Read Online The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim - Free Book Online Page A

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?”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œFreezing 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?”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œHello hello,” he said when she opened the door.
    â€œCareful, 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