A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  Silence ensued. Rachel looked away, nervously. She muttered a small apology. Susan glanced up at the bar, saw familiar eyes break away. She tapped Rachel.

  “For instance. See that guy?” she asked. “At the bar. Blindingly bright blond hair, combed back?” The man at the bar took one look back at Susan, grabbed his raincoat and slapped some cash on the counter. He tossed a grey fedora on his head and ducked into the crowd.

  “He’s been following us all evening,” Susan said. “He was at the restaurant. He was in the movie line. I didn’t realize it until just now.” She watched as the man pushed his way out of the bar. “And he knows that I know. So he’s leaving.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Rachel said. “He was beautiful. More beautiful than the sax player. You could do worse than that, surely.”

  Someone said something that annoyed her, and suddenly Susan was shoving her way out of the bar, through the smoke and the chatter and the laughing faces, and Rachel was right behind her. They walked back to Rachel’s apartment, and Susan stayed for a moment but told her that she was too tired to stick around, and she walked away into the night.

  Broadway was bathed in mist; the light from street lamps seemed to float through the air like dust. Two blocks downtown she saw a figure in a gray raincoat striding away. His collar was up, but she could see a tuft of his distinctive, whitish-blond hair. She ran a while, tried to catch up with him, but the avenue was so empty. Susan’s stubbornness began to wear out.

  She stopped walking to think for a moment, and the man glanced back with a look of unseemly affection. But he immediately looked away, and Susan found herself wondering whether it had all been her imagination. The stranger in the grey coat vanished into the rain and the fog and the darkness, and Susan was left alone with the sound of distant taxi horns, here on this chilly street corner. A few raindrops began to fall.

  Someone grabbed her around the waist, pulled her to the sidewalk just a moment before she heard tires screech in front of her. Horns blared. Susan sat on the sidewalk in the dark, frightened and confused.

  “You almost stepped in front of that taxi,” said a gentle voice.

  Susan looked up.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Her vision cleared. It was the man from the bar, and he looked down at her calmly. He had a smooth face, seemingly untouched by time.

  “You could have died.”

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  “Let me help you up.”

  He took one hand and pulled her to her feet. “You saved me," she said, and he nodded. Then, almost crossly: “What were you doing here?”

  He smiled and pointed to a small diner on the corner, a one-story building with steeples at either end, and which she had never noticed before.

  “I’ve got an important meeting in there,” he explained. “Which explains my presence in this neighborhood, at this moment. You almost got hit by a car. I just happened to be passing by at the right time.” He tipped his hat to her; it was such an artificial gesture, but it seemed right in such an artificial man.

  “Look,” Susan said. She grabbed his arm. “You were following me,” and the accusation sounded hollow, almost ridiculous, but she knew it really wasn’t.

  He smiled at her. “You must be mistaken. You were following me. I’m sure of it.” He had just the touch of an accent, which he tried to hide. He seemed to be hiding everything, hiding his very nature, and he seemed to know something about her, something deep and personal and maybe embarrassing. She was grateful to him for saving her life, and ashamed of the anger that kept rising within her. But still.

  “This whole night,” Susan said, trying to soften her tone. “You had a drink at the restaurant where I ate dinner. You were a few places behind me in line at the movies. Then you were staring at me at the bar. And now you turn up here.” Rainwater ran into her eyes.

  “Let’s get out of the rain.” He took her arm and they moved under an awning.

  “When I caught you staring at me at the bar, you ran off.”

  “I’m very sorry about all this, but I did save your life.” He didn’t sound angry; he sounded completely innocent, but he seemed to have been expecting her accusations. He tipped his hat, but now it was a part of him, and the artifice was gone. He began to move away.

  Susan followed him down the street, then into the diner. “I still have unanswered questions,” she said.

  “Don’t we all,” he laughed. The door of the diner swung shut behind them. “Good, good,” he added. “We can have a cup of tea together while I wait.”

