The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  Saying this made me sad. Billy told me, “My father is not a bad man, no matter what people say.”

  Night was falling; the air had grown cold. Puck on his stomach crawled up the bank of his pond, then splashed back down into the water. Faeries on platforms jumped up and down noisily. Mary and Sheila, one tree over from me and Billy, adjusted costumes and each other’s hair. Up Puck came again, covered in mud. His glasses had slipped from his head, and now his sightless eyes stared wildly; he could not have realized how afraid he looked. “I’ll put a girdle. Round about. Earth—” he sputtered as, suddenly, the duck attacked. Martin howled and grasped at the mud and the grass, reaching for a handhold on dry land. It was too late. The duck blasted off the pond and came down hard in a spray of foam on Martin’s pudgy, naked back. Webbed feet slapped the boy’s white skin as the duck gave the coup de grâce with a thrust of her bill into Martin’s neck.

  “Thanks for talking, Lysander,” Billy exclaimed. He bolted from behind our oak tree. Sheila Tannenbaum leaped out of hiding and ran after him. “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not,” the boy yelled at the girl.

  What is more exciting than kinetic, technical theater, the impeccable orchestrations of pratfall farce? I say this in consideration of the fact that audience members were leaving their seats and sneaking close, the better to gawk at Puck in his hole. As is always the case during productions of the Bard, a few carried paperback copies of the script. Sticklers. I watched them thumb pages back and forth, no doubt searching for references to a vengeful mallard. I have no objection to the public encroaching on the players—during Shakespeare’s time, spectators sat on the stage and became, to a limited degree, implicated in the theater experience—but in this instance a participatory audience was a safety hazard. Billy, Mary, Sheila, and I had to dodge and weave throughout the better part of acts two and three. Darting barefoot and more or less naked around people wearing formal clothes had, as an activity, a distinctly anarchic, rebellious aspect—rebellious in the sense that it created, for me at least, the kind of sweaty excitement that comes with dangerous play. I felt free and young. I should say that I felt myself backsliding to a younger state of mind. It’s hard to say what this feeling consisted in—panic and hope, disappointment, shame. I was wearing torn Barry Bears gym shorts and feeling like a teenager and running fast, and my feet sank into the earth, and mud splashed my legs. What is more awful and disorienting than adolescence? How had I become so lost and alone? What had persuaded me that I could play a young man’s part? Was Billy pursuing me? Was I pursuing Billy? The bereaved came forward into the fray with heads bowed, and I stumbled through a puddle and narrowly missed crashing into President Farnham. “Reginald! This is criminal! Criminal!” the man shouted after me. Then: “Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down; I am fear’d in field and town: Goblin, lead them up and down,” Martin Epps sang out magnificently, beautifully, before, at long last, he slid through ooze and disappeared, cane and all, beneath the water.

  Bubbles, then silence.

  Women and men wearing black lined the banks of the wine-black lake. They appeared, I thought, to be enjoying the show. It must be said that Shakespeare’s genius lies partly in his plays’ ready adaptability to the kinds of high-handed, decadent concepts guaranteed to astonish playgoers and offend the critics. Theater artistes often speak of their disregard for the audience, and it’s a badge of integrity among some in this business to ignore the ostensible needs and desires of that inexpert class the ticket holders. But I think this is a rotten attitude. I’m in favor of putting on a show people will remember and talk about.

  Who cared if it was too dark out to really see anything? Who noticed that Mary Victoria Frost was whacked on pot and dropping her best lines? What did it matter if Mustardseed and Moth had stripped off their G-strings in order to sixty-nine atop the tree-house stage set? Puck had sunk, and the important middle acts were nearing conclusion, and this meant it was time for me to cuddle on the grass with Sheila Tannenbaum.

  There she was. She looked darling in her black-and-orange cheerleader’s outfit and her mesh tights. She was my Helena, and she came toward me, smiling her awkward smile; and we settled on the wet ground and held each other in the night.

