By Nightfall by Cunningham Michael

Author:Cunningham, Michael [Cunningham, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, New York (N.Y.), General, Fiction - General, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Fiction
ISBN: 9780374299088
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

AN OBJECT OF INCALCULABLE WORTH

When Peter awakens the next morning he’s alone in bed. Rebecca is up already. He rises, sleep-smeared, slips into the pajama bottoms he ordinarily doesn’t wear but he’s not going to walk out there naked with Mizzy around (never mind about Mizzy’s own policies in that department).

In the kitchen, Rebecca has just finished making a pot of coffee. She, too, is dressed, in a white cotton robe she’d not ordinarily wear (they aren’t modest at home, or anyway they haven’t been since Bea left for college).

Mizzy, it seems, is still asleep.

“I thought I’d let you sleep in,” Rebecca says. “Are you feeling better?”

He goes to her, kisses her affectionately. “Yeah,” he says. “It has to have been food poisoning.”

She pours two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for him. She is standing more or less exactly where Mizzy stood last night. She’s slack-faced from sleep, a bit sallow. She does this semimiraculous early-morning thing whereby at a certain point in her preparations for the waking day she . . . snaps into herself. It’s not a question of putting on makeup (she doesn’t wear much) but of a summoning of energy and will that brightens and tautens her, gives color to her skin and depth to her eyes. It’s as if, during sleep, some fundamental capacity of hers to be handsome and lively drifts away; as if in sleep she releases all the faculties she doesn’t need, and prominent among them is her vitality. For these brief interludes in the mornings, she not only looks ten years older, she looks ever so slightly like the old woman she will probably be. She will in all likelihood be thin and erect, a bit formal with others (as if dignity in old age required a certain cordial distance), cultured, beautifully dressed. For Rebecca, a certain part of not becoming her mother involves the eschewing of eccentricity.

He says, “I called Bea last night.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. We’ve got this faux child on our hands, I suddenly wanted to talk to our actual child.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s mad at me.”

“Stop the presses.”

“She specifically chewed me out for talking on my cell during Our Town.”

Please, Rebecca, stand with me on this.

“I don’t remember that.”

Bless you, my love.

She lifts a coffee cup to her lips, standing where her brother stood, almost as if to demonstrate the likeness and the un. Mizzy, who might be cast in bronze, and Rebecca, his older girl-twin, who has with age taken on a human patina, a hint of mortal weariness that’s never more apparent than it is in the morning light; a deep, heartbreaking humanness that’s the source and the opposite of art.

“She swears I did. She won’t be talked out of it. I didn’t, right?”

“No.”

Thank you.

“I know it’s a little early in the morning for this conversation,” he says.

“No, it’s fine.”

“I just. I didn’t know what to say. How do I tell her that this memory she’s holding on to never happened?”

“I guess she has an idea that you were capable of talking on your phone while she was in a play.

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