Love In the Air

by James Collins

  After a minute, Peter organized the sheets, evened them out, and handed them back to Graham, who folded them and put them in the envelope. Graham could play quiet and still. He leaned back in his chair, holding the envelope in his lap with both hands. He neither spoke nor gave any indication that he wished to speak, nor did he move.

  Peter’s face was damp and hot. He had placed his elbows on the arms of his chair and he was resting his chin on his clasped hands. He stared down at his desk, at the fancy calculator the possession of which had made him feel so foolishly proud when he had bought it years before. Then his shoulders heaved a couple of times. Putting his hands to his forehead again to shield his eyes, he cried some more. Eventually, he managed to compose himself, and, after attending to his eyes and nose with his handkerchief, he raised his head and looked at Graham.

  Graham didn’t say anything as he turned the letter over edgewise several times. Finally, he spoke. “Okay, so that settles at least half the question. What’s the next step?”

  Peter looked away, out the window. The snowflakes twirled downward. In an office across the street, a maintenance woman was vacuuming. In another, a woman had her shoeless feet up on her desk and was drinking bottled water while talking on the phone. The lab samples.

  Peter looked at Graham. “The problem is—all right, I’ve given you a hint of how I feel about things. But what about Holly? Has she ever said anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. So there you are. Julia’s ESP or whatever it is may tell her all sorts of things—maybe I should ask her where the stock market is going—but there’s no reason to think that she’s right about this.”

  “She was right about you,” Graham said.

  Peter rocked from side to side in his chair. “Yeah, I know. She got lucky.”

  “All right,” Graham said. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  “I do, but please don’t ever tell anybody.”

  “Okay. So you were the guy on the plane, right? Years ago, when Holly flew out to see the baby?”

  “Yes. You know about that?”

  “Sure. I was there, after all. I remember it very well. She met this guy on the plane, he was going to call. Holly tried to play it cool, but Alex was beside herself. Every time the phone rang she jumped out of her skin, and if she answered she would say hello brightly, listen for a moment, and then say, in the tone of a mental patient full of Thorazine, ‘Dad, it’s for you.’ After a couple of days it became clear that this guy would not be calling after all. Holly did some sniffling, and Alex was outraged. Me, too, actually. I was ridiculously heartbroken and angry and I wanted to kneecap the bastard.”

  “Would you be interested in knowing why I never called?”

  “Of course.”

  Peter rocked in his chair for a moment before finally saying, “I lost the number.”

  “You lost the number?”

  “Yes. Holly wrote it on a piece of paper and I put it in my shirt pocket, and when I got to my hotel, it was gone. I didn’t even know her last name.”

  “You lost the number?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lost the number?”

  “Yes! Yes! All right? I lost the number!”

  “How idiotic.”

  “Thanks. I know.”

  Graham leaned forward. “But you see the point. You could tell that Holly was kind of devastated. Something had happened on the plane, she thought. She really thought that there had been something between her and this guy. Now, if that isn’t love at first sight, I don’t know what is. You know, I’ve heard Holly talk about you once in a while, and now that I think about it, it’s always been with a tone of voice you don’t use when you’re talking about just anybody. Then there’s what Julia says.” He leaned back in his chair again and folded his arms. “So: case closed.”

  “‘Case closed,’” Peter repeated under his breath. He spoke quietly, his eyes downcast. “Look, Graham. I’d like to believe you, I really would. I’d like to believe Julia. Somebody must have told her something—I can’t imagine what—and, yeah, maybe Holly and I do have this special affectionate vibe. As far as I know, though, Holly had a brief little crush on the guy on the plane and then totally forgot about him, and this special affectionate vibe is exactly that, and exactly not something else.” Now he looked at Graham. “But do you know what? Even so, after Charlotte took off, I was ready to take my chances anyway. I had it all planned out how I was going to tell Holly all about how I feel about her. I know she would have said that she was deeply moved and that she loved me, too, but that she loved me as a friend, a dear friend. After that, I was going to rampage through this floor killing everyone before finally turning the gun on myself. But I was willing to risk it.” He paused. “But then another element came into it.”

  Graham rolled his eyes. “Okay, here we go. Your rival. You know what I have to say about your rival? Pfah!”

