The Emerald Light in the Air

SOLACE

They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little, and when, in their early thirties, they met and began sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground — for that was how she thought of it — seemed to her a great, welcome solace. At last! she thought more than once during the weeks and months after they’d started going to bed together — always at friends’ places, because they were both in transitional periods and didn’t have anywhere comfortably private; she was saving money by sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in the East Twenties that she shared with her friend Susan, while he, also recently forced to cut expenses, was installed uptown in a rented room in the apartment of an older, intimidating former co-worker, also named Susan. At last! Jennifer said to herself many times before falling asleep after sex in some friend’s or friend of a friend’s freshly changed bed. Then she would squeeze his hand.

One morning after this way of life had been going on for a while — it was the day after the summer solstice, and they were occupying their sixth or seventh borrowed apartment, getting away from their Susans for the weekend — Christopher woke early. He pushed back the sheet and the thin bedspread, rolled off the strange mattress, and, leaving her sleeping, went searching for coffee in Bert and Lucie’s kitchen. He moved down the line of melamine cabinets, opening and shutting the white doors. The open, uncurtained kitchen window gave him a view of a treeless back courtyard and neighbors’ windows directly opposite. There was no breeze. Living without air-conditioning or blinds was, Christopher thought, exactly the kind of thing his friends Bert and Lucie would do; it was a statement about iconoclasm or freedom or hedonism, and there was more evidence of it, the ambiguous statement, everywhere in the apartment — in the preponderance of tacky objects from the sixties and seventies, in the bright upholstery colors on the couch and podlike chairs, in the large fish tank inhabited by a piranha.

Christopher put water on the stove and turned on the burner. There, on the counter beside the refrigerator, was the gin bottle. But where was the coffee? He was naked.

They’d met at the end of the previous winter, at a dinner party thrown by a movie producer for whom Christopher had once done some legal work. The producer’s husband had been seated directly across the table from Christopher, and on the husband’s right was Jennifer. Shortly after the halibut came out, Christopher remembered, this man had dropped his napkin on the floor beside her chair, then boldly leaned into her space to reach for it. As he reached down, his forehead bumped the side of her left breast. And that wasn’t all. Coming up after grabbing the napkin, the husband, in a show of spatial awareness or perhaps a feigned considerateness, moved backward to avoid a second contact. Instead of sitting straight in his seat, however, he paused, his body bent awkwardly over, his face close to the breast, which he gazed at, it seemed to Christopher, with intensity. In a mock-formal voice, addressing the breast, the husband growled, “Pardon,” then sat upright and laughed, forcing Jennifer to grimace out at the table as she shared the joke. But what was the joke?

“You’re Charlie Harrison’s friend!” she shouted at Christopher before coffee was served, before they pushed back their chairs and wandered off to find privacy — the sloppiness of the people around them making it possible for them to seek refuge with each other — in a bedroom.

“Charlie,” he said, and finished chewing. Then he thought: Christ, why bring that up?

Down the table, a man who’d drunk too much knocked his glass across a plate, and there was a commotion.

“You’ve got to speak up!” she called over the noise. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying!”

“How do you know Charlie?” he asked loudly, and she yelled back, “I wouldn’t say I know him!”

“I don’t, either! I mean, I don’t not know him! I know him”—gathering steam—“but, well, not well, anymore. I knew him!” What was he doing? Why was he blurting?

“I understand! I understand completely!” she shouted at him. “Here’s to old acquaintances!” She leaned over her plate, raised her glass in her hand, and, in a softer voice, told him, “My name’s Jennifer.”

Was she making a toast? He had nothing in his glass but water. It occurred to him that she’d maybe had a bad experience with his ex-friend, that she and Charlie had possibly slept together. He tilted himself forward to meet her halfway. A candle burned between them, and he moved it aside. Her eyes were brown and somewhat cloudy; he made a point of looking into them when he said, “It’s bad luck to toast with water.”

“We don’t want bad luck.”

So he picked up a wineglass from among the scattered dishes, one that had been filled but seemed not to belong to anyone, and raised it to his mouth and took a quick fake drink, even that a violation of the major rule he lived by, the rule he tried not to violate too often or — since most nights he was, after all, likely to break down — too early in the evening. But it wasn’t early in the evening, was it?

“For luck,” he said.

