sorry.”
    He steps back, closes the shower door. Mizzy has always been shameless, no, more like shame-free , satyrlike, so unembarrassed by nakedness or by biological functions that he makes almost everyone else seem like a Victorian aunt. With the shower door closed Peter can see only the fleshly pink silhouette, and although Peter knows it’s Mizzy (Ethan) he finds himself pausing, thinking of the young Rebecca (striding into the surf, slipping out of a white cotton dress, standing on the balcony of that cheap hotel in Zurich), until he realizes he’s lingered there a second or two longer than he should—Mizzy, don’t get the wrong idea—and he turns to leave. As he does he catches sight of his own ghostly image, the blur of him, skating across the steam-fogged mirror.

HER BROTHER
    Rebecca’s family is, in its way, a country unto itself. Peter married into it as he might have married the customs and legends, the peculiar history, of a girl from a small, remote nation. The Taylor family nation would be solvent but not wealthy, devoted to regional dishes and handicrafts, lax about timetables and train schedules, tucked into the declivities of a mountain range daunting enough to have protected it from invaders, immigrants, and most ideas and inventions it did not itself engender. Mizzy would be its wounded patron saint, whose pale,