  Peter laughed. “‘Pfah.’ Let me try that: pfah.” He shook his head. “No, it’s not working. You see, first of all, it certainly looks an awful lot like love at first sight between Holly and Arthur Beeche. How am I supposed to believe that she is really in … uh … in—?

  “In love with you.”

  “Right, that. How am I supposed to believe that when she and Arthur seem so crazy about each other? It’s not just that Arthur is incredibly rich. There’s something about him—he’s a really good guy, actually. Then, second of all, do you really think that Arthur would let me keep him from getting anything he wanted, especially a woman? Yeah, he’s a good guy, but so was Othello. Combine jealousy with the power Arthur’s got, and there’s no limit to what he might do. It’s not just losing my job. Bankruptcy, starvation, madness, death. These are all possible.” He frowned. “Also, have you ever seen Arthur?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Peter said, “he’s big. And he looks very fit.” After contemplating this for a moment, Peter continued. “But, Graham, I am going to tell Holly. I am. I really am. I’ve been planning on it. Whatever happens, whatever the consequences. I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell her.”

  Graham clapped his hands together and got a big grin on his face. “You are? Peter, that’s terrific! That’s wonderful! You’re going to tell her!” He paused. “When?”

  Peter coughed and cleared his throat. “When. When. Well, you know, the timing, it’s tricky, and I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to Holly the past few weeks … and, well, I’m waiting for, you know … uh, the right elements to come together …”

  With a thoughtful expression, Graham looked off above Peter’s head and nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. He sat up straight and drummed his hands on his thighs. “Well, thank you for your time, Peter. I know how busy you are. I won’t detain you any further.” With a slap, he put his hands on the arms of the chair and began pushing himself out of it. But then he stopped, waited a second, and sat down again. He looked Peter directly in the eye. “I have just one question for you.” Graham paused dramatically. “Are you in love with my daughter?”

  “Yes,” Peter answered.

  Graham leapt out of his chair and began waving his hands. “Well, then, for God’s sake! What are you waiting for? Are you just going to sit there while somebody steals her away from you? Look, Peter, what I care about is Holly’s happiness. I wouldn’t actually mind if you were happy, too, but that’s not as important. If you two belong together, and I have a feeling you do, then I want you to be together. But if you don’t have the courage to do something about it, then Holly is better off with Arthur Beeche—or anyone else but you.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?” Peter asked hotly.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you saying that I’m too much of a coward to deserve Holly?”

  “Yes!”

  Peter slumped in his chair. “You’re probably right.”

  Graham threw up his hands in exasperation. Then he sat and just stared at Peter. Eventually he leaned forward an
d spoke in a forceful whisper. Graham’s resonant voice had a roughness that made it very effective at this volume. “Look, Peter,” he said, “you can take this guy. Oh, he’s got a couple of trivial advantages, but you go out there, you do your best, and I’m sure you can wipe up the floor with him. Is Holly really going to choose some old stiff who’s spent his entire life counting money over you, a guy she’s had a thing for for a long time? So he’s got a couple of shekels! Come on, Peter! Arthur Beeche, he’s nobody. He’s nothing!”

  Graham leaned back in his chair and allowed this encouragement to sink in. Then he reached into his second shirt pocket, the one without the glasses, and took out a soft cigarette pack. He looked inside and shook it and extracted a hand-rolled cigarette that was the size of a toothpick. “Is it okay? Just a little pin joint, a little hash mixed with tobacco.”

  “Well, they’re very strict, I mean about the smoking—”

  “Christ! I forgot. I’m really sorry. Not anywhere inside the building? Sorry, never mind.”

  “What the hell,” said Peter. “Go ahead.”

  Graham lit the joint and offered it to Peter, who drew on it. The hash tasted like coffee and dark chocolate. Peter and Graham passed the joint back and forth a couple of times and Peter felt the cables holding up his eyebrows go slack. He and Graham remained silent while entering a sort of mild, mutual trance. It was amazing about Julia, Peter was thinking. How could she possibly know that he was in love with Holly? But this was an important point: if she was right about one side of it, maybe she was right about the other one. It was amazing. Maybe Julia had learned something from somebody somehow. He was taking a last drag and drifting off into a pleasant reverie when he and Graham were shocked by the sound of two light raps on the door. Peter looked up and saw a form through the ripply glass. He doused the roach on his desk and waved his hands, trying to disperse the smoke.