  It was time for sleep. Sheila, the Lady Bears basketball star, snuggled warmly in my arms. She made a surprisingly good fit. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we kissed, lightly, and I looked up at trees and saw naked children.

  How nice to lie on the grass. Other players, the demons and mere mortals, coupled nearby. It was a world of youthfulness and love. It was our summer at last. Faeries in the old oaks cradled Bottom and their mistress, and you could hear Sam English braying in ecstasy.

  Beneath a tree, sprawled face down on the ground, lay Mary Victoria Frost, my poor Hermia. She looked so pale, so stuporous.

  There would be plenty of time, later in act four or five or whatever act this was, to wake up, dump Helena, and marry, for a fitting consummation, the right girl.

  It was the deep of night, late even for the fireflies. A few appeared here and there. Soon they would be gone. In the meantime, the Lord of Athens lit a cigarette and waited in the wings.

  POND, WITH MUD

  “The yellow bird made from cloth and / vines sits better in the / window than / the red truck I built last / year of / bottles,” Patrick Rouse wrote, in the fifteenth volume of what he liked to refer to as his life’s work—in reality, a journal crammed with passages written in a metaphorized terminology that Patrick had borrowed, or so he told himself, from the Imagist poets, and which he used to describe his emotions and whatever objects aroused his emotions. The “yellow bird,” for instance, referred to a lingerie bikini set featuring yellow lace woven in a tropical-jungle motif, which he had purchased a few days earlier for his fiancée, Caroline, who, at that moment, was standing in the living room modeling it for Patrick and—though the boy could hardly appreciate the significance of his mother’s erotic poses in bare feet before the hearth … or could he?—for her son, the “three-eyed rabbit.” That being, of course, more of Patrick’s code, or poetry, in this case describing Gregory, Caroline’s five-year-old from her marriage to Roger, an unemployed chamber musician.

  “You like it?” Caroline asked Patrick.

  He did. He did like it! He said, “That’s a good color for you.”

  Caroline turned and peered over her shoulder, as if into a mirror hung on the wall. There was no mirror. She drank from her wine, and said, “It is a good color, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have picked it, because it’s bright. But you spotted it! You had the wisdom to see it.” She took another sip.

  “Not wisdom,” Patrick said, as he wrote, in scratchy blue letters on a blank page in the book open on his lap, “Fat airplanes spot cloudless skies / their propellers / soft fans humming / leaking,” which was effectively a reminder to himself that soon he would be taking off his clothes, getting into bed, pushing aside the blue coverlet, climbing atop Caroline, and fucking.

  “You always know what colors I can wear.”

  “All I need to figure that out is a peek in the closet.”

  At that point Gregory, who was sitting in the enormous Mission-style chair beneath the framed photograph of Caroline on vacation, waving from the bow of the USS Wisconsin—Gregory made one of his demands.

  “Other! Chair!”

  “Do you want to get him?” Patrick said.

  “You get him. I’ve got these new things on.”

  What was difficult was not moving the boy from one chair to another, exactly; the problem consisted in the likelihood that, once moved, Gregory might become sad. It was grotesque, Patrick thought, always to be hoisting this growing boy, who could, after all, walk. Why did they do it, he and Caroline? Why did they take orders from Gregory? There was nothing wrong with him—at least, nothing Dr. Percy could ever find.

  “Here I come, my young boy who is not my own,” Patrick said. It was one of his jokes. He closed the volume on h
is lap and capped his pen, an ostentatious black-and-red lacquered fountain pen that he had bought for himself as a gift, and which leaked while he wrote. As always, he checked his hands, his shirt, and the front of his pants around the zipper. He found no ink smears. It had been a good writing day.

  It frequently happened, when Patrick stopped purposefully making notes in “Pond, with Mud” (his secret name for his encrypted journal), that he began to feel as if he might be on the verge of formulating a concrete idea about the nature of existence, and about his place in the scheme of things. It was a feeling that came, as he thought of it, from deep in his heart. But each time he got this feeling it almost instantly went away. Would he never know what it was that he was trying to think about himself?

