Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

“Do you mean it?” she said.

“More than anything,” he answered. He said, “I know what we need to do. We need to take a vacation. We need to take our trip to the mountains. Let’s do it. If we go soon, we’ll still be in time to see the autumn leaves.”

They talked about the trip, what kind of car they’d rent — not a convertible at this time of year, certainly — and about how many days they might spend in this place or that; and they wondered together what they’d find, after so many years away, of their old home towns and the houses in which they’d grown up. He held her hand tightly in his as they spoke, and she remembered something she’d never told him before. There had been a spring that made a little swimming hole in the woods behind her house. It had been a secret place for her — she hadn’t even told her brother about it. Would it still be there? Would it have been bulldozed for a strip mall or a retirement community or a new drive-through bank? Would she be able to find it again?

“Let’s go there,” he said, and with that he left three twenty-dollar bills on the bar and stood up and put on his coat and helped her to stand. He buttoned her coat for her and wrapped his scarf in a knot around her collar. He picked up her bags and took her by the hand and led her carefully through the Halloween necropolis. They were the only two regular-looking people in the place.

Outside, he hailed a cab. He held the door for her, then got in beside her and gave the address, and they rode down Fifth Avenue, past Central Park and the Plaza and Tiffany & Co., and Cartier and Rockefeller Center and Saks, down through the Forties and the Thirties and the Twenties, to Washington Square Park, the very bottom of the avenue, and west from there into the Village. She leaned on him as they climbed the four flights to their walk-up. He unlocked and pushed open the door. He turned on a light and guided her through the living room and into their bedroom, where he turned on the little lamp beside the bed. He took her coat and sat her on the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor in front of her. He started tugging off her clothes — first her shoes, then her skirt and her stockings. “Raise your arms, baby,” he said, and pulled her blouse up and over her head. He unsnapped her bra and took that, too. He helped her to lie down. He pulled the covers over her, and then undressed himself, switched off the lamp, and went unclothed into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, absently touching and spinning the gold ring on his finger. After a while, he got up and turned off the living-room light and made his way quietly back to her in the dark. He raised the covers and got into bed beside her and brought her close, spooning, so that he could cup her breasts in his hands and feel the length of her body against his.

In the morning, he told himself before falling asleep, they would sit naked beside each other, resting against pillows, drinking coffee in bed — his black, hers with milk — and he would speak to her openly and forthrightly about getting his acting career back on track; and before long they would kiss, and when they made love he would drive hard into her and come, hoping, hoping for her pregnancy, for the child, their son, perhaps — a boy like him! — and believing as best he could that their family was drawing close, was near at last.

Ever since his wife had left him — but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop — Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality and become the sort of lurking man who, say, at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close, listening in while gazing out vaguely over their heads in order to seem distracted and inattentive, waiting for the conversation to wind down, so that he can weigh in gloomily and summarize whatever has just been said.

He was at it again.

“What you’re saying, if I’ve heard you right, is that the current rates of city government spending will eventually bankrupt the public schools.” He was speaking to a group of young parents — presumably, that’s what they were — at a book-publication party for a novelist he’d never read. He’d come with his friend, his date, he should say, who worked for the novelist’s publisher. He added, “My ex-wife, well, not my wife, but, you know, she might as well have been, taught eighth grade in the Bronx for two years.”

“Really?” a woman in the group asked. The man next to Jonathan turned sideways, as if he were a door swinging open to let him in.

Jonathan stepped forward. “Yes. She found it exhausting but exhilarating. She loved her students but always felt at war with the administration. Finally, she quit. It made her depressed.”

“I can see how it might be depressing to teach in the New York public schools,” the man who’d moved to let Jonathan into the circle said. “But it’s important work.”

Jonathan said, “That’s how Rachel felt, and that was the pity of it. Every day was a struggle for her, because she believed in what she was doing.” In this way he invoked her, as he often did, in heroic terms. Thinking of her in a grandiose light made him want to cry for what he’d lost in her, and he lowered his head and quietly announced, “Excuse me, it’s been nice talking to you all.” Without waiting for introductions, he headed off to the bar, where he asked the bartender for “Scotch and soda on the rocks? Please?”

Where was Sarah? He couldn’t see her in the crowd. This party was a work night for her. It was important that he not get too drunk.

But it had been one of those weeks, and he wanted a cigarette. There had to be smokers somewhere, clustered together in a stairwell or guest bedroom, or craning out of one of the giant loft’s windows overlooking the Hudson. The sun setting behind industrial New Jersey was brightly orange and enormous. He heard Sarah’s voice, and turned. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m running away from my boss.”

“I’ll bet you are,” he said.

“She wants me to be paying attention to this obnoxious writer we’re celebrating tonight.”

“Tell me again the name of his book?”

“ The Strictures of My Love .”

“Right.”

“He’s very demanding. He wants a lot of publicity. He’s a twerp. But he makes money for the company.”

Publicity was Sarah’s area.

“Give me a sip of your drink,” she said, and Jonathan handed her his glass.

“I was looking for a place to smoke,” he said.

“Did you bring cigarettes?”

“No, I was going to bum one.”

“Bum two, will you?” she said, and gave him back his Scotch and soda. The ice in the glass was already melting. “I’ll come find you. I have to make an effort to be professional.” He watched her sashay off toward the author, who was surrounded by guests and was wearing a suit. Really, he should marry Sarah, he reminded himself. But, then again, he should’ve married Rachel.

Now waiters were making their rounds with trays. Jonathan took something off one of the trays and wound up holding a toothpick, which he put in his shirt pocket, next to the joint he’d rolled that afternoon in a stall in the men’s room at his office. Was it time for another drink? The last shindig Sarah had brought him to — it had been on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University, for a historian of the Revolution — he’d remained sober and later wondered why.

On his way back to the bar, he saw Fletcher, a young editor at Sarah’s company, who, according to Sarah, bombarded her with daytime e-mails asking for dates that she then declined. Fletcher was thinner than he — in better shape all around, no doubt — with sharp cheekbones and a widow’s peak.