Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  Belinda is calling Kelly and Kelly will come fast. She will take Tory and put her in the car and she will want to take me too but I will say no, that I can drive, that I don’t want to leave my car here. In my almost comical numbness I will insist on unloading the cupcakes before I go. I will tell everyone that I have made seventy-two of them and Belinda will finally take the cupcakes just to shut me up. She will carry them up the steps while I stand, alone for a minute in the emptying churchyard, looking all around me. I will fight the urge to run into the woods and make sure Phil is okay. His new wife will be nice. I will like her, Tory will like her. In two years, maybe three, she will come by some Friday to pick up Tory for the weekend and mention that she’s going to run by Domino’s and get pizza and I will say there’s half a pizza in my fridge, that she can just take it. She will say, “I hate to think that I took your husband and your pizza too,” and I will say, “Please, I was finished with both of them.” And we will laugh, because she is a nice woman and her presence makes my life easier. We will pretend not to notice how much alike we are and we will be a kind of friends. Above me I see a single high band of blue, like a child’s drawing of the sky. Music is coming from a parked car. I can smell the charcoal of the barbecue and the ground is rushing toward me and I exhale, just enough that there is a slight scream at the moment of impact. I can take this. It’s not so bad. It hurts a little, but it’s nothing I can’t take. It’s surprising, definitely surprising, to find myself here in mid air, and yes, it’s a shame that this had to happen here and now, at the cookout, on the eve of Easter, but it had to happen, right? I could not have been allowed to get away with it. I think we’re all in agreement on that. Jeff is saying he’s sorry, he’s so sorry, and he is pulling me up, pulling me roughly. I am now officially pitiful and a woman who has been struck (much less on the steps of the church) is certainly entitled to leave. Even the Christians admit that much, so I turn toward the ground and for a moment it feels as if my seams are splitting open and pieces of me are exploding out like beans from a rag doll. I will have to find so much more work. I will have to call every gallery owner I’ve ever known, I will have to figure out a way to get health insurance. Who is in that car? Why are they playing the radio and what is that song? I think it is Miles Davis, but then I think everything is Miles Davis.

  Phil is a big man but Jeff is not and yet he pulls me to my feet effortlessly and I remember again how easily men can move women’s bodies through space. This is why our bodies exist, to be moved through space by their bodies, so why pretend any differently? I think of Gerry bent over me on the bed, how he slides one arm underneath me and moves me, moves me all in one unit, carefully, as if I have been hurt in a crash. His face changes when he sees me, on the other side of a hotel door or in an airport, and, even though he knows I will be in this hotel or this airport, he always seems a little surprised. A little relieved. I will know Gerry all my life. He is the one goodbye I will not have to face. We will be lovers, then friends, and then lovers again, and years from now when I am what, sixty or perhaps even seventy, I will gaze down from my bedroom window with a white ceramic coffee cup in my hand, watching as he parks his car and walks toward my door. I will rap the glass of the window and he will look up. His eyes are older and his body is thicker but when he lifts his chin and sees me there above him in the window, he will still have his airport face. We will find each other over and over, in airports and hotels all around the world, yet this is the part I must do alone, and that can’t be him I see in the crowd, because he isn’t here and who are all these people watching me? They have come so fast, from the grill, from inside the church and from the tables stacked high with clothes we have all outgrown. Who are these people, where have they come from, and why does the bad luck of our friends excite us so much? They are standing in a semicircle watching me and I think I can already hear them mumbling, talking among themselves. So that was it, that’s what was wrong all along. He’s a hitter. Who’d have guessed? These letters that have fallen out of Phil’s hands and scattered on the lawn are not my letters, were never my letters, they are Kelly’s letters and she will tell everyone that and then they will feel even more sorry for me. Poor Elyse who always was so unhappy but none of us knew quite why. These are Kelly’s letters, not mine, and yet I hear the whoosh as the grass rises around my head, sweet with the sap of spring. You always forget this part, that life regenerates itself underground through the winter, that happiness comes back. You forget that your body has the capacity for joy, that it craves it like water. You forget that one thing can end and another can begin. There is always a way out, out through the broken places, although you don’t know this at first—of course not, how could you? Pay attention, Tory. This is why things have edges.

  I look down and see the ground beneath me, bright and green and scattered with love letters and I know it’s not really the ground but a door, the door I’ve been looking for all my life, and I know the trick is to tuck and roll and I don’t know why I’m the one who will be set free on a technicality. I don’t why I’m the one who will get this second chance, but I am, and the noise that it makes when he hits me is like a champagne cork popping, like a pistol going off or prison doors sliding apart, like a well-read pitch that lifts a softball into the summer air. The grass rises around my ears and muffles the sounds of someone screaming, the fading jazz from the car. I close my eyes and breathe. The grass is thick and cool. It smells clean. It smells like grace.