  He forced himself to concentrate on Gregory. The boy was spread, neither sitting nor lying—Gregory was doing a perverse version of both at once—across the leather seat cushion of the big Stickley that Patrick had carted with him everywhere he’d lived since college. The chair was coming apart in places. Something structural somewhere had broken, and one leg had a tendency to work its way gradually loose from the frame. Every now and then, the leg had to be slapped back into position. Patrick had seduced Amy in this chair. Then Vanessa. Then Caroline.

  He said to the sprawling boy, “Funny Bunny, I’m going to do something for you that you are going to like.”

  “Don’t get him excited,” Caroline said. She placed her wineglass on the mantel. She did a slow, balletic turn, showing Patrick her body. And Patrick knew—her voice had that angry sound—that the wine had begun to take hold.

  He approached the boy. He leaned over and placed his hands under Gregory’s arms. He began to lift. He said, “Do you love it when I hold you in the air? Are you my Bunny?”

  In fact, the approval Patrick cared for was Caroline’s. Patrick craved recognition from her, in order to view himself favorably as a man who could function as a father. This had become especially meaningful to him after what had happened a few days before.

  He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o’clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground. Immediately following the zoo’s inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony—or relatively soon after, to be more precise—strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you’d never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo’s future was in question. The time for a visit was now.

  “Here we go!” Patrick had exclaimed to Gregory as, with the boy’s damp hand grasped in his fist, the two of them made their way awkwardly through one of the angling, cavernous passageways leading from the street to the elevated central lobby of the city’s restored art deco train terminal. Patrick was in the habit of carrying along, wherever he went, the current volume of “Pond, with Mud.” Here, with a view ahead toward the train station’s towering and heavily leaded windows, windows that allowed ray after ray of sunlight to spill into the station’s airy middle spaces, illuminating floating dust and giving the whole marble place the steamy, mystical aura of a site associated with feelings and moods that were, for want of a better word, spiritual (the spirit of progress? This, to Patrick, had the feel of a theme), even otherworldly—here in the train station, Patrick felt inspired to say to the boy, whose hand he now shook loose, “Hang on a minute, Bunny.”

  He took his pen from the inside pocket of his coat. He unscrewed the brass-and-lacquer cap. What he loved most about untwisting the cap was the care required to keep the ink from running. Rituals were important. For instance, Patrick always carried the journal tucked at a certain angle beneath his left arm, pressed close to his heart, in the manner, he fantasized, of some boyish scholar traipsing with a rare edition of Donne through an English library hung with tapestries. Now he opened the volume and found a clean page. He gazed up at the tile mosaics of women’s faces adorning the lintels above the station windows. As he wrote, Patrick whispered to himself, in cadence with the travelers’ footsteps echoing along the entryway to the great hall, “Beasts or angels / arcing / entwined.”

  “We! Go!” Gregory shouted, badly interrupting Patrick, who looked rapidly left to right, and up and down, saying, “What? What? Of course, Gregory. We’re going to the zoo to see the deformed animals.”

  Patrick had one of his upsetting everyday thoughts: Christ, I’m not much of a poet, am I? He pushed this question out of his mind.

  In a soft voice, and in tones meant to be conciliatory, he said to Gregory, “Hey, little man, you don’t have to scream.”

  It was too late. The boy was crying. Patrick shut the book. He had forgotten to blow the ink dry, and the page would smudge. It would be a bad writing day.

  “Shit,” he said to Caroline’s son, bawling in the middle of the crowded station concourse. Carefully Patrick capped and returned the pen to the interior pocket of his jacket. He produced a wad of the loose tissues he always carried in his coat pockets for these routine weeping sessions. He knelt and pushed the soft white paper toward the boy’s face. What had made him think that he could ever deal with a kid?

  In fact, he was dealing with a kid, and not doing nearly as bad a job as he worried others might suppose, were any of those people rushing by—on their way to trains or jobs—to stop and watch as he wiped the tears and the snot from Gregory’s cheeks and the rashy area around his mouth.