  The diner was larger inside than it had seemed from the street, and it was surprisingly crowded for this time of night. Crazy art deco design, tin ceiling, mirrored and mosaic walls, bright-shining spotless counters. They sat down in a booth near the window. He called the waitress over and ordered two cups of tea.

  Susan asked him to stop lying to her. She asked him why he had run away earlier in the evening. Their eyes had met and he had run away.

  “I could tell you were angry,” he said suddenly. “Look, I didn’t come to your table because I didn’t think you’d remember me. You’re Susan, right? I thought I recognized you, but you looked too angry. I was afraid to say hello.”

  Susan looked out the window, watched the taxis speeding by on Broadway. She could feel herself blushing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t – ”

  He described the party where they had met. It had been fourteen months earlier and they’d somehow found themselves embroiled in a debate about war; Susan had loudly and perhaps somewhat drunkenly declared her support for the Salvadoran rebels, while he had made a fairly theoretical argument against authoritarian power structures of any kind, military, civilian or insurgent.

  “I’m Joren,” he said, “in case you don’t remember.” Then he added quickly, “I don’t expect you to remember. You spoke quite glowingly that night about your boyfriend, that older guy. The one with the wife. You couldn’t see anything else.” He smiled. “I can tell, somehow, that you’re more ambivalent tonight. About both Daniel and the FMLN. It’s probably a good thing, anyway.”

  Susan blinked back tears of frustration. “Not for you,” she said, still not looking at him. “I don’t remember you, and it upsets me, frankly, that you remember me. After so long. Why should you remember me? What could have been on your mind? Why are you everywhere tonight? It’s as though you were hanging around, waiting for an opportunity to save me.”

  “Would that have been so bad?” he asked, and she felt her objections melting away. “Would it have been so bad for me to have been waiting around for an opportunity to save you?”

  She almost laughed. “I don’t get saved that often.”

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Joren went on. “I remember people.” He laughed mildly. “It’s maybe the only real skill I have, so I try to keep in practice. Some people collect stamps – well, not so many people collect stamps these days, more people collect money, but I like to think that I collect people. And I keep them in my mind.”

  The waitress brought them some tea, with a smile. She had a shingle-cut haircut, but Susan couldn’t name it. All she knew was that the waitress had a haircut that she recognized, and that she could not place.

  Susan felt as though she were making a terrible mistake; it seemed that, with all the tyrants in New York, she had chosen to accost the city’s only saint, but stubbornness kept her from backing down.

  “But you were following me, all evening,” Susan said.

  “Believe what you will.”

  His gaze fell on a couple, halfway across the restaurant.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  He stood and crossed the room. She could see him smiling at the couple, who were clearly distraught. They were both in their late thirties, both of them overweight, the man more than the woman, both of them plain. (Again, the man more than the woman.) The man wore a bow tie, and a spread collar shirt. A trilby hat sat on the table, although Su
san, of course, did not know it was a trilby hat. Odd. She heard bits and pieces of the conversation. Joren was introducing himself to the two of them, reminding them of the day he had made their acquaintance, out in Sheepshead Bay. He pleaded with the man to remain. He asked if he could sit.

  She looked out the window, and she saw a Ford Model A pass; them, moments later, a Nash Advanced Six Coupe, although, again, she did not know that these cars were, respectively, a Model A and an Advanced Six Coupe. All she knew was that these were not cars from the 1980s, from today, and that the hat, the trilby hat that she could not name, was not a hat of today. She flushed, realizing at last what had happened. Some time this evening, she figured, someone had dropped something in her drink. It made her angry, but she controlled herself. It would wear off soon enough. She was not inordinately upset (it would not be the first time), although annoyed.

  A party of five came into the diner, and they blocked her view of Joren, and their chatter drowned out whatever he was saying. Susan turned to the street, and she watched actors from an old silent movie stroll by on the sidewalk.

