Love In the Air

by James Collins

  Holly closed the window. She stood there for a moment staring out and sighed shallowly. Then she went back to her bedroom, where she undressed, tossing her clothes on the bed; lying there they looked like burst balloons. Stepping into the bathroom, she found some pins and put up her hair, and then sat down on the edge of the bathtub. She ran a bath and, after testing the water’s temperature with her hand, turned off the spigots. The water became calm. Holly looked through it at the crazy porcelain on the bottom of the tub. Then her eyes refocused on the water’s surface, where she saw her own wobbly image. A jar of salts sat nearby, and Holly took it. She scattered a handful of the rough crystals in the water and, looking down again, saw her features fragment and collide in a hundred ripples.

  Holly lowered herself into the bath. She began to soap herself with a sponge. She lifted a leg and ran the sponge up and down it, and she washed around her stomach and chest and the back of her neck. But then she threw the sponge to the other end of the bath and put her fingers up to her eyes. Her face was hot and damp, so when the tears came, she did not notice for a moment. Now they were flowing freely, dribbling off her jaw and into the tub, and her chest was heaving. Eventually, she wiped her nose with the back of a hand, took a couple of deep breaths, and submerged her shoulders in the warm water. There, that was better. She had stopped crying. Then her shoulders shuddered, and began to heave, and the tears flowed once again.

  Peter has been great, she thought, he’s been a good friend. When has he ever done anything that would indicate that he wanted to be something other than friends? Never, not once ever. No looks, not even any flirting. Nothing.

  She would never forget the conversation she had had with Jonathan shortly after she had met Peter again. They were at Jonathan’s apartment and he was correcting a proof, talking idly.

  “You know,” he said, “Peter really got a crush on you during that plane trip when you sat next to each other.”

  “Really?” Holly said.

  “Yeah,” said Jonathan. He scrawled a couple of words in the margin and continued to work on the proof as he talked. “Yeah. We were talking about it, and that’s what he told me. So, naturally, I got concerned and I said, ‘So what about now?’ He laughed. He said, ‘You’re jealous over somebody I sat next to on a plane years ago? Are you crazy?’ I guess it did sound pretty silly. Oh hell!” He drummed his pencil on the paper and then made an erasure. “Anyway, he told me not to worry. ‘You know how those things go,’ he said, ‘you meet somebody someplace with some kind of forced intimacy and you think there’s been some magic, and then two days later you’ve forgotten all about them.’ It’s interesting. That’s really true, don’t you think?” He whispered aloud a few words of his text and made a change. “Well, also, he said, you know, he’s such a nice guy that he felt really bad about not calling. He had gotten so wrapped up in his business stuff. You can imagine.” He crossed out a couple of words. “So anyway, phew. I wouldn’t want to have to shoot him.” He teethed his pencil, slumped down in his chair, and held the proof up, frowning at it.

  “I thought he said he lost the number,” Holly said.

  Jonathan looked up. “He said he …? He lost the …? Uh-oh. Oops. Well, um, I guess not exactly. I guess he felt so bad, he said that.”

  So Peter had had a little crush on her—for a minute.

  The water had cooled. Holly lifted her foot and with her long toes turned the fat porcelain handle of the hot-water spigot. The water ran for a minute, and then she shut it using the same method. How loud and tumultuous the roiling waters had been! And with what utter quiet had they been followed. The bathroom was as quiet as the moon, Holly thought. This was in contrast to her mind, where her woes reverberated.

  How Peter had hurt her! That was the bizarre thing. It can often be particularly painful for women when someone with whom they have been physically intimate fails to call them, despite the promise he made with his parting words. Inexplicably, Holly’s experience with Peter had been much more hurtful even than that. She had thought … Well, what had she thought? When she left Peter at the baggage claim carousel, she was thinking about Fate, and how eons before it had been determined that Peter and she were to be mates and so were brought together in a manner that seemed completely random—seat assignments—but was in fact part of a sequence set at the dawn of time. Hurray for Fate! she had thought, laughing.

