The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  “Right.”

  “He’s very demanding. He wants a lot of publicity. He’s a twerp. But he makes money for the company.”

  Publicity was Sarah’s area.

  “Give me a sip of your drink,” she said, and Jonathan handed her his glass.

  “I was looking for a place to smoke,” he said.

  “Did you bring cigarettes?”

  “No, I was going to bum one.”

  “Bum two, will you?” she said, and gave him back his Scotch and soda. The ice in the glass was already melting. “I’ll come find you. I have to make an effort to be professional.” He watched her sashay off toward the author, who was surrounded by guests and was wearing a suit. Really, he should marry Sarah, he reminded himself. But, then again, he should’ve married Rachel.

  Now waiters were making their rounds with trays. Jonathan took something off one of the trays and wound up holding a toothpick, which he put in his shirt pocket, next to the joint he’d rolled that afternoon in a stall in the men’s room at his office. Was it time for another drink? The last shindig Sarah had brought him to—it had been on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University, for a historian of the Revolution—he’d remained sober and later wondered why.

  On his way back to the bar, he saw Fletcher, a young editor at Sarah’s company, who, according to Sarah, bombarded her with daytime e-mails asking for dates that she then declined. Fletcher was thinner than he—in better shape all around, no doubt—with sharp cheekbones and a widow’s peak.

  “Jonathan,” Fletcher was saying.

  “Hi, Fletcher.”

  “It looks like we’re both en route to the bar.”

  “Or the bathroom.”

  “Good point,” Fletcher said, and Jonathan said, “I think you’re right, though. The bar.” Then a pretty girl walked past, and the energy in the room seemed to rise. The men got their drinks refreshed and went off in different directions.

  The loft was filling and growing noisier. Next to Jonathan, people were talking animatedly about health-care reform—a woman in the group who’d undergone surgery was deep in debt. Jonathan craned his neck and blurted, “The possibilities for real change in health care are undercut by the bureaucracies that make change crucial! My ex-wife used to talk about this all the time.” Then, shyly, he added, as he always did, “Actually, she wasn’t my wife, but we were together for many years.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” a man wearing a pale-green shirt said. “I’m William, and this is Kathy, and this is Deborah.” It was Kathy, a short blonde, who had had the surgery.

  Jonathan nodded and said, “My name is Jonathan. I hope it wasn’t rude of me to jump in like that.”

  “What’s a party for?” Kathy said, and then asked, “Do you know a lot about the medical industry?”

  “Not really,” Jonathan admitted. “Rachel—that’s the woman I wasn’t married to—had strong opinions on social issues.”

  “I’m ready for another drink!” William announced.

  “Get me a white wine?” Deborah asked.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jonathan, who had been sipping constantly, said. He looked around for Rachel—no, Sarah—but didn’t see her.

  At the bar he told William, “I’m not of this world.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, I’m here with a friend.”

  “Aren’t we all?” William said. “Cheers.” He carried his drink and Deborah’s wine back into the crowd.

  The summer sun had nearly set. The light it threw into the loft had become an amber glow that shone up through the windows to touch the ceiling, where it outlined the shadows of party guests. Soon, as night fell, the loft’s numerous wall sconces would come on. Copies of the author’s books were stacked in little piles everywhere.

  Jonathan was extremely conscious of his origins, which were Southern, his father and his father’s family having come from Virginia, and his mother and hers from the Florida Gulf Coast. Jonathan’s father had been dead for ten years, and his mother had retired to Maryland’s Eastern Shore; and, these days, he regarded himself as oddly and bravely homeless, imagining, from this city he’d chosen to live in, a lost, green place—Charlottesville, where his parents had been professors, and the nearby Blue Ridge, where he’d camped as a boy. If he drank enough, his accent would break through.

  Sarah appeared at his side. “Hey, buster, let’s go fuck in the bathroom,” she said. That was something that he loved about her—her easy playfulness, which he took as a sign not only of her trust in him but also of her willingness to let him trust her. “I wish we could,” he told her, though in fact he didn’t, at that moment, wish so—he needed a smoke more.