  When she looked back into the restaurant, Joren was gone, and the room seemed different, smaller, emptier.

  Susan wondered who had slipped her a mickey, and felt grateful that it had worn off with no damage done. She wondered what part of her evening had been real. She wondered if Joren existed, or if she had spent the last half hour talking to herself. She finished her tea.

  “We are part of a continuum,” Joren said to the couple, just out of Susan’s earshot. “This night is not about you. We are all of us part of something bigger than ourselves, like parasites in a human colon. You see, Sieg? If you leave with Peppy, you will kill a man in your travels across the country. You will not be caught, but you will spend the rest of your very short life in hiding. In California, you will obtain employment as Pola Negri’s butler, and you will lose your job after a single day. After that catastrophe, you will be forgotten. Peppy will leave you, but she too will be forgotten. Each of you will die, and there will be no mourners. Miss Negri will show up, drunk and dressed in black, at Rudolph Valentino’s funeral, claiming to be his widow, and she will live on in infamy.” Sieg began to stand up, and Joren touched the crook of the man’s arm. “Please,” he said. “Sit here for a while and think this through. Peppy does not love you. Your future is not in her arms” He raised his hand to the waitress and ordered, “Two coffees, and make them strong,” and the waitress smiled. “I think you need a bit of whiskey,” Joren said, then, laughing: “Please do not be shocked. I am usually a law abiding citizen, even when the law is an ass. But there is an exception to every rule.”

  Emmett and Katherine, driving through the desert: they had visited Indian reservations, bought a couple of pairs of moccasins, stood over the Hoover Dam, dropped $400 in Las Vegas, and were now on their way to California for a new life. Emmett held a pocket TV in his lap, cursed at the television screen.

  Katherine glanced over at him from time-to-time. Maybe he should change the channel, she suggested.

  “If you knew him,” Emmett said, squinted at the tiny screen, “you would know what it was like to be around real evil. Just the smell, the wet stink that flows out of his pores.”

  “At our wedding,” Katherine said, “he was very nice.”

  He looked over at her. Her eyes were open wide, the sharp features of her face were softening in the hazy dim glow from the desert moon and the headlights reflecting off the desert highway. She turned back to the road, brushing a ringlet of frizzy blond hair out of her eyes.

  “Anyway,” she added, “you just don’t like him.”

  He looked at Senator Solomon, tiny Senator Solomon. He turned off the television.

  “You don’t have to be so nice, you know,” he said quietly.

  “You just need to rest, to smile a little,” she said.

  “I’m OK,” he said. “I’m OK, and it wasn’t your fault. I married you so you could give me hell.”

  She laughed a little, and held out her right hand. He took it, and they held hands, staring straight ahead as they drove on and on, and the highway stretched off through the endless barren plains, under the clear sky filled with stars, on a quiet, cool desert night. Back at Johnson & Tierney, Emmett’s office was still empty, and a half-bitten pencil lay on top of his desk, half-sprawled over a yellow legal pad.

  At three in the morning they reached a motel at a tiny town a few hundred miles outside of California, and they stopped for the night, because Katherine still didn’t trust him to drive. They checked into room 213, tossed their luggage in the comer. Katherine went into the bathroom, and a moment later Emmett heard the shower running. He turned off the bedside lamp and stared out the window at the desert. Soon the water stopped, Katherine was humming gently and sadly, the sound of her voice echoing. She walked into the bedroom, naked, and he went to her and held her in his arms, pushed his hands through her hair, kissed her lips, her neck, her breasts, felt her hot breath in his ear. She pushed him onto the bed and smothered him with her body. Now everything made him feel small and sorrowful, even what had once made him feel strong and alive.

  Up until three months ago, of course, Emmett had labored in the corporate law department of Johnson & Tierney, a labyrinthine law firm headquartered in two New York locations on Wall Street and midtown, where he worked on mergers, acquisitions, swaps, options, swaptions and other matters.

