Love In the Air

by James Collins

  When Julia visited, she sat with her father by the pool. There was no wind, and the heavy Florida air seemed to weigh down the palms. Billy lay back on a chaise contentedly, smoking, having a drink. His skin was brown, smooth, and unblemished, and he exposed it to the sun almost as if he were daring it to harm him. Most of the time, but especially when Lori was nearby, he wore an expression very much like that of the cat who ate the canary. For as long as she could remember, Julia’s father had flashed his beautiful (and carnivorous) teeth and laughed about some damn thing or other that had happened on the golf course or in the office. This had not changed. He was still as full of stories as ever, and as full of ideas about stocks that were going to double. “That’s a seventy-five-dollar stock!” Usually he was excited about a couple of small companies (they’d invented a perpetual motion machine or something). With a certitude that no specialist in these matters would ever claim, Billy could tell you where the dollar would be in a year, why nobody had ever made a dime with the airlines, how scrap steel was going to go through the roof, when rates would rise (or fall), how a vastly complicated new communications bill would benefit the Baby Bells. The backyard of the house on Hibiscus Street was surrounded by hedges, but you could still see the TV dishes on the roofs next door. The cement pool, built in the fifties, cut the size of the yard by a third; yellowing palm leaves floated in it. Here Julia’s father reclined; yet from his manner and conversation you would have thought that he was sitting by the pool at his place in Cap Ferrat.

  What had happened? Where had it all gone? How well Julia remembered her grandmother’s apartment, the one Billy had grown up in. It had two stories and a very big staircase, and Julia and her cousins would run all over it and never seem to master all its hallways and rooms. The big rooms in the front had windows that were twice as tall as any Julia ever saw anywhere else. Julia had been too young to understand much about the vases, the side tables and chairs, and the paintings, all policed vigilantly to protect them from children. She did know they had an aura of preciousness, and she had an innate sense that they were beautiful. Even as a child Julia liked to go to the part of the museum where they had whole rooms set up. It was so mysterious, and no one else was ever there. Some of the furniture was much more fancy-looking than her grandmother’s, but being in Gram-Gram’s living room felt like climbing over the rope and being in one of those displays. With this difference, though: Gram-Gram owned her furniture and paintings, they were hers in her house, and in this private setting their force was concentrated. At the same time, they were everyday objects, which made Gram-Gram’s life seem effortlessly pitched at a certain height.

  It did seem effortless. There was a sense of fullness, of amplitude and of plenitude. Gram-Gram’s possessions were not pushed on a visitor; they receded, the exact opposite of a façade created to impress someone. It seemed that there must be something very thick and solid behind what you saw. It felt secure; there was more of everything than was necessary, which implied that necessity held no power in Gram-Gram’s demesne. Not only were her apartment and her country house big, so was everything in them. The kitchen stove looked like the engine of a steamship. Whenever Julia picked up a knife or fork, she was surprised by its heft. Using it was actually hard for a little girl! The cooks and the maids were big (and there were many of them), the roast beef was big, the napkins were like sails; the blankets and shawls and sheets were big; so were Gram-Gram’s pearls and gems. Even the ice cubes were as big and solid as a child’s alphabet blocks. The whole of life seemed lush and sturdy.

  Then Gram-Gram died. Julia was fifteen years old and she knew that when people died their children inherited their money. She didn’t know how exactly, but she expected her life to change, to be resized in a proportionate way to her grandmother’s. But nothing happened. Billy had two brothers and two sisters, and they discussed and argued a bit, but fairly quickly decided that it all should be sold (one of the sisters was the impractical holdout, being so attached to “Mother’s things”). And it was all sold, except for a few small items that Gram-Gram had left for specific people. Julia got a pair of ruby and diamond earrings, which was her prize possession. Otherwise, it all went: the houses, the furniture, the paintings, the rugs, the vases, the stocks, the large portfolio of Treasury bills. Then there were taxes to pay and the market was way down that year. Everything was. The proceeds were divided five ways. Billy bought a small apartment in the city. Then, a few years later, he sold it.

