Slowly she said, “I would literally rather kill myself than go to a movie tonight.”
He raised his brows, as if, at his desk on some Wednesday afternoon, the peal of a fire alarm had brought him to sudden life. It was an exaggeration, but her level voice was soft and frighteningly sincere.
“OK,” he said. “We won’t go to the movies.”
Traffic eased. They stepped off the median and hurried across the street. But they didn’t know where they were going or what they were doing, so they idled under the shade of a building. Passersby ignored them in a push toward known destinations, fixed plans, the city’s eight million souls seeming to conspire against her, joining in something mysterious and urgent.
“Sarah,” he said. “What is it you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t put it like that.”
“Like what?”
“What should we do, Jay?” she said pointedly. “What should we do?”
“Don’t they come to the same thing?”
“They don’t.”
She spent ten minutes searching for something on her phone. He retreated a few feet, squatting near a scrawny tree planted in a little cell. When she gestured, he rose to his feet and followed her, keeping a step behind. At the next corner, they waited as taxis bounced by on their shocks. They caught every red light thereafter. They reached the building she wanted, the one with the lounge with a floor-to-ceiling view. She kept hitting the button as the elevator made its way down to them.
They were the last ones out when the doors opened. The window just past the reception area showed the buildings down Fifty-ninth Street checkerboarded with lights in the dimming hour. Bankers in their brigs, she thought. A canopy of shadow was slowly rolling across the silver treetops, settling the leaves into their darkest green.
All the tables were occupied or reserved. The hostess took Jay’s name.
“Should we be here?” Sarah asked him.
“Isn’t this where you wanted to be?”
The hostess watched them. “You’re welcome to sit at the bar,” she told them.
“Thank you.”
“How long until a table is free?” Sarah asked.
The hostess didn’t know. She couldn’t guarantee one at all. They went to the bar, where they drank in silence.
She had wanted a picnic, then the subway had defeated her. Then they’d been stranded on the median bickering over nothing, the all-consuming nothing of what to do. Was it she, she alone, who made that question so inscrutable and accusing some nights, like a stranger leveling a finger at her from across a room? Or was it the haltings and blinders of an entwined life: the fact of Jay, the disequilibrium of having to take what he wanted into consideration, whatever that might be? Because he kept it to himself, or it remained alien to him, and so how could she hope to name it? Or maybe there was no mystery at all. Maybe he just wanted to see a movie.
The last of the daylight disappeared as they waited, and all the possibility that had arrived with the breeze was reduced to yet another series of drinks at a bar. By the time a table opened up, she felt drunk and unfocused. They had a final drink and left.
They tried having dinner at a cheap Italian joint downtown, but they got into a fight and left before he would even enter the restaurant. When they got home, they were no longer speaking. They lay in the dark for a long time before he broke the silence. “I could have gone to the fucking movie,” he said.
She grabbed him when they reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and, with his hand in hers, raced back the way they’d come, up the stairs into the mellow night. She breathed the spring air in deeply, shedding the subway stuff, the still blue sky confirming her good judgment. But he was confused.
“What are we doing?”
“Let’s not get on the subway,” she said. “I can’t stand it down there, not right now. Let’s just walk.”
“Walk where?”
She led him west toward the Brooklyn Bridge. On the pedestrian walkway, she skipped ahead, then waited for him, then skipped ahead, then swung around and smiled. They came to a stop midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn just as the sun was setting. The wavelets in the bay turned over in little strokes, scaling the water silver before it darkened to stone. She looked straight up. Just to see the towering spires of the bridge climbing to a single point in the sky was to affirm that nothing more could be asked of this hour, nothing better apprehended in this life. She took hold of a steel cable in each hand and gazed out again at the setting sun. The burn-off against the buildings grew milder, its colors deeper; for a minute, the certainty that it would die out was in doubt. The sun dropped away, and a blue shadow settled over everything—the bridge, the water. It mirrored the cool ferric touch of the suspension cables. She let go, and the blood came back to her hands in heavy pulses. Her eyes filled with tears for the second time that night.
When the last of the sunlight was gone, she turned to him and said, “What did you think of that?”
He looked at her with perfect innocence. “Of what?” he said.
It was before midnight when she found herself sitting on the edge of the tub, fully dressed, doubting the future of her marriage.
They waited a long time for their drinks to arrive. The bar was situated—stupidly, to her mind—far from the view, and they were facing the wrong way. They had nothing to look at but liquor bottles and wineglasses, while outside the sun was disappearing and shadow was unfurling swiftly across the trees.
