A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  Daniel didn’t even think.

  “I would still go to Johnson & Tierney every day.”

  “To bring home more money,” she said. “To buy more things. To eat more caviar. A second car. Another vacation home.”

  “It’s not as though we’re just wasting money. We help to develop the law that will clean up this country into the next century. When I die, I’ll at least know I’ve accomplished something.”

  “Daniel, I’m not even going to get insulted at that stupid comparison you just made between the two of us, because I know you don’t even believe it yourself.” She shook her head. “All you’re doing is taking money from very rich business people and working yourself to death to try to keep them rich. But do you want to die knowing that your life’s work helped, even in some small way, to keep things exactly the way they’ve always been?”

  “Maybe things are OK the way they are,” he said quietly.

  “Hah!” Susan exclaimed in exasperation. “Daniel, someplace inside of that ageing body is the young man who knows that’s bullshit! I may not be doing too much, but at least I’m not doing any harm. Why is it so wrong to do nothing with my life, considering the alternative?”

  He nodded. “Well, I didn’t come here to argue with you,” he said, ending their dispute abruptly. “My congratulations on your fortune, and my condolences on your father.”

  “Thank you.”

  “As I said, I didn’t come here to argue with you.”

  Daniel wasn’t sure why he had felt it necessary to repeat the obvious, and the statement hung in the air, conspicuous for what it had left unsaid. Why had he come? To rekindle an old romance? Or to allow himself to be sucked into contentious discussions with Susan, to allow her to belittle him, to thrust him back into the arms of his unflappable, uncritical, unfathomable wife? Was that the function Susan had always served in his life?

  She drove him just outside of San Francisco, over the bridge, to a little sandy cove with a sweeping view of the city itself. They parked on a hillside then ran down to the deserted beach, leaned against a dead tree that jutted out from the cliff and stared out at the arctic waves. They talked a little more about irrelevant things: Susan loved the fat young new president, his energy and his hope, but Daniel had his doubts and insisted that nothing would ever change in this country, not within their lifetime. Even the distant dream of revolution was beyond Daniel’s grasp.

  “Rachel keeps asking about Henry,” Susan said. “She’s phoned him a couple of times, but there’s no answer. How is he?”

  “He’s into different sorts of things now,” Daniel said. “He’s very different. I think Rachel should just give up.” He thought for a moment about his old friend, about his hopeless quest for solutions after Henry’s death, and his sudden decision to return to his wife, the strange conclusion that her steady embrace would somehow protect him. He saw the other life stretching out before him, and a doorway that had long since slammed shut. “I wonder where we would be today if I had asked you to marry me,” Daniel mused aloud.

  Susan looked puzzled. “From out of nowhere. When would you have asked me to marry you, Daniel? Before you met your beautiful wife? When I was in high school?”

  “No,” he said. “You know. I was coming over to your apartment for us to talk about getting married? Anyway, that was at least the subtext. We sat around in your apartment, and I explained that ... anyway, you probably remember all that. I suppose I said I couldn’t marry you. I don’t know.”

  Susan thought. She seemed to be thinking very hard. “I don’t remember the marriage thing, Daniel, and I think I would have. I remember that you called me up and asked if you could come over. That’s all I remember. I had no idea why you were coming over.”

  “Well, now you know. I was coming over to ask you to marry me.” There was a hard edge in his voice that he had not intended.

  A couple in their early forties now came off the path and lay out a beach towel a few yards away.

  “Why didn’t you?” Susan whispered. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “I was confused. I don’t know. Maybe it was a mistake.”

  Susan frowned. “Maybe it was a mistake.”

  “Would you have said yes?”

  He shouldn’t have asked, and Daniel knew it immediately.

  “Never mind,” he said quickly. “A stupid thing to –”

  “I would never answer a question like that, Daniel. I can’t hypothetically decide whether to marry you in some comic book alternate universe.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea why I said that.”

