Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  I called Nancy and said, “Should I give her juice?” and Nancy said no, Belinda was funny about introducing sugar, and I said, “Do you have any formula?” and Nancy said, “Well, yeah, but you need to check with Belinda first. I think this one needs soy because she’s lactose-sensitive.”

  I could barely hear her above the two screaming babies. “I can’t call Belinda,” I said. This was the days before everybody had cell phones, the days when mothers could be truly gone, at least for an hour. “I don’t even know where she is.”

  “Maybe she’ll look in the backseat and realize what she’s done,” said Nancy, but by then Belinda had been gone too long to hope for that. If she’d seen the diaper bag she’d already have come back.

  “Then you’re just going to have to let her cry it out,” Nancy said, in that cool way she has. “It’s not going to kill a baby to go without eating for a couple of hours.” But if you’ve ever been with a hungry baby for a couple of hours you know what that means. Courtney frantically clawed the air with her fists and wailed in deep, heartbreaking sobs. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I stuck Tory into her bouncy swing and took Courtney into the bathroom where I sat down on the closed toilet seat and guiltily took out my breast. Now Courtney sits high on my lap, kicking my shins with each swing of her legs. Nancy evidently went overboard on the instructions to the shepherds because when the part comes where the Angel of the Lord appears roundabout them and they are sore afraid, the boys begin to stagger around, some of them clutching their chests and dropping backward as if they’ve been shot. The congregation is laughing openly now. There is a great simultaneous click of cameras.

  Six years ago I sat on the toilet seat and Belinda’s baby took a couple of deep gulps, shuddered with relief, and then went limp. She was so worn out with her weeping that she was asleep within minutes. I heard my kitchen door opening and I eased my nipple from the baby’s mouth, now slack and moist with milk, and jerked my blouse closed. Belinda was standing in the kitchen when I emerged. She said she couldn’t believe she’d done that. She was an idiot. How had I managed, how had I coped? I knew how hard it could be to get away for an afternoon and now she was nearly in tears. She’d blown it. She’d realized her mistake just after the shampoo and she’d pulled off the plastic smock and walked out and now she was going to have to start all over again, lining up people to keep three kids and swapping off favors with half the women in the neighborhood. I said the baby had fretted for a minute but then dozed right off. I never told Belinda what I’d done, something worse than sleeping with her husband, and I wouldn’t confess it to her now, although, to be honest, it’s the only time in all the years we’ve known each other that I’ve been any real kind of friend to her at all.

  The angels come forward, lifting their arms, and begin to sing a sweet shaky carol. Tory is near the middle and she glances at us to make sure that we’re where we always sit and then she turns her full attention to Megan, the choir director who has saved her marriage and expanded her house. Tory’s face is serious and beside me Phil shifts a little in his pew, as if his body is taking on the weight of her anxiety. “She knows the song great,” I whisper, and he nods, but his eyes never leave his daughter.

  The angels gaze down into the manger where the role of Baby Jesus is being played by a forty-watt lightbulb. Where is Mary Magdalene in this pageant? I think, and then I remember that no, of course she would not be here. She would be a baby herself at this time—a baby girl in the midst of Herod’s reign of infanticide, unimportant and thus totally safe. It would be years before she grew up and met the man who saved her and thrust her into danger. I think of the picture in the ladies’ room, the expression that I interpreted as desire but which could just as easily have been fear. Because they look alike, don’t they? The same parted lips, entreating arms, slightly glazed eyes. What was she looking at? Or, more likely, who was she looking at?

  Phil slides his arm along my back, drapes it over my shoulders. Tory’s face is reflected in the dim light of the glowing manger and I smile at her although I know she probably can’t see me. There are illusions all around us, some more persuasive than others, and despite what I say, I don’t really believe that you can step out just a little. My foolish assertion that marriage is a door you walk in and out of… my comfortable myth that you can leave, look up and say, “Oh, it’s raining,” and dash back in. In my heart, I know better. Out is out. You are exiled to the bathroom. You are glimpsed picking up trash by the road. Or worse, they treat you with that soul-killing gentleness—driving you to parties, insisting that it’s their turn to pay for lunch, talking to you in that bright slow voice that people save for small children or the recently diagnosed. The music fades and Courtney wiggles across my lap. I shush her as if she were my own daughter, with the casual entitlement we all share, that sense of a common ownership in each other’s children, each other’s homes, each other’s fates. Think of all the things you’re risking, Gerry told me. Think of them all. People here have loved me. Perhaps they love me still, but that doesn’t mean I won’t lose them. I might make the first change voluntarily, but the others will find me on their own.

  When I was a teenager my grandmother used to tell me, “You marry the man, you marry the life,” and it seems to me logical, perfectly ordinary karma, that the reverse is also true. If I leave this man then I must leave this life. I squint through the candlelight at the tallest angel, the one who has reluctantly come to tell the good news.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The package hits my front stoop with a thud. I open the door to see the UPS truck pulling out of the driveway.

  I call Gerry. “Thank you,” I say.

