The Emerald Light in the Air (6 page)

He could play the violin, though. Boy, could he! That was a hell of a lot more than Patrick could do!

Was it time yet to relocate from the bar to a booth? The barstools weren't the most comfortable things.

“Bartender!” Patrick called. “Hit us!” And to Roger he said, “This is going to have to be it. I'm about out of cash.”

The men looked sadly at the money. It was true, there wasn't much left. Would Roger offer to spend the money that Patrick had dropped in his case? It was not likely.

And, hey, where was “Pond, with Mud”? Had the bartender taken it and stashed it behind the bar? Had one of the miserable drunks walked off with it? No, there it was, next to the violin. It was safe.

To Roger, Patrick said, “You've hardly said a word all night. All day. My friend. Tell me something. I've told you things. I've told you that Bunny and I are on our way to the zoo. I've told you we were going to look at all the crazy animals. I've told you that you can hold your son. I want you to tell me something I can write down. Tell
me
something, fucker,” he said to Roger, and immediately regretted this. “I'm sorry. I am sorry.”

“Don't,” the other man said.

Don't? Don't what? Don't be sorry? Don't say these things? Don't apologize? Don't ask Roger to apologize?

Roger placed his hand on Gregory's back. He moved his hand gently, stroking the boy. As Patrick watched this, it came into his mind to say, “Don't wake him.” Another “don't.” Was that what Roger had meant? Don't ask me not to touch my son?

“Gregory.” Roger said his son's name. “Gregory.”

The boy's face was wrinkled from lying against his arms and the edge of the bar. He was coming awake. How long had he been sleeping? What was the time? How could there be a bar without a clock?

Patrick removed his malfunctioning pen from his pocket. But by the time he'd got the pen out he'd forgotten his subject. His subject had been? What were his subjects? Patrick's subjects were the usual subjects. There was another of his unfunny jokes. Patrick's subject had been time. But he'd forgotten time. Why was he holding his pen? He put it away. Was it leaking? No, that wetness Patrick felt was water dripping on him from the bottom of his glass. How much had he drunk? Or maybe the wetness was a spot of ink soaking through the lining of his coat, staining his shirt above his heart.

And Patrick, unwilling or unable to allow himself to be vanquished by Roger, said, sharply, “Hey, everybody, I'm bleeding to death!”

That did it. That brought on the tempest. Could anything have hurt Patrick more than to hear the boy cry out at the sound of his, Patrick's, voice?

“No crying, Bunny. Okay, no crying? No need to cry. I'm going to pick you up! You'll be happy in the air! Are you ready to be happy?”

He looked across at Gregory's father. One last look before leaving. He believed he knew in that instant what he saw in Roger's eyes.

And with that he leaned close to Gregory, picked up the Scotch and soda from the bar, raised the glass to the boy's lips, and said, “Here. Don't cry.”

 

SOLACE

They were children of parents who'd acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground—for that was how she thought of it—seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they'd started going to bed together—always at friends' places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn't have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At
last
! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend's or friend of a friend's freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.

One morning after this way of life had been going on for a while—it was the day after the summer solstice, and they were occupying their sixth or seventh borrowed apartment, getting away from their Susans for the weekend—Christopher woke early. He pushed back the sheet and the thin bedspread, rolled off the strange mattress, and, leaving her sleeping, went searching for coffee in Bert and Lucie's kitchen. He moved down the line of melamine cabinets, opening and shutting the white doors. The open, uncurtained kitchen window gave him a view of a treeless back courtyard and neighbors' windows directly opposite. There was no breeze. Living without air-conditioning or blinds was, Christopher thought, exactly the kind of thing his friends Bert and Lucie would do; it was a statement about iconoclasm or freedom or hedonism, and there was more evidence of it, the ambiguous statement, everywhere in the apartment—in the preponderance of tacky objects from the sixties and seventies, in the bright upholstery colors on the couch and podlike chairs, in the large fish tank inhabited by a piranha.

Christopher put water on the stove and turned on the burner. There, on the counter beside the refrigerator, was the gin bottle. But where was the coffee? He was naked.

They'd met at the end of the previous winter, at a dinner party thrown by a movie producer for whom Christopher had once done some legal work. The producer's husband had been seated directly across the table from Christopher, and on the husband's right was Jennifer. Shortly after the halibut came out, Christopher remembered, this man had dropped his napkin on the floor beside her chair, then boldly leaned into her space to reach for it. As he reached down, his forehead bumped the side of her left breast. And that wasn't all. Coming up after grabbing the napkin, the husband, in a show of spatial awareness or perhaps a feigned considerateness, moved backward to avoid a second contact. Instead of sitting straight in his seat, however, he paused, his body bent awkwardly over, his face close to the breast, which he gazed at, it seemed to Christopher, with intensity. In a mock-formal voice, addressing the breast, the husband growled, “Pardon,” then sat upright and laughed, forcing Jennifer to grimace out at the table as she shared the joke. But what was the joke?

“You're Charlie Harrison's friend!” she shouted at Christopher before coffee was served, before they pushed back their chairs and wandered off to find privacy—the sloppiness of the people around them making it possible for them to seek refuge with each other—in a bedroom.

“Charlie,” he said, and finished chewing. Then he thought: Christ, why bring that up?

Down the table, a man who'd drunk too much knocked his glass across a plate, and there was a commotion.

“You've got to speak up!” she called over the noise. “I can't hear a word you're saying!”

“How do you know Charlie?” he asked loudly, and she yelled back, “I wouldn't say I
know
him!”

“I don't, either! I mean, I don't
not
know him! I
know
him”—gathering steam—“but, well, not
well
, anymore. I
knew
him!” What was he doing? Why was he blurting?

