Free The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim Page B

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.
    â€œJesus,” 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.
    â€œDo 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.
    â€œGo 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œUgh,” she said.
    They had another conversation about art.
    â€œDid you paint this week?”
    â€œI tried one day. It was windy and the stretcher blew off the