Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  The bleeding has almost stopped. I drop the damp washtowel to the desk and take the phone out of my purse.

  I dial quickly. All ten numbers this time. “Gerry,” I say, “it’s Elyse.”

  Chapter Six

  Once a week the Women of the Church send food to shut-ins and new mothers and people who have had deaths in the family. It’s mostly the old ladies who do this, except for Nancy, who not only heads up the Wednesday Friendship Tray project at our church but goes to another church to drive their Friday route as well. She’s guilt-tripped Belinda into helping her, mostly because she’s always telling everybody about how the trays are so heavy that the old ladies can’t lift them into the van. If Belinda isn’t there, Nancy has to carry thirty-five trays all by herself.

  I have to walk past the church kitchen to get to Jeff’s office. For a minute I think about going all the way around the building and coming in the back, but no, that would make it seem like I’m ashamed or something, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, the back door has an alarm that’s easy to set off and that’s all I need. I walk by the kitchen fast, but Belinda still sees me and says, “Elyse?” There’s nothing to do but go in. She’s alone, thank God, and she doesn’t ask me why I’m there so early on a Wednesday morning. Nancy probably told her Phil and I were going to start counseling with Jeff. Nothing is private, at least not in a church as small as this one.

  “I want you to look at something,” Belinda says. “This is going to amaze you.”

  She walks me back to the double-door freezers and pulls them open. There, wrapped in tinfoil and stacked as neatly as bricks, are about a hundred casseroles.

  “What are they for?”

  “Emergencies,” says Belinda.

  “They must be expecting a lot of emergencies,” I say, struggling to unstick a brick from the one beneath it. Each casserole has a three-by-five index card taped to the top with instructions and I squint down at the spidery handwriting. “ ‘Chicken-noodle mushroom casserole. Heat for an hour at 350.’ My grandmother used to make this stuff.”

  “Mine too,” says Belinda. “I don’t think she ever made anything that didn’t call for a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Look at this, look at these down at the bottom, they’ve got names on them. There’s a whole bunch from Miss Bessie Morgan and she’s been dead for years.”

  “How’d you even know they were in here?”

  “Nancy got out three of them this morning. She’s taking them by David Fontana’s house.” Belinda’s voice drops, even though we are alone. “His wife left him.”

  It takes me a minute to think who she’s talking about. “He doesn’t even come to church here, his wife and kids do, and they only come at Christmas. Why is he getting three frigging casseroles?”

  “I guess he’s having an emergency.”

  “How many are they taking to his wife?”

  Belinda seems confused by the question. “She left him, Elyse. She just up and walked out.”

  Phil is already in Jeff’s office when I arrive and he’s taken the time to change out of his dentist whites and into jeans. “You look good,” I say. “Did you take the jeans to work?”

  “Obviously.”

  Okay. So it’s going to be that kind of day.

  Jeff walks in, says hi, asks what we think of this weather. He seems prepared to make small talk, to ease us into what might be an awkward situation, but Phil evidently has a surgical scheduled for the afternoon.

  “She’s not happy,” he says.

  If Jeff is startled, he recovers fast. “Is that true, Elyse?”

  “I’m not happy in the marriage, that much is true. But sometimes I’m happy. I’m happy when I’m with Tory or when I’m throwing pots or when I’m out on my own…”

  Jeff waves his hand in the air as if he’s trying to erase my words. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  I frown. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

  “You have an odd way of talking about marriage. You say ‘in the marriage’ or ‘out on my own’ like it’s some sort of door you go in and out of.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re always married. You’re married every day, every second, whether Phil happens to be standing beside you or not.”

  “Okay, then, I’ll be more blunt. You remember that sermon you gave a few months ago about gratitude? You said we should make a list of all the recent times we’ve felt joy in our lives, and I actually did. I went home and listed the last ten times I was really happy, and you were right, just seeing them on paper made me feel good. I thought, ‘Well, I bitch a lot but when it comes down to it, I have a pretty great life.’ ”

  “It’s gratifying to know there’s actually somebody out there listening.”

  “Yeah, well, the trouble is there’s actually somebody out there thinking. Because when I looked at the list I noticed there was a common denominator to all ten of my happy times. Phil wasn’t there.”

  I look over at Phil as I say this. I don’t want to hurt him, and if he ever said anything like that, it would hurt me. But he doesn’t look sad, just exasperated.

  Jeff pushes back in his chair, fingers knit, peering over the tops of his heavy black glasses. They must have taught him this pose in counseling school. “What do you think that means?”

  “It means I can be happy. I’m capable of it. I have the capacity for joy…”

  “Just as long as I’m not there,” Phil says.

  Jeff turns to him. “Do you feel the same way, Phil, like your capacity for happiness is affected by whether or not Elyse is present?”

  Phil smiles smugly. “I feel exactly the same whether she’s there or not.”

  Jesus. Even I know that’s the wrong answer.

  Jeff decides to let it lie. He swivels his chair back toward me.

  “Okay, so Elyse has the capacity for joy. Let’s look at that more closely. Tell me about the last time you were happy.”

