Donald Antrim - The Emerald Light in the Air

“Jonathan,” Fletcher was saying.

“Hi, Fletcher.”

“It looks like we’re both en route to the bar.”

“Or the bathroom.”

“Good point,” Fletcher said, and Jonathan said, “I think you’re right, though. The bar.” Then a pretty girl walked past, and the energy in the room seemed to rise. The men got their drinks refreshed and went off in different directions.

The loft was filling and growing noisier. Next to Jonathan, people were talking animatedly about health-care reform — a woman in the group who’d undergone surgery was deep in debt. Jonathan craned his neck and blurted, “The possibilities for real change in health care are undercut by the bureaucracies that make change crucial! My ex-wife used to talk about this all the time.” Then, shyly, he added, as he always did, “Actually, she wasn’t my wife, but we were together for many years.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” a man wearing a pale-green shirt said. “I’m William, and this is Kathy, and this is Deborah.” It was Kathy, a short blonde, who had had the surgery.

Jonathan nodded and said, “My name is Jonathan. I hope it wasn’t rude of me to jump in like that.”

“What’s a party for?” Kathy said, and then asked, “Do you know a lot about the medical industry?”

“Not really,” Jonathan admitted. “Rachel — that’s the woman I wasn’t married to — had strong opinions on social issues.”

“I’m ready for another drink!” William announced.

“Get me a white wine?” Deborah asked.

“I’ll go with you,” Jonathan, who had been sipping constantly, said. He looked around for Rachel — no, Sarah — but didn’t see her.

At the bar he told William, “I’m not of this world.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, I’m here with a friend.”

“Aren’t we all?” William said. “Cheers.” He carried his drink and Deborah’s wine back into the crowd.

The summer sun had nearly set. The light it threw into the loft had become an amber glow that shone up through the windows to touch the ceiling, where it outlined the shadows of party guests. Soon, as night fell, the loft’s numerous wall sconces would come on. Copies of the author’s books were stacked in little piles everywhere.

Jonathan was extremely conscious of his origins, which were Southern, his father and his father’s family having come from Virginia, and his mother and hers from the Florida Gulf Coast. Jonathan’s father had been dead for ten years, and his mother had retired to Maryland’s Eastern Shore; and, these days, he regarded himself as oddly and bravely homeless, imagining, from this city he’d chosen to live in, a lost, green place — Charlottesville, where his parents had been professors, and the nearby Blue Ridge, where he’d camped as a boy. If he drank enough, his accent would break through.

Sarah appeared at his side. “Hey, buster, let’s go fuck in the bathroom,” she said. That was something that he loved about her — her easy playfulness, which he took as a sign not only of her trust in him but also of her willingness to let him trust her. “I wish we could,” he told her, though in fact he didn’t, at that moment, wish so — he needed a smoke more.

“Are you done taking care of the writer?” he asked.

“I was finished with that a long time ago,” she said.

She was shorter than Jonathan by a foot. When they walked down the street together, and he rested his arm on her shoulder, he thought sometimes about how essential it would be in old age to have someone to lean on. And though his old age was a long way off, and he felt, the majority of the time, that he would never reach it anyway, he nonetheless considered it often when he was with Sarah.

“How are you and Fletcher getting on?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” she said.

“I saw him earlier. He’s not very talkative.”

“Come with me — there’s something I want to show you.” She took Jonathan’s hand and tugged him toward the windows.

He said, “Hang on, I want to get a drink.”

“You’ve got a drink.”

“It’s about gone.”

“Get it in a minute,” she pleaded. “We’ll get drinks together and then find somewhere to hide out.”

She was in love with him. It pulled at him, as if with a kind of warm, perfumed gravity.

What she had to show him was the sun, disappearing at last, and the sky above, the color of fire. She held his hand, as they stood together before a big window, and he wished that he were more in love with her. Or was he, maybe, in love with her?

She said, “The world is incredible at this time of day, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he agreed, and took a step back from the windows. He said, “A lot of the color in the air is the product of atmospheric pollutants.” He felt her hand go limp in his. He apologized. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

She was easily upset. He often found himself apologizing to her for remarks that he hadn’t meant to be hurtful. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers, and he felt, for just an instant, at peace.

Things at the party were picking up. Jonathan faintly smelled cigarette smoke. “Come on, sweet pea,” he said to Sarah, and pulled her away from the window and back to the bar.

They took their drinks and went to stand in a corner, and Sarah said, “So, mister, what about us?”

Was she a little drunk?

“Us,” he said. But before he could go on there was a loud crash in the middle of the room, followed by a hasty shuffling of partygoers turning around, making space for the accident, the mishap — someone had tripped over a piece of furniture and fallen heavily. It was William, the man in the green shirt. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” Jonathan heard him saying as he rose to his knees, then his feet. “I’m only suffering minor embarrassment,” he said, laughing, as, behind him, a man in gray — it was the celebrated author — pushed the chair William had tripped on back into its place beside the long glass-topped coffee table.

“Is he good?” Jonathan asked Sarah.

“Who?”

“The author. Is he good?”

“People think so.”

“Rachel read one of his books.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t remember,” Jonathan said, but amended, “Oh, no, I almost remember. It had ‘kill’ in the title.”

“ Abel Kills Cain ,” Sarah said.

“It sounds like the name of a band.”

“It should be.”

“Hey, I like this guy,” Jonathan said.

She joked, “Don’t say that until you’ve worked with him,” and Jonathan said, “No, not the writer. I mean the guy who fell. He’s coming over here.”

Then William was upon them.

“How bad did that look?” he asked.

Jonathan said, “William, this is Sarah. Sarah, William.” Then he said, “It didn’t look bad.”

“From your lips to God’s ears.”

“As long as you’re not hurt, that’s all that matters,” said Sarah.

“Hurt my body all you want, but leave my pride alone,” William said, and Sarah replied, “I know what you mean.”

She was a touch drunk.

It was the three of them now, snaking in a line past artworks and tall bookshelves, searching for smokers. They stopped at a door that was locked, and kept going, single file, with Jonathan leading and Sarah in the middle. At times the crowd pressed in, and Jonathan had to forge a path through it. They came to an open door that led into a hallway painted dark red, and could hear voices down the hall.

“Who lives here?” William asked.

“The owner is the heir to a cosmetics fortune,” Sarah said, adding, “He’s also a very good poet.”

At the end of the hall was a room, where about eight people were gathered on and around a big bed, talking and drinking.