A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  Enjoy dinner, Emmett said, and told him that tonight’s meal was Cajun meat loaf with garlic sauce, and exclaimed, “Do you wonder why I’m going home?”

  Well, Daniel mused, he supposed he would call Henry.

  Henry was just under six-feet tall, two years older than Daniel, in perfect health, socially and professionally successful. He had an easy manner and a ready smile that had been noticed early by the partnership committee; his admission to the upper echelons was by now a fait accompli. It was also said that Henry had managed to balance work and the depression that follows the failure of a marriage with a wildly successful romantic life. He had been little more than an office acquaintance of Daniel’s before the separation, but when Natalie packed her bags and left, and especially a week or so after that when the silence of the apartment began to eat away at him, Daniel turned to Henry as proof that divorce was survivable. Henry became his coach, in a way, and over lunch every week or so, he extolled the benefits of the divorced life; it was better than being single the first time around, he insisted, in the same way that the afterlife was considered better than the one here on Earth. This insight gave divorce a spiritual, moral quality that Daniel had never before imagined.

  Although Daniel insisted that they were the closest of friends – a lie that he would never quite admit even to himself – Henry made him extremely nervous and was really the last person Daniel wanted to be with. Perhaps Henry was now, to Daniel, almost a mythical creation, a legendary, idealized vision of what Daniel – newly single, drunk, tired Daniel – could one day become. Henry had been through a divorce, alcoholism and the struggle for partnership, and when Daniel looked to Henry a better future seemed to beckon.

  One other thing: Henry worked out at the gym three days a week, spent time in a tanning booth, ate no red meat and popped vitamins. At the time he seemed terribly healthy, but years later, in retrospect, Daniel would realize that Henry had really been a man desperately trying to stay alive.

  “I’m worried about you,” Henry said bluntly when Daniel dropped by his office and invited him to dinner.

  “Worried?” Daniel laughed. “About me?”

  “Yeah,” Henry replied. Was Daniel spending time at the office even when he didn’t have to? Did he dread returning to an empty apartment, filled with all the artifacts of married life? Did he dread this so much that he actually now preferred to stay at work? Is this how he would spend the rest of his life? It was obvious that Daniel was sublimating his sexual desires by winning motions in opposition to plaintiffs’ motions for reargument of courts’ orders denying changes of venue! And what could be more pathetic than actually getting off on a thing like that?

  “I have stuff to do,” Daniel said.

  “Skip the work for one damn night. Give yourself a break.” Henry explained the situation: tonight he would have a drink with Rachel, a shy, withdrawn woman fifteen years Henry’s junior, with whom he’d been lightly involved for a few months. Rachel was bringing along a friend. “Rachel’s a buttinski and wants me to find some eligible lawyer from work. I have no backbone, and I’m obeying her blindly. So I’m bringing you.”

  No drinks, Daniel said. He didn’t want to wake up hung-over the next day. He didn’t mention to Henry that he’d been drinking all the time lately, drinking alone for the first time ever in his life – or so his selective memory was trying unsuccessfully to insist these days – drinking in bed to help him fall asleep, drinking and smoking in bed like some kind of daredevil, lying in bed watching the naked women on Channel J and drinking and smoking like there was no tomorrow. He hadn’t had a single drink in a day, and now he was determined to stick with it. “No, not going to a bar and drinking on a school night.”

  Henry smiled. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. The one lingering effect of his own divorce, he admitted with feigned reluctance, was that he could no longer drink in moderation, and so he clutched a seltzer in his big hands on his nights in dark Irish bars. But teetotalers live a lot longer than drinkers, Henry pointed out, and they don’t get the flu so often either. “That’s not why I gave it up,” he admitted, “but that’s a good thing. Just drink what I drink. I take the rap for it.”

  Daniel nodded. He knew about Henry’s alcohol problem. Everyone knew about Henry’s alcohol problem: he’d been a pathetic drunk and had somehow kicked the habit just in time to keep his job and get himself back on track. But Henry didn’t seem to realize that Daniel already knew the secret that he now imparted with such solemnity.

  And so Daniel simply nodded innocently.

  “Look,” Henry added, “come along with Rachel and me. Get out of the office. No pressure at all, I just promised to bring someone along. Maybe you’ll fall madly in love and she’ll dump you next month. You know, failed love affairs and recovery from failed love affairs are essential steps on the road to healthy self-sufficiency.

  Daniel cringed a bit and said something biting and sarcastic, then took it back and explained that he hadn’t meant to seem so biting and sarcastic.

  “It gets easier,” Henry said gently. “Don’t worry, buddy, it gets easier.”

  Susan looked at herself in the mirror, then turned to Rachel and told her that she was canceling the whole thing. “Daniel will stand us up again,” she said to her friend.

  “It can’t happen twice,” Rachel promised, sounding not at all sure.

  “And I’ll have to talk to Henry all evening,” she said, looking back at the mirror. “I hate that. Did you know that Henry’s law firm represented Adolph Hitler in the 1930s?”

