The Best American Short Stories 2014 (20 page)

She stood.

“Sarah?” he said.

The train started to move—not enough to jolt her, but enough to get her sitting again. She didn't answer or look at him.

 

She left the table and started toward the ladies' room of the beer garden. She walked under a sagging banner of car-lot flags weathered to white, past a bin of broken tiki torches. A thick coat of dust darkened a stack of plastic chairs growing more cockeyed as they ascended a stucco wall. Open only a week or two after the long winter and already the place looked defiled by a summer of rough use.

In the brig a few hours earlier, she had come to believe that in all the years she had lived in the city, this was the most temperate and gentle day it had ever conferred. Distant church bells had rung out. The blue of the sky had affected her deeply. A single cloud had drifted by like a glacier in a calm sea. Looking down, she had paid close attention to the tree nearest the brig, picking out a discrete branch. It ended in a cluster of dark nubs, ancient knuckles sheltering life. Now, breaking through, surfacing blindly to the heat and light, pale buds had begun to flower. Even here, in rusted grates, down blocks of asphalt, spring had returned. Then the breeze touched her flesh. A tingling ran down her spine to her soul, and her eyes welled with tears. Did she have a soul? In moments like this, absolutely. The breeze! She spent the day at her desk, all the light of day spent while she kept her head down, and the snack pack convinced her it was OK—the snack pack and the energy drink, the time stolen to buy shoes online. Then this reminder, this windfall. As thrilling and irretrievable as a first kiss. This was her one and only life! It would require something of her to be equal to this day, she had thought at that moment in the brig, and now, looking at herself in the mirror of the ladies' room, scrutinizing her eyes, her veined and clouded eyes, she was afraid that she had made a series of poor choices and failed.

She left the bathroom. Jay was quietly drinking, surrounded by livelier tables. Their friends had not been able to come on such short notice.

“Can we go?” she asked.

He stood. She was dozing in the cab before they reached the bridge.

 

When they came up the subway stairs, she took one look at the light and said that it was too late. By the time they found food for the picnic and bought the wine, walked the rest of the way to the Park, and laid everything out, they would be eating in darkness.

“What are you after?” Jay asked.

“Let's cross,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do with this stupid blanket if we're not going to the Park?”

They left the curb late and found themselves marooned on an island of concrete between two-way traffic. Cars zipped by in a steady stream. They didn't give them an inch to maneuver.

“What do you want to do?” she asked him.

“No, no,” he said. “You just killed the picnic. You're in charge.”

“I came up with the picnic,” she said.

She needed an alternative, something to salvage this vital hour. But what? And this fucking traffic! A hundred million lights and every one of them stuck on green.

“What about that hotel?” she asked.

“What hotel?”

The drinks would be overpriced, and there would be no breeze, but the hotel lounge had a fine view of Central Park. It'd be better than waiting in a badly lit bodega for sandwiches to be made. They could eat later.

It was a short walk. They took the elevator up. The lobby, like the lounge, was on the thirty-fifth floor. Receptionists were checking guests in with hushed efficiency, as if, behind them, the first act of a play were just getting under way. Through the window in the distance, the Park was divided in two: the westernmost trees, hunkered beneath the tall buildings, were sunk below a line of shadow, while the rest, looking fuller, rose up in the light. Their leaves shivered in the breeze with more silver than green.

They had to sit at the bar first. Then the hostess came and got them. Once seated in the tiered lounge, they faced outward, as in a Paris café, and watched as the remaining trees were claimed by the shadow. They drank crisp white wine. Night settled grandly.

 

It still felt like winter down in the subway. There were hot gusts, weird little eddies of cold, the steel burn of brakes poisoning the platform—but never a breeze. Nothing so limpid and delicate as spring could penetrate here. Even inside the car, they were breathing last century's air. Salt tracks stained the floors. Soon winter would give way to hell: the subway's two seasons.

The train pulled into the station. Passengers rose from their seats and stood before the silver doors. They waited and waited. At last the doors opened and off they went, given early release; she still had time to serve. People from the front cars walked by, and then the platform was empty, and yet the doors didn't close. The purgatorial train seemed to be breathing, taking in air and letting it out, pointlessly. The automated voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held momentarily by the train dispatcher.” A ludicrous little god at play with switches. One station after another it was like that, and, between each station, a maddening stop-and-go.

The warning
ding
of the closing doors sounded, but nothing happened, and the train failed to move. She was out on the edge of the bench. She turned, offering him only her profile.

Slowly she said, “I would literally rather kill myself than go to a movie tonight.”

He raised his brows, as if, at his desk on some Wednesday afternoon, the peal of a fire alarm had brought him to sudden life. It was an exaggeration, but her level voice was soft and frighteningly sincere.

“OK,” he said. “We won't go to the movies.”

 

Traffic eased. They stepped off the median and hurried across the street. But they didn't know where they were going or what they were doing, so they idled under the shade of a building. Passersby ignored them in a push toward known destinations, fixed plans, the city's eight million souls seeming to conspire against her, joining in something mysterious and urgent.

“Sarah,” he said. “What is it you want to do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But don't put it like that.”

“Like what?”

“What
should
we do, Jay?” she said pointedly. “What
should
we do?”

“Don't they come to the same thing?”

“They don't.”

She spent ten minutes searching for something on her phone. He retreated a few feet, squatting near a scrawny tree planted in a little cell. When she gestured, he rose to his feet and followed her, keeping a step behind. At the next corner, they waited as taxis bounced by on their shocks. They caught every red light thereafter. They reached the building she wanted, the one with the lounge with a floor-to-ceiling view. She kept hitting the button as the elevator made its way down to them.