  Sometimes around noon he would sit in the firm’s spacious lawyer lunchroom and eat pasta and sun-dried tomatoes with other lawyers, and they would all stare across the water at the Statue of Liberty and laugh at each other’s jokes.

  Then one day, three months ago, a partner for whom he was working made a particularly cutting remark.

  In the motel room, in the center of the desert, in the middle of the night, a few hundred miles from the California border, Emmett could hear a wolf howl. He kept thinking about that infamous day, just three months ago, running it through his head, erasing it, creating scenarios. He remembered thinking that if he didn’t fight back, he would never forgive himself, but had not realized that even if he did fight back, he would still never forgive himself. He could feel the anger rising in him, remembered thinking that the partner’s cutting remark had been too casual, too thoughtless, without consequence, that he, Emmett, was meat, just a pile of meat, and they were grinding him up, eating him, and farting him out. That was actually what ran through his head.

  Emmett could remember working until two the previous morning, feeling tired as he called for car service, remembered walking out to the limo at 2:30 am, carrying his briefcase, sitting slumped in the back seat of the car as the driver veered through the narrow alleys of Wall Street. He remembered collapsing into bed, Katherine kissing him, hugging him, and for one last night he was a responsible, respectable man.

  He remembered getting up the next morning at six. Walking to the subway, and standing by the track. He could vividly recall the old blind man who hobbled along the platform – the old man’s cane had a wheel at the end, for some reason – and he remembered a fat guy in a suit who stopped the blind man from toppling into the tracks.

  The subway car was crowded, and Emmett could barely breathe. To the right of him was the old blind man, to the left, a smartly dressed but sickly pale young woman. The blind man began playing the accordion in Emmett’s ear. The woman to his left bent over suddenly, threw up on Emmett’s shoe.

  He remembered arriving at the office at seven am, busily working until ten, taking a bite of his breakfast sandwich every five minutes or so. At noon he had some lunch delivered, had finished his work by two and had presented it to the partner, a bald, forty-five year-old man with a tiny little body and liver spots all over his shiny scalp. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and tiny little veins hung out of his arms.

  Emmett, lying in bed in the motel, thought about the little partner, now so much uglier in his mind than he had ever been in life, and he listened, inside his
head, to the partner’s particularly cutting remark. He remembered feeling rather hurt, and taking exception.

  The partner had made another cutting remark, whirled his chair around so that his back was to Emmett and dismissed the associate with a brush of his hand. Emmett’s cheeks turned red. He called the partner a rather insulting name, and the partner spun around and stared at Emmett.

  Emmett stared back at him and suddenly, without thinking, Emmett threw his coffee mug. One moment that he would never forget, for the rest of his life, a simple, inexplicable action, the coffee mug’s slow journey to the center of the little partner’s head, the way it bounced off and landed with a gentle thud on the carpet.

  Emmett could remember watching coffee splatter around the office, in slow motion.

  Emmett cleared out his desk that afternoon, and the firm didn’t press charges for assault, which was certainly within their rights, according to Margaret Spencer, the genteel middle-manager who fired him. Emmett had figured that the firm didn’t want any more publicity: four weeks earlier, one of their junior partners had been murdered by a 15-year-old male prostitute, and six months before that, an associate had been killed in the lunchroom by the firm’s chef, who had repeatedly hacked the young man’s neck with a meat cleaver in full view of 100 startled lawyer-witnesses. The incident had never been adequately explained.

  “Katherine,” said Emmett, in the dark.

  “Yes,” she whispered. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her breath.

  “Now that I’ve done what I’ve done,” he said, “I don’t trust myself. None of the old rules apply. When I’m driving, I can’t be sure I won’t drive off the road. When we watch the ballet, how do I know I won’t scream when the ballerina is standing on one foot, absolutely still, and the whole audience is hushed? When we have dinner with your sister, I might throw a glass of water in her face without any provocation, then stand up and yodel. How can I be sure I won’t?”