By Nightfall: In Dreams

At the moment they resemble nothing so much as an anonymous couple in a depot somewhere, huddled together, glad for the room's warmth, if nothing else.

Small grayish snowflakes tumble and swirl, swirl and eddy and tumble against the window.

Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways—you have not imagined the lives of others.

Out there, beyond the glass, Bette Rice is laughing over a glass of wine with her husband. Mizzy is in midair, watching a romantic comedy on a miniature screen as The Magic Mountain lies open on his lap. Bea is getting ice from the cooler behind the bar, thinking she's tired of what she's doing, maybe she should travel, maybe she should ... go someplace. Someplace else. Uta is standing at her bedroom window, smoking a cigarette and thinking about blank white canvas.

Snow is falling into the urn in Carole Potter's garden, falling on the herb beds, into the petaled mouths of the oregano flowers. A white snow-sheet blows over the empty garden as skeins of falling snow turn and twist in the silvered dark.

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock gar¬den, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.

It's the last snow of the year. After tonight, the days and nights will grow steadily warmer, the hard little buds on the Potters’ yew trees will burst open and bloom.

And here, on this cold night, are Peter and Rebecca, in then familiar bedroom.

Something rises in Peter, more like a plant being uprooted by an invisible hand than a levitation of soul. He can feel the hairlike roots extracting themselves from his flesh. He is being lifted out of himself, shedding the husk of self, that sad hungry man, the action figure with the indifferently painted eyes and the dashed-off polyester suit. But if he's been a clownish figure he has also been (please God) an acolyte, a lover of love, and his little earthly cavortings were meant to appease a deity, however silly and inadequate his offering. He can see the snow falling and he can see the room from outside the window, a modest chamber worried by weather but fast for now, home for now, to him and his wife, until others take their places. If he died or if he just walked out into the dark, would Rebecca feel his ongoing presence? She would. They have come too far together. They have tried and failed and tried and failed and there's probably, in the final analysis, nothing left for them to do but try again.

He looks at her.

She is radiant in her sorrow, gauntly fabulous, present in all her particulars, in the broad, pale expanse of her forehead and the Athena-like just of her brows, in the gray livingness of her eyes, the firm line of her decisive mouth, the prominent bulb of her almost-masculine chin. She is here, right here; she looks exactly like this. She is no failed copy of her younger self. She is herself, exactly that, rapt and ravaged-looking, incomparable, singular.

"What do you think?" she says.

This is her voice, deep for a woman, with a little rasp to it, an undercurrent of burr, like a stick drawing on sand. She still retains, if you listen carefully, a trace to the old Richmond lilt, burnished by her years away to a soft, astonished rise that makes hard music of the world "think."

Here is Peter's art, then. Here is his life (though his wife may leave him, though he's faltered in so many ways). Here is a woman who keeps changing and changing, impossible to cast in metal because she's already not who she was when he walked through the door, not who she'll be ten minutes from now.

Maybe it isn't too late. Maybe all of Peter's chances are not yet squandered.

He kisses Rebecca, lightly, on her chapped lips. A single tear meanders down from her right eye.

"Yes," he says. "I think we could try. I do. Yes."

He begins to tell her everything that has happened.

from By Nightfall

published by Farrar,Straus and Giroux in September 2010