Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  “Do you like being a potter?”

  “It gives me freedom.”

  The coach steps a few feet closer and tries again.

  “Freedom in the sense that it would be easy for you to get away for a couple of days?”

  “Oh my God. My daughter just hit her first softball.” The ball falls between second and third and the kids, some of whom have become so bored that they’re actually lying down in the infield, push up to their knees and watch it roll past. Tory’s coach turns toward me and grins.

  “She hit it?”

  I tell him that she not only hit it, she hit it solid. He says that sometimes he hates the bank. Sometimes he thinks there’s a whole other life out there. Teaching, or running a bike repair shop in Key West. Something real. Something simple. Something with heart. Do I ever think about it, that we might all have another life out there? A pop, louder than the first, and this time Tory’s ball is high in the air, dropping somewhere in the empty green field behind third.

  It’s been so long since I’ve felt desire that at first I mistake it for the flu.

  There has to be some explanation for why I wake up queasy the next morning, why I have to place a hand on each side of the bathroom sink until I can steady myself. When I look up at the mirror, my face is pale and foreign.

  It’s a bit like pregnancy, but I’m not pregnant. I take a small blue pill every morning, and I am happy that Phil didn’t have the vasectomy we considered several years ago, that we opted to keep, as he says, this door open. For it gives me an excuse to take the pills and perhaps… I haven’t asked Gerry this. He has three children so there’s a very good chance he’s been, as Phil would say, clipped. I don’t know how to ask the question so it’s good I don’t have to. I push the pill through the tinfoil and swallow it.

  All day I am languid and fitful. I can’t seem to concentrate on the wheel and I wander back into the den and surf channels until I find a Bette Davis movie. Maybe I’m sick, I think, as I lie on the couch. I blow off walking with the girls and nothing sounds good for lunch. When I go for carpool at two I mistakenly turn into the driveway for the school buses and have to do an awkward three-point turn while the mothers in the other cars sit and watch. I drop off the first kid and when Tory whines to get out at her friend Taylor’s house I walk with the girls to the kitchen door and ask Taylor’s mother if it would be okay. She says of course, it’s fine, and that I do look a little tired. It might be the flu, I tell her, and she says yeah, she hears something’s going around.

  All day I’ve kept my cell phone in my bra. I turned it off for carpool and when I get home I check for messages. But of course he hasn’t called. It’s only been one day. He won’t call every day. I go out to the garage and sit at the wheel. I walk out in the yard and pull some weeds. I lie down on the bed and get back up. I put a load of laundry in the washer but do not turn it on.

  At 4:16 my breast vibrates.

  “I think I’m getting sick,” I tell him.

  He says he doesn’t feel that great himself.

  Chapter Eight

  I’m standing in front of a circular table in Frederica’s Lingerie, my hands sunk into a stack of eggplant and cinnamon camisoles. I’ve read that in order to sell things to women you should name colors after foods. Artichoke and eggshell and mango and cabernet. It sounds logical. Women are always hungry.

  The mall is nice in the morning, before the teenagers come, when they play classical music and the sun from the skylights falls across the slate tiles. Through the open doors of the shop I can see the courtyard fountains throbbing in their irregular rhythms, shooting arteries of water high into the air. It’s the kind of fountain you want to wade into, climbing the marble steps in stiletto boots, standing over the jets until the pattern changes course and a cannonball of water rises up between your legs.

  “Ready?” The saleswoman, who has announced her name to be Tara, holds out her hands and I release the clothes to her and follow her to the dressing room. It is small but pretty, with a padded chair and framed oval mirror, and I stand back while Tara struggles to fit the hangers on pegs. There’s too much stuff here. Too many choices. The sign of a woman who doesn’t know what she wants or what she wants to be.

