Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

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Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim’s stories. As they do the things we all do — bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo — they’re confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.
These stories, all published in
over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America’s most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described
as “one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years.” And here is Antrim’s best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.

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He held the door. “In you go,” he said.

At the booth, he counted out pills, his antidepressants and her anti-anxieties — he carried and dispensed for her more often than not, ever since her suicide attempt — and he asked her, “How many do you think will do the trick? One? Two? Do you need two? Honey, can you talk?”

“Are those ten-milligram?”

“They are.”

“Give me two. For now.”

“Hang on.”

“You’re scattering them across the table !”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

It was true, he’d dumped out a few too many pills, and some had rolled off toward the condiments, the ketchup and the sugar and the salt and pepper shakers and so forth, and he was missing — what was he missing? He had Alice’s portion under control. And there were his pink-and-yellow anti-psychotics. Where had his beta-blockers gone?

He peered up and saw that Alice’s hair was a mess from the wind. He could see the tension in her face — it always came on so swiftly and visibly. It was her terror of going back into the hospital. Her jaw had clenched, she was grinding her teeth, and the muscles in her neck were taut. “You’re twisted up,” he said, and reached across the table to help her adjust her clothes. Her cotton blouse had been pulled back over one shoulder when she’d taken off her coat, causing the shirt’s brilliant mother-of-pearl buttons to look as if they were about to pop off at the collar.

He pushed two Valium tablets her way. Then he noticed Dr. Tillman, sitting alone at the counter, at the back of the restaurant.

The waitress arrived, and Alice said, “I’d like a Coca-Cola and a big piece of chocolate cake, but not the kind with raspberry filling.”

Stephen said to Alice, “I think I see my former doctor over there,” and Alice asked him rather too loudly if he was ready to order.

She told him, “You should eat something. If you don’t, you’re going to have a crash, and you’re going to get all angry, and I don’t want to be screamed at by you later on the street.”

“Excuse me?”

He rolled his eyes at the waitress and blurted, “Ha, I don’t know what to say to that!” but he felt embarrassed, and conceded to her, to the waitress, that he’d probably better have a muffin.

“Pumpkin, please,” he added, and abruptly got up and pushed past her and escaped to the rear of the diner, calling, “Dr. Tillman? Dr. Tillman?” But the man didn’t seem to hear him. Stephen came closer and got a better look at his old analyst, hunched over a plate of pancakes. Why was Dr. Tillman alone? Had his wife, whom Stephen had never met or even glimpsed, passed away? Dr. Tillman had to be in his eighties by now; he’d shrunk, of course, and his hair had finally gone fully white. And then Stephen remembered, shockingly, that Dr. Tillman had died six or seven or maybe eight years before. The man in the diner could never have been Dr. Tillman. Stephen marched off to the men’s room, where he sat in a stall and checked his cell phone for text messages from his old friend Claire. Where was she? Had she gone to the country with Peter? He needed to talk to her — he needed her to calm him down — if only for a moment. It was a risky thing to do, with Alice so close by. Alice accepted as fact her suspicion that he and Claire had had an affair, several years back, during the months when Alice was hospitalized. They hadn’t had an affair, actually, though for a while Claire had been important to him as a confidante. He’d fallen in love with her, a little, for her kindness, and, he told himself now, for her soft, deep voice, which always seemed to reassure him. He flushed, buckled, went back to the booth, and, thinking of Dr. Tillman, told Alice that he felt as if he’d seen a genuine ghost, and that he couldn’t image how he’d forgotten the death of his psychiatrist of almost fifteen years, and that, although he understood that that time in his life, the time of his analysis with Dr. Tillman, was far in the past — or maybe because of this fact — he felt disoriented, weird.

“Welcome to the club,” Alice replied. The Valium was doing its work. She already sounded slurry.

He said, “How’s your chocolate cake?”

“Better than your muffin.”

“You ate my muffin?”

“I didn’t eat your muffin. It’s sitting in front of you on your place mat.”

“Right you are, there it is,” he admitted.

He heard the sounds of a football game. Was there a television in the restaurant? It was the weekend of the Nebraska-Colorado game. Was it? Or, no, that game came closer to Thanksgiving.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He watched her eat. She’d scooped out all the cake and left a shell of frosting on her plate, which she’d saved for last. He watched her lick the icing off the tines of her fork. “Are you?” he asked her.

“I asked you first.”

“I’m all right,” he told her.

“Should I believe you?”

He picked up her medicine bottle, shook it gently, and dropped it into his sport coat’s inside breast pocket.

“Are you all right?” he asked once more.

“I’m fine. I’m eating my lunch.”

Later, back on the street, they made their way at a kind of wobbling pace uptown, toward the Whitney Museum. The sun was getting low in the sky. He said to her, “Alice, how many did you take?”

She was leaning hard on his shoulder, like a drunk date. They slowed to gaze at autumn scenery in the shop windows along the way. The first children wearing Halloween costumes had begun to appear on the avenue. Stephen saw a dragon, a skeleton, and several little princesses. He again asked Alice how many pills she’d sneaked while he was in the men’s room.

“Five?” Her voice sounded like a young girl’s.

“Five in all? Or five plus the two I gave you?”

“Five in all. Three more.”

He shifted her shopping bags from his left hand to his right, and offered her his other shoulder. Supporting her weight, block after block, wasn’t easy, and at Seventy-third Street he insisted that they get in a cab, go straight home, and tuck her into bed for the rest of the day.

But she simply apologized for letting her anxiety get the better of her. She said that she was also sorry for provoking him, in the restaurant, with her fear that he might yell at her if he didn’t eat properly. She hadn’t meant to shame him. She loved him. She wanted them to have a fantastic time out in the world. That was all that mattered.

More children, herded by parents and nannies, ran past them, trick-or-treating, hitting the boutiques. The costumes were good. A few — in particular, a spectacular lion suit on a four- or five-year-old boy — looked to have been sewn with care, showing a level of detailing appropriate to durable stage costumes, the sort meant for nightly scrutiny under theater lights.

When Stephen was younger, when he was a young actor, working in his costume for the first time — putting it on before the call for the first dress rehearsal — had always been a revelation. This was the case for many actors, certainly. Wearing the garment was an acquisition of — why not say it? — humanity. A Victorian frock coat or a pair of Windsor-style stovepipe trousers or even Depression-era dungarees, worn as a character, could in turn produce character. When Stephen put on a costume, he could feel his whole nervous system, his muscles, and his bones, rearranging themselves to form his character’s body and posture. For instance, the heavy woolen overcoat worn by a foolish servant caused a slump in the shoulders and an itchy stiffness in the neck that might seem to an audience to be the symptoms of a master’s beatings. The drama became palpable through tailoring. Maybe it followed that Stephen’s life seemed to gain grace and substance when he walked at an even pace on a nice street in well-cut pants.

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