The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  “No. Siegfried. No,” Christopher scolded. His sinuses were flooding. Jennifer threw Brunhilda onto the bed and told him that she was aware that by training to paint in a manner she thought of as realistic—she was aware that, by trying to render from life, she was covertly attacking her mother and what she called her mother’s alcoholic world view, a world view quite accurately illustrated, she felt, in the sixties-style abstract paintings her mother never finished, or in the ones she finished but ruined by angrily painting past the point of completion. “She destroys her own work,” Jennifer said, and went on to add that she, Jennifer, had recently come to feel that she could, in her own, more representational paintings, not only repudiate her mother but escape her; her attempt to mirror in paint some piece of reality represented her determination to live a dignified life. That was what she believed. Or hoped. She said, “When I study the thing I’m painting, I feel free from not painting.”

  Instead of asking her, What do you mean? he said, “What do you paint?”

  “I’m one of those people standing behind an easel in Central Park.”

  “Really?”

  “It seems quaint, but it’s not. It’s serious.”

  “No. I didn’t mean … It’s not that I … I,” he said, and this time—she was embarrassed for having embarrassed him—she laughed. How could she not? Weren’t couples supposed to laugh together? Sniffling, he said, “What do I know? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said, and whispered, consolingly, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Then she confided, “I wear a beret.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  When they kissed, the metallic taste that he remembered from the bench by the Hudson, and which he’d found himself worrying over up in his room, was gone. Maybe it had been neutralized by the fish. They set their plates on the floor beneath the window. He’d expected her to be nervous with him—at what point might she leap up and end the evening with some excuse or other?—and this made him vigilant and clumsy as he unbuttoned her blouse and felt behind her back for the hooks fastening her bra. She helped him with the hooks and her shirt’s bottom buttons, and she raised her arms, allowing him to unwrap her. He grabbed her hand and one of her ankles, twisting her toward him. She clutched his shirt, yanked its tail from his pants, fiercely untucking him. Behind her was the big window with its skyline view. What would it be like to come home to that?

  They got up on the bed, on the pillows, and could hear Siegfried and Brunhilda snapping at the food they’d left on their plates. It was obscene, he thought, this noisy feline licking, and yet he feared that getting up and clearing the plates to the sink might be interpreted as an act of antiseptic fastidiousness, explicitly anti-sexual. He pinned her shoulders to the mattress and leaned down to bite her nipple. Though he did not yet know her body, what pressures to apply, where to linger and for how long, he managed, in spite of his worry that she would find him awkward, to hold her in a way that felt—this was something he sensed—soothing to them both. That said, it was true that she, too, passed through moments of dread. It had always been this way with her. Her heart raced, her skin got a prickly feeling, and she was forced to concentrate on breathing deeply.

  Right before he pulled out and came, he looked down and caught her gazing out the window at the Empire State. He brushed her hair off her forehead, lowered his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “Are you with me, Jennifer? Are you there? Are you there, Jennifer?” This got her attention. His quiet murmuring so turned them on that it immediately became repertoire, their version of “Fuck me, fuck me.”

  Afterward, she told Christopher some, but not all, of the truth of her childhood. She was afraid, though without having a clear idea why, that if she confessed too much, if she reported in full her memories of her father coming drunk into her room at night, she’d lose him. He’d sat in his underwear in a chair beside her bed, her father had, or, she said to Christopher, sometimes right on the bed, and he’d told her again and again how he loved her, and how he wished the two of them could pack their things, right this minute, and drive away together to some remote place where she’d never hear vicious fighting from the other side of the door. It would be simple. But she had to choose. Would she come with him? her father had asked her, before leaning in close and putting his arms around her neck and weeping. She would always remember the smell of his breath when he’d been drinking.

  Christopher listened politely, then, sighing—his turn, once again, to show her that he could face up to his own history—confided in a whisper that he had never been anything but a goddamn disappointment to his family, and that no matter how hard he’d tried, he’d never escaped or really even understood his role as a clown, as a fool, but that he’d finally made up his mind that it didn’t matter, that their opinion of him wasn’t going to bother him forever. She asked him, then, whether they drank, his parents, and he, startled by this interruption, said, “Oh, you know,” to which she replied, “No, I don’t know. You have to tell me.” And so he said, somewhat defensively, “Yes. They did. They did,” then, waving his hands in the dark, went on to announce—it was as if he were making a promise—that he could handle himself in this world. And though he was not, he further acknowledged, currently employed, neither was he concerned. He had savings, in a manner of speaking, from his last and only secure position, as an associate at a law firm where he’d realized early on that he would not have the will or the desire to make partner. What point would there have been in carrying on? he asked her without really asking. He said, closing, “I’m not worried. I can find legal temp work when I need to. Hey, life’s just one big process of elimination, right?” He shoved Siegfried aside, jumped up from the bed, and stood staring out at the bright city. Why was he so jittery all of a sudden? “How about a little air?” he suggested, raising the window an inch, letting in the sounds of sirens and car horns blaring far below.