  “Are you done taking care of the writer?” he asked.

  “I was finished with that a long time ago,” she said.

  She was shorter than Jonathan by a foot. When they walked down the street together, and he rested his arm on her shoulder, he thought sometimes about how essential it would be in old age to have someone to lean on. And though his old age was a long way off, and he felt, the majority of the time, that he would never reach it anyway, he nonetheless considered it often when he was with Sarah.

  “How are you and Fletcher getting on?” he asked.

  “We’re fine,” she said.

  “I saw him earlier. He’s not very talkative.”

  “Come with me—there’s something I want to show you.” She took Jonathan’s hand and tugged him toward the windows.

  He said, “Hang on, I want to get a drink.”

  “You’ve got a drink.”

  “It’s about gone.”

  “Get it in a minute,” she pleaded. “We’ll get drinks together and then find somewhere to hide out.”

  She was in love with him. It pulled at him, as if with a kind of warm, perfumed gravity.

  What she had to show him was the sun, disappearing at last, and the sky above, the color of fire. She held his hand, as they stood together before a big window, and he wished that he were more in love with her. Or was he, maybe, in love with her?

  She said, “The world is incredible at this time of day, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he agreed, and took a step back from the windows. He said, “A lot of the color in the air is the product of atmospheric pollutants.” He felt her hand go limp in his. He apologized. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  She was easily upset. He often found himself apologizing to her for remarks that he hadn’t meant to be hurtful. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers, and he felt, for just an instant, at peace.

  Things at the party were picking up. Jonathan faintly smelled cigarette smoke. “Come on, sweet pea,” he said to Sarah, and pulled her away from the window and back to the bar.

  They took their drinks and went to stand in a corner, and Sarah said, “So, mister, what about us?”

  Was she a little drunk?

  “Us,” he said. But before he could go on there was a loud crash in the middle of the room, followed by a hasty shuffling of partygoers turning around, making space for the accident, the mishap—someone had tripped over a piece of furniture and fallen heavily. It was William, the man in the green shirt. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” Jonathan heard him saying as he rose to his knees, then his feet. “I’m only suffering minor embarrassment,” he said, laughing, as, behind him, a man in gray—it was the celebrated author—pushed the chair William had tripped on back into its place beside the long glass-topped coffee table.

  “Is he good?” Jonathan asked Sarah.

  “Who?”

  “The author. Is he good?”

  “People think so.”

  “Rachel read one of his books.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jonathan said, but amended, “Oh, no, I almost remember. It had ‘kill’ in the title.”

  “Abel Kills Cain,” Sarah said.

  “It sounds like the name of a band.”

  “It should be.”
/>   “Hey, I like this guy,” Jonathan said.

  She joked, “Don’t say that until you’ve worked with him,” and Jonathan said, “No, not the writer. I mean the guy who fell. He’s coming over here.”

  Then William was upon them.

  “How bad did that look?” he asked.

  Jonathan said, “William, this is Sarah. Sarah, William.” Then he said, “It didn’t look bad.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  “As long as you’re not hurt, that’s all that matters,” said Sarah.

  “Hurt my body all you want, but leave my pride alone,” William said, and Sarah replied, “I know what you mean.”

  She was a touch drunk.

  It was the three of them now, snaking in a line past artworks and tall bookshelves, searching for smokers. They stopped at a door that was locked, and kept going, single file, with Jonathan leading and Sarah in the middle. At times the crowd pressed in, and Jonathan had to forge a path through it. They came to an open door that led into a hallway painted dark red, and could hear voices down the hall.

  “Who lives here?” William asked.

  “The owner is the heir to a cosmetics fortune,” Sarah said, adding, “He’s also a very good poet.”

  At the end of the hall was a room, where about eight people were gathered on and around a big bed, talking and drinking.

