The Emerald Light in the Air (8 page)

Over the next months, as winter turned to spring, and spring to summer, in apartments in Manhattan and a brownstone in Brooklyn, Jennifer and Christopher developed a pattern of habitation described in rough form by the weekend at Amy's. After hauling overnight bags and specialty-shop groceries into the new house-sit, they would cook without cleaning, nose through cabinets and drawers, and fall in and out of bed, where, after screwing, they might also eat. It never took long for things to go to hell—crumbs in the sheets, ashtrays and unwashed glasses and a wine bottle or two (she liked a glass before sleep) sitting on the floor, spills drying on kitchen countertops, leftovers hardening in pans. “What a disaster,” Christopher would invariably say when the time came to tidy up, and she'd answer, rolling her eyes, “Yes, but it's our disaster.”

Before they made their escape, she'd scribble a note and leave gift-wrapped soap or a bottle of good olive oil (along with her leftover wine, if there was any) in a place where it would be found the minute the rightful inhabitants came through the door.

Some places worked out better than others. Karen and Peter's Little Italy walk-up facing the street was cluttered and dreary, and a tenant in a neighboring apartment had the music turned up loud, but Jennifer, intent on a good time, hauled Karen's wardrobe from the closet in search of skirts and dresses to model for Christopher. Karen had fabulous clothes, in Jennifer's size. It wasn't long before Jennifer began pulling out the shoe boxes as well, along with Karen's cashmere sweaters and blazers, and parading from the bedroom in head-to-toe outfits, while Christopher commented from his chair on the looks that worked and those that didn't. That was a fun night. Less enjoyable was the brownstone, where Christopher caused basement flooding when he used paper towels instead of toilet paper in an upstairs bathroom, clogging a section of pipe, three stories below, that had been rusting away for years. The owners of the house, Sam and Beth, were away in California with their twins, Sarah and Miles, at Sam's grandmother's memorial service. The better part of Christopher and Jennifer's weekend was given over to negotiations with plumbers, negotiations undertaken without consulting Sam and Beth. Finally, a man came in and sawed away and replaced the corroded pipe, and they spent Sunday afternoon laundering the towels they'd used to clean the floor and the assortment of Miles's and Sarah's toys that had been sitting in a pile beneath the leak. “That's what happens when you buy instead of rent,” Christopher announced that night as he locked the front door behind them. He said, “Shall we?,” and they hurriedly kissed before darting off to different subways and the lives they lived separately during the week.

Then, in May, they shut themselves up inside a modern high-rise on Madison Avenue. For three days, they shared what should have been a paradise of high-ceilinged rooms while the apartment's owner, Danny, a friend of Christopher's who'd inherited a department-store fortune, was away in Germany buying art. He was a collector.

“Jesus,” Jennifer said when they walked in. “Will you look at this crap?” She made a clicking sound, dismissive, using tongue against teeth. She'd stopped before a large drawing hanging in the entryway. It was, like all the pieces displayed on Danny's walls, abstract—a charcoal turmoil of overlapping marks, smudges, and erasures executed with such force by the artist that the paper had worn through in places.

“Do you hate it?” Christopher asked. He'd wanted her to be proud of him for scoring Danny's keys. He hadn't thought to worry about his friend's taste. She didn't answer, so he dropped their grocery bags, came up behind her, and wrapped her in a hug. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he looked at the drawing from her point of view. At first it appeared, he thought, inchoate and stagy—as if the artist had been playing with an idea about the drama in disorder. But the longer Christopher stared the more he felt compelled to see otherwise. Was that a reptile skittering across the bottom of the paper? Were those faces? He felt the muscles around his eyes relax as his gaze became less focused; outlines of faces and figures receded into the drawing's shadows, and the work acquired space and depth, interiority.

Glancing sideways, he saw that she was biting her lower lip. “How about that? It's a world,” he said. She'd been thinking the same thing, though the world she saw was not his world. She saw the white walls and porch-paint gray floor inside her mother's studio, in particular the floor, its smudged arabesques and dirty footprints of paint dripped from brushes held slackly in her mother's hand, year after year, as far back as she could remember.

