The Emerald Light in the Air (11 page)

She'd been going once or sometimes twice a week to the Upper East Side to meet Elliot at the Lowell Hotel, on Sixty-third Street between Madison and Park. She rode the bus. Typically, she arrived first. She got the room key, went up, and showered; if Elliot was delayed at the lab and the day was growing dark, she might unlock the minibar and make a Manhattan or an approximation of a Manhattan, then recline naked by the window and look north toward the East Nineties, Carnegie Hill, where her mother, an only child, like Kate, had lived before marrying her father and moving to the farm.

Manhattans had been her mother's drink. Unlike her mother, Kate tried to keep herself to three an evening. At Lorenzo's that night, she was ahead of pace, finishing her second before having eaten a bite. She held her glass in one hand and her phone in the other, listening hard through the restaurant noise as the girl at the florist's recited back her AmEx number. Elliot sat quietly beside her. He had his arms crossed, and his chair pushed back at an angle to make room for his legs. Susan had got up from the table; she'd announced to Kate—sounding well on the way to being tight—“Kate, you're my best friend, but I don't know how you drink such a strong drink.” To Kate and Elliot together, she'd added, “Will you two do me a big giant favor? Will you snag Lorenzo and ask him to bring me a Cosmo?”

“Don't utter a word to me about my husband,” Kate warned Elliot, once Susan had gone to the bathroom.

Into the phone, to the girl, she said, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean you. I was talking to somebody else.”

Meanwhile, in the women's room, Susan was on her own phone, calling Jim's number from a stall.

It was the girl who answered, of course.

“Hello, can you hold?” the girl said. The line went briefly dead. After a pause, the girl came back and said, “May I ask who is calling?”

“May I ask who's answering?”

“Hold, please.”

“Sir?” the girl called out to Jim. She looked this way and that for him. Where had he gone? The shop closed at eight. It was nearly closing time. “A woman is calling you!”

“I'm here! I'm right here!” he answered from behind his tree.

“He'll be with you in one second,” he heard her promise into the phone. After that, there was a pause, before, in a businesslike tone, the girl resumed with Kate. “I'm sorry to have to ask you this again. Would you mind verifying the last five digits and the expiration date?”

Back when he was in the hospital—in the past six months, there had been three emergency-room visits and two locked-ward admissions—he had spent day after day lying on a mattress, crying. His doctors (along with the psychiatric nurses and the social workers who led the daily therapy groups) had encouraged him to uncurl himself from the fetal position and try, at least try, to watch television or play a board game with the other patients, but this had mostly proved too great a challenge. There had been times when, walking to or from the bathroom or the water fountain or the patients' common room, or standing in line to receive his medications at the nurses' station, or even simply sitting upright on the table in the examining room, he'd had the strong sensation that the air through which he moved was gathering around him and becoming—really, no word was sufficient to name it—substantive. Its weight pressed in on him. This hurt, it hurt terribly, yet when he tried to locate the source of the pain he could not: It came, as he knew, only from himself. On the mattress, shattered and sobbing over Kate and their messed-up love, he'd lain crushed.

“Sir?”

The girl's voice seemed to echo through the shop. He peeked up. When had she come out from behind the bouquet? He could see her standing on the other side of the tree. She was looking at him through the leaves.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“I maybe—I need a minute.” His mouth was dry and his heart was beating fast. That could be his meds.

“There's someone who wants to talk to you. Do you think you can take the call? Would you like to try?” She held his phone out with one hand, reaching toward him through the branches.

He had to reach into the tree to meet her hand. He was sweating.

“Hello?” he said into the phone.

“What the hell, Jim?” Susan said to him from the women's-room toilet at Lorenzo's.

“Susan, how are you?” he said.

“I've been better.”

“I'm sorry.”

“We're all here, Jim. We're waiting and waiting for you.”

“I'm doing my best to get there. Have you ordered yet? What are the specials? What looks good?”

“Kate is beside herself. She says the two of you are bankrupt. She says you've spent all the money.”

“I haven't.”

