The Emerald Light in the Air

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.

“There’s nothing at Barneys this season. Everything’s got an Empire waist,” Alice was telling him. She said, “That cut makes me feel like a little girl in an Easter dress. A giant little girl.”

“It’s not my favorite look,” he agreed.

“It’s all right on some people,” she said, and he finished her thought for her, saying, “But not on you.”

“Is it my tits? Are my tits too small? Is that the problem?”

“Take it easy. It’s not your tits. Your tits are great,” he said, and went on, “Those dresses are weird. You know what I mean? You’re maybe a little too tall for an Empire waist, unless, I guess”—he made shapes with his hands in the air—“unless the skirt is very long.”

It was how they’d met and fallen in love, five years before — her absurd height. Alice and Stephen had been invited to the same dinner party, for which they’d arrived at the same time. They got into the elevator together, and he pressed the button for their friends’ floor, and she said, “That’s me, too, thanks,” and after that the doors closed and they avoided making eye contact, but on the way up they slipped and saw each other in the same instant and, in the shock of meeting her eyes, he exclaimed, in a whisper, “You’re so tall!” and she blushed, and his face got red, too. Later that night, after they’d both drunk a lot of wine, while their hosts were clearing up, she confessed to him that, in the elevator, he’d uttered aloud her first, fleeting thought whenever she met anyone, which was that she was tall — her noticing of herself being seen, being taken in, was part of her appealing self-consciousness: It was her come-on, and it was working on him — and she’d added that (though Stephen had hardly been the first man to lead with a comment on her height) no one had ever read her mind in quite the way he seemed to have done.

That Halloween afternoon on Madison Avenue, she sounded mildly manic. “You’re right! You’re right, as always. It’s not a big deal. I’m too tall for an Empire waist. It’s as simple as that! I try and it doesn’t work, and I try it and it doesn’t work, and I should know better by now, because it’s obvious!”

They were holding hands again. But he had a strong feeling that she was beginning to sink, that she was anxiously coming to feel and believe that she would somehow never be right. “Let’s get you something to eat,” he said, and she sighed and said, “Yeah, I’m starting to spin.”

“I can hear it,” he told her.

“You can?”

“Your Southern accent is coming out.”

“I don’t want to be too tall for you,” she cried.

“You’re not.”

“I’m a wee bit dizzy.”

“I’ll hold you,” he said.

A baby carriage was bearing down on them. He gripped her coat sleeve. On the next block, on the other side of Madison, was a coffee shop. He would have preferred a bar, but the one that he and Alice liked lay many blocks ahead. It wasn’t yet time for drinking, anyway. He guided her off the curb, between two closely parked cars, and directly out into the open avenue — there was a moment, he figured, before the light changed and traffic surged forward — where he maneuvered her diagonally across against the wind that funneled down between the buildings. “We’re almost there, come on,” he called. He heard cars rushing up behind them. He sped her across the final lane, onto the sidewalk, and then ten feet more, to the door of the restaurant.

He held the door. “In you go,” he said.

At the booth, he counted out pills, his antidepressants and her anti-anxieties — he carried and dispensed for her more often than not, ever since her suicide attempt — and he asked her, “How many do you think will do the trick? One? Two? Do you need two? Honey, can you talk?”

“Are those ten-milligram?”

“They are.”

“Give me two. For now.”

“Hang on.”

“You’re scattering them across the table!”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

It was true, he’d dumped out a few too many pills, and some had rolled off toward the condiments, the ketchup and the sugar and the salt and pepper shakers and so forth, and he was missing — what was he missing? He had Alice’s portion under control. And there were his pink-and-yellow anti-psychotics. Where had his beta-blockers gone?

He peered up and saw that Alice’s hair was a mess from the wind. He could see the tension in her face — it always came on so swiftly and visibly. It was her terror of going back into the hospital. Her jaw had clenched, she was grinding her teeth, and the muscles in her neck were taut. “You’re twisted up,” he said, and reached across the table to help her adjust her clothes. Her cotton blouse had been pulled back over one shoulder when she’d taken off her coat, causing the shirt’s brilliant mother-of-pearl buttons to look as if they were about to pop off at the collar.

