The Emerald Light in the Air (7 page)

This made her laugh—
he
'
d
made her laugh. She could just see the awful scene around the family table. Christopher peeking over the top of the obituary page. She hoped her laughter would be taken conspiratorially, as evidence of her recognition of his mistreatment. And his shame.

At the back of the café, the mother struggled with her children. Crying had begun. Jennifer turned to look. When she finally turned back to Christopher, he said, “You see? You laughed. It's so exasperating.”

That was when she rolled her eyes. Was she playing with him? He gazed down at his spoon and knife, at his empty cup set crookedly on its saucer, at the miniature milk pitcher and the sugar bowl. What was the use in telling her how bleak he felt when people found him funny? What if he were to reach across the table and touch her face? Right now. Would she understand, through his touch, that making people laugh felt to him like being hit? What made people want to hit him in this way?

He said, “It's not your fault.”

“What's not my fault?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don't know.”

How red his hair was beneath the warm coffeehouse lights. He looked to her like a skinny, freckled, Scottish orphan. “You can tell
me
a joke,” she said.

“You'll hate it.”

“I won't hate it.”

“It's not going to be funny.”

“Please?” she said.

The joke involved a horse, a carrot, and a man wearing a cap. A third of the way through the setup, he broke character and said, “The guy in the cap is Norwegian. I forgot to mention that.” He started over and, a moment later, paused again before saying—to himself? to her?—“Is it a carrot? It's got to be a carrot, it's a horse.” Looking across their small table, he could see her eyes narrowing. He sighed and—he was getting panicky now—said, “The reason the horse won't give the Norwegian a ride is that he's depressed. The
horse
is depressed, not the man.” At that point he lost the thread. What in the world was he doing? He had no tolerance for comedy. He said, “How's your coffee?”

“Good. It's good.”

He paid the check, and they walked out and stood on the sidewalk, which was busy with people coming and going in parkas and hats. It struck her, as she watched him standing on the dark street with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, that he was a decent person, a serious man, and she wanted to sleep with him, but it was too soon for that, and besides, she did not see how she could invite him to her apartment, where Susan would undoubtedly be planted on the living-room couch—the foldout couch that Jennifer slept on—watching television in a sweatshirt. Jennifer did not yet know that Christopher felt similarly thwarted, that at his place uptown on Broadway, a different Susan, home from her job, was busy smoking cigarettes, watering her overgrown plants, and talking on the telephone in a haughty, supercilious voice.

She said, “Which way are you walking?”

He said, “Which way are
you
walking?”

“You're tall,” she commented as they made their way west. She said this because she was forced to hurry to keep up with him on the sidewalk. Christopher did not understand, however, that her compliment was also a plea. He did not slow his pace.

They wound up on a bench overlooking the Hudson, making out. Her mouth tasted faintly metallic to him, and he wondered whether this might indicate a problem with their chemistry. Would she be wrong for him? A wind blew in from the river, and they edged closer to each other, taking the cold as permission to mash together on the slatted bench. He worked his hand inside her coat. He didn't bother with buttons. Instead, he found passage where the coat flapped open between two closures, and felt, as his fingers burrowed under wool, the bottom of a breast. Should he push his way inside her shirt? He could hear people walking and jogging past. She kissed him harder, and, with his other hand, the hand not buried in her coat, he touched her cheek.

“Freezing hands! Ow!” She jumped up from the bench and, straightening and arranging herself, said—stating a more or less impossible proposition, he thought, considering that the city's lights, as well as those dotting New Jersey's urban hills across the Hudson, burned ceaselessly through the night—“Look how late it's getting.”

Two days later, she phoned to tell him that a friend of hers was leaving town for a weekend trip, and she'd be looking in on the friend's cats. How about dinner at the friend's apartment? Would that be nice? What should she make? Did he have any food allergies that she needed to know about? “Shellfish? Chocolate? Nuts?”

