By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham Page B

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 garden,” he answers. “In a shrine in the mountains in the north. Five stones that were put there by priests six hundred years ago. I sat and looked at those stones for almost a month.”
    “Really?”
    Mizzy, don’t kid a kidder. I was once a self-dramatizing young romantic, too. A month ?
    “And I got what I should have expected. Which was