Later, sitting next to him on a bed, atop partygoers’ mixed-up coats, scarves, and hats, she told him that she’d worked in the film business for six years but hadn’t felt at home, that she’d wanted all along to paint. Her mother painted but had never made a career of it, though who knew what might have happened were it not for her mother’s drinking and drugging. Those were Jennifer’s words: drinking and drugging. She told him she felt sure that as a very young girl she’d probably been happy, but because of things that had happened when she was a bit older in her childhood, things that had influenced every aspect of her existence — did he follow her meaning? — those sweeter memories, whatever they might have been, were no longer playing. Her current project was self-acceptance, not an uncommon goal, she said, among the sorts of people she mainly hung out with, people who’d moved to the city from distant places because, as she put it, “they had no homes in their home towns.”

That last line sounded like something she’d said before, on more than one occasion. Nonetheless, her words were a mini-revelation to him. She’d expressed a condition that he’d known in life yet had been unable to articulate until it was figured forth concretely by her, in speech that sounded canned. “I’m enjoying myself,” he told her, and she said, “I’m having a nice time, too. I’m glad I came tonight,” and went on to tell him how much her painting meant to her — so much that it frightened her sometimes — even though she was only a beginner. She was interested in realism, she said. This was one area in which she differed from her mother, who, she confided to Christopher in a low whisper, was an abstract expressionist; and — she was getting excited again — the fact of her mother’s frustrated ambition obviously had everything to do with the anxieties that she, Jennifer, felt whenever she picked up a paintbrush. Breathlessly, she told him, “I need to make painting mine.”

“How about you?” she asked.

“Me?”

“Yes.” Flirting. “You.”

“I’m not an artist.”

He paused. She waited. Finally he said, “I used to scribble a few lines in college. Poetry. Does that count?”

“Count? What do you mean, count?” She laughed, and he said, “Oh, I just, I guess, I don’t know,” and then, against his will, he was laughing with her, because what else could he do? He gazed at the side of her face, wondering, absurdly, whether he would like what he saw — what he would see — as the years rolled by and she and he got older. Her nose, it seemed to him, was on the small side in relation to her wide mouth. Makeup did not completely conceal a slight dryness to her skin, and her hair, pulled tightly back, gave her forehead a stretched appearance — would she look less startled without the ponytail? And yet she was attractive in a prim, smart way that he found sexy. And who was he to find fault, he with his thin upper lip and jutting ears?

After they’d stayed a while longer in their hosts’ bedroom, she exclaimed, “I have to go now!” and leaped up and tugged her coat and scarf from the loose pile — he was forced to scramble when other guests’ clothes began shifting beneath him. Would he walk her out? In fact, would he mind saying goodbye to the others for her? Yes, he assured her, he’d be happy to. Where were her gloves, though? she wanted to know. “Did you check in your coat? Are the gloves in a pocket? Are there pockets in the lining? Could the gloves be in the lining?” he asked. But they weren’t there. Nor were they under the bed. “They’ll turn up,” she announced as she marched out of the bedroom. They sneaked past the clamorous guests in the dining room. “Sh-h-h,” he whispered in her ear, and she giggled. He could smell her hair, a sweet smell of — what? At the front door, they did not kiss.

This abruptness of hers during the moments leading to leave-taking (was it that parting produced anxiety, or that her mounting claustrophobia required a quick getaway?) was, as Christopher would witness again and again, part of a style characterized by a variety of impatient behaviors — dramatically rolling her eyes, for instance, whenever it seemed to her that he was being pathetic. They would be a wry couple. But a little sarcasm, even in fun — and the evening had turned out to be fun — a little sarcasm went a long way for Christopher, who, when they next met, at a Village café appropriate for a casual non-date (though it was, in fact, a big date for Christopher, in that it was his turn to risk a few remarks about his own origins), told her, “Everybody laughed at me.”

A week had passed since the dinner party.

“Everybody? Who’s everybody?” She crossed her arms. She was taking his measure. She wore a pink woolen scarf wrapped loosely about her shoulders, in the style of young Parisian women. At the rear of the café, a mother and her two small children were making a racket. Christopher spoke up. “My family. My family laughed at me,” and immediately she broke in, “I understand what you mean. Everybody who matters,” and he replied, “Yeah, right?” before continuing, in tones that she would learn to recognize as harbingers of a mild paranoia, “For example, let’s say I had something serious on my mind, something to say at the dinner table. I’m trying to think of an example. I can’t think of one. It doesn’t matter. I could have been talking about anything. They’d burst out laughing! It got so that I was afraid to speak! If I tried telling a joke or a funny story — and I didn’t often try that — they’d sit in their chairs and chew their food. But I could read the obituaries, well, maybe not the obituaries, and my father and mother and sisters would laugh!”

This made her laugh—he’d made her laugh. She could just see the awful scene around the family table. Christopher peeking over the top of the obituary page. She hoped her laughter would be taken conspiratorially, as evidence of her recognition of his mistreatment. And his shame.

