The Emerald Light in the Air (12 page)

“I'm good, I'm fine,” he said, nodding reassuringly (he hoped) to Lorenzo, the waiter, the people who'd turned in their seats to stare.

“What has happened to you, James?” Lorenzo pulled his white silk pocket square from his breast pocket and reached around the yellow and pink and blue and white flowers to dab at Jim's forehead.

“I ran all the way here,” Jim said.

“You're bleeding,” Lorenzo told him. Jim saw the blood spotting Lorenzo's handkerchief.

Lorenzo said, “You have a lot of scratches. You look like you've been in a fight with some squirrels or something.” He laughed, nicely.

“I've—I have been fighting, Lorenzo. Not with squirrels. Roses,” Jim specified, and Lorenzo said, “Ah, of course. Let me take them.”

He spoke to the waiter. “Paul, will you please take these from James?” To Jim, he added, “We will bring them to your table.”

“No, no,” Jim said. He explained to Lorenzo that the flowers were a gift for Kate, and that he needed to present them himself. This was crucial, he told Lorenzo. He clutched the vase. His pants were wet from water that had sloshed over the rim. Water stained his shoes. He could see tiny snags marking the sleeves of his overcoat and the front of his suit. How frustrating, after having labored so hard to avoid the thorns. His clothes would have to go to a reweaver, he thought. Then his thinking disintegrated into bitter resignation. Everything he touched was ruined. The flowers were almost destroyed.

Nonetheless, he bore them down the aisle. Here and there, people ducked forward in their chairs, or to the side, letting him through. As he progressed toward the back, the room quieted. People put down their silverware, their wineglasses; Jim felt eyes watching him.

“Eat! Live while you can!” he wanted to proclaim to the crowd. But what did he have to teach anyone? He was a thief, a common criminal—worse. He'd stolen a bouquet to give to the love of his life.

When she saw him, she was filled with happiness. She'd had a lot to drink—but, well, it wasn't that alone.

“Kate,” he said. She stood, and he lurched toward her. Elliot and Susan stood as well. They flanked Kate, who came out from between them—not unlike Jim, she was unsteady on her feet—saying, “I'm sorry, excuse me,” as she tacked her way through the sea of tables.

They met near the bathrooms. The bar was to their right. Kate raised her open hands to wipe the blood from his face. Blood had run down his neck, and stained the collar of his shirt. “These are for you,” he told her.

She was quietly crying, whispering, “They're beautiful, beautiful.” Then her crying began in force, and she wailed, “You made it, oh, you
made
it, we were all so scared, and I felt so lost.”

“I'm here,” he said, and his own tears started. He wanted to tell her that everything would be better, that
he
would be better, that one day soon he would work again, and start paying some bills, and take the burden off her shoulders; that they would be able, at last, to leave the little apartment with the busted plumbing. He wanted to tell her how much he needed her.

But he could see, out of the corner of his eye, his horrid reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He looked down at Kate's hands, the blood smeared across her palms. And he saw the restaurant-goers and the waiters and waitresses and busboys, who, not knowing what to make of the bleeding and the crying and the broken lilies arcing over Jim's and Kate's heads like some insane wedding canopy, had come from the kitchen or the bar to stand mutely around them. The pain in his body grew, and the words that spilled out of him were not words of love. Or they were. He spoke to his wife, as he spoke to the people gathered.

“Don't you see, Kate? Don't you
see
? It's time for me to go. I can't do this anymore. I have no place here. I don't belong. I hurt so. You can live and be happy. That will never be true for me.”

“No, no, baby,” she wept at him.

Someone touched his arm. It was Elliot, who'd come up behind him. He said to Jim, “Let's get in the car.”

Lorenzo was there, too. Kate said to Jim, “Honey, let Lorenzo take the flowers. Just for now,” and he did.

A moment later, Lorenzo came back with a wet cloth. Kate used it to wipe her eyes and to clean Jim's face and her hands. She tied the belt around his overcoat. She said, “There.”