It had been a terrible idea to come up here, thinking they’d fall miraculously into a table. She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn’t work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance. And, as if choosing the wrong place weren’t bad enough, there were all those alternatives, abstractions taking shape only now: a walk across the bridge, drinks with Molly at the beer garden. Lights, crowds, parties. Even staying put in the brig, watching the neighborhood descend into darkness. The alternatives exerted more power over her than the actual things before her eyes. What had she been thinking, penning them in a bar on a night like this?
Knees fixed between the stool and the bar, she turned to him as best she could. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she said.
“For what?”
“For rushing us out of the apartment, and for how I acted on the subway. And it was a mistake to come up here. Let’s do something,” she said.
“OK,” he said. “Like what?”
The second he asked, the desire came over her to be in the Park, obscured by trees and bent over with her fingertips dug into the earth, and to feel him push her panties down to her ankles. As she worked it out in her mind, they would not be perfectly secluded, so that he would feel rushed, and as a result would be a little rough with her, dispense with the considerate sheets-and-pillows concerns of their weekend sex life and just fuck her, fuck her hard and fast. Then let the passersby ignore them, ignore the flash of white skin inside a clot of trees in the near-dark. She’d feel no sense of exclusion then. The minute she felt him coming, she would come too. Then she would right herself as he was buckling, straighten the sundress, smile at him, and, just like that, all the stale tenement air of married life would disperse.
“Sounds like you have something in mind, Sarah,” he said, taking her hand under the bar. “Tell me what it is.”
She dared herself to lean in and whisper it.
“I’m up for anything,” he said.
But she lost the nerve.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
He suggested they buy sandwiches before getting on the train, from the neighborhood place. But the neighborhood place! She was so sick of it. They had lived off that menu for as long as she could remember. Then she climbed out of the subway and knew they’d made a mistake. Finding food for a picnic would take time, time they didn’t have. But if she called off the
picnic because there was no time to find food, then what did they have if not time? Time to squander and squander until the night was over. One night after another until her life was over. A night in spring could make her go a little crazy, start thinking her options were either a picnic or death. Jay was charging forward, blanket under his arm, toward the picnic he believed was still on, when she stopped. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.
It wasn’t in him to see what made this day different from other days. He didn’t pick up on breezes and breaks in weather, or they came upon him as the natural course of events too common to celebrate. If he had had his druthers, even today he would have worked into the night, feeding at his desk from some Styrofoam trough, then hurrying to meet her for the late-night showing of the follow-up to the sequel. Once home, he would have collapsed on the bed as if all the adventurous excursions of the day had depleted him of everything but the delicious aftertaste of exhaustion. She wanted to be a different person, a better person, but he was perfectly happy being his limited self.
She had made a series of bad decisions, and now she traced them back to their source. It was not forgoing the sandwiches, or stepping onto the subway, or heading into Manhattan at the wrong hour. It was not leaving the brig where she had fallen into a fragile harmony with the day, or foolishly breaking that harmony to seek out something better. It was asking him to come home early. That was the mistake that had set everything else in motion.
“What is it?” he asked.
She was about to tell him. She had overcome her fear and was about to tell him everything when she said, “Thanks for carrying the blanket.”
He looked at the blanket in his hands. “Sure,” he said.
By the time they found food and made it into the Park, the shadow had overtaken the spaces between the trees. She could see vaguely that it was him as they laid the food out on the blanket, but, when the time came to pack up, it was so dark that he could have been anyone.
Molly looked up from the general laughter just as Sarah hurried past the tables in the distance. Sarah disappeared through a rusted steel trellis festooned with lights that served the beer garden as entrance and exit. “Uh, Jay?” Molly said.
She was a block away by the time he caught up with her.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey!”
“It’s over!” she cried. “It’s over!”
“What’s over?” he said, trying to take hold of her. “Stop. Stop!”
She stopped resisting and pressed her head against him and sobbed. Tears came through his shirt. Passersby, intrigued by the sight of another life on fire, skirted around them, turning back to stare.
“Spring,” she said.
“Over?” He lifted her off his chest and looked at her. “Sarah,” he said, “spring just started.”
He was wrong. Spring was a fleeting moment, and it blew past like the breeze on the brig. Then summer rushed in, hot and oppressive as car exhaust, and she couldn’t take another summer in the city. It was followed by another single moment, the instant the leaves changed color, and then it was winter again, the interminable winter, one after another endured and misspent until they came to an end with a final hour that she would never be prepared for.
“Tell me you get it,” she said. “Please tell me you get it, Jay.” She shook her head into his chest. “I’m scared to death,” she said.
“What just happened?” he asked. “What went wrong?”
“What are we doing? Why did we come here?”
“Where?”
“What else could we have done?”
“We did a lot,” he said. “We had a picnic, now we’re with friends. Why are you so upset?”
“Should I not do the thing I do?” she asked. “Or should I do the thing I don’t do?”
“What thing are you talking about?” he asked.
