The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  “I just got—I just got out of the hospital!” he blurted.

  He watched her as she turned to face him; in her hands she held white lilies and a red satin bow, and her eyes looked left, right, left.

  “I shouldn’t’ve said that! Forget I said that! I didn’t mean to say that! Give me the vase. I want a vase.”

  “Oh!” she said, as if startled to realize that she was still clutching pieces of the bouquet. “Let me run in the back and get one.”

  While Jim and the girl sorted themselves out downstairs, Kate was marching around the apartment in her red heels, shoving things into her purse and looking in the usual places for her keys. She had to flee before Jim walked in. She could phone him from the street and tell him that she’d meet him at the restaurant. Going from Elliot to Jim to Elliot and Jim and Susan without a break was bullshit. But, seriously, where was she going to go? It was too cold out to sit on a bench. The bar next door to the restaurant was bleak and depressing, an old men’s dive, and the bar inside the restaurant would be a mob scene of people pushing for tables. She could stand idly flipping through magazines at the newsstand across Broadway, but that would mean accommodating the line of men squeezing past her to look at porn at the rear of the store. She slammed the apartment door behind her and started down the five flights of stairs. Too often in winter she failed to leave the apartment before sunset. It worked hell on her mood.

  Outside, the wind was blowing hard. She wasn’t wearing a hat. She tightened her scarf around her neck, tugged up her coat collar, lowered her head, and walked toward Broadway with her fists punched down into her pockets and her purse clinched under her arm. If only it would snow. But when did it ever snow anymore? Hat or no hat, she wouldn’t have minded a few snowflakes swirling down through the city light to settle on her head. When she’d been a girl, snow had lain on the ground all winter. That was what she remembered. Of course, she was thinking of the farm, of New England, not New York. So what was her point? These days, it rarely snowed the way it had back in the years before her parents died. The snowfalls she remembered from her childhood seemed lost to time and, she supposed, the changing climate.

  She hurried along as quickly as she could in her high heels. At Broadway, she turned uptown and passed the florist’s, where the pretty shop assistant had just come out from the back with the flowers—flowers for her, for Kate—in their vase.

  “Here we are,” the girl announced to Jim. She extended her arms and held the flowers out in front of her, presenting them. Before he could move to take them from her, however—it was the medication, warping his mind and delaying his reaction—she heaved the arrangement onto the counter and explained that she’d had to search high and low for an extra-heavy vase, one that was not only broad enough but also deep enough to properly anchor the bouquet.

  Jim and the girl admired her creation. With its stalks vertical and free to fan out or droop down, the bouquet’s real immensity became apparent. Roses with their thorns stuck out everywhere, and the lilies, whose columnar stalks the girl had bunched at the center, shot up through the top of the bouquet like, like, like—like insane trees towering above some insane world, he thought. He was light-headed when he spoke. “I love the way you’ve used ribbons and bows to tie the blossoms into clusters. It looks like a bouquet made of little bouquets! There’s so much to see. I can smell the lilies. Don’t you want to inhale that scent? Do you know the painter Fragonard? Do you know Boucher? Look at Boucher’s flowers. They’re practically obscene. There might be a Boucher hanging at the Frick.”

  He went for it. “Do you like museums?”

  “When I have time.”

  “I could show you the Frick.” He grinned widely and shrugged his shoulders and tipped his head, and she mirrored him, shrugging her own shoulders and making a funny face.

  “You’re very good at what you do,” he added, and she said, “Thank you,” then asked him, “How would you like to pay?”

  He tried to imagine what he’d be forced to spend. Whatever the amount, it would be too great. The bills from his recent hospitalizations were mainly covered by Kate’s insurance—the policy was hers; they’d gone ahead and got married in order for him to take advantage of it during this protracted (Kate’s word, sometimes used sarcastically) time of crisis in his life—but there were nevertheless many outstanding fees, brand-new bills arriving every other week, plus the only partly reimbursable expense of the aftercare program he attended across town, on the Upper East Side.

  “Let’s charge it.” He handed the girl his debit card.

  She swiped the card. “It’s not going through,” she said. After passing the card through the machine a second time, she apologized. “This doesn’t automatically mean that there’s a problem with the account,” she said. “You’ll have to contact your bank. Would you like to try another account?”

  “I don’t have another. Tell me the total?”

  “Three hundred and forty-one dollars and sixty cents.”

  His anxiety spiked and he took a breath. How could a bouquet of flowers be that much?

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt around for cash, but what was the point?

  “Hold on a minute,” he said.

  What to do, what to do? He was going to have to call his wife. Was he going to have to call her? He was going to have to call her. He took out his phone and dialed—in that moment he was glad that he had his meds on board—and right away Kate picked up and hollered, “Where are you? I’m at the restaurant with Susan! Elliot is out parking the car. Did you go to your therapy?”

  “Could you not shout, Kate?”

  “It’s goddamn packed in here!”

