Love in Mid Air (10 page)

Twenty minutes later, after brushing teeth and putting the cats out and checking the locks on the doors and setting the alarm,
we get into bed. We move toward the middle.

I lie back, close my eyes. Once you’re in the X it’s easy to forget where you are. It’s easy to imagine you’re with someone
else—in fact, it’s easy to imagine that you are someone else. Two thousand dollars and some bank stock won’t go far. I need
to take every commission I can, even the crappy ones, and I need to stay at least another year. That means fifty-two more
times in the X position, fifty-six if we go away on vacation. Phil makes a halfhearted effort to pull me on top of him but
I roll back and when we connect at the hips and he starts his familiar rocking rhythm I think that it’s not bad, really, it’s
kind of calming and sweet. Gerry has not called and I am being ridiculous. What if I break a marriage and a family only to
arrive at the same place? What if this thing that seems to be a doorway turns out to be just another mirror? Maybe I’m doomed
to spend eternity walking into reflections of myself and saying, “Damn, I guess it was my fault, after all.” Maybe Jeff is
right, that there are ways to feel like a significant person in my day-to-day life. The last track on the fourth CD of the
marriage series suggested new lingerie. I suppose I could do that. Sure, it’s a cliché, but clichés sometimes work. Phil mumbles
something, slips a hand underneath my hip to turn me a little more toward him and get the angle better. It’s not so bad, I
tell myself, it’s really sort of pleasant, but then I wonder how I would have felt this afternoon if it had been Gerry’s voice
on the line and I know, in my secret tiny heart, that I would do anything to be back in that Traveler’s Chapel in Dallas.
I’m beginning to think I’m like Elizabeth Taylor in an old movie, that there is something fundamentally wrong with my mind,
that I can’t seem to see anything the way a normal woman would.

I made a mistake when I married Phil and I know I’m going to have to pay for that mistake—the only question is, how long am
I going to have to keep paying? It seems like I have already been paying for a very long time. And Gerry, Gerry is a player,
definitely a player. Definitely unavailable, definitely too polished of a kisser, definitely married, definitely the wrong
choice. Not to mention the fact that he hasn’t called back. Phil was a mistake and Gerry probably is too—but sometimes it
seems like the only way to erase one mistake is to make another. “I need to…” Phil says, and I tell him it’s okay, I’m not
close. He pounds for a few seconds, shudders, and rolls off of me, his hand brushing my hair in what I can only assume is
a gesture of affection. “Sorry,” he whispers, and I tell him that I’m fine.

T
he coach-pitch coach calls and, as I predicted, Phil is thrilled. I take Tory to the first day of conditioning, where she
is the youngest by six months and a full head shorter than the next shortest kid.

But I think the coach likes Tory. He keeps coming over to the fence to make little comments about her, looking down at me
in his reflector shades as if he were a cop. T-ball is one thing, he tells me, but she’s ready to start hitting a moving target.
And that’s what separates the men from the boys. Most people see something coming right at them and they freeze. Do I know
what he means? I know what he means.

Then he moseys his way back to the infield, walking not quite all the way to the mound, because he doesn’t want to have to
throw too hard. Tory looks so small at the plate and when she puts on the helmet her head is as huge and wobbly as an alien’s.
The coach throws and she swings way too late. The ball smacks the chain-link fence behind her and the assistant coach retrieves
it and throws it back. “You got yourself a good look at it,” says the coach, who throws again, a slow, high-arced pitch that
gives her plenty of time to think. Apparently too much time. Tory stands there as the ball floats past her. My phone rings
and I dig in my purse for it, my eyes still on Tory. “Now you’re ready,” says the coach.

A man’s voice asks, “Is this the right number?”

“What?”

“Is this your cell phone? You’re a hard person to find.”

I jump up so fast that the folding chair collapses under me. I walk to the end of the fence out of earshot of the other mothers.
“This is Elyse,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I know who you are,” he says. “I just called you, remember?” Then he goes on to tell me that he had Googled me, but
he was spelling my name wrong. He thought I’d said Burden, not Bearden, but he kept trying different combinations and finally
Google asked him, “Do you mean Elyse Bearden?” And from there he got the name of a gallery in Charleston that carried my pots
and called the manager and lied and said he collected me and that he wanted to commission something specific and she’d given
him my number. Only that was my home number, and when he called a child had answered and he’d panicked and hung up. Then he
checked his cell and got the message from me.

I am laughing. I don’t know why. Everything he says to me is funny.

“Have you always been this hard to find?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time anybody looked for me.”

“Where are you? Can you talk?”

“I’m at the ball field. My daughter is only seven but they want her in coach-pitch. It’s the first practice.” The coach releases
the ball, and Tory looks up at it, the helmet shifting, dropping, nearly covering her eyes.

“That’s great,” says Gerry. “Coach-pitch already?”

“Tell me again,” I say. “Tell me how hard it was to find me,” and he does the whole story all over again, including the Charleston
gallery owner’s accent, how she’s always saying “oot” instead of “out” like she’s British royalty or some damn thing. How
he normally checks his cell every day but he’d lost the charger, left it in Arizona maybe, and then when he finally bought
a new one and got the phone back up he’d had twenty-seven messages, including the one from me. His voice sounds different
than I remember and there is something unreal about the situation, something magical and electric. I have never thought before
about the science of a ringing phone, but now I am entranced with the miracle of our connection—the idea of satellites above
us in the dark of space, releasing signals, wavelengths of impulses bouncing from one solid thing to another, so that the
sounds leave his mouth and travel immeasurable distances before they reverberate within my ear. The coach releases the ball
and Tory swings, the effort nearly pulling her off her feet.