“I understand! I understand completely!” she shouted at him. “Here's to old acquaintances!” She leaned over her plate, raised her glass in her hand, and, in a softer voice, told him, “My name's Jennifer.”

Was she making a toast? He had nothing in his glass but water. It occurred to him that she'd maybe had a bad experience with his ex-friend, that she and Charlie had possibly slept together. He tilted himself forward to meet her halfway. A candle burned between them, and he moved it aside. Her eyes were brown and somewhat cloudy; he made a point of looking into them when he said, “It's bad luck to toast with water.”

“We don't want bad luck.”

So he picked up a wineglass from among the scattered dishes, one that had been filled but seemed not to belong to anyone, and raised it to his mouth and took a quick fake drink, even that a violation of the major rule he lived by, the rule he tried not to violate too often or—since most nights he was, after all, likely to break down—too early in the evening. But it wasn't early in the evening, was it?

“For luck,” he said.

Later, sitting next to him on a bed, atop partygoers' mixed-up coats, scarves, and hats, she told him that she'd worked in the film business for six years but hadn't felt at home, that she'd wanted all along to paint. Her mother painted but had never made a career of it, though who knew what might have happened were it not for her mother's drinking and drugging. Those were Jennifer's words: drinking and drugging. She told him she felt sure that as a very young girl she'd probably been happy, but because of things that had happened when she was a bit older in her childhood, things that had influenced every aspect of her existence—did he follow her meaning?—those sweeter memories, whatever they might have been, were no longer playing. Her current project was self-acceptance, not an uncommon goal, she said, among the sorts of people she mainly hung out with, people who'd moved to the city from distant places because, as she put it, “they had no homes in their home towns.”

That last line sounded like something she'd said before, on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, her words were a mini-revelation to him. She'd expressed a condition that he'd known in life yet had been unable to articulate until it was figured forth concretely by her, in speech that sounded canned. “I'm enjoying myself,” he told her, and she said, “I'm having a nice time, too. I'm glad I came tonight,” and went on to tell him how much her painting meant to her—so much that it frightened her sometimes—even though she was only a beginner. She was interested in realism, she said. This was one area in which she differed from her mother, who, she confided to Christopher in a low whisper, was an abstract expressionist; and—she was getting excited again—the fact of her mother's frustrated ambition obviously had everything to do with the anxieties that she, Jennifer, felt whenever she picked up a paintbrush. Breathlessly, she told him, “I need to make painting mine.”

“How about you?” she asked.

“Me?”

“Yes.” Flirting. “You.”

“I'm not an artist.”

He paused. She waited. Finally he said, “I used to scribble a few lines in college. Poetry. Does that count?”

“Count? What do you mean, count?” She laughed, and he said, “Oh, I just, I guess, I don't know,” and then, against his will, he was laughing with her, because what else could he do? He gazed at the side of her face, wondering, absurdly, whether he would like what he saw—what he would see—as the years rolled by and she and he got older. Her nose, it seemed to him, was on the small side in relation to her wide mouth. Makeup did not completely conceal a slight dryness to her skin, and her hair, pulled tightly back, gave her forehead a stretched appearance—would she look less startled without the ponytail? And yet she was attractive in a prim, smart way that he found sexy. And who was he to find fault, he with his thin upper lip and jutting ears?

After they'd stayed a while longer in their hosts' bedroom, she exclaimed, “I have to go now!” and leaped up and tugged her coat and scarf from the loose pile—he was forced to scramble when other guests' clothes began shifting beneath him. Would he walk her out? In fact, would he mind saying goodbye to the others for her? Yes, he assured her, he'd be happy to. Where were her gloves, though? she wanted to know. “Did you check in your coat? Are the gloves in a pocket? Are there pockets in the lining? Could the gloves be in the lining?” he asked. But they weren't there. Nor were they under the bed. “They'll turn up,” she announced as she marched out of the bedroom. They sneaked past the clamorous guests in the dining room. “Sh-h-h,” he whispered in her ear, and she giggled. He could smell her hair, a sweet smell of—what? At the front door, they did not kiss.

This abruptness of hers during the moments leading to leave-taking (was it that parting produced anxiety, or that her mounting claustrophobia required a quick getaway?) was, as Christopher would witness again and again, part of a style characterized by a variety of impatient behaviors—dramatically rolling her eyes, for instance, whenever it seemed to her that he was being pathetic. They would be a wry couple. But a little sarcasm, even in fun—and the evening had turned out to be fun—a little sarcasm went a long way for Christopher, who, when they next met, at a Village café appropriate for a casual non-date (though it was, in fact, a big date for Christopher, in that it was his turn to risk a few remarks about his own origins), told her, “Everybody laughed at me.”

A week had passed since the dinner party.

“Everybody? Who's everybody?” She crossed her arms. She was taking his measure. She wore a pink woolen scarf wrapped loosely about her shoulders, in the style of young Parisian women. At the rear of the café, a mother and her two small children were making a racket. Christopher spoke up. “My family. My family laughed at me,” and immediately she broke in, “I understand what you mean. Everybody who matters,” and he replied, “Yeah, right?” before continuing, in tones that she would learn to recognize as harbingers of a mild paranoia, “For example, let's say I had something serious on my mind, something to say at the dinner table. I'm trying to think of an example. I can't think of one. It doesn't matter. I could have been talking about anything. They'd burst out laughing! It got so that I was afraid to speak! If I tried telling a joke or a funny story—and I didn't often try that—they'd sit in their chairs and chew their food. But I could read the obituaries, well, maybe not the obituaries, and my father and mother and sisters would laugh!”