The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  One morning after this way of life had been going on for a while—it was the day after the summer solstice, and they were occupying their sixth or seventh borrowed apartment, getting away from their Susans for the weekend—Christopher woke early. He pushed back the sheet and the thin bedspread, rolled off the strange mattress, and, leaving her sleeping, went searching for coffee in Bert and Lucie’s kitchen. He moved down the line of melamine cabinets, opening and shutting the white doors. The open, uncurtained kitchen window gave him a view of a treeless back courtyard and neighbors’ windows directly opposite. There was no breeze. Living without air-conditioning or blinds was, Christopher thought, exactly the kind of thing his friends Bert and Lucie would do; it was a statement about iconoclasm or freedom or hedonism, and there was more evidence of it, the ambiguous statement, everywhere in the apartment—in the preponderance of tacky objects from the sixties and seventies, in the bright upholstery colors on the couch and podlike chairs, in the large fish tank inhabited by a piranha.

  Christopher put water on the stove and turned on the burner. There, on the counter beside the refrigerator, was the gin bottle. But where was the coffee? He was naked.

  They’d met at the end of the previous winter, at a dinner party thrown by a movie producer for whom Christopher had once done some legal work. The producer’s husband had been seated directly across the table from Christopher, and on the husband’s right was Jennifer. Shortly after the halibut came out, Christopher remembered, this man had dropped his napkin on the floor beside her chair, then boldly leaned into her space to reach for it. As he reached down, his forehead bumped the side of her left breast. And that wasn’t all. Coming up after grabbing the napkin, the husband, in a show of spatial awareness or perhaps a feigned considerateness, moved backward to avoid a second contact. Instead of sitting straight in his seat, however, he paused, his body bent awkwardly over, his face close to the breast, which he gazed at, it seemed to Christopher, with intensity. In a mock-formal voice, addressing the breast, the husband growled, “Pardon,” then sat upright and laughed, forcing Jennifer to grimace out at the table as she shared the joke. But what was the joke?

  “You’re Charlie Harrison’s friend!” she shouted at Christopher before coffee was served, before they pushed back their chairs and wandered off to find privacy—the sloppiness of the people around them making it possible for them to seek refuge with each other—in a bedroom.

  “Charlie,” he said, and finished chewing. Then he thought: Christ, why bring that up?

  Down the table, a man who’d drunk too much knocked his glass across a plate, and there was a commotion.

  “You’ve got to speak up!” she called over the noise. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying!”

  “How do you know Charlie?” he asked loudly, and she yelled back, “I wouldn’t say I know him!”

  “I don’t, either! I mean, I don’t not know him! I know him”—gathering steam—“but, well, not well, anymore. I knew him!” What was he doing? Why was he blurting?

  “I understand! I understand completely!” she shouted at him. “Here’s to old acquaintances!” She leaned over her plate, raised her glass in her hand, and, in a softer voice, told him, “My name’s Jennifer.”

  Was she making a toast? He had nothing in his glass but water. It occurred to him that she’d maybe had a bad experience with his ex-friend, that she and Charlie had possibly slept together. He tilted himself forward to meet her halfway. A candle burned between them, and he moved it aside. Her eyes were brown and somewhat cloudy; he made a point of looking into them when he said, “It’s bad luck to toast with water.”

  “We don’t want bad luck.”

  So he picked up a wineglass from among the scattered dishes, one that had been filled but seemed not to belong to anyone, and raised it to his mouth and took a quick fake drink, even that a violation of the major rule he lived by, the rule he tried not to violate too often or—since most nights he was, after all, likely to break down—too early in the evening. But it wasn’t early in the evening, was it?

  “For luck,” he said.

