Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  I let him brush my hair, buckle my shoes, and thread the earrings through my lobes. We go into the bathroom where I am momentarily shocked by the redness of my face. “You want the works?” he says, and I shake my head. Just lipstick and mascara. He has steady hands, the hands of a dentist, and he darkens my lashes and traces the outline of my lips with a putty-colored gloss. We stand side by side, staring into the mirror. Just for a moment he catches my eye and something passes between us. Something… unmarital.

  I sit on the bed watching silently while he dresses, and just as we start to leave, Phil gets a small silver filigreed key from the bedside table to take the handcuffs off my wrists. It doesn’t fit.

  “Where’d you get these handcuffs?” he asks, his voice suddenly suspicious. “They’re not the ones I gave you.”

  I am flummoxed. When did he ever buy me handcuffs? Surely I’d remember that. For a dizzying moment I think maybe he has me confused with some other woman, some lover he meets in Miami or New York. I do remember seeing the key in the top drawer of my bedside table a while back and wondering what it went to. Phil tries it again and then he tries another key, one from the desk drawer in the kitchen, and finally the blade of his Swiss Army knife. He’s shaking so badly it takes several attempts before he gets the knife anywhere near the slot.

  I am not as upset as Phil. It isn’t like him to speak sharply to me, and he says that if we can’t find the key we’ll have to take a pistol and go in the yard and shoot the handcuffs off. “Or we could call a locksmith,” I say. “Jesus Christ.” We were supposed to be at the party twenty minutes ago. He votes for the gun solution.

  “We don’t have a gun,” I say, but then again I didn’t know we had handcuffs. Apparently there are all sorts of things in this house that I knew nothing about. Phil is distraught, walking back and forth between the kitchen and the den with the Swiss Army knife in his hands. I stand perfectly groomed in my black silk dress and try to think of some way to calm him down.

  It occurs to me the key might still be in the UPS box. “Call Kelly,” I say. “Tell her we’re running late.”

  He nods, relieved to have a task, and while he is on the phone I go out to the cardboard box in the garage, rummage clumsily through the packing peanuts, and finally find a square white envelope. The key is inside, small and filigreed, an uncanny twin to the other. I come back into the house and toss it to Phil. I hold my wrists very still until he gets the handcuffs unsnapped.

  “You don’t really have a gun, do you?” I ask. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He gives a funny little laugh. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “You spoke sharply to me. I didn’t like it.”

  The cuffs spring open. “If you hadn’t found the key,” Phil says, “just exactly how were you planning to explain this to our friends?”

  Whoa,” says Jeff, holding up his palms. “That’s way more than I needed to know.”

  “That’s my wife,” says Phil. “Sometimes she’s absolutely crazy.” But he says it proudly, just like I imagine that he told Lynn I was a pistol, and from the way Jeff flushes when he looks at me I realize that Phil has already told him this story, told it to him on the basketball court or in the sauna of the YMCA. Here in the counseling room of the church Phil has pared it down to a sanitized version, but earlier, in a different setting, I have no doubt that Jeff was given the fuller picture. Me cuffed to my own bed by my own accord, me on my knees and practically begging, me flat on my back and happy to be taking it hard, and now, magically, all our problems are solved. Everything I’ve ever said to Phil has been expunged from the record.

  I could be angry but I should’ve expected as much. When you’ve been married as long as I have you know damn well that sex hits the reset button, and besides, maybe this works for me. I’ve spent so many years trying to get Phil’s attention that I keep forgetting that this is a new game, with different rules. This time I win by persuading him that things are fine. An easier task. When a woman says things are fine, the man always believes her. He’d believe her if she was covered in blood. They think of us as simple creatures who are easily placated by roses and shiny new shoes. Trusting, childlike, easily duped—willing to trade them Manhattan for a handful of beads. Perhaps they’re right. My husband doesn’t understand me. So what? I don’t understand him either, and besides, the fact that he doesn’t understand me has set me free. He can’t see that being sexual with one man doesn’t sate me, it just makes it easier to be sexual with another. He doesn’t know how deep I can go, how relentless I can be. He doesn’t understand that for women there is no natural stopping point to sex.

  Jeff and Phil are smiling in opposite directions and I suspect that if they were indiscreet enough to meet each other’s eyes they’d actually start to giggle. Fine, let them laugh. I should be able to coast on this handcuff incident for quite a while. It’s a story that seems to make everybody happy. Jeff thinks he was right about what women really want. Phil thinks he has his pistol back. And Gerry—because of course I told Gerry, of course I called him the very next day. I’d thought maybe it would make him jealous that I used his handcuffs to fuck my husband, but it didn’t. He just stopped me halfway through the story and said, “Wait a minute,” and then I heard a door close and he said, “Okay, tell me again. From the beginning.”

  Apparently I just can’t get into trouble.

  How does the saying go? The chains of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, and sometimes three. After all, gossip and literature are made up of the unlucky ones, the people who aren’t good at covering their tracks. “You only get caught if you want to get caught,” Gerry tells me. “I bet there are millions of people out there who have secret affairs for years.”

