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 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
