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.
ANOTHER MANHATTAN
They had lied to each other so many times, over so many years, that deceptions between them had become commonplace, practically repertoire. Everyone knew this about them — it wasn’t news among their friends. That night, they had dinner reservations with Elliot and Susan, who were accustomed to following the shifts in attitude and tone — Kate’s theatrical sighs, for instance, in reaction to Jim’s mournful looks across the table at her — brought on by the strain of living in an atmosphere of worry and betrayal. It was winter, and dark, and the air in their little apartment was dry and nauseatingly warm; and yet what they needed, it seemed to Jim, was not to flee their home for another night of exciting conversational pauses and sly four-way flirting. They needed to sit down together, no matter how stuffy it got in the living room, no matter how loudly the radiators hissed and banged, and take turns speaking their minds. They had to talk. But first he would stop at the florist’s on his way home from the outpatient clinic. If he walked through the door carrying a bouquet, there was a chance that Kate might smile.