He pushed two Valium tablets her way. Then he noticed Dr. Tillman, sitting alone at the counter, at the back of the restaurant.

The waitress arrived, and Alice said, “I’d like a Coca-Cola and a big piece of chocolate cake, but not the kind with raspberry filling.”

Stephen said to Alice, “I think I see my former doctor over there,” and Alice asked him rather too loudly if he was ready to order.

She told him, “You should eat something. If you don’t, you’re going to have a crash, and you’re going to get all angry, and I don’t want to be screamed at by you later on the street.”

“Excuse me?”

He rolled his eyes at the waitress and blurted, “Ha, I don’t know what to say to that!” but he felt embarrassed, and conceded to her, to the waitress, that he’d probably better have a muffin.

“Pumpkin, please,” he added, and abruptly got up and pushed past her and escaped to the rear of the diner, calling, “Dr. Tillman? Dr. Tillman?” But the man didn’t seem to hear him. Stephen came closer and got a better look at his old analyst, hunched over a plate of pancakes. Why was Dr. Tillman alone? Had his wife, whom Stephen had never met or even glimpsed, passed away? Dr. Tillman had to be in his eighties by now; he’d shrunk, of course, and his hair had finally gone fully white. And then Stephen remembered, shockingly, that Dr. Tillman had died six or seven or maybe eight years before. The man in the diner could never have been Dr. Tillman. Stephen marched off to the men’s room, where he sat in a stall and checked his cell phone for text messages from his old friend Claire. Where was she? Had she gone to the country with Peter? He needed to talk to her — he needed her to calm him down — if only for a moment. It was a risky thing to do, with Alice so close by. Alice accepted as fact her suspicion that he and Claire had had an affair, several years back, during the months when Alice was hospitalized. They hadn’t had an affair, actually, though for a while Claire had been important to him as a confidante. He’d fallen in love with her, a little, for her kindness, and, he told himself now, for her soft, deep voice, which always seemed to reassure him. He flushed, buckled, went back to the booth, and, thinking of Dr. Tillman, told Alice that he felt as if he’d seen a genuine ghost, and that he couldn’t image how he’d forgotten the death of his psychiatrist of almost fifteen years, and that, although he understood that that time in his life, the time of his analysis with Dr. Tillman, was far in the past — or maybe because of this fact — he felt disoriented, weird.

“Welcome to the club,” Alice replied. The Valium was doing its work. She already sounded slurry.

He said, “How’s your chocolate cake?”

“Better than your muffin.”

“You ate my muffin?”

“I didn’t eat your muffin. It’s sitting in front of you on your place mat.”

“Right you are, there it is,” he admitted.

He heard the sounds of a football game. Was there a television in the restaurant? It was the weekend of the Nebraska-Colorado game. Was it? Or, no, that game came closer to Thanksgiving.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He watched her eat. She’d scooped out all the cake and left a shell of frosting on her plate, which she’d saved for last. He watched her lick the icing off the tines of her fork. “Are you?” he asked her.

“I asked you first.”

“I’m all right,” he told her.

“Should I believe you?”

He picked up her medicine bottle, shook it gently, and dropped it into his sport coat’s inside breast pocket.

“Are you all right?” he asked once more.

“I’m fine. I’m eating my lunch.”

Later, back on the street, they made their way at a kind of wobbling pace uptown, toward the Whitney Museum. The sun was getting low in the sky. He said to her, “Alice, how many did you take?”

She was leaning hard on his shoulder, like a drunk date. They slowed to gaze at autumn scenery in the shop windows along the way. The first children wearing Halloween costumes had begun to appear on the avenue. Stephen saw a dragon, a skeleton, and several little princesses. He again asked Alice how many pills she’d sneaked while he was in the men’s room.

“Five?” Her voice sounded like a young girl’s.

“Five in all? Or five plus the two I gave you?”

“Five in all. Three more.”

He shifted her shopping bags from his left hand to his right, and offered her his other shoulder. Supporting her weight, block after block, wasn’t easy, and at Seventy-third Street he insisted that they get in a cab, go straight home, and tuck her into bed for the rest of the day.

But she simply apologized for letting her anxiety get the better of her. She said that she was also sorry for provoking him, in the restaurant, with her fear that he might yell at her if he didn’t eat properly. She hadn’t meant to shame him. She loved him. She wanted them to have a fantastic time out in the world. That was all that mattered.