  The middle-aged couple tried to wade into the water. They both stuck a toe in the surf, then jumped about giggling and shivering. The man said something in German, and the woman laughed, with thick, untempered Bavarian glee.

  In the car, driving back from the Cove, Susan said, “I've been spending time camping, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot. It’s cleared my head.” She glanced away from the road, at Daniel. “When did you last camp?”

  “Long time ago. Natalie doesn’t like cooking outside, and I’ve always felt that it ruins the whole point if you go out for dinner. Natalie doesn’t really like bugs. I’m not complaining about Natalie, I’m just stating a fact.”

  A car ahead hit its brakes. Susan swerved. Car horns wailed all around her. She stared nervously at the road. “Daniel, I think getting outdoors would do you a lot of good.”

  “Maybe. Sure. I don’t know.”

  “No, you don’t get it. I’m inviting you to hit the road with me, to go camping in the middle of the wilderness.”

  Daniel was completely quiet, thinking.

  “Anyway, I don’t know what you should make of the offer, since I haven’t thought about it much. But I reserved a place in Yosemite months ago, and I figured your visit wouldn’t slow me down, since I expected to spend an afternoon with you, then storm away in disgust. Now, against my better judgment, I don’t really want to say goodbye, and I wish that you would tag along.”

  Daniel smiled, not looking at her. To Susan, his smile seemed both sad and hopeful.

  “Against my better judgment, I think I’d like to go.” His voice trailed off at the end of the sentence, and he stared out the window, a little wide-eyed boy.

  From a hotel room just across the continent, again an unexpected phone call from Irina, now more urgent, more desperate. “I am being eaten alive,” she said sadly to Emmett. “I don’t know, Emmett ... is there something you can do?”

  Emmett’s wife was at work, his daughter was at day care, and he was spending the afternoon finishing a difficult magazine portrait of a reclusive, unforthcoming film actor.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  The only thing that would be worse, he thought, than Irina’s occasional, distracting phone calls, would be if they stopped altogether, and if she forgot about him.

  “I think the only thing for you to do,” she finally said, “is to come here and be with me.”

  Her voice faded away at the very end of the sentence, and Emmett had to strain to hear her.

  He chose the least startling interpretation of her offer.

  “Be with you in what capacity?” he asked, his voice assuming an official tone. “You want me to manage your affairs. Handle your career.”

  “Emmett!” she laughed, embarrassed. “I want you to come here and stay with me. I have charted the course of our lives. I think that our meeting was too unlikely to be the result of chance. Think for one moment, Emmett. But if you would just think, you know. My film plays almost nowhere in the world, but in one theater in Pushkin Square and one theater in Istanbul, only once, at ten in morning. You are there in audience, watching me, wishing you could fall into screen and spend those two hours beside me. You write my praises filled with tender feelings because, you know, you are a little bit in love. You know it, but you are sad because you think I have died. Like a man widowed, you mourn me. When you hear I am alive, you become like man pos
sessed. Not only do I live, but I live in America, just across continent. Like Superman, you fly through clouds to save me. You scream my name in the city streets. You spin around the corner, and there I am, standing in a deserted street, waiting for you, though I do not know what I am waiting for. I run away from you, but, even though I am younger and stronger and faster than you, fate intervenes and you catch me. You save me from destitution, I make you a little bit famous. Together we thrive; apart, we will die. You are my protector, and I am your savior.”

  Emmett did not interrupt, sat enraptured by every word. He felt now that he was living in a movie, and repercussions were banished to some unconscious corner of his mind. “I just can’t think,” he said. “I’m not thinking. Everything’s shutting down ....” Sweat dripped into his eyes in the August heat.

  “I have a bag packed,” she said, “and one day of vacation from filming. We will have dinner at expensive restaurant across the street from my hotel, we will watch the sun set, watch the sun rise. And then I will ask you to make decision.”

  “I can’t ....”