  Later, sitting next to him on a bed, atop partygoers’ mixed-up coats, scarves, and hats, she told him that she’d worked in the film business for six years but hadn’t felt at home, that she’d wanted all along to paint. Her mother painted but had never made a career of it, though who knew what might have happened were it not for her mother’s drinking and drugging. Those were Jennifer’s words: drinking and drugging. She told him she felt sure that as a very young girl she’d probably been happy, but because of things that had happened when she was a bit older in her childhood, things that had influenced every aspect of her existence—did he follow her meaning?—those sweeter memories, whatever they might have been, were no longer playing. Her current project was self-acceptance, not an uncommon goal, she said, among the sorts of people she mainly hung out with, people who’d moved to the city from distant places because, as she put it, “they had no homes in their home towns.”

  That last line sounded like something she’d said before, on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, her words were a mini-revelation to him. She’d expressed a condition that he’d known in life yet had been unable to articulate until it was figured forth concretely by her, in speech that sounded canned. “I’m enjoying myself,” he told her, and she said, “I’m having a nice time, too. I’m glad I came tonight,” and went on to tell him how much her painting meant to her—so much that it frightened her sometimes—even though she was only a beginner. She was interested in realism, she said. This was one area in which she differed from her mother, who, she confided to Christopher in a low whisper, was an abstract expressionist; and—she was getting excited again—the fact of her mother’s frustrated ambition obviously had everything to do with the anxieties that she, Jennifer, felt whenever she picked up a paintbrush. Breathlessly, she told him, “I need to make painting mine.”

  “How about you?” she asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yes.” Flirting. “You.”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  He paused. She waited. Finally he said, “I used to scribble a few lines in college. Poetry. Does that count?”

  “Count? What do you mean, count?” She laughed, and he said, “Oh, I just, I guess, I don’t know,” and then, against his will, he was laughing with her, because what else could he do? He gazed at the side of her face, wondering, absurdly, whether he would like what he saw—what he would see—as the years rolled by and she and he got older. Her nose, it seemed to him, was on the small side in relation to her wide mouth. Makeup did not completely conceal a slight dryness to her skin, and her hair, pulled tightly back, gave her forehead a stretched appearance—would she look less startled without the ponytail? And yet she was attractive in a prim, smart way that he found sexy. And who was he to find fault, he with his thin upper lip and jutting ears?

  After they’d stayed a while longer in their hosts’ bedroom, she exclaimed, “I have to go now!” and leaped up and tugged her coat and scarf from the loose pile—he was forced to scramble when other guests’ clothes began shifting beneath him. Would he walk her out? In fact, would he mind saying goodbye to the others for her? Yes, he assured her, he’d be happy to. Where were her gloves, though? she wanted to know. “Did you check in your coat? Are the gloves in a pocket? Are there pockets in the lining? Could the gloves be in the lining?” he asked. But they weren’t there. Nor were they under the bed. “They’ll turn up,” she announced as she marched out of the bedroom. They sneaked past the clamorous guests in the dining room. “Sh-h-h,” he whispered in her ear, and she giggled. He could smell her hair, a sweet smell of—what? At the front door, they did not kiss.

  This abruptness of hers during the moments leading to leave-taking (was it that parting produced anxiety, or that her mounting claustrophobia required a quick getaway?) was, as Christopher would witness again and again, part of a style characterized by a variety of impatient behaviors—dramaticall
y rolling her eyes, for instance, whenever it seemed to her that he was being pathetic. They would be a wry couple. But a little sarcasm, even in fun—and the evening had turned out to be fun—a little sarcasm went a long way for Christopher, who, when they next met, at a Village café appropriate for a casual non-date (though it was, in fact, a big date for Christopher, in that it was his turn to risk a few remarks about his own origins), told her, “Everybody laughed at me.”

  A week had passed since the dinner party.

