The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  Late in June, a heat wave hit. The daytime sky grew white with becalmed air trapped over the city. Faint thunder could sometimes be heard, but storms never materialized, showers never arrived. On the evening of the solstice, Christopher and Jennifer hauled suitcases, groceries, and her painting—shrouded, for protection, in bubble wrap and muslin—up six flights to Bert and Lucie’s top-floor apartment. The temperature rose higher and higher as they climbed. When they reached the landing, they stopped to rest. She recovered against a wall, and he leaned his weight on the doorknob, then turned the key in the lock, and they tumbled in. She went straight to the bathroom and ran a cold tub, while he dumped ice cubes from trays to glasses in the kitchen. He stood before the open freezer, letting mist touch his face. He could hear her splashing in the bathroom, and he heard Bert’s fish tank bubbling in the living room. What did Bert and Lucie keep in the freezer? Was that a bottle cap poking out from beneath two ice-cream cartons? He pulled out the bottle of gin, unscrewed the top, mopped his face with a dish towel, refilled the ice trays. It was still light out. Instructions for feeding the piranha had been left on the counter beside the sink. Christopher carried his drink down the hall and peered into the tank. He tapped its glass wall.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  The bathroom door opened, closed. “I fixed you a drink! It’s in the kitchen!” he called, and heard her walking in that direction. A moment later, he smelled cigarette smoke. He went down the hall and saw her bent over the windowsill, her head craned out, her back to him. She was naked and damp; the wet ends of her hair stuck to her shoulders. She looked, he thought, with her hair streaming back and her breasts proudly showing, not unlike a ship’s figurehead, sea-sprayed. Christopher would remember this vision—Jennifer’s raised butt, framed against the building behind Bert and Lucie’s, and, above that building, chimneys and water towers crowning roof after roof on the horizon—long after he’d forgotten the things they’d said in these rooms where he and she became partners.

  He said, “It’s too hot to eat.” Dinner lay in a bag on the floor. Propped against a wall was her painting.

  “No kidding.” Smoke drifted from her mouth.

  He leaned against the doorframe and shook his glass, clinking melting ice. “We’ll have to make do with this.” Was he trying to be funny? Frankly, he wasn’t sure.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her feet were pink from her bath. She said, “That’s fine. It’s summertime,” and, as if on cue, he sneezed.

  “Bless you,” she said, and he told her, “Something’s in bloom somewhere.”

  She flicked ashes and came in from the window. She squeezed past him on her way to the bedroom. Dying light brightened a corner of floor and the wall beside the painting. Soon it would be dark. She returned wearing one of Lucie’s see-through nighties.

  He refilled their glasses.

  “To home away from home.”

  “Cheers,” she said.

  In that heat, without food, they were quickly smashed. He grabbed hold of her lace nightie and, like a man in a conga line, hanging on to keep time with the leader, trotted after her down the hall. In the living room she turned on a light, and they both collapsed onto Bert and Lucie’s sofa and watched the piranha tank as if it were a television set, a television broadcasting leafy weeds, luminous rocks, and bubbles, but no fish.

  Was he ready to see the painting? Would he be equipped to comment? What might he say? He was going to need a refill.

  He said, “Is it worth it?”

  “What?” she said. “Is what worth what?”

  “Art. Painting. You know.”

  That made her laugh.

  “The truth about you is, you’re kind of a funny guy. I don’t know why you fight it,” she told him.

  She took his hand in hers, and he turned to look at her. She pulled him close to her on the sofa. He laid his head on her lap. In a minute he would sit up and ask her if she was ready to show him the painting. She would stand up, go barefoot and tipsy to the kitchen, get it, bring it back, and, after warning, “It may not be finished, so be nice,” unwrap it.