  “I’m sure Henry had nothing to do with that. I don’t think he’s had an opportunity to work on the Hitler account.”

  “That must be disappointing for him.”

  Susan’s friend Rachel was a romantic, sort of a crazy, obsessive romantic. She was pretty, twenty-five, almost beautiful, with blazing red hair and a bright, loving smile, but Rachel couldn’t see that, and so no one else could, either. She was studying psychology because she wanted to understand other people’s minds, but couldn’t understand her own, and maybe that was the whole point. When Susan glanced back at Rachel, who now seemed tired of trying to help, she saw a very strange thing for just a moment. The hallway mirror caught the reflection of the living room window, which seemed to reveal, standing protectively in the shadows to the left of the couch, a tall and youthful white-haired man directly behind Rachel, gazing at Susan with a restrained, almost proud smile on his face. Susan jumped and put her hand to her mouth, holding in a startled scream, and the figure vanished.

  “What’s wrong?” Rachel asked, spinning around to look where the man had seemed to be just a moment before.

  “Oh god, the light in here plays tricks,” Susan said, trying very hard to laugh. “This is happening to me all the time lately. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see a man here in my apartment, watching me. Then when I look more closely, I realize it’s just shadows.”

  “How frightening for you,” Rachel said.

  “It’s not,” Susan said, sounding surprised. “You’d think it would be. But it’s not frightening at all.”

  Daniel and Henry took a taxicab up Broadway to a little bar on the Upper West Side filled with old drunks and young intellectuals. In the far corner, Henry spotted Rachel. She waved, flashing a brief, uncharacteristically dazzling smile, and Henry waved back.

  Susan was the youngest member of the group. Daniel wasn’t sure how much younger, and he didn’t ask, it just seemed obvious. She smiled a certain way and seemed self-consciously world-weary and jaded as those in their early twenties often do. Daniel yearned for those lost days when his weariness had been nothing more than an attractive pose; and so, he realized immediately, he yearned for Susan.

  She had curly black hair and laughed more with each drink she ordered, but to Daniel it seemed that, behind her amused eyes, numbers were still running through her brain. Daniel thought that he had met her before, and in the conscious darkness of the bar his first sight of
her – smart, cynical and welcoming – cheered him. So he spent the evening trying to impress Susan across their little wooden table, and when he asked her questions, she answered with enthusiasm.

  Susan was unemployed and apparently entirely unanchored and aimless, a passivity that seemed to collide with an angry worldview verging on the subversive. Her political asides she directed towards Henry and Rachel, but Daniel assumed that she was testing him. Certainly, Henry must have reassured her that Daniel was “apolitical.” (This was true only in Johnson & Tierney’s corridors, however; his true political leanings, like his past drug abuse, was a secret to all his current acquaintances.)

  Still, Susan seemed genuinely concerned that Henry might have chosen her a reactionary for the evening, so whenever she threw out some sort of neo-Socialist barb, Daniel made certain to laugh, or even to chime in supportively if the remark had been innocent enough. It seldom was. At some point, Rachel and Henry rose as one to visit their respective rest rooms. Susan smiled at Daniel when their friends were both out-of-earshot.

  “Thank God,” she exclaimed with a laugh. “They’re peeing at last!”

  Daniel smiled back at her, but he felt himself blushing.

  “Hurry,” she said. “We don’t have much time to learn everything we can about each other. I’ll start. At one time, I was engaged to be married, but I changed my mind, and it broke the guy’s heart. I almost drowned at the age of eight. But I survived, and now I believe in God. Your turn. Make it quick.”

  “I’m older than I look. Or younger. I’m not good at basketball, but I’ve never lost at ping pong, or Monopoly. I can’t dance the hora for the life of me, and so I’m an atheist. And this is, I think, my first blind date. If that’s what this is.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Bored,” Daniel said. “Talked into it. New York is tough if you’re not .... “

  His sentence drifted off. Not what, exactly?

  “To be honest,” he admitted, “Henry kept pestering me, and I got sick of it eventually. And you? Why are you here?”

  Susan now didn’t know what to say. He had actually thought very carefully before agreeing to meet Daniel. She did her research, analyzed her investment. She absconded with the J&T face-book so that she could evaluate him. There was just something in his awkward scowl, or maybe it was the haircut that he’d gotten for his first day at work. Rachel said he was better-looking than that picture, that his ears didn’t really stick out like that. Rachel told him other strangely intriguing things, about rude things he’d said and done that made Susan want to know him. She was not discussing it much these days, but the reason for her cynicism was what she could only have described as a “bad experience with the Middle Eastern peace movement” – she and the movement apparently had two different definitions of the word “peace” – and she now preferred a soul-mate without an overabundance of optimism. He’d stood her up once, a month earlier, but still she’d given him another try. And here she was. But she couldn’t say all that, since Daniel didn’t seem to recall having stood her up a month ago and apparently had devoted no thought to this whatsoever.