At the back of the café, the mother struggled with her children. Crying had begun. Jennifer turned to look. When she finally turned back to Christopher, he said, “You see? You laughed. It’s so exasperating.”

That was when she rolled her eyes. Was she playing with him? He gazed down at his spoon and knife, at his empty cup set crookedly on its saucer, at the miniature milk pitcher and the sugar bowl. What was the use in telling her how bleak he felt when people found him funny? What if he were to reach across the table and touch her face? Right now. Would she understand, through his touch, that making people laugh felt to him like being hit? What made people want to hit him in this way?

He said, “It’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know.”

How red his hair was beneath the warm coffeehouse lights. He looked to her like a skinny, freckled, Scottish orphan. “You can tell me a joke,” she said.

“You’ll hate it.”

“I won’t hate it.”

“It’s not going to be funny.”

“Please?” she said.

The joke involved a horse, a carrot, and a man wearing a cap. A third of the way through the setup, he broke character and said, “The guy in the cap is Norwegian. I forgot to mention that.” He started over and, a moment later, paused again before saying — to himself? to her? — “Is it a carrot? It’s got to be a carrot, it’s a horse.” Looking across their small table, he could see her eyes narrowing. He sighed and — he was getting panicky now — said, “The reason the horse won’t give the Norwegian a ride is that he’s depressed. The horse is depressed, not the man.” At that point he lost the thread. What in the world was he doing? He had no tolerance for comedy. He said, “How’s your coffee?”

“Good. It’s good.”

He paid the check, and they walked out and stood on the sidewalk, which was busy with people coming and going in parkas and hats. It struck her, as she watched him standing on the dark street with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, that he was a decent person, a serious man, and she wanted to sleep with him, but it was too soon for that, and besides, she did not see how she could invite him to her apartment, where Susan would undoubtedly be planted on the living-room couch — the foldout couch that Jennifer slept on — watching television in a sweatshirt. Jennifer did not yet know that Christopher felt similarly thwarted, that at his place uptown on Broadway, a different Susan, home from her job, was busy smoking cigarettes, watering her overgrown plants, and talking on the telephone in a haughty, supercilious voice.

She said, “Which way are you walking?”

He said, “Which way are you walking?”

“You’re tall,” she commented as they made their way west. She said this because she was forced to hurry to keep up with him on the sidewalk. Christopher did not understand, however, that her compliment was also a plea. He did not slow his pace.

They wound up on a bench overlooking the Hudson, making out. Her mouth tasted faintly metallic to him, and he wondered whether this might indicate a problem with their chemistry. Would she be wrong for him? A wind blew in from the river, and they edged closer to each other, taking the cold as permission to mash together on the slatted bench. He worked his hand inside her coat. He didn’t bother with buttons. Instead, he found passage where the coat flapped open between two closures, and felt, as his fingers burrowed under wool, the bottom of a breast. Should he push his way inside her shirt? He could hear people walking and jogging past. She kissed him harder, and, with his other hand, the hand not buried in her coat, he touched her cheek.

“Freezing hands! Ow!” She jumped up from the bench and, straightening and arranging herself, said — stating a more or less impossible proposition, he thought, considering that the city’s lights, as well as those dotting New Jersey’s urban hills across the Hudson, burned ceaselessly through the night—“Look how late it’s getting.”

Two days later, she phoned to tell him that a friend of hers was leaving town for a weekend trip, and she’d be looking in on the friend’s cats. How about dinner at the friend’s apartment? Would that be nice? What should she make? Did he have any food allergies that she needed to know about? “Shellfish? Chocolate? Nuts?”

“I’m fine with nuts,” he said, and she told him that she’d started a new painting since meeting him, using bolder colors than she’d ever dared use in the past, and he said that he’d love to see it when it was done, and she nervously said, “I’m afraid that might be a while,” and then they talked about their last couple of days. She’d done her proofreading jobs in the mornings, then painted or gone to painting class in the afternoons, whereas he had hardly strayed from his small room in his Susan’s apartment, the room where he often sat late into the night, drinking, a fact he didn’t let on to Jennifer. Anyway, she told him to write down her friend’s address, and they rang off, and that Friday night he arrived for dinner at a studio apartment with nothing much in it but a pair of Maine coon cats and a queen-size bed stacked with pillows.

“Hello hello,” he said when she opened the door.