  What had happened? Where had it all gone? Asking herself these questions could make Julia weep. It wasn’t just the money, she’d think, it was the lost beauty and the lost dignity. But then she’d recall that it was the money, for there would not have been the beauty and the dignity without it.

  And what of Julia’s sentimental education? At her school in New York, she was in the popular crowd. She was pretty, and she could be quite mean. In seventh grade she dropped the plain, chubby girl who had been her best friend and confidante since kindergarten. She and her popular friends began smoking cigarettes; they hung around with boys, who provided beer and pot. Julia spent hours on the phone talking to her friends about boys, and she got her first kiss at a young age, and she technically lost her virginity in tenth grade. Her first love appeared that summer: a tall, athletic boy with an upturned nose, prominent lips, and blue eyes. Addison. They spent virtually all their time engaged in some sort of sexual activity. He promised to write her when they went back to school, but he didn’t, and still he expected to pick up where they left off the following year, something that Julia, after a few grapples, refused to do.

  In college Julia had handsome, confident boyfriends, smart athletes who were headed to good careers. Then, when she had moved to New York, there was a string of handsome and ultraconfident investment bankers and a couple of Euros. For a year she lived with an Englishman named Julian. (Julia, Julian—wasn’t that cute?) He did some kind of international PR something or other. She still despised that sponging, lying, short-dicked faggot. A couple of these guys wanted to marry her, but she couldn’t go through with it, and then she got on the second-wife track, where every time she went out with someone it was like a job interview.

  How, in so many ways, she hated this life. She worked in an advertising firm. She liked some of her colleagues, she liked the secretaries, she liked talking for two minutes each day to the ancient clerk who brought her mail (he had been in the merchant marine), but she despised her boss, an older, senior-executive woman, and her perfect grooming and erect posture and brisk purposeful manner. She hated the tiny, grimy apartment that she lived in by herself, just as she had hated the larger grimy apartment she had previously lived in with roommates, along with hating the roommates. She hated her social life. She was often the pretty single girl asked along by a female friend when a group was going out to dinner at a shockingly expensive restaurant. A repellent man would take care of the bill and then call her the next day. Julia’s friend would say to her, “What’s the big deal? You can at least have dinner with him. He’s sweet. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s completely loaded.” She hated being invited to dinner parties at people’s apartments. She would have to rush home after work to get ready and she always felt embittered when she arrived and saw the hostess, who had been dressing and making herself up since noon.

  Then Dick had appeared. One weekend she met him at a cocktail party on Long Island, where she was visiting friends. They had talked on the terrace, among flower beds and greensward. The sun gave the humid air a rosy tint. They talked about gardens and Julia’s work, about which she was deprecating. Dick told her she shouldn’t be and said, “I’ve always wished I could have done something creative.” Julia remembered seeing but not meeting Janet, an attractive large-boned woman. The next day, it happened that Julia and Dick played tennis on neighboring courts; Julia was a very good tennis player, and so was Dick. After their matches, the two groups had a drink together, and Julia and Dick chatted some more. They talked about who had won, h
ow they had played. With her dark coloring, long legs and arms, and her toned figure, Julia looked good in tennis clothes. When they parted, they shook hands, with the most fleeting look into each other’s eyes.

  The following Wednesday, when she listened to a phone message from Dick asking her if she would like to have lunch, Julia saw the whole story unfold. In an instant, she saw everything that would happen, and everything that did in fact happen. They had lunch. They had lunch again, and once again. They had dinner. On one occasion, Julia asked Dick if he would like to come to her place for a drink before they went out. He did, and soon enough after arriving he was kissing her. The next time he came over, they made love. This continued, most often in the afternoon. Julia was always struck by how incongruous Dick looked getting dressed in her bedroom. It was hardly bigger than her bed. The window was filthy and the walls and ceiling hadn’t been painted for decades, it seemed. With his burnished English suits and custom-made shirts, Dick could have been in such a setting only for an illicit purpose.

