Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  I have now been married for ten years.

  The general consensus is that we should do something special to mark the milestone. Ten’s big.

  “Europe maybe,” Phil says to a clump of people as we’re leaving church on the Sunday before our anniversary. We have never discussed Europe. Not seriously, at least. “But of course,” he goes on, as everyone murmurs how nice that will be, “we’ll have to wait for summer.”

  “Where in Europe?” someone asks. A guy on the basketball team.

  “Elyse has always wanted to go to Italy,” Phil says.

  I’ve been to Italy. I spent a semester there in college and Phil well knows that, or at least he used to know that. But everyone on the steps of the church seems to think that going to Italy is a great idea. Tuscany maybe. We can rent a car. Everyone says it’s so beautiful. The food is fabulous, and the art—wouldn’t I like to see all that art? Well of course, who wouldn’t, I say, although the thought of driving through Italy with this man, this man who forgets everything (except, of course, the times I’ve screwed up)… the very thought of driving through Italy with this man sounds like hell.

  A woman tells me I’m a lucky girl.

  I smile.

  In the meantime we go to an Italian restaurant. You have to do something to mark ten years, even if your marriage is caving in around you. I give him a camera. He gives me a tape series called Conversational Italian. The owner of the restaurant brings over a free tiramisu.

  And then we go home and get into bed. He scoots toward me and begins. It’s anniversary sex—like he’s giving it a little more than usual. He wants to kiss me but I have become a master of positioning bodies in bed—not just the X shape, but also asking Phil to do it from behind. “It’s deeper that way,” I tell him, which he readily accepts, so there’s no need to add that the true advantage of this position is that I cannot see his face. But tonight he has an agenda of his own. I let him kiss me once and then I break away and slide my head down the length of his torso. Perhaps he will think I am going to go down on him. Perhaps he will think I want to cuddle. Either way he will not stop me and I pause there, somewhere on the solid ground of his chest, and close my eyes.

  Between the wine and the garlic and the faint acridity of his underarm is a smell that is both familiar and unfamiliar. I freeze. Really inhale.

  I ask him if he’s wearing cologne and he says no, but he found some new soap under the sink and thought it smelled good, that it smelled like something his grandfather used to use. Yeah. Yeah. He’d found the bar of bay rum soap from the Restoration Hardware in New York. I don’t know how. I’d hidden it under the sink behind the big wall of toilet paper and sometimes I would take it out and smell it.

  But now, lying here on Phil’s chest, the bay rum makes me confused and disoriented, like you sometimes become when driving a familiar road. A road you drive day after day, but then one afternoon—and who knows why—you look up and you think, “Where am I?” And there’s that moment of panic, that feeling that you’re lost right here in the middle of the familiar. The scent on Phil’s skin is faint, but I know what it means. I am cheating on my lover with my husband.

  Because here, in this moment… The smell of bay rum, the feel of a nipple against my cheek, the reality of the larger form beneath me and I think, just for this moment, that all men are alike in the dark. I remember Kelly laughing at me about the twins at the drive-in, Kelly asking, “What makes you think they didn’t switch us?” Teasing me for being so slow to figure out what she’d known at sixteen. Kelly laughing at me in book club, saying to the other women, “We’ve all got to be kind to Elyse. She’s our romantic. She thinks if she was with a different man she’d be a different woman.” The others had laughed too. Is that all a romantic is? I still want to believe it, that one man is different from another, that I am different with one man than I am with another, but the smell of bay rum soap has confounded me and made me unsure, for just a moment, of where I am or who I am with.

  “I don’t like it,” I say.

  “What?”

  “That soap. I don’t like it.”

  Phil lifts his head, cranes his neck to look at me. “Then why did you buy it?”

  “I don’t know how it got there but I don’t like it. Please.” I push against him. “I think I’m allergic.”

  “You’re not allergic to anything.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Phil drops his head back to the pillow. “Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll throw it out.”

  I’ve been too harsh. I drag my hand across his shoulders, a conciliatory gesture, and try to think of something that will please him. “The coach wants Tory to catch,” I tell him.

  “Catch? Does that mean he’s thinking of starting her?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this? That’s phenomenal news, especially considering she’s the youngest on the team. Is she pleased?”

  “Not really. She thinks catching is kind of a second-rate position, but I told her I’d been a catcher and—”

  “You never played softball.”

  “I mean I was a catcher in cheerleading. I caught the other girls.”

  “That’s ironic.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m not trying to start.” He pushes off the bed. “I’ll take a shower but you need to get in with me. Come on. Get up. It’s our anniversary. That has to be worth something.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Mark’s smoking again,” Kelly says. It’s the one thing she can’t tolerate. At first he was doing it out on the deck, and then he moved it into the den, and last night, he did the unthinkable. He brought a cigarette into their bedroom.

  “He said this was his house and he’d do what he wanted, can you imagine?”

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “He’ll cave.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because he says I give the best blow jobs of any woman he’s ever known.”