“Careful, careful,” she said, meaning: Don’t let the cats out. He could see them behind her feet, angling for escape, barging about on tremendous paws matted with fur. “This is Siegfried. This is Brunhilda.” With one foot, she forced aside a cat. She said, “Come in, hurry,” then added, “Amy”—her friend whose apartment they were about to treat like a motel room—“is from Maine.”

Quickly she closed the door.

The cats seemed a third or so larger than any house cat he’d ever seen. “You look great,” he said to Jennifer, and wondered why he’d failed to bring flowers. She did look beautiful. He hadn’t expected the tartan miniskirt. She’d untied her hair and let it fall, and whatever had earlier seemed hard in her appearance was tempered now. He did a turn around the tiny room. Everything — bed comforter, pillow shams and cases, headboard, the petite dresser near the front door, the phone — was white. There was even a white plastic television. The apartment was on a high floor, and an east-facing picture window overlooked the Empire State Building, lit purple and white at its tip. What holiday did purple designate? Easter? But Easter was weeks away. He sat on the edge of the mattress, then bent over with his head between his knees and stared down a big-headed animal that had wedged itself under the box spring. “Here, kitty.”

“They like to play,” she said.

“Which is Brunhilda?”

“That one,” pointing, “the female.”

Then she said, “I guess we’ll have to eat on the bed.” It was true. There was nowhere else to sit.

He said, “Or on the floor,” though the available floor space was not much more than a parquet walkway surrounding the bed (there was barely room to open the closet) and a kitchen area recessed along one wall. “Or in the bathroom?” he added.

She’d chosen halibut in honor of their meeting. Already they were building traditions. While he kept the cats busy with a chewed-up string dragged back and forth across the floor, she cooked the fish in one of Amy’s white enamel pans, on top of Amy’s white mini-stove. They squeezed onto the floor between bed and window, and balanced their plates on their knees. Paper towels were their napkins. He took a bite and said, “This is terrific.”

“Is it? Do you mean that? I’m glad.”

A cat crashed into his arm and he put down his fork and shoved it away.

“Don’t let them bother you.”

“It’s not a problem. I like cats.” In fact, he was allergic. He peered around the room and saw, through watery eyes, a white cosmos. He said, “I feel like I should be drinking milk.”

“I think there’s some in the refrigerator,” she said, and he protested, “No, please, I wasn’t serious,” leading her to wonder if he’d been making a reference to the cats — was that it? — while he thought back over their past conversations. Had she shown a pattern of literal-mindedness? He saw her puzzlement, and felt as he always did when he allowed himself even the weakest attempt at humor. And what was with these animals that kept coming and coming, nosing around their laps and swatting at their food, so that he or Jennifer seemed always to be hoisting one and tossing it aside?

“No. Siegfried. No,” Christopher scolded. His sinuses were flooding. Jennifer threw Brunhilda onto the bed and told him that she was aware that by training to paint in a manner she thought of as realistic — she was aware that, by trying to render from life, she was covertly attacking her mother and what she called her mother’s alcoholic world view, a world view quite accurately illustrated, she felt, in the sixties-style abstract paintings her mother never finished, or in the ones she finished but ruined by angrily painting past the point of completion. “She destroys her own work,” Jennifer said, and went on to add that she, Jennifer, had recently come to feel that she could, in her own, more representational paintings, not only repudiate her mother but escape her; her attempt to mirror in paint some piece of reality represented her determination to live a dignified life. That was what she believed. Or hoped. She said, “When I study the thing I’m painting, I feel free from not painting.”

Instead of asking her, What do you mean? he said, “What do you paint?”

“I’m one of those people standing behind an easel in Central Park.”

“Really?”

“It seems quaint, but it’s not. It’s serious.”

“No. I didn’t mean … It’s not that I … I,” he said, and this time — she was embarrassed for having embarrassed him — she laughed. How could she not? Weren’t couples supposed to laugh together? Sniffling, he said, “What do I know? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, and whispered, consolingly, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Then she confided, “I wear a beret.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

When they kissed, the metallic taste that he remembered from the bench by the Hudson, and which he’d found himself worrying over up in his room, was gone. Maybe it had been neutralized by the fish. They set their plates on the floor beneath the window. He’d expected her to be nervous with him — at what point might she leap up and end the evening with some excuse or other? — and this made him vigilant and clumsy as he unbuttoned her blouse and felt behind her back for the hooks fastening her bra. She helped him with the hooks and her shirt’s bottom buttons, and she raised her arms, allowing him to unwrap her. He grabbed her hand and one of her ankles, twisting her toward him. She clutched his shirt, yanked its tail from his pants, fiercely untucking him. Behind her was the big window with its skyline view. What would it be like to come home to that?