  “I need to talk to you, privately,” he said, and turned away from the shopgirl. But there was no way, in the small space, to keep the girl from overhearing, so he put his hand over the phone, leaned toward her, and whispered, “I’ll be right back,” then stepped out of the shop, stood on the sidewalk in the freezing wind, and slowly, deliberately humiliated himself, saying to Kate, “I stopped on my way home and bought you flowers, but the bank account isn’t cooperating with my card for some reason and now I’m stuck at the florist’s because I don’t have enough cash on me, and I think the problem is simply that—shit, I don’t know what the problem is, I must not have kept my eye on the balance, and it’s possible that we’re overdrawn. I know we’ve talked about this. But it’s not a serious problem, I promise.”

  “Oh, Jim. Are you spending? How much have you spent?” Kate cried, and he winced.

  He said, “Is Susan there?”

  “Do you not hear a word I say? She’s right here! We’re drinking Manhattans. Are you coming? We’re waiting for you. Why do you want to talk to Susan? Jim, are you spending our money?”

  “I don’t want to talk to Susan. I’d just prefer that this conversation be private between the two of us.”

  “Please, Jim, as if everyone we know doesn’t already know everything there is to know?”

  “I’m not—I am not spending our money.”

  “You’re agitated.”

  “Why are you diagnosing me? I’m not agitated. I wanted to surprise you with flowers. But clearly it was just another of my many mistakes. I’ll think twice next time. Everything I do is unwanted.”

  “Stop it,” Kate said to him then.

  Through the phone he could hear sounds from the restaurant bar, voices and other noises in the after-work crush. Then the wind came up, and the only sound he heard was the phone’s own static. The wind died, and Kate’s voice was saying, “Elliot is here now, and Lorenzo is clearing us a table. Let me talk to someone about the flowers.”

  In this way he was forced to trudge back into the shop, hold the phone out, and say to the girl, “She wants to talk to you.”

  The girl hesitated, then reached out and let him pass the phone into her hand.

  “Hello?” she said into his phone.

  He retreated to a corner of the store. Joking aside, he didn’t c
are to loiter about, smelling the flowers, while the girl wrote down his wife’s American Express number. He would never learn the girl’s name, not now, Kate would see to that, he told himself as he peered out from his hiding place behind a leafy potted tree. He saw the shop’s buckets of flowers and the refrigerators in a row, and the door leading to the back, but where was the girl? He heard her laugh in response to some remark Kate must’ve made, and realized that she was standing behind the bouquet. “Oh, don’t I just know that about men and their important purchases!” she exclaimed.

  What was Kate saying to her? Was he being made fun of? Was she calling him bipolar?

  He had a problem with anxiety and suicidality, and, as Kate had reminded him in their conversation a moment earlier, everyone knew about his previous autumn’s sojourns on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and his games of chicken—no, not games, not at all, really—on the fire escape outside their bedroom window.

  He didn’t want to think about any of that. Yet it was the reason he was now crouched behind a ficus, eavesdropping while a girl he wanted to fuck got treated to an earful of Kate—on his phone! And what was the big problem, anyway, if a handful of times on his way home from day care, as he sometimes called his ongoing treatment, he’d got excited about life and jumped off the crosstown bus at Fifth Avenue and run into Bergdorf Goodman and ridden the elevator to the second floor and tried on clothes until closing? Was that unhealthy? His doctors didn’t think he was manic-depressive; in fact, they’d ruled it out. Kate had been reading the clinical literature, though, and felt autodidactically certain that the Payne Whitney professionals were minimizing something in plain sight: His death-trip history, considered alongside the “conspicuous” spending on coats, ties, shirts, and shoes, represented, at the least, she thought, a mixed-state depression. “Why don’t they have you on olanzapine?” she’d got in the habit of asking him. He begged her not to interfere with his treatment, and suggested—thinking of her father’s death and the forfeiture of the family farm in Massachusetts, when she was a teenager—that her consuming anxiety about bankruptcy, her emphasis on this as a potentially mortal trauma, might have less to do with his new handmade suits than with the ways in which his almost dying had reactivated an old mourning in her.

  He peered from behind the ficus. He was wearing a ridiculous cashmere overcoat, and his suit today was a medium-gray flannel herringbone. It featured, on the jacket, minimal shoulder padding, dual vents, and a graceful, three-rolled-to-two-button stance (his current favorite lapel style), and, on the pants, single reverse pleats and one-and-a-quarter-inch-cuffed trouser legs. Why would a man ever not cuff his trousers? He kept a single jacket-sleeve button open on the left, another open on the right. He didn’t look like blown credit. Did he?

  Kate was going to kill him. She was mad enough to kill him. That was a fact. What was he doing, charging expensive flowers for no reason on an average night in the middle of the week when they were already committed to a crippling tab—it was sure to be a huge bar bill, by evening’s close—for dinner with Elliot and Susan? But, Kate thought, as she sat with their friends, waiting for him at a tiny table near the back of the restaurant, this was how it went with her husband: He made the gestures; she absorbed the costs. “How awful this all is,” she sighed. She was on the phone to the girl at the florist’s. Kate hadn’t meant to be audible, not to the girl, and certainly not to Elliot, who would take her vexation over Jim as a cue to call her up the next day and argue for more afternoons at the hotel.