  I decide to tell him about the next-to-last time I was happy.

  It wasn’t that long ago, really. Two days before I met Gerry, back at the Phoenix art show. Several of the exhibitors were going out to dinner and they invited me to come, but I didn’t feel like it. I’d been talking so much to customers and potential customers that my voice had gone hoarse. I considered room service but at the last minute I decided that no, I’d go somewhere great. I went back to the hotel room and showered and put on a nice dress and wore the scarf I got in Florence years ago. It drapes really beautifully and I went to a restaurant the concierge recommended.

  “You went by yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s interesting. Some women don’t feel comfortable going to a restaurant alone.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a woman eating by herself,” I say. This is going just great. He’s probably going to stand up in the pulpit Sunday and announce to everybody that I’m an erotomaniac.

  “No, I think it’s a good thing,” he says. “Tell me about it.”

  It had been a wonderful night. It was one of those restaurants where the walls are all lined in mirrors. I sat down at the bar and I ordered foie gras and an arugula salad and a wine with this really beautiful name—something like Covenant of the Moon, but maybe I’m remembering that part wrong. And I sat there all alone and watched myself eat. I had slicked back my hair and I was wearing my pewter earrings, and the scarf of course, and when I looked at myself in the restaurant mirrors I decided I was pretty. Okay, not pretty exactly, but significant. I decided that I looked like a significant person. I didn’t pull out a book like I usually do when I am alone in a restaurant. I just ate very slowly, and I looked at my reflection, and then at some point I began to look at the flowers. There were three blooms on each table—white, yellow, and orange—and the vases undulated in such a way that the flowers all fell in different directions. The brass bar fittings had been recently polished and I further noticed that above me someone had painted tiny gol
d stars across the deep purple ceiling. But mostly it was the mirrors, so many that when I headed toward what I thought was the exit, I’d only walked smack into another image of myself.

  “So what made you happy?” Phil asks. “The fact that you looked good?” Poor Phil. It has to bug him, the way I slop around the house in cargo pants and dress up when I go out of town.

  “No,” says Jeff, who surprises me sometimes. “You were happy because you just gave yourself a moment and sat there and were open to everything.”

  “Yeah, I was open. And I was seen. I want to be seen.”

  “I see you,” says Phil, and I swear he’s trying to sneak a peek at his watch.

  “I mean really seen. I’m happy whenever I’m noticed, even if it’s just me noticing myself.”

  “You don’t have to be in a restaurant in Phoenix to have that feeling,” Jeff says. “There are ways to make you feel like that in your day-to-day life.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s a great idea,” says Phil. “We’ll go home and cover all the walls in mirrors so she can watch herself coming and going just like Louis at Versailles or something. Will that make her happy?”

  Jeff blinks, turns away as if he is embarrassed. He’s not used to this side of Phil.

  “I want you to see me,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure that this is no longer true.

  That night, during a station break, Phil asks, “What time were you thinking about going to bed?” It’s his signal he wants to have sex and the weird thing is I want to have sex too. Gerry hasn’t called me back. I know it’s only been two days but the anticipation is running neck and neck with the disappointment and it’s all worn me out. The phone rang about four, and when I picked it up there was no one on the other end. For a minute I almost said, “Gerry?” but of course that would be stupid and maybe it’s best if he doesn’t call me back because I am too stupid to have an affair. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Ten,” I tell him, and saying that I’m going to bed early is my signal that yeah, tonight is okay. He grins and I remember, just for a second, how charmed I once had been by his boyishness and shagginess and his Amish-collared blue denim shirt. But that was eight years ago. Now we usually have sex in the shape of an X, with our heads facing in different directions, our bodies touching only where mine overlaps his at the pelvis. I believe I first saw this position in an old issue of Cosmo and at the time I thought it would be fun, something different, the sort of thing you try every once in a while. I brought the magazine to bed that night and Phil glanced at it and said, “Can do.” I’m not sure exactly when it became our default position, but now we move into it without consultation. You can’t kiss in the X. You don’t look into each other’s eyes. But the advantage is that one person doesn’t crush the other person’s chest and neither of you has to hold your weight in that kind of unnatural push-up. I’m not sure at what point Phil and I first realized how heavy we are.

  Twenty minutes later, after brushing teeth and putting the cats out and checking the locks on the doors and setting the alarm, we get into bed. We move toward the middle.