  Jeff smiles at me. I smile back. If Lynn could see us, she would pull me aside and whisper, “This can’t go on forever,” and I would whisper back, “Of course not.”

  But the truth of the matter is I don’t see why it can’t.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I get my pots fired at a kiln about twenty miles from my house, one of those places where they make commemorative coffee cups for businesses and sporting events. I found it one day in the yellow pages and a man answered the phone by saying, “Jesus saves and can I help you?” His name was Lewis and he told me he used to be an artist “in the medium of concrete” but now he pretty much spends all his time running the kiln and doing pulpit supply for the Southern Baptist Church. He said he could fire stuff for me “dirt cheap” on Saturdays—he was sure I could understand why he didn’t work on Sundays—and I got the impression that what Lewis would consider “dirt cheap” I could consider practically free. The first time I drove out there I stopped three times thinking I was lost. You turn off the highway, then you turn off what Lewis called the main road, and then you turn off the dirt road and you drive the last quarter mile following tire tracks through an open field. Charlotte is like this. Make a couple of turns and you’re not only out in the country, you’re back in 1957.

  On the Monday after New Year’s, Lewis calls and says we might have a little problem. He’s never said that before.

  “A little problem like what?” I ask him.

  “They busted.”

  When I get there he greets me with a rectangular cardboard box whose resemblance to a coffin is impossible to overlook. The box is full of broken pieces of ceramic. It’s hard to believe that twenty pots came down to such a small pile of rubble.

  “What were you going to sell them for?”

  “That’s the bad part,” I say. “I’d already sold them. A hundred a pot.”

  “They’re bigger than the ones we usually do, aren’t they?” asks Lewis, who is clearly trying not to cry.

  “It’s not the size, it’s the texture,” I say. “I didn’t use as much grout. It’s not your fault, Lewis, it’s mine. I got fancy.”

  “You can tell they were going to be pretty,” he says, sliding the box into the backseat of my car.


  Yeah. I drive off down the long bumpy gravel road, a driveway I normally take at a crawl to protect my darlings. But today I drive fast, the box of green and copper shards bouncing and tinkling beside me. I am in big trouble.

  Mark’s car is in the driveway when I arrive at Kelly’s house. An unusual occurrence and I glance at the clock. Damn. It’s not even nine. But I’m here and I can’t think of anywhere else to go. Besides, there are vehicles parked in front of the house—landscapers and some sort of stonemasons too, judging by the writing on the side of the truck. I walk up the back steps, the ones that lead to the kitchen, and rap on the glass.

  One of the maids is wiping the counter, the taller one whose name, I think, is Rosa, and she waves at me in a way that seems to be an invitation to enter. I push open the door and am enveloped in music, the easy listening that Kelly plays constantly, that pours through speakers in every room of the house, music that makes it seem like you’re in some sort of eternal waiting room. “Is she here?” I ask and Rosa points toward the ceiling.

  I don’t think I’ve ever walked through this house without Kelly, and it feels like a school in the summer or a museum at night. Hollow and empty, and I remember when Kelly told me she was engaged. She just said, “I’m marrying Mark,” as if this were the most logical thing in the world, as if moving into a gated community was the sort of thing she’d planned to do all her life. No one had met him. She herself, in fact, had only been working for him for three months. “Working under him” was the phrase she used, with a sharp little laugh obviously meant to forestall any questions. There was no polite way to ask why she was doing this. She was the last person on earth who would marry for money, yet there seemed to be no other explanation. Well, maybe one other explanation.

  Right after Kelly moved in, Phil and I came over for dinner. I was nervous. Back then I was still afraid that my friends would see my husband as foolish or unloving and I told many small lies. Sometimes I would pretend it was him on the phone when it was not. If someone said I was wearing a pretty sweater I would smile and tell them that Phil had picked it out. On the drive over I coached Phil on what not to say. It was especially imperative that he not mention their lawn. Phil was obsessed with lawn care and one of the happiest days of his life was the morning we’d awoken to find that the Yard of the Month sign had been hammered into our shrubbery while we slept. But Mark and Kelly had hired a landscape architect and I knew that if Phil started asking him how he got his hedges so even, Mark would say something like, “Our man does it,” and Kelly and I would both have to be ashamed of our husbands, albeit for different reasons.

  Phil didn’t say a word about the lawn but it was still a bad night. Kelly cooked Cornish game hens, something I have never known her to eat before or since, and she led us on a tour of the house, a style Mark had referred to as Tuscany Tudor. “What the hell does that mean?” Phil muttered as we followed her up and down all three flights of stairs, watching her stiffly indicate points of interest along the way: the skylight above the whirlpool tub in the master bath, the humidity-controlled wine storage unit, the built-in shoe racks, the sensory-activated water faucets, the underlighting buried in the sod of the lawn.

  “It’s a frigging starter castle,” Phil said on the ride home, and then, when I didn’t answer, he added, “I guess you think you married a loser.” I told him that I didn’t want all that stuff. That I didn’t understand why Kelly wanted it and that I certainly hadn’t dragged him over there to rub it in his face. “Mark’s a million years old,” I told him. “That’s the only reason they live like they do.”