They were the last ones out when the doors opened. The window just past the reception area showed the buildings down Fifty-ninth Street checkerboarded with lights in the dimming hour. Bankers in their brigs, she thought. A canopy of shadow was slowly rolling across the silver treetops, settling the leaves into their darkest green.

All the tables were occupied or reserved. The hostess took Jay's name.

“Should we be here?” Sarah asked him.

“Isn't this where you wanted to be?”

The hostess watched them. “You're welcome to sit at the bar,” she told them.

“Thank you.”

“How long until a table is free?” Sarah asked.

The hostess didn't know. She couldn't guarantee one at all. They went to the bar, where they drank in silence.

She had wanted a picnic, then the subway had defeated her. Then they'd been stranded on the median bickering over nothing, the all-consuming nothing of what to do. Was it she, she alone, who made that question so inscrutable and accusing some nights, like a stranger leveling a finger at her from across a room? Or was it the haltings and blinders of an entwined life: the fact of Jay, the disequilibrium of having to take what he wanted into consideration, whatever
that
might be? Because he kept it to himself, or it remained alien to him, and so how could she hope to name it? Or maybe there was no mystery at all. Maybe he just wanted to see a movie.

The last of the daylight disappeared as they waited, and all the possibility that had arrived with the breeze was reduced to yet another series of drinks at a bar. By the time a table opened up, she felt drunk and unfocused. They had a final drink and left.

They tried having dinner at a cheap Italian joint downtown, but they got into a fight and left before he would even enter the restaurant. When they got home, they were no longer speaking. They lay in the dark for a long time before he broke the silence. “I could have gone to the fucking movie,” he said.

 

She grabbed him when they reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and, with his hand in hers, raced back the way they'd come, up the stairs into the mellow night. She breathed the spring air in deeply, shedding the subway stuff, the still blue sky confirming her good judgment. But he was confused.

“What are we doing?”

“Let's not get on the subway,” she said. “I can't stand it down there, not right now. Let's just walk.”

“Walk where?”

She led him west toward the Brooklyn Bridge. On the pedestrian walkway, she skipped ahead, then waited for him, then skipped ahead, then swung around and smiled. They came to a stop midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn just as the sun was setting. The wavelets in the bay turned over in little strokes, scaling the water silver before it darkened to stone. She looked straight up. Just to see the towering spires of the bridge climbing to a single point in the sky was to affirm that nothing more could be asked of this hour, nothing better apprehended in this life. She took hold of a steel cable in each hand and gazed out again at the setting sun. The burn-off against the buildings grew milder, its colors deeper; for a minute, the certainty that it would die out was in doubt. The sun dropped away, and a blue shadow settled over everything—the bridge, the water. It mirrored the cool ferric touch of the suspension cables. She let go, and the blood came back to her hands in heavy pulses. Her eyes filled with tears for the second time that night.

When the last of the sunlight was gone, she turned to him and said, “What did you think of that?”

He looked at her with perfect innocence. “Of what?” he said.

It was before midnight when she found herself sitting on the edge of the tub, fully dressed, doubting the future of her marriage.

 

They waited a long time for their drinks to arrive. The bar was situated—stupidly, to her mind—far from the view, and they were facing the wrong way. They had nothing to look at but liquor bottles and wineglasses, while outside the sun was disappearing and shadow was unfurling swiftly across the trees.

It had been a terrible idea to come up here, thinking they'd fall miraculously into a table. She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn't work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance. And, as if choosing the wrong place weren't bad enough, there were all those alternatives, abstractions taking shape only now: a walk across the bridge, drinks with Molly at the beer garden. Lights, crowds, parties. Even staying put in the brig, watching the neighborhood descend into darkness. The alternatives exerted more power over her than the actual things before her eyes. What had she been thinking, penning them in a bar on a night like this?

Knees fixed between the stool and the bar, she turned to him as best she could. “I'm sorry, Jay,” she said.

“For what?”

“For rushing us out of the apartment, and for how I acted on the subway. And it was a mistake to come up here. Let's do something,” she said.

“OK,” he said. “Like what?”

The second he asked, the desire came over her to be in the Park, obscured by trees and bent over with her fingertips dug into the earth, and to feel him push her panties down to her ankles. As she worked it out in her mind, they would not be perfectly secluded, so that he would feel rushed, and as a result would be a little rough with her, dispense with the considerate sheets-and-pillows concerns of their weekend sex life and just fuck her, fuck her hard and fast. Then let the passersby ignore them, ignore the flash of white skin inside a clot of trees in the near-dark. She'd feel no sense of exclusion then. The minute she felt him coming, she would come too. Then she would right herself as he was buckling, straighten the sundress, smile at him, and, just like that, all the stale tenement air of married life would disperse.

“Sounds like you have something in mind, Sarah,” he said, taking her hand under the bar. “Tell me what it is.”

She dared herself to lean in and whisper it.

“I'm up for anything,” he said.

But she lost the nerve.

“I don't really know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

 

He suggested they buy sandwiches before getting on the train, from the neighborhood place. But the neighborhood place! She was so sick of it. They had lived off that menu for as long as she could remember. Then she climbed out of the subway and knew they'd made a mistake. Finding food for a picnic would take time, time they didn't have. But if she called off the picnic because there was no time to find food, then what did they have if not time? Time to squander and squander until the night was over. One night after another until her life was over. A night in spring could make her go a little crazy, start thinking her options were either a picnic or death. Jay was charging forward, blanket under his arm, toward the picnic he believed was still on, when she stopped. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.