The Emerald Light in the Air (15 page)

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

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.

“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.