  “Everybody? Who’s everybody?” She crossed her arms. She was taking his measure. She wore a pink woolen scarf wrapped loosely about her shoulders, in the style of young Parisian women. At the rear of the café, a mother and her two small children were making a racket. Christopher spoke up. “My family. My family laughed at me,” and immediately she broke in, “I understand what you mean. Everybody who matters,” and he replied, “Yeah, right?” before continuing, in tones that she would learn to recognize as harbingers of a mild paranoia, “For example, let’s say I had something serious on my mind, something to say at the dinner table. I’m trying to think of an example. I can’t think of one. It doesn’t matter. I could have been talking about anything. They’d burst out laughing! It got so that I was afraid to speak! If I tried telling a joke or a funny story—and I didn’t often try that—they’d sit in their chairs and chew their food. But I could read the obituaries, well, maybe not the obituaries, and my father and mother and sisters would laugh!”

  This made her laugh—he’d made her laugh. She could just see the awful scene around the family table. Christopher peeking over the top of the obituary page. She hoped her laughter would be taken conspiratorially, as evidence of her recognition of his mistreatment. And his shame.

  At the back of the café, the mother struggled with her children. Crying had begun. Jennifer turned to look. When she finally turned back to Christopher, he said, “You see? You laughed. It’s so exasperating.”

  That was when she rolled her eyes. Was she playing with him? He gazed down at his spoon and knife, at his empty cup set crookedly on its saucer, at the miniature milk pitcher and the sugar bowl. What was the use in telling her how bleak he felt when people found him funny? What if he were to reach across the table and touch her face? Right now. Would she understand, through his touch, that making people laugh felt to him like being hit? What made people want to hit him in this way?

  He said, “It’s not your fault.”

  “What’s not my fault?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I don’t know.”

  How red his hair was beneath the warm coffeehouse lights. He looked to her like a skinny, freckled, Scottish orphan. “You can tell me a joke,” she said.

  “You’ll hate it.”

  “I won’t hate it.”

  “It’s not going to be funny.”

  “Please?” she said.

  The joke involved a horse, a carrot, and a man wearing a cap. A third of the way through the setup, he broke character and said, “The guy in the cap is Norwegian. I forgot to mention that.” He started over and, a moment later, paused again before saying—to himself? to her?—“Is it a carrot? It’s got to be a carrot, it’s a horse.” Looking across their small table, he could see her eyes narrowing. He sighed and—he was getting panicky now—said, “The reason the horse won’t give the Norwegian a ride is that he’s depressed. The horse is depressed, not the man.” At that point he lost the thread. What in the world was he doing? He had no tolerance for comedy. He said, “How’s your coffee?”

  “Good. It’s good.”

  He paid the check, and they walked out and stood on the sidewalk, which was busy with people coming and going in parkas and hats. It struck her, as she watched him standing on the dark street with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, that he was a decent person, a serious man, and she wanted to sleep with him, but it was too soon for that, and besides, she did not see how she could invite him to her apartment, where Susan would undoubtedly be planted on the living-room couch—the foldout couch that Jennifer slept on—watching television in a sweatshirt. Jennifer did not yet know that Christopher felt similarly thwarted, that at his place uptown on Broadway, a different Susan, home from her job, was busy smoking cigarettes, watering her overgrown plants, and talking on the telephone in a haughty, supercilious voice.

  She said, “Which way are you walking?”

  He said, “Which way are you walking?”

  “You’re tall,” she commented as they made their way west. She said this because she was forced to hurry to keep up with him on the sidewalk. Christopher did not understand, however, that her compliment was also a plea. He did not slow his pace.

  They wound up on a bench overlooking the Hudson, making out. Her mouth tasted faintly metallic to him, and he wondered whether this might indicate a problem with their chemistry. Would she be wrong for him? A wind blew in from the river, and they edged closer to each other, taking the cold as permission to mash together on the slatted bench. He worked his hand inside her coat. He didn’t bother with buttons. Instead, he found passage where the coat flapped open between two closures, and felt, as his fingers burrowed under wool, the bottom of a breast. Should he push his way inside her shirt? He could hear people walking and jogging past. She kissed him harder, and, with his other hand, the hand not buried in her coat, he touched her cheek.

  “Freezing hands! Ow!” She jumped up from the bench and, straightening and arranging herself, said—stating a more or less impossible proposition, he thought, considering that the city’s lights, as well as those dotting New Jersey’s urban hills across the Hudson, burned ceaselessly through the night—“Look how late it’s getting.”

