By Nightfall Read Online Free PDF Page A

not.”
    “Elena’s in love with you.”
    “Then I wish she’d fucking buy something.”
    “Are you meeting Bette uptown?”
    “Yeah. JoJo.”
    “Mm.”
    “We can go to the Met after, and see the Hirst. I keep wondering how it looks in there.”
    “Bette. What is she, sixty-five?”
    “Thereabouts. When did you get checked last?”
    “I don’t have breast cancer.”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “It really and truly doesn’t make any difference if you say it or you don’t.”
    “I know. But still.”
    “If I die, I give you permission to remarry. After a suitable period of mourning.”
    “Ditto.”
    “Ditto?”
    They both laugh.
    He says, “Matthew left such elaborate instructions. We knew about the music, we knew about the flowers. We knew which suit to put him in.”
    “He didn’t trust your parents and his nineteen-year-old straight brother. Can you blame him?”
    “He didn’t even trust Dan.”
    “Oh, I bet he trusted Dan. He just wanted to make the decisions himself. Why wouldn’t he?”
    Peter nods. Dan Weissman. Twenty-one-year-old boy from Yonkers, working as a waiter, saving to go to Europe for a few months, thinking he’d finish up at NYU when he got back. He believed, he must have believed, at least briefly, that the world was showering bounty on him. He was making good money at the new café-of-the-moment. He and Matthew Harris, his improbably fabulous new boyfriend, would walk together through Berlin and Amsterdam. Madonna had left him fifty-seven dollars on a forty-three-dollar check.
    Rebecca says, “I think I want Schubert.”
    “Hm?”
    “At the memorial. Cremation. Schubert. And please, everybody get drunk afterward. A little Schubert, a little sorrow, and then have drinks and tell funny stories about me.”
    “Which Schubert?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I think maybe Coltrane for me. Would that be pretentious?”
    “No more than Schubert. Do you think Schubert is too pretentious?”
    “It’s a funeral. We’re allowed.”
    “Maybe Bette’s okay,” she says.
    “Maybe. Who knows?”
    “Shouldn’t you get in the shower?”
    Is she eager for him to go?
    He says, “You sure you don’t mind?”
    “No, it’s fine. Bette wouldn’t call at the last minute like this if it wasn’t something important.”
    Right. Of course. And yet. Sunday really is their day, their only day, shouldn’t she be a little more conflicted about releasing him, no matter how noble the cause?
    He glances at the bedside clock, its beautiful aqua numerals. “Shower in twenty minutes,” he says.
    And so. Twenty minutes in bed with your wife, reading the Sunday paper: this little cup of time. Black holes are expanding; a section of Arctic ice bigger than Connecticut has just melted away; someone in Darfur who wants desperately to live, who’d let himself believe he’d be one of the survivors, has just been cut open by a machete and for an instant sees his own viscera, the wet red of it darker than he’d imagined. Amid all that, Peter can probably rely on twenty minutes of simple domestic comfort.
    Bette Rice has beamed something into the room, though. Call it mortal urgency.
    Who ever expected heroism from little Dan Weissman, handsome in his avid-eyed, narrow-faced way, something of the antelope about him; no extravagant passions; Dan who was so clearly meant to be one of the boys Matthew used to date? . . . Who could possibly have imagined him learning more than some of the doctors knew, facing down the most terrifying nurses, staying with Matthew when he was home and getting him into the protocol they said was closed and being at the hospital those last days and . . . ? Yes, the list goes on . . . and no, Dan didn’t mention his own first symptoms until after Matthew was gone. Who expected Matthew and this more or less random boy to become Tristan and fucking Isolde?
    You could panic in the face of it all—your brother dead at twenty-two (he’d be forty-seven now), along with his