Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  “I don’t know,” I say. “This fancy hotel room you booked us into doesn’t seem to have a clock.” The bed is gray with afternoon shadows. It’s been hours since he knocked on the door, but I don’t know how many.

  Gerry gets up and roots around in his pants for his watch. It’s a climber’s model and it glows in the dark. “No wonder we’re hungry. It’s almost seven.”

  Exactly twelve hours until he’s leaving. I inhale and exhale slowly, trying not to make the sound of a sigh. “Wear my panties,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Wear my panties and I’ll wear your boxers.”

  “That won’t work.”

  I pull the twisted wad of his navy silk boxers from the bottom of the bed with my foot. I wonder if he wears stuff like this every day to the office or if he bought them special. The shorts pull easily over my hips. “I regret to inform you that they are a perfect fit.”

  “You know, for the record, it does get hot in Boston. You ever been there?”

  I shake my head.

  Gerry moves closer. “We could get room service,” he says.

  “No, I want to be with you in public. I want to put on clothes and sit up straight and look across a table at you with other people there.”

  “Can you do it again before we go?”

  “Girls can always do it.” I’m going to be sore tomorrow.

  “Yeah,” he says softly, leaning across the bed to thump me with his thumb and index finger, traveling from my collarbone down to my navel, and stopping just short of the elastic waist of his boxer shorts. “Yeah, I’d say you’re just about ready.”

  At the restaurant they tell us it will be fifty minutes before they have a table. Many men would be dismayed and demand that we go somewhere else, but this is something I’ve noticed about Gerry, that he is always willing to wait. We put in our name and take the buzzer and walk across the street to kill time in a Restoration Hardware. I like Restoration Hardware. The music is soothing and the salespeople are nice. They have coiled hoses and brass kickplates, heavy lovely dishes and leather chairs. They sell marriage.

  Gerry is standing across the store from me, looking at books. He is frowning, his face intense. When I walk up to him he shows me a recipe for coq au vin cooked over a campfire. He also has a basketful of some old-fashioned bay rum soap and he tells me that just seeing the wrapper reminded him of his grandfather. “This is what a man is supposed to smell like,” he says, holding out a bar for me to sniff. “This is a smell you can trust.”

  He pays in cash. We link arms as we leave the shop. I like the fact that he is so much taller than me, and when I put my arm through his he almost pulls me behind him. I stumble a couple of times because he takes long strides. His wife must be closer to his height, I think, or else they do not often walk arm in arm. We pass our reflection in the window. We are a handsome couple.

  The next morning he will leave very early. His flight is hours before mine and I tell him to wake me. He doesn’t want to. There is no reason for me to get up before dawn to see him off, he says, and he would rather leave with the image of me sleeping in the plush white bed. I suspect he doesn’t have the stomach for goodbyes or questions about when I will see him again. “I promise I won’t make a scene,” I tell him. “Please get me up.” And yet the next morning I will awaken alone to muffled noises from the maids in the hall. He will have left me the breakfast menu on his pillow, along with a bar of the bay rum soap.

  But I don’t know any of this as we go in to dinner. I can’t see the future and this is my great gift. I only see us happy, handsome, our arms linked as we walk, our outlines reflected in the windows of expensive stores. I see him jumping, laughing as the buzzer in his pocket goes off, us escorted to a booth, us bending over our menus, deciding to begin with a plate of mussels. I tell him stories about me and Kelly at the drive-in and he quotes me lyrics of a song he wrote back in the seventies for the first girl he ever loved.

  “She broke my heart,” he says.

  “She’s probably dead by now,” I tell him. “Or she should be.” He smiles and for a minute there in the restaurant we expand and the air around us shimmers with possibility. He pushes the last mussel toward me, just like Tramp gave Lady the last meatball. That was my favorite movie when I was a little girl.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sex can save you. You’re not supposed to say this, but it’s true. After I get back from New York, I am high for three solid days. I send him an e-mail, the entire text of which reads, “I am happy.”