They got up on the bed, on the pillows, and could hear Siegfried and Brunhilda snapping at the food they’d left on their plates. It was obscene, he thought, this noisy feline licking, and yet he feared that getting up and clearing the plates to the sink might be interpreted as an act of antiseptic fastidiousness, explicitly anti-sexual. He pinned her shoulders to the mattress and leaned down to bite her nipple. Though he did not yet know her body, what pressures to apply, where to linger and for how long, he managed, in spite of his worry that she would find him awkward, to hold her in a way that felt — this was something he sensed — soothing to them both. That said, it was true that she, too, passed through moments of dread. It had always been this way with her. Her heart raced, her skin got a prickly feeling, and she was forced to concentrate on breathing deeply.

Right before he pulled out and came, he looked down and caught her gazing out the window at the Empire State. He brushed her hair off her forehead, lowered his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “Are you with me, Jennifer? Are you there? Are you there, Jennifer?” This got her attention. His quiet murmuring so turned them on that it immediately became repertoire, their version of “Fuck me, fuck me.”

Afterward, she told Christopher some, but not all, of the truth of her childhood. She was afraid, though without having a clear idea why, that if she confessed too much, if she reported in full her memories of her father coming drunk into her room at night, she’d lose him. He’d sat in his underwear in a chair beside her bed, her father had, or, she said to Christopher, sometimes right on the bed, and he’d told her again and again how he loved her, and how he wished the two of them could pack their things, right this minute, and drive away together to some remote place where she’d never hear vicious fighting from the other side of the door. It would be simple. But she had to choose. Would she come with him? her father had asked her, before leaning in close and putting his arms around her neck and weeping. She would always remember the smell of his breath when he’d been drinking.

Christopher listened politely, then, sighing — his turn, once again, to show her that he could face up to his own history — confided in a whisper that he had never been anything but a goddamn disappointment to his family, and that no matter how hard he’d tried, he’d never escaped or really even understood his role as a clown, as a fool, but that he’d finally made up his mind that it didn’t matter, that their opinion of him wasn’t going to bother him forever. She asked him, then, whether they drank, his parents, and he, startled by this interruption, said, “Oh, you know,” to which she replied, “No, I don’t know. You have to tell me.” And so he said, somewhat defensively, “Yes. They did. They did,” then, waving his hands in the dark, went on to announce — it was as if he were making a promise — that he could handle himself in this world. And though he was not, he further acknowledged, currently employed, neither was he concerned. He had savings, in a manner of speaking, from his last and only secure position, as an associate at a law firm where he’d realized early on that he would not have the will or the desire to make partner. What point would there have been in carrying on? he asked her without really asking. He said, closing, “I’m not worried. I can find legal temp work when I need to. Hey, life’s just one big process of elimination, right?” He shoved Siegfried aside, jumped up from the bed, and stood staring out at the bright city. Why was he so jittery all of a sudden? “How about a little air?” he suggested, raising the window an inch, letting in the sounds of sirens and car horns blaring far below.

Over the next months, as winter turned to spring, and spring to summer, in apartments in Manhattan and a brownstone in Brooklyn, Jennifer and Christopher developed a pattern of habitation described in rough form by the weekend at Amy’s. After hauling overnight bags and specialty-shop groceries into the new house-sit, they would cook without cleaning, nose through cabinets and drawers, and fall in and out of bed, where, after screwing, they might also eat. It never took long for things to go to hell — crumbs in the sheets, ashtrays and unwashed glasses and a wine bottle or two (she liked a glass before sleep) sitting on the floor, spills drying on kitchen countertops, leftovers hardening in pans. “What a disaster,” Christopher would invariably say when the time came to tidy up, and she’d answer, rolling her eyes, “Yes, but it’s our disaster.”

Before they made their escape, she’d scribble a note and leave gift-wrapped soap or a bottle of good olive oil (along with her leftover wine, if there was any) in a place where it would be found the minute the rightful inhabitants came through the door.

