Love in Mid Air (12 page)

“Can you talk?”

“I have to be at the school—”

“Not until 2:05.” He knows my schedule. “I’m not asking you to fly to Europe, I just need five minutes.”

“I’ve never done phone sex.”

“We’re not having phone sex. God, that sounds awful. We’re talking, that’s all. Nobody gets in trouble for talking.” An outrageous
lie, but I find myself laughing anyway. The clock on my dashboard says 1:15.

Five minutes later my underwear is stretched down around my knees and my head is flung back against the car seat. He asks
if that will hold me for a little while.

“I think so,” I tell him.

I call him back that afternoon.

O
n Saturday mornings the kids come with us to the track and they play on the swings and climbing forts of the elementary school
playground while we walk. Kelly and I are moving fast today, fast enough that we break away from Belinda and Nancy. A group
of cheerleaders is practicing in the middle of the loop, building pyramids and collapsing, taking long flipping runs down
the field and rounding off.

“Look at those girls,” I say. “They’re so young and pretty.”

Kelly sighs. “It’s a long life.”

Tory has decided she wants to walk with us. She is trotting to stay with our pace but evidently it’s worth it for the chance
to be let in on adult conversation. She looks at the girls too, then back at us. “When you and Mommy were cheerleaders did
you throw each other in the air?”

“Not anything like what they’re doing,” Kelly says. “We weren’t gymnasts back then. We didn’t go away to camps and learn fancy
stuff. But we did have this one lift…”

“You lifted Mom?”

“She lifted me.”

“Kelly was what we called a flyer,” I say. “I was a catcher so I stayed down below.”

“Why did they put you on the bottom?”

“Because your mom was strong enough to pick me up.”

“Oh, tell her the truth,” I say. “I was always on the bottom because I never had the guts to jump.”

“You never trusted me to catch you.”

“It’s true,” I admit. I put two fingers up to my throat to feel for my pulse. “I’ve never trusted anybody to catch me.”

“You kept making a big deal about that time I dropped Tracy McLeod.”

“Who’s Tracy McCrowd?” Tory asks, reaching out to hold Kelly’s hand.

“Some whiny little nobody who completely doesn’t matter. But one time I kind of dropped her and your mom never got over it.
I think it was the way Tracy kept limping around school telling everybody that her ankle was broken.”

“Her ankle
was
broken.”

“Tory, do you remember that story you made up when you were little?” Kelly asks, clearly ready to change the subject. We have
been walking at this pace for twenty minutes and she is getting a little breathless. “You climbed on my lap and I wrote it
down and then your mom put it in your baby book. It was about being a cheerleader.”

“You wrote it down?”

“Well, yeah, but I remember it by heart.” We come to a stop as Kelly clears her throat and recites:

Once upon a time there was born a baby girl.

She was a ballerina.

She was a cheerleader.

Then she was a wiff.

Then she died.

Tory frowns. “What’s a wiff?”

“You were probably trying to say ‘wife,’ ” I tell Tory, smiling at the memory. “But it was kind of strange that you knew ‘ballerina’
and ‘cheerleader’ but you didn’t know the word for ‘wife.’ ”

“You were so funny,” said Kelly. “I would have written down everything you ever said if I could.”

Tory nods, as if that would have indeed been a sensible response to her brilliant youth. We begin to walk again and she gazes
at the cheerleaders. “Were you and Mommy pretty?”

“Oh God, we were gorgeous.”

“And your aunt Kelly could fly.”

“It wasn’t really flying. It was more like falling.”

Tory looks up at Kelly. “Will you teach me how to fall?”

“There’s nothing to teach. You just let go.”

Tory squints into the little frown she gets when she’s thinking hard. She wants to believe Kelly, but some part of her is
unconvinced.

“It’s not like you’re really learning anything,” Kelly says, staring out at the field, out at the young girls climbing on
top of each other. “It’s more like forgetting something. But I’ll lift you up and drop you if you want…”

“Okay,” Tory says, but her voice is soft.

“… and your mom can catch you because your mom is the strongest woman in the world. Just ask her.”

“It’s two different kinds of strength, that’s all.”

Tory is still not sure. “How high would you fly?”

“She could do a full inverted pike,” I say. “She was the best.”

“Do you have a picture of it?”

I laugh. Typical Tory. She wants proof.

“I think I can dig one up,” says Kelly, laughing too. “You’ve got to give us a break, Tory. We weren’t always wiffs.”

K
elly was in love once.

The man was married. She told me this defiantly one morning when we were sitting in front of our favorite coffeehouse, the
one with an Asian-looking patio and Frank Lloyd Wright–style light fixtures. I don’t remember how I felt or what I said. I’d
only been married about a year or so myself. I probably told her marriage was a door people walk in and out of, something
ridiculous like that. But I must have said enough that she knew I wasn’t going to judge her, that I wasn’t going to frown
and ask her just exactly where she thought all this was heading.

In those days Kelly always seemed to be slightly drunk. Perhaps that’s because I was pregnant with Tory and not drinking myself,
so I was in a position to better observe her increasing giddiness. She was telling me about all the men she’d dated during
the time we’d fallen out of touch, how sometimes she would give them blow jobs just because she was uncomfortable, and dropping
to your knees seemed like a good thing to do when you weren’t sure what to do next. “Isn’t that awful?” she said. “Isn’t that
sad?”