“She said you were talented,” he tells me. “She said I’d be smart to get as much of you as I could.”

“She’s right,” I say. I am standing very straight, gripping the chain-link fence. My posture perfect, as if he can see me.

“Do you like being a potter?”

“It gives me freedom.”

The coach steps a few feet closer and tries again.

“Freedom in the sense that it would be easy for you to get away for a couple of days?”

“Oh my God. My daughter just hit her first softball.” The ball falls between second and third and the kids, some of whom have
become so bored that they’re actually lying down in the infield, push up to their knees and watch it roll past. Tory’s coach
turns toward me and grins.

“She hit it?”

I tell him that she not only hit it, she hit it solid. He says that sometimes he hates the bank. Sometimes he thinks there’s
a whole other life out there. Teaching, or running a bike repair shop in Key West. Something real. Something simple. Something
with heart. Do I ever think about it, that we might all have another life out there? A pop, louder than the first, and this
time Tory’s ball is high in the air, dropping somewhere in the empty green field behind third.

I
t’s been so long since I’ve felt desire that at first I mistake it for the flu.

There has to be some explanation for why I wake up queasy the next morning, why I have to place a hand on each side of the
bathroom sink until I can steady myself. When I look up at the mirror, my face is pale and foreign.

It’s a bit like pregnancy, but I’m not pregnant. I take a small blue pill every morning, and I am happy that Phil didn’t have
the vasectomy we considered several years ago, that we opted to keep, as he says, this door open. For it gives me an excuse
to take the pills and perhaps… I haven’t asked Gerry this. He has three children so there’s a very good chance he’s been,
as Phil would say, clipped. I don’t know how to ask the question so it’s good I don’t have to. I push the pill through the
tinfoil and swallow it.

All day I am languid and fitful. I can’t seem to concentrate on the wheel and I wander back into the den and surf channels
until I find a Bette Davis movie. Maybe I’m sick, I think, as I lie on the couch. I blow off walking with the girls and nothing
sounds good for lunch. When I go for carpool at two I mistakenly turn into the driveway for the school buses and have to do
an awkward three-point turn while the mothers in the other cars sit and watch. I drop off the first kid and when Tory whines
to get out at her friend Taylor’s house I walk with the girls to the kitchen door and ask Taylor’s mother if it would be okay.
She says of course, it’s fine, and that I do look a little tired. It might be the flu, I tell her, and she says yeah, she
hears something’s going around.

All day I’ve kept my cell phone in my bra. I turned it off for carpool and when I get home I check for messages. But of course
he hasn’t called. It’s only been one day. He won’t call every day. I go out to the garage and sit at the wheel. I walk out
in the yard and pull some weeds. I lie down on the bed and get back up. I put a load of laundry in the washer but do not turn
it on.

At 4:16 my breast vibrates.

“I think I’m getting sick,” I tell him.

He says he doesn’t feel that great himself.

I
’m standing in front of a circular table in Frederica’s Lingerie, my hands sunk into a stack of eggplant and cinnamon camisoles.
I’ve read that in order to sell things to women you should name colors after foods. Artichoke and eggshell and mango and cabernet.
It sounds logical. Women are always hungry.

The mall is nice in the morning, before the teenagers come, when they play classical music and the sun from the skylights
falls across the slate tiles. Through the open doors of the shop I can see the courtyard fountains throbbing in their irregular
rhythms, shooting arteries of water high into the air. It’s the kind of fountain you want to wade into, climbing the marble
steps in stiletto boots, standing over the jets until the pattern changes course and a cannonball of water rises up between
your legs.

“Ready?” The saleswoman, who has announced her name to be Tara, holds out her hands and I release the clothes to her and follow
her to the dressing room. It is small but pretty, with a padded chair and framed oval mirror, and I stand back while Tara
struggles to fit the hangers on pegs. There’s too much stuff here. Too many choices. The sign of a woman who doesn’t know
what she wants or what she wants to be.

I strip down to my high-waisted cotton underwear and begin to go through my options. Loose, drapey pajamas that remind me
of Katharine Hepburn movies. She always thinks she can jerk Spencer Tracy around, but he’s way too much man for her. I button
the pajamas and stand tall in front of the mirrors. Tara calls through the slats in the door that she has hot tea brewing
and I say that’s nice, I’d love a cup. I move on to the kimonos. They’re my favorites anyway, the way they hide everything
and yet can fall to the floor at any moment. One swift pull of the silk tie at your hips, and it’s done. Tara brings in the
tea while I wrap a yellow and tangerine sarong beneath my armpits. This is good—light and campy. Dorothy Lamour joking around
on the beach with Bob and Bing and my shoulders look strong above the knotted cloth. I ask Tara about those hose with the
elastic tops, the kind that are supposed to stay up by themselves. Do they really work and would she bring me a pair in black,
medium opaque?