  When she started sleeping with Dick, Julia vowed that she would not be like the typical young woman who is sleeping with a married man. She would not act as if she were desperately hoping that he would leave his family and marry her. She would not extract bogus promises from him that he would tell his wife “after Christmas” or “when Kevin has settled into his new school” or “soon.” As it happened, it was Dick who pushed for marriage, and eventually Julia said yes. Dick was good-looking, youthful, well-off, successful, and he seemed crazy about her. They were having a love affair, and it certainly had a love component from Julia’s point of view—enough love anyway to suit Julia, who doubted that love really existed. And she liked the idea of their life being done. She just wasn’t interested in the sloppy struggles of young marrieds, with their fights and laundry and little children underfoot. She liked the idea that Dick was a finished person and that their life would be finished. It had been okay for a while. Now she couldn’t stand him.

  It was strange, but out of her whole romantic history, it seemed to Julia as if she could remember only one moment really vividly. A couple of years after college she had become involved with a boy who was different from her other beaux. Joss MacNeill was handsome, but in a delicate way, with the gentlest brown eyes, and he was tall and thin and had beautiful long fingers. More than anyone else, he was someone whom Julia really loved to talk to, and with him she even lost her natural reserve. Joss had many appealing qualities. He was charming and polite to everyone; he was funny, intelligent, and affectionate. He knew a lot about a lot of things. But despite all these attributes, he was unable to construct a life or career that was well engineered and stable and that took best advantage of his admittedly vague abilities. Eventually he drifted off, and, years later, suffered a couple of crack-ups.

  For a time, though, Julia thought she was in love with Joss, really in love with him; he had gotten under her skin as others never had. She remembered one summer evening when she was lying in his arms on his sofa. It had been a hot, muggy, windless day. Now in the early evening, with the day’s heat spent, a breeze wafted through the wide-open window. Traffic rumbled, a horn sounded, a loose manhole cover clanked repeatedly. Joss was stroking Julia’s hair, and, with her eyes closed, she listened to the thwup-thwup, thwup-thwup of his heart. The tumbling city summer-evening air, tinged with grit and bus fumes, rolled gently over them, lapping last at their feet. Then it was time to go to dinner. It was a Saturday night, so the people out on the street were excited, and it was warm, so they all wore the least clothing possible. After Joss and Julia had walked a few steps down the sidewalk, Joss scratched and tickled her palm with his fingers, then interlaced them with hers and held her hand tightly. She thought then (and sometimes still thought) that this was the happiest moment of her life.

  The past! The past! Do we stride before it, trailing it behind? No. It pushes us inexorably forward, like a glacier, into the present.

  It had not been very far into the summer before Julia suspected that she was pregnant. Years before her doctor had insisted that if she wouldn’t give up cigarettes she at least had to stop taking birth-control pills. Complying wasn’t too hard. Dick had gotten himself fixed, and as for any non-Dick-related activities, they were pretty infrequent. If anything happened, she’d deal with it. This time a store-bought pregnancy test and a doctor had confirmed her supposition. Of course, Julia had had no doubt about what she would do. And yet she kept putting it off. She had some morning sickness, not too bad, which she tried to hide from Dick until she realized that, despite having had three children, he had no clue what a pregnant woman acted or looked or smelled like. When he finally did ask about her nausea, she said she had some kind of stomach virus she couldn’t get rid of.

  The point, though, was to keep her head. Nothing—nothing—could be more absurd than the idea of having this child. It would be a huge mess. There would be no money. The child wouldn’t even have a father. Moreover, she didn’t like babies or children; she had always found the noise and chaos they caused tiresome. She would lose her freedom, for even married to Dick she was quite free (and more freedom was easily attainable). With some indignation, Julia reminded herself of her disdain for these childless women who lost their nerve at the last moment and late in life decided they must have a child, and thought that this would solve all their problems.

  But she saw an obstetrician. The doctor told her that everything looked good. “It should be about the size of a coffee bean now,” she said with a smile. She explained to Julia their schedule of appointments, the tests, the problems her age might cause. She gave Julia a due date. Julia wrote down the next appointment in her diary, but she had no intention of keeping it. Almost as soon as she left the office and was on the bright sidewalk, where indifferent pedestrians and taxis rushed by, the entire visit vanished from her mind. The doctors’ offices on the ground floors of apartment buildings in New York were like caves on the banks of a river, and what happened there was easily forgotten once you left and the current swept you away.