More children, herded by parents and nannies, ran past them, trick-or-treating, hitting the boutiques. The costumes were good. A few — in particular, a spectacular lion suit on a four- or five-year-old boy — looked to have been sewn with care, showing a level of detailing appropriate to durable stage costumes, the sort meant for nightly scrutiny under theater lights.

When Stephen was younger, when he was a young actor, working in his costume for the first time — putting it on before the call for the first dress rehearsal — had always been a revelation. This was the case for many actors, certainly. Wearing the garment was an acquisition of — why not say it? — humanity. A Victorian frock coat or a pair of Windsor-style stovepipe trousers or even Depression-era dungarees, worn as a character, could in turn produce character. When Stephen put on a costume, he could feel his whole nervous system, his muscles, and his bones, rearranging themselves to form his character’s body and posture. For instance, the heavy woolen overcoat worn by a foolish servant caused a slump in the shoulders and an itchy stiffness in the neck that might seem to an audience to be the symptoms of a master’s beatings. The drama became palpable through tailoring. Maybe it followed that Stephen’s life seemed to gain grace and substance when he walked at an even pace on a nice street in well-cut pants.

She wasn’t letting him do this. Both of her arms were wrapped around him. Alice was hugging him tightly from the side, and they’d become like two people in a three-legged race at a county fair or family reunion. Neither of them had much in the way of family. She’d come to the city from North Carolina, as had he. They’d grown up in neighboring valleys in the Smoky Mountains, though he’d left home — he was gone before his eighteenth birthday — before she was even born. Their somewhat shared origins had, of course, been a crucial factor in their romance. (It wasn’t her body alone that had attracted him, that night at the dinner party; nor had she truly believed, when he spoke to her in the elevator, that he was an actual mind reader.) For the first year or two of their relationship, they’d discussed plans to rent a convertible and drive south together through New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland, continuing around Washington and on through the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia — there was a nineteenth-century inn near Staunton that he’d read about in a food magazine and wanted to spend a night or two at — and then from there into the southerly regions of the Blue Ridge, where, taking their time, they’d leave the interstate and get on the old two-lane, hairpin-turn state and county road that would take them up and across the mountains, to home. But they hadn’t done it.

They hadn’t done it because there was no one there for them. His parents were dead, and he had no aunts or uncles left, either. He had only a sister, who lived in Minnesota. Stephen and his sister had less and less to do with each other these days, and it had been at least a couple of decades since he had heard from, or thought to be in touch with, any of their remaining kin, the more or less distant cousins, who (some of them, at least) were surely still scattered about the countryside around Asheville. Alice’s situation wasn’t much happier. Her father, an alcoholic, had left her mother when Alice was four, and the man whom Alice had grown up calling father had been killed in an automobile accident when she was sixteen. Her mother, in later years, had become one of those people who try new places again and again, endlessly relocating. Currently she was parked outside Fort Worth. Alice had an unmarried, born-again brother who repaired computers in Sacramento.

Stephen turned to face her. Adjusting himself wasn’t easy to do; they were pressed together, and his arms were pinned at his sides by her close embrace. Her clothes remained as they’d been in the restaurant, tugged slightly askew, and strands of her hair, caught between their bodies, were pulled when he moved. “Ouch!” she said.

She looked good — no, great. That she was so attractive while sedated troubled him. Did he like her best when she was out of it? “I know exactly the thing to do,” he said, and she whispered, “What’s that?”

“Let’s go buy you a hat.”

“A hat!” she said.

“Would you like that?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to let me move. Let go, all right?” he asked. But she didn’t release him. The boy in the fancy lion suit bolted from a store’s open doorway, and Alice said, “Oh, honey.”

She wasn’t talking to Stephen. She was peering down at the boy, who’d stopped short on the sidewalk in order to roar at them.

“Are you a lion?” Alice asked. “What kind of lion are you? Are you a fierce”—she paused; it was the Valium—“lion?”

“Yes,” the lion growled, though not very fiercely.

Here came the father, calling, “Baby girl, baby girl, where are you going? Don’t run off! Come take Daddy’s hand. Leave those people alone.”

