Love in Mid Air (2 page)

I am leaving out of Gate 42 and this is Gate 7. Gerry lives in Boston. He is leaving out of Gate 37 in twenty minutes. “Come
on,” he says. “We’re going to have to hurry.” It seems easier to follow him than to think, so I do. Follow him, that is, away
from the departure board and down the long corridor that leads to the higher numbers. We put our bags over our shoulders and
begin to run, run full out until we get to the moving sidewalk and hop aboard. My chest hurts and I feel sick.

“We’re being cheated,” Gerry says. “We could just forget our flights and find a hotel. This is Dallas. Nobody knows us. We
could say we missed our connection.” We are walking fast on the sidewalk, cutting right and left around couples and old people,
blowing past them like they were obstacles on a video screen, until we come up behind a woman with a baby stroller and we
have to stop.

He glances at me. “I’ve offended you.”

“No,” I say. “I’m thinking.” We might run like this and miss our planes anyway. If we stopped running right now it would be
one of those lies that isn’t much of a lie, and they’re my favorite kind. He’s quite right, this is Dallas. Nobody here knows
us. He is sliding his hand up and down my spine and I lean into him a little, feel the sharp angle of his hipbone cutting
into my waist. The moving sidewalk carries us past Gate 16 and the clock there says 5:27. There’s a very good chance we won’t
make it.

“I just have to be back for a meeting on Monday,” he says.

“Monday’s tomorrow.”

He frowns, like maybe I’m wrong.

The moving sidewalk ends, spilling us in front of Gate 22. I see a cart that sells bottled water, but there isn’t time. I
put my bag over my right shoulder, he puts his over his left, and we join hands and start running again. The airport is interminable,
it’s like a dream, and he looks over to me at some point and says, “It’ll be all right.” What? What will be all right? I catch
a glimpse of myself in a mirrored wall as we pass. My shirt is stained with burrito juice and my hair has dried really strangely
and I start to tell him that usually I don’t look this bad. Which isn’t exactly the truth. I often look this bad but I guess
what I want to tell him is that I am capable of looking much better. I am watching him for a sign that he does this all the
time, for surely he is the sort of man who does this all the time. He’s strong and tall, with the kind of teeth that are designed
to rip flesh from bone, and just then—the clock says 5:32—he pulls me to the side and I go with him, unquestioning, into the
Traveler’s Chapel where he drops his bag, puts his hands on my shoulders, and kisses me.

It’s one of those kisses that gives you the feeling that you’re falling, that the elevator floor has dropped out from under
you, and when I finally break away I see a mural of Jesus, a sort of Hispanic Jesus looking all flat and distorted, with long
thin hands reaching out to hold a 747. His eyes are sorrowful but sympathetic. Here, in the Traveler’s Chapel of the Dallas
airport, apparently he has seen it all.

“I need your card,” Gerry says. “Your business card.”

“Okay,” I say. The blood has rushed to my face and my ears are ringing. Gerry and I are practically screaming at each other,
as if we are climbers high on a mountain, as if we have to yell to be heard over the sound of the whipping wind. “But you
can’t call me. I’m married.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m rich.”

“You’re rich?”

“I make a lot of money, that’s all I mean. I don’t know why I make a lot of money, I don’t really understand why they pay
me what they pay me, but it could make things easier.” He glances over at Jesus.

What does he mean, it could make things easier? For the first time I am wary. He’s like an actor suddenly gone off script
and I don’t know what to say. He has been so smooth up to this point, so smooth that I could imagine he would slide right
off me when we parted, never leaving a mark. I have already been practicing the story I will tell Kelly on the phone tomorrow,
imagining how she will laugh at the cliché of it all. Elyse drinking two vodka doubles and getting herself picked up on a
plane. (“That’s a vodka quadruple,” Kelly will say. “Exactly what did you think was going to happen?”) Elyse making out in
an airport chapel. (“With some Tex-Mex Jesus watching you the whole time.”) Elyse walking toward her plane while the man walks
away in another direction, toward another plane that will carry him to a different town and a different life. (“It’s just
one of those things,” she will tell me, as I sit on my kitchen countertop with the phone pressed to my ear and my legs swinging.
“Nothing really happened so there’s no point in feeling guilty.”) Kelly is the only one who knew me when we were both young
and pretty, when we were impulsive and the world seemed full of men, and we would find ourselves sometimes transported by
sex, picked up and carried into situations that, in the muddle of memory, seem a bit like movie scenes. She is the only one
who would understand that I am relieved to find a sliver of this girl still inside me. Relieved to find that, although older
and more suspicious and heavy with marriage, under the right circumstances I can still be picked up and carried. That I remember
how to kiss a man who doesn’t seem to have a last name.

But now, suddenly, this man standing before me isn’t acting like a player. He’s awkward and embarrassed and real. He is determined
to make me understand something, something that I suspect will not fit well into the story I’ve planned to tell Kelly. I raise
my fingers to his mouth to stop the words, but it has been a long time since I have been in a situation like this and perhaps
the lines have changed. If a mistake is being made here, it is undoubtedly mine.

He pushes my hand aside, squeezing it for a moment to soften the rebuff. “No,” he says. “I need you to hear this. My first
car was a fucking AMC Pacer, do you even remember those? They blew up if somebody ran into you. I spent a whole summer sleeping
in a tent on my friend’s grandmother’s back porch because a bunch of us were going to move to New Orleans and start a blues
band but we couldn’t half play and we were stoned all the time and you know how it is with the blues… I used to eat those
ramen noodles, do you know what I’m talking about, those kind that were like four packages for a dollar? I didn’t think I
was going to turn out to be some rich asshole banