There’s one thing I still remember him saying, though. At one point he put down his fork and he leaned across to me, as if I had all the answers. “I mean, why do I even feel this need to act? It’s weird, right? We’re living in this terrible world with wars and broken hearts and starvation, but some of us are compelled to make art, like that’s supposed to help anything. It’s a disease, Drew. Don’t you remember how it felt, when we were sitting there obsessed with finding ourselves in the orchestra? It was awful. Only you grew out of it, and I didn’t. Or maybe I just finally did, last year. Like I was cured and cursed all in one moment. I mean, what if the universe decided it was done using me?”
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine you as anything other than an actor.”
“Right. Right. I know. But how can it be who I am if it’s not what I do?”
We left it rhetorical and continued eating.
“So, how’s Carlos?” he asked once we’d ordered dessert.
It was too late in the meal, and he was too far behind on the story. “Not great, but you know,” I said, confident he didn’t care enough to press further. “He’s gotten into jazz lately.” To be safe, though, I changed the subject. “So, I had a dream about the Berghoff last night. I was running around downtown, trying to give everyone vitamin shots because of this disease I’d exposed them to. For some reason it was a battle zone, with tanks in the streets, and wild animals. And if people didn’t get these shots they were going to die. I had to find everyone I ever slept with and get them to come to the Berghoff to get this shot. So I’m knocking on doors, but people have moved, and by the time I find Carlos he tells me he won’t take the shot, he’d rather die. He’s lying there in the snow, dying, and he goes, ‘You can’t save them all, Drew.’ And I woke up screaming. I mean, what the hell is that?”
“Dreams don’t mean anything,” he said. “I used to believe they did, but they really don’t. Random synapses.” As I signed the bill, he dug into his apple tart like someone just rescued from the wilderness, his eyes wide with the wonder of sugar and crust. He chewed so fast it looked like his teeth were chattering. He gestured behind me with a jerk of his eyes, and I turned to look at the next table, pretending to get something out of my jacket pocket. I assumed he meant the teenage girl with a roll of fat hanging over the back of her low jeans. She was with her parents. “What would you do?” he said. His mouth was full of tart.
Sometime after high school, the game had evolved away from musicians and actors, and we (or at least Peter) had begun obsessing about leaping into regular people’s lives, about how to fool their families. I was tired of it after twenty years, but this wasn’t the day to put him in a bad mood. “Okay. Pretend to get sick so I don’t have to go to school, and spend the whole time doing aerobics. I could get fifteen pounds off, at least. Do I get to be myself again after?”
“Presumably.”
“Then I finish reading Proust.”
Peter took a sip from his root beer bottle, and I noticed his hand shaking. I wondered briefly if it was Parkinson’s, if the whole personality shift was that easy to explain — but Peter was such a hypochondriac, he’d have thought of it already. “You’re so fucking boring,” he said. “I’d run that ass into the street right now and see if I could stop traffic. I’d see how many laws I could break.”
“You could do it anyway,” I said. “You could run out there and just ruin your life. Nothing stopping you.”
He put his napkin on his plate and stood up. “I thought that’s what the museum was for.”
As we headed through the front doors of the Art Institute, the last regular museum visitors of the night were bundling past the stone lions and out into the cold. “Did you ever read that book when you were a kid?” Peter said as we walked through the emptying halls. “The one where the kids run away and live in the Met?”
“And they bathe in the fountain,” I said.
“That’s my new plan. I want to camp out under some dinosaur bones and just…” He let his sentence trail off, as if the suits of armor we were passing would explain the rest. I imagined them as a hundred failed geniuses, hiding behind the glass, starved down to thin, steel exoskeletons. They knew what he meant.
We stopped at the Chagall windows, stood for a minute in the warmth of their thick blue light, then headed into the special exhibit hall. I left Peter staring at a messy Klee while I talked to Lauren, my boss, who’d hated the idea of this event from the time I brought it up two years before and was waiting for everything to fall apart. Her over-plucked little eyebrows arched up her forehead as she asked me why half the writers weren’t there yet. I went to check on the champagne, and once the evening started moving I lost track of Peter among the tablecloths and microphones and whining interns, and finally among the rush of people and coats. Half were Art Institute supporters with vintage bracelets or Frank Lloyd Wright neckties, and half were NPR junkies with professor haircuts. Some might have been both, bless them.
I knew I should have introduced Peter to the other actors, told him where to be, but leaving him alone was my small way of shaking him by the shoulders, of telling him to grow up. When I saw him again, he was talking to one of the actresses he knew from Chicago Shakespeare, a woman who’d just returned from off-Broadway and chopped her hair short. She was laughing at something he’d said, and he was teetering back and forth as if he might at any second lose a lifelong battle with gravity. He was laughing, too, but the way his skin stretched across his jaws, he looked deathly.
I took the microphone and welcomed everyone. My voice could never command a room; people milled and talked and jostled for position. I introduced the five actors, and it wasn’t until they came and stood beside me that I noticed Peter still had his puffy green coat on, his hands shoved down in its pockets. I wondered if he was punishing me for leaving him alone, or if he was so thin under there that he didn’t want to frighten people. In high school, he would take his shirt off at every opportunity, claiming it was hot out at sixty degrees. I’d assumed back then that his dark skin was from Italian genes, but now I saw it must have been the sun.
The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we’d grabbed him off the street.
We started with the first painting, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, and the short-haired actress read a brief Stuart Dybek story called “Rainy Day Chicago.” When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called “Triangle Woman.” We’d pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit. Even so, there were certain works they wouldn’t let us use. We’d asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and Nighthawks topped almost every one. It must have been something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence — everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder-to-shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it? If Hopper’s little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.
I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in Lear one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you’d been on the verge of remembering, if you’d only had time.