  I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to go into therapy and work on your issues. You’re supposed to journal and do yoga and breathe deeply. You’re supposed to go somewhere very blank and plain—a beach house perhaps, in a town where you don’t know anybody and the walls of the house are all white without a single picture. Or instead you go to Ireland with a group of women, and everyone wears homespun shifts and eats nourishing root vegetables and the sky is perpetually on the verge of rain. Or maybe India. Probably India. That or Nepal. The point is you must journey somewhere far away and stay gone for a very long time. Happiness is tough. It requires silence and solitude and contemplation. And then maybe, somewhere in year seven or year fifteen or twenty-two, happiness comes to you. Maybe not. I know that’s how it’s supposed to be. I know you’re not supposed to use men like shortcuts and off-ramps, I know that, and yet if I had to count the times that sex dragged me back to life versus therapy or religion or meditation or the love of good friends, it wouldn’t even be close.

  * * *

  I’m not sure how men know when they’re better, but when women recover from something they cut their hair. On the third day after New York I wake up, walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror and think, “It’s time to cut my hair.”

  8 a.m.: I call the most expensive salon in town and they say that Antonio has an unexpected opening. They assure me that I’m very lucky—apparently, this rarely happens. When I arrive they bring me Italian Vogue and bottled water and drape a long aromatherapy pillow around my neck. When Antonio asks me to describe my vision, I tell him I want a haircut that makes me look good when I’m lying flat on my back. He makes that European sound, something between a snort of derision and an exhalation of cigarette smoke, but he’s very careful with my hair, snipping my bangs three times to get the layers just right. Later he tells me he’s from Tennessee.

  10:40: With my hair swishing around my chin, I go to buy wrapping paper for Belinda’s birthday present. This takes longer than expected, because I am transfixed by the beauty of the Hallmark store. Everything seems as strange and exotic as if I were back in the Chinese shop in Chelsea wandering among the dusty jade statues and bins of dark aromatic teas. I walk up and down the aisles and finally, after much consideration, I buy ballerina-blue tissue paper and thin, serrated ribbons that you can curl with the edge of a scissor. That will do for Belinda, but I also take a ball of rough twine, two red silk boxes filled with confetti, a velvet bag tied with a gold cord, a shiny silver cylinder, and olive green paisley paper. All bought with no plan for how or when I will use them. I run my hands along the displays and touch the points of the satin bows as if they were sea anemones, capable of recoiling at my touch. I had forgotten that life had this much texture.

  11:20: I buy thirty pounds of potting soil from Wal-Mart, take it home, drag it into the backyard, and plunge a steak knife into the belly of the bag. I collect all the pots that aren’t quite right to sell and then I take my houseplants outside. There, one by one, I pull each from its container, exposing the tangled white roots to the air. I’m hit with a sudden, nearly blinding wave of guilt. The roots on some of the plants are interwoven so deeply that it’s clear they’ve needed larger pots for a long time. After the rooted ones I move on to the bulbs, yanking at the base of each stem until there is this soft little sigh and the soil releases the flower into my dirty hands.

  The bulbs are my favorite anyway. They have always s
eemed to me like small miracles, the way they have the power to regenerate themselves, to push up time and again through the soil. They have slept so patiently all summer and fall in my garage, their pots covered in cobwebs. I hold each one in my hand and imagine I can feel its small beating heart and I bury them back into much larger pots, cover them with fresh soil and a sprinkle of water, leave them with a small prayer of apology for the neglect they have suffered. At one point I become quite emotional about the whole thing. I have to stop and lie down in the hammock and cry. I figure that if Phil asks me that night why I’m not wearing my wedding rings I can say, “I spent the afternoon repotting plants,” but as it turns out he doesn’t ask.

