Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

“Very romantic. Where’s your hand?”

  I look down at my bandaged palm. “You’re always worried about where my hand is.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “I have to be at the school—”

  “Not until 2:05.” He knows my schedule. “I’m not asking you to fly to Europe, I just need five minutes.”

  “I’ve never done phone sex.”

  “We’re not having phone sex. God, that sounds awful. We’re talking, that’s all. Nobody gets in trouble for talking.” An outrageous lie, but I find myself laughing anyway. The clock on my dashboard says 1:15.

  Five minutes later my underwear is stretched down around my knees and my head is flung back against the car seat. He asks if that will hold me for a little while.

  “I think so,” I tell him.

  I call him back that afternoon.

  Chapter Ten

  On Saturday mornings the kids come with us to the track and they play on the swings and climbing forts of the elementary school playground while we walk. Kelly and I are moving fast today, fast enough that we break away from Belinda and Nancy. A group of cheerleaders is practicing in the middle of the loop, building pyramids and collapsing, taking long flipping runs down the field and rounding off.

  “Look at those girls,” I say. “They’re so young and pretty.”

  Kelly sighs. “It’s a long life.”

  Tory has decided she wants to walk with us. She is trotting to stay with our pace but evidently it’s worth it for the chance to be let in on adult conversation. She looks at the girls too, then back at us. “When you and Mommy were cheerleaders did you throw each other in the air?”

  “Not anything like what they’re doing,” Kelly says. “We weren’t gymnasts back then. We didn’t go away to camps and learn fancy stuff. But we did have this one lift…”

  “You lifted Mom?”

  “She lifted me.”

  “Kelly was what we called a flyer,” I say. “I was a catcher so I stayed down below.”

  “Why did they put you on the bottom?”

  “Because your mom was strong enough to pick me up.”

  “Oh, tell her the truth,” I say. “I was always on the bottom because I never had the guts to jump.”

  “You never trusted me to catch you.”

  “It’s true,” I admit. I put two fingers up to my throat to feel for my pulse. “I’ve never trusted anybody to catch me.”

  “You kept making a big deal about that time I dropped Tracy McLeod.”

  “Who’s Tracy McCrowd?” Tory asks, reaching out to hold Kelly’s hand.

  “Some whiny little nobody who completely doesn’t matter. But one time I kind of dropped her and your mom never got over it. I think it was the way Tracy kept limping around school telling everybody that her ankle was broken.”

  “Her ankle was broken.”

  “Tory, do you remember that story you made up when you were little?” Kelly asks, clearly ready to change the subject. We have been walking at this pace for twenty minutes and she is getting a little breathless. “You climbed on my lap and I wrote it down and then your mom put it in your baby book. It was about being a cheerleader.”

  “You wrote it down?”

  “Well, yeah, but I remember it by heart.” We come to a stop as Kelly clears her throat and recites:

  Once upon a time there was born a baby girl.

  She was a ballerina.

  She was a cheerleader.

  Then she was a wiff.

  Then she died.

  Tory frowns. “What’s a wiff?”

  “You were probably trying to say ‘wife,’ ” I tell Tory, smiling at the memory. “But it was kind of strange that you knew ‘ballerina’ and ‘cheerleader’ but you didn’t know the word for ‘wife.’ ”

  “You were so funny,” said Kelly. “I would have written down everything you ever said if I could.”

  Tory nods, as if that would have indeed been a sensible response to her brilliant youth. We begin to walk again and she gazes at the cheerleaders. “Were you and Mommy pretty?”

  “Oh God, we were gorgeous.”

  “And your aunt Kelly could fly.”

  “It wasn’t really flying. It was more like falling.”

  Tory looks up at Kelly. “Will you teach me how to fall?”

  “There’s nothing to teach. You just let go.”

  Tory squints into the little frown she gets when she’s thinking hard. She wants to believe Kelly, but some part of her is unconvinced.

  “It’s not like you’re really learning anything,” Kelly says, staring out at the field, out at the young girls climbing on top of each other. “It’s more like forgetting something. But I’ll lift you up and drop you if you want…”

  “Okay,” Tory says, but her voice is soft.

  “… and your mom can catch you because your mom is the strongest woman in the world. Just ask her.”

  “It’s two different kinds of strength, that’s all.”

  Tory is still not sure. “How high would you fly?”

  “She could do a full inverted pike,” I say. “She was the best.”

  “Do you have a picture of it?”

  I laugh. Typical Tory. She wants proof.

  “I think I can dig one up,” says Kelly, laughing too. “You’ve got to give us a break, Tory. We weren’t always wiffs.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kelly was in love once.

  The man was married. She told me this defiantly one morning when we were sitting in front of our favorite coffeehouse, the one with an Asian-looking patio and Frank Lloyd Wright–style light fixtures. I don’t remember how I felt or what I said. I’d only been married about a year or so myself. I probably told her marriage was a door people walk in and out of, something ridiculous like that. But I must have said enough that she knew I wasn’t going to judge her, that I wasn’t going to frown and ask her just exactly where she thought all this was heading.