  I lie back, close my eyes. Once you’re in the X it’s easy to forget where you are. It’s easy to imagine you’re with someone else—in fact, it’s easy to imagine that you are someone else. Two thousand dollars and some bank stock won’t go far. I need to take every commission I can, even the crappy ones, and I need to stay at least another year. That means fifty-two more times in the X position, fifty-six if we go away on vacation. Phil makes a halfhearted effort to pull me on top of him but I roll back and when we connect at the hips and he starts his familiar rocking rhythm I think that it’s not bad, really, it’s kind of calming and sweet. Gerry has not called and I am being ridiculous. What if I break a marriage and a family only to arrive at the same place? What if this thing that seems to be a doorway turns out to be just another mirror? Maybe I’m doomed to spend eternity walking into reflections of myself and saying, “Damn, I guess it was my fault, after all.” Maybe Jeff is right, that there are ways to feel like a significant person in my day-to-day life. The last track on the fourth CD of the marriage series suggested new lingerie. I suppose I could do that. Sure, it’s a cliché, but clichés sometimes work. Phil mumbles something, slips a hand underneath my hip to turn me a little more toward him and get the angle better. It’s not so bad, I tell myself, it’s really sort of pleasant, but then I wonder how I would have felt this afternoon if it had been Gerry’s voice on the line and I know, in my secret tiny heart, that I would do anything to be back in that Traveler’s Chapel in Dallas. I’m beginning to think I’m like Elizabeth Taylor in an old movie, that there is something fundamentally wrong with my mind, that I can’t seem to see anything the way a normal woman would.

  I made a mistake when I married Phil and I know I’m going to have to pay for that mistake—the only question is, how long am I going to have to keep paying? It seems like I have already been paying for a very long time. And Gerry, Gerry is a player, definitely a player. Definitely unavailable, definitely too polished of a kisser, definitely married, definitely the wrong choice. Not to mention the fact that he hasn’t called back. Phil was a mistake and Gerry probably is too—but sometimes it seems like the only way to erase one mistake is to make another. “I need to…” Phil says, and I tell him it’s okay, I’m not close. He pounds for a few seconds, shudders, and rolls off of me, his hand brushing my hair in what I can only assume is a gesture of affection. “Sorry,” he whispers, and I tell him that I’m fine.

  Chapter Seven

  The coach-pitch coach calls and, as I predicted, Phil is thrilled. I take Tory to the first day of conditioning, where she is the youngest by six months and a full head shorter than the next shortest kid.

  But I think the coach likes Tory. He keeps coming over to the fence to make little comments about her, looking down at me in his reflector shades as if he were a cop. T-ball is one thing, he tells me, but she’s ready to start hitting a moving target. And that’s what separates the men from the boys. Most people see something coming right at them and they freeze. Do I know what he means? I know what he means.

  Then he moseys his way back to the infield, walking not quite all the way to the mound, because he doesn’t want to have to throw too hard. Tory looks so small at the plate and when she puts on the helmet her head is as huge and wobbly as an alien’s. The coach throws and she swings way too late. The ball smacks the chain-link fence behind her and the assistant coach retrieves it and throws it back. “You got yourself a good look at it,” says the coach, who throws again, a slow, high-arced pitch that gives her plenty of time to think. Apparently too much time. Tory stands there as the ball floats past her. My phone rings and I dig in my purse for it, my eyes still on Tory. “Now you’re ready,” says the coach.

  A man’s voice asks, “Is this the right number?”

  “What?”

  “Is this your cell phone? You’re a hard person to find.”

  I jump up so fast that the folding chair collapses under me. I walk to the end of the fence out of earshot of the other mothers. “This is Elyse,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” he says. “I just called you, remember?” Then he goes on to tell me that he had Googled me, but he was spelling my name wrong. He thought I’d said Burden, not Bearden, but he kept trying different combinations and finally Google asked him, “Do you mean Elyse Bearden?” And from there he got the name of a gallery in Charleston that carried my pots and called the manager and lied and said he collected me and that he wanted to commission something specific and she’d given him my number. Only that was my home number, and when he called a child had answered and he’d panicked and hung up. Then he checked his cell and got the message from me.

  I am laughing. I don’t know why. Everything he says to me is funny.

  “Have you always been this hard to find?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time anybody looked for me.”

  “Where are you? Can
you talk?”

  “I’m at the ball field. My daughter is only seven but they want her in coach-pitch. It’s the first practice.” The coach releases the ball, and Tory looks up at it, the helmet shifting, dropping, nearly covering her eyes.

  “That’s great,” says Gerry. “Coach-pitch already?”

  “Tell me again,” I say. “Tell me how hard it was to find me,” and he does the whole story all over again, including the Charleston gallery owner’s accent, how she’s always saying “oot” instead of “out” like she’s British royalty or some damn thing. How he normally checks his cell every day but he’d lost the charger, left it in Arizona maybe, and then when he finally bought a new one and got the phone back up he’d had twenty-seven messages, including the one from me. His voice sounds different than I remember and there is something unreal about the situation, something magical and electric. I have never thought before about the science of a ringing phone, but now I am entranced with the miracle of our connection—the idea of satellites above us in the dark of space, releasing signals, wavelengths of impulses bouncing from one solid thing to another, so that the sounds leave his mouth and travel immeasurable distances before they reverberate within my ear. The coach releases the ball and Tory swings, the effort nearly pulling her off her feet.

  “She said you were talented,” he tells me. “She said I’d be smart to get as much of you as I could.”

  “She’s right,” I say. I am standing very straight, gripping the chain-link fence. My posture perfect, as if he can see me.