By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham

another word.”

      “What did you do?”

      “I left.”

      “Do you want to make up a version where you stayed?”

      “Not for all the money in the world.”

      “Were you upset?”

      “Yes.”

      “Because you saw your sister having group sex.”

      “Not just that.”

      “What, then?”

      “It all seemed so … ugly. Joe had been an asshole to me and here was my sister just sort of servicing these two idiots …”

      “You don’t think they were servicing her?”

      “She and I talked about that, after.”

      “And?”

      “She said it had been her idea.”

      “Did you believe her?”

      “I wanted to. I mean, it was her senior year, she’d made the national finals and she was going to Barnard. She seemed sort of … heroic, to me.”

      “So?”

      “I still didn’t buy it. She was the most competitive person I’d ever known. And really, I figured out how it must have gone. Even dumb old Beau Baxter was capable of understanding that after a few drinks, she wouldn’t turn down a dare. I knew she’d have to think of it afterward as having been her idea. She’d have to tell herself she’d been the one in power. Which sort of made it worse.”

      “You were a nice girl.”

      “I was not.”

      “Nicer than Julie.”

      “Not really.”

      “You don’t think so?”

      “I had sex with Beau two days later. Correction. I fucked Beau two days later.”

      “You’re joking.”

      “He came up to me at a party to apologize, supposedly embarrassed but actually so damned pleased with himself.”

      “And you …”

      “I told him to follow me.”

      “Where’d you take him?”

      “Into the garden. It was this big house where they had a lot of parties, and there was a garden.”

      “And …”

      “I told him to fuck me. Right there, on the wet grass.”

      “No way.”

      “I’d had it. I’d had it with my asshole boyfriend and I’d had it with my slutty sister who thought she had to win every single contest and I’d had it with being the innocent younger sister who got hysterical when she saw people fucking in the garden room. That night I still thought I’d left my boyfriend forever, plus I’d drunk almost a full pint of cheap vodka and I just wanted to straddle the dick of that big stupid boy who’d humiliated my sister. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life.”

      “Wow.”

      “You like that, huh?”

      “Uh, what happened next?”

      “He was scared. As I’d suspected he’d be. He was all, Um, hey, Rebecca, I dunno … So I gave him a little shove on the chest with both hands and told him to lie down.”

      “Did he?”

      “You bet he did. He’d never seen the power of a girl, possessed.”

      “Go on.”

      “I pulled down his pants and pulled up his shirt. I didn’t need him to be naked. I got down on his dick and I showed him exactly what he was to do with his fingertip on my clitoris. It wasn’t clear that, until that moment, he knew what a clitoris was.”

      “You’re making this up.”

      “You’re right. I am.”

      “No.”

      “Maybe I am.”

      “Really and truly?”

      “Do you care?”

      “Sure I do.”

      “It’s a sexy story whether it’s true or not, right?”

      “I guess so. Yeah.”

      “Men are such perverts.”

      “You’re right. We are.”

      “Anyway, story time’s over for tonight. Come here, Charlie.”

      “What’s with Charlie?”

      “I really and truly don’t know. Just come here.”

      “Where?”

      “Here. Right here.”

      “Here?”

      “Mm-hm.”

      Six months later, he married her.

      Twenty years later, he is sitting at his dining room table across from Mizzy, who’s fresh from the shower, wearing cargo shorts. He hasn’t put on a shirt. There’s no denying his resemblance to the Rodin bronze—the slender, effortless muscularity of youth, the extravagant nonchalance of it; that sense that beauty is in fact the natural human condition, and not the rarest of mutations. Mizzy has dark pink nipples (there’s some sort of Mediterranean blood in these Taylors, somewhere) about the size of quarters. Between his neatly square pectorals, a single medallion of sable-colored hair.

      Is he being seductive, or is it just his regular carnal heedlessness? There’s no reason for him to think Peter might be interested, and even if there were, he wouldn’t get sexy around his sister’s husband. Would he? (When was it that Rebecca said, “I think Mizzy is capable of just about anything”?) There is, of course, in some young men, a certain drive to try to seduce everybody.

      Peter says, “How was Japan?”

      “Beautiful. Inconclusive.” Mizzy has retained the soft Virginia burr Rebecca lost years ago. Bee-oo-tiful. In-con-cloo-sive.

      Out of the shower, Mizzy looks less like Rebecca. He has his own version of the Taylor face: hawklike thrust of feature, jutting nose and big, attentive eyes (which, in Mizzy, are ever so slightly crossed, giving his face a stunned, ever-questioning quality); that vaguely Ancient Egyptian aspect they share, apparent in neither Cyrus nor Beverly, evidence of some insistently repeating snarl in their combined DNA. The Taylor brood, three girls and one boy, variations on a theme, profiles that would not be entirely surprising on millennia-old pottery shards.

      Peter is staring, isn’t he?

      “Can a whole country be inconclusive?” he asks.

      “I didn’t mean Japan. I meant me. I was just a tourist there. I couldn’t connect.”

      He has that Taylor presence, that thing they all do (with the possible exception of Cyrus), without quite realizing it. That ability to … command a room. Be the person about whom others ask, Who’s that?

      Mizzy went to Japan for a purpose, didn’t he? To visit some relic?

      Where the hell is Rebecca?

      “Japan is a very foreign country,” Peter says.

      “So is this one.”

      Score one for undeluded youth.

      “Didn’t you go there to see some kind of holy rock?” Peter says.

      Mizzy grins. Okay, he’s not as self-important as he might be.

      “A