  “Tell me you know you don’t love me,” she said, in a gentle whisper. He could tell that she was speaking with her eyes shut, a little smile on her lips, the smile he had seen in the movie, shining so brightly through radioactive mist. “Tell me that when you first saw me standing bigger than human on the movie screen that you didn’t know right then that you loved that woman. Tell me you are certain that you love your wife more than you love me. Tell me that you do not think there is something out there, pushing us together, something we cannot fight.”

  He sat quietly on his couch, lost in her words.

  “If you can tell me all that,” she said, “I will vanish into the darkness. You will never hear from me again.”

  He could picture their life together, he guiding her career, bathing in her reflected glory, flashbulbs everywhere. He knew that the image was from a 1940s movie, he couldn’t remember which one. In his fantasy, he was not as pudgy anymore, since, probably, if he accepted her offer he would have the time and money for a personal trainer.

  On the way to the national park, traffic stalled, then died. It was eleven in the morning, and the still cars stretched for miles. By the side of the road, the farmland had dried out, leaving bright golden wisps of vegetation glowing in the morning sun. The cars inched up, then stopped. Daniel’s car nudged the bumper of the car in front of him. The driver shot him the finger without even turning around.

  “Do you remember,” Daniel said, “when we went to see that friend of yours perform stand­up at open-mike night, back when comedy clubs were the big thing? Remember how she stunk, how she was really really lousy?”

  Susan nodded.

  “I remember that you kept laughing the whole time, encouraging her.”

  What about it? she wanted to know.

  Daniel reached over and took Susan’s hand. “Sometimes,” he said sadly, “I miss your laugh.”

  Susan stared straight ahead at the cars. She said, “Sometimes I miss my laugh too,” which seemed to have its intended effect.

  “I called you a couple of times in the middle of the night,” Daniel said. “I probably woke up your boyfriend.”

  “That was smooth,” Susan said calmly. “When did you learn that one? 1978?” She put one leg up on the dashboard. Daniel looked over at the curve of her thigh, and stroked it. She shut her eyes. “I sleep with myself,” she said.

  Daniel stopped the car to look out over a valley, miles of forest with patches of road. Off on the horizon, two fires burned out of control, one in the east, one to the southwest.

  “You’ve had boyfriends in the past five years,” Daniel said, “of course.”

  She hesitated a moment.

  “I’ve had sex from time to time,” she said.

  Why did she put it that way? If she’d admitted that, for the past five years, she’d had very few boyfriends, that would have sounded terribly sad. It would have implied no sex for five years, which was sadder, Susan thought, than no love. Love was eventual, or gradual, depending upon one’s personality. No love was not fatal. Also, sex from time to time sounded better than “married for a short while,” which was also true. Anyway, at this point the previous half-decade’s brief, passionate affairs held a more sacred place in her heart and fantasies than her dispiriting marriage.

  Susan kept her mouth shut.

  Daniel smiled, and he said: “Oh.”

  “Do you miss me, ever?” he asked.

  Their cabin. A little room without a phone or a TV, screens on the windows, a wasp buzzing in the bathroom. They sat on their porch, drinking a bottle of wine in the shadow of Half Dome, the towering peak that they would attempt to climb the following day. Susan, in cut-off shorts, a white t-shirt, bare feet.

  She took a little breath. “Daniel, you had no right ever to call me again. For a while, I was very sad.” Then, a moment later, “I sometimes miss you. I had a dream about you maybe half a year ago, maybe a year. I didn’t tell anyone about it. It was vivid.” She turned to him, and she laughed, embarrassed. “It was vivid, you know?”

  “What do you remember about that?”

  She smiled, looking up at the moon.

  “When I woke up, it was three in the morning, or something, and I was lying all alone in bed. It was so real. As though you had fled before I’d woken up.” She blushed, took a sip of wine. He was stroking the inside of her bare thigh, moving his hand slowly higher. “You were really there, as real as real. Then, when I woke up, for five minutes I wondered where you had gone. Then I remembered.”

  Her eyes glistened, but she wasn’t near tears.