Why hadn't her mother protected her?

She pried Christopher's arms from her waist, stomped into the living room, and plopped down on one of the leather sofas he'd been looking forward to having sex on while listening to Danny's stereo.

“Go to hell,” she said, and he flinched—was she joking? But it didn't sound like a joke.

The situation wasn't much improved in the living room. On one wall was a sculpture that looked like a complicated tricornered hat, with a high crown and a razor-edged brim. And that painting above Jennifer's head couldn't possibly be a—a what's-his-name, could it? Outside, trees were in bloom and the park was alive with insects and birds. But Danny preferred that they not open the apartment's windows. It was important to keep out dust. And, he had asked, could they please not raise the shades during the day, also for reasons having to do with conservation? Perhaps it was the drawn shades that caused Jennifer's bad mood to worsen. Christopher spent Saturday afternoon alone in the semi-darkness, flipping channels on Danny's giant television. Occasionally Jennifer called to him from the bedroom. She didn't feel like getting out of bed, even though she was sharing the room with a Richard Serra print that looked like a leaden, black sun.

“I feel sick,” she told him that night when he came in and checked on her. “Do I have a fever?”

He felt her forehead. “If you do, it's not high.”

“Ugh,” she said.

They had another conversation about art.

“Did you paint this week?”

“I tried one day. It was windy and the stretcher blew off the easel. Twice. Anyhow, it doesn't matter. My painting is all over the place. I don't know what I'm doing.”

“That can't be true.”

“I don't understand color. I don't understand paint. I want things brighter. Not brighter, more alive. What am I trying to say?”

“Intense? More intense?”

She coughed. “That's part of it. I'm also searching for restraint.”

“Intense restraint.”

“Very funny.” She coughed again.

“I didn't mean to be funny.”

“I know.”

He felt her forehead once more, and this time decided that she was hot. She had a temperature. He said, “I'd better get you some aspirin and a glass of water.”

When he came back into the room, he sat on the bed and waited while she swallowed the pills.

“Stop staring at me.”

“Sorry.”

“You're making me nervous,” she said. She handed him the glass. “Could you get me a drop of wine? The merlot on the counter beside the sink?”

“Is that a good idea?”

“It's Saturday night. Who cares if it's a good idea?” She held the glass for him to take. “A drop? Just a drop?”

He took the glass and went out of the room. Who drank with a fever? He made a special effort not to drink on these weekends they shared. He did not want her to see him knocking back a six-pack in the hours past midnight, as he did in secret during the week, on the nights alone—and there were other things he didn't want Jennifer to get wind of. His departure from his job hadn't come about in precisely the way he'd indicated when he'd glossed the matter on their first night together, at Amy's. Had he lied to her? He'd omitted certain specifics. She didn't need to hear about his cavalier approach to sick days or his periodic failure to bill clients, or about the humiliation he'd suffered when, one day, he'd sneaked downstairs to have a beer in the restaurant attached to the building's lobby and a partner standing at the bar had loudly upbraided him over some minor mistake, then called him a drunk. And there was something else Jennifer might not be happy knowing: He'd lately been taking walks in Central Park, hunting for her beneath the trees near Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn. On his walks he became furtive, nervous; he imagined that if he could catch her at her easel, her brush in her hand, painting a picture of the known world, he might—he might what? Hide behind a tree and, like a trespasser hopped up on adrenaline, watch her? Call her cell phone from his and, while pretending to be nowhere near, chat?

He poured her wine and shoved the cork back into the bottle. He enjoyed a moment of pride over not having any alcohol himself. In the bedroom, he said, “Here.”

She took the glass. She sat propped against pillows. She said, “A sip will help me sleep.”

“Right.”

“It helps before bed, you know?”

“Yes.”

“Is something the matter?” she asked, because she'd heard his tone.