  In those days Kelly always seemed to be slightly drunk. Perhaps that’s because I was pregnant with Tory and not drinking myself, so I was in a position to better observe her increasing giddiness. She was telling me about all the men she’d dated during the time we’d fallen out of touch, how sometimes she would give them blow jobs just because she was uncomfortable, and dropping to your knees seemed like a good thing to do when you weren’t sure what to do next. “Isn’t that awful?” she said. “Isn’t that sad?”

  I shook my head because there isn’t a woman alive who at some point hasn’t looked at an erect penis and thought, “Oh Christ, what’s the fastest way I can deal with this?”

  “Yeah, it’s awful,” I said. “It’s awful and it’s sad and it happens all the time.”

  But sex with this new man—it was furtive, ecstatic. It was, she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, sort of a religion. All of a sudden, here at the age of thirty she had met this man and—she flapped her hands around, at a loss to explain it. They were doing everything, they were trying it all. He wanted her to blindfold him. He wanted her to tie him up with some sort of rubber tubing left over from when he’d hurt his back and had physical therapy. They did it in swivel chairs, in cars, on the picnic tables of a park near her house. Once, in a gas station restroom, they ripped the sink completely loose from the wall. “That BP station at the corner of Providence and Rama,” she said. “You know the one?”

  I nodded, so deeply shocked and sick with jealousy that I could hardly hold myself upright in my chair.

  “It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s like it never ends.”

  To prove the point, her phone rang. Kelly was the first person I knew who had a cell phone, and she had one back when they were big and heavy and only worked if you were outdoors and standing on a hill. I always wondered why she would own such a thing, but now it made sense. She fished the phone out of her purse, answered it, and turned toward me as if to include me in the conversation. “No,” she said, “no, I’m with Elyse. She’s right here. It’s okay. She�
�s my best friend and she totally gets it.” A longer pause. She looked at me. “You want to talk to him?”

  I almost shook my head. She might think that I totally got it, but to me it seemed like we were growing farther apart than we’d ever been. Here I was pregnant and driving a minivan that still had that new-car smell and sticker marks on the windows and she’s ripping the sinks out of BP stations. “Do you want me to?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “Talk dirty. You used to be good at that.”

  I guess talking dirty is like riding a bicycle. I sat there and spun out this whole story about him being under the table while she and I were having coffee. I said things I’d never say if I knew him, things I’d never say if I thought he could see me, but it was strangely intoxicating, this disembodied voice of an unknown man coming out of the phone saying, somewhat frantically, “And then what, and then what?”

  Kelly was bent double in a fit of giggles and later she said my story was perfect, that this was his fantasy, two women, and that he was always submissive, always held captive and forced to serve them in some way. We were barely thirty. We were too young to realize that’s what they all want. We believed we’d stumbled on some sort of miracle, how easy it was to taunt this man, how desperate he seemed for every syllable of every promise.

  But then I got nervous. I don’t remember why. Perhaps someone else came out on the patio. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of myself in the coffee shop window and remembered that I was pregnant. I was not one of those pregnant women who glowed. I was perpetually sweaty and queasy with a splotchy face and Phil and I hadn’t had sex for three months, not since the night where I had suddenly, right in the middle of things, turned and thrown up on the bed. Kelly was smiling, leaning across the table and nodding to encourage me on, but when I saw my reflection in the window I stopped talking. The man on the phone was silent. Finally I said, “I hope I haven’t made a bad first impression,” and he said, “Quite the contrary, I don’t ever remember anyone ever making such a good first impression.” I handed her back the phone and said, “He’s adorable.”

  She raised it to her ear, listened a minute, and then smirked at me. “No,” she said. “I told you. Elyse and I are going to the movies. I won’t be back until five.” Then she paused again and said, “No, I don’t think she’d be game and don’t use words like that. It makes it sound like you’re planning to shoot her.”

  In the months that followed, I was the only witness to their affair. Kelly would call, giggly and talking fast, and I would assure her that I wasn’t asleep anyway. I rarely was. And through the restless nights of late pregnancy and the long sessions of breastfeeding that followed I would bend my head to hold the phone in the crook of my neck and I would listen as the words flooded out of her, stories that she told all out of sequence, stories that seemed to have no logical beginning or end. Stories that opened with a mumble of, “My God, I don’t know how to tell you…”

  She would pause sometimes, even in the middle of her wildly careening life, and say, “How was your day?” But, my God, I didn’t know how to tell her. For starters, I often didn’t know what day it was. And while life gives us words for what she was going through, there didn’t seem to be any words for what was happening to me. How can you describe hours where you stare at a baby’s hand or whole days in which you seem to be neither asleep nor awake? Everything around her was risky and sharp, but I was moving into a world without edges. Padding around beds, pillows stacked against fireplaces, locks on cabinets, plastic discs covering the holes in electrical outlets, vaporizers that muffled every sound into a soft dull purr. How could I explain a world in which it was impossible to get hurt? “My day was fine,” I would say. “Tell me more.”