  But she did keep the second appointment. She was taking prenatal vitamins and iron, and she had stopped drinking. Dick noticed that. “No wine? Hey, what’s this? Have you joined AA?” “I’m having so much trouble sleeping, I’m going to see what it’s like without alcohol for a while.” Legally, she knew, she could put off a final decision until the twenty-fourth week, but nobody waited beyond the first trimester, and that was her moral and psychological point of no return. The deadline came closer and closer. Terror and joy contended in Julia’s breast. She felt both like a prisoner waiting to be executed and like a bride waiting to be married. Three days left, two days left. One day left.

  On the last day of her first trimester, Julia rose early, as she usually did. She made coffee and retrieved the papers. When she returned, she heard Dick moving around in his bathroom. He came into the kitchen and sat heavily at the table.

  “Good morning, darling,” he said as she gave him his cup of coffee. “Thank you. Now, let’s see what fresh havoc the politicians have wreaked since yesterday.”

  Julia had poured out a bowl of Dick’s special muesli. “We have blueberries and raspberries. Which would you like?” she asked.

  “Would it be too extravagant to have both?”

  “Of course not.” Julia rinsed the berries, added them to his bowl, and set it down in front of him.

  “Merci bien,” he said.

  “Not a problem,” Julia replied with an outer-borough accent.

  Dick chortled.

  Julia sat down with her own black coffee and a slice of dry, multigrain toast. She broke off a small piece of toast and tugged a section of the paper so it was right side up in front of her. Registering nothing, she looked at the headlines.

  After several minutes, Dick muttered without looking up, “New report on abuse by priests …”

  “The … what? I’m sorry—”

  “There’s a new report on sex abuse by priests. ‘Diocese
s that had not participated in earlier surveys, et cetera, et cetera. Let’s see. Oh, here. Listen to this: ‘In thirty-four percent of the cases the priests performed oral sex on their male victims.’” He looked up at Julia with a mischievous grin. “You know the really important number that they don’t seem to have?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How often the priests got sucked off by the boys. That’s the metric I’d like to see before I went into the priesthood.” Dick laughed and Julia smiled wanly, and seeing that this hadn’t gone over so well, he adopted a more serious expression, shook his head, and, in a what-is-the-world-coming-to tone, said, “Jesus.” He took a sip of coffee and continued reading his paper.

  Julia felt sick to her stomach. How disgusting was the male drive for sexual satisfaction; how indiscriminately men spilled their life essence. If she had been born into the right tribe, she could have seen herself worshipping it, the sacred, viscous, life-giving nectar. Body and blood in one convenient serving! But how did men regard it? As no more sacred than the water in a child’s squirt gun. Think of their profligacy! Each day men pumped out trillions of spermatozoa, and only a tiny proportion of them were intended to fulfill their actual purpose: the creation of life. These thoughts put Julia into a heavy sea of anxiety whose waves pulled her down, then raised her high before crashing her on the rocks. What about her baby? Her baby was merely the chance by-product of lust; her egg had been fertilized by a sperm of no greater nobility than one that stained a pornographic photo.

  It was hard to have these dark, stabbing thoughts, so much darker and sharper on this day than they had ever been before, while sitting across from Dick in their brightly lit kitchen. Dick. His gray stubble, messy hair, and the droopy pads beneath his eyes always made him look old in the morning. The second button of his pajama top was undone, and even his gray chest hairs seemed to have lost their spring. Dick had always been vain about his figure and he kept fairly fit, but he had been less rigorous lately, and he carried the irreducible bulk of late middle age. He liked his food. He was only a little greedy in the morning, but more so at lunch, and by dinnertime he was eager to tuck in. Late at night, he often rooted around the kitchen for cookies, nuts, leftover pie. At breakfast he looked old—unshaven, saggy-faced, overweight, with stained teeth. But somehow after he showered, shaved, and dressed, he was transformed, and without resorting to the corset and powder of an aging matinee idol. Costumed in a suit, tie, shirt, and shoes that all gleamed in their own register, he was as handsome as ever. His hair! His thick head of hair seemed like an extrusion of potency and youth.