  I strip down to my high-waisted cotton underwear and begin to go through my options. Loose, drapey pajamas that remind me of Katharine Hepburn movies. She always thinks she can jerk Spencer Tracy around, but he’s way too much man for her. I button the pajamas and stand tall in front of the mirrors. Tara calls through the slats in the door that she has hot tea brewing and I say that’s nice, I’d love a cup. I move on to the kimonos. They’re my favorites anyway, the way they hide everything and yet can fall to the floor at any moment. One swift pull of the silk tie at your hips, and it’s done. Tara brings in the tea while I wrap a yellow and tangerine sarong beneath my armpits. This is good—light and campy. Dorothy Lamour joking around on the beach with Bob and Bing and my shoulders look strong above the knotted cloth. I ask Tara about those hose with the elastic tops, the kind that are supposed to stay up by themselves. Do they really work and would she bring me a pair in black, medium opaque?

  Frederica’s is full of ghosts. The last time I was here I was lingerie shopping with Kelly just before she married Mark. When they heard that Kelly was shopping for her honeymoon, they put us in the dressing room on the end, a room so large it had a pedestal for her to stand on and a full sofa for me. The salesgirl kept calling Kelly “the bride” in hushed tones, as if she were referring to the recently deceased, and irritation had flashed across Kelly’s face, so fast that only someone who knows her as well as I do would have even noticed. It’s like when people are all the time saying she’s pretty. Kelly hates being reduced. But the salesgirl had insisted on bringing these big flowing peignoir sets, formless filmy clouds of pink and white.

  “They look like something Eva Gabor would wear to make flapjacks,” Kelly said, handing them back.

  The girl was too young to get the reference to Eva Gabor and flapjacks but she did seem to understand that we would be requiring something sexier. She returned with a black bustier with long flapping garters, and Kelly had nodded and begun pulling off her jeans. Her body still looked great, her waist as tapered as always. I flopped down on the sofa and watched her struggle to pull on the bustier, writhing like a snake trying to get back into its skin. It was a punishing sort of garment, thrusting her breasts out the top and cupping her hips into an exaggerated curve. I asked her how you took it off when it was time to have sex.

  “You don’t, silly, that’s the whole point,” she said, and she’d twirled in the mirror, the garters slapping her thighs like small whips. The salesgirl had brought us champagne—another perk, I suppose, if you’re in the big dressing room at the end that is evidently the Frederica’s equivalent of a bridal suite. It was clear that she wanted us to be happier than we were. She produced the champagne flutes with such a flourish that I think she expected us to squeal, maybe applaud or propose a toast. When Kelly just said, very calmly, “That’s fine, put them down on the table,” the girl’s face had fallen in momentary disappointment. But she pushed it aside with a professional smile and finally left me and Kelly alone. Kelly insisted that I try on something too and—even though I was a little self-conscious about how my post-baby body looked in comparison to hers—I stood up and yanked off my jeans and grabbed the first hanger on the peg. It was a red satin teddy that kept sliding down my shoulders as I popped the champagne cork.

  For the next hour Kelly and I gulped the cheap champagne, and we swapped the camisoles and slips and teddies back and forth in a wild, pointless effort to mute our grief. Even though we were speculating about which of these garments might best seduce her fiancé or my husband, the truth is we were really deep in mourning for men who weren’t there. The man who had left her, the man who had not yet come for me. When Kelly had climbed up onto the pedestal, holding the empty champagne bottle with her cheeks bright pink and her hair disheveled, I had
almost asked her what she would do if Daniel came back. I had never told her that he called me that time, never told her that his cell phone number was scribbled on the last page of my phone book under the single letter D. “Leave her alone,” I had told him. “You broke her heart once and I’ll kill you if you show up here and break it again.” It sounded good at the time I said it but when I saw her there in that dressing room, so flushed, so beautiful, and so in despair, I wondered if I was really trying to protect her. Maybe I just knew that if Daniel returned and swept her away that I would be left, for the first time, utterly alone.