“I'm fine with nuts,” he said, and she told him that she'd started a new painting since meeting him, using bolder colors than she'd ever dared use in the past, and he said that he'd love to see it when it was done, and she nervously said, “I'm afraid that might be a while,” and then they talked about their last couple of days. She'd done her proofreading jobs in the mornings, then painted or gone to painting class in the afternoons, whereas he had hardly strayed from his small room in his Susan's apartment, the room where he often sat late into the night, drinking, a fact he didn't let on to Jennifer. Anyway, she told him to write down her friend's address, and they rang off, and that Friday night he arrived for dinner at a studio apartment with nothing much in it but a pair of Maine coon cats and a queen-size bed stacked with pillows.

“Hello hello,” he said when she opened the door.

“Careful, careful,” she said, meaning: Don't let the cats out. He could see them behind her feet, angling for escape, barging about on tremendous paws matted with fur. “This is Siegfried. This is Brunhilda.” With one foot, she forced aside a cat. She said, “Come in, hurry,” then added, “Amy”—her friend whose apartment they were about to treat like a motel room—“is from Maine.”

Quickly she closed the door.

The cats seemed a third or so larger than any house cat he'd ever seen. “You look great,” he said to Jennifer, and wondered why he'd failed to bring flowers. She did look beautiful. He hadn't expected the tartan miniskirt. She'd untied her hair and let it fall, and whatever had earlier seemed hard in her appearance was tempered now. He did a turn around the tiny room. Everything—bed comforter, pillow shams and cases, headboard, the petite dresser near the front door, the phone—was white. There was even a white plastic television. The apartment was on a high floor, and an east-facing picture window overlooked the Empire State Building, lit purple and white at its tip. What holiday did purple designate? Easter? But Easter was weeks away. He sat on the edge of the mattress, then bent over with his head between his knees and stared down a big-headed animal that had wedged itself under the box spring. “Here, kitty.”

“They like to play,” she said.

“Which is Brunhilda?”

“That one,” pointing, “the female.”

Then she said, “I guess we'll have to eat on the bed.” It was true. There was nowhere else to sit.

He said, “Or on the floor,” though the available floor space was not much more than a parquet walkway surrounding the bed (there was barely room to open the closet) and a kitchen area recessed along one wall. “Or in the bathroom?” he added.

She'd chosen halibut in honor of their meeting. Already they were building traditions. While he kept the cats busy with a chewed-up string dragged back and forth across the floor, she cooked the fish in one of Amy's white enamel pans, on top of Amy's white mini-stove. They squeezed onto the floor between bed and window, and balanced their plates on their knees. Paper towels were their napkins. He took a bite and said, “This is terrific.”

“Is it? Do you mean that? I'm glad.”

A cat crashed into his arm and he put down his fork and shoved it away.

“Don't let them bother you.”

“It's not a problem. I like cats.” In fact, he was allergic. He peered around the room and saw, through watery eyes, a white cosmos. He said, “I feel like I should be drinking milk.”

“I think there's some in the refrigerator,” she said, and he protested, “No, please, I wasn't serious,” leading her to wonder if he'd been making a reference to the cats—was that it?—while he thought back over their past conversations. Had she shown a pattern of literal-mindedness? He saw her puzzlement, and felt as he always did when he allowed himself even the weakest attempt at humor. And what was with these animals that kept coming and coming, nosing around their laps and swatting at their food, so that he or Jennifer seemed always to be hoisting one and tossing it aside?

“No. Siegfried. No,” Christopher scolded. His sinuses were flooding. Jennifer threw Brunhilda onto the bed and told him that she was aware that by training to paint in a manner she thought of as realistic—she was aware that, by trying to render from life, she was covertly attacking her mother and what she called her mother's alcoholic world view, a world view quite accurately illustrated, she felt, in the sixties-style abstract paintings her mother never finished, or in the ones she finished but ruined by angrily painting past the point of completion. “She destroys her own work,” Jennifer said, and went on to add that she, Jennifer, had recently come to feel that she could, in her own, more representational paintings, not only repudiate her mother but escape her; her attempt to mirror in paint some piece of reality represented her determination to live a dignified life. That was what she believed. Or hoped. She said, “When I study the thing I'm painting, I feel free from not painting.”

Instead of asking her, What do you mean? he said, “What do you paint?”

“I'm one of those people standing behind an easel in Central Park.”

