By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham

much for a moment, and then her release, it could never be too much. Her thighs relax, rest more solidly on his shoulders, and she whispers oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Here the smell is her own, that faint hint of fresh shrimp; here’s where he’s most in love with her body and most fascinated by it, maybe a little frightened as well, she probably feels that way about his dick, too, though they’ve never talked about it, maybe they should but it’s too late to start that now, isn’t it? He’s got her going, tweaking her nipple with thumb and forefinger, lapping with his tongue at her clit, insistent, insistent, he knows (he just knows) that the relentlessness matters, the tongue and lips and fingers that won’t stop no matter what, that will find her wherever she goes; it’s that (and who knows what else?) that’ll put her over—something about admitting there’s nowhere to go, it’s too late, no point in arguing, it will not stop. She says oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, louder, no more whispering, she’s on her way, it always works (Does she ever fake it? Better not to know), he’ll get her off this way tonight, they’re too tired to actually fuck, and then she’ll take care of him, she’s an expert at that, too; they’re both on their way, they’re on their way, and then they can sleep, and then it will be Sunday.

      They have two cats, named Lucy and Berlin.

      What?

      Dreaming. Where is this? Bedroom. His own. Rebecca’s beside him, breathing steadily.

      It’s 3:10. He knows what that means.

      He slips out of bed, careful not to wake her. It’s the fatal hour. He’ll be awake at least until five.

      He slides the bedroom door shut, pours himself a vodka in the kitchen (no, he can’t tell the difference between what he keeps in his freezer and what Elena has smuggled in at great expense from some mountain glade in the Urals). He’s a naked man drinking vodka from a juice glass, and he lives here. He goes into the bathroom for one of the blue pills, then wanders into the living room, the part of the loft they call the living room, though it’s all really just one big room, with two bedrooms and a bathroom sectioned off.

      It’s a great space, as people say. They’re lucky they got in before the market went crazy. As people say.

      He’s got a nocturnal hard-on, and it’s not going away. Tell me, Mr. Harris, how long has your real estate affected you this way?

      The Chris Lehrecke daybed, the Eames coffee table, the austerely perfect nineteenth-century rocking chair, the Sputnik-inspired fifties chandelier that keeps (they hope) the rest of it from seeming too solemn and self-important. The books and the candlesticks and the rugs. The art.

      Right now, two paintings and a photograph. A beautiful Bock Vincent (the show’s only half sold, what’s the matter with people?) wrapped in paper and cord. A Lahkti, an exquisitely painted scene of Calcutta squalor (those sold, who can ever figure?). A Howard smoke painting, set for next fall, back gallery, helps to have something that costs a little less, especially these days. All the money’s gone, lord, where’d it go? Which Beatles song is that?

      He walks to the window, pulls up the shade. Nobody’s on Mercer at three-plus in the morning, just that pallid orangey street light on the cobbles, looks like it rained a little. This window, like many New York windows, doesn’t offer much in the way of view: a patch of Mercer Street mid-block between Spring and Broome, the taciturn brown-brick facade of the building opposite (some nights there’s a light on in the fourth floor, he imagines a fellow skittish sleeper, hopes—and worries—that that person will come to the window and see him); a pile of black trash bags thrown out onto the sidewalk, and two glittery dresses, one green and one oxblood, in the window of the stratospherically expensive little shop that will probably be out of business soon; Mercer is still a little back alley for that level of trade. Like most windows in New York, Peter’s is a living portrait. By day, you can see the pedestrians through about thirty-five feet worth of their life’s journey. By night the street could be a high-definition picture of itself. If you watch it long enough it can start to feel like a Nauman, like Mapping the Studio—the strange fascination that announces itself, gradually, as you watch a cat, a moth, a mouse flit quickly through those supposedly empty nighttime rooms; the growing sense that rooms are never empty, not only of furtive animal life but of their inanimate selves, their piles of paper and half-empty coffee cups, all of which would remain, not cognizant but not exactly unconscious, either—haunted, you might say—if humans suddenly vanished and the rooms remained just as they were the moment everyone got up to leave. If he himself died, or if he just got dressed and walked away right now and never came back, this room would retain something of him, some mix of portrait and essence.

      Wouldn’t it? For a while, anyway?

      No wonder the Victorians made wreaths of their dead lovers’ hair.

      What would a stranger think, coming into this room after Peter was gone? A dealer would think he made some shrewd investments. An artist, most artists, would think he had all the wrong art. Most other people would think, What’s this, a painting wrapped and tied, why don’t you just open it up?

      Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.

      Hold me, darkness. What’s that? An old rock lyric, or a feeling? The trouble is …

      There’s no trouble. How could he, how could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled? Who said to Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?” You don’t have to be a vicious right-wing zealot to entertain the question.

      Still.

      It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

      The trouble is …

      He can feel something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan’s treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity. Although he isn’t religious, he adores those pre-Renaissance icons, those gilded saints and jeweled reliquaries, not to mention Bellini’s milky Madonnas and Michelangelo’s hottie angels. In another era he might have been an acolyte to art; a monk whose life’s work would have consisted of producing a single illuminated page, the Flight into Egypt, say, in which two small people and an infant are frozen in eternal mid-step under a lapis blue vault studded with brilliant gold stars. He can feel it sometimes—he can feel it tonight—that medieval world of sinners and the occasional saint conducting their travels under a painted celestial infinitude. He’s an art history guy, maybe he should have become … what? … a conservator, say, one of those museum-basement people who spend their lives swabbing away the varnish and overpaint, reminding themselves (and, eventually, the world) that the past was garish and bright—the Parthenon was gilded, Seurat used blinding colors but his cheap paint has faded into the classically crepuscular.

      Peter, however, didn’t want to live in basements. He wanted to be a wheeler and dealer (as some would call him), a denizen of the present, though he can’t quite live in the present; he can’t stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn’t say which world exactly but someplace that isn’t this, isn’t streetside piles of black garbage bags and shrill little boutiques that come and go. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.

       Chapter 2 The Bronze Age

      The bedroom is full of the gray semilight particular to New York, an effusion, seemingly sourceless; a steady shadowless illumination that might just as well be emanating up from the streets as falling down from the sky. Peter and Rebecca are in bed with coffee and the Times.

      They do not lie close to each other. Rebecca is absorbed in the book review. Here she is, grown