Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  “Sucks, sucks, sucks,” she says, pleased that I have tacitly given her permission to use a word that her father forbids. “Because now I can’t play for two days and I have to write a paper on diphtheria.” She says the word carefully, adding a couple of unnecessary syllables. Dip-a-the-ree-ree-ah.

  “This is a bad day for the Bearden girls,” I say. “Look what happened to Mommy’s pots. Watch it,” I add, as she extends a finger. “The edges are rough.”

  “Why do things have edges?”

  “What?”

  “Edges hurt people.”

  “Not always.”

  “You get to the edge and you either cut yourself or fall off.”

  I can’t think of anything to say to that. “You can use that medical book of your daddy’s,” I tell her, “to look up diphtheria.” She looks at me as if I’m nuts.

  “I’ll just Google it,” she says.

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Do people get diphtheria anymore?”

  “No, it’s one of the things in the DPT shots they give babies.”

  “What do people die from now?”

  Cancer, I tell her. Heart attacks. Things that little girls hardly ever get.

  The phone rings. She runs to get it and, since my hands are sticky, wedges it under my chin and then disappears into the kitchen. It’s Belinda.

  “I was thinking maybe we could go out and get ice cream.”

  “Just us?”

  “Us and the kids.”

  “I don’t know. We’re having a shitty day over here. Tory got diphtheria on the Oregon Trail and a thousand dollars’ worth of my pots busted.”

  “All the more reason you need ice cream. We’ll come by and get you.”

  There was a time when Belinda would never think to initiate an outing, even one as simple as this. And there was a time, maybe only months ago, when she ran every decision by Nancy, even one as simple as this. But Tory will be thrilled to have a reason to abandon her homework and I don’t really want to think about the pots. ”Okay,” I tell her. “Ice cream is a good idea.”

  While the kids take their cones to the little playground behind the Ben & Jerry’s, Belinda and I sit on a bench and drink our hot chocolate. We are talking about how Meredith’s math teacher is really too hard on the kids when suddenly Belinda grips my arm.

  “Look,” she says.

  It takes me a second to recognize her. Lynn is coming out of the Starbucks across the courtyard. She’s got on the same pink Chanel-style jacket she was wearing the day I saw her with the contractors, but this time she has it on with jeans and boots. It looks better this way. There is a man with her, and his arm is around her waist. He is bald but it is the kind of deliberate shaved baldness of the very young and he pulls her over by the fountain and removes something—maybe a scone—from a flat brown bag. Lynn is laughing. She looks careless, casual, her hair is a little mussed. She looks just-fucked.

  “Oh my God,” says Belinda. “Do you think they’re… dating?”

  “It sure seems that way,” I say, dropping my head. Watching her like this makes me uneasy, as if I’m catching her naked.

  “Did you know she was seeing somebody?” Belinda has none of my embarrassment. She is staring at Lynn as if she’s the coming attraction on a movie screen.

  I shake my head. “No, but why shouldn’t she? It’s not like she’s doing anything wrong. We need to get out of here. She’d be mortified if she saw us gawking at her.”

  “How old do you think he is, anyway? Late twenties?”

  “He’s older than that.”

  “Early thirties?”

  “I don’t know. We need to get out of here. And we don’t have to tell Nancy about this.”

  “Why not?” Belinda asks, reasonably enough. “You said it yourself, it’s not like she’s doing anything wrong, even though I’d say he’s closer to twenty-five than thirty. I mean, if you want to say thirty, we’ll go with thirty, but I really think he’s… Oh my God, he’s feeding her.”

  “Men do that. Men feed women.”

  She shoots me a strange look out of the corner of her eye and I know that she’s thinking that no, women feed men, that’s the way it really works, and my mind clicks back to New York, to Gerry lifting a mussel to my mouth, tilting the shell so that butter and salt and white wine poured down my throat.

  “Sometimes men feed women,” I repeat, speaking slowly, as if this is something important for Belinda to understand. “When you really stop to think about it, if you go all the way back to Darwin or something, men feeding women is the way things are supposed to be.”

  “But his fingers were on her tongue. It’s so…”

  “I know. We need to get out of here.”

  Belinda shudders, as if literally shaking herself out of a stupor. “Did you know she was dating anybody?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “You’re helping her paint.”

  “We don’t talk about anything personal. I had no idea she was even dating, I swear. Much less… eating scones.”

  When Belinda drops us off, I ask her to come in and look at something. “For a minute,” she says. She seems surprised at the invitation. The kids climb out of the van and scatter across the lawn like birds. Tory always says she doesn’t like playing with Belinda’s daughters but I’ve noticed that when they’re actually together she’s sweet to them, with a kind of distracted compassion. It amazes me how much my relationship with Belinda is being extended into the next generation.

  “Don’t go far,” Belinda yells to the kids. “We’re only staying a minute.”

  I take Belinda into the studio and show her the ceramic pot with the shards glued to the top.

  “What do you think?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “I guess.”

  “It looks like something Nancy would do at Home Depot.”

  Shit. That’s bad. I lean back against the clay bin and shut my eyes.