  No. In a minute she would get up, and he would say, “Hey, do you mind,” then hand her his glass, and she would go to the kitchen, make him a fresh drink with new ice, and bring it to him along with the painting. He would be careful, in his remarks on her work, to avoid overstating his praises. Yet he would not want her to doubt either his fundamental enthusiasm or her own promise. If the painting was accomplished, or even if not, he would find and appreciate an aspect of it—an element reflecting technical execution and artistic choice, a movement of brushstrokes indicating an intensity of gray light behind bare trees, say, since she’d begun in winter. Or she might have revised with the changing seasons, painting over winter’s silvers with the pale greens and eggshell blues that signify spring. There might be a figure in the painting, a man walking quickly through the park, as he himself had done when out searching for her at her work; and maybe, if the painting showed a man, a man like him, beside a particular tree, rock, or bench, near a path that wound beside the banks of a familiar pond, he might recognize the topography and speak confidently about her handling of perspective, and about the way the light reflected off the water in precisely that way, in that place.

  While he imagined his reaction to her painting, she lit another cigarette. Though he could not see the flame, he saw its image come and go, mirrored in the glass aquarium, and he sensed her hands and arms fluttering in the air above his head. He heard the match being struck.

  ANOTHER MANHATTAN

  They had lied to each other so many times, over so many years, that deceptions between them had become commonplace, practically repertoire. Everyone knew this about them—it wasn’t news among their friends. That night, they had dinner reservations with Elliot and Susan, who were accustomed to following the shifts in attitude and tone—Kate’s theatrical sighs, for instance, in reaction to Jim’s mournful looks across the table at her—brought on by the strain of living in an atmosphere of worry and betrayal. It was winter, and dark, and the air in their little apartment was dry and nauseatingly warm; and yet what they needed, it seemed to Jim, was not to flee their home for another night of exciting conversational pauses and sly four-way flirting. They needed to sit down together, no matter how stuffy it got in the living room, no matter how loudly the radiators hissed and banged, and take turns speaking their minds. They had to talk. But first he would stop at the florist’s on his way home from the outpatient clinic. If he walked through the door carrying a bouquet, there was a chance that Kate might smile.

  There was a chance also that it wouldn’t look awkward or strange when, at the end of the evening—he didn’t really believe that he and Kate would be staying in—he paired with Susan for the walk through the cold, from the restaurant to Elliot’s car. It might look, in other words, as if he were not bothered by Kate’s whispering to another man. (She had a way, with Elliot, of bowing her head and mumbling furiously through the strands of hair that fell across the side of her face, so that, in order to make out her words, Elliot was forced to stoop and lean into the fog of her breath.) Jim’s own affair, his affair with Susan, had been over for almost five months, long enough, he thought, as he approached the florist’s on the corner by his and Kate’s building, for him to begin experimenting—later that same night, if the mood was right—with innocently putting his arm around Susan’s shoulder while she and he and Kate and Elliot walked in two sets of two toward the parking garage.

  Of course, he wanted to be careful not to punish Kate, or at least not to seem to punish her, for her success in adultery. Elliot made her laugh—in a sweet way. Anyone meeting them for the first time would think they were a new couple.

  It was wrong to hate her.

  He’d arrived at the florist’s. Inside, he went straight over to the roses in their refrigerated case. Though it was a cold day, cold and very windy, and he’d come in chilled, the shor
t walk across the heated space warmed him, and he could feel the frigid air hit him in the face when he yanked open the glass door. He leaned in and peered at the flowers. He asked the girl, “Do you have yellow roses that haven’t already bloomed and, you know, opened?”

  Yellow roses, signifying friendship more than eros, seemed right, given the complex potentials of the evening.

  “We only have these.”

  “They’re pretty, but they’re not going to last.”

  She was pretty as well, the girl showing him roses. Had he seen her in here before and somehow not noticed? How old was she? Should he risk looking into her eyes? Was she wearing a ring? What about her ass? And what had he said to her just now? Blooming and opening meant the same thing in relation to flowers. He’d become inarticulate in her presence.

