The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  “Yes,” the lion growled, though not very fiercely.

  Here came the father, calling, “Baby girl, baby girl, where are you going? Don’t run off! Come take Daddy’s hand. Leave those people alone.”

  The man was about thirty-five or maybe thirty-eight or nine years old, forty or so, and his wife was coming up behind.

  “Sorry about that, please excuse us,” the lion’s father said.

  The man’s wife looked plain, with short brown hair and a small chin, though, on the other hand, she was attractive. “Don’t be a bother,” she instructed her daughter. She was English. Both she and her husband were conservatively dressed. The man was frankly, openly appraising Alice. Did this entitled young punk think that greater age made Stephen weak? He said to the parents, “I was noticing what a finely made costume your little girl is wearing. She looks so ferocious in it, I was certain she was a boy.”

  “Girls can’t be ferocious, then?” the mother said, and her mildly accusing tone made Stephen unsure how to take this. Was it a reprimand, and, if so, was it also a flirtation?

  A low mood was creeping on him. “Of course girls can be ferocious,” Stephen replied. “My name is Stephen.” He held out his hand and said, “And this is my ferocious wife, Alice.” Alice was still leaning on his shoulder, with her right arm wrapped around his neck. Her body, against his, seemed to be sliding toward the pavement.

  “I’m Margaret,” the English wife said, and her American husband followed: “Robert. It’s nice to meet you.”

  The mother said, “Claire, can you say hello to these nice people?” Stephen felt a sharp tremor in Alice, and he thought, Fuck, why that name?

  Together, as if on cue, they all peered down at the daughter. The girl was slowly turning, spinning in a circle inside the cage of legs that had formed around her when the adults squared off to shake hands.

  “Don’t spill your candy, dear,” her mother said.

  The lion girl looked at her mom. She checked in with Dad. She seemed quite drawn to Alice, whose gaze she held a long moment.

  “Claire, please say hello,” her mother said again.

  “Claire!” her father ordered.

  Stephen could feel Alice clinging to him and pulling away at the same time.

  “Hello,” the little girl said, and Stephen loudly blurted, “And how old are you?”

  “Five.”

  “Five!” he exclaimed.

  “We’re in kindergarten, aren’t we?” her mother said to her, and went on, “It takes her a while to feel comfy with strangers.”

  “I understand,” Stephen said, and wondered what Margaret and Robert were thinking of him and Alice. What picture did they make, this older man worrisomely buoying up his sedated young wife? His anxiety was on the rise, the sun was setting in earnest, the temperature was falling, and the wind was building. He might need to sneak one or two of Alice’s Valiums. He spoke for them as a couple. “It’s awfully nice to have met you and your lovely daughter, but we should get going.”

  And to Alice he proposed, brightly, “Hey, we’re looking for a hat for you, remember?”

  But before they could make their getaway Margaret announced to her husband, “Oh, Rob! I know who he is!”

  “You were on that TV show,” she said to Stephen. “Am I right? What was the show called? Was that you?”

  “It may have been me, yes.”

  “You were that friend of the main character who was always causing mischief for everyone.”

  “Get out of my way,” Stephen said.

  “What?” the husband said.

  “The show was called Get Out of My Way,” Stephen explained, and added, “That was a long time ago. I’m amazed that you recognized me.”

  “You were very funny.”

  “Thank you.”

  To her husband, Margaret said, “Do you remember that show, dear?” And he answered, “No, I don’t.”

  “He’s not much for television,” she said to Stephen, in a low, confiding tone. “Are you on something now?” she asked, and he thought to make a joke about his meds.

  “No. I’ve been on a hiatus.”

  “Refueling your creativity?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And are you an actress?” Margaret was addressing Alice. Stephen said, “Alice, she’s asking you.”

  Sleepy Alice replied, “Oh, no.”

  “My wife is also between things,” he said, and then, stupidly, he remarked to Alice, “We’re taking some time to enjoy our lives, right?” He gave her a squeeze, and she glared at him.

  Later, after they’d finally got free and resumed their trek up Madison Avenue, she accused him: “You were flirting with her.”

  “What? I wasn’t.”

  “She’s the type for you. Refueling your creativity.”

  “Come on, let’s get you home.”

  “I don’t have a home!”

  “Yes, you do, you have a home with me.”

  They’d been lost in these woods before.

  “How many pills did you take, Alice? Will you tell me how many pills you took? You took more than five, Alice. Please don’t lie to me. How many?”

  She wasn’t talking. They passed shop after shop, but she didn’t want him to go into any of them. She’d pulled away at last and was walking faster, out ahead of him now, fleeing. He buttoned up his coat and pulled off his scarf—it was the blue scarf that she’d given him in the first year of their marriage; he loved it and wore it all the time in the colder months—and ran up beside her and wrapped it around her neck. He said, emphatically, “Alice, nothing ever happened between me and Claire. Nothing was ever going to happen,” which was true, though Alice would not believe it. Alice had met Claire and found her to be very beautiful. She suspected that Stephen would be more comfortable, more at home, with a woman closer to him in age—Stephen and Claire had gone to college together. Alice had conceived of Stephen’s betrayal in the days before her breakdown, and, once in the hospital, when she’d been unable to simply go to a phone in the night and call him, the idea of their affair had grown in her; to this day, he could not say with certainty whether she’d tried to kill herself over her anticipated abandonment or whether that deranging fantasy had been a symptom of some deeper despair. It haunted them still.

