The Emerald Light in the Air (17 page)

“Do you want a cigarette?” Fletcher asked, taking a pack from his jacket pocket.

“Good God, thank you,” Jonathan said.

It seemed they were going to be friends for the night.

Jonathan said, “Let's go to the terrace.”

When they got outside, they found Deborah and Kathy.

“Forgive me for running off like that,” Jonathan said to Deborah.

She asked, “Did I scare you?”

“A little,” he said, and laughed, and she laughed, too.

It wasn't long before Sarah and William appeared, sweaty from dancing. Jonathan took the joint from his shirt pocket and asked, “Does anyone want this?”

Fletcher held the lighter. Jonathan inhaled and then passed the joint to William, who took a puff and gave it to Kathy, who handed it to Sarah. She gave the joint to Deborah, and Deborah took a big hit before offering it to Fletcher, who had some and gave it back to Jonathan, who passed it around again.

“Are you stoned?” a voice asked. It was Sarah.

His body felt heavy, and he could clearly hear the traffic coming and going on the streets and avenues below.

“Kind of. Are you?”

“I'm on the way,” she said.

William said, “I'm ready to dance some more.”

“I'll go with you,” Deborah said, and Kathy added, “Let's all go.”

Inside, Deborah and Kathy cleared a space and began gyrating. William followed, and then Sarah, too, began to move.

Jonathan watched her sway to the left then to the right, her arms seeming to float in the air beside her; she looked as if she were in a pleasant trance, like a charmed cobra. Watching her, he felt—what? Appreciation? Affection? Love? He felt himself lucky to be with her, for she made him feel calm, and now he slid up next to her, got his arms partway around her, and lightly pulled her toward him, so that their faces came close to touching. She shut her eyes and let his hands around her waist balance her.

“You can be a jerk sometimes,” she whispered to him.

“I apologize.”

“I'm sick of hearing about Rachel,” she said.

“I won't mention her again,” he said.

“You hurt my feelings,” she said, and separated herself from him and joined the other three.

He stood next to Fletcher. Without a word, they turned around and headed to the bar.

“Will that be a Scotch and soda?” the bartender asked Jonathan.

“Thanks,” Jonathan said.

It was late now, almost midnight. He'd drunk too much. Had he been at the party with Rachel, she would have said, “Enough is enough,” and they would have left by now.

But Rachel was gone, for good, it seemed to him at that moment, and—it was both crushing and a relief to feel this—he was free. And though he knew that this sense of freedom from her would not entirely last, that the memory of her would overtake him again, the feeling was nonetheless substantial: He was with Sarah.

“Excuse me, do you have any cherries?” he said to the bartender.

The bartender leaned over, opened a small refrigerator, and pulled out a jar of bright-red maraschino cherries. “We're closing up,” he said. “Why don't you just take the bottle.”

He turned around and began opening cardboard boxes for the empty and near-empty bottles lined up on the bar.

Jonathan dug two fingers into the jar and began trying to capture the cherry with the longest stem. He pulled up one, then another, and finally found one that seemed right. He ate the cherry but kept the stem.

“Fletcher, will you excuse me?”

He stumbled away from the bar and began weaving among people.

Where were they—where were
his
people? There they were. They were still in their circle of sorts. He crossed the floor to Sarah.

“Hello,” he said in her ear.

“Hello,” she said.

He got down on one knee before her and took hold of her hand. Awkwardly, he curled the cherry stem around her ring finger. He made a number of tries at tying it there, but, sadly, it wasn't long enough after all, so he held it in place with his hand, clutching hers.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked.

It was a good question—what
was
he doing? “What does it look like?” he said, and he wondered, briefly, whether he meant it, whether he would still feel this strongly about her after he'd sobered up. And he thought that he would. Surely, he would. He had the idea that he was seeing into his future, and he felt, quite naturally, at that drunken hour, that they would share it.

“Are you proposing?” Sarah asked.

He said, “I'm not sure that I can propose without a real ring. But at least you'll know.”

“I'll know what?”

But he was afraid to say.

He stood and kissed her on the cheek. Then he gave her a kiss on the lips. They came closer and wrapped their arms around each other.

The party was ending. The loft's wall sconces came up brightly, and the music went down low, and in the harsher light he could see a line of people heading for the door to the elevator.

They stood together holding hands. Their new friends were with them. Everybody said what a nice time it had been, then exchanged phone numbers and promised to be in touch.

On the sidewalk in front of the building, beneath the awning, he asked Sarah, “Do you want to walk?”

Her apartment wasn't far.

“Let's walk,” she said. They went toward Broadway.

Out on the avenue, the air was hotter and more humid than it had been on the terrace. A few cars and taxis drove by. He asked her which of the author's books he should read.

She said, “Everybody likes
Abel Kills Cain
, but it's not my favorite. I think you might like the new one.”

They turned at the corner. There was no traffic now, and he could hear their footsteps echoing from one side of the street to the other. “I'll bring you a copy from work,” she offered.

“That'd be great,” he said.

He took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder, then undid the buttons on his shirt cuffs, first the left, then the right, and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. The moon was bright and the sky was starless. Buildings rose above them. He put his arm around her shoulder.

 

THE EMERALD LIGHT IN THE AIR

In less than a year, he'd lost his mother, his father, and, as he'd once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life; and during this year, or, he should say, during its suicidal aftermath, he'd twice admitted himself to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where, each stay, one in the fall and one the following summer, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he'd climbed onto an operating table and wept at the ceiling while doctors set the pulse, stuck electrodes to his forehead, put the oxygen meter on his finger, and then pushed a needle into his arm and instructed him, as the machines beeped and the anesthetic dripped down the pipette toward his vein, to count backward from a hundred; and now, another year later, he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection—it wasn't a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics—that he'd kept since he was a boy. He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he'd come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.