  “Come in!” a comfortably stretched-out man, who had taken off his shoes, cried. “We’re having an argument about whether it’s ethical to live on government disability in your twenties.”

  Right away, Jonathan said, “It is if you’re disabled. My ex-wife used to work with disabled kids.” Then, for Sarah’s sake, he anxiously exclaimed, “I don’t mean my ex-wife! I don’t know why I said that!”

  “We’re not talking about that kind of disabled,” the man said.

  “My friends and I were looking for a place to smoke,” Jonathan quickly replied.

  “I think people were smoking on the terrace,” the man said.

  “There’s a terrace?” Jonathan asked.

  “I know where it is,” William said.

  It was William’s turn to lead. They went back out and along the red hallway to the main room, and then squeezed and pushed their way diagonally through the crowd toward the terrace door. Now when Jonathan tried to touch Sarah’s shoulder, or hold her hand, she pulled away. As they were about to reach the terrace, she spun around, shouting above the party noise, “Your ex-wife?”

  “I’m sorry. That was a slip.”

  “She was your wife? Are you out of your mind? She was never your wife!” Then Sarah asked him, “Do you still love her?” But she didn’t wait for him to answer. She said, “I don’t even want to know.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Sarah said.

  William held the door, and she marched out onto the hot, humid terrace. Jonathan skulked behind her.

  He and she and William sprawled on the patio furniture and waited for smokers, but none came. The terrace faced north, toward midtown. A large ascending moon, glowing in the sky over the Rockaways, was partly visible around the corner of the building.

  “Ought I to light a joint?” Jonathan asked—now a trace of his Southern diction emerged—and William said, “Absolutely,” but Sarah, still angry, said, “Save it for later.”

  He could feel a light breeze. He felt the joint in his shirt pocket. He’d known her in a distant way, through other people, mutual friends, for a long, long time—when had they first met? It had been at the wedding of his college classmate Kenneth—and they’d run into each other here and there in the ten or eleven years since, either at parties or in big groups at restaurants, that sort of thing; and, at any rate, this drawn-out, vague acquaintance had given them each the subtle feeling, once they’d begun seeing each other and sleeping together, that they somehow shared common origins, though in fact she’d grown up on the Upper East Side, the daughter of psychoanalysts, and showed a dedication to European fashion magazines—Rachel had rejected fashion as a malignant form of commercialism—that he would never, throughout their long life ahead, their marriage, come to fathom.

  He overheard her whispering to William but couldn’t make out what she was saying. She and William were on a pair of low lounge chairs, off a ways from his. Above the brick terrace wall, he could see the spire of the Empire State Building. Below that, on the terrace, was Sarah’s back, turned to him. He had a view of her ass, wrapped in her cotton skirt. How much had she drunk?

  Finally the terrace door opened and more people tumbled out, including William’s friends.

  “We came to find you!” Kathy exclaimed, and Deborah said, “Here you are! Where have you been?”

  “Exploring!” William said, then went on, “Deborah, Kathy, this is Sarah, my new pal, and you met Jonathan earlier.”

  “Hi, hi,” everyone said.

  Jonathan had the feeling—he was drunk enough to feel this—that, though they were all just casually meeting, they were also, after a stretch of being apart, coming into one another’s company again in a significant way: The encounter on the terrace was a homecoming.

  “Is anyone smoking?” he asked, and Deborah felt about in her purse and said, “Where are my cigarettes? I just had them.”

  The terrace was filling. Everywhere, people were gathering in groups of two and three and four.

  Deborah practically screamed at him, “I’m sorry, I don’t know where my pack went!” and Jonathan said, “We’ll find some.”

  He called, “Sarah, come sit with me,” but Sarah turned her head and said, “In a minute. I’m talking to William.”