  Two days later, she phoned to tell him that a friend of hers was leaving town for a weekend trip, and she’d be looking in on the friend’s cats. How about dinner at the friend’s apartment? Would that be nice? What should she make? Did he have any food allergies that she needed to know about? “Shellfish? Chocolate? Nuts?”

  “I’m fine with nuts,” he said, and she told him that she’d started a new painting since meeting him, using bolder colors than she’d ever dared use in the past, and he said that he’d love to see it when it was done, and she nervously said, “I’m afraid that might be a while,” and then they talked about their last couple of days. She’d done her proofreading jobs in the mornings, then painted or gone to painting class in the afternoons, whereas he had hardly strayed from his small room in his Susan’s apartment, the room where he often sat late into the night, drinking, a fact he didn’t let on to Jennifer. Anyway, she told him to write down her friend’s address, and they rang off, and that Friday night he arrived for dinner at a studio apartment with nothing much in it but a pair of Maine coon cats and a queen-size bed stacked with pillows.

  “Hello hello,” he said when she opened the door.

  “Careful, careful,” she said, meaning: Don’t let the cats out. He could see them behind her feet, angling for escape, barging about on tremendous paws matted with fur. “This is Siegfried. This is Brunhilda.” With one foot, she forced aside a cat. She said, “Come in, hurry,” then added, “Amy”—her friend whose apartment they were about to treat like a motel room—“is from Maine.”

  Quickly she closed the door.

  The cats seemed a third or so larger than any house cat he’d ever seen. “You look great,” he said to Jennifer, and wondered why he’d failed to bring flowers. She did look beautiful. He hadn’t expected the tartan miniskirt. She’d untied her hair and let it fall, and whatever had earlier seemed hard in her appearance was tempered now. He did a turn around the tiny room. Everything—bed comforter, pillow shams and cases, headboard, the petite dresser near the front door, the phone—was white. There was even a white plastic television. The apartment was on a high floor, and an east-facing picture window overlooked the Empire State Building, lit purple and white at its tip. What holiday did purple designate? Easter? But Easter was weeks away. He sat on the edge of the ma
ttress, then bent over with his head between his knees and stared down a big-headed animal that had wedged itself under the box spring. “Here, kitty.”

  “They like to play,” she said.

  “Which is Brunhilda?”

  “That one,” pointing, “the female.”

  Then she said, “I guess we’ll have to eat on the bed.” It was true. There was nowhere else to sit.

  He said, “Or on the floor,” though the available floor space was not much more than a parquet walkway surrounding the bed (there was barely room to open the closet) and a kitchen area recessed along one wall. “Or in the bathroom?” he added.

  She’d chosen halibut in honor of their meeting. Already they were building traditions. While he kept the cats busy with a chewed-up string dragged back and forth across the floor, she cooked the fish in one of Amy’s white enamel pans, on top of Amy’s white mini-stove. They squeezed onto the floor between bed and window, and balanced their plates on their knees. Paper towels were their napkins. He took a bite and said, “This is terrific.”

  “Is it? Do you mean that? I’m glad.”

  A cat crashed into his arm and he put down his fork and shoved it away.

  “Don’t let them bother you.”

  “It’s not a problem. I like cats.” In fact, he was allergic. He peered around the room and saw, through watery eyes, a white cosmos. He said, “I feel like I should be drinking milk.”

  “I think there’s some in the refrigerator,” she said, and he protested, “No, please, I wasn’t serious,” leading her to wonder if he’d been making a reference to the cats—was that it?—while he thought back over their past conversations. Had she shown a pattern of literal-mindedness? He saw her puzzlement, and felt as he always did when he allowed himself even the weakest attempt at humor. And what was with these animals that kept coming and coming, nosing around their laps and swatting at their food, so that he or Jennifer seemed always to be hoisting one and tossing it aside?