They went out of the restaurant, the four of them. Susan let Jim lean on her, and Elliot steadied Kate. On the way out the door, they heard Lorenzo, behind them, telling his patrons, “Everything is all right. Our friend has had a bad time. Please, let me buy everyone a drink.”

On Broadway, the wind had died, and the air seemed to have warmed. They walked out into new snow. And, wouldn't you know, Jim did wrap his arm around Susan's shoulders, and Elliot ducked down close to Kate, listening to her mumble whatever it was she had to say to him.

At the garage, Jim and Kate got into the backseat of Elliot's car. Susan sat beside Elliot. Elliot started the engine, turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers.
Thump, thump, thump
. He steered east. During the trip, Jim took his belt from around his waist. He gave Kate his scarf and his phone and his keys and all his money, which amounted to about thirty dollars.

Later, she would get on her knees on the emergency-room floor and extract the laces from his shoes. A nurse would come, then another, and a doctor promising sleeping pills.

By that time, after midnight, Elliot and Susan would have driven up the FDR Drive and out of Manhattan, through the Bronx, and into Westchester County.

“You can go home now, if you'd like,” the doctor said to Kate. “We won't let anything happen to him.”

He gave Kate a plastic garbage bag, into which she put Jim's overcoat and his suit jacket. She would use the last of his money for her crosstown taxi, and for milk and cereal at the Korean market near the apartment.

In the deep of the night, they came for him. A male nurse helped him into a wheelchair, and then pushed him through the white labyrinth of hallways and waited for the elevator.

Margaret, one of the night nurses, met him on the ward. She said, “Hello, Mr. Davis. You're back with us again, I see.” She asked, “Do you think you can walk?” She gave him Ativan and a paper cup of water, and watched while he swallowed. Then she showed him to a room of his own.

 

HE KNEW

When he felt good, or even vaguely a little bit good, and sometimes even when he was not, by psychiatric standards, well at all, but nonetheless had a notion that he might soon be coming out of the Dread, as he called it, he insisted on taking Alice to Bergdorf Goodman, and afterward for a walk along Fifty-seventh Street, to Madison, where they would turn—this had become a tradition—and work their way north through the East Sixties and Seventies, into the low Eighties, touring the expensive shops. He was an occasional clotheshorse himself, of course, at times when he was not housebound in a bathrobe.

And it was one or the other, increasingly. The apartment or the square! He should have bought a place when he could have—he and Alice rented in the Village—back when he worked all the time instead of only rarely. But no, that wasn't the right attitude. Keep moving, he said to himself.

She was half a block ahead, across the street already, carrying her bags, which held the simple white blouse and the French lotions they'd bought for her. She was waiting for him to catch up. The light changed, and he crossed the street. He had a young wife. She didn't yet know what life had in store for her. Or did she?

He'd long ago been a competitive runner, and he sometimes thought about resuming his sport at the veteran level. He'd been worrying about his heart, and it would do him good. But he'd never do it. Or maybe he would.

She called out, “How do you get to stay so handsome?,” and he was in love again. He trotted up the sidewalk and said, “Ha, that's nice of you, but I'm overweight.”

“Who cares? So am I,” she proclaimed. “Look at my ass! I need to get exercise.”

“I love your ass,” he said. “What do you see?” They were standing in front of a boutique. She laughed. “We already have enough Italian
sheets
!” There it was, the volume rising on the last word, her shrill crescendo.

It was about the time of day when they should be choking down a few pills. “We'll need to find some fluids before too long,” he said.

He put his arm around her shoulders and gently hugged her. She arranged her shopping bags in one hand and wrapped her other, free arm too tightly around his waist, steering him up the block. They didn't fit well, walking so close—she swung her butt, and their hips collided—and eventually they drew apart and held hands. She had long dark hair and round brown eyes, which, when he looked into them, seemed to have other eyes behind them. What did he mean by that? It was a feeling, hard to shape into words.

Thank God the money was holding out. He wasn't too worried about their shopping. It had been his idea, to begin with; it couldn't be laid at her feet, and, in fact, he wasn't always spending on her. To do so, as was his intention that afternoon, might implicate him in a father stereotype, it was true, but who cared? It was a bright, cold Saturday, the last Saturday in October—Halloween—and the light seemed already to be fading toward night. Stephen had got himself shaved and outdoors for the first time in two weeks, and women wearing heels and men in European clothes were showing themselves in the uptown air.