“Don't lie to me, Jim. Please, don't lie to me.” She was sniffling, beginning to weep, lightly.

“Stop crying, stop crying, baby,” he whispered into the phone. Then he laid his hand over the receiver and said to the girl, who was still peering down at him through the leaves of the tree, “You'll have to excuse me one more time.” With a powerful effort of will, he stood upright and came out from behind the ficus. He didn't dare look at the girl, but he heard her telling him, as he pushed painfully past her toward the door, that it looked like his wife's American Express card wasn't working, either—and was there any way for him to pay for the flowers?

He waved his hand, motioning that he'd return. He stepped out into the cold on Broadway. He pulled up his overcoat's shawl collar. The door to the florist's closed behind him.

Back at their table for four, Kate and Elliot had hit a snag.

“Let me talk to him,” Elliot said. He had his elbows on the table. He'd drunk almost none of his Scotch.

“That's not a good idea.”

“Give me your phone.” He held out his hand.

“I'm on hold.”

“Kate,” he said.

“Leave me alone.”

“As you wish,” he said, leaning back in his chair, and she burst out at him, “How can you act like this? You're a doctor. How can you be so unfeeling?”

He said, “What does my being a doctor have to do with my feelings?” (She rolled her eyes at this, but he didn't appear to notice.) He went on, “I may be a doctor, but I'm not your husband's doctor.”

“His name is Jim, remember?”

“I think you're drunk. That's what I think.”

He got up from the table, patted his pockets—checking for his own phone—and said, “Goddamn it, I do research. I don't treat patients. He has excellent doctors. I'll call him myself.”

When he'd gone and Kate was alone, Lorenzo arrived with Susan's Cosmopolitan.

“Everybody has gone away and left you,” Lorenzo said, and Kate chirped back, “Everybody's gone!”

“Let me bring you another Manhattan.” Lorenzo placed Susan's cocktail on the table and picked up Kate's empty glass. Kate managed a little smile. She held her phone to her ear. “Jim? Jim, are you there?” she whispered.

Six blocks downtown, Jim was on the line to Susan. “I'm here, I'm here with you, baby,” he assured her. In fact, he wasn't thinking of sleeping with her again. Oh, he'd loved sleeping with Susan—that wasn't the problem. But that evening his body was compressing: The weight of the air was on him, flattening his libido and his trust in humankind.

“Susan,” he said. “Susan.”

“What is it?” she said. Her voice filled the stall. “What is happening? Is it happening? Is it happening to you now? I'm scared. What do I
do
?”

“Susan,” he said. “Susan.”

He explained to her that in a few minutes he was going to calmly walk back inside the florist's and steal a mysterious and beautiful bouquet that he and an angel had made for Kate. He'd helped the angel, he pointed out. He was feeling honest. He acknowledged to Susan that he was speaking metaphorically when it came to angels—in order to seem aboveboard and keep her trust. He needed her to be cool when he entered the restaurant, he told her. Then he ended the call and switched over to Kate.

“I'm coming,” he said.

“I'm glad,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, I love you,” she said. She was alone at their table.

She said, “Have you talked to Elliot?”

He said, “I haven't heard from him.”

Elliot, in the meantime, had been unable to get through, Jim's phone lines having been taken up by both their wives. He'd left two messages already, one saying, “Jim, call me, all right?”; the other, “Jim, will you call me?” His third attempt got through, but Jim didn't answer. He heard the beeping, plucked the phone away from his ear, glanced at it, saw who was calling, and said, to Kate, “It's him. There is no way that I want to speak to him right now.”

“I understand,” she said. Then she said, “Just get here, dear, and have dinner with us. We all need food. We need to eat.”

He said, “Has he taken care with you, since I've been gone?”

“Gone?” she said.

“I don't know how else to put it.”

She asked, “Will you stay where you are, until people come?”

“Don't send an ambulance,” he said to her.

He put his phone in his pocket. He turned and faced the door to the flower shop. A few people swept past him on the windy avenue—or so it seemed; his thoughts were with the pain beneath his temple. He wanted to put it out. He could imagine different ways to do this. This was how it was when his mind turned to high open windows or unlocked rooftop fire doors or breaks in the chain-link fences lining bridge walkways.