  Of course she couldn’t understand my pillowed life, of course she couldn’t slow down to look around. Of course she had tunnel vision; she was in a tunnel. There is a time to draw back and see the big picture, a time to consider another point of view, but not then. “Do I talk about him too much?” she would ask, and then immediately add, “I know, I know, I talk about him too much.” But these brief moments of lucidity were not enough to slow the process she was being pulled into. Something primordial was happening to her and to ask her to stop and look around would have been like asking a woman in labor if she’d like to discuss politics. She would tell you, quite rightly, that at the moment she had other things on her mind.

  Although I never said this out loud, I couldn’t conceive of any way that Kelly and Daniel would end up together. Marriage is not designed for that kind of passion. It would be like pouring boiling water into a glass pitcher. I imagined Kelly breaking, flying into shards and bouncing in a thousand pieces across my kitchen floor. Part of me wanted to rouse myself from my stupor and tell her to be careful, but another part of me knew that what I called protectiveness was really just envy. Romantic lightning finally hits, after all these years of waiting, and it doesn’t strike me, it strikes the person standing right beside me. Even if Daniel was a cad and an infidel, they were creating some phenomenal stories. And we needed those stories. She needed to tell them, and as I sat in the dark, rocking, with my daughter fussing in my arms, I needed to hear them.

  She was my best friend. It happened to one of us, and so, in a way, it happened to both of us.

  Their plan was actually pretty simple. Daniel would ask for a transfer to St. Louis based on his theory that it would be easier for him and Kelly to start fresh in a new town. When the transfer came through he would tell his wife he wanted a divorce. Clean and quick, just like that. He’d go and his wife would stay here. He’d let her have the house, of course, that seemed only fair. (“There’s always a guilt tax,” he once told me. “But when the time comes you’re more than willing to pay it.”) Kelly would join him a few months later. His wife would never know he’d been having an affair. His kids would never think of Kelly as the evil stepmother who broke up their somewhat happy home.

  He went to St. Louis. He never sent for her. After a week of frantic speculation she finally called him, only to find that his cell number had been disconnected. His company said that he was no longer in their employ. No, he hadn’t left any sort of forwarding address. When we drove past his old house there was a SOLD sign in the yard.

  “The only thing on earth that could possibly make this moment more pathetic,” Kelly said grimly as we sat in the end of the cul-de-sac staring at the empty house, “is if I turned to you right now and told you I was pregnant.”

  I was the one who took her to have the abortion. Tory was five months old by then and I may be the only woman who has ever shown up at an abortion clinic with a baby in her arms. I felt funny sitting there nursing her in the waiting room, so once they called Kelly back I carried Tory outside and walked her back and forth. When the women coming up the sidewalk would see me, they probably thought I was there to stage some sort of protest. The only thing worse than me greeting them with pictures of mangled fetuses was me greeting them with an actual infant. They were mostly girls, really, not women, mostly very young and terrified-looking. For some reason Kelly had insisted on going to the public clinic where the chairs were plastic and there were pamphlets about STDs and domestic violence and AIDS everywhere. Okay, I’d figured, if she’s hell-bent on punishing herself by paying eighty-nine dollars for a cut-rate abortion, the least I can do is sit and wait for her. She’d looked over at one point on the drive there and asked, “How’d you even know how to get here? This is hardly your part of town.”

  “This is where I met Phil,” I reminded her.

  “You met Phil at an abortion clinic?”

  “Of course not.”

  I said it too quickly, my voice too sharp with denial. I took a deep breath, glanced at Tory sleeping in the backseat, then at Kelly’s profile. “He was volunteering at the free dental clinic and my mother asked me to take this kid—”

  “Oh right, I remember,” she said, her voice vague as if she were slipping down the side of something. “The free clinic. T
hat’s where you met Saint Phil.”

  I walked and paced and bounced Tory for over an hour, until I finally saw Kelly emerge from the door, pale and clutching a bottle of orange juice. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said and I strapped Tory in the car seat and drove us all home. We didn’t know that was the only time she would ever be pregnant.

  She suffered for exactly one year.

  She suffered so hard that she scared me. I would call her every morning and I saw her almost every day. She kept Tory when Phil and I went out and each time she came to visit she brought her a gift, wildly impractical dresses and books more suitable for a ten-year-old. And then—a year to the day after I took her to the clinic—she called me and said, “Enough.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Enough.”

  “It’s a long life, Elyse.”

  “I know,” I said. “A very long life. And we have a lot of it left.”

  “Do you know what day this is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why I figured it’s time to say enough.”

  She was true to her word. We very rarely spoke of Daniel and after a while it almost came to seem like she and I had experienced some sort of collective hallucination. When I happened to go into the bathroom at the BP at the corner of Providence and Rama, the sink looked like any other bathroom sink. Kelly got a better job and then an even better one. She began to date other men—handsome men, men with good jobs, men who took her on exotic vacations. I could not count how many now if I tried, largely because in most cases I never knew their names. She and I had a rule that until she had dated a man for a month, I didn’t have to bother to learn his name but rather had permission to call him merely “the boy.” Even now when she and I speak of that time we call it the Year of Many Boys.

  And then one day she said that she was going to marry Mark. She had come to my house to tell me and she had brought something with her, a packet bound with a rubber band. All the letters Daniel had written her during their affair.