  “Did I have a choice? When we were in Miami, you ripped my best tie.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You opened them, didn’t you?”

  “Them? There was only one box.”

  “You didn’t open it?”

  “No. I assumed this was my Christmas present.”

  There is a silence on the other end, just long enough to make it clear he has never thought about sending me a Christmas present.

  “That’ll be there next week,” he finally says. “In the meantime, I want you to know that I’m a man who honors his debts. The Panthers beat the Patriots, fair and square.”

  Now I understand. He has bought me handcuffs.

  “I didn’t think you’d send them.”

  “I said I would.”

  “I didn’t think you’d send them here.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  What’s the matter? Doesn’t he see how easily, how casually, he could fuck up my whole life? I stretch the phone cord into the kitchen, look at the small square brown box on the counter. “I don’t want you to call me on this line again,” I say. “You know it’s dangerous. Use the cell.”

  “Don’t do this.” He doesn’t remind me that I called him. He doesn’t want us to have two bad conversations in a row. Something like that can jettison a relationship as fragile as ours.

  I know this too, but I’m still upset. “You just don’t send something like that to a woman’s home. You’ve crossed a boundary.”

  “Well, excuse me if I don’t know exactly where the boundaries are. You were fine about getting a box at your home when you thought it was a Christmas gift.”

  “What if I had opened it in front of Tory or Phil? What if I thought it was something I’d ordered for Tory?”

  “You wouldn’t have done that. Look at the address. I sent it to your maiden name.”

  “Shit, that’s the one thing that would draw even more attention to it. The one thing that would make Phil open it.”

  “According to you, he’s never there. According to you, you spend every day alone.”

  “Are you going to be here to pick up the pieces?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You take evidence that I’m having an affair and you wrap it up and ship it to my house. So I’
m asking you—when I lose my child and when I lose my home are you going to be there to pick up the pieces?”

  “You said you were leaving him.”

  “I am. On my own time frame and when I’m ready. Not forced out because some man in Boston has decided to be a total idiot.”

  “It was a joke, Elyse. You thought it was funny as hell when we were in Miami.”

  “I confide in you and I trust you and then you tell me everything’s a joke.”

  “It’s not a joke. It’s just the day I was ordering them… I was having a bad day, that’s all. I didn’t think about your daughter. It made me feel good to go on the Internet and pick them out.”

  “I’m throwing them away.”

  “Fine. If you feel like that, I think you should. And, just for the record, I don’t think you’re ever going to walk out that door. You like talking about it. You think it makes you tough.”

  “I’m going to hang up the phone now. I’m going to hang up the phone without saying goodbye.”

  “Yeah, do that. I’m not going to say goodbye to you either.”

  I put the phone down and the stretched cord pulls it off the counter and across the hardwood floor, bouncing loudly back toward the bedroom. The sound is strangely satisfying. I pick up the box. It’s light, mostly packing materials. He says it’s a joke. He says it’s not a joke. I turn the carefully wrapped brown cube over and over in my hands. Pascal, who likes boxes, jumps up on the counter to watch me. When did I tell him my maiden name? I’ve told him too much and there’s always the question—the question of how far to let Gerry in. He knows my address. He knows my social security number. He knows the hours that my husband works, the time my daughter leaves for school, the amount of money I have in the bank, the way I like to be kissed and how many pots I have left before I’ve honored the Charleston order. The box is very light, almost as if nothing is in it. It’s almost as if he has sent me a box of air.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Look at this,” I say to Phil, dangling the handcuffs in front of his face.

  He is immediately intrigued. “What are those?”

  “Handcuffs, silly.”

  “I know, but… are they for you or for me?”

  We are in our bedroom, getting ready for Kelly’s New Year’s Eve party. I’ve been at her house all day, shucking oysters and wiping out champagne glasses.

  Phil and I are alone. He has already driven Tory to Nancy’s house where she and Jeff have hired a couple of teenagers from the church to keep the kids overnight. There are eleven of them in total and they are having their own party. Nancy has rented movies and ordered pizzas and moved the ping-pong table from the garage into the house. So now the adults can stay out as late as they want without worrying. The funny thing is, it’s not New Year’s Eve. We are so cautious that we do not like to stay out all night on this alcohol-sodden holiday. We like to spend the real eve at church, with our children beside us, lighting candles in a watchnight service. Our revelries, such as they are, take place on some random night between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s one thing our circle has always agreed on.

  My new red dress lies across our unmade bed. I carefully push it aside and climb over the mattress to the headboard. If Gerry wants to send them to my house, then damn it, I’ll use them in my house. I snap one end of the handcuffs around my right wrist, weave the short chain around the bedpost, and snap the other end on my left wrist. “Oh dear,” I say. “I seem to be held captive.”

  Phil is smiling slightly, his hand running along the top of the towel tied around his waist. “What are you doing?”

