By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
then, as if she’s forgotten an errand, leans urgently forward and asks the driver, “How do you know it’s an accident involving a horse?”
Even in his spasm of irritation, Peter is able to marvel at women’s ability to ask direct questions of men without seeming to pick a fight.
“Call from the dispatcher,” the driver says, waggling a finger at his earphone. His bald head sits solemnly on the brown plinth of his neck. He, of course, has his own story, and it does not in any way involve the well-dressed middle-aged couple in the back of his cab. His name, according to the plate on the back of the front seat, is Rana Saleem. India? Iran? He might have been a doctor where he comes from. Or a laborer. Or a thief. There’s no way of knowing.
Rebecca nods, settles back in her seat. “I’m thinking more about other kinds of limits,” she says.
“What kinds?”
“He can’t just rely on other people forever. And, you know. We all still worry about that other thing.”
“You think that’s something his big sister can help him with?” She closes her eyes, offended now, now, when he’d meant to be compassionate.
“What I mean,” Peter says, “is, well. You probably can’t help him change his life, if he doesn’t want to himself. I mean, a drug addict is a sort of bottomless pit.”
She keeps her eyes closed. “He’s been clean for a whole year. When do we stop calling him a drug addict?”
“I’m not sure if we ever do.”
Is he getting sanctimonious? Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where?
The problem with the truth is, it’s so often mild and clichéd. She says, “Maybe he’s ready for some actual stability.”
Yeah, maybe. Mizzy has informed them, via e-mail, that he’s decided he wants to do something in the arts. That would be Something in the Arts, an occupation toward which he seems to have no cogent intentions. Doesn’t matter. People (some people) are glad when Mizzy expresses any productive inclinations at all.
Peter says, “Then we’ll do what we can to give him some stability.”
Rebecca squeezes his knee, affectionately. He has been good.
Behind them, somebody blasts his horn. What exactly does he think that’s going to do?
“Maybe we should get out here and take the train,” she says.
“We have such a perfect excuse for being late.”
“Do you think that means we have to stay late?”
“Absolutely not. I promise to get you out of there before Mike is drunk enough to start harassing you.”
“That would be so lovely.”
Finally they reach the corner of Eighth Avenue and Central Park South, where the remains of the accident have not yet been entirely cleared away. There, behind the flares and portable stanchions, behind the two cops redirecting traffic into Columbus Circle, is the bashed-up car, a white Mercedes canted at an angle on Fifty-ninth, luridly pink in the flare light. There is what must be the body of the horse, covered by a black tarp. The tarp, tarrily heavy, offers the rise of the horse’s rump. The rest of the body could be anything.
“My God,” Rebecca whispers.
Peter knows: any accident, any reminder of the world’s capacity to cause harm, makes her, makes both of them, panic briefly about Bea. Has she somehow come to New York without telling them? Could she conceivably have been riding in a horse carriage, even though that’s something she’d never do?
Parenthood, it seems, makes you nervous for the rest of your life. Even when your daughter is twenty and full of cheerful, impenetrable rage and not doing all that well in Boston, 240 miles away. Especially then.
He says, “You never think of those horses getting hit by cars. You hardly think of them as animals.”
“There’s a whole … cause. About the way those horses are treated.”
Of course there is. Rana Saleem drives a night-shift cab here. Destitute men and women walk the streets with their feet bound in rags. The carriage horses must have dismal lives, their hooves are probably cracked and split from the concrete. How monstrous is it, to go about your business anyway?
“This’ll be good for the pro-horse people, then,” he says.
Why does he sound so callous? He means to be rigorous, not hard; he himself is appalled by how he can sound. He feels at times as if he hasn’t quite mastered the dialect of his own language—that he’s a less-than-fluent speaker of Peter-ese, at the age of forty-four.
No, he’s still only forty-three. Why does he keep wanting to add a year?
No, wait, he turned forty-four last month.
“So maybe the poor thing didn’t die in vain,” Rebecca says. She runs a fingertip consolingly along Peter’s jaw.
What marriage doesn’t involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn’t unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?
“A mess,” the driver says.
“Yeah.”
And yet, of course, Peter is mesmerized by the ruined car and the horse’s body. Isn’t this the bitter pleasure of New York City? It’s a mess, like Courbet’s Paris was. It’s squalid and smelly; it’s harmful. It stinks of mortality.
If anything, he’s sorry the horse has been covered up. He wants to see it: yellow teeth bared, tongue lolling, blood black on the pavement. For the traditional ghoulish reasons, but also for … evidence. For the sense that he and Rebecca have not only been inconvenienced by an animal’s death but have also been in some small way a part of it; that the horse’s demise includes them, their willingness to mark it. Don’t we always want to see the body? When he and Dan washed Matthew’s corpse (my God, it was almost twenty-five years ago), hadn’t he felt a certain exhilaration he didn’t mention afterward to Dan or, for that matter, to anyone, ever?
The cab creeps into Columbus Circle, and accelerates. At the top of the granite column, the figure of Christopher Columbus (who as it turns out was some kind of mass murderer, right?) wears the faintest hint of pink from the flares that attend the body of the horse.
I tbought that they were angels, but to my surprise, we something something something, and headed for the skies …
The point of the party is having gone to the party. The reward is going to dinner afterward, the two of them, and then home again.
Particulars vary. Tonight there is Elena Petrova, their hostess (her husband is always away somewhere, probably best not to ask what he’s doing), smart and noisy and defiantly vulgar (an ongoing debate between Peter and Rebecca—does she know about the jewelry and the lipstick and the glasses, is she making a statement, how could she be this rich and intelligent and not know?); there is the small, very good Artschwager and the large, pretty good Marden and the Gober sink, into which some guest—never identified—once emptied an ashtray; there is Jack Johnson seated in waxy majesty on a loveseat beside Linda Neilson, who speaks animatedly into the arctic topography of Jack’s face; there is the first drink (vodka on the rocks; Elena serves a famously obscure brand she has shipped in from Moscow—really, can Peter or anyone tell the difference?), followed by the second drink, but not a third; there is the insistent glittery buzz of the party, of enormous wealth, always a little intoxicating no matter how familiar it becomes; there is the quick check on Rebecca (she’s fine, she’s talking to Mona and Amy, thank God for a wife who can manage on her own at these things); there is the inevitable conversation with Bette Rice (sorry he had to miss the opening, he hears the Inksys are fantastic, he’ll come