Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

  “Look at you in Levi’s with your hair all long,” Kelly said. “You look sixteen. Where you’d get that stuff?”

  “It’s what you brought me in the Hefty bag.”

  “It is? Damn, I wasn’t even sure what I took, I was in such a rush. Being in that house without you, Elyse, it’s pretty weird.”

  “How’d she do?”

  “Great. She ran to him. They looked like nothing had happened.”

  “Thank God.”

  “The whole afternoon, she seemed…”

  “Happy to be home? You can say it.”

  Kelly picked up a tube of lipstick, pulled off the cap, and twisted it out. A shiny red cylinder, slowly rotating and elongating, blunted at the end with the shape of my mouth. “It looks obscene, doesn’t it?” she asked. “The day you came home from New York with this all over your face I knew nothing was ever going to be the same.”

  “Do you want to wear it?”

  She shook her head. “Not my color.”

  But she had helped me pin my hair and then, because I was wearing the Levi’s and she had on a dress and we didn’t quite match, we had rummaged back through the bag until we found jeans and a shirt for her. And then we walked the three blocks to this restaurant where, because they have a band on Friday nights, we were given a choice between an hour’s wait and eating in the bar. Kelly said she didn’t like eating in bars and started to take a buzzer but I persuaded her to give it back. Eating in bars will set you free.

  Especially this bar, where it seems to me that everyone is beautiful.

  “No they’re not,” says Kelly. “You’re beautiful. Look at you.” She points to the mirror behind the liquor bottles and I pause for a moment to study myself. The long hair is a shock, as is the lilac color of the tunic. I usually wear brown or black. I look different, true, but I am not the pretty one.

  This is a rather self-consciously rustic restaurant and they have brought us wine in a jug. A white sangria, as clear as water, but there is plenty of it, and when Kelly decides to refill me, the jug is so heavy that she partially misses the glass and splashes it across the tile-covered bar. “Do you know what Phil tried to do when he saw me sitting there on your couch?” she asks. “You’re not going to believe this, but he tried to talk to me.”

  “Really.”

  “He picks up Tory and he twirls her around and he has, you know, chicken in a bucket with him so I let myself out and he follows me into the driveway and starts trying to talk to me. You two were married for about a million years, during which time he and I never had a single conversation that I can recall, and now all of a sudden he wants one. He says to tell you that you can still come there during the day to use your studio if you want to, like that’s some sort of great thing…”

  “It is a great thing.”

  “… and he says that it’s good you have me. He says, ‘I’m glad Elyse has you, Kelly, she’s going to need you now.’ ”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Why did he say ‘now’? Like, you know, when you were married to great big wonderful him you didn’t need me at all. I mean, I don’t want to offend you or anything or sound like I’m being critical, but sometimes your husband can be a little insensitive.”

  This from the girl who made a photo album of my bruises. “Baby,” I say, “are you drunk?”

  “What if I am? It’s not like we’re driving.”

  “Phil’s full of shit. When I was married to him, that’s when I needed you most.”

  “That’s what scares me,” she said, tossing her head, flipping her hair so hard that it strikes the shoulder of the man on the next barstool. “Now that you’re not married to him, maybe you won’t need me at all.”

  Funny that she’d say the same thing Gerry said. Funny that the two people who know me best would read this part so wrong. “Right, Kelly,” I say, “I’ve lived with you for two weeks and you’ve loaned me money and called me a lawyer and picked up my kid every day and packed all my shit and moved it and paid for my ketchup and found me this hairpiece I didn’t even know I had and stuck it to the back of my head. Yeah. I don’t need you at all.”

  The bartender sets a plate down between us. Tuna and Marcona almonds and olives and curled strips of lemon rind, carefully laid out across a long thin white platter. “Look at this,” I say to Kelly. “It’s perfect.” I take a slow deep breath.

  “You’re going to go off somewhere,” says Kelly. “And have this big life.”

  The bar swims. I flex my back, shift my weight on the stool. My energy, so tenuous in these last days and weeks, seems to be failing me again. “Stop for a moment,” I say, “and just look at this plate. It’s so beautiful. It’s like a painting.”

  Kelly looks down obediently. The tuna is bright pink and the olives are shiny black and the lemon rind, when I pinch it, sends a mist of citrus into the air. I pick up my fork, plunge it into the food. It won’t last. Not the tuna, not this evening, not this sudden rush of joy. It’s all temporary. The price for enjoying anything is using it up. Every pleasure eventually slips through our hands, and perhaps that is the greatest pleasure of all, the feeling of something slipping through your hands.

  “Give me your lipstick,” Kelly says.

  I get it out of my purse and hand it to her. Kelly leans toward the bar mirror and begins to color her mouth.

  “I can stay at your place tonight, right?” she says, the lipstick skidding off her mouth as she talks, leaving a smudge that extends nearly as high as her nose. I have put her in a series of impossible situations over the past few months. I have frightened her and exhausted her, just as, in the course of our long friendship, she has sometimes frightened and exhausted me.

  “Look at us,” I say.

  “I thought I was supposed to be looking at the tuna.”

  “We’re through looking at the tuna. Now I want you to look in the mirror at us.” She puts down the lipstick and squints at the bar. We have always been photo negatives of each other, her so light and me so dark, but tonight, for the first time in years, we look a little bit alike. “Now see these women sitting before us,” I say. “They’re beautiful and strong and young. They are very significant people. Things are getting ready to happen to them. Both of them.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  I reach over with my napkin to fix her lipstick. “Not at all.”

  “It’s okay if I spend the night, right?”

  “Of course. But Kelly—”

  “I know. I know. We’re significant. Shit’s gonna to happen to us. We’re the heroes of our own lives.”

  She makes a grand gesture as she speaks, a sweep of her arm that narrowly avoids striking the tuna, the earthenware jug, the shoulder of the man beside us. Instead she hits my lipstick, sending it rolling across the terra-cotta counter, a bright silver tube that goes spinning over the edge. Before I can move or even speak, Kelly does something that surprises me. She catches it in mid air.