Some places worked out better than others. Karen and Peter’s Little Italy walk-up facing the street was cluttered and dreary, and a tenant in a neighboring apartment had the music turned up loud, but Jennifer, intent on a good time, hauled Karen’s wardrobe from the closet in search of skirts and dresses to model for Christopher. Karen had fabulous clothes, in Jennifer’s size. It wasn’t long before Jennifer began pulling out the shoe boxes as well, along with Karen’s cashmere sweaters and blazers, and parading from the bedroom in head-to-toe outfits, while Christopher commented from his chair on the looks that worked and those that didn’t. That was a fun night. Less enjoyable was the brownstone, where Christopher caused basement flooding when he used paper towels instead of toilet paper in an upstairs bathroom, clogging a section of pipe, three stories below, that had been rusting away for years. The owners of the house, Sam and Beth, were away in California with their twins, Sarah and Miles, at Sam’s grandmother’s memorial service. The better part of Christopher and Jennifer’s weekend was given over to negotiations with plumbers, negotiations undertaken without consulting Sam and Beth. Finally, a man came in and sawed away and replaced the corroded pipe, and they spent Sunday afternoon laundering the towels they’d used to clean the floor and the assortment of Miles’s and Sarah’s toys that had been sitting in a pile beneath the leak. “That’s what happens when you buy instead of rent,” Christopher announced that night as he locked the front door behind them. He said, “Shall we?” and they hurriedly kissed before darting off to different subways and the lives they lived separately during the week.

Then, in May, they shut themselves up inside a modern high-rise on Madison Avenue. For three days, they shared what should have been a paradise of high-ceilinged rooms while the apartment’s owner, Danny, a friend of Christopher’s who’d inherited a department-store fortune, was away in Germany buying art. He was a collector.

“Jesus,” Jennifer said when they walked in. “Will you look at this crap?” She made a clicking sound, dismissive, using tongue against teeth. She’d stopped before a large drawing hanging in the entryway. It was, like all the pieces displayed on Danny’s walls, abstract — a charcoal turmoil of overlapping marks, smudges, and erasures executed with such force by the artist that the paper had worn through in places.

“Do you hate it?” Christopher asked. He’d wanted her to be proud of him for scoring Danny’s keys. He hadn’t thought to worry about his friend’s taste. She didn’t answer, so he dropped their grocery bags, came up behind her, and wrapped her in a hug. Resting his chin on her shoulder, he looked at the drawing from her point of view. At first it appeared, he thought, inchoate and stagy — as if the artist had been playing with an idea about the drama in disorder. But the longer Christopher stared the more he felt compelled to see otherwise. Was that a reptile skittering across the bottom of the paper? Were those faces? He felt the muscles around his eyes relax as his gaze became less focused; outlines of faces and figures receded into the drawing’s shadows, and the work acquired space and depth, interiority.

Glancing sideways, he saw that she was biting her lower lip. “How about that? It’s a world,” he said. She’d been thinking the same thing, though the world she saw was not his world. She saw the white walls and porch-paint gray floor inside her mother’s studio, in particular the floor, its smudged arabesques and dirty footprints of paint dripped from brushes held slackly in her mother’s hand, year after year, as far back as she could remember.

Why hadn’t her mother protected her?

She pried Christopher’s arms from her waist, stomped into the living room, and plopped down on one of the leather sofas he’d been looking forward to having sex on while listening to Danny’s stereo.

“Go to hell,” she said, and he flinched — was she joking? But it didn’t sound like a joke.

The situation wasn’t much improved in the living room. On one wall was a sculpture that looked like a complicated tricornered hat, with a high crown and a razor-edged brim. And that painting above Jennifer’s head couldn’t possibly be a — a what’s-his-name, could it? Outside, trees were in bloom and the park was alive with insects and birds. But Danny preferred that they not open the apartment’s windows. It was important to keep out dust. And, he had asked, could they please not raise the shades during the day, also for reasons having to do with conservation? Perhaps it was the drawn shades that caused Jennifer’s bad mood to worsen. Christopher spent Saturday afternoon alone in the semi-darkness, flipping channels on Danny’s giant television. Occasionally Jennifer called to him from the bedroom. She didn’t feel like getting out of bed, even though she was sharing the room with a Richard Serra print that looked like a leaden, black sun.

“I feel sick,” she told him that night when he came in and checked on her. “Do I have a fever?”

He felt her forehead. “If you do, it’s not high.”

“Ugh,” she said.

They had another conversation about art.

“Did you paint this week?”

“I tried one day. It was windy and the stretcher blew off the easel. Twice. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. My painting is all over the place. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“That can’t be true.”

“I don’t understand color. I don’t understand paint. I want things brighter. Not brighter, more alive. What am I trying to say?”

“Intense? More intense?”

She coughed. “That’s part of it. I’m also searching for restraint.”

“Intense restraint.”

“Very funny.” She coughed again.

“I didn’t mean to be funny.”

“I know.”

He felt her forehead once more, and this time decided that she was hot. She had a temperature. He said, “I’d better get you some aspirin and a glass of water.”

When he came back into the room, he sat on the bed and waited while she swallowed the pills.