She didn’t want to go back to the beer garden. She made him go. He said goodbye to their friends and reassured them that everything was OK. Then he returned to the corner where he’d left her. She was already in a cab on her way back to Brooklyn. She gathered some things from the apartment—her pills, her toiletries—and an hour later she was in Molly’s apartment falling apart again.
The hostess came for them at the bar and led the way to a table in the lounge. The buildings down Fifty-ninth Street brought midtown to an abrupt end; the trees filling the Park had tumbled over the sheer blue cliffs of their mirrored surfaces.
Now night was rapidly resolving the green from the trees. A minute later, it seemed, the dark knit them together, and they were all one. Yellow taxis lost their color and became lights floating on air. The mysterious figures they were picking up and dropping off at the curb, those shadows: what were they seizing hold of at this hour, that would escape her grasp? She had to do something.
“Jay,” she said. “Do you know what I’ve always wanted to do in the Park?”
He was idly picking at the label on his bottle of beer. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Lean in,” she said. “I have to whisper it.”
The hostess never rescued them from their tight squeeze at the bar. They had a final drink and left. Out on the street, in the shadow of the Park, he asked, “Are you in the mood for dinner?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Yes or no?”
“I said sure.”
“Should we stay here, or go downtown?”
“Either way.”
They took a cab downtown. This was the best they could imagine: another dinner downtown. She opened the cab door and stepped onto the curb just as a loud pack of strangers came through a foyer and out to the street. They were aimed half drunk at the center of the night. She wanted to abandon Jay and his blanket and dinner plans and follow them into another life.
Jay shut the door, and the cabbie drove off. “Do you have a taste for anything in particular?” he asked.
“No.”
They stopped at a place to look at the menu. “Looks good to me,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
“You’re not crazy about it.”
“Do I have to be crazy about it? It’s dinner, who cares. It’s fine.”
“It should be more than fine if we’re going to drop a hundred bucks in there,” he said. “It should be a place you want to go.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and opened the door and walked inside.
It was an Italian place with checkered tablecloths, not likely to be anything special. And air-conditioned! There was no breeze here, only a recycled stream of arctic air. She would have walked out if Jay had been beside her. It was an affront to time. The first day of spring, and this place had it in a choke hold, waiting for its legs to stop kicking.
She requested a table for two, then turned and gestured Jay inside. He didn’t move. She followed the hostess to the table and sat down. He glared at her through the window. Unbelievable. She picked up the menu and began to study it. So this was how the night had settled: in a squalid little showdown at a cheap Italian restaurant that was as far from a picnic in the Park as—
She didn’t see him open the door. He raised his voice above the din.
“I’m not fucking eating in there!” he yelled.
Startled, she watched his head disappear and the door swing slowly shut. In that second, she was more determined to stay than ever, but people turned to stare at her, and she felt embarrassed, and so at sea compared with them, in their perfect little parties of friends and lovers, unburdened by the possibility of different companions, competing appetites, alternative pursuits of a finer life, as their dishes arrived at the appointed hour like destiny.
They left the bar excited. This was unexpected. This was being equal to the night. Not just watching the Park from afar, admiring its trees. Heading straight for them, into a different life. She hardly recognized him in the elevator. He kept looking over with a smile she’d never seen before. It was nearly enough to release them from the se
ntence of a long winter and its dull bedroom strain.
Outside, the last of the sunlight was gone from the sky. They were led into the Park by the silver light of old-fashioned streetlamps. Her heart pounded with uncertainty: Where would they do it? Would they be seen? How was it even done? Like a rush job, or something more deliberate, slowed down to expand the risk, intensify the thrill, feel anew the audacity of what two people can do?
They went deeper and deeper into the Park, until they were lost in it. They stopped and looked in both directions. Then she took his hand and rushed him into a dark knot of trees.
He unbuckled in a hurry as they kissed. She had to slip her panties down herself. Then she turned, planting her hands on the ground, and waited.
She waited and waited.
“Do you need help?” she whispered.
“Sh-h-h,” he said suddenly. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
He was quiet.
“Jay?”
“I need some help,” he said.
She turned. A few minutes later, she brought her hands back to the ground. She waited.
“I lost it again,” he said.
She stood and dusted herself free of earth.
“That’s OK,” she said. He was quickly buckling up. She reached out and touched him on the head.
There was an essential difference between them—what he might have called her restlessness, what she might have called his complacency—which had not surfaced before they were married, or, if it had, only as a possibility, hidden again as soon as it revealed itself. When they pointed out their shortcomings to each other, often in an argument, they both treated them as implausible accusations. But, if there was some intractable self in her that could be identified and accused, she thought, it was one in search of more life, more adventure, of the right thing to do at the given hour. It was not a homebody. It was not a moviegoer.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 16