The man was about thirty-five or maybe thirty-eight or nine years old, forty or so, and his wife was coming up behind.

“Sorry about that, please excuse us,” the lion’s father said.

The man’s wife looked plain, with short brown hair and a small chin, though, on the other hand, she was attractive. “Don’t be a bother,” she instructed her daughter. She was English. Both she and her husband were conservatively dressed. The man was frankly, openly appraising Alice. Did this entitled young punk think that greater age made Stephen weak? He said to the parents, “I was noticing what a finely made costume your little girl is wearing. She looks so ferocious in it, I was certain she was a boy.”

“Girls can’t be ferocious, then?” the mother said, and her mildly accusing tone made Stephen unsure how to take this. Was it a reprimand, and, if so, was it also a flirtation?

A low mood was creeping on him. “Of course girls can be ferocious,” Stephen replied. “My name is Stephen.” He held out his hand and said, “And this is my ferocious wife, Alice.” Alice was still leaning on his shoulder, with her right arm wrapped around his neck. Her body, against his, seemed to be sliding toward the pavement.

“I’m Margaret,” the English wife said, and her American husband followed: “Robert. It’s nice to meet you.”

The mother said, “Claire, can you say hello to these nice people?” Stephen felt a sharp tremor in Alice, and he thought, Fuck, why that name?

Together, as if on cue, they all peered down at the daughter. The girl was slowly turning, spinning in a circle inside the cage of legs that had formed around her when the adults squared off to shake hands.

“Don’t spill your candy, dear,” her mother said.

The lion girl looked at her mom. She checked in with Dad. She seemed quite drawn to Alice, whose gaze she held a long moment.

“Claire, please say hello,” her mother said again.

“Claire!” her father ordered.

Stephen could feel Alice clinging to him and pulling away at the same time.

“Hello,” the little girl said, and Stephen loudly blurted, “And how old are you?”

“Five.”

“Five!” he exclaimed.

“We’re in kindergarten, aren’t we?” her mother said to her, and went on, “It takes her a while to feel comfy with strangers.”

“I understand,” Stephen said, and wondered what Margaret and Robert were thinking of him and Alice. What picture did they make, this older man worrisomely buoying up his sedated young wife? His anxiety was on the rise, the sun was setting in earnest, the temperature was falling, and the wind was building. He might need to sneak one or two of Alice’s Valiums. He spoke for them as a couple. “It’s awfully nice to have met you and your lovely daughter, but we should get going.”

And to Alice he proposed, brightly, “Hey, we’re looking for a hat for you, remember?”

But before they could make their getaway Margaret announced to her husband, “Oh, Rob! I know who he is!”

“You were on that TV show,” she said to Stephen. “Am I right? What was the show called? Was that you?”

“It may have been me, yes.”

“You were that friend of the main character who was always causing mischief for everyone.”

“Get out of my way,” Stephen said.

“What?” the husband said.

“The show was called Get Out of My Way,” Stephen explained, and added, “That was a long time ago. I’m amazed that you recognized me.”

“You were very funny.”

“Thank you.”

To her husband, Margaret said, “Do you remember that show, dear?” And he answered, “No, I don’t.”

“He’s not much for television,” she said to Stephen, in a low, confiding tone. “Are you on something now?” she asked, and he thought to make a joke about his meds.

“No. I’ve been on a hiatus.”

“Refueling your creativity?”

“Something like that.”

“And are you an actress?” Margaret was addressing Alice. Stephen said, “Alice, she’s asking you.”

Sleepy Alice replied, “Oh, no.”

“My wife is also between things,” he said, and then, stupidly, he remarked to Alice, “We’re taking some time to enjoy our lives, right?” He gave her a squeeze, and she glared at him.

Later, after they’d finally got free and resumed their trek up Madison Avenue, she accused him: “You were flirting with her.”

“What? I wasn’t.”

“She’s the type for you. Refueling your creativity.”

“Come on, let’s get you home.”

“I don’t have a home!”

“Yes, you do, you have a home with me.”

They’d been lost in these woods before.

“How many pills did you take, Alice? Will you tell me how many pills you took? You took more than five, Alice. Please don’t lie to me. How many?”