  “You couldn’t glue the pieces back together?”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. There are shards from twenty different pots in that box. It would be trying to put together twenty jigsaw puzzles at once.”

  “Could you jam the pieces into clay and make a, you know, a…”

  “Mosaic?”

  “Yeah. I mean you could sort of stick them into those raw clay pots and—”

  “That won’t work either,” I say. My voice is sharp and that’s too bad. She’s honestly trying to help. “The shards have already been fired and I can’t embed them into greenware and fire the whole thing again. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s chemical.”

  “You could make twenty more and hope those don’t break.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s always an option. Keep doing what didn’t work the first time and maybe someday it’ll come out different.”

  Belinda ruffles her hair. “I’m sorry, Elyse.”

  “No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m being a bitch because I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I think they broke because I didn’t use enough grout or maybe I didn’t work out all the air bubbles. It’s weird because I’ve lost pots before, but I’ve never lost a whole batch at once, and I keep thinking maybe they broke because I cared about them too much, you know? Like maybe they broke specifically because they’re the ones I really couldn’t afford to have break and I put that fear out into the universe and it turned around and bit me on the ass, and besides, you know the really weird part? The weird part is that I like the broken pieces better than I ever liked the whole pots. Look, look at this…”

  I pull the original pot, the one on which Mrs. Chapman based her order, off the shelf and put it down on the table. Beside it I put the Nancy Home Depot pot. “See what I mean? I like the solid shape of the first one. It’s not all glued on and sharp pieces and crafty crappy and all. But I like the way the pattern on the second one looks when the pieces are broken and reassembled. See what I
mean?”

  “Actually, yeah.”

  “This was my chance, Belinda. This was my chance to get my stuff out there and make some real money and have it be a real job, a real career, and not something I just do in my garage because I’m a dentist’s wife who’s trying to be an artist…” I look at her. She doesn’t appear to be listening. Her mind seems a thousand miles away. Thinking of what she’s going to fix for supper, maybe, or how she’s going to herd the kids back into the van. “Belinda,” I say, and even I can hear the desperation in my voice. “Do you know what the word ‘dilettante’ means?”

  But Belinda is staring at the pots. “You know,” she says slowly, “there’s one other thing you could do.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  He has a conference in San Francisco and all I have to do is entertain myself during the day. I’ve never seen him in full work mode and I lie on the bed naked while he sits in the chair near the window and pores over his BlackBerry. I like him with his glasses on. Later he does a conference on speaker. There seem to be several different people on the line and I hear how they defer to him. They all talk over each other, but when he begins to speak, no one interrupts him.

  “You’re so important,” I say when he hangs up.

  “Right,” he says, already back on the BlackBerry.

  He wears his good suit when we go out to dinner and something spills on his pants. Trouble. He needs this suit for the final day of the conference, when he’ll be introducing the main speaker. So when we get back to the hotel I call down to the concierge to see if we can have the pants cleaned overnight.

  The concierge answers the phone by asking, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Kincaid?” I am not totally surprised. This is the sort of hotel where the room knows when you’re there and not there and when you phone down for assistance they always greet you by name. Someone asked me that very same question earlier in the afternoon when I called to make the reservations for the restaurant.

  But now it stings. Maybe just because it’s late or because we finished a bottle of some unpronounceable French wine at dinner—expense-account wine, Gerry had called it—or maybe it was upsetting this time because I actually had to pretend to be Mrs. Kincaid. “My husband has spilled something on his suit,” I tell the concierge. “We need to have it cleaned by 2 p.m. tomorrow.” But my husband hasn’t spilled anything on his suit. My husband is three thousand miles away, in a different time zone, asleep.

  “What’s wrong?” Gerry asks me as he comes out of the bathroom. “Couldn’t they do it?”

  “They’re sending somebody up for it now. But he called me Mrs. Kincaid.”

  His face crumples, just for a second. “Oh honey, I’m sorry.”

  “And I answered to it. I told them my husband had spilled something on his pants.”

  The crease between his eyebrows is always there. It’s his job to be constantly worried and I have seen that crease all afternoon as he has talked about hedge funds and buyouts and short sales gone wrong. Now it deepens. “What do you want me to do?” he asks, and without waiting for my answer, he kisses me. It’s an old-movie kind of kiss. He pushes me against a wall and he likes this, the World War II romance of a man pressing a woman against a wall, but it never lasts long. Almost immediately, my knees bend. I begin to slide. I yearn for the floor, for that solid hardness beneath me, and I am thankful yet again that I am not a man, that no one really expects me to support my own weight, much less the weight of another person.

  Sometimes we sink all the way like this, until we are on the floor in a heap. We have been on the floor in New York and Miami but tonight he stops me before I buckle completely and he conveys me, part carrying me and mostly dragging me, to the bed. He captures my lower lip between his teeth and pulls me in. It is not always pleasant, the way he seems to pierce my flesh at just the thinnest and most vulnerable part.

  The kiss hurts. I make a noise. He lets go. And then we open our lips, the tips of our tongues barely touching. We lie very still and I think that this would probably be a good time to die. There’s a knock at the door. Gerry rolls off me.

