The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  “His name is Jim, remember?”

  “I think you’re drunk. That’s what I think.”

  He got up from the table, patted his pockets—checking for his own phone—and said, “Goddamn it, I do research. I don’t treat patients. He has excellent doctors. I’ll call him myself.”

  When he’d gone and Kate was alone, Lorenzo arrived with Susan’s Cosmopolitan.

  “Everybody has gone away and left you,” Lorenzo said, and Kate chirped back, “Everybody’s gone!”

  “Let me bring you another Manhattan.” Lorenzo placed Susan’s cocktail on the table and picked up Kate’s empty glass. Kate managed a little smile. She held her phone to her ear. “Jim? Jim, are you there?” she whispered.

  Six blocks downtown, Jim was on the line to Susan. “I’m here, I’m here with you, baby,” he assured her. In fact, he wasn’t thinking of sleeping with her again. Oh, he’d loved sleeping with Susan—that wasn’t the problem. But that evening his body was compressing: The weight of the air was on him, flattening his libido and his trust in humankind.

  “Susan,” he said. “Susan.”

  “What is it?” she said. Her voice filled the stall. “What is happening? Is it happening? Is it happening to you now? I’m scared. What do I do?”

  “Susan,” he said. “Susan.”

  He explained to her that in a few minutes he was going to calmly walk back inside the florist’s and steal a mysterious and beautiful bouquet that he and an angel had made for Kate. He’d helped the angel, he pointed out. He was feeling honest. He acknowledged to Susan that he was speaking metaphorically when it came to angels—in order to seem aboveboard and keep her trust. He needed her to be cool when he entered the restaurant, he told her. Then he ended the call and switched over to Kate.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, I love you,” she said. She was alone at their table.

  She said, “Have you talked to Elliot?”

  He said, “I haven’t heard from him.”

  Elliot, in the meantime, had been unable to get through, Jim’s phone lines having been taken up by both their wives. He’d left two messages already, one saying, “Jim, call me, all right?”; the other, “Jim, will you call me?” His third attempt got through, but Jim didn’t answer. He heard the beeping, plucked the phone away from his ear, glanced at it, saw who was calling, and said, to Kate, “It’s him. There is no way that I want to speak to him right now.”

  “I understand,” she said. Then she said, “Just get here, dear, and have dinner with us. We all need food. We need to eat.”

  He said, “Has he taken care with you, since I’ve been gone?”

  “Gone?” she said.

  “I don’t know how else to put it.”

  She asked, “Will you stay where you are, until people come?”

  “Don’t send an ambulance,” he said to her.

  He put his phone in his pocket. He turned and faced the door to the flower shop. A few people swept past him on the windy avenue—or so it seemed; his thoughts were with the pain beneath his temple. He wanted to put it out. He could imagine different ways to do this. This was how it was when his mind turned to high open windows or unlocked rooftop fire doors or breaks in the chain-link fences lining bridge walkways.

  He took a step forward. The door was made partly of glass, and he could see into the shop. It occurred to him that it would be easy to break the window with his fist and deliberately cut up the veins in his arms. Instead, he put his hand on the doorframe and pushed. He stuck his head inside. He was acting guiltily, though he knew there was no reason to, not at the florist’s—he hadn’t done anything yet. Still, he snuck in, ashamed.

  The girl was nowhere in sight. The bouquet looked bigger than it had the last time he’d sized it up. How would he manage to get it up Broadway in his trembling hands? Beside it on the table—careful, he had to be careful—were the girl’s pruning shears, as well as regular scissors and a small sharp knife.

  He told himself to let those things lie.

  Uptown at the restaurant, Lorenzo brought Kate her drink. She asked for bread, and apologized to him for taking so long to order dinner. “We’ll all be here together soon,” she sighed.

  She was right about that. Elliot had given up trying to reach Jim, and the cold had driven him back inside. He was threading his way down the aisle to their table. Susan, too, would return, as soon as she had peed. Pride had made her unable to while on the phone.

