Love in Mid Air (16 page)

“And they don’t talk.”

“A melon’s never going to tell you what you’re doing wrong.”

“So you split them open… how does it work?”

He shakes his head. “No splitting. You take your pocketknife and cut a hole. Small enough to give you some kicks, but big
enough to impress the other boys, and then you go behind a bush…”

I’m laughing, and he is too, flattening himself on top of me, opening his jacket and rubbing the tender arc beneath my breast
as we roll back and forth. “This feels good,” he whispers, and I stop rolling. We’re face-to-face but not looking at each
other.

He feels heavy all of a sudden and I shift my weight a little. “Watermelon fucking doesn’t sound like something that takes
a lot of skill,” I say. “Where did Custis come in?”

“He taught me how to choose a good one.”

“You thump it?”

“There’s more to it than that. You get your eye on a particular melon out in the field and you watch and wait until it’s the
right size. Every day you pick it up and bounce it a little in your hands.” He illustrates, using my breast. “Once I had one
in mind I’d go out several times a day and check on it. Because you don’t want to pull it off the vine until you’re sure it’s
ready. You want it heavy in proportion to its size, so it’s juicy.”

“You’re so funny. Not that you’d do it, because you were what, fourteen or fifteen? But you had this whole relationship with
it, you were practically dating it.”

“Sometimes I named them.” Now we are giggling again, rocking again. His mouth is close to my ear. “I’m getting hungry,” he
says. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “This fancy hotel room you booked us into doesn’t seem to have a clock.” The bed is gray with afternoon
shadows. It’s been hours since he knocked on the door, but I don’t know how many.

Gerry gets up and roots around in his pants for his watch. It’s a climber’s model and it glows in the dark. “No wonder we’re
hungry. It’s almost seven.”

Exactly twelve hours until he’s leaving. I inhale and exhale slowly, trying not to make the sound of a sigh. “Wear my panties,”
I say.

“What?”

“Wear my panties and I’ll wear your boxers.”

“That won’t work.”

I pull the twisted wad of his navy silk boxers from the bottom of the bed with my foot. I wonder if he wears stuff like this
every day to the office or if he bought them special. The shorts pull easily over my hips. “I regret to inform you that they
are a perfect fit.”

“You know, for the record, it does get hot in Boston. You ever been there?”

I shake my head.

Gerry moves closer. “We could get room service,” he says.

“No, I want to be with you in public. I want to put on clothes and sit up straight and look across a table at you with other
people there.”

“Can you do it again before we go?”

“Girls can always do it.” I’m going to be sore tomorrow.

“Yeah,” he says softly, leaning across the bed to thump me with his thumb and index finger, traveling from my collarbone down
to my navel, and stopping just short of the elastic waist of his boxer shorts. “Yeah, I’d say you’re just about ready.”

A
t the restaurant they tell us it will be fifty minutes before they have a table. Many men would be dismayed and demand that
we go somewhere else, but this is something I’ve noticed about Gerry, that he is always willing to wait. We put in our name
and take the buzzer and walk across the street to kill time in a Restoration Hardware. I like Restoration Hardware. The music
is soothing and the salespeople are nice. They have coiled hoses and brass kickplates, heavy lovely dishes and leather chairs.
They sell marriage.

Gerry is standing across the store from me, looking at books. He is frowning, his face intense. When I walk up to him he shows
me a recipe for coq au vin cooked over a campfire. He also has a basketful of some old-fashioned bay rum soap and he tells
me that just seeing the wrapper reminded him of his grandfather. “This is what a man is supposed to smell like,” he says,
holding out a bar for me to sniff. “This is a smell you can trust.”

He pays in cash. We link arms as we leave the shop. I like the fact that he is so much taller than me, and when I put my arm
through his he almost pulls me behind him. I stumble a couple of times because he takes long strides. His wife must be closer
to his height, I think, or else they do not often walk arm in arm. We pass our reflection in the window. We are a handsome
couple.

The next morning he will leave very early. His flight is hours before mine and I tell him to wake me. He doesn’t want to.
There is no reason for me to get up before dawn to see him off, he says, and he would rather leave with the image of me sleeping
in the plush white bed. I suspect he doesn’t have the stomach for goodbyes or questions about when I will see him again. “I
promise I won’t make a scene,” I tell him. “Please get me up.” And yet the next morning I will awaken alone to muffled noises
from the maids in the hall. He will have left me the breakfast menu on his pillow, along with a bar of the bay rum soap.

But I don’t know any of this as we go in to dinner. I can’t see the future and this is my great gift. I only see us happy,
handsome, our arms linked as we walk, our outlines reflected in the windows of expensive stores. I see him jumping, laughing
as the buzzer in his pocket goes off, us escorted to a booth, us bending over our menus, deciding to begin with a plate of
mussels. I tell him stories about me and Kelly at the drive-in and he quotes me lyrics of a song he wrote back in the seventies
for the first girl he ever loved.

“She broke my heart,” he says.

“She’s probably dead by now,” I tell him. “Or she should be.” He smiles and for a minute there in the restaurant we expand
and the air around us shimmers with possibility. He pushes the last mussel toward me, just like Tramp gave Lady the last meatball.
That was my favorite movie when I was a little girl.

S
ex can save you. You’re not supposed to say this, but it’s true. After I get back from New York, I am high for three solid
days. I send him an e-mail, the entire text of which reads, “I am happy.”