  It is, of course, a pivotal moment. Only two months ago that same question sent me to the closet in tears. I have always felt so vulnerable when I’ve tried to be sexy with Phil. A single word of sarcasm, a single suggestion that this isn’t how he sees me, and normally it would all be over. But something has shifted between us. I no longer care what he’s thinking. This, after all, is merely a rehearsal. I close my eyes, toss my head back and forth like some beautiful victim in a movie, and say, “I couldn’t get away even if I tried.”

  It is a faux capture, of course. At any point I can rise up on my knees and simply slip my wrists over the top of the bedpost. But something in my helplessness, feigned or not, seems to excite him. He climbs onto the bed behind me, pulling off the towel.

  “Am I the good guy or the bad guy?”

  “What do you think?’

  His voice is low, almost as if he is talking to himself. “I think I’m bad.” I look over my shoulder. He’s already hard.

  “Punish me,” I say. “You know you want to.”

  That’s all he needs. He is on me with one move, entering me from behind so roughly that my knees slide from the bed and the upper half of my body is hanging in mid air from the bedpost. I struggle to get one foot on the floor. “Watch it,” I say. “We’re going to break the bed.” Even though I have invited it, I’m surprised by the fierceness of his assault.

  “Watch it,” I say again, but he’s gone deaf with his own pounding. He hits my cervix and a shudder runs through my body. I jerk my hips—no, that isn’t right. I don’t jerk my hips. My hips jerk of their own volition, jerk to the left and for a second I almost dislodge him. My mind is scattered all over the place. We’ve never been like this together, not even back in the early days, and what was it Jeff asked me last week? He asked me what I thought femininity was and I said it’s a willingness to be penetrated. Phil gets us aligned and rams into me again, this time with so much authority that I can’t help but bow my back and push my head up like a porn star.

  A willingness to be penetrated. It’s a good answer, but I’m not sure Jeff understood what I meant. I wasn’t talking about being penetrated by a penis, but by the whole world. Noticing the way the flowers fall against the side of the vase, that’s feminine—yes, come to think of it, maybe that was where I waded into this river, back in that restaurant in Phoenix when I only thought I was brave to eat alone and I didn’t see the future, couldn’t have seen how it would pick me up and wash me away. I never finished Ulysses. I just skipped to the end where Molly Bloom becomes lost in this stream of yes, yes, yes… and that’s what we’ve all been talking about all along, isn’t it, this wave of yesness, this prayer that begins with the words “fuck me,” this absolute joy that comes in the moment where you let your life go? “I didn’t read the whole book,” I mumble, sounding just like Belinda, but Phil doesn’t seem to be listening, and besides it isn’t just fuck me, it’s like wear me down, erase me, grind me off the page and let me start all over. I exhale and animal air comes out of my body.

  And then there is the sudden sensation that someone else has entered the room. Yes. We’re being watched. I twist around to look over Phil’s shoulder.

  “Who are you looking for?” he asks, his voice rough and breathless. I turn a little more, try to focus on the doorframe.

  “We’re the only ones here,” says Phil, who’s picked a damn funny time to start reading my mind. He grabs me under the hips and flips me onto my back. My wrists are crossed now and stretched straight over my head so that I am like a martyr on the rack and it occurs to me that in this position I really couldn’t get away, even if I tried. Each time he lifts my hips toward him I am stretched a bit farther down the bed until my armpits ache and the handcuffs cut into my hands. I shut my eyes, then open them again and then close them. He presses his fist against my pubic bone to help me come, and I grind hard against his hand. Phil watches me with narrow eyes.

  “Are you a slut?” he says. “Are you a whore?”

  “You know I am,” I say. “I betray you with other men. I bring them to the house and fuck them when you’re not home.”

  He roars and begins to pump so hard that I am driven farther up the bed with each thrust until my face is crammed against the headboard. It would be comic… all these circus noises that are spilling from his throat, how he’s pulled me first one way and then pulled me the other. It would
be comic… if my head wasn’t being pounded, if my wrists weren’t aching, but I manage to lift myself into a better position. and just as I do, it’s there. A strange, dark sort of orgasm that falls over me like a curtain drops at the end of a play. When I open my eyes I see that Phil is arching his back and pulling out of me, shooting across my stomach as if we were teenagers without protection. As if I truly were a whore.

  Afterwards we’re both a little stunned. We don’t talk. He is gentle, careful with me. He helps me turn back over and slide my hands up the bedpost until I am free. Or mostly free. My wrists are still tethered. At some point we must have rolled onto my new red dress because there is a dark smear across the skirt. I walk to the closet and pull out another one, a loose black shift that fastens with two bone buttons on the shoulders.

  “You’re going to have to dress me.”

  “I don’t know how to dress a woman.”

  “Figure it out.”

  I saw this once in a movie, a man dressing a woman after sex, rolling up her hose and buttoning her blouse, and it struck me as so sensual, so the opposite of what sex usually is, that the image has always stayed with me. Phil didn’t see that particular movie, but he seems to warm to the idea nonetheless. He rouses himself and climbs off the bed. He takes the black dress and, with some instruction from me, holds it low where I can step into it and then he pulls it up and fastens it, one button at a time, on each shoulder.