Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

They got up on the bed, on the pillows, and could hear Siegfried and Brunhilda snapping at the food they’d left on their plates. It was obscene, he thought, this noisy feline licking, and yet he feared that getting up and clearing the plates to the sink might be interpreted as an act of antiseptic fastidiousness, explicitly anti-sexual. He pinned her shoulders to the mattress and leaned down to bite her nipple. Though he did not yet know her body, what pressures to apply, where to linger and for how long, he managed, in spite of his worry that she would find him awkward, to hold her in a way that felt — this was something he sensed — soothing to them both. That said, it was true that she, too, passed through moments of dread. It had always been this way with her. Her heart raced, her skin got a prickly feeling, and she was forced to concentrate on breathing deeply.

Right before he pulled out and came, he looked down and caught her gazing out the window at the Empire State. He brushed her hair off her forehead, lowered his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “Are you with me, Jennifer? Are you there? Are you there, Jennifer?” This got her attention. His quiet murmuring so turned them on that it immediately became repertoire, their version of “Fuck me, fuck me.”

Afterward, she told Christopher some, but not all, of the truth of her childhood. She was afraid, though without having a clear idea why, that if she confessed too much, if she reported in full her memories of her father coming drunk into her room at night, she’d lose him. He’d sat in his underwear in a chair beside her bed, her father had, or, she said to Christopher, sometimes right on the bed, and he’d told her again and again how he loved her, and how he wished the two of them could pack their things, right this minute, and drive away together to some remote place where she’d never hear vicious fighting from the other side of the door. It would be simple. But she had to choose. Would she come with him? her father had asked her, before leaning in close and putting his arms around her neck and weeping. She would always remember the smell of his breath when he’d been drinking.

Christopher listened politely, then, sighing — his turn, once again, to show her that he could face up to his own history — confided in a whisper that he had never been anything but a goddamn disappointment to his family, and that no matter how hard he’d tried, he’d never escaped or really even understood his role as a clown, as a fool, but that he’d finally made up his mind that it didn’t matter, that their opinion of him wasn’t going to bother him forever. She asked him, then, whether they drank, his parents, and he, startled by this interruption, said, “Oh, you know,” to which she replied, “No, I don’t know. You have to tell me.” And so he said, somewhat defensively, “Yes. They did. They did,” then, waving his hands in the dark, went on to announce — it was as if he were making a promise — that he could handle himself in this world. And though he was not, he further acknowledged, currently employed, neither was he concerned. He had savings, in a manner of speaking, from his last and only secure position, as an associate at a law firm where he’d realized early on that he would not have the will or the desire to make partner. What point would there have been in carrying on? he asked her without really asking. He said, closing, “I’m not worried. I can find legal temp work when I need to. Hey, life’s just one big process of elimination, right?” He shoved Siegfried aside, jumped up from the bed, and stood staring out at the bright city. Why was he so jittery all of a sudden? “How about a little air?” he suggested, raising the window an inch, letting in the sounds of sirens and car horns blaring far below.

Over the next months, as winter turned to spring, and spring to summer, in apartments in Manhattan and a brownstone in Brooklyn, Jennifer and Christopher developed a pattern of habitation described in rough form by the weekend at Amy’s. After hauling overnight bags and specialty-shop groceries into the new house-sit, they would cook without cleaning, nose through cabinets and drawers, and fall in and out of bed, where, after screwing, they might also eat. It never took long for things to go to hell — crumbs in the sheets, ashtrays and unwashed glasses and a wine bottle or two (she liked a glass before sleep) sitting on the floor, spills drying on kitchen countertops, leftovers hardening in pans. “What a disaster,” Christopher would invariably say when the time came to tidy up, and she’d answer, rolling her eyes, “Yes, but it’s our disaster.”

Before they made their escape, she’d scribble a note and leave gift-wrapped soap or a bottle of good olive oil (along with her leftover wine, if there was any) in a place where it would be found the minute the rightful inhabitants came through the door.

Some places worked out better than others. Karen and Peter’s Little Italy walk-up facing the street was cluttered and dreary, and a tenant in a neighboring apartment had the music turned up loud, but Jennifer, intent on a good time, hauled Karen’s wardrobe from the closet in search of skirts and dresses to model for Christopher. Karen had fabulous clothes, in Jennifer’s size. It wasn’t long before Jennifer began pulling out the shoe boxes as well, along with Karen’s cashmere sweaters and blazers, and parading from the bedroom in head-to-toe outfits, while Christopher commented from his chair on the looks that worked and those that didn’t. That was a fun night. Less enjoyable was the brownstone, where Christopher caused basement flooding when he used paper towels instead of toilet paper in an upstairs bathroom, clogging a section of pipe, three stories below, that had been rusting away for years. The owners of the house, Sam and Beth, were away in California with their twins, Sarah and Miles, at Sam’s grandmother’s memorial service. The better part of Christopher and Jennifer’s weekend was given over to negotiations with plumbers, negotiations undertaken without consulting Sam and Beth. Finally, a man came in and sawed away and replaced the corroded pipe, and they spent Sunday afternoon laundering the towels they’d used to clean the floor and the assortment of Miles’s and Sarah’s toys that had been sitting in a pile beneath the leak. “That’s what happens when you buy instead of rent,” Christopher announced that night as he locked the front door behind them. He said, “Shall we?” and they hurriedly kissed before darting off to different subways and the lives they lived separately during the week.

Then, in May, they shut themselves up inside a modern high-rise on Madison Avenue. For three days, they shared what should have been a paradise of high-ceilinged rooms while the apartment’s owner, Danny, a friend of Christopher’s who’d inherited a department-store fortune, was away in Germany buying art. He was a collector.

“Jesus,” Jennifer said when they walked in. “Will you look at this crap?” She made a clicking sound, dismissive, using tongue against teeth. She’d stopped before a large drawing hanging in the entryway. It was, like all the pieces displayed on Danny’s walls, abstract — a charcoal turmoil of overlapping marks, smudges, and erasures executed with such force by the artist that the paper had worn through in places.

“Do you hate it?” Christopher asked. He’d wanted her to be proud of him for scoring Danny’s keys. He hadn’t thought to worry about his friend’s taste. She didn’t answer, so he dropped their grocery bags, came up behind her, and wrapped her in a hug. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he looked at the drawing from her point of view. At first it appeared, he thought, inchoate and stagy — as if the artist had been playing with an idea about the drama in disorder. But the longer Christopher stared the more he felt compelled to see otherwise. Was that a reptile skittering across the bottom of the paper? Were those faces? He felt the muscles around his eyes relax as his gaze became less focused; outlines of faces and figures receded into the drawing’s shadows, and the work acquired space and depth, interiority.