  Kate, in the meantime, was upstairs in the apartment, talking on the phone to Elliot. The call had gone on for more than five hours. Kate had had to use all available phones: her cell phone and, before the cell, the apartment’s two cheap cordless handsets, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. “Can you hear beeping? I’ve got to switch phones. Hang on,” she’d exclaimed when the kitchen phone’s battery began dying. Carrying that phone (her first of the call), she’d gone into the bedroom, picked up its brother from the night table, and said, into this new phone, “Are you there? Can you hear me? Hold on while I hang up the other phone,” after which she’d taken both phones to the kitchen and dropped the dead one into its cradle on the wall. A small cabinet door beside this phone opened onto a narrow and dark airshaft that had once housed a dumbwaiter. Kate opened and closed this empty cabinet several times while explaining, on the bedroom phone, why Elliot’s being married and her being married shouldn’t necessarily be considered something they had in common. That they were both childless could stand as an area of emotional parity, she felt, considering the fact that they both remained unsure as to whether to have children, while their spouses frequently made it clear that, in their opinions—Susan’s specifically regarding Elliot, Jim’s specifically regarding Kate, and neither Susan nor Jim meaning to suggest a marital reconfiguration—they’d make “a great dad” or “a great mom.”

  Elliot interrupted: “Don’t you get tired of hearing that?”

  “It’s beside the point,” Kate answered, and went on, “Oh, Elliot, why is talking to you so damn fucking difficult?”

  “Do you need an answer?”

  “You know me, always curious.” How stupid was that? She’d been trying, not for the first time, to lovingly make clear to Elliot why she could no longer sleep with him. During the first hours of the conversation she’d been able to control the impulse to bait and flirt. But the business of swapping phones, the walking from room to room in the stuffy apartment, had, as it were, weakened her. It was as if, in losing that first phone, she’d lost a line of defense, however symbolic, against Elliot’s desire. Or maybe, she thought as she stood in the kitchen, opening and closing the dumbwaiter door with one hand, the necessary act of sacrificing one phone for another could be read as a veiled enactment of the sort of ambivalence required for alternating between lovers in the first place. Or was that too absurd?

  “Say that once more. I didn’t hear what you were saying,” she said to Elliot. The heating pipes banged; day was turning to dusk. She listened to the hiss of steam escaping from the radiator beneath the kitchen window. Elliot began again, “I was saying that I sometimes think that you think that because I’m a psychiatrist I can automatically see all the different sides of a situation. But I’m not that kind of psychiatrist.”

  “Please don’t talk to me like I’m one of your postdocs,” she said, and he took a long breath.

  He said, “Kate, we’re involved with each other, Kate.”

  “Jim’s your friend.”

  “And so are you my friend.”

  “Your wife is my friend, too.” She continued, “Fuck, I hate this. Now this motherfucking phone is beeping. Hold on. Elliot, can you hold on?” She swapped the bedroom phone for the insufficiently charged kitchen phone, went with that phone back into the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Kate, why are you bringing up Susan? I need to know what your point is. We agreed that we weren’t going to talk about Susan. So where are you going with this? Kate? Are you there?”

  He waited.

  “Will you talk to me? Please, don’t do this. Don’t do this, Kate. All right, fuck this, fuck this, fuck—”

  His phone was beeping. It wasn’t the battery. It was another call. He said, “Kate, hang on a minute. Hang on, Kate.”

  He took the call. “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” she said, and then told him in a miserable voice that both her home phones were dead, and that she was on her cell phone and just wanted to say that she didn’t much enjoy dishonesty.

  “You’ll have to speak up,” he said.

  “Can you hear me? Tell me when the signal is clear.” She pressed the cell phone against her ear and walked from the bedroom to the living room, then into the kitchen, then straight down the hall, passing the tiny second bathroom, with the broken, unusable toilet, to the apartment’s miniature front foyer.

  “Here?” she said. “Here?”