  Over the next months, as winter turned to spring, and spring to summer, in apartments in Manhattan and a brownstone in Brooklyn, Jennifer and Christopher developed a pattern of habitation described in rough form by the weekend at Amy’s. After hauling overnight bags and specialty-shop groceries into the new house-sit, they would cook without cleaning, nose through cabinets and drawers, and fall in and out of bed, where, after screwing, they might also eat. It never took long for things to go to hell—crumbs in the sheets, ashtrays and unwashed glasses and a wine bottle or two (she liked a glass before sleep) sitting on the floor, spills drying on kitchen countertops, leftovers hardening in pans. “What a disaster,” Christopher would invariably say when the time came to tidy up, and she’d answer, rolling her eyes, “Yes, but it’s our disaster.”

  Before they made their escape, she’d scribble a note and leave gift-wrapped soap or a bottle of good olive oil (along with her leftover wine, if there was any) in a place where it would be found the minute the rightful inhabitants came through the door.

  Some places worked out better than others. Karen and Peter’s Little Italy walk-up facing the street was cluttered and dreary, and a tenant in a neighboring apartment had the music turned up loud, but Jennifer, intent on a good time, hauled Karen’s wardrobe from the closet in search of skirts and dresses to model for Christopher. Karen had fabulous clothes, in Jennifer’s size. It wasn’t long before Jennifer began pulling out the shoe boxes as well, along with Karen’s cashmere sweaters and blazers, and parading from the bedroom in head-to-toe outfits, while Christopher commented from his chair on the looks that worked and those that didn’t. That was a fun night. Less enjoyable was the brownstone, where Christopher caused basement flooding when he used paper towels instead of toilet paper in an upstairs bathroom, clogging a section of pipe, three stories below, that had been rusting away for years. The owners of the house, Sam and Beth, were away in California with their twins, Sarah and Miles, at Sam’s grandmother’s memorial service. The better part of Christopher and Jennifer’s weekend was given over to nego
tiations with plumbers, negotiations undertaken without consulting Sam and Beth. Finally, a man came in and sawed away and replaced the corroded pipe, and they spent Sunday afternoon laundering the towels they’d used to clean the floor and the assortment of Miles’s and Sarah’s toys that had been sitting in a pile beneath the leak. “That’s what happens when you buy instead of rent,” Christopher announced that night as he locked the front door behind them. He said, “Shall we?,” and they hurriedly kissed before darting off to different subways and the lives they lived separately during the week.

  Then, in May, they shut themselves up inside a modern high-rise on Madison Avenue. For three days, they shared what should have been a paradise of high-ceilinged rooms while the apartment’s owner, Danny, a friend of Christopher’s who’d inherited a department-store fortune, was away in Germany buying art. He was a collector.

  “Jesus,” Jennifer said when they walked in. “Will you look at this crap?” She made a clicking sound, dismissive, using tongue against teeth. She’d stopped before a large drawing hanging in the entryway. It was, like all the pieces displayed on Danny’s walls, abstract—a charcoal turmoil of overlapping marks, smudges, and erasures executed with such force by the artist that the paper had worn through in places.

  “Do you hate it?” Christopher asked. He’d wanted her to be proud of him for scoring Danny’s keys. He hadn’t thought to worry about his friend’s taste. She didn’t answer, so he dropped their grocery bags, came up behind her, and wrapped her in a hug. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he looked at the drawing from her point of view. At first it appeared, he thought, inchoate and stagy—as if the artist had been playing with an idea about the drama in disorder. But the longer Christopher stared the more he felt compelled to see otherwise. Was that a reptile skittering across the bottom of the paper? Were those faces? He felt the muscles around his eyes relax as his gaze became less focused; outlines of faces and figures receded into the drawing’s shadows, and the work acquired space and depth, interiority.

  Glancing sideways, he saw that she was biting her lower lip. “How about that? It’s a world,” he said. She’d been thinking the same thing, though the world she saw was not his world. She saw the white walls and porch-paint gray floor inside her mother’s studio, in particular the floor, its smudged arabesques and dirty footprints of paint dripped from brushes held slackly in her mother’s hand, year after year, as far back as she could remember.

  Why hadn’t her mother protected her?

  She pried Christopher’s arms from her waist, stomped into the living room, and plopped down on one of the leather sofas he’d been looking forward to having sex on while listening to Danny’s stereo.

  “Go to hell,” she said, and he flinched—was she joking? But it didn’t sound like a joke.

  The situation wasn’t much improved in the living room. On one wall was a sculpture that looked like a complicated tricornered hat, with a high crown and a razor-edged brim. And that painting above Jennifer’s head couldn’t possibly be a—a what’s-his-name, could it? Outside, trees were in bloom and the park was alive with insects and birds. But Danny preferred that they not open the apartment’s windows. It was important to keep out dust. And, he had asked, could they please not raise the shades during the day, also for reasons having to do with conservation? Perhaps it was the drawn shades that caused Jennifer’s bad mood to worsen. Christopher spent Saturday afternoon alone in the semi-darkness, flipping channels on Danny’s giant television. Occasionally Jennifer called to him from the bedroom. She didn’t feel like getting out of bed, even though she was sharing the room with a Richard Serra print that looked like a leaden, black sun.