It was a humid Saturday morning. Thunderstorms had come through in the early hours after dawn, but now the rain and wind had passed, and the sun lit the puddles on the road and the silver roofs of the farmhouses and barns that flickered into view between the trees as he steered the ancient blue Mercedes—it had been his father's, and his grandfather's before that—across the county he'd grown up in. Maybe on his way back home he'd stop at Fox Run Farm for a gallon of raw milk. Or no. He'd drink a glass or two and then, in a month, have to dig the rest out of the refrigerator and pitch it. He reminded himself to vacuum the living room and clean the downstairs toilet. His name was Billy French, and he was carrying a Browning .30-06 A-bolt hunting rifle in the trunk of the Mercedes. He wasn't a gun nut, and he didn't hunt. He was a sculptor and a middle-school art teacher. Every now and then, he liked to stop on his way home from school and shoot cans off the rotting fence posts that surrounded the unused cow pasture where, at sixteen, in the grass and weeds, he'd lost his virginity to Mary Doan. He hadn't thought about Mary in ages, and then, recently, he'd run into her—surprise, surprise, after all these years—at a bar in the valley. He'd recognized her right away—he remembered her limp—but it had taken her a couple of tries to remember his name. They'd had a laugh over that, and he'd bought her a drink, and she'd bought him one, and now she was coming across the mountain, she was coming that night for dinner.

He'd told her seven thirty.

Ahead on the road, a tree limb was down. He was on a small rural route, a cut between two lanes, not much used. He stopped the Mercedes, unbuckled his seat belt, and got out. A locust bough had sheared off in the wind. The bough was long and twisting, green with crooked branches and smaller, thorny stems. His tree saw and his ax were back at the house, but it might be possible to drag the bough from the tip and more or less swing the whole thing—swing wasn't the right word, maybe—over and around and off the road, enough at least for the car to pass. He reached through the leaves and grabbed a narrow stem that stuck up in the air. There were no flowers—it was late in the season for that—but the locust's seedpods had begun to sprout, and many of these were scattered across the asphalt.

He swatted a mosquito and got the branch in both hands. The wood was damp, and the end of the bough flexed and bent when he pulled. He moved down to a thicker part, planted his feet, and leaned back. After four or five difficult heave-hos, he'd opened enough clearance, he thought, to steer the car through. He was out of breath and his shirt was wet and sticky. He got in the driver's seat and eased the Mercedes onto the oncoming side of the road. The ground sloped down from the road's edge and the soil had taken on rain. As he was working his way around the branch, wheels partly on the shoulder, the car tipped to the left and then shifted further, and a piece of ground seemed to fall away underneath. It was startling: a little slide and the Mercedes plunged. Then the tires dug in, and, abruptly, a distance off the road and at a steep angle, the car settled and stopped. Billy pushed his foot against the brake. He gripped the steering wheel. When he took his hands off, he saw that he'd scraped his palms on the locust. He was bleeding.

“Shit, fuck. Shit,” he said aloud.

He turned off the engine. He hadn't slept the night before. It wasn't the thunder and lightning that had kept him up—he'd been going through the artworks that Julia had left rolled in tubes or stacked against the wall in the upstairs bedroom that had been her studio. They were piled in the backseat now. The paintings, he thought, while sitting in the car perched on the berm, were not as strong as the drawings, which, though more or less precise studies for their oil counterparts, all rural Virginia scenes—trees in a field, a dying pond, a rotting house in a mountain hollow—nonetheless had about them, with their bold erasures and smudges and retraced pencil lines, the feeling of something abstract and, in comparison with the worked and reworked paintings, complexly three-dimensional. The paintings seemed to exist as strangely flat fields—they put Billy in mind of Early American naïve art—and, in looking at them and, back in the day, talking to Julia about them, he'd come to see how purposefully she distorted light and shadow. “I'm searching for something that isn't quite there,” she'd once said.

He was afraid of shifting his weight and starting another slide—the car had gone four or five feet already, and the embankment fell maybe ten more. He could hear running water. Was there a creek off in the woods? He knew this country, or thought he did, but it was always surprising him, just the same.

He wiped his hands on his pants. Gently now, he ratcheted down the brake. He eased open the driver's-side door.

Anyway, her drawings and paintings—he knew better than to throw them out, but the fact of them in his house was terrible. He'd meant for some time to do something about them. At first, of course, he'd tried to get them back to her, but she'd told him—this was during one of their five or six phone conversations since her departure, two years earlier—that her old work was no longer meaningful or important to her. “I'm not doing that kind of painting anymore,” she'd said. “I'm engaged with a more total realism.”

“Photo-realism?” he'd asked.

“No, nothing like that.”

He was standing in the kitchen in his socks and underwear, drinking bourbon and Coke—his mother's drink. Ice rattled in the glass. The floor was brown and dirty, in need of mopping.

Julia said, “Billy, you're drinking.”

Oh, God, how to get out of the Mercedes safely? The hillside was steep and the grass was wet. And what if he made it, with both feet firmly on the ground, and the car slid down on top of him?

He pushed the car door open all the way and, clutching the doorframe for balance, tumbled out onto the incline. Fuck Julia. He could take her pictures and toss them into the woods right now.

He had weed in the glove compartment. Might there be a stray Ativan or two in there as well? The thing to do was slog around to the uphill side, the passenger side, reach through the window, and feel around in the glove compartment for whatever he could find. But wouldn't you know it? He got partway around the Mercedes, and the whole car seemed to shudder and tremble. Billy watched it start into another drop—it was as if the car were shaking its wheels free of the mire—and then down the grade it rumbled, through the mud and across the grass, sliding to a rest at last in a patch of milkweed at the foot of the hill.