Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

She wasn’t letting him do this. Both of her arms were wrapped around him. Alice was hugging him tightly from the side, and they’d become like two people in a three-legged race at a county fair or family reunion. Neither of them had much in the way of family. She’d come to the city from North Carolina, as had he. They’d grown up in neighboring valleys in the Smoky Mountains, though he’d left home — he was gone before his eighteenth birthday — before she was even born. Their somewhat shared origins had, of course, been a crucial factor in their romance. (It wasn’t her body alone that had attracted him, that night at the dinner party; nor had she truly believed, when he spoke to her in the elevator, that he was an actual mind reader.) For the first year or two of their relationship, they’d discussed plans to rent a convertible and drive south together through New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland, continuing around Washington and on through the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia — there was a nineteenth-century inn near Staunton that he’d read about in a food magazine and wanted to spend a night or two at — and then from there into the southerly regions of the Blue Ridge, where, taking their time, they’d leave the interstate and get on the old two-lane, hairpin-turn state and county road that would take them up and across the mountains, to home. But they hadn’t done it.

They hadn’t done it because there was no one there for them. His parents were dead, and he had no aunts or uncles left, either. He had only a sister, who lived in Minnesota. Stephen and his sister had less and less to do with each other these days, and it had been at least a couple of decades since he had heard from, or thought to be in touch with, any of their remaining kin, the more or less distant cousins, who (some of them, at least) were surely still scattered about the countryside around Asheville. Alice’s situation wasn’t much happier. Her father, an alcoholic, had left her mother when Alice was four, and the man whom Alice had grown up calling father had been killed in an automobile accident when she was sixteen. Her mother, in later years, had become one of those people who try new places again and again, endlessly relocating. Currently she was parked outside Fort Worth. Alice had an unmarried, born-again brother who repaired computers in Sacramento.

Stephen turned to face her. Adjusting himself wasn’t easy to do; they were pressed together, and his arms were pinned at his sides by her close embrace. Her clothes remained as they’d been in the restaurant, tugged slightly askew, and strands of her hair, caught between their bodies, were pulled when he moved. “Ouch!” she said.

She looked good — no, great. That she was so attractive while sedated troubled him. Did he like her best when she was out of it? “I know exactly the thing to do,” he said, and she whispered, “What’s that?”

“Let’s go buy you a hat.”

“A hat!” she said.

“Would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to let me move. Let go, all right?” he asked. But she didn’t release him. The boy in the fancy lion suit bolted from a store’s open doorway, and Alice said, “Oh, honey.”

She wasn’t talking to Stephen. She was peering down at the boy, who’d stopped short on the sidewalk in order to roar at them.

“Are you a lion ?” Alice asked. “What kind of lion are you? Are you a fierce”—she paused; it was the Valium—“lion?”

“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.”