  Riding from the airport to her father’s house, she had tried to figure out the appeal of her seatmate. He was so sweet and funny. He was obviously intelligent. He had just the faintest air of melancholy. And he was so good-looking. His face was very easy to “read” visually. Holly supposed that some people would say his looks were conventional or even bland. But he had the softest hazel eyes, and his lips appeared to be extremely kissable. His hands were strong-looking, manly hands, and it seemed to Holly he must be some kind of athlete. Oh, who knows? The amazing thing was that they had just started talking and the next five hours had been nothing but fun.

  When she arrived at her father’s, she was in a very good mood. She was excited about her niece, and she was still feeling the intoxicating effects of the guy she had met on the plane. When Holly first saw Clementine, she was wrapped up in her blanket like a burrito. After washing her hands, Holly picked her up. The baby was perfectly healthy and of normal weight, but Holly could hardly believe how light she was. A whole human being, and she felt as light as a cantaloupe. Meanwhile, her head looked like a tortoise’s, wrinkly and hairless. Holly made a hammock of her forearms, held Clementine with them, and gently rocked her back and forth. Holly had rarely held a baby, and this time the sensation was electrifying. A whole life right there in her arms; a whole life, but right now a being that was completely helpless and defenseless. All of Clementine’s eggs were inside her, Holly thought, so she was holding more than one life. Also, Clementine had the most adorable flat little nose. Suddenly she awoke and began to scream and cry; her face turned purple. Holly handed her off to Alex and watched as she nursed her daughter and stared at her blissfully. The rest of the evening was taken up with changing Clementine (which, with great enthusiasm, Holly learned how to do), listening out for Clementine’s cry, nursing her, rocking her, burping her, checking on her, and just watching her.

  Throughout all this, Peter wasn’t in the forefront of Holly’s mind, but he was in the back of it. When the phone rang, she listened anxiously for her father to summon her, but the only calls were from Holly’s mother and Michael, Clementine’s father. Michael had been there every day, Alex told Holly, and he was coming over tomorrow. Ugh, thought Holly. That creep. Thumb rings, and sharks’ teeth hanging from his neck, and wide leather wrist gear with lots of silver. Spirituality. “Michael says that my being with him now isn’t part of his practice,” Alex had explained. Holly held her tongue, but she wanted to say, “But screwing Inge is, I suppose?” Inge was Michael’s girlfriend, a sloe-eyed Swedish-Hispanic masseuse. He wanted to bring her around: “She’s part of my life now. She’s the woman I’m with.” Michael was one of those people who could not only have his cake and eat it too, but who could, by eating his cake, actually end up with more.

  That night Holly told her sister about the guy on the plane. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but anyone could tell by her animation and the glow in her eyes that she had given her heart to this “Peter.” Alex reacted with lots of enthusiasm and lots of questions. “Is he in a relationship?” “Does he eat meat?” Peter still hadn’t called when Holly went to bed, and she was bothered, but not panicked.

  Alex had begun listening intently for the phone, too. Late in the afternoon the next day, Holly’s father asked Holly to go to the post office before it closed since he had something that had to be postmarked that day.

  “No!” Alex cried. “Holly can’t go.”

  “She can’t go? But why—?”

  “I need her here.”

  “You need her here …?”

  “Yes.” Alex allowed her body to droop and sa
id in a quavering voice. “I’m feeling very weak. Very weak …” She trailed off.

  “Oh … uh …”

  “So you’ll have to go,” Alex said.

  “But I can’t go! I’m making lemon buttercream icing!”

  “All right,” said Alex, miraculously reviving. “Then I’ll go.”

  “You’re nursing!”

  “I’ll bring the baby. I’ll drive with one hand.”

  “Alex!” Graham said. Then he paused. “Wait a minute. What’s going on here?”