  “There, it’s all right. Come on. Don’t you want to see the goiters on the chimpanzees?”

  “The! What?”

  “Where in the world did you learn to talk, anyway?” Patrick asked. This question came out sweetly. He said, “We’re a pair, aren’t we?” and finished wiping the boy’s face. Gregory had such clear eyes. They were not at all bloodshot, even after sobbing.

  Patrick put the wet tissues back in a coat pocket to dry for the next squall. From another pocket he fished a child-size bottle of juice and a miniature straw. He shook the bottle, opened it, planted the straw in the juice, and held bottle and straw for Gregory to drink. The bottle was quite small; Patrick’s hand closed around it. Were you to have seen the two of them, the man kneeling before the boy, the boy sucking on the almost invisible plastic straw, you might have imagined that the boy was drinking from the man’s hand.

  “Ready?” Patrick asked.

  “Juice!” Gregory exclaimed, and, just like that, he was done drinking, and everything returned to normal.

  Patrick removed the wet straw from the juice. He capped the bottle and put it back in his pocket for later. No trash can was in sight, so he replaced the straw in the jacket pocket already stuffed with the bottle and the used tissues. Looking over the top of Gregory’s head, he saw, across the terminal crowded with people indistinctly coming and going, a young man and woman holding hands and running, though not in the manner of people hurrying to board a train. The girl seemed to be skipping, or dancing. Her skirt flew up around her legs. Was there music playing in her head? Was she maybe wearing headphones?

  Patrick took Gregory’s hand in his. He said, with equal measures of sarcasm and earnestness, “Shall we dance?”

  It was at this moment that a musician who had set up near the door to the street—the door through which Patrick and Gregory had entered the station—began playing a violin. The musician was situated directly behind Patrick, who, for one narcissistic moment, believed that the music in the tunnel was a reverberant production of his own imagination. Then, peering down at Gregory, he saw that Gregory was peeking around his, Patrick’s, legs. Gregory was seeing the man playing the violin. Patrick turned and saw that the violinist was Roger, Gregory’s father, the man Caroli
ne had been married to when Patrick had come on the scene.

  “Roger! Hey, Roger!” Patrick called down the corridor. It was an act of impulsiveness and guilt. Patrick heard his own voice echoing, decaying, and dying against the richer, seductive sounds of the music. The musician—yes, it was Caroline’s former husband—was wearing a green coat that looked frayed and unclean. God only knew what he might have been carrying in the pockets of that coat. It appeared that Roger had continued to be what he had been in the old days: a poor, alcoholic artist.

  “Look, Bunny,” Patrick said to the top of Gregory’s head. “Do you know who that man is?”

  “Daddy.”

  “Right you are. Daddy. The pea-green boat with torn sails. Someone should haul her out to sea.”

  What was he saying? What was he doing? Why had he called out? Had the violinist heard? Had Roger seen Gregory spying from behind Patrick’s legs? Patrick flipped open “Pond, with Mud,” got out his pen, went through the ritual of delicately removing the cap, and scribbled (after searching for an unsmudged page) a few lighthearted, comical-nautical associations. “Pea-green / boat / towed / in shreds / out.” This time he remembered to blow on the ink.

  And it was still possible, he thought, that Roger had neither seen nor heard them, that he and the boy might slip away and take refuge on a train-platform bench, before setting out on their journey to the contaminated zoo. He had taken the afternoon off for this. They really ought to make it to the zoo.

  He watched the violinist, who was swaying above the hips in that enchantedly theatrical fashion in which string players expectably do—as if blowing in the intermittent wind on which all music travels. And travelers, actual ones, entering and departing through the colossal wooden doors onto the street, altered their courses, automatically tacking around Roger and his empty music case left open on the ground for small bills and change. Patrick watched the bow rising and falling, pulled by the violinist’s hand across the instrument’s strings. He had the impression that the musician was rocking himself to sleep. The music rolled up the tunnel. Because the corridor walls and the ceiling were tiled, the notes came on amplified, and certain passages sounded both muddled and complexly dynamic, orchestral.