  “Come in!” he called.

  The door opened and the large head of Arthur Beeche poked through it.

  Peter had still not exhaled, not even when he’d said “Come in,” and a coughing fit seized him.

  “I’m so sorry,” Arthur said. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Arthur, hello!” said Peter through his coughing. “Not at all! Not at all!” He shot to his feet and ran over to the door and opened it further. “Please come in!”

  Arthur entered. He was beaming and wore a beautiful gray suit and highly polished shoes. Peter coughed quite dramatically.

  “Goodness, Peter,” Arthur said, “are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Peter said with a gasp. “I’m fine.” He coughed again but was finally able to speak. “We were just … uh … uh … uh …”

  By this time, Graham had also stood up.

  “Uh … uh … uh …” Peter continued. He swallowed. He tried to smile graciously. “Graham, this is Arthur Beeche, and Arthur, let me introduce you to Graham Edwards.”

  “Graham Edwards!” Arthur said. “Well! This is a delightful surprise!”

  The two men shook hands.

  “It’s a nice surprise for me as well,” said Graham. “I wasn’t expecting to see you until tomorrow night.”

  “No! Nor was I! I’ve been looking forward to our dinner very much.”

  “Me too.”

  “Your daughter is a wonderful person,” said Arthur.

  “Yes. Yes she is.”

  “But,” Arthur said, taking a step backward and looking from Peter to Graham, “I fear I am intruding.”

  “Oh! Not at all!” said Peter. “Not at all!”

  Arthur gave a slight nod of his head and came forward again. His face was flushed and it appeared that he was tipsy. Suddenly he lifted his nose in the air and began to sniff.

  “That’s strange,” he said. “It smells as if something is burning. Do you smell it?” He looked at Peter and Graham, who looked at each other, and did not answer. Arthur sniffed again.

  “Funny,” he said, “to me it smells like a mixture of tobacco and hashish.” He considered this with a quizzical expression. “Well,” he said abruptly, “if there is a smell of smoke that we can’t identify, then we had better call the building fire marshal.”

  “Uh … uh … uh …” said Peter.

  “We’ve been having a little smoke,” Graham said. “I’m afraid I’m to blame. Peter was too good a host to forbid it.”

  “Oh, I see!” said Arthur. “Well, well. Would there be any chance of my joining you?”

  “Of course!” said Graham.

  They all sat, and Graham lit another pin joint and handed it to Arthur, who took a puff. Exhaling, he wore a relaxed smile, as if his skull were thawing.

  “Good heavens,” he said, after passing the joint to Peter, “Graham Edwards. You know, it really is an honor to meet you, and not just because of Holly. I have always been a tremendous fan. Apostle’s Run, that was terrific. The Chinese restaurant—I’ll never forget that! And the romantic one—Forever and a Day? I swear, I cried. You know, I also quite liked—what was it? Oh, come on, the conqueror.”

  “Tamerlane,” Peter said.

  “Tamerlane! Of course! Fantastic battles.” Arthur frowned. “I seem to recall that that one didn’t do quite as well.”

  “It sure didn’t,” said Graham.

  “Oh, but, please. I didn’t mean to be rude!”

  “Not at all, not at all. I’m glad you liked it, and the others.”

  “Oh, yes. Indeed, indeed,” Arthur said. Then he gestured to Peter. “Well, now, I see you have paid a call on my trusted and valued colleague here.”

  “We’re old friends, aren’t we, Peter?” said Graham. Peter nodded. “Yep, I was in the neighborhood, and I thought that I’d drop in on old Peter.” The joint had made a couple of circuits, and after taking the last drag Graham stubbed it out on the sole of his boot and tossed it toward the wastebasket, missing. “As a matter of fact, Arthur—may I call you Arthur?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, Arthur, I hate to admit that I’ve been talking about someone behind his back, but as a matter of fact, the reason I wanted to see Peter was to ask him about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Graham. “A father always has a temptation to check up on the people his daughter is seeing. No one knows Holly better or cares about her more than old Peter, and he knows you, of course, so he seemed like a logical person to consult.”

