By Nightfall: A Novel by Michael Cunningham

Author:Michael Cunningham [Cunningham, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - General, New York (N.Y.), General, Literary, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Fiction
ISBN: 9780374299088
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

Sleep, however, will not return. After a full hour he gets out of bed, gropes for his clothes. Rebecca stirs.

“Peter?”

“Shh. Everything’s okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“I feel better.”

“Really?”

“It must have been food poisoning. I’m suddenly okay again.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I just want some air. Back in ten minutes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

He leans over, kisses her, inhales the sleepy, sweet-sweaty smell she emanates.

“Don’t go for long.”

“I won’t.”

Again, the ice pick in the chest. Someone who worries over you, tends to you, and for whom you do the same . . . Don’t couples live longer than single people, because they’re better cared for? Didn’t somebody do a study?

He’s eavesdropped on his wife’s brother as he whacked off, there’s probably no way to tell her that, ever, is there?

He does have to tell her that the precious little brother is using again. How and when does he do that?

Dressed, he steps out into the semidark of the big room. There’s no line of light under the door to Mizzy’s room.

Time to go out, just out, into the nocturnal world.

And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble, like the world’s richest, best-dressed refugees.

Mercer Street is empty late at night. Peter turns uptown, then heads east on Prince, toward Broadway, going nowhere in particular but generally toward the more raucous, younger part of downtown, away from the filtered Jamesian slumber of the West Village. He’s aware of his own reflection skating silently alongside him in the dark windows of closed shops. The semiquiet of Prince Street holds for less than a block and then he’s crossing Broadway, which, of course, is never quiet, though this particular stretch is a Blade Runner strip mall, with its mammoth suburban chain stores, its Navy and Banana and Etcetera, which have reproduced themselves as perfectly here as they would anywhere, though here they display their wares to an endless riot of horn-blasting traffic; here their doorways are makeshift nocturnal homes that the resident sleepers have rigged up out of cardboard and blankets. Peter waits for the light, crosses among a small congregation of those nighttime pedestrians of lower Broadway, the couples and quartets (they’re always paired) who are neither old nor young, who are clearly prosperous, who are Out for the Night and seem to be having a good-enough time, having driven in, he supposes, from somewhere nearby, parked in a public garage, had dinner, and are now headed . . . where? To retrieve their cars, to go home. Where else? These are not people with inscrutable assignations. They’re not tourists,

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