  “It’s nothing, Pop,” Holly said. “What do you—”

  Alex interrupted with a rapid stream of words: “Holly met someone on the plane who she really likes and she’s waiting for him to call, which he’s supposed to do, so she has to be here when he does call!”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Graham said very mildly, “Oh … uh … oh … I see. Well, then. Well …” He looked around, at a bit of a loss.

  “Pop—” said Holly.

  “No, no-no,” said Graham. “It’s fine. You sit tight. Um. I’ll just run down there myself. You couldn’t, with the mixer …? Or Alex …?” They gave him the blank stares of two young women whose mother had taught them only one thing about cooking: how to shirr an egg. “No, I guess not.”

  With the heavy heart of someone who knew his butter was going to get too warm and that the lemon would curdle it, Graham began to shamble off. Seeing his dejection, Holly insisted on doing the errand and, after making sure she really meant it, he gratefully agreed.

  Peter never did call. Holly had proceeded with her life. After the Dominican Republic, she lived in Los Angeles for a while, working for a production company, mostly reading scripts. She went out with a television writer, a brilliant young man whose willful philistinism Holly eventually tired of. Then she moved back east. For a year she lived with a boatbuilder near the resort where her mother had always spent summers; she had been convinced that she could transform herself from a summer person—the men with their bald heads like baby birds and the women dressed to look like hard candies—into a real person, but she had failed. After that, it was graduate school and then Jonathan. The thought of him made Holly smile. It would be difficult for any woman to forget what it was like when he turned to her at a party and she saw his blue eyes, creamy white skin, tousled curly hair, ruby lips, and heard him say, “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Jonathan Speedwell.” The absolute naturalness of it! And yet with a hint of flirtatiousness. Jonathan set his mind to making her fall in love with him, and it had been impossible to resist. Over time, of course, she learned that he was an almost complete phony. But he was one of those phonies whom you want to let get away with it. He was always kind, fun, thoughtful, and sensitive with her, not least in la phase érotique department. He never once treated her badly. He was fun! And he was so encouraging and supportive; along with his vanity came such confidence in his choice of a friend that it didn’t occur to him to have any doubts about the person, and this seemed especially true of Holly, with whom he had chosen to fall in love. Now, Holly wasn’t entirely naïve, and while Jonathan always was exactly where he said he would be, and while Holly was convinced that he never actually told her any untruths, she had gotten an inkling that perhaps he had strayed. Well, they might have had to have a little chat about that at some point. Meanwhile, she had had no evidence, and strangely, her whiffs of suspicion hadn’t bothered her so much. Jonathan hadn’t seemed quite real, and while she had loved him she wasn’t sure she had felt attached to him—there hadn’t been anything solid to attach to—so his possible liaisons had not felt so threatening. Contrariwise, she imagined that if she were with Peter and then discovered that he had slept with another woman, she would toss them both in a wood chipper.

  The bathwater had cooled once again. After rinsing herself one last time, Holly got out of the tub and opened the drain. She took a towel and without unfolding it patted her body in a couple of places, but she stopped, and with both hands held the towel up to her chest and rested her chin on it. She stared at the ebbing water. At first only a dimple on the surface above the drain, the whirlpool grew wider and wider until it collapsed and the drain drank down the bath’s dregs with a loud slurp.

  Holly made a resolution. Peter was very kind, and it was clear that he sincerely cared about her. Nor did she doubt that he and she had an unusual and precious rapport. Nevertheless, it was time for her to put Peter out of her mind as an object of romantic interest. Time? It was long past time. Indeed, she should never have regarded him in that light in the first place. How often had she imagined sitting on the sofa in her aunt’s library, telling him her feelings, and having him take her into his arms saying he felt exactly the same way. They would kiss and caress each other for a long time, listening to a certain CD set on repeat: Lee Wiley’s Night in Manhattan with Joe Bushkin, a collection of ballads recorded in the fifties. It was so silly. The player’s tray could hold six CDs and she always left that one in it on the billion-to-one chance all this would actually happen.