  With Rachel, all his pent-up urges to make a home and a family had begun to declare themselves—in his last year with her he’d felt a strong desire to have a child. At times this desire had come on him fiercely. He’d felt it as a pleasurable shock that rose from his knees up through his chest to the top of his head, causing him to tremble and sometimes visibly shudder. He recalled that Rachel, early in their relationship, had had an intuition that, were they to have a child, it would be a daughter. This idea of a girl had settled in him, and after a while he couldn’t conceive of a son. When Rachel left him for Richard Bishop, he’d felt bereft not only of her, of his never-to-be wife, but of the daughter that they had not had, would not have; and now a year had passed, during which he’d often felt that his chances at fatherhood had gone with her, with Rachel. Of course, this wasn’t true, he knew that, but the feeling was convincing, and much of the time he went about in a state of grief over it.

  He had to take action. He would go hunting and bring back a cigarette for Sarah. He got up from the chaise and said, “Deborah, come on, let’s go find cigarettes.” He held the door for her, and she went inside ahead of him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  She had dyed red hair and pale skin. She was about Rachel’s height and size. He hadn’t looked closely at her earlier, when William had first introduced them.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. What was he doing with this woman? “We’re going to the bar,” he said.

  “Lead the way,” Deborah said, and he squeezed by her and got in front, where he set to work. At one point, he got them stuck—the crowd was thick indeed—and he heard a man near him say, “You can’t just drop a bunch of rocks in a pile to make a stone wall. There’s a way to do it. It isn’t random.”

  They backtracked. Now Jonathan was following. Deborah found a path and got them to the bar. She was drinking vodka.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m an architect.”

  “Really? What kinds of things do you build?”

  “I mostly work on apartment renovations. I’ve done some house additions. How about you?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” he said.

  “What kind?”

  “I do litigation.”

  “I like your jacket,” she said, and reached out and felt the s
leeve.

  “Oh, thanks, thank you,” he said.

  Behind her, he saw Fletcher, gazing over at them. Jonathan turned his body away from Deborah’s. He spoke to the bartender. “Is there a back stairwell somewhere, or a fire exit?”

  “Try the kitchen,” the bartender said.

  Jonathan could see the tops of two swinging doors opening and closing about twenty feet away. He could see Fletcher approaching.

  He grabbed Deborah’s hand and pulled her forcibly toward the kitchen doors. “I think it’s over in this direction,” he said.

  Deborah exclaimed, “I’m right here!”

  “Sorry, I was trying to avoid someone,” he said.

  They waited for a man carrying a tray to pass, and then went into the kitchen.

  “Can I help you, sir?” a waiter asked.

  “We’re looking for the stairs.”

  The waiter pointed past a long kitchen island lined with trays and overhung with copper and steel pots.

  “Make room, make room, please,” a waitress called as she walked by. There was a smell of baking bread.

  Jonathan said, “Let’s go,” and he and Deborah rounded the kitchen island. He opened the heavy steel door at the back, near the freezer.

  “Aw, fuck,” he said.

  The gray stairwell was empty. The door closed behind them and they stood face-to-face under the dim light. Peering at Deborah in the dark put him in mind of Rachel; suddenly he wanted to call her, a bad idea.

  Deborah was holding his sleeve again. “Hey,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “All right.”

  “I like you,” she said then.

  “I like you, too,” he said, and she announced, “I want you to know that if we sleep together and get pregnant I’m keeping the baby.”

  He frantically wrenched the door open.

  “I don’t know what to say! It used to be that people always smoked in the fire exit!” he blurted.

  Where was Sarah? He needed to put things right with her. He stormed out of the kitchen and through to the terrace. On his way, he noticed that a few people at the center of the room had begun subtly dancing to the music playing on the stereo. Sarah was no longer on the terrace. The moon was higher in the sky now. Instead of a dying sunset, he saw in the west a bright metropolis of oil tanks, freeways, and planes taking off or landing at Newark. He’d lost Deborah—abandoned her, really—along the way. Back into the party he went. Then, at a loss over how the evening was going, he made for the front door and the antique cage elevator, which he rode to the lobby with a couple who were leaving the party—but what was he doing? Was he also leaving?