  Alice said, “Don’t blow up at me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re shouting.”

  “Alice, I love you! Please try to take that in!” he shouted, and then quickly glanced around to see if he’d been heard by people passing by. In a lowered voice he said, “Why must we always return to this?”

  “You were sleeping with her when I was on a locked ward! I thought my life was over! Where were you?” she pleaded.

  “I was with you every day, Alice. I visited you every single day.”

  “And then you went to her!” she said angrily. Now he could hear and feel her terror, and he, too, began to feel frightened, because he knew where this fight could take them.

  “Alice, stop this,” he commanded.

  “Leave me, just leave me already,” she cried, and he watched as she ran away, up the block and across Seventy-ninth Street.

  “Alice!” he called. But she was still going, a dark shape charging unsteadily up the street with her shopping bags.

  It was the time of day when the lights from apartment buildings and stores began to shine brightly. Through the pools of light spilling out of shop doors came people in costume, not only children but adults, on their way to Halloween parties and bars. He forged ahead against a tide of ghosts and pirates and sexy nurses from the spirit realm. He passed a shattered Marilyn Monroe, but could no longer see Alice in the distance. With hands trembling, he took her pills from his coat pocket, opened the lid, and shook out two. Did he need one or two? It was the same question he’d asked Alice earlier in the coffee shop.

  He put one in his mouth and another in his shirt pocket, in case. His mouth was parched from his own medications. He
held the pill under his tongue. Eventually it would dissolve. He had only to wait.

  He would wait at their bar. Maybe she was there already, he thought, as he turned the corner and left the avenue.

  The place was a carnival inside. Cardboard witches and crepe-paper bats hung from the ceiling, and candlelit jack-o’-lanterns had been set out on the marble surface of the bar. Everyone inside was costumed, to some degree, but in his agitation Stephen imagined that it was actually he, in his soft windowpane jacket and pressed shirt and woolen pants—he and not the dead and undead thronging about him, blocking his way—who was wearing a costume. Through the crowd he pushed, searching for her. Finally he gave up and went to the bar, where he leaned into a gathering of wraiths and ordered a bourbon from a pretty bartender with a blood-red slash impastoed darkly across her neck.

  The Valium was starting to help. He drank, and the alcohol burned his throat. When a seat became free, he took it immediately and ordered another bourbon, before locating his phone and dialing Alice’s number.

  “You can run a tab,” he told the bartender, and added, “I could use some water, too, when you get a minute.”

  Outside in the night, he thought, Alice would be walking, disoriented. She’d be feeling scorned. She would hear her phone ringing in her purse and know it was him, but she’d be unable to answer, though she badly wanted to. She’d be afraid of him pulling her back, afraid of going childless all her life and winding up a widow, like her mother, running from place to place and never stopping. He’d heard all of this played out before.

  Of course, he’d told her again and again that he wanted to have a baby with her. Why hadn’t it happened already? Why hadn’t they yet done it, like normal people?

  He pictured her gathering her coat around her and slumping on a town-house stoop, ignoring his calls, or, likely, though by now she knew better than to expect a helpful response, calling her mother.

  When he dialed her number for the fifth or sixth time, Alice answered. He told her that he was in their bar and felt desperate. “Come back,” he said. “Will you?”

  “Are you having a drink?” she asked.

  “I am,” he said. He pressed his phone hard against his ear. Loudly, above the bar chaos, he asked her, “Where are you? Do you know where you are? Do you need me to come get you?”

  “No,” she said. She hadn’t gone far; she was only around the corner from where they always wound up at the end of these days when he took her out and bought her gifts.

  She said that she was on her way, and a few minutes later he saw her appear behind him in the antique saloon mirror above the bar. She peered over the crowd of monsters and ghouls, his statuesque, distraught Alice, until she caught sight of him, his reflection and hers making contact in the glass.

  He stood and said, “Excuse me, excuse me,” to some skeletons and ghosts who were clustered between them. He opened a path for her and led her back to his seat. The goblin who’d been sitting beside him at the bar, when he saw Alice in her very real anguish, said, politely, “Oh, here, please, sit,” and Stephen said, “Thank you,” and nestled in beside his wife and let her rest her head on his shoulder. Gently, she cried. He wrapped one arm around her shoulders, and with his other hand he stroked her hair, pressing her close to him, so that her cheek lay against his heart. The bartender approached, but he gestured at her to give them time, another minute, then picked up his drink and brought it to Alice’s lips, saying, “Here, love, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  He let her drink, then put the glass on the bar and, with his fingers, softly massaged away the mascara that had run in streams down her cheeks. For a while, they stayed together like that. He ordered a drink for her, and another for himself, and, little by little, she regained herself and was able to sit up straight. “I’m sorry,” she said to him, and he said, “I’m sorry, too,” and she asked, “Can you forgive me for running away?” and he said, “Alice. I don’t want anyone but you.”