  We’re in her kitchen making soup. It’s something we do every few months—get together and make large batches of four or five kinds of soup. Then we divvy it up, freeze it in small square Tupperware containers, and eat away at it until it’s time to do it again. Making the soup is my favorite domestic ritual. Kelly puts on Miles Davis in the background, and now, after so many seasons of doing this, we have a system. I sit at the end of the counter with a small paring knife, a panorama of cutting boards, and all the vegetables and meats piled up around me. I like to chop. Kelly mans the burners, the recipes we’re working on that day lined up along the countertop between us, although we’ve been through the soup cycle so many times that at this point recipes are a bit of a formality.

  “What exactly do you do?” I ask her. Men have told me I’m good but nobody’s ever told me I’m the best he’s ever had.

  “There’s nothing to it, really. You just lie flat on the bed and let you head hang off the end. It turns your throat into a long, straight canal.” Kelly demonstrates, throwing her head back like she’s going to scream.

  “The man stands up?”

  “Yeah, the man stands up.”

  “Damn,” I say, surprised and impressed. “I could never do that. I’d gag.”

  “That’s the hard part. Getting your throat to relax.”

  “No wonder you drive a Jaguar.”

  She laughs. We have four different kettles of stock going. I push the first of the chopped onions and garlic toward her and she slides them from the cutting board into the kettles then turns down the burners. We have never discussed the morning of the retaining wall.

  “What do you do?”

  “With Gerry?”

  She shrugs. “I have a feeling that’s the more interesting story.”

  “Totally different. Gerry lies back and I get on my knees between his. I nuzzle. I lick that puckery road of skin that runs betw
een his ass and his balls.” I make a fist and run my tongue along it to illustrate and Kelly looks at me quizzically, her hand at her throat. “And when it comes to the cock—”

  “It always comes to the cock,” she says.

  “But not right away. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It can be very slow. It can take a week or a year, and I use my hands and mouth together to simulate the canal you make with your throat. I know, I know, it’s not exactly the same. It’s a subtle thing. It’s about texture. It’s about worship.”

  “Worship?” she asks, smiling slightly, her head tilted to the side.

  I tell her about the last time Gerry and I were together. It’s not exactly compassionate, I know. I’m forcing her to be the docent of my sex life just as I was once the one who kept all the secrets for her. We haven’t talked like this for years, but now she leans forward, her chin in her hand, and listens so intently that I can’t tell if I’m entertaining her or breaking her heart.

  We had two hours left before we had to leave for the airport. It turns out that the morning Gerry killed the clock in New York was an anomaly; that we are not, in fact, destined to live this affair in some sort of Zenlike world of the eternal moment. Quite the contrary. As the weeks and months go by I have learned the most important rule of infidelity: You must always know what time it is. How many hours have we been here, how long do we have left? Sometimes I catch him glancing at the bedside clock with a feigned casualness, the way a man glances at the form of a passing woman. I am not jealous of his wife, but I am always jealous of the clock. The clock, his other mistress. The one who has more power to move him, the one he always obeys.

  “You had two hours,” Kelly prompts me.

  “Gerry said he was spent. He had nothing left, he was drained dry. He’d been telling me that since breakfast. There was something silly on TV—ESPN, I guess, it’s what he always watches, and this show comes on about bass fishing. We’re laughing like crazy because the beginning is so dramatic. All the men strapping on their gear and the music sounds like something out of a cowboy movie. The announcer said, ‘There are days when you conquer the lake and there are days when the lake conquers you,’ and Gerry was being totally goofy, walking around in his underwear, bowlegged like a gunfighter, and imitating that deep announcer-type voice. He does voices, have I ever told you that? He’s really pretty good. I looked at the clock and I saw we had a little time left. Gerry kept saying, ‘Listen to that music, it sounds like they’re going to go out in the middle of Main Street and throw the bass in the air and shoot their fucking heads off.’ ”

  “But he was spent.”

  “Did you turn that burner down?”

  “You know I did. Get on with it, Elyse. I swear, the way you keep stopping and starting it’s like… And I’m ready for the chicken, by the way.”

  “Okay, so I do everything I tell you about, only even more slowly, and he’s being absolutely silent. Or maybe it was the bass fishing show muffling everything else out. The men had pulled off from shore and I could hear the lake water slurping against the side of the boat. We were fucking quieter than fishing.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “And when he came it was unexpected—”

  “Unexpected?”

  “Well, not totally unexpected, of course, but usually he makes this little gasp and he puts his hands on my head, but this time there was none of that. It was just—this doesn’t make any sense, but it was very slow. I mean we both completely stopped moving and it happened and it was different. I’m not explaining this right. You know what Milton says?”

  “Of course I don’t know what Milton says.”

  “There’s this part in Paradise Lost when Adam asks Michael—you know the archangel Michael, I think Nancy has his figurine—but Adam asks him how angels make love and Michael says, ‘Easier than air…’ ”

  “Easier than air?”

  “That’s what this was. The sex was easier than air.”

  “Wow,” Kelly says. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Elyse. That was one romantic blow job.”