  12:40: Afterwards I’m smeared with potting soil so I go into the house to take a bath. At the last minute I squirt a dollop of bath gel into the water. This bottle of Vitabath has been in the bathroom cabinet for years but I can’t remember who gave it to me or what I was saving it for. It falls from the bottle with a big gelatinous thud and makes the bottom of the tub so slick that when I step in I slide straight down and make a splash. The sound of my laughter surprises me and I look up, thinking maybe somebody else has come into the room.

  1:30: For lunch I stop by a sports bar near the mall and order a draft beer and chicken wings. The beer is so cold that with the first swallow I feel an icepick stab in the back of my brain. I’ve brought a big heavy book with me, one of those classics you always mean to read but never do. I keep a pen in my hand so that I can underline anything that strikes me as particularly interesting or well written—it’s a quirk left over from my days in graduate school. I used to be smart. I used to be able to remember things. Now I am just a woman who has cats with clever names. But today everything strikes me as significant and I am underlining nearly every sentence. It’s like I’m wearing 3-D glasses and the page is no longer flat—some words seem to be moving toward me and others are receding.

  The bartender asks me if I have everything I need. People are always asking me these sorts of questions: How you doing today, ma’am? What are you looking for? Ready for a refill? Would you like to see those in another color? Did we save room for dessert? When you have this much, people can’t seem to stop themselves from asking if you need a little more.

  “I’m fine,” I tell the bartender, but the truth is I am starving—greedy, ravenous, greasy and vulgar with appetite. The wings are great, charred and spicy, and I go through three cups of the blue cheese dressing. It’s like the first time I’ve tasted food in months. It’s like food is a secret that only I have discovered. Enough, enough, enough, who can say what is enough? I have a daughter and a home and a husband and a lover and my pots and my books and my cats and one true friend and this should be enough, but if I knew how to count to enough I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

  I close my eyes and wonder how long this manic joy can continue. I’ve been a wild woman for days, screaming out the letters on Wheel of Fortune, pouring the pancake batter in the shapes of ships and bunnies, just like my dad used to do. Pancakes were vehicles of vision for him, sort of like a Rorschach test, and he believed you could read a person based on what they saw in the swirls of batter and syrup. My father would make pancakes for me every Saturday morning, and I suddenly miss him so much that I put my hands over my face and feel tears rising for the second time that day.

  “What are you reading?” asks the bartender.

  “Ulysses.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says. “How about some key lime pie?”

  Tory has noticed the change in me but she is still young enough to notice things and not wonder at the reasons behind them. Besides, she likes this new mommy who takes her on walks to waterfalls and lets her get the whole front of her shirt wet. This mommy who sings Motown in the car, who screams “Olé!” every time the light turns green, who says we can skip the vocabulary words just this once. This happy mommy who slaps misshapen pancakes onto her breakfast plate and asks, “Now just what does that look like to you?”

  Okay, I get it, you’ve been high as a kite for a week,” Kelly says. “What happens after this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”

  “I don’t want to see you get hurt.” We’re sitting on the patio outside our favorite coffeehouse, the one with the Frank Lloyd Wright light fixtures. All the tables were taken so we have dragged three chairs to the only shady spot and now we sit facing each other with our feet propped on the seat between us.

  “You’re the one who told me I should have an affair.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “But you were right.”

  “When are you going to see him again?”

  “It’s one of those Zen things. It happens when it happens.”

  “Oh shit, you’re getting ready to fall in love, I can hear it in your voice.”

  Gerry is not my life, I tell her. We plan to see each other once a month, in different cities, a pace that we have agreed shows continuity but not obsession. Tory will never know he exists. Phil doesn’t know anything, doesn’t have to know. It’s just once a month. Gerry is not my life, I tell her. I hold my hands apart to show her what a small part of my life he is. He is about the size of a fish.

  “You’re dreaming,” she says. Kelly has this way of half sitting, half lying in chairs with her knees flexed and her legs slightly open so that she always looks as if she’s just made love. As if her lover has just risen up and walked away from her. “I can’t even figure out what you did that was worth a six-hundred-dollar hotel room.”