  And that left Jim, who had no desire to become a thief. Might he, instead, offer something in barter for the flowers? His wristwatch wasn’t worth much. His overcoat was brand-new, and cost well more than the watch and the bouquet combined. He decided to leave an IOU, promising to come back another day with money, or if not with actual money, then with a clear idea of when one or another of his or his wife’s credit cards might again be active and usable.

  But when he tried to hold a pen in his hand, he could not; and when he tried to focus his eyes on the piece of paper lying beside the cash register—it was the scrap of a receipt on which the girl had penciled Kate’s American Express information—he found that his mind was frantic. This was his disorder. This was the descent. He crumpled the receipt and shoved it into his pocket. He reached for the bouquet. The girl had put water in the vase.

  Had you been walking downtown on Broadway that February night at a little past eight, you might have seen a man hurrying toward you with a great concrescence of blooms. You might have noticed that he did not even pause for traffic signals, but charged across streets against the lights; and so you might rightly have supposed that he could not see through the flowers that he held (doing what he could to keep clear of thorns) at arm’s length before him. Whenever a siren sounded in the distance—and, once, beating helicopter blades in the night sky caused him to sprint up a side street—he dropped into a furtive, crouching gait. His balance was off; he was paranoid about police. Windblown flowers lashed at his head. Seen from a distance, he might have brought to mind an old, out-of-favor stereotype: the savage in a headdress. But as he came closer, you would have noticed his European clothes, his stylish haircut; and you might have asked yourself, “What’s wrong with that man?”

  Had you stepped to the side as he hurtled past, tightened your scarf securely around your neck, and continued on your way, you might next have encountered a young woman on a street corner, distraught and coatless. “Did you happen to see a man carrying a bouquet of flowers?” she might have asked in a startled voice, and you would have looked away from her bare, pale legs, pointed upwind, and told her, “He went that way.” By then, the first snowflakes would have been swirling through the caverns between the apartment buildings, down onto the thoroughfare.

  Jim looked up and saw the snow on his way into Lorenzo’s. For an instant, he took it as an omen—of what, though? He pulled hard on the restaurant door, forcing it open, and stumbled with his tattered flowers into the dark realm between the door and the velvet drapes that had been hung to keep the cold from sweeping in over diners at the front of the room.

  He parted the curtains. “Pardon me,” he said to the people seated near the entrance. Long- and short-stemmed flowers alike had snagged on the drapes. Now a waiter approached—and here came Lorenzo, too, calling, in his soft, ristoratore’s voice, “Ciao, James. Ciao. I cannot call you Jim, you know.”

  “Lorenzo, ciao,” Jim said. The waiter was busy tugging on the curtains. Lorenzo lent a hand. “This way, try this way,” Lorenzo instructed. Jim spun left then right, enshrouding himself—and the bouquet—within the folds of drapery fabric. There followed a flurry of petals. The rose thorns came loose; the bouquet’s topmost stems sprung free. He tumbled out into the room.

  “I’m good, I’m fine,” he said, nodding reassuringly (he hoped) to Lorenzo, the waiter, the people who’d turned in their seats to stare.

  “What has happened
to you, James?” Lorenzo pulled his white silk pocket square from his breast pocket and reached around the yellow and pink and blue and white flowers to dab at Jim’s forehead.

  “I ran all the way here,” Jim said.

  “You’re bleeding,” Lorenzo told him. Jim saw the blood spotting Lorenzo’s handkerchief.

  Lorenzo said, “You have a lot of scratches. You look like you’ve been in a fight with some squirrels or something.” He laughed, nicely.

  “I’ve—I have been fighting, Lorenzo. Not with squirrels. Roses,” Jim specified, and Lorenzo said, “Ah, of course. Let me take them.”

  He spoke to the waiter. “Paul, will you please take these from James?” To Jim, he added, “We will bring them to your table.”

  “No, no,” Jim said. He explained to Lorenzo that the flowers were a gift for Kate, and that he needed to present them himself. This was crucial, he told Lorenzo. He clutched the vase. His pants were wet from water that had sloshed over the rim. Water stained his shoes. He could see tiny snags marking the sleeves of his overcoat and the front of his suit. How frustrating, after having labored so hard to avoid the thorns. His clothes would have to go to a reweaver, he thought. Then his thinking disintegrated into bitter resignation. Everything he touched was ruined. The flowers were almost destroyed.

