The Best American Short Stories 2014 (21 page)

It wasn't in him to see what made this day different from other days. He didn't pick up on breezes and breaks in weather, or they came upon him as the natural course of events too common to celebrate. If he had had his druthers, even today he would have worked into the night, feeding at his desk from some Styrofoam trough, then hurrying to meet her for the late-night showing of the follow-up to the sequel. Once home, he would have collapsed on the bed as if all the adventurous excursions of the day had depleted him of everything but the delicious aftertaste of exhaustion. She wanted to be a different person, a better person, but he was perfectly happy being his limited self.

She had made a series of bad decisions, and now she traced them back to their source. It was not forgoing the sandwiches, or stepping onto the subway, or heading into Manhattan at the wrong hour. It was not leaving the brig where she had fallen into a fragile harmony with the day, or foolishly breaking that harmony to seek out something better. It was asking him to come home early. That was the mistake that had set everything else in motion.

“What is it?” he asked.

She was about to tell him. She had overcome her fear and was about to tell him everything when she said, “Thanks for carrying the blanket.”

He looked at the blanket in his hands. “Sure,” he said.

By the time they found food and made it into the Park, the shadow had overtaken the spaces between the trees. She could see vaguely that it was him as they laid the food out on the blanket, but, when the time came to pack up, it was so dark that he could have been anyone.

 

Molly looked up from the general laughter just as Sarah hurried past the tables in the distance. Sarah disappeared through a rusted steel trellis festooned with lights that served the beer garden as entrance and exit. “Uh, Jay?” Molly said.

She was a block away by the time he caught up with her.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey!”

“It's over!” she cried. “It's over!”

“What's over?” he said, trying to take hold of her. “Stop. Stop!”

She stopped resisting and pressed her head against him and sobbed. Tears came through his shirt. Passersby, intrigued by the sight of another life on fire, skirted around them, turning back to stare.

“Spring,” she said.

“Over?” He lifted her off his chest and looked at her. “Sarah,” he said, “spring just started.”

He was wrong. Spring was a fleeting moment, and it blew past like the breeze on the brig. Then summer rushed in, hot and oppressive as car exhaust, and she couldn't take another summer in the city. It was followed by another single moment, the instant the leaves changed color, and then it was winter again, the interminable winter, one after another endured and misspent until they came to an end with a final hour that she would never be prepared for.

“Tell me you get it,” she said. “Please tell me you get it, Jay.” She shook her head into his chest. “I'm scared to death,” she said.

“What just happened?” he asked. “What went wrong?”

“What are we doing? Why did we come here?”

“Where?”

“What else could we have done?”

“We did a lot,” he said. “We had a picnic, now we're with friends. Why are you so upset?”

“Should I not do the thing I do?” she asked. “Or should I do the thing I don't do?”

“What thing are you talking about?” he asked.

She didn't want to go back to the beer garden. She made him go. He said goodbye to their friends and reassured them that everything was OK. Then he returned to the corner where he'd left her. She was already in a cab on her way back to Brooklyn. She gathered some things from the apartment—her pills, her toiletries—and an hour later she was in Molly's apartment falling apart again.

 

The hostess came for them at the bar and led the way to a table in the lounge. The buildings down Fifty-ninth Street brought midtown to an abrupt end; the trees filling the Park had tumbled over the sheer blue cliffs of their mirrored surfaces.

Now night was rapidly resolving the green from the trees. A minute later, it seemed, the dark knit them together, and they were all one. Yellow taxis lost their color and became lights floating on air. The mysterious figures they were picking up and dropping off at the curb, those shadows: what were they seizing hold of at this hour, that would escape her grasp? She had to do something.

“Jay,” she said. “Do you know what I've always wanted to do in the Park?”

He was idly picking at the label on his bottle of beer. “What's that?” he asked.

“Lean in,” she said. “I have to whisper it.”

 

The hostess never rescued them from their tight squeeze at the bar. They had a final drink and left. Out on the street, in the shadow of the Park, he asked, “Are you in the mood for dinner?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Yes or no?”

“I said sure.”

“Should we stay here, or go downtown?”

“Either way.”

They took a cab downtown. This was the best they could imagine: another dinner downtown. She opened the cab door and stepped onto the curb just as a loud pack of strangers came through a foyer and out to the street. They were aimed half drunk at the center of the night. She wanted to abandon Jay and his blanket and dinner plans and follow them into another life.

Jay shut the door, and the cabbie drove off. “Do you have a taste for anything in particular?” he asked.

“No.”

They stopped at a place to look at the menu. “Looks good to me,” he said.

“It's fine.”

“You're not crazy about it.”

“Do I have to be crazy about it? It's dinner, who cares. It's fine.”

“It should be more than fine if we're going to drop a hundred bucks in there,” he said. “It should be a place you want to go.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake,” she said, and opened the door and walked inside.

It was an Italian place with checkered tablecloths, not likely to be anything special. And air-conditioned! There was no breeze here, only a recycled stream of arctic air. She would have walked out if Jay had been beside her. It was an affront to time. The first day of spring, and this place had it in a choke hold, waiting for its legs to stop kicking.

She requested a table for two, then turned and gestured Jay inside. He didn't move. She followed the hostess to the table and sat down. He glared at her through the window.
Unbelievable
. She picked up the menu and began to study it. So this was how the night had settled: in a squalid little showdown at a cheap Italian restaurant that was as far from a picnic in the Park as—

She didn't see him open the door. He raised his voice above the din.

“I'm not fucking eating in there!” he yelled.