  “I think it was a matter of how many times I did it.”

  “Think he’ll ever be available?”

  “Available?”

  “Unmarried.”

  I shake my head. “There was Paxil in his duffle bag. I saw it when he got out this special shampoo he brought.” I look away from her, suddenly shy. “He washed my hair.”

  “He washed your hair.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He brought a special shampoo to wash your hair.”

  “Why is that so hard to believe? It can’t be you every time, Kelly.”

  “What’s Paxil?”

  “It’s what they give you when you’ve been on Zoloft so long that the Zoloft’s stopped working. Look, he’s depressed, and he has been for years. He’s where I’d be if I let the first doctor who ever wanted to put me on drugs actually put me on drugs.” And I know it’s true. As long as he’s taking those pills, Gerry is never going to get up a big enough head of steam to actually break out of this life. He’s not contented enough to stay, he’s not miserable enough to leave. He’s in that gray band between the two, vibrating in some frequency that only the unhappily married can hear.

  “Do you think he washed your hair because he saw it in a movie?”

  “Probably,” I say, remembering the warm trail of suds running from my shoulder blades down my spine, Gerry’s careful, climb-callused hands cupped above my brow to shield my eyes as he rinsed. When a man puts Paxil and sandalwood shampoo into a duffle bag and spends six hundred dollars for a hotel room just so he can wash a woman’s hair it only means one thing. That he’s a thoroughly married man.

  Kelly lifts her feet off the shared chair, balances her coffee mug on one of the light fixtures, and bends forward. I follow suit until our foreheads are nearly touching. Despite everything we’ve been through and all the years we’ve been friends, Kelly and I frequently don’t understand what the other one is talking about. It’s not like we think alike. We never have. We are friends of the body. If I asked her to go with me to the bathroom and change shirts, she’d do it, no questions asked. If she took off running toward me right now, her arms outstretched and her feet in a stutter step, I’d drop my cup of coffee and catch her in mid air, without hesitation. Because the body, it remembers everything.

  “How does he call you?”

  “On the cell.”

  “What’s the code to retrieve your messages?”

  “
1-2-3.”

  She frowns. “You might want to think about changing that.”

  I take her hands between mine and squeeze them. It’s a game we used to play where she’d press her palms together and chop the air up and down between my hands and I would try to trap her. She was too quick for me back in high school but today she is preoccupied and I catch her easily. We sit for a moment like this, hands meshed.

  “It would probably be smart to slow it down,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe like talking once a week instead of every day.”

  “Right.”

  “It would be easy to let things accelerate, but that’s dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “Because when you’re in these situations, like, you know, getting in planes and going places and somebody washing somebody’s hair… you’ve got to be careful because sometimes people start feeling things.”

  “I know, baby,” I say.

  Winter

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kelly and I went to different colleges and spent our single-girl years in different cities. When she talks about this time in our lives, the years between eighteen and twenty-seven, she always says that our paths were diverging. She likes the word “diverging.” She likes to say it out loud, extending every syllable, but the truth of the matter is I don’t know that our paths ever diverged. Wouldn’t that imply that she was out of sight? She was never out of sight.

  I was living in Baltimore, teaching art and sleeping with an artist when, out of nowhere, I was swept away in a tide of baby fever. This sort of thing happens to women in their late twenties, everyone knows it, but I didn’t expect it to happen to me. I’d never played with dolls as a child or babysat as a teenager but suddenly I found myself in supermarkets staring at other people’s children. “Excuse me,” I would say, “but how old is that baby? Is it a boy or a girl?” It was like remembering a past life, one I’d spent in a hut by the sea with a wooden bowl for grinding corn and long strips of bright cloth tied around my hair, a life where I had babies one after the other, always pregnant or nursing. It was all I could go toward. It was like I was possessed, caught in some sort of lunar pull.