  Nonetheless, he bore them down the aisle. Here and there, people ducked forward in their chairs, or to the side, letting him through. As he progressed toward the back, the room quieted. People put down their silverware, their wineglasses; Jim felt eyes watching him.

  “Eat! Live while you can!” he wanted to proclaim to the crowd. But what did he have to teach anyone? He was a thief, a common criminal—worse. He’d stolen a bouquet to give to the love of his life.

  When she saw him, she was filled with happiness. She’d had a lot to drink—but, well, it wasn’t that alone.

  “Kate,” he said. She stood, and he lurched toward her. Elliot and Susan stood as well. They flanked Kate, who came out from between them—not unlike Jim, she was unsteady on her feet—saying, “I’m sorry, excuse me,” as she tacked her way through the sea of tables.

  They met near the bathrooms. The bar was to their right. Kate raised her open hands to wipe the blood from his face. Blood had run down his neck, and stained the collar of his shirt. “These are for you,” he told her.

  She was quietly crying, whispering, “They’re beautiful, beautiful.” Then her crying began in force, and she wailed, “You made it, oh, you made it, we were all so scared, and I felt so lost.”

  “I’m here,” he said, and his own tears started. He wanted to tell her that everything would be better, that he would be better, that one day soon he would work again, and start paying some bills, and take the burden off her shoulders; that they would be able, at last, to leave the little apartment with the busted plumbing. He wanted to tell her how much he needed her.

  But he could see, out of the corner of his eye, his horrid reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He looked down at Kate’s hands, the blood smeared across her palms. And he saw the restaurant-goers and the waiters and waitresses and busboys, who, not knowing what to make of the bleeding and the crying and the broken lilies arcing over Jim’s and Kate’s heads like some insane wedding canopy, had come from the kitchen or the bar to stand mutely around them. The pain in his body grew, and the words that spilled out of him were not words of love. Or they were. He spoke to his wife, as he spoke to the people gathered.

  “Don’t you see, Kate? Don’t you see? It’s time for me to go. I can’t do this anymore. I have no place here. I don’t belong. I hurt so. You can live and be happy. That will never be true for me.”

  “No, no, baby,” she wept at him.

  Someone touched his arm. It was Elliot, who’d come up behind him. He said to Jim, “Let’s get in the car.”

  Lorenzo was there, too. Kate said to Jim, “Honey, let Lorenzo take the flowers. Just for now,” and he did.

  A moment later, Lorenzo came back with a wet cloth. Kate used it to wipe her eyes and to clean Jim’s face and her hands. She tied the belt around his overcoat. She said, “There.”

  They went out of the restaurant, the four of them. Susan let Jim lean on her, and Elliot steadied Kate. On the way out the door, they heard Lorenzo, behind them, telling his patrons, “Everything is all right. Our friend has had a bad time. Please, let me buy everyone a drink.”

  On Broadway, the wind had died, and the air seemed to have warmed. They walked out into new snow. And, wouldn’t you know, Jim did wrap his arm around Susan’s shoulders, and Elliot ducked down close to Kate, listening to her mumble whatever it was she had to say to him.

  At the garage, Jim and Kate got into the backseat of Elliot’s car. Susan sat beside Elliot. Elliot started the engine, turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers. Thump, thump, thump. He steered east. During the trip, Jim took his belt from around his waist. He gave Kate his scarf and his phone and his keys and all his money, which amounted to about thirty dollars.

  Later, she would get on her knees on the emergency-room floor and extract the laces from his shoes. A nurse would come, then another, and a doctor promising sleeping pills.

  By that time, after midnight, Elliot and Susan would have driven up the FDR Drive and out of Manhattan, through the Bronx, and into Westchester County.

  “You can go home now, if you’d like,” the doctor said to Kate. “We won’t let anything happen to him.”