Startled, she watched his head disappear and the door swing slowly shut. In that second, she was more determined to stay than ever, but people turned to stare at her, and she felt embarrassed, and so at sea compared with them, in their perfect little parties of friends and lovers, unburdened by the possibility of different companions, competing appetites, alternative pursuits of a finer life, as their dishes arrived at the appointed hour like destiny.

 

They left the bar excited. This was unexpected.
This
was being equal to the night. Not just watching the Park from afar, admiring its trees. Heading straight for them, into a different life. She hardly recognized him in the elevator. He kept looking over with a smile she'd never seen before. It was nearly enough to release them from the sentence of a long winter and its dull bedroom strain.

Outside, the last of the sunlight was gone from the sky. They were led into the Park by the silver light of old-fashioned streetlamps. Her heart pounded with uncertainty: Where would they do it? Would they be seen? How was it even done? Like a rush job, or something more deliberate, slowed down to expand the risk, intensify the thrill, feel anew the audacity of what two people can do?

They went deeper and deeper into the Park, until they were lost in it. They stopped and looked in both directions. Then she took his hand and rushed him into a dark knot of trees.

He unbuckled in a hurry as they kissed. She had to slip her panties down herself. Then she turned, planting her hands on the ground, and waited.

She waited and waited.

“Do you need help?” she whispered.

“Sh-h-h,” he said suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

He was quiet.

“Jay?”

“I need some help,” he said.

She turned. A few minutes later, she brought her hands back to the ground. She waited.

“I lost it again,” he said.

She stood and dusted herself free of earth.

“That's OK,” she said. He was quickly buckling up. She reached out and touched him on the head.

 

There was an essential difference between them—what he might have called her restlessness, what she might have called his complacency—which had not surfaced before they were married, or, if it had, only as a possibility, hidden again as soon as it revealed itself. When they pointed out their shortcomings to each other, often in an argument, they both treated them as implausible accusations. But, if there was some intractable self in her that could be identified and accused, she thought, it was one in search of more life, more adventure, of the right thing to do at the given hour. It was not a homebody. It was not a moviegoer.

But suddenly she stopped. What made her any less predictable, she wondered, than she accused him of being? Night after night she was anxious not to miss out on . . . what? She didn't know. Something she couldn't define, forever residing just on the other side of things. It must be so tiresome for him, she thought. He must be convinced by now that she would never find it, that indeed there was nothing to find.

She was no longer beside him. It took him a minute to notice. He turned, then walked slowly back to her.

She reached out and took his hand. “Jay,” she said. “What do you want to do tonight?”

“I thought we were having a picnic.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Sure,” he said. “Isn't that what you want?”

“Am I too predictable, Jay?”

“Because you like picnics?” he asked.

He put his arm around her, and they walked the rest of the way to the Park. After they ate, they lay on the blanket in the dark and talked again about having kids.

 

He was gloomy on the ride downtown, and gloomy when they stepped out of the cab. He was gloomy going from restaurant to restaurant while she studied the menus posted outside.

“Do you have a taste for anything in particular?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you just want to go home?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Up to you.”

“Well, I don't want to go home,” she said.

She chose a harmless Italian place. She wanted to turn to him to express her outrage that they were blasting the air conditioning on the first day of spring, but she knew that he wasn't in the mood. The place was louder than she had anticipated, a fact that became clear only after they'd been seated. They looked at the menu, keeping whatever impressions it made on them to themselves. Finally, he set his down on the checkered tablecloth, on top of the checkered blanket he'd brought for the picnic.

“Do you know what you're getting?”

He shrugged.

“Jay,” she said, “it doesn't matter, it really doesn't.”

“Maybe not to you,” he said.

“I'm sorry that I even suggested it,” she said.

“Why did you touch my head?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did you have to pat me on the head?”

She returned to studying the menu. Had she patted him? She hadn't meant to. She was just trying to make him feel better. When she looked up, sometime later, she found Jay staring intently across the room. She tracked his gaze to a table and to the man there, who was, she thought, his opposite in every way: charismatic at a glance, holding the table rapt with some expansive conversation. He was the handsomest man in New York. He would know what to do with her in the Park. Jay's fixation on him, she thought, while sullen and violent with envy, was also possibly at root pure curiosity, a reflection, a desire. He wanted to be the man, or at least someone like him: someone poised, commanding, rapacious. He would never change, but in his way, he wanted to, as she had always wanted most to be someone else.

They waited for their meal in silence, in muted unhappiness, the odd ones out in that lively place. They ate quickly, but it took forever. He went to bed when they got home. She went back out on the brig. What breeze came had no effect on her, and she understood that the night had been over several hours earlier, when everything she was seeking in the world had been brought out from inside her. If it had not lasted long, was it not enough? It had been an error to go in search of something more. If she had just told Jay about the breeze, shared that stupid fleeting moment with him—why hadn't she? He might have understood. Everything that came after was a gift that she had squandered.

 

They walked out of the Park and hailed a cab. The driver let them out with plenty of time to kill. They had dinner, then found a bar where they nursed their drinks. They didn't say much.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked her.

“I told you.”

“I know, but why? You were so adamant on the subway.”

“It's what you want to do,” she said.

It was time to leave. She stood up from the bar.

“OK,” he said. “But it was never that big a deal to me.”

“I know,” she said.

“And what you wanted to do,” he said, “we couldn't do.”

“I told you it doesn't matter,” she said.

They left the bar and walked to the theater. They watched the follow-up to the sequel, and then they went home.