She wasn’t talking. They passed shop after shop, but she didn’t want him to go into any of them. She’d pulled away at last and was walking faster, out ahead of him now, fleeing. He buttoned up his coat and pulled off his scarf — it was the blue scarf that she’d given him in the first year of their marriage; he loved it and wore it all the time in the colder months — and ran up beside her and wrapped it around her neck. He said, emphatically, “Alice, nothing ever happened between me and Claire. Nothing was ever going to happen,” which was true, though Alice would not believe it. Alice had met Claire and found her to be very beautiful. She suspected that Stephen would be more comfortable, more at home, with a woman closer to him in age — Stephen and Claire had gone to college together. Alice had conceived of Stephen’s betrayal in the days before her breakdown, and, once in the hospital, when she’d been unable to simply go to a phone in the night and call him, the idea of their affair had grown in her; to this day, he could not say with certainty whether she’d tried to kill herself over her anticipated abandonment or whether that deranging fantasy had been a symptom of some deeper despair. It haunted them still.

Alice said, “Don’t blow up at me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re shouting.”

“Alice, I love you! Please try to take that in!” he shouted, and then quickly glanced around to see if he’d been heard by people passing by. In a lowered voice he said, “Why must we always return to this?”

“You were sleeping with her when I was on a locked ward! I thought my life was over! Where were you?” she pleaded.

“I was with you every day, Alice. I visited you every single day.”

“And then you went to her!” she said angrily. Now he could hear and feel her terror, and he, too, began to feel frightened, because he knew where this fight could take them.

“Alice, stop this,” he commanded.

“Leave me, just leave me already,” she cried, and he watched as she ran away, up the block and across Seventy-ninth Street.

“Alice!” he called. But she was still going, a dark shape charging unsteadily up the street with her shopping bags.

It was the time of day when the lights from apartment buildings and stores began to shine brightly. Through the pools of light spilling out of shop doors came people in costume, not only children but adults, on their way to Halloween parties and bars. He forged ahead against a tide of ghosts and pirates and sexy nurses from the spirit realm. He passed a shattered Marilyn Monroe, but could no longer see Alice in the distance. With hands trembling, he took her pills from his coat pocket, opened the lid, and shook out two. Did he need one or two? It was the same question he’d asked Alice earlier in the coffee shop.

He put one in his mouth and another in his shirt pocket, in case. His mouth was parched from his own medications. He held the pill under his tongue. Eventually it would dissolve. He had only to wait.

He would wait at their bar. Maybe she was there already, he thought, as he turned the corner and left the avenue.

The place was a carnival inside. Cardboard witches and crepe-paper bats hung from the ceiling, and candlelit jack-o’-lanterns had been set out on the marble surface of the bar. Everyone inside was costumed, to some degree, but in his agitation Stephen imagined that it was actually he, in his soft windowpane jacket and pressed shirt and woolen pants — he and not the dead and undead thronging about him, blocking his way — who was wearing a costume. Through the crowd he pushed, searching for her. Finally he gave up and went to the bar, where he leaned into a gathering of wraiths and ordered a bourbon from a pretty bartender with a blood-red slash impastoed darkly across her neck.

The Valium was starting to help. He drank, and the alcohol burned his throat. When a seat became free, he took it immediately and ordered another bourbon, before locating his phone and dialing Alice’s number.

“You can run a tab,” he told the bartender, and added, “I could use some water, too, when you get a minute.”

Outside in the night, he thought, Alice would be walking, disoriented. She’d be feeling scorned. She would hear her phone ringing in her purse and know it was him, but she’d be unable to answer, though she badly wanted to. She’d be afraid of him pulling her back, afraid of going childless all her life and winding up a widow, like her mother, running from place to place and never stopping. He’d heard all of this played out before.

Of course, he’d told her again and again that he wanted to have a baby with her. Why hadn’t it happened already? Why hadn’t they yet done it, like normal people?

He pictured her gathering her coat around her and slumping on a town-house stoop, ignoring his calls, or, likely, though by now she knew better than to expect a helpful response, calling her mother.

When he dialed her number for the fifth or sixth time, Alice answered. He told her that he was in their bar and felt desperate. “Come back,” he said. “Will you?”

“Are you having a drink?” she asked.

