Read Online By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham - Free Book Online Page A

want to do?”
    Mizzy frowns, but amusedly. “I think I’d like to be king of the underworld.”
    “Hard job to get.”
    “Don’t let me get all cryptic. I need to shape up a little. People have been telling me that for years, and I’m finally starting to believe them. I can’t really go to one more shrine in Japan. I can’t drive to Los Angeles just to see what happens along the way.”
    “Rebecca thinks you think you’d like to do something in, um, the art world, is that right?”
    Mizzy’s face colors with embarrassment. “Well, it seems to be the thing I care most about. I don’t know if I have anything, exactly, to offer .”
    It’s a pose, isn’t it, all this boyish abashment? How could it not be? Mizzy, why do you refuse to summon up your gifts?
    “Do you know what you want to do , exactly?” Peter says. “In the arts, I mean.”
    That was a little Dad-like, wasn’t it?
    Mizzy says, “Honestly?”
    “Mm-hm.”
    “I think I’d like to go back to school, and maybe become a curator.”
    “That’s about the same odds as becoming king of the underworld.”
    “But somebody has to do it, right?”
    “Sure. It’s just. It’s a little like setting out to become a movie star.”
    “And some people get to be movie stars.”
    Here it is, then—the armature of hubris over which this skin of uncertainty is stretched. Then again, why should a smart, beautiful boy pursue modest ambitions?
    “Sure they do,” Peter says.
    “And, well. I’m sort of . . . Thank you for taking me in like this.”
    “Egyptian” isn’t quite right for the Taylor face, is it? There’s too much pink-tinged Irish pallor about them, and too much strong Creole chin. El Greco? No, they’re not that gaunt or severe.
    “We’re glad to have you.”
    “I won’t stay long. I promise.”
    “Stay as long as you need to,” Peter says. Which he does not exactly mean. What can he do, though? He’s a sucker for the whole damned family. Rose is selling real estate in California, Julie quit her practice to spend more time with her kids. Those are not terrible fates. Neither Rose nor Julie has come to a tragic end, but they are, both of them, living unexpectedly usual lives. And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter’s care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylors’ grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost—to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world’s most promising children.
    He must have been desperate to be born.
    “That’s kind of you,” Mizzy says. The rinsing formality of the South . . .
    “Rebecca should take you to see the Puryear show. At the Modern.”
    “I’d like that.”
    He looks at Peter with those off-kilter eyes, which somehow manage not to render him foolish-looking, though they do produce an effect of slightly crazy intensity.
    “Do you know his work?” Peter says.
    “I do.”
    “It’s a beautiful show.”
    And then, now, Rebecca is back. Peter startles slightly when he hears her key in the lock, as if she’s caught him at something.
    “Hello, boys.” She walks in with the milk Mizzy will need in his morning coffee and the two bottles of extravagant cabernet they’ll all drink tonight. She brings the vitality of herself—her offhand sense of her own consequence; her perfectly careless jeans and pale aqua sweater and the nape-length tangle of her hair, which is going wiry with its infusion of gray. She still carries herself like the pretty girl she was.
    Is it the Taylor curse to peak early, is there some magic in that decrepit old house that fades the moment they leave it?
    Kisses and greetings are exchanged, one of the wine bottles is opened. (Should Rebecca be serving wine to a drug addict, what’s up with that?) They go and sit in the living room with wineglasses.
    “I’m going to