  This is not a happy story. Why am I remembering it now? I exhale sharply and pull a plum camisole over my head. It looks good against my skin. Tara pushes open the door. She has the black hose and an armful of bras as well. She wants me to try them. She says they’re the most comfortable bras on the market, and once women try them on they get one in every color. You know how it is. Ladies will do anything to find a really comfortable bra, and I realize this is how I look to her, like a woman who buys in bulk.

  “Bring me some of those black satin heels,” I say. “The ones in the window.” I sit down on the little chair and pull the stockings on carefully. I love the sound the nylon makes when one leg rubs against the other and I imagine the rough tug of Gerry’s hands pushing my knees apart, Gerry’s head sliding up between my thighs. Tara knocks at the door, hands the shoes in without a word. They’re too small but I jam my feet into them anyway and stand up in front of the mirror. This is all quite nasty and lovely, the way the shoes lift your legs up to the eye level of the consumer, and isn’t that what they do with candy at the checkout counter, after all? It’s the way of the world. What you see is what you want, and I would like to be candy at the checkout counter, at least once in a while. I would like to be the guilty pleasure, that thing you know isn’t good for you but you grab it anyway. You grab it hastily, guiltily, looking over your shoulder to make sure that your gluttony is unobserved. I stand shakily in the high-heeled shoes, turning my hips one way and then the other in front of the mirror and murmuring, “Would you like some of this, sir?”

  “You’re sure you don’t need the bras?” Tara asks, but within five minutes I am out and walking through the mall, with the shoes, the plum-colored silk slip, a silvery camisole, and the elastic hose nestled inside a swirl of hot pink tissue paper. I am humming as I swing the bag back and forth in my palm, headed toward the bistro where I will meet Nancy for lunch. Headed toward Gap Kids where I will buy a parka for Tory, toward Home + Garden where I will stir the tails of each wind chime hanging in a row, my eyes closed, swaying in a small and private dance. Headed toward Nordstrom where I will spray a different perfume on each wrist, headed toward Barnes & Noble where there are so many stories of so many people who have loved and lost in so many ways, headed past the courtyard fountains and through the puddles of light that spill across the pretty slate floor. Headed wherever it is that women like me go.

  Chapter Nine

  What do you want?” Jeff asks me.

  “That’s just it, I’m not entirely sure. I know, I know, you’re thinking that it’s unfair to make Phil try to guess what I want when I don’t even know myself.”

  Jeff shakes his head. “You sound human. But you’ve gotta know something—Phil is very sure about what he wants. He wants to keep this family together at any cost.”

  “At any cost?”

  “Those were his exact words.”

  “I guess it’s easy to say ‘at any cost’ when you know the bill is going to be delivered to somebody else.”

  Jeff sits back in his chair and folds his hands very carefully in front of him.

  “Didn’t you think it was weird,” I ask him, “that Phil was the one who called to schedule our counseling?”

  It was damn weird and he knows it. “Couples have all sorts of arrangements,” he says. “I thought maybe at your house Phil was the one who scheduled the family appointments.”

  “Please. He wouldn’t know the name of Tory’s teacher or her pediatrician if you held a gun to his head. He just wanted to make sure we ended up here. He wanted to make sure that this whole thing would be argued in a court that was sympathetic to him.”

  “I take it you don’t think the church is as responsive to the needs of women as it is to the needs of men.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Well, you’re right. Of course you’re right. But you’re not talking to the church, Elyse, you’re talking to me.” Jeff rubs his eyes. “Does it make you uncomfortable—that we’re all friends?”

  “I thought about putting up a fight for my own therapist. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, that I’d just go out and hire somebody like a normal person, but then I thought that it’s not that big a deal and I should just give Phil what he wants. Keep it within the family.”

  “The church family.”

  I laugh. I’m not sure why. “Yeah, the church family.”

  “You sound like you’ve thrown in the towel and we haven’t even started.”

  What can I say? He’s right. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but it doesn’t matter who we talk to. It’s too late.”

  “Phil said one other thing. He doesn’t think you’ve fully considered what all this could mean for Tory.”