“Really?”

“It seems quaint, but it's not. It's serious.”

“No. I didn't mean … It's not that I … I,” he said, and this time—she was embarrassed for having embarrassed him—she laughed. How could she not? Weren't couples supposed to laugh together? Sniffling, he said, “What do I know? I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize,” she said, and whispered, consolingly, “It's all right. It's all right.” Then she confided, “I wear a beret.”

“No, you don't.”

“Yes, I do.”

When they kissed, the metallic taste that he remembered from the bench by the Hudson, and which he'd found himself worrying over up in his room, was gone. Maybe it had been neutralized by the fish. They set their plates on the floor beneath the window. He'd expected her to be nervous with him—at what point might she leap up and end the evening with some excuse or other?—and this made him vigilant and clumsy as he unbuttoned her blouse and felt behind her back for the hooks fastening her bra. She helped him with the hooks and her shirt's bottom buttons, and she raised her arms, allowing him to unwrap her. He grabbed her hand and one of her ankles, twisting her toward him. She clutched his shirt, yanked its tail from his pants, fiercely untucking him. Behind her was the big window with its skyline view. What would it be like to come home to that?

They got up on the bed, on the pillows, and could hear Siegfried and Brunhilda snapping at the food they'd left on their plates. It was obscene, he thought, this noisy feline licking, and yet he feared that getting up and clearing the plates to the sink might be interpreted as an act of antiseptic fastidiousness, explicitly anti-sexual. He pinned her shoulders to the mattress and leaned down to bite her nipple. Though he did not yet know her body, what pressures to apply, where to linger and for how long, he managed, in spite of his worry that she would find him awkward, to hold her in a way that felt—this was something he sensed—soothing to them both. That said, it was true that she, too, passed through moments of dread. It had always been this way with her. Her heart raced, her skin got a prickly feeling, and she was forced to concentrate on breathing deeply.

Right before he pulled out and came, he looked down and caught her gazing out the window at the Empire State. He brushed her hair off her forehead, lowered his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “Are you with me, Jennifer? Are you there? Are you there, Jennifer?” This got her attention. His quiet murmuring so turned them on that it immediately became repertoire, their version of “Fuck me, fuck me.”

Afterward, she told Christopher some, but not all, of the truth of her childhood. She was afraid, though without having a clear idea why, that if she confessed too much, if she reported in full her memories of her father coming drunk into her room at night, she'd lose him. He'd sat in his underwear in a chair beside her bed, her father had, or, she said to Christopher, sometimes right on the bed, and he'd told her again and again how he loved her, and how he wished the two of them could pack their things, right this minute, and drive away together to some remote place where she'd never hear vicious fighting from the other side of the door. It would be simple. But she had to choose. Would she come with him? her father had asked her, before leaning in close and putting his arms around her neck and weeping. She would always remember the smell of his breath when he'd been drinking.

Christopher listened politely, then, sighing—his turn, once again, to show her that he could face up to his own history—confided in a whisper that he had never been anything but a goddamn disappointment to his family, and that no matter how hard he'd tried, he'd never escaped or really even understood his role as a clown, as a fool, but that he'd finally made up his mind that it didn't matter, that their opinion of him wasn't going to bother him forever. She asked him, then, whether they drank, his parents, and he, startled by this interruption, said, “Oh, you know,” to which she replied, “No, I don't know. You have to tell me.” And so he said, somewhat defensively, “Yes. They did. They did,” then, waving his hands in the dark, went on to announce—it was as if he were making a promise—that he could handle himself in this world. And though he was not, he further acknowledged, currently employed, neither was he concerned. He had savings, in a manner of speaking, from his last and only secure position, as an associate at a law firm where he'd realized early on that he would not have the will or the desire to make partner. What point would there have been in carrying on? he asked her without really asking. He said, closing, “I'm not worried. I can find legal temp work when I need to. Hey, life's just one big process of elimination, right?” He shoved Siegfried aside, jumped up from the bed, and stood staring out at the bright city. Why was he so jittery all of a sudden? “How about a little air?” he suggested, raising the window an inch, letting in the sounds of sirens and car horns blaring far below.