  “Well, well,” said Arthur, looking embarrassed. “I—of course, I understand.” Then he turned to Peter and smiled. “In fact, I’ve tried to use Peter for a similar purpose. And I certainly expect, Peter, that you have been candid. But I also hope you have not been too harsh.”

  “How did you put it, Peter?” Graham asked. “‘It’s not just that he’s incredibly rich, he’s also a really good guy.’ Wasn’t that it?”

  “Graham!” Peter cried. “Arthur—”

  “Don’t apologize!” said Arthur. “Don’t apologize! That will do very nicely! Very nicely, indeed!” He laughed. “If I were you, Graham, I’d want to protect her too. She’s a precious item.”

  “Yes,” said Graham.

  “Amazing girl.”

  “Yes.”

  Arthur looked at both of the other men with a big grin. “I was coming back to the office to do some work after having dinner with her tonight, and I thought I’d see if Peter was around. I wanted to tell him about what happened. So now I guess I’ll tell both of you. Here, look at this.”

  He removed a square velvet jewelry case from his coat pocket, put it on the desk, and lifted the lid. Inside lay a diamond and emerald necklace that was the shape and size of a maple leaf. Light refracted among the stones following an infinity of crisscrossing paths. “It was a present for her,” Arthur said dreamily. “The emeralds were for her eyes.”

  “It was a present,” Graham said, “but you still seem to have it.”

  “Exactly,” said Arthur. “I do. That’s the story I was going to tell.

  “
I wanted to give this to her, an early Christmas present. So, at dessert, I pulled it out. I haven’t had any practice with these things for many years, but she made a little gasp and it seemed to me that she liked it. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ she said. I asked her if she wouldn’t like to try it on, and her face got an anxious look and she said, ‘Oh, Arthur,’ and gave me a kiss. ‘Oh, Arthur,’ she started again. ‘It’s very beautiful. But I can’t accept it. Really, I can’t. It’s too much. I don’t mean to sound old-fashioned, but it might create an expectation or a sense of obligation or … but can I see it again?’” Arthur chuckled. “Well, I pressed it on her. ‘Please take it,’ I said. I said I wanted so much to give her something as beautiful as she is.” He blushed. “That sort of came to me on the spot. She looked at me and looked at it, and I could tell she was feeling torn. She closed the box and shook her head. And then she seemed to have an idea.

  “‘I will take it,’ she said. ‘But it’s only fair of me to tell you that what I want to do is to give it to the hospital and let them sell it.’”

  “Low-income pediatric oncology,” Graham said.

  “Yes,” said Arthur.

  “I remember” Graham said, “Holly once saying that, sure, in just about every case you could probably make an argument that you hurt people more by trying to help them than if you just left them alone, but that helping poor children with cancer might just be an exception.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said. “Well, I told her that if she would accept the necklace, I would make a contribution that would be equal to the necklace’s value. She thought about that for a moment, and then said, ‘Okay, that would be great. Except then I would still give the necklace to them, so they would have twice the money.’ Fine, I said, how about if I gave them twice the money, and she took the necklace? You know what she said, of course—that she’d still give them the necklace. Then I said, ‘All right, I’ll give you the necklace and I’ll give them three times its value, but if you don’t keep it, they don’t get anything!’ Then she got a solemn look on her face. ‘Oh, Arthur,’ she said, and she put her hand on my arm, ‘you wouldn’t want to put me in the position of having to make that choice and possibly deceiving you, would you?’ What could I say to that but no? So then she said, ‘So it’s all settled. You’ll contribute four times the value of the necklace.’ ‘Four times!’ I said. ‘Four times? When did I ever say four times?’ Then she looked up at me with these soggy eyes. ‘The three times plus the new one,’ she said. So I told her, ‘Okay! Okay! I better just agree before this gets even more expensive!’ She thanked me and kissed me and began to laugh and cry at the same time. I’ve been asked for money by a lot of people in my time, but I’ve never been swindled quite like that.” Arthur started laughing and so did Graham. Nervous as well as intoxicated, Peter laughed harder than either of them. Oh, they all three had a good laugh together.