  Let us face facts, she said to herself. If you meet a male person on a plane and instantly fall in love with him, you and he can have a great love affair, but not if he doesn’t call you. That first meeting was very nice, fun, exciting, but its epochal significance was entirely vitiated by the fact that the male person never called. With regard to that first meeting, at which you fell in love at first sight, you have been told directly that he did not view it as anything more meaningful than a pleasant jetliner interlude. Further, he has never taken any action since then that would suggest he has romantic feelings toward you; he has never made that suggestion verbally; you have established a friendship whose depth in and of itself suggests that his feelings for you run along that channel, not a romantic one; he is married, quite happily, by all appearances, to someone who is not yourself. What conclusion can be drawn from this evidence?

  This conclusion: forget it.

  Holly had been very upset by something, and now she wondered, although she knew it was irrational, whether the cosmos was trying to give her a message: she couldn’t find the book she had been reading on the plane when she had met Peter, a paperback copy of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. They had talked about it, and she had torn out a page from it in order to write down her father’s number for Peter. Holly had always kept it with some other precious books, but now it had disappeared. The only explanation she could think of was that it had gotten misplaced when she and Jonathan were shifting their books around after she moved in, and they discovered they had far too many to fit in his apartment. Anyway, it was gone, and maybe this was a sign that she really should give up Peter for good.

  Holly felt a chill. She finished drying herself, then took an old cotton nightgown off a peg and slipped it on. She did the same with her bathrobe (toile) and tied it snugly. She cleaned up around the soap dish and wiped the ring off the tub; she squeezed out the sponge and tightened the spigots one last time; she draped the wet towel over a rack. She felt pink and clean, which was a good feeling, but she had papers to correct, and she had a difficult couple of days coming up. It was a lonely Sunday evening. Then it occurred to her that she could give her father a call. Not to talk to him about Peter or anything important, just to talk to him.

  At the phone she saw that there was a message. It was from Peter.

  “Hi, Holly, it’s Peter. It was great seeing you today. Look, do you remember, I think I mentioned that Charlotte and I were going to this big dinner party at Arthur Beeche’s, you know, the guy who owns the firm? Well, it’s on Thursday, and, um, it turns out, I just found out, that Charlotte is going to be out of town for it, and I was wondering, if I can arrange it, if you’d like to come with me instead? I know it’s kind of short notice, so I wanted to call you right away. He has this incredible house and he invites all sorts of people, and these things are supposed to be pretty fun. I’ll have to see if it’s okay, but it would be great if you could come. So give me a call tonight or at the o
ffice or whatever. Okay, so we’ll talk. Bye!”

  Typical Peter, Holly thought. Giving her some fun. How kind. Dear, sweet Peter. Holly shivered. She had to start thinking about him differently. She had to. She shook her head as if to shake her old thoughts out of it. Calling him back could wait till tomorrow. She didn’t have the strength to do that now. She called her father instead.

  After Holly left him, Peter stood for a moment under the awning of her aunt’s apartment building. He held his left elbow in his right hand, pressed his left fist against his mouth, and looked down at the sidewalk. Peter had often noticed that the concrete used on sidewalks in New York varied considerably. Sometimes it was beige and had white and black and brown pebbly bits; sometimes it was just a striated beige. This one must have been quite new, he thought. It was a sleek, smooth gray; there were no cracks or blemishes, and the expansion lines, one wide deep one between two that were shallow and thin, resembled a design element, a border. Yes, it was a handsome sidewalk.

  Peter sensed that the doorman was staring at him. He looked up and met the latter’s scowl with a nice smile, which had no effect. Then Peter started to walk uptown.

  He should have said something. Or should he have? It was all over so fast, and what words could he have found to say—what? It was just the tiniest glance. Did it mean something? Jonathan could have pulled it off. Jonathan would have instinctively expressed the perfect sentiment in the perfect tone, even, low, melting around the edges. Peter was not that kind of person. But what did the glance mean, anyway? It was exactly the kind of thing that Peter knew he could wildly overinterpret by projecting his own feelings.