“Stop staring at me.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re making me nervous,” she said. She handed him the glass. “Could you get me a drop of wine? The merlot on the counter beside the sink?”

“Is that a good idea?”

“It’s Saturday night. Who cares if it’s a good idea?” She held the glass for him to take. “A drop? Just a drop?”

He took the glass and went out of the room. Who drank with a fever? He made a special effort not to drink on these weekends they shared. He did not want her to see him knocking back a six-pack in the hours past midnight, as he did in secret during the week, on the nights alone — and there were other things he didn’t want Jennifer to get wind of. His departure from his job hadn’t come about in precisely the way he’d indicated when he’d glossed the matter on their first night together, at Amy’s. Had he lied to her? He’d omitted certain specifics. She didn’t need to hear about his cavalier approach to sick days or his periodic failure to bill clients, or about the humiliation he’d suffered when, one day, he’d sneaked downstairs to have a beer in the restaurant attached to the building’s lobby and a partner standing at the bar had loudly upbraided him over some minor mistake, then called him a drunk. And there was something else Jennifer might not be happy knowing: He’d lately been taking walks in Central Park, hunting for her beneath the trees near Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn. On his walks he became furtive, nervous; he imagined that if he could catch her at her easel, her brush in her hand, painting a picture of the known world, he might — he might what? Hide behind a tree and, like a trespasser hopped up on adrenaline, watch her? Call her cell phone from his and, while pretending to be nowhere near, chat?

He poured her wine and shoved the cork back into the bottle. He enjoyed a moment of pride over not having any alcohol himself. In the bedroom, he said, “Here.”

She took the glass. She sat propped against pillows. She said, “A sip will help me sleep.”

“Right.”

“It helps before bed, you know?”

“Yes.”

“Is something the matter?” she asked, because she’d heard his tone.

“No. I guess not. No.” He looked at her body outlined beneath the blankets. How could he tell her what was wrong? What was wrong? Was it simply that he didn’t care to watch her do what he did? He felt afraid for her — was that it? “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” he said, while she drank. But later that night he was unable to sleep. He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where he found Danny’s liquor in a cabinet above the stove. He went into the living room and sat up until three drinking Scotch. His mood followed a well-worn path: Halfway through his second drink, he knew his life was good — he was a lucky man. Everything, even the glass in his hand — especially the glass in his hand, crystal, heavy-bottomed, warm to his touch — felt right to him. As he drank, his ebullience increased, and he regarded his expensive surroundings as somehow belonging to him, or, more appropriately, as a preview of what he’d surely one day have. But after another few shots his thoughts veered into a familiar loop. Who was he fooling? How would he ever have any of this? Why was he unable to take possession of the world’s bounties? Why had he and Jennifer not ever gone dancing, for Christ’s sake? What was their plan? They met, climbed into bed, leaped out of bed, said goodbye — was he in love? Was she? Or were they just fucking? They had so much to be thankful for, so much. They had each other.

His face was numb. He gave himself a bit more to drink, put away Danny’s bottle, rinsed the glass, and groped his way down the hall to the bedroom, where he stood in his underwear beside the bed. The shades were drawn, the windows blacked out. As Christopher’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that each window — there were three — was haloed in a corona of light, the city’s nighttime glow seeping in through the narrow chinks between glass and shade. He felt the impulse to wake Jennifer and show her the illuminated windows, as if the phenomenon represented something uniquely worth experiencing, like a solar eclipse. Three black suns hovered over her as she slept. Make that four, counting the Serra.

The following afternoon, he woke beside her. How was she feeling today? A little better, she told him. He, of course, was hungover. But that wasn’t a life-or-death problem, was it? She wondered aloud if she’d given him whatever bug had bitten her, and he promised her she hadn’t, then asked her — he hadn’t planned this; it just came out of his mouth — if she would consider showing him her painting, the one she’d begun in the days after they met. Dry-mouthed, he added, “Don’t be scared.”

After that, he went ahead and joined her for drinks when they got together. Who took the lead in this new policy? It was she, after all, who didn’t make much fuss over a glass of wine. Following his old rule, he waited until dinner was finished before pouring his first, so that he could have a decent amount in a short span of time without causing a sodden evening. When he drank, she drank. Sometimes she smoked. She liked to stand at a window and exhale out into the world. When the nights got warm, she opened the window wide and leaned on the casement.