  “Do you mean it?” she said.

  “More than anything,” he answered. He said, “I know what we need to do. We need to take a vacation. We need to take our trip to the mountains. Let’s do it. If we go soon, we’ll still be in time to see the autumn leaves.”

  They talked about the trip, what kind of car they’d rent—not a convertible at this time of year, certainly—and about how many days they might spend in this place or that; and they wondered together what they’d find, after so many years away, of their old home towns and the houses in which they’d grown up. He held her hand tightly in his as they spoke, and she remembered something she’d never told him before. There had been a spring that made a little swimming hole in the woods behind her house. It had been a secret place for her—she hadn’t even told her brother about it. Would it still be there? Would it have been bulldozed for a strip mall or a retirement community or a new drive-through bank? Would she be able to find it again?

  “Let’s go there,” he said, and with that he left three twenty-dollar bills on the bar and stood up and put on his coat and helped her to stand. He buttoned her coat for her and wrapped his scarf in a knot around her collar. He picked up her bags and took her by the hand and led her carefully through the Halloween necropolis. They were the only two regular-looking people in the place.

  Outside, he hailed a cab. He held the door for her, then got in beside her and gave the address, and they rode down Fifth Avenue, past Central Park and the Plaza and Tiffany & Co., and Cartier and Rockefeller Center and Saks, down through the Forties and the Thirties and the Twenties, to Washington Square Park, the very bottom of the avenue, and west from there into the Village. She leaned on him as they climbed the four flights to their walk-up. He unlocked and pushed open the door. He turned on a light and guided her through the living room and into their bedroom, where he turned on the little lamp beside the bed. He took her coat and sat her on the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor in front of her. He started tugging off her clothes—first her shoes, then her skirt and her stockings. “Raise your arms, baby,” he said, and pulled her blouse up and over her head. He unsnapped her bra and took that, too. He helped her to lie down. He pulled the covers over her, and then undressed himself, switched off the lamp, and went unclothed into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, absently touching and spinning the gold ring on his finger. After a while, he got up and turned off the living-room light and made his way quietly back to her in the dark. He raised the covers and got into bed beside her and brought her close, spooning, so that he could cup her breasts in his hands and feel the length of her body against his.

  In the morning, he told himself before falling asleep, they would sit naked beside each other, resting against pillows, drinking coffee in bed—his black, hers with milk—and he would speak to her openly and forthrightly about getting his acting career back on track; and before long they would kiss, and when they made love he would drive hard into her and come, hoping, hoping for her pregnancy, for the child, their son, perhaps—a boy like him!—and believing as best he could that their family was drawing close, was near at last.

  EVER SINCE

  Ever since his wife had left him—but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop—Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality and become the sort of lurking man who, say, at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close, listening in while gazing out vaguely over their heads in order to seem distracted and inattentive, waiting for the conversation to wind down, so that he can weigh in gloomily and summarize whatever has just been said.

  He was at it again.

  “What you’re saying, if I’ve heard you right, is that the current rates of city government spending will eventually bankrupt the public schools.” He was speaking to a group of young parents—presumably, that’s what t
hey were—at a book-publication party for a novelist he’d never read. He’d come with his friend, his date, he should say, who worked for the novelist’s publisher. He added, “My ex-wife, well, not my wife, but, you know, she might as well have been, taught eighth grade in the Bronx for two years.”

  “Really?” a woman in the group asked. The man next to Jonathan turned sideways, as if he were a door swinging open to let him in.

  Jonathan stepped forward. “Yes. She found it exhausting but exhilarating. She loved her students but always felt at war with the administration. Finally, she quit. It made her depressed.”

  “I can see how it might be depressing to teach in the New York public schools,” the man who’d moved to let Jonathan into the circle said. “But it’s important work.”

  Jonathan said, “That’s how Rachel felt, and that was the pity of it. Every day was a struggle for her, because she believed in what she was doing.” In this way he invoked her, as he often did, in heroic terms. Thinking of her in a grandiose light made him want to cry for what he’d lost in her, and he lowered his head and quietly announced, “Excuse me, it’s been nice talking to you all.” Without waiting for introductions, he headed off to the bar, where he asked the bartender for “Scotch and soda on the rocks? Please?”

  Where was Sarah? He couldn’t see her in the crowd. This party was a work night for her. It was important that he not get too drunk.

  But it had been one of those weeks, and he wanted a cigarette. There had to be smokers somewhere, clustered together in a stairwell or guest bedroom, or craning out of one of the giant loft’s windows overlooking the Hudson. The sun setting behind industrial New Jersey was brightly orange and enormous. He heard Sarah’s voice, and turned. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m running away from my boss.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” he said.

  “She wants me to be paying attention to this obnoxious writer we’re celebrating tonight.”

  “Tell me again the name of his book?”

  “The Strictures of My Love.”