  Now I walk through this house, hushed and perfect, with the arrangement of tulips and crocuses on the foyer table, the pillows plumped and dimpled on the neighboring chair. It’s pretty, of course it is, and I understand it, of course I do, this need for a husband and a house and tulips on the table. Just minutes earlier, bumping down the rutted driveway that leads away from the pottery, I had found my hand reaching for my cell phone. It’s amazing how automatic it is to call the husband when something goes wrong, amazing how fast my finger goes to the number 2 on my speed dial. It will always be this way. No matter what happens between us, a part of my brain will always cry out for Phil in times of trouble. Years from now, in a bed far from here, I will have a nightmare and awaken screaming his name.

  The marble of the foyer floor is so shiny that I can see the reflection of my legs as I cross. It’s disconcerting, as if I am walking on water, and I call out, “Kelly?” but there’s no answer. Way too early to drop in, I think, but there are breakfast dishes and an abandoned newspaper on the kitchen table. They must be awake. I call her name again and start up the stairs.

  Halfway up the curved steps I enter a zone without music, a spot between speakers, and it is there, floating in that silence between the first and second floor, that I hear the voices.

  They’re arguing.

  No, it’s just Mark’s voice, but he’s angry. One word comes through: “Ridiculous.”

  I freeze in midstep. It’s one thing to hear about your best friend’s fight with her husband after the fact, in a moment of calmer recollection, when she’s had time to edit out the most upsetting parts and maybe think of a few witty observations on the unreasonableness of men. It’s one thing to hear about it at the coffee shop after she has washed her face and put on her makeup and rewritten everything in her mind. It’s quite another to walk into it while it’s happening, to hear the tone in the man’s voice, and to witness, for the first time, the depth of his contempt.

  I could leave, go down the steps and out the door. The odds are that Rosa will never say that I was here. But just as I am doing that, putting my hand on the banister to turn, the double doors at the top of the stairs yank open and Mark is standing there in his underwear.

  I don’t know what had made him mad but my presence seems to confirm something to him, seems to be an illustration of everything he resents about living with a younger woman who has ridiculous hobbies and ridiculous friends who come by too early in the morning. I say I’m sorry, but he has already shut the double doors, and I turn, dash down the steps and back through the kitchen, nearly colliding with the maid. I wrench open the door and see that the stonemason’s truck has pulled into the driveway and blocked me. Great. While I’m telling the guy he’s going to have to back up and let me out, Kelly comes down the front steps and walks across the lawn. She is wearing Mark’s bathrobe.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she says.

  “I really didn’t hear anything.”

  “So you ran out the door for exercise?”

  “I shouldn’t have come this early. I should have called.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I glance toward the car. It seems pointless to show her the broken pottery now, but she has followed my gaze and is heading toward the driveway, rewrapping the robe as she stomps. He talks to her like this all the time, I realize. She’s used to it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have grabbed his robe to come outside—she would have taken the time to find her own. The only thing different about this morning is that I overheard it, and she’s embarrassed, and maybe, on second thought, the best thing I can do right now is show her something that’s going shitty in my own life.

  I pull the box, which is surprisingly heavy, across the backseat and lift the lid. At first Kelly is confused and doesn’t even realize she’s looking at pots, and then she asks me if I was in a wreck and broke them—a question that makes no sense. The men have begun to unload large flat stones from the back of the truck and carry them around the side of the house. They stop for Kelly to inspect one and she nods. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s definitely a rock.”

  “What was going on up there?” I ask.

  “Mark got ticked when he saw the bill for the retaining wall.”

  “Wasn’t that his idea?”

  “He wants me to bring in money, you know, to contribute something. He says he doesn’t know why I’m tired all the time when I don’
t do anything.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. An unfortunate choice of words but it’s already out of my mouth.

  She shrugs, raising her arms and dropping them with an elaborate, almost European nonchalance. “He pointed out that you have a job.”

  “I bet he said, ‘Even goddamn Elyse has a job.’ ”

  “That’s exactly what he said.”

  There have been plenty of times when I wondered why she doesn’t work, but the fact that Mark has suggested this fills me with fury. Mark, who’ll tell anyone who will listen about his stock options and 401(k), Mark who has built this exhausting and time-draining empire of linen suits and forced bulbs and wine cellars and retaining walls. Mark who likes having a younger, thinner, well-buffed wife to squire around at the golf course dinners, and yet he can’t see what Kelly does. Before she arrived this was a queenless empire, just a pile of sad money. Men don’t understand how much energy it takes to pump life into everything, how women live in a state of eternal lactation, a sort of lactation of the soul. She doesn’t do anything? She lights his fucking world.

  “Well,” I say, rocking from one foot to another. The ground is soft beneath our feet and it takes some effort to extricate my heel from the sod. “Goddamn Elyse isn’t going to have a job for long unless she figures out what to do about these pots.”

  “Call the lady in Charleston and tell her you’re going to need more time.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “Why not?”

  I don’t know why not. It just doesn’t feel like an option.

  I push the box back across the seat, listening to the clank of the broken pieces. “You don’t have to do this,” I say, pretending to fuss with the lid so that I don’t meet her eyes.