“No. I guess not. No.” He looked at her body outlined beneath the blankets. How could he tell her what was wrong? What
was
wrong? Was it simply that he didn't care to watch her do what he did? He felt afraid for her—was that it? “It's nothing, I'm fine,” he said, while she drank. But later that night he was unable to sleep. He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where he found Danny's liquor in a cabinet above the stove. He went into the living room and sat up until three drinking Scotch. His mood followed a well-worn path: Halfway through his second drink, he knew his life was good—he was a lucky man. Everything, even the glass in his hand—especially the glass in his hand, crystal, heavy-bottomed, warm to his touch—felt right to him. As he drank, his ebullience increased, and he regarded his expensive surroundings as somehow belonging to him, or, more appropriately, as a preview of what he'd surely one day have. But after another few shots his thoughts veered into a familiar loop. Who was he fooling? How would
he
ever have any of this? Why was he unable to take possession of the world's bounties? Why had he and Jennifer not ever gone
dancing
, for Christ's sake? What was their
plan
? They met, climbed into bed, leaped out of bed, said goodbye—was he in love? Was she? Or were they just fucking? They had so much to be thankful for, so much. They had each other.

His face was numb. He gave himself a bit more to drink, put away Danny's bottle, rinsed the glass, and groped his way down the hall to the bedroom, where he stood in his underwear beside the bed. The shades were drawn, the windows blacked out. As Christopher's eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that each window—there were three—was haloed in a corona of light, the city's nighttime glow seeping in through the narrow chinks between glass and shade. He felt the impulse to wake Jennifer and show her the illuminated windows, as if the phenomenon represented something uniquely worth experiencing, like a solar eclipse. Three black suns hovered over her as she slept. Make that four, counting the Serra.

The following afternoon, he woke beside her. How was she feeling today? A little better, she told him. He, of course, was hungover. But that wasn't a life-or-death problem, was it? She wondered aloud if she'd given him whatever bug had bitten her, and he promised her she hadn't, then asked her—he hadn't planned this; it just came out of his mouth—if she would consider showing him her painting, the one she'd begun in the days after they met. Dry-mouthed, he added, “Don't be scared.”

After that, he went ahead and joined her for drinks when they got together. Who took the lead in this new policy? It was she, after all, who didn't make much fuss over a glass of wine. Following his old rule, he waited until dinner was finished before pouring his first, so that he could have a decent amount in a short span of time without causing a sodden evening. When he drank, she drank. Sometimes she smoked. She liked to stand at a window and exhale out into the world. When the nights got warm, she opened the window wide and leaned on the casement.

Late in June, a heat wave hit. The daytime sky grew white with becalmed air trapped over the city. Faint thunder could sometimes be heard, but storms never materialized, showers never arrived. On the evening of the solstice, Christopher and Jennifer hauled suitcases, groceries, and her painting—shrouded, for protection, in bubble wrap and muslin—up six flights to Bert and Lucie's top-floor apartment. The temperature rose higher and higher as they climbed. When they reached the landing, they stopped to rest. She recovered against a wall, and he leaned his weight on the doorknob, then turned the key in the lock, and they tumbled in. She went straight to the bathroom and ran a cold tub, while he dumped ice cubes from trays to glasses in the kitchen. He stood before the open freezer, letting mist touch his face. He could hear her splashing in the bathroom, and he heard Bert's fish tank bubbling in the living room. What did Bert and Lucie keep in the freezer? Was that a bottle cap poking out from beneath two ice-cream cartons? He pulled out the bottle of gin, unscrewed the top, mopped his face with a dish towel, refilled the ice trays. It was still light out. Instructions for feeding the piranha had been left on the counter beside the sink. Christopher carried his drink down the hall and peered into the tank. He tapped its glass wall.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

The bathroom door opened, closed. “I fixed you a drink! It's in the kitchen!” he called, and heard her walking in that direction. A moment later, he smelled cigarette smoke. He went down the hall and saw her bent over the windowsill, her head craned out, her back to him. She was naked and damp; the wet ends of her hair stuck to her shoulders. She looked, he thought, with her hair streaming back and her breasts proudly showing, not unlike a ship's figurehead, sea-sprayed. Christopher would remember this vision—Jennifer's raised butt, framed against the building behind Bert and Lucie's, and, above that building, chimneys and water towers crowning roof after roof on the horizon—long after he'd forgotten the things they'd said in these rooms where he and she became partners.