I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to go into therapy and work on your issues. You’re supposed
to journal and do yoga and breathe deeply. You’re supposed to go somewhere very blank and plain—a beach house perhaps, in
a town where you don’t know anybody and the walls of the house are all white without a single picture. Or instead you go to
Ireland with a group of women, and everyone wears homespun shifts and eats nourishing root vegetables and the sky is perpetually
on the verge of rain. Or maybe India. Probably India. That or Nepal. The point is you must journey somewhere far away and
stay gone for a very long time. Happiness is tough. It requires silence and solitude and contemplation. And then maybe, somewhere
in year seven or year fifteen or twenty-two, happiness comes to you. Maybe not. I know that’s how it’s supposed to be. I know
you’re not supposed to use men like shortcuts and off-ramps, I know that, and yet if I had to count the times that sex dragged
me back to life versus therapy or religion or meditation or the love of good friends, it wouldn’t even be close.

*    *    *

I
’m not sure how men know when they’re better, but when women recover from something they cut their hair. On the third day
after New York I wake up, walk into the bathroom, look into the mirror and think, “It’s time to cut my hair.”

8 a.m.: I call the most expensive salon in town and they say that Antonio has an unexpected opening. They assure me that I’m
very lucky—apparently, this rarely happens. When I arrive they bring me Italian
Vogue
and bottled water and drape a long aromatherapy pillow around my neck. When Antonio asks me to describe my vision, I tell
him I want a haircut that makes me look good when I’m lying flat on my back. He makes that European sound, something between
a snort of derision and an exhalation of cigarette smoke, but he’s very careful with my hair, snipping my bangs three times
to get the layers just right. Later he tells me he’s from Tennessee.

10:40: With my hair swishing around my chin, I go to buy wrapping paper for Belinda’s birthday present. This takes longer
than expected, because I am transfixed by the beauty of the Hallmark store. Everything seems as strange and exotic as if I
were back in the Chinese shop in Chelsea wandering among the dusty jade statues and bins of dark aromatic teas. I walk up
and down the aisles and finally, after much consideration, I buy ballerina-blue tissue paper and thin, serrated ribbons that
you can curl with the edge of a scissor. That will do for Belinda, but I also take a ball of rough twine, two red silk boxes
filled with confetti, a velvet bag tied with a gold cord, a shiny silver cylinder, and olive green paisley paper. All bought
with no plan for how or when I will use them. I run my hands along the displays and touch the points of the satin bows as
if they were sea anemones, capable of recoiling at my touch. I had forgotten that life had this much texture.

11:20: I buy thirty pounds of potting soil from Wal-Mart, take it home, drag it into the backyard, and plunge a steak knife
into the belly of the bag. I collect all the pots that aren’t quite right to sell and then I take my houseplants outside.
There, one by one, I pull each from its container, exposing the tangled white roots to the air. I’m hit with a sudden, nearly
blinding wave of guilt. The roots on some of the plants are interwoven so deeply that it’s clear they’ve needed larger pots
for a long time. After the rooted ones I move on to the bulbs, yanking at the base of each stem until there is this soft little
sigh and the soil releases the flower into my dirty hands.

The bulbs are my favorite anyway. They have always seemed to me like small miracles, the way they have the power to regenerate
themselves, to push up time and again through the soil. They have slept so patiently all summer and fall in my garage, their
pots covered in cobwebs. I hold each one in my hand and imagine I can feel its small beating heart and I bury them back into
much larger pots, cover them with fresh soil and a sprinkle of water, leave them with a small prayer of apology for the neglect
they have suffered. At one point I become quite emotional about the whole thing. I have to stop and lie down in the hammock
and cry. I figure that if Phil asks me that night why I’m not wearing my wedding rings I can say, “I spent the afternoon repotting
plants,” but as it turns out he doesn’t ask.

12:40: Afterwards I’m smeared with potting soil so I go into the house to take a bath. At the last minute I squirt a dollop
of bath gel into the water. This bottle of Vitabath has been in the bathroom cabinet for years but I can’t remember who gave
it to me or what I was saving it for. It falls from the bottle with a big gelatinous thud and makes the bottom of the tub
so slick that when I step in I slide straight down and make a splash. The sound of my laughter surprises me and I look up,
thinking maybe somebody else has come into the room.

1:30: For lunch I stop by a sports bar near the mall and order a draft beer and chicken wings. The beer is so cold that with
the first swallow I feel an icepick stab in the back of my brain. I’ve brought a big heavy book with me, one of those classics
you always mean to read but never do. I keep a pen in my hand so that I can underline anything that strikes me as particularly
interesting or well written—it’s a quirk left over from my days in graduate school. I used to be smart. I used to be able
to remember things. Now I am just a woman who has cats with clever names. But today everything strikes me as significant and
I am underlining nearly every sentence. It’s like I’m wearing 3-D glasses and the page is no longer flat—some words seem to
be moving toward me and others are receding.

The bartender asks me if I have everything I need. People are always asking me these sorts of questions: How you doing today,
ma’am? What are you looking for? Ready for a refill? Would you like to see those in another color? Did we save room for dessert?
When you have this much, people can’t seem to stop themselves from asking if you need a little more.

“I’m fine,” I tell the bartender, but the truth is I am starving—greedy, ravenous, greasy and vulgar with appetite. The wings
are great, charred and spicy, and I go through three cups of the blue cheese dressing. It’s like the first time I’ve tasted
food in months. It’s like food is a secret that only I have discovered. Enough, enough, enough, who can say what is enough?
I have a daughter and a home and a husband and a lover and my pots and my books and my cats and one true friend and this should
be enough, but if I knew how to count to enough I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

I close my eyes and wonder how long this manic joy can continue. I’ve been a wild woman for days, screaming out the letters
on
Wheel of Fortune
, pouring the pancake batter in the shapes of ships and bunnies, just like my dad used to do. Pancakes were vehicles of vision
for him, sort of like a Rorschach test, and he believed you could read a person based on what they saw in the swirls of batter
and syrup. My father would make pancakes for me every Saturday morning, and I suddenly miss him so much that I put my hands
over my face and feel tears rising for the second time that day.