  She’d been going once or sometimes twice a week to the Upper East Side to meet Elliot at the Lowell Hotel, on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park. She rode the bus. Typically, she arrived first. She got the room key, went up, and showered; if Elliot was delayed at the lab and the day was growing dark, she might unlock the minibar and make a Manhattan or an approximation of a Manhattan, then recline naked by the window and look north toward the East Nineties, Carnegie Hill, where her mother, an only child, like Kate, had lived before marrying her father and moving to the farm.

  Manhattans had been her mother’s drink. Unlike her mother, Kate tried to keep herself to three an evening. At Lorenzo’s that night, she was ahead of pace, finishing her second before having eaten a bite. She held her glass in one hand and her phone in the other, listening hard through the restaurant noise as the girl at the florist’s recited back her AmEx number. Elliot sat quietly beside her. He had his arms crossed, and his chair pushed back at an angle to make room for his legs. Susan had got up from the table; she’d announced to Kate—sounding well on the way to being tight—“Kate, you’re my best friend, but I don’t know how you drink such a strong drink.” To Kate and Elliot together, she’d added, “Will you two do me a big giant favor? Will you snag Lorenzo and ask him to bring me a Cosmo?”

  “Don’t utter a word to me about my husband,” Kate warned Elliot, once Susan had gone to the bathroom.

  Into the phone, to the girl, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you. I was talking to somebody else.”

  Meanwhile, in the women’s room, Susan was on her own phone, calling Jim’s number from a stall.

  It was the girl who answered, of course.

  “Hello, can you hold?” the girl said. The line went briefly dead. After a pause, the girl came back and said, “May I ask who is calling?”

  “May I ask who’s answering?”

  “Hold, please.”

  “Sir?” the girl called out to Jim. She looked this way and that for him. Where had he gone? The shop closed at eight. It was nearly closing time. “A woman is calling you!”

  “I’m here! I’m right here!” he answered from behind his tree.

  “He’ll be with you in one second,” he heard her promise into the phone. After that, there was a pause, before, in a businesslike tone, the girl resumed with Kate. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this again. Would you mind verifying the last five digits and the expiration date?”

  Back when he was in the hospital—in the past six months, there had been three emergency-room visits and two locked-ward admissions—he had spent day after day lying on a mattress, crying. His doctors (along with the psychiatric nurses and the social workers who led the daily therapy groups) had encouraged him to uncurl himself from the fetal position and try, at least try, to watch television or play a board game with the other patients, but this had mostly proved too great a challenge. There had been times when, walking to or from the bathroom or the water fountain or the patients’ common room, or standing in line to receive his medications at the nurses’ station, or even simply sitting upright on the table in the examining room, he’d had the strong sensation that the air through which he moved was gathering around him and becoming—really, no word was sufficient to name it—substantive. Its weight pressed in on him. This hurt, it hurt terribly, yet when he tried to locate the source of the pain he could not: It came, as he knew, only from himself. On the mattress, shattered and sobbing over Kate and their messed-up love, he’d lain crushed.

  “Sir?”

  The girl’s voice seemed to echo through the shop. He peeked up. When had she come out from behind the bouquet? He could see her standing on the other side of the tree. She was looking at him through the leaves.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I maybe—I need a minute.” His mouth was dry and his heart was beating fast. That could be his meds.

  “There’s someone who wants to talk to you. Do you think you can take the call? Would you like to try?” She held his phone out with one hand, reaching toward him through the branches.

  He had to reach into the tree to meet her hand. He was sweating.

  “Hello?” he said into the phone.

  “What the hell, Jim?” Susan said to him from the women’s-room toilet at Lorenzo’s.

  “Susan, how are you?” he said.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all here, Jim. We’re waiting and waiting for you.
”

  “I’m doing my best to get there. Have you ordered yet? What are the specials? What looks good?”

  “Kate is beside herself. She says the two of you are bankrupt. She says you’ve spent all the money.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Jim. Please, don’t lie to me.” She was sniffling, beginning to weep, lightly.

  “Stop crying, stop crying, baby,” he whispered into the phone. Then he laid his hand over the receiver and said to the girl, who was still peering down at him through the leaves of the tree, “You’ll have to excuse me one more time.” With a powerful effort of will, he stood upright and came out from behind the ficus. He didn’t dare look at the girl, but he heard her telling him, as he pushed painfully past her toward the door, that it looked like his wife’s American Express card wasn’t working, either—and was there any way for him to pay for the flowers?

  He waved his hand, motioning that he’d return. He stepped out into the cold on Broadway. He pulled up his overcoat’s shawl collar. The door to the florist’s closed behind him.

  Back at their table for four, Kate and Elliot had hit a snag.

  “Let me talk to him,” Elliot said. He had his elbows on the table. He’d drunk almost none of his Scotch.

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Give me your phone.” He held out his hand.

  “I’m on hold.”

  “Kate,” he said.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “As you wish,” he said, leaning back in his chair, and she burst out at him, “How can you act like this? You’re a doctor. How can you be so unfeeling?”

  He said, “What does my being a doctor have to do with my feelings?” (She rolled her eyes at this, but he didn’t appear to notice.) He went on, “I may be a doctor, but I’m not your husband’s doctor.”