She asked, “Did I scare you?”
“A little,” he said, and laughed, and she laughed, too.
It wasn’t long before Sarah and William appeared, sweaty from dancing. Jonathan took the joint from his shirt pocket and asked, “Does anyone want this?”
Fletcher held the lighter. Jonathan inhaled and then passed the joint to William, who took a puff and gave it to Kathy, who handed it to Sarah. She gave the joint to Deborah, and Deborah took a big hit before offering it to Fletcher, who had some and gave it back to Jonathan, who passed it around again.
“Are you stoned?” a voice asked. It was Sarah.
His body felt heavy, and he could clearly hear the traffic coming and going on the streets and avenues below.
“Kind of. Are you?”
“I’m on the way,” she said.
William said, “I’m ready to dance some more.”
“I’ll go with you,” Deborah said, and Kathy added, “Let’s all go.”
Inside, Deborah and Kathy cleared a space and began gyrating. William followed, and then Sarah, too, began to move.
Jonathan watched her sway to the left then to the right, her arms seeming to float in the air beside her; she looked as if she were in a pleasant trance, like a charmed cobra. Watching her, he felt — what? Appreciation? Affection? Love? He felt himself lucky to be with her, for she made him feel calm, and now he slid up next to her, got his arms partway around her, and lightly pulled her toward him, so that their faces came close to touching. She shut her eyes and let his hands around her waist balance her.
“You can be a jerk sometimes,” she whispered to him.
“I apologize.”
“I’m sick of hearing about Rachel,” she said.
“I won’t mention her again,” he said.
“You hurt my feelings,” she said, and separated herself from him and joined the other three.
He stood next to Fletcher. Without a word, they turned around and headed to the bar.
“Will that be a Scotch and soda?” the bartender asked Jonathan.
“Thanks,” Jonathan said.
It was late now, almost midnight. He’d drunk too much. Had he been at the party with Rachel, she would have said, “Enough is enough,” and they would have left by now.
But Rachel was gone, for good, it seemed to him at that moment, and — it was both crushing and a relief to feel this — he was free. And though he knew that this sense of freedom from her would not entirely last, that the memory of her would overtake him again, the feeling was nonetheless substantiaclass="underline" He was with Sarah.
“Excuse me, do you have any cherries?” he said to the bartender.
The bartender leaned over, opened a small refrigerator, and pulled out a jar of bright-red maraschino cherries. “We’re closing up,” he said. “Why don’t you just take the bottle.”
He turned around and began opening cardboard boxes for the empty and near-empty bottles lined up on the bar.
Jonathan dug two fingers into the jar and began trying to capture the cherry with the longest stem. He pulled up one, then another, and finally found one that seemed right. He ate the cherry but kept the stem.
“Fletcher, will you excuse me?”
He stumbled away from the bar and began weaving among people.
Where were they — where were his people? There they were. They were still in their circle of sorts. He crossed the floor to Sarah.
“Hello,” he said in her ear.
“Hello,” she said.
He got down on one knee before her and took hold of her hand. Awkwardly, he curled the cherry stem around her ring finger. He made a number of tries at tying it there, but, sadly, it wasn’t long enough after all, so he held it in place with his hand, clutching hers.
“What in the world are you doing?” she asked.
It was a good question — what was he doing? “What does it look like?” he said, and he wondered, briefly, whether he meant it, whether he would still feel this strongly about her after he’d sobered up. And he thought that he would. Surely, he would. He had the idea that he was seeing into his future, and he felt, quite naturally, at that drunken hour, that they would share it.
“Are you proposing?” Sarah asked.
He said, “I’m not sure that I can propose without a real ring. But at least you’ll know.”
“I’ll know what?”
But he was afraid to say.
He stood and kissed her on the cheek. Then he gave her a kiss on the lips. They came closer and wrapped their arms around each other.
The party was ending. The loft’s wall sconces came up brightly, and the music went down low, and in the harsher light he could see a line of people heading for the door to the elevator.
They stood together holding hands. Their new friends were with them. Everybody said what a nice time it had been, then exchanged phone numbers and promised to be in touch.
On the sidewalk in front of the building, beneath the awning, he asked Sarah, “Do you want to walk?”
Her apartment wasn’t far.
“Let’s walk,” she said. They went toward Broadway.
Out on the avenue, the air was hotter and more humid than it had been on the terrace. A few cars and taxis drove by. He asked her which of the author’s books he should read.
She said, “Everybody likes Abel Kills Cain, but it’s not my favorite. I think you might like the new one.”
They turned at the corner. There was no traffic now, and he could hear their footsteps echoing from one side of the street to the other. “I’ll bring you a copy from work,” she offered.
“That’d be great,” he said.
He took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder, then undid the buttons on his shirt cuffs, first the left, then the right, and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. The moon was bright and the sky was starless. Buildings rose above them. He put his arm around her shoulder.
THE EMERALD LIGHT IN THE AIR
In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his father, and, as he’d once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life; and during this year, or, he should say, during its suicidal aftermath, he’d twice admitted himself to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where, each stay, one in the fall and one the following summer, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he’d climbed onto an operating table and wept at the ceiling while doctors set the pulse, stuck electrodes to his forehead, put the oxygen meter on his finger, and then pushed a needle into his arm and instructed him, as the machines beeped and the anesthetic dripped down the pipette toward his vein, to count backward from a hundred; and now, another year later, he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection — it wasn’t a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics — that he’d kept since he was a boy. He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he’d come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.
It was a humid Saturday morning. Thunderstorms had come through in the early hours after dawn, but now the rain and wind had passed, and the sun lit the puddles on the road and the silver roofs of the farmhouses and barns that flickered into view between the trees as he steered the ancient blue Mercedes — it had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that — across the county he’d grown up in. Maybe on his way back home he’d stop at Fox Run Farm for a gallon of raw milk. Or no. He’d drink a glass or two and then, in a month, have to dig the rest out of the refrigerator and pitch it. He reminded himself to vacuum the living room and clean the downstairs toilet. His name was Billy French, and he was carrying a Browning.30–06 A-bolt hunting rifle in the trunk of the Mercedes. He wasn’t a gun nut, and he didn’t hunt. He was a sculptor and a middle-school art teacher. Every now and then, he liked to stop on his way home from school and shoot cans off the rotting fence posts that surrounded the unused cow pasture where, at sixteen, in the grass and weeds, he’d lost his virginity to Mary Doan. He hadn’t thought about Mary in ages, and then, recently, he’d run into her — surprise, surprise, after all these years — at a bar in the valley. He’d recognized her right away — he remembered her limp — but it had taken her a couple of tries to remember his name. They’d had a laugh over that, and he’d bought her a drink, and she’d bought him one, and now she was coming across the mountain, she was coming that night for dinner.