By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham

I got what I should have expected. Which was nothing.”

      And now: the lecture on the superiority of Eastern culture.

      “Nothing at all?”

      “A garden like that is part of a practice. It’s part of a life of contemplation. As it turns out you can’t just go and, I don’t know. Pay it a visit.”

      “Would you want a life of contemplation?”

      “Ah’m contemplating it.”

      This is a Southern gift, isn’t it—tremendous self-regard diluted with humor and modesty. That’s what they mean by Southern charm, right?

      Peter expects a story, but no story, it seems, is forthcoming. A silence catches, and holds. Peter and Mizzy sit looking at the tabletop. The silence takes on a certain decisiveness, like the interlude during which it becomes apparent that a date is not going well; that nothing promising is going to happen after all. Soon, if this awkwardness doesn’t resolve itself, it will be established that Peter and Mizzy—this Mizzy, anyway, this troubled, world-scavenging boy who has supposedly been clean for over a year—don’t get along; that Mizzy is here to stay with his sister and that his sister’s husband will tolerate it as best he can.

      Peter shifts on his chair, looks aimlessly into the kitchen. Okay. They won’t be friends. They have to get along though, don’t they? It’ll be too hard on Rebecca if they don’t. He can feel the stillness turning from failed affinity to combat. Who will speak—who will fill the silence with whatever comes to mind?—and by so doing declare himself the loser, the bitch; the one willing to devise some conversational gambit so that everything can be okay.

      Peter looks back at Mizzy. Mizzy smiles mildly, helplessly.

      Peter says, “I was in Kyoto, years ago.”

      And really, that’s all it takes. Just a tiny declaration of one’s willingness to dance.

      “The gardens in Kyoto are amazing,” Mizzy says. “I got fixated on this particular shrine because it was far away. As if, you know. It was going to be holier because there were no convenient nearby hotels.”

      Something about the released tension makes him love Mizzy, briefly, soaringly, the way he imagines men love their comrades in battle.

      “And it wasn’t,” Peter says.

      “I thought it was, at first. It’s insanely beautiful. It’s way up in the mountains, they have snow more than half the year.”

      “Where did you stay?”

      “There’s a dumpy rooming house kind of thing in the town. I’d hike up the mountain every morning, and stay till just before dark. The priests let me sit there. They were so sweet. I was like their foolish child.”

      “You went every day and sat in the garden.”

      “Not in. It’s a dry garden. It’s raked gravel. You sit to one side and look at it.”

      Yew set to one sad and look et it. No denying the musky sweetness of that Virginia tone.

      “For a whole month,” Peter says.

      “At first, I thought something amazing was happening. It turns out there’s this noise in our heads, we’re all so used to it we don’t hear it. This sort of static of information and misinformation and what-all. And after about a week of just looking at five rocks and some gravel, it starts to go away.”

      “And is replaced by?”

      “Boredom.”

      It is so not what Peter expected that he emits a strange, phlegmy little snort-laugh.

      Mizzy says, “And other things. I don’t mean to be flippant about it. But I … this’ll sound corny.”

      “Go ahead.”

      “Huh. As it turns out, I don’t really want to wear a robe and sit on some mountain halfway across the planet looking at rocks. But I also. I don’t want to just say, okay, that was my spiritual phase, now it’s time to apply to law school.”

      The mystery of Mizzy: Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he’s considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

      Peter says, “Would it be too horrible and embarrassing if I asked what you think you want to do?”

      Mizzy frowns, but amusedly. “I think I’d like to be king of the underworld.”

      “Hard job to get.”

      “Don’t let me get all cryptic. I need to shape up a little. People have been telling me that for years, and I’m finally starting to believe them. I can’t really go to one more shrine in Japan. I can’t drive to Los Angeles just to see what happens along the way.”

      “Rebecca thinks you think you’d like to do something in, um, the art world, is that right?”

      Mizzy’s face colors with embarrassment. “Well, it seems to be the thing I care most about. I don’t know if I have anything, exactly, to offer.”

      It’s a pose, isn’t it, all this boyish abashment? How could it not be? Mizzy, why do you refuse to summon up your gifts?

      “Do you know what you want to do, exactly?” Peter says. “In the arts, I mean.”

      That was a little Dad-like, wasn’t it?

      Mizzy says, “Honestly?”

      “Mm-hm.”

      “I think I’d like to go back to school, and maybe become a curator.”

      “That’s about the same odds as becoming king of the underworld.”

      “But somebody has to do it, right?”

      “Sure. It’s just. It’s a little like setting out to become a movie star.”

      “And some people get to be movie stars.”

      Here it is, then—the armature of hubris over which this skin of uncertainty is stretched. Then again, why should a smart, beautiful boy pursue modest ambitions?

      “Sure they do,” Peter says.

      “And, well. I’m sort of … Thank you for taking me in like this.”

      “Egyptian” isn’t quite right for the Taylor face, is it? There’s too much pink-tinged Irish pallor about them, and too much strong Creole chin. El Greco? No, they’re not that gaunt or severe.

      “We’re glad to have you.”

      “I won’t stay long. I promise.”

      “Stay as long as you need to,” Peter says. Which he does not exactly mean. What can he do, though? He’s a sucker for the whole damned family. Rose is selling real estate in California, Julie quit her practice to spend more time with her kids. Those are not terrible fates. Neither Rose nor Julie has come to a tragic end, but they are, both of them, living unexpectedly usual lives. And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter’s care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylors’ grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost—to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world’s most promising children.