“Can we stop here?” she said. They'd arrived at the lingerie store where, every year, before Christmas—usually at the last minute on Christmas Eve, at the end of one of his eleventh-hour gift-gathering runs—he came to buy her tap pants or a camisole, just as he'd done for his former wife on Christmases in years past. Marina, how was she? Was she still with Jeff?

“Let's go in and get you a pair of fishnets,” he said, and they went in—the store was narrow—in single file. Two salesgirls were there to help them. One walked around the counter, toward Stephen, who raised his hands in the air, as if to prevent her from coming too close. Alice could easily be made upset if she thought she saw intimacy springing up between Stephen and another woman, even an attentive shopgirl or waitress, and he had learned to play down these innocent encounters. He announced to the women that he was shopping for his wife, and then put his arm around Alice and pulled her up beside him. “We'll need a tall size,” he said.

He charged a pair of black woolen fishnets and two pairs of regular black stockings, and then they crossed the street and detoured off the avenue to look at a window display of men's suits. He had no need of one, and in fact hadn't bought one in quite some time, not since the world economy had taken its downturn.

“Let's keep moving,” he said. A beautiful jacket in blue worsted wool was making him feel sad over—what? His reduced opportunities in life, probably. “How're you doing?” he asked Alice. “Are you holding up?” She was leaning against him. Here and there around them, babies, pushed in strollers, came and went.

“I'm holding up,” she said.

The problem—the
problem
—was that he was no longer getting cast in the comic roles that had become, over years of acting in plays and, for a brief spell, on television, his strong suit. Or, no, maybe that wasn't the root problem. In a way, though, it was, in part because the dropoff in work and income had increased his normal daily load of terror, but also because his heartbreaking difficulties onstage had amplified his sense of himself, of his
Self
, he should say, as somehow consisting in, or activated by—what was a fitting way to put this?—the willing community made by the laughter of audiences.

“Will you please let me hold those for you?” he asked, and reached for Alice's shopping bags, the things he'd bought for her. She backed away from him quickly—had he startled her?—and said, “You're too slow,
man
!”

“You're right about that,” he said.

“Come on! You're not even going to try?”

“Oh, God. You want me to fight you for the bags?”

“Yeah. Fight me.”

“Are you fucking with me right now?” he said, in the snarl of a stock comic-melodrama villain. But this didn't come out funny—it was too unhinged-sounding, in tone and in volume—and her smile dropped, and she exclaimed, “Jesus, you don't need to freak
out
!”

She handed over the two purple bags and the one little black one, and they continued up Madison. They stopped for a light, and he asked her, “Are we skipping Barneys?” The entrance to the women's side of the department store was close by. Around the corner, over near Lexington Avenue, was the apartment of a hooker he'd visited in the nineties. Victoria.

What he hated about nice clothes was both wanting and not wanting to wear them. He disliked his own conspicuousness to himself, whenever he was out in the world expensively costumed. It was only the pleasure he felt in his tactile awareness of sewing and fabric, of the hands of the maker in the garment, that led him, again and again, to risk the danger of seeing himself—literally, reflected in the mirror of a bar, perhaps—as somehow faintly ridiculous.

It was an American problem, something that he felt only in America. He should have moved across the ocean when he'd had the chance, after his divorce from Marina. Though he'd never really had the chance. Where would he have gone? Rome? Berlin? London? How would he have worked? His old Neighborhood Playhouse friend Ned had decamped to the Netherlands some years back—when people still called it Holland—in order, Ned had told Stephen, to follow through on an artistic commitment to experimental performance, of which there always seemed to be so much in northern Europe; but then Stephen had heard through mutual acquaintances that Ned had married a Dutch woman, who'd helped him qualify for some form or other of enlightened state arts support, and that the two of them had taken to spending their days and nights smoking pot with expatriates in Amsterdam coffee shops, which sounded, to Stephen, both awful and wonderful.