  She is looking at me, her chin once again tilted in her hands. Sometimes I think everything in the world changes except Kelly’s eyes. They’re as blue as they’ve ever been, as blue as they were back in high school. There is still the hint of a displaced California girl about her—with her rumpled blond hair and the scattering of freckles across her cheeks. Her coloring, in fact, is very much like Tory’s, so much so that when we all go out together, waitresses and sales clerks assume that Tory is Kelly’s daughter. “Do you ever worry,” she asks, “that it’s like cocaine?”

  “Cocaine?”

  “That it takes a little more to get you off every time?”

  “Was it that way with you and Daniel?”

  She stands up straight, fiddles with the controls on the stove. “Maybe,” she finally says. “I mean desire increases… it has to increase or else it…”

  “Decreases?”

  “I don’t know. The point is, it can’t stay still.”

  “It’s the shark of emotions,” I say. I try to laugh. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you these stories.”

  “No, I want to hear them. It’s just that—”

  “You worry about me.”

  She looks down into the soup. “I worry about both of us.”

  Later, after I have transported twelve containers holding four different kinds of winter soups back to my freezer, I call Gerry. I don’t actually want him, I want his machine, so I call the cell instead of the office, and when his cool businesslike voice instructs me to leave a message, I spin out a long fantasy that begins with me going down on him in a hotel room. There’s a knock at the door. Against his protests I answer it and my friend Kelly walks in. I explain that she and I are doing research on the best way to give a man a blow job. We’re trying to decide which matters more—technique or attitude—and will he please help us decide? Of course he will. I whisper into the receiver, “You will do it in a car, you will do it on a star… that’s just the sort of man you are.”

  After I hang up the phone I curl on the bed, depleted, as I often am when I talk about sex. As I lie there, half asleep, I hear the muted slap of the pet door and the soft thud of Pascal landing in the laundry room. I call his name and he pads into the bedroom and jumps up beside my pillow with a single silken leap. For all his wildness, Pascal comes when he is called.

  It’s been a strange day. A strange phone message, even for Gerry and me. Maybe it’s just like Kelly says—cocaine sex, and it takes more every time. But Gerry and I have always told each other stories and he doesn’t expect anything real to come of them. It’s just how we comfort ourselves and today is no different from any other. He won’t consider it a promise. At least I don’t think he will. And as for telling Kelly that bit about the angels—I’m just trying to get her to talk to me again. Just giving her a yank to make sure that the bond between us still holds.

  Pascal’s feet are wet and his nose is cold. God knows where he’s been or what he’s done. “Bad boy,” I say, but I’m aware that my voice is gentle, already drowsy and thick. I may as well be saying, “Good boy,” and he knows that I am not really angry with him, that I never really get angry with him, despite all the blood and feathers I find on the deck each morning, despite all the things that he has hurt. “Bad boy,” I say again and he presses against my stomach, as small and round as a fetus, and we both go to sleep.

  Mrs. Chapman calls later that afternoon, just as Phil is walking in, to say that the pots arrived.

  She says, “Well, it isn’t exactly what we discussed, is it dear?” and then, before I can explain, she says, “It’s better.”

  I am weak with relief. She and I go through the shipping dates again for the rest of the order and I apologize for not warning her that the pots would be different from the prototype, and then I begin to babble, confessing the whole story, telling her how I broke the pots with my daughter’s bat and Lewis prayed over the pieces. But Mrs. Chapm
an says she knows how artists can be. She expects changes, and she would never tie my hands. She’s just glad I got them to her on time at all.

  “That was cool,” I say as I hang up the phone. “She liked the new pots. She’s going to pay me what we agreed.”

  Phil looks up from the newspaper. “Speaking of money…”

  Oh God.

  “They called me from the bank today…”

  Oh God for real.

  “… and said you’d come in last week and opened up an account in your own name.”

  “I told you about that,” I lie. “I told you the day I did it.”

  He puts down the financial section and picks up sports.

  “Why’d they call you?”

  He bends back the page and peers at some sort of chart. “When they ran your social security number they realized we already have accounts there and we keep a big balance. You shouldn’t have to be paying for the money market. I don’t know why they didn’t tell you that the day you came in.”

  And then he is silent.

  “Kelly and I made soup today,” I say. “Do you want some of that corn chowder she does?” The blood is pounding in my ears but I am surprised how normal my voice sounds. I’m getting better at duplicity.

  “I know why you did it.”

  Now I am silent.

  “Shoes,” he says in triumph, turning the newspaper page. “After the bank called I walked out to the front desk and asked the girls why a woman would open an account in her own name. They said it was because she doesn’t want her husband to know how much she spends on shoes.” He looks up with a slight frown. “Are the good ones really two hundred a pair?”

  I shrug. “You caught me,” I say.

  It is 8:30 before Gerry calls back. Phil is watching basketball. I take the phone back to my bedroom.

  “Baby, baby,” he says. “I’m in a ditch. I got your message and I ran off the road.”

  “You liked my story?”

  “Oh my God.”