  He starts talking about those studies that show, even now, that children from broken homes don’t do as well in school. They have sex earlier, their own marriages fail. I’ve read the same studies. Then there are the biographies. Go to the library, pick one up. The famous person came from a broken home and from there the dominoes begin to fall. There’s something different about these people, these children of divorce. They walk with their legs farther apart than the rest of us, like they grew up on a boat. These are the people who’ve learned to expect changes at any minute. They may grow up to be famous, but they’re not happy.

  Jeff pulls off his glasses and I wonder, not for the first time, if they’re real. They have thick, heavy black frames like the kind Michael Caine used to wear and I’ve never seen Jeff use them anywhere outside this office. “Of course I know what happens to the kids,” I tell him. “That’s all that’s keeping me here.” Which is a small lie but one I figured would shut Jeff up. I wouldn’t put it past him to wear fake glasses. Jeff has a lot of props.

  “I don’t know, Elyse, you just seem so…” Jeff stops, fumbles for a word.

  “Angry? Stubborn?”

  “Well, yeah, of course you’re angry and stubborn, but there’s something else going on.”

  “You think I’m scared? You think like Phil does, that I make these wild statements but when push comes to shove I’m too scared to go out there and live on my own. You think I’m just some dentist’s wife living in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house with twenty bucks in her purse who talks this big game but doesn’t have the balls to see it through.”

  Jeff fidgets a minute, straightens the Bible on his desk. I wonder if it’s an unconscious gesture or a bit of a threat. Phil has made it here first, practically painted the walls with his interpretation of events. It’s very hard to prove you’re not crazy. Hard to prove you’re not selfish. Almost impossible to prove you’re not paranoid. No matter what I say, Jeff—well, all of them, really, the whole chorus—will try to call me back. My reasons will never be good enough. My explanations will always fall flat. The only way I’d be allowed to leave this marriage is by stretcher.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “What?”

  “Your hand. Why is it bandaged?”

  “Phil accused me of being overdramatic so I stabbed myself in the palm.”

  Jeff has a strange look on his face and we sit there for a long time before he finally speaks. “Marriage is funny, isn’t it?”

  “Hilarious.” I stare at the cross behind his head and bite my lip. For some reason, he’s the last person I want to see me cry.

  As I walk down the hall from Jeff’s office I see Lynn standing in the atri
um, talking to a man with a clipboard. Evidently the church has decided to go ahead with the renovations and she has taken charge of getting the estimates. She is wearing a pale pink suit, a Chanel-style knockoff, and she seems absurdly overdressed for the occasion. Her hair is blown into a neat little cap and she looks good in the suit, slender and tastefully accessorized. The fact that she’s stopped walking with us doesn’t seem to have affected her weight. Lynn is disciplined and always has been. When we used to go out to eat for book club she would order an appetizer and swear she was full.

  I start to wave at her, but that feels wrong. She’s trying to be professional. She’s trying to figure out what her new job is. The last thing she needs is me hanging around.

  Gerry says give him a minute and he’ll call me back. When he says “a minute” my heart sinks. It was a mistake to call. He calls me. I don’t call him. Maybe he thinks I’m being pushy. Maybe he’s already starting to feel trapped. But I drive to the mall anyway and pull into the far side of the parking lot, the section that only fills up around Christmas. I’ve only been there a few seconds when the phone rings.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I had to find an empty conference room.”

  “I just left a counseling session,” I say. “This time it was only me and Jeff.”

  “Did he talk mean to you?”

  “No. That’s the bad part. He was nice.”

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” Gerry says. “Don’t laugh at me.”

  I am giggling already. “What?”

  “I get hard dialing your number.”

  “No you don’t,” I say, although the thought makes me absurdly happy. I am smiling at the steering wheel.

  “I swear. I’m like Pavlov’s dog. I hit that 704 and go hard as a rock. Where are you?”

  “The mall parking lot. The far corner, where they put tires on your car at Sears.”