“I am,” he said. He pressed his phone hard against his ear. Loudly, above the bar chaos, he asked her, “Where are you? Do you know where you are? Do you need me to come get you?”

“No,” she said. She hadn’t gone far; she was only around the corner from where they always wound up at the end of these days when he took her out and bought her gifts.

She said that she was on her way, and a few minutes later he saw her appear behind him in the antique saloon mirror above the bar. She peered over the crowd of monsters and ghouls, his statuesque, distraught Alice, until she caught sight of him, his reflection and hers making contact in the glass.

He stood and said, “Excuse me, excuse me,” to some skeletons and ghosts who were clustered between them. He opened a path for her and led her back to his seat. The goblin who’d been sitting beside him at the bar, when he saw Alice in her very real anguish, said, politely, “Oh, here, please, sit,” and Stephen said, “Thank you,” and nestled in beside his wife and let her rest her head on his shoulder. Gently, she cried. He wrapped one arm around her shoulders, and with his other hand he stroked her hair, pressing her close to him, so that her cheek lay against his heart. The bartender approached, but he gestured at her to give them time, another minute, then picked up his drink and brought it to Alice’s lips, saying, “Here, love, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

“I’m scared,” she said.

He let her drink, then put the glass on the bar and, with his fingers, softly massaged away the mascara that had run in streams down her cheeks. For a while, they stayed together like that. He ordered a drink for her, and another for himself, and, little by little, she regained herself and was able to sit up straight. “I’m sorry,” she said to him, and he said, “I’m sorry, too,” and she asked, “Can you forgive me for running away?” and he said, “Alice. I don’t want anyone but you.”

“Do you mean it?” she said.

“More than anything,” he answered. He said, “I know what we need to do. We need to take a vacation. We need to take our trip to the mountains. Let’s do it. If we go soon, we’ll still be in time to see the autumn leaves.”

They talked about the trip, what kind of car they’d rent — not a convertible at this time of year, certainly — and about how many days they might spend in this place or that; and they wondered together what they’d find, after so many years away, of their old home towns and the houses in which they’d grown up. He held her hand tightly in his as they spoke, and she remembered something she’d never told him before. There had been a spring that made a little swimming hole in the woods behind her house. It had been a secret place for her — she hadn’t even told her brother about it. Would it still be there? Would it have been bulldozed for a strip mall or a retirement community or a new drive-through bank? Would she be able to find it again?

“Let’s go there,” he said, and with that he left three twenty-dollar bills on the bar and stood up and put on his coat and helped her to stand. He buttoned her coat for her and wrapped his scarf in a knot around her collar. He picked up her bags and took her by the hand and led her carefully through the Halloween necropolis. They were the only two regular-looking people in the place.

Outside, he hailed a cab. He held the door for her, then got in beside her and gave the address, and they rode down Fifth Avenue, past Central Park and the Plaza and Tiffany & Co., and Cartier and Rockefeller Center and Saks, down through the Forties and the Thirties and the Twenties, to Washington Square Park, the very bottom of the avenue, and west from there into the Village. She leaned on him as they climbed the four flights to their walk-up. He unlocked and pushed open the door. He turned on a light and guided her through the living room and into their bedroom, where he turned on the little lamp beside the bed. He took her coat and sat her on the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor in front of her. He started tugging off her clothes — first her shoes, then her skirt and her stockings. “Raise your arms, baby,” he said, and pulled her blouse up and over her head. He unsnapped her bra and took that, too. He helped her to lie down. He pulled the covers over her, and then undressed himself, switched off the lamp, and went unclothed into the living room, where he sat on the sofa, absently touching and spinning the gold ring on his finger. After a while, he got up and turned off the living-room light and made his way quietly back to her in the dark. He raised the covers and got into bed beside her and brought her close, spooning, so that he could cup her breasts in his hands and feel the length of her body against his.

In the morning, he told himself before falling asleep, they would sit naked beside each other, resting against pillows, drinking coffee in bed — his black, hers with milk — and he would speak to her openly and forthrightly about getting his acting career back on track; and before long they would kiss, and when they made love he would drive hard into her and come, hoping, hoping for her pregnancy, for the child, their son, perhaps — a boy like him! — and believing as best he could that their family was drawing close, was near at last.