  Back when Kelly and I were cheerleaders I was always on the bottom of the pyramid because I was strong and able to lift. I used to look up at Kelly and envy her the guts it took to jump. She had something that I didn’t have, a faith in those below. “The hard part is thinking about it,” she would say, and I’m sure that I will understand all this later, when I’m old, when I’m safe, when I’m dead. Once upon a time there was born a baby girl and in the hot afternoons when we used to meet at the school track to learn the new routines, Kelly would sometimes say, “But don’t you even want to try the top? There’s only one life, Elyse.” There’s only one life, only one life… I have only one life, but it’s huge.

  One time I asked Kelly, isn’t it scary, the moment when you let go and fall? And she said no, that when it finally happens it’s not what you’d expect. She said you see everything clearly and you have all the time in the world. She was right.

  Chapter Forty-two

  After two weeks in Kelly’s guest wing, Tory and I move into the apartment. Not the one I reserved on the day Pascal was killed, but another one that has the advantage of being ready right now, probably because it has a hideous bright turquoise carpet.

  I go to Target. You can love one man and leave another and love a man and still leave him and leave a man without ever loving him, you can fuck everybody you meet or live like a nun and in the end you still wind up at Target. I get a toaster and TV and can opener and microwave and pots and pans and a muffin tin, three towels, three washcloths, a bathmat, two sets of sheets, a scale, that cheap knockoff Tupperware stuff, a colander, two wineglasses, and a vacuum cleaner. I buy socks and underwear and jeans for Tory, replicating everything but her shoes and coat so we don’t have to carry so much stuff between the two houses, so it will be easier. I’m pushing one cart and pulling another and there are mops and brooms sticking out, whapping everything I pass. People get out of my way. It comes to over seven hundred dollars and I put it on my Visa, the new one in my maiden name. It takes the whole afternoon to get the kitchen set up and the appliances unpacked and working. The vacuum cleaner lies on its side as if it’s been shot. Earlier today Kelly came over to help me but we bolted it together before we realized we had the roller in wrong and we had to undo the left side and start again. She brought a bottle of wine but I’d forgotten to buy a corkscrew. She went out to get one and came back with bags of groceries—ketchup and salt and Cascade and diet Coke and toilet paper, all the things you need when you’re setting up a new house. I’m afraid to ask how much I owe her.


  This is the first night since we left that Tory will be sleeping at her father’s and Kelly has offered to pick her up from school and then stay with her until Phil gets home from work. The truth is that Kelly has gone by my old house every afternoon for the last two weeks, to turn on the lights. When I first asked her to do this, she agreed—just as everyone agrees to everything I’m asking of them right now—but I could tell she found it a strange request. “Just turn on the floodlights and a couple inside,” I told her. “Maybe the TV.” The one thought I can’t face is Phil parking in the empty driveway, Phil walking up the dark and silent steps, Phil being denied even the briefest illusion that someone is in that house waiting for him.

  If I am surprised at the tenderness I feel for my estranged husband, it’s nothing compared to how much my compassion has shocked other people. The bruises on my face are gone now but when I showed the big honking uptown lawyer the pictures that Kelly took, he practically salivated. He said, “We’ll go after the bastard hard,” and when I said, “But I don’t want to go after him hard,” he looked at me curiously, as if I was one of those broken women who believe they deserve to be hit. My divorce lawyer has pudgy fingers, heavy-lidded eyes, an incongruous black ponytail, curled across his shoulder like a question mark. He looks foolish, like the last of the good old boys, but everyone has assured me he’s the best in town and that even if I don’t like him, I had get to him before Phil did. This is the sort of man who could get me half of Phil’s boat, if Phil had a boat. “So what’s your story, darlin’?” he asked me and for a moment I considered telling him, but he bills at four hundred an hour and at those prices I cannot afford to be completely understood by anybody. I started to say, “You know, I really was cheating, he just got the particulars wrong,” but even that opens up the heavy door of memory—another thing I cannot afford. At least not right now.

  “I only want to be fair,” I said, and he nodded slowly, as if it certainly was a novel experience to have Mother Teresa as a client. But there’s no penalty for taking the high road. My husband hit me three times in the face on the steps of the church in front of about a hundred witnesses on the day before Easter. I am going to get a very generous settlement.

  While Kelly is gone I rumble through the Target bags until I find a wineglass. I pull the price sticker off of it, grab a can of diet Coke, and go into the bedroom to make the bed. The mattress is an old one, borrowed from the guest bedroom in my mother’s condo, and dots of my adolescent menstrual blood are scattered across its surface, like a map of the Caribbean. I forgot to get a mattress pad at Target too. I’ll have to go back tomorrow. I need to start a list.