I shook my head because there isn’t a woman alive who at some point hasn’t looked at an erect penis and thought, “Oh Christ,
what’s the fastest way I can deal with this?”

“Yeah, it’s awful,” I said. “It’s awful and it’s sad and it happens all the time.”

But sex with this new man—it was furtive, ecstatic. It was, she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, sort of a religion.
All of a sudden, here at the age of thirty she had met this man and—she flapped her hands around, at a loss to explain it.
They were doing everything, they were trying it all. He wanted her to blindfold him. He wanted her to tie him up with some
sort of rubber tubing left over from when he’d hurt his back and had physical therapy. They did it in swivel chairs, in cars,
on the picnic tables of a park near her house. Once, in a gas station restroom, they ripped the sink completely loose from
the wall. “That BP station at the corner of Providence and Rama,” she said. “You know the one?”

I nodded, so deeply shocked and sick with jealousy that I could hardly hold myself upright in my chair.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s like it never ends.”

To prove the point, her phone rang. Kelly was the first person I knew who had a cell phone, and she had one back when they
were big and heavy and only worked if you were outdoors and standing on a hill. I always wondered why she would own such a
thing, but now it made sense. She fished the phone out of her purse, answered it, and turned toward me as if to include me
in the conversation. “No,” she said, “no, I’m with Elyse. She’s right here. It’s okay. She’s my best friend and she totally
gets it.” A longer pause. She looked at me. “You want to talk to him?”

I almost shook my head. She might think that I totally got it, but to me it seemed like we were growing farther apart than
we’d ever been. Here I was pregnant and driving a minivan that still had that new-car smell and sticker marks on the windows
and she’s ripping the sinks out of BP stations. “Do you want me to?” I asked, and she nodded.

“Talk dirty. You used to be good at that.”

I guess talking dirty is like riding a bicycle. I sat there and spun out this whole story about him being under the table
while she and I were having coffee. I said things I’d never say if I knew him, things I’d never say if I thought he could
see me, but it was strangely intoxicating, this disembodied voice of an unknown man coming out of the phone saying, somewhat
frantically, “And then what, and then what?”

Kelly was bent double in a fit of giggles and later she said my story was perfect, that this was his fantasy, two women, and
that he was always submissive, always held captive and forced to serve them in some way. We were barely thirty. We were too
young to realize that’s what they all want. We believed we’d stumbled on some sort of miracle, how easy it was to taunt this
man, how desperate he seemed for every syllable of every promise.

But then I got nervous. I don’t remember why. Perhaps someone else came out on the patio. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of myself
in the coffee shop window and remembered that I was pregnant. I was not one of those pregnant women who glowed. I was perpetually
sweaty and queasy with a splotchy face and Phil and I hadn’t had sex for three months, not since the night where I had suddenly,
right in the middle of things, turned and thrown up on the bed. Kelly was smiling, leaning across the table and nodding to
encourage me on, but when I saw my reflection in the window I stopped talking. The man on the phone was silent. Finally I
said, “I hope I haven’t made a bad first impression,” and he said, “Quite the contrary, I don’t ever remember anyone ever
making such a good first impression.” I handed her back the phone and said, “He’s adorable.”

She raised it to her ear, listened a minute, and then smirked at me. “No,” she said. “I told you. Elyse and I are going to
the movies. I won’t be back until five.” Then she paused again and said, “No, I don’t think she’d be game and don’t use words
like that. It makes it sound like you’re planning to shoot her.”

I
n the months that followed, I was the only witness to their affair. Kelly would call, giggly and talking fast, and I would
assure her that I wasn’t asleep anyway. I rarely was. And through the restless nights of late pregnancy and the long sessions
of breastfeeding that followed I would bend my head to hold the phone in the crook of my neck and I would listen as the words
flooded out of her, stories that she told all out of sequence, stories that seemed to have no logical beginning or end. Stories
that opened with a mumble of, “My God, I don’t know how to tell you…”

She would pause sometimes, even in the middle of her wildly careening life, and say, “How was your day?” But, my God, I didn’t
know how to tell her. For starters, I often didn’t know what day it was. And while life gives us words for what she was going
through, there didn’t seem to be any words for what was happening to me. How can you describe hours where you stare at a baby’s
hand or whole days in which you seem to be neither asleep nor awake? Everything around her was risky and sharp, but I was
moving into a world without edges. Padding around beds, pillows stacked against fireplaces, locks on cabinets, plastic discs
covering the holes in electrical outlets, vaporizers that muffled every sound into a soft dull purr. How could I explain a
world in which it was impossible to get hurt? “My day was fine,” I would say. “Tell me more.”

Of course she couldn’t understand my pillowed life, of course she couldn’t slow down to look around. Of course she had tunnel
vision; she was in a tunnel. There is a time to draw back and see the big picture, a time to consider another point of view,
but not then. “Do I talk about him too much?” she would ask, and then immediately add, “I know, I know, I talk about him too
much.” But these brief moments of lucidity were not enough to slow the process she was being pulled into. Something primordial
was happening to her and to ask her to stop and look around would have been like asking a woman in labor if she’d like to
discuss politics. She would tell you, quite rightly, that at the moment she had other things on her mind.