He took a step forward. The door was made partly of glass, and he could see into the shop. It occurred to him that it would be easy to break the window with his fist and deliberately cut up the veins in his arms. Instead, he put his hand on the doorframe and pushed. He stuck his head inside. He was acting guiltily, though he knew there was no reason to, not at the florist's—he hadn't done anything yet. Still, he snuck in, ashamed.

The girl was nowhere in sight. The bouquet looked bigger than it had the last time he'd sized it up. How would he manage to get it up Broadway in his trembling hands? Beside it on the table—careful, he had to be careful—were the girl's pruning shears, as well as regular scissors and a small sharp knife.

He told himself to let those things lie.

Uptown at the restaurant, Lorenzo brought Kate her drink. She asked for bread, and apologized to him for taking so long to order dinner. “We'll all be here together soon,” she sighed.

She was right about that. Elliot had given up trying to reach Jim, and the cold had driven him back inside. He was threading his way down the aisle to their table. Susan, too, would return, as soon as she had peed. Pride had made her unable to while on the phone.

And that left Jim, who had no desire to become a thief. Might he, instead, offer something in barter for the flowers? His wristwatch wasn't worth much. His overcoat was brand-new, and cost well more than the watch and the bouquet combined. He decided to leave an IOU, promising to come back another day with money, or if not with actual money, then with a clear idea of when one or another of his or his wife's credit cards might again be active and usable.

But when he tried to hold a pen in his hand, he could not; and when he tried to focus his eyes on the piece of paper lying beside the cash register—it was the scrap of a receipt on which the girl had penciled Kate's American Express information—he found that his mind was frantic. This was his disorder. This was the descent. He crumpled the receipt and shoved it into his pocket. He reached for the bouquet. The girl had put water in the vase.

Had you been walking downtown on Broadway that February night at a little past eight, you might have seen a man hurrying toward you with a great concrescence of blooms. You might have noticed that he did not even pause for traffic signals, but charged across streets against the lights; and so you might rightly have supposed that he could not see through the flowers that he held (doing what he could to keep clear of thorns) at arm's length before him. Whenever a siren sounded in the distance—and, once, beating helicopter blades in the night sky caused him to sprint up a side street—he dropped into a furtive, crouching gait. His balance was off; he was paranoid about police. Windblown flowers lashed at his head. Seen from a distance, he might have brought to mind an old, out-of-favor stereotype: the savage in a headdress. But as he came closer, you would have noticed his European clothes, his stylish haircut; and you might have asked yourself, “What's wrong with that man?”

Had you stepped to the side as he hurtled past, tightened your scarf securely around your neck, and continued on your way, you might next have encountered a young woman on a street corner, distraught and coatless. “Did you happen to see a man carrying a bouquet of flowers?” she might have asked in a startled voice, and you would have looked away from her bare, pale legs, pointed upwind, and told her, “He went that way.” By then, the first snowflakes would have been swirling through the caverns between the apartment buildings, down onto the thoroughfare.

Jim looked up and saw the snow on his way into Lorenzo's. For an instant, he took it as an omen—of what, though? He pulled hard on the restaurant door, forcing it open, and stumbled with his tattered flowers into the dark realm between the door and the velvet drapes that had been hung to keep the cold from sweeping in over diners at the front of the room.

He parted the curtains. “Pardon me,” he said to the people seated near the entrance. Long- and short-stemmed flowers alike had snagged on the drapes. Now a waiter approached—and here came Lorenzo, too, calling, in his soft, ristoratore's voice, “
Ciao
, James.
Ciao
. I cannot call you Jim, you know.”

“Lorenzo,
ciao
,” Jim said. The waiter was busy tugging on the curtains. Lorenzo lent a hand. “This way, try this way,” Lorenzo instructed. Jim spun left then right, enshrouding himself—and the bouquet—within the folds of drapery fabric. There followed a flurry of petals. The rose thorns came loose; the bouquet's topmost stems sprung free. He tumbled out into the room.