  “I feel sick,” she told him that night when he came in and checked on her. “Do I have a fever?”

  He felt her forehead. “If you do, it’s not high.”

  “Ugh,” she said.

  They had another conversation about art.

  “Did you paint this week?”

  “I tried one day. It was windy and the stretcher blew off the easel. Twice. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. My painting is all over the place. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I don’t understand color. I don’t understand paint. I want things brighter. Not brighter, more alive. What am I trying to say?”

  “Intense? More intense?”

  She coughed. “That’s part of it. I’m also searching for restraint.”

  “Intense restraint.”

  “Very funny.” She coughed again.

  “I didn’t mean to be funny.”

  “I know.”

  He felt her forehead once more, and this time decided that she was hot. She had a temperature. He said, “I’d better get you some aspirin and a glass of water.”

  When he came back into the room, he sat on the bed and waited while she swallowed the pills.

  “Stop staring at me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re making me nervous,” she said. She handed him the glass. “Could you get me a drop of wine? The merlot on the counter beside the sink?”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s Saturday night. Who cares if it’s a good idea?” She held the glass for him to take. “A drop? Just a drop?”

  He took the glass and went out of the room. Who drank with a fever? He made a special effort not to drink on these weekends they shared. He did not want her to see him knocking back a six-pack in the hours past midnight, as he did in secret during the week, on the nights alone—and there were other things he didn’t want Jennifer to get wind of. His departure from his job hadn’t come about in precisely the way he’d indicated when he’d glossed the matter on their first night together, at Amy’s. Had he lied to her? He’d omitted certain specifics. She didn’t need to hear about his cavalier approach to sick days or his periodic failure to bill clients, or about the humiliation he’d suffered when, one day, he’d sneaked downstairs to have a beer in the restaurant attached to the building’s lobby and a partner standing at the bar had loudly upbraided him over some minor mistake, then called him a drunk. And there was something else Jennifer might not be happy knowing: He’d lately been taking walks in Central Park, hunting for her beneath the trees near Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn. On his walks he became furtive, nervous; he imagined that if he could catch her at her easel, her brush in her hand, painting a picture of the known world, he might—he might what? Hide behind a tree and, like a trespasser hopped up on adrenaline, watch her? Call her cell phone from his and, while pretending to be nowhere near, chat?

  He poured her wine and shoved the cork back into the bottle. He enjoyed a moment of pride over not having any alcohol himself. In the bedroom, he said, “Here.”

  She took the glass. She sat propped against pillows. She said, “A sip will help me sleep.”

  “Right.”

  “It helps before bed, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is something the matter?” she asked, because she’d heard his tone.

  “No. I guess not. No.” He looked at her body outlined beneath the blankets. How could he tell her what was wrong? What was wrong? Was it simply that he didn’t care to watch her do what he did? He felt afraid for her—was that it? “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” he said, while she drank. But later that night he was unable to sleep. He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where he found Danny’s liquor in a cabinet above the stove. He went into the living room and sat up until three drinking Scotch. His mood followed a well-worn path: Halfway through his second drink, he knew his life was good—he was a lucky man. Everything, even the glass in his hand—especially the glass in his hand, crystal, heavy-bottomed, warm to his touch—felt right to him. As he drank, his ebullience increased, and he regarded his expensive surroundings as somehow belonging to him, or, more appropriately, as a preview of what he’d surely one day have. But after another few shots his thoughts veered into a familiar loop. Who was he fooling? How would he ever h
ave any of this? Why was he unable to take possession of the world’s bounties? Why had he and Jennifer not ever gone dancing, for Christ’s sake? What was their plan? They met, climbed into bed, leaped out of bed, said goodbye—was he in love? Was she? Or were they just fucking? They had so much to be thankful for, so much. They had each other.

  His face was numb. He gave himself a bit more to drink, put away Danny’s bottle, rinsed the glass, and groped his way down the hall to the bedroom, where he stood in his underwear beside the bed. The shades were drawn, the windows blacked out. As Christopher’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that each window—there were three—was haloed in a corona of light, the city’s nighttime glow seeping in through the narrow chinks between glass and shade. He felt the impulse to wake Jennifer and show her the illuminated windows, as if the phenomenon represented something uniquely worth experiencing, like a solar eclipse. Three black suns hovered over her as she slept. Make that four, counting the Serra.

  The following afternoon, he woke beside her. How was she feeling today? A little better, she told him. He, of course, was hungover. But that wasn’t a life-or-death problem, was it? She wondered aloud if she’d given him whatever bug had bitten her, and he promised her she hadn’t, then asked her—he hadn’t planned this; it just came out of his mouth—if she would consider showing him her painting, the one she’d begun in the days after they met. Dry-mouthed, he added, “Don’t be scared.”

  After that, he went ahead and joined her for drinks when they got together. Who took the lead in this new policy? It was she, after all, who didn’t make much fuss over a glass of wine. Following his old rule, he waited until dinner was finished before pouring his first, so that he could have a decent amount in a short span of time without causing a sodden evening. When he drank, she drank. Sometimes she smoked. She liked to stand at a window and exhale out into the world. When the nights got warm, she opened the window wide and leaned on the casement.