  Softly, while she spoke, he kissed her mouth, her neck, her hair. She stood up, and he followed her into the cabin, shutting the door behind him. He lifted her up into the heavy air, tossed her on the bed – bouncing up, just a few inches above the mattress, at last Susan laughed.

  Afterwards, they lay together on the damp sheets, sweating on each other. He absently massaged her back, her butt, ran a couple of fingers through her hair. She flipped over on her back, and he watched her breasts move gently up and down with each breath.

  “If only I had met you first,” Daniel said. “Or even sooner.”

  “Daniel,” she whispered. “Don’t, OK?” Her eyes were still shut.

  “I just had this terrible feeling in my stomach. Like I hadn’t done my homework. Or I hadn’t fed my hamster.”

  She patted his hand. “We’re a couple of adulterers, Daniel,” she said. “We are committing adultery.” The word sounded nice as it slid over her tongue. She said it again, getting used to the feel.

  “Just before we split up, it was like I went nuts,” Daniel said. “I was so confused, Susan. I was looking everywhere for some kind of answer to all my confusion. I thought … first of all, this friend of mine died – ”

  “I’m so sorry. Was it someone that I – ”

  “And I was confused about that. Then, because he died, maybe, I felt that I couldn’t change anything more in my life, and I just sort of ran back to my wife. But then I was trying to find something ... I don’t know what. Hopelessly naive, anyway. So I went to a channeler – I even went to a regression therapist, to see who I was in a past life. You know.”

  “And who were you?”

  He frowned. “I'll tell you someday.”

  “Was it someone famous?”

  “I can’t tell you now.” He didn’t know if he were even capable of relating the story; he had never tried. “The point is that if I could just freeze this moment, just freeze it and hold onto it ....” He turned and looked into her eyes. She knew what he was trying to say even if he didn’t, and so he stopped talking, and just looked at her, and held her.

  They were up at six the next morning, eating breakfast in the Yosemite cafeteria, bright fluorescent lights nearly drowning out the brilliant sunrise poking up over the mountains. Fifteen minutes later they were on the trail, deep in the forest, heading str
aight up. At every bend in the trail, everything looked the same: birds singing overhead, a dull haze of moisture floating through the air, a fallen tree, crumbling into dirt. Daniel was in a terrible hurry; he glanced at his watch, charted their progress. He was almost afraid that he could not survive such a rigorous journey. They planned to get to the top of Half Dome, a 17-mile round trip, but Daniel’s heart was beginning to clatter around. He glanced back at Susan, who looked good to him, all covered with sweat.

  The Fact was that he was married, and he took that seriously. He did love Natalie. He loved her cutting intellect, her beauty, her Art. She had everything he’d ever looked for in himself but never found. But the Truth was that if Susan were to do nothing more with the rest of her life than sit in the park watching the sunrise, he would love her still. He had fallen in love with her years ago; throughout the last half-decade he would see her daily in the arch of a woman’s eyebrow, hear her voice in a burst of impossibly familiar laughter somewhere on the street, and he would fall in love again. In 1991, when he’d returned home to an empty apartment, depressed for no reason, he had dialed her number, then hung up quickly; in 1989, when someone had said something stupid at the coffee machine, Daniel had wanted to hear Susan’s reaction. She was something he needed, something essential and indescribable, sunlight.

  The woods abruptly ended, and Daniel and Susan were walking along crumbling stone steps, two feet wide, by the edge of a sheer cliff. Daniel stumbled, and a rock clattered to the valley far below. Off in the distance, the fires were still burning.

  “If I fell,” Daniel said, “wouldn’t you feel stupid? If someone just gets hit by a bus on the way to work, well, you know, suckers die. Whatever. People know what to say. I’m so sorry. But when someone dies on vacation, it’s more tragic, almost embarrassing. It’s doubly horrible to die when you’re supposed to be having fun!”

  Susan said, “The worst thing is that I would have to explain all this to your wife. She would want to know why you were climbing up the side of a mountain with a young woman. I would have to explain that we’re adulterers.” She laughed. “And that you’re dead.”