  He gave Kate a plastic garbage bag, into which she put Jim’s overcoat and his suit jacket. She would use the last of his money for her crosstown taxi, and for milk and cereal at the Korean market near the apartment.

  In the deep of the night, they came for him. A male nurse helped him into a wheelchair, and then pushed him through the white labyrinth of hallways and waited for the elevator.

  Margaret, one of the night nurses, met him on the ward. She said, “Hello, Mr. Davis. You’re back with us again, I see.” She asked, “Do you think you can walk?” She gave him Ativan and a paper cup of water, and watched while he swallowed. Then she showed him to a room of his own.

  HE KNEW

  When he felt good, or even vaguely a little bit good, and sometimes even when he was not, by psychiatric standards, well at all, but nonetheless had a notion that he might soon be coming out of the Dread, as he called it, he insisted on taking Alice to Bergdorf Goodman, and afterward for a walk along Fifty-seventh Street, to Madison, where they would turn—this had become a tradition—and work their way north through the East Sixties and Seventies, into the low Eighties, touring the expensive shops. He was an occasional clotheshorse himself, of course, at times when he was not housebound in a bathrobe.

  And it was one or the other, increasingly. The apartment or the square! He should have bought a place when he could have—he and Alice rented in the Village—back when he worked all the time instead of only rarely. But no, that wasn’t the right attitude. Keep moving, he said to himself.

  She was half a block ahead, across the street already, carrying her bags, which held the simple white blouse and the French lotions they’d bought for her. She was waiting for him to catch up. The light changed, and he crossed the street. He had a young wife. She didn’t yet know what life had in store for her. Or did she?

  He’d long ago been a competitive runner, and he sometimes thought about resuming his sport at the veteran level. He’d been worrying about his heart, and it would do him good. But he’d never do it. Or maybe he would.

  She called out, “How do you get to stay so handsome?,” and he was in love again. He trotted up the sidewalk and said, “Ha, that’s nice of you, but I’m overweight.”

  “Who cares? So am I,” she proclaimed. “Look at my ass! I need to get exercise.”

  “I love your ass,” he said. “What do you see?” They were standing in front of a boutique. She laughed. “We already have enough Italian sheets!” There it was, the volume rising on the last word, her shrill crescendo.

&nb
sp; It was about the time of day when they should be choking down a few pills. “We’ll need to find some fluids before too long,” he said.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and gently hugged her. She arranged her shopping bags in one hand and wrapped her other, free arm too tightly around his waist, steering him up the block. They didn’t fit well, walking so close—she swung her butt, and their hips collided—and eventually they drew apart and held hands. She had long dark hair and round brown eyes, which, when he looked into them, seemed to have other eyes behind them. What did he mean by that? It was a feeling, hard to shape into words.

  Thank God the money was holding out. He wasn’t too worried about their shopping. It had been his idea, to begin with; it couldn’t be laid at her feet, and, in fact, he wasn’t always spending on her. To do so, as was his intention that afternoon, might implicate him in a father stereotype, it was true, but who cared? It was a bright, cold Saturday, the last Saturday in October—Halloween—and the light seemed already to be fading toward night. Stephen had got himself shaved and outdoors for the first time in two weeks, and women wearing heels and men in European clothes were showing themselves in the uptown air.

  “Can we stop here?” she said. They’d arrived at the lingerie store where, every year, before Christmas—usually at the last minute on Christmas Eve, at the end of one of his eleventh-hour gift-gathering runs—he came to buy her tap pants or a camisole, just as he’d done for his former wife on Christmases in years past. Marina, how was she? Was she still with Jeff?

  “Let’s go in and get you a pair of fishnets,” he said, and they went in—the store was narrow—in single file. Two salesgirls were there to help them. One walked around the counter, toward Stephen, who raised his hands in the air, as if to prevent her from coming too close. Alice could easily be made upset if she thought she saw intimacy springing up between Stephen and another woman, even an attentive shopgirl or waitress, and he had learned to play down these innocent encounters. He announced to the women that he was shopping for his wife, and then put his arm around Alice and pulled her up beside him. “We’ll need a tall size,” he said.