  “Give them the pants,” he says. “And then come back, because the situation is hopeless and I want to kiss you all night.”

  Chapter Thirty

  I don’t know why she insists on debasing herself,” Nancy whispers.

  “It’s very odd,” Kelly agrees, gazing down the hall of the Sunday school wing where Lynn has just disappeared into one of the workrooms. “I expect to show up any day and see her hosing down the Dumpster. Do you think she’s like—I don’t know, punishing herself for something?”

  The question is directed to me and I flash on the memories of Kelly at the public abortion clinic, me cuffed to my marital bed. Women punish themselves all the time, for crimes only they can see, but I don’t think that’s what Lynn is doing now.

  “She’s just trying to do her job,” I say, and the comment sounds spineless, even to me.

  “She’s the one who decided what that job was,” Nancy points out. “The session’s directive was very vague. Nobody expected her to paint the entire Sunday school wing by herself.”

  “Is she coming with us to lunch?” Belinda asks. “Did anybody even think to ask her?”

  “Oh God,” says Kelly.

  “She’s been turning us down for months,” Nancy says.

  But it’s still the first time that nobody thought to ask her.

  Lynn emerges from the workroom, a ladder balanced on her shoulder, and we watch in silence as she makes her way down the hall toward us. “I’m up to third grade,” she calls out cheerfully. “What do you think of the colors?”

  “I don’t guess you want to come to lunch with us, do you?” Belinda calls back.

  The moment is awkward beyond words. Lynn sets down the ladder and says, very quietly, “I’m not dressed for it today.” No kidding. She’s actually in baggy white overalls, splattered with colors from every room in the hall, an effect so bizarre that for a second I wonder if she’s done it deliberately. If she went to Goodwill and searched out a garment that would fit her badly, straps that keep sliding off her shoulders, legs carefully rolled up with one shorter than the other. It’s as if she’s created some sort of costume to make herself look like the neighborly handyman on a children’s program.

  It’s hard to say who among us is the most upset. Nancy’s northern political correctness, Kelly’s southern manners, Belinda’s embarrassment over her badly phrased question, my strange and sudden vision of the bald man placing a piece of scone on Lynn’s tongue—they have all convened to form this moment in which we stand uneasy and wordless, staring at each other like strangers. Lynn moves to relift the ladder and we all throw out our hands to help her.

  “No, I’ve got it,” she says, bending her knees.

  Why, I wonder, are we so rattled by this brief exchange? What has unnerved us so badly that it will cast a shadow over our traditional Tuesday lunch? Lynn’s ladder is, after all, no heavier than our children, whom we lift all day long. It’s no heavier than bags of groceries or a pot on a bat or the Friendship Trays that Nancy and Belinda load into the church van once a week. It’s no heavier than a man in sex and certainly not as heavy as the metal discs Kelly and I stack on the bench press at the YMCA, twenty pounds at a time, as this weight that we carefully, methodically lower over ourselves and then push away. It’s no heavier than the low-slung belt of pregnancy or the square books of carpet samples in the back of Nancy’s car. Women bear weight all the time, so it is hard to say why we stand so silent at the sight of Lynn bending her knees and taking the ladder to her shoulder, carrying it with an experienced fluidity away from us, down the dark hall.

  Kelly glances at me and I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking, “So this is what you want?” She doesn’t mean the work. The work is no big deal. She’s asking me if I could endure the pity of my friends.

  Belinda’s idea was simple. Not simple in the sense it was easy to do, but simple in conce
pt. I make a pot and then, at the greenware stage before it is fired, I break it.

  The first time I try to do this, it feels like a sacrilege. It’s a misshapen pot I’ve dug out of the recycle heap, a failed experiment from months ago, but it’s still painful to deliberately destroy it. I roll it off the kneading table but, amazingly, it remains intact. I push it down the brick steps leading from the kitchen to the garage. This chips the top but leaves the body of the pot unharmed. I toy with the idea of running over it with my car. I take one of Tory’s softball bats out of the sports closet, lob the pot into the air and take a swing. I miss the pot but it falls to the floor with a definitive crash.

  Getting it back together is a little trickier, but I use a slip-and-score method I haven’t practiced since art school and when I bisque-fire it in the little kiln I sometimes use for testing, it holds. The glaze puddles in the cracks then disappears, sucked into the bisque as if the very flesh of the pot was thirsty. There’s something savage about it.

  I try not to get my hopes up. I take it to Lewis for the final firing. He offers to pray over it.

  Yeah, I think, let’s pray over it, and he and I stand, hands clasped in his dusty little coffee cup factory, and I listen to him exhort Jesus to lift up Sister Elyse and set her free. Amen.

  I’m back at eight the next morning.

  “You’re gonna be happy,” Lewis says. “Shut your eyes.” I do, and when I open them he is holding the pot up for my inspection. I feel a strange kick in the gut, some cellular acknowledgment that this is an important moment.

  “Damn,” I say.

  “Jesus helped you.”

  “He sure did.”

  “Between me and you,” Lewis says, “after you finish out this first order you need to go right up on that price. I mean shit, girl, these are like art or something.”