The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

said, “Take your time.”
    But there was a problem: What were these flowers going to cost? The bouquet as she assembled it—as it came to be , in her hands—was broader and taller by far than what he’d come into the florist’s wanting. It was less a bouquet than a proper arrangement, a centerpiece, thanks in part to the leafy green branches the girl stuffed between blossoms, and the pale white baby’s breath, which she didn’t so much layer as clump into the globular mass.
    â€œCan we take some out?” he asked, and wished he hadn’t. What kind of man courts a woman by letting her make an enormous bouquet for his wife, then asks her to pare back?
    â€œWhat would you like me to take out?” the girl asked. Was she annoyed? She had her back to him. Did she think less of him? Did she think he was a cheap bastard who cheats on his wife?
    â€œIt’s just that I was hoping to use a particular Arts and Crafts vase on the mantel, which, in my opinion, these would look lovely in,” he elaborately lied. (Actually, there was a vase on the mantel—but so what?) He went on, “What I mean to say is that the vase I have in mind isn’t very big.”
    Did he need excuses? Did he need to bring up his home life?
    He went into reverse. “Come to think of it, never mind about that vase on the mantel. It would be a shame to wreck such a nice bouquet.”
    â€œI’m not going to wreck anything.”
    Was she scolding him? Were things heating up between them? He waited for her next move.
    â€œI can give you a bigger vase,” she proposed, finally.
    He held his breath. She had to be at least twenty years younger than he. But it wasn’t their age difference, nor the fact that he was married, that made him feel uncertain of himself. The problem was his thought process: The lithium he was taking in small doses brought a slower speed to reality. It was the lithium or the antidepressant cocktail or all of it in concert. At times, when he spoke, he felt as if a kind of mental wind were blowing his thoughts back at him, forcing him to self-consciously order his syntax as he pushed words out.
    â€œI just got—I just got out of the hospital!” he blurted.
    He watched her as she turned to face him; in her hands she held white lilies and a red satin bow, and her eyes looked left, right, left.
    â€œI shouldn’t’ve said that! Forget I said that! I didn’t mean to say that! Give me the vase. I want a vase.”
    â€œOh!” she said, as if startled to realize that she was still clutching pieces of the bouquet. “Let me run in the back and get one.”
    While Jim and the girl sorted themselves out downstairs, Kate was marching around the apartment in her red heels, shoving things into her purse and looking in the usual places for her keys. She had to flee before Jim walked in. She could phone him from the street and tell him that she’d meet him at the restaurant. Going from Elliot to Jim to Elliot and Jim and Susan without a break was bullshit. But, seriously, where was she going to go? It was too cold out to sit on a bench. The bar next door to the restaurant was bleak and depressing, an old men’s dive, and the bar inside the restaurant would be a mob scene of people pushing for tables. She could stand idly flipping through magazines at the newsstand across Broadway, but that would mean accommodating the line of men squeezing past her to look at porn at the rear of the store. She slammed the apartment door behind her and started down the five flights of stairs. Too often in winter she failed to leave the apartment before sunset. It worked hell on her mood.
    Outside, the wind was blowing hard. She wasn’t wearing a hat. She tightened her scarf around her neck, tugged up her coat collar, lowered her head, and walked toward Broadway with her fists punched down into her pockets and her purse clinched under her arm. If only it