  The act of unfolding the new sheets and yanking them over the mattress exhausts me and just for a moment I lie down and shut my eyes. This day will go on, and the next one, and the next. There will be many details and I will take care of them. The next few weeks and months are going to be tough and I wish I could fast-forward through them for us all. I think of the small brave smile Tory gave me when I taped the Disney prints to her wall. “They’re nice,” she said, “as nice as—”

  She started to say “home,” but then she quickly corrected and said, “Daddy’s house,” and my heart broke, just for a minute, and I said, “Yeah, Daddy’s house.” I told her that she’s like the city mouse and country mouse in the story we used to read, and when she’s with me she’s the city mouse and when she’s with her dad, she’ll be the country mouse. She nodded vigorously, as if this were all some sort of grand adventure. Of course she wants to be in her old bedroom. The apartment is so empty it echoes. There is a price Tory will pay for what she has witnessed. There is a day of reckoning that will come for her, and for me, but I can’t stop and consider all that now. The creases from the sheets are still intact, and when I lie on them they smell heavily of dye. I should have washed them before I put them on. I don’t seem to be thinking clearly anymore. Garcia jumps up to the window frame.

  “What do you see?” I ask her. “Do you see birds?” My apartment is on the third floor. I’ve climbed the steps a dozen times today, carrying full boxes up and empty boxes down. But it’s worth it. I like it up here. I am as tall as the tops of trees and the breeze coming through the open windows is fresh and sweet. Garcia bats at the screen and makes a low rumbling sound in her throat. She doesn’t yet realize that her hunting days are gone.

  “You see them, don’t you?” I ask her. “I’ll have to take your word for it because I’m half-blind, you know.” Great. First day on my own and I’m already talking to the cat.

  I pat the bed but she does not jump over to lie beside me. “I think,” I tell her, “that pretty soon you and me are going to start feeling some real peace.”

  She looks at me skeptically, tilting her head like Kelly.

  “No, I mean it,” I say. “Everybody thinks this is the hard part but you and I both know the worst is behind us.”

  The doorbell rings. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard it.

  Jeff is there, leaning against the frame with his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans. “I only have a minute,” he says. “But I wanted to run by and make sure you’re all right.”

  “I have an interview at the community college on Monday. They might need a ceramics teacher.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” he says. “I understand Tory’s staying with Phil this weekend.” His eyes are troubled. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “He’d never hurt Tory. I told you the truth. That was the first and only time Phil has ever hit me. He’s a good man.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. That’s all anyone has said to me for two weeks. “Nancy thought she’d noticed bruises and I should have listened to her.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Someday when you and I are both really old, we’ll sit down together and I’ll pour you a cup of coffee and tell you a story.”

  I smile as I say this but he is not consoled. “You never really know people, do you?” he says, looking past me into the empty apartment. “You never really know what’s going on inside a marriage.”

  I can tell this confession pains him. He’s a minister, after all, a counselor. He was our friend. It was his job to know what was going on within our marriage. For a minute I think he is reaching out to touch me, but he stops short of my arm and instead grabs the doorframe as if he has momentarily lost his balance. “It isn’t what you think,” I say. “He’ll be a good dad to Tory.”

  “But if you ever—”

  “What? Need a job at the church?”

  He has the grace to smile. “Nancy will be over in a day or two,” he says. “She can’t come quite yet. She feels bad about what happened.”

  “Jeff, there’s a lot more to the story.”

  “She thinks I should have stopped it.”

  “How? Tell her I’m not mad at anybody. I thought I could handle it. I thought I had it all under control. But then—I don’t know, things were happening so fast there at the end nobody could have stopped them. It started the morning the cat died.”

  “Today… What are you going to do today?”

  “Finish unpacking. And then Kelly’s going to take me out to eat. It’s going to be okay, it really is.”

  Over Jeff’s shoulder I can see Belinda coming up the stairs. She is carrying a rectangular casserole dish in her hands. It is covered with tinfoil and for the first time in two weeks my eyes fill with tears.

  “It’s not from a dead woman,” she says, panting slightly as she takes the last flight of steps. “I made it myself. But it’s the real thing. Chicken and noodles and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.”

  “Oh my God,” I say. “Thank you. I’ll put it in my freezer.”

  She looks into my living room with the single canvas folding chair that I usually keep in my car and take to Tory’s softball games, with the lamp on the floor and the vacuum cleaner on its side and the hideous turquoise carpet, and she says, “I like what you’ve done with the place
.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m going minimalist.”

  Then it suddenly occurs to me they’re both standing out on the landing and I say, “Would you two like to come in? We can all sit on the bed.”

  Is it just me or is everyone in this place beautiful?”

  Kelly looks around. “It’s just you.”

  We have walked three blocks to a Spanish restaurant. One of the advantages of being a city mouse is that there are a dozen restaurants within a ten-minute walk from my apartment. When Kelly came in from waiting with Tory she found me in my ridiculously clean white bathroom trying to pin a hairpiece to the back of my head. I didn’t even know I had a hairpiece but one of the days Kelly had run by to cut on the lights she’d also grabbed a Hefty bag and thrown some of my stuff in it. I dumped the bag in the middle of the bed and the hairpiece had fallen out, along with a bunch of other things I’d forgotten I owned, like a lilac tunic and some jeans that used to be too tight.