  “I’m losing you,” he said. And so she retraced her route, winding up back in the living room, where she turned on a lamp. The sky was dark. Everywhere on the city’s horizon she saw other people’s lit windows. Once again, Elliot had bullied her—or she’d let him bully her—into leaving open the question of their affair. What was the use in arguing, anyway? Jim would come home any minute, and, a little later, the two of them would go out and meet Elliot and Susan for dinner. How crazy was that? She still had to shower and dress. She conceded to Elliot, “All right, I’ll think about it.”

  “Tomorrow, then?” Elliot said, and added, “I knew you’d come to your senses.” He joked that if he didn’t get out of his office in the next few minutes he’d be forced to show up at the restaurant in his white coat. They said goodbye, and she put down the phone and wept for a quarter of an hour.

  Downstairs at the florist’s, Jim’s bouquet for Kate was growing and growing. It featured not only yellow roses but red and pink solitaires, along with sprigs of heather, freesia, and alstroemeria; green and white calla lilies; blue irises; mums; and some other things the girl had plucked from buckets and waved in the air for him to see and approve. “What else? What does she like?” she’d asked him, as she leaned into the refrigerator and reached for more.

  “That looks so nice. I think she’ll like just what you like,” he said, and wondered whether it was okay for him to have said it. Was it provocative? There were no other customers in the shop. Staying close but keeping his distance, he followed the girl from one display case to another. He might as well have been buying lingerie, he felt; and, in fact, it seemed to him that the bouquet was somehow intended for the girl, as much as for Kate, who would’ve been, well, not exactly mortified to know that her husband was downstairs using a shopgirl as a proxy to get himself worked up for sex later that night.

  “Baby’s breath,” the girl said to him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I love baby’s breath.”

  “In that case, we’ll have to have a bunch,” Jim said.

  “Good.”

  She turned away, laid the unfinished bouquet on its side on the countertop beside the cash register, and, with her back to him, said, “We have a lot to work with here.” She glanced back over her shoulder (did she want him to come closer?), then, quickly—what a great flirt, he thought—turned away again and set to work breaking down the bouquet and separating the flowers into groups, a variegated series of stacks that she arranged not by color or type (except in the case of the combined red, pink, and yellow roses) but, as became clear, by stem length. When she had her piles, she picked up clippers.

  “This will take a minute,” she said.

  He watched her snip the stems. He said, “Take your
time.”

  But there was a problem: What were these flowers going to cost? The bouquet as she assembled it—as it came to be, in her hands—was broader and taller by far than what he’d come into the florist’s wanting. It was less a bouquet than a proper arrangement, a centerpiece, thanks in part to the leafy green branches the girl stuffed between blossoms, and the pale white baby’s breath, which she didn’t so much layer as clump into the globular mass.

  “Can we take some out?” he asked, and wished he hadn’t. What kind of man courts a woman by letting her make an enormous bouquet for his wife, then asks her to pare back?

  “What would you like me to take out?” the girl asked. Was she annoyed? She had her back to him. Did she think less of him? Did she think he was a cheap bastard who cheats on his wife?

  “It’s just that I was hoping to use a particular Arts and Crafts vase on the mantel, which, in my opinion, these would look lovely in,” he elaborately lied. (Actually, there was a vase on the mantel—but so what?) He went on, “What I mean to say is that the vase I have in mind isn’t very big.”

  Did he need excuses? Did he need to bring up his home life?

  He went into reverse. “Come to think of it, never mind about that vase on the mantel. It would be a shame to wreck such a nice bouquet.”

  “I’m not going to wreck anything.”

  Was she scolding him? Were things heating up between them? He waited for her next move.

  “I can give you a bigger vase,” she proposed, finally.

  He held his breath. She had to be at least twenty years younger than he. But it wasn’t their age difference, nor the fact that he was married, that made him feel uncertain of himself. The problem was his thought process: The lithium he was taking in small doses brought a slower speed to reality. It was the lithium or the antidepressant cocktail or all of it in concert. At times, when he spoke, he felt as if a kind of mental wind were blowing his thoughts back at him, forcing him to self-consciously order his syntax as he pushed words out.