Late in June, a heat wave hit. The daytime sky grew white with becalmed air trapped over the city. Faint thunder could sometimes be heard, but storms never materialized, showers never arrived. On the evening of the solstice, Christopher and Jennifer hauled suitcases, groceries, and her painting — shrouded, for protection, in bubble wrap and muslin — up six flights to Bert and Lucie’s top-floor apartment. The temperature rose higher and higher as they climbed. When they reached the landing, they stopped to rest. She recovered against a wall, and he leaned his weight on the doorknob, then turned the key in the lock, and they tumbled in. She went straight to the bathroom and ran a cold tub, while he dumped ice cubes from trays to glasses in the kitchen. He stood before the open freezer, letting mist touch his face. He could hear her splashing in the bathroom, and he heard Bert’s fish tank bubbling in the living room. What did Bert and Lucie keep in the freezer? Was that a bottle cap poking out from beneath two ice-cream cartons? He pulled out the bottle of gin, unscrewed the top, mopped his face with a dish towel, refilled the ice trays. It was still light out. Instructions for feeding the piranha had been left on the counter beside the sink. Christopher carried his drink down the hall and peered into the tank. He tapped its glass wall.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

The bathroom door opened, closed. “I fixed you a drink! It’s in the kitchen!” he called, and heard her walking in that direction. A moment later, he smelled cigarette smoke. He went down the hall and saw her bent over the windowsill, her head craned out, her back to him. She was naked and damp; the wet ends of her hair stuck to her shoulders. She looked, he thought, with her hair streaming back and her breasts proudly showing, not unlike a ship’s figurehead, sea-sprayed. Christopher would remember this vision — Jennifer’s raised butt, framed against the building behind Bert and Lucie’s, and, above that building, chimneys and water towers crowning roof after roof on the horizon — long after he’d forgotten the things they’d said in these rooms where he and she became partners.

He said, “It’s too hot to eat.” Dinner lay in a bag on the floor. Propped against a wall was her painting.

“No kidding.” Smoke drifted from her mouth.

He leaned against the doorframe and shook his glass, clinking melting ice. “We’ll have to make do with this.” Was he trying to be funny? Frankly, he wasn’t sure.

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her feet were pink from her bath. She said, “That’s fine. It’s summertime,” and, as if on cue, he sneezed.

“Bless you,” she said, and he told her, “Something’s in bloom somewhere.”

She flicked ashes and came in from the window. She squeezed past him on her way to the bedroom. Dying light brightened a corner of floor and the wall beside the painting. Soon it would be dark. She returned wearing one of Lucie’s see-through nighties.

He refilled their glasses.

“To home away from home.”

“Cheers,” she said.

In that heat, without food, they were quickly smashed. He grabbed hold of her lace nightie and, like a man in a conga line, hanging on to keep time with the leader, trotted after her down the hall. In the living room she turned on a light, and they both collapsed onto Bert and Lucie’s sofa and watched the piranha tank as if it were a television set, a television broadcasting leafy weeds, luminous rocks, and bubbles, but no fish.

Was he ready to see the painting? Would he be equipped to comment? What might he say? He was going to need a refill.

He said, “Is it worth it?”

“What?” she said. “Is what worth what?”

“Art. Painting. You know.”

That made her laugh.

“The truth about you is, you’re kind of a funny guy. I don’t know why you fight it,” she told him.

She took his hand in hers, and he turned to look at her. She pulled him close to her on the sofa. He laid his head on her lap. In a minute he would sit up and ask her if she was ready to show him the painting. She would stand up, go barefoot and tipsy to the kitchen, get it, bring it back, and, after warning, “It may not be finished, so be nice,” unwrap it.

No. In a minute she would get up, and he would say, “Hey, do you mind,” then hand her his glass, and she would go to the kitchen, make him a fresh drink with new ice, and bring it to him along with the painting. He would be careful, in his remarks on her work, to avoid overstating his praises. Yet he would not want her to doubt either his fundamental enthusiasm or her own promise. If the painting was accomplished, or even if not, he would find and appreciate an aspect of it — an element reflecting technical execution and artistic choice, a movement of brushstrokes indicating an intensity of gray light behind bare trees, say, since she’d begun in winter. Or she might have revised with the changing seasons, painting over winter’s silvers with the pale greens and eggshell blues that signify spring. There might be a figure in the painting, a man walking quickly through the park, as he himself had done when out searching for her at her work; and maybe, if the painting showed a man, a man like him, beside a particular tree, rock, or bench, near a path that wound beside the banks of a familiar pond, he might recognize the topography and speak confidently about her handling of perspective, and about the way the light reflected off the water in precisely that way, in that place.

While he imagined his reaction to her painting, she lit another cigarette. Though he could not see the flame, he saw its image come and go, mirrored in the glass aquarium, and he sensed her hands and arms fluttering in the air above his head. He heard the match being struck.