  So instead she said, “Girl needs to drink, after all.”

  “I had no idea,” he said, “that I’d get to meet Trotsky’s long lost great-granddaughter.”

  “I’m not really plotting world revolution,” she said seriously. “I just had to make sure about you, you know. I won’t let a Wall Street fascist Republican get within ten feet of putting his hands on me.”

  “I think honesty’s charming,” Daniel blurted out.

  “Thank you. So do I.”

  “If you’re so incorruptible,” Daniel said, “why aren’t you saving the world? Why aren’t you doing anything with your life.”

  “That’s a little complicated, so how about ‘the usual reason’? That’s what everyone says. Do you know the usual reason for total apathy and lethargy?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Then what is it?” she asked. “Because I don’t have a clue.”

  “You’re looking for something, maybe?” he said. “Something you’ve wanted since you were a little girl. And when you grow up, you don’t really know what it was. It was just a feeling only little kids can understand. A life filled with meaning and value. A nice window looking out at pretty pictures. A pat on the back. A pat on the back that feels really nice. You can’t put it into words. So you do something drastic, anything. You decide not to marry the millionaire your parents are so fond of, because he doesn’t look like the face in the dream you had when you were eight years old. So you do something else, something that pops into your head one idle Wednesday afternoon when you’re hanging around your parents’ house, something that would make the world a better place, but that thing you came up with turned out to be a terrible idea. Because the world won’t be a better place, it cannot be a better place, any change means human cruelty beyond your wildest dreams. Growing up under pretty trees with plenty of hugs, good grades and hot cocoa, you never thought to consider that there’s no good in the world, that the world is not and never will be good. But now you know, and you’ve discovered it at a young age. So what is your Plan B? What could it possibly be? You don’t go out and sell your soul for the almighty dollar because, quite honestly, you’ve already got more money than you could possibly spend. And any other life goal is pointless. And here you are.”

  Susan was quiet.

  “How did you know all this?” she whispered.

  “It’s not new, Susan,” he said. “Youthful idealism exists to be crushed.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “You don’t mind if I smoke,” he said absently.

  Susan thought for a while.

  “And you?”

  Daniel said, “I specialize in environmental law,” he said, and Susan’s face lit up with admiration, and so he didn’t explain that for him, environmental law, as nice as the term sounded, meant representing big polluters. Again, he might have said; don’t look for any good in the world, especially not from me. I hope you have been listening.

  Outside on Broadway, Daniel was walking Susan home. Over their heads, at West 82nd Street, a street lamp flickered, then blew out with a loud pop.

  “You know,” Daniel said, “the bartender in that place had a very familiar face. I was thinking about it all evening, and now that I’m out in the cool air, I remember. I once saw a movie. What happens is that there’s this tribe of nomads out in the desert in one of the Soviet Republics, and there’s this terrible battle with another tribe of nomads. A man gets separated from his wife, and they’re both lost in the middle of the dunes. So they’re both discovered separately by another tribe. But when they regain consciousness, they both have amnesia. So they fall in love all over again, never realizing that they used to be married, and that they have a little son who misses them.”

  “I’ve seen that. The Sands of Kyzyl Kum?” Susan asked. “Kazakhstan, maybe 1968 or something?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said, baffled.

  “The bartender was a dead ringer for the Kazakh actor who played the leader of the second tribe of nomads. Right?”

  “Yeah.” Daniel shook his head back and forth weakly.

  “When did you see that movie?” she asked.

  “I was in Poland during college for a couple of days. There were these movies from the Soviet Republics showing for visiting students. When did you see it?”

  “Kazakhstan could be the world’s next economic miracle, you know, because if every Kazakh citizen took his share of the oil there, they’d all be millionaires. So when you say Kazakhstan these days, no one says ‘Whatistan?’ anymore. Nervous American businessmen are trying to buy everything up to make sure that all the profit from Kazakh oil flows to the West. A friend of mine from school went to Kazakhstan last summer and when he got back, he loaned me a video of that movie, with French subtitles.” She stopped speaking for a moment. “Do you think that could happen? That you could lose your memory and then me
et the woman you love, but not realize it immediately?”

  “I think it could happen,” Daniel said.

  “Well,” Susan said, “I think it’s impossible.”

  “I can’t believe we’ve both seen that movie,” Daniel said, still baffled. “I don’t see very many movies.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “The odds against this,” Daniel mused. “If I believed in omens, I would say this is an omen, of some sort.”

  “I believe in omens,” Susan said.

  When they reached Susan’s building, she turned to him in the darkness.

  “All right, here goes,” Susan said. “I think we have more to say. The evening was too short. I only got to talk to you on this walk home and for a minute or two in the bar, and now I don’t want you to leave, especially now that we’ve had a good omen.”

  “I’m flattered,” he said, stupidly.

  Susan waited for him to say something more; when he remained silent, she averted her eyes. She laughed. “Oh god, you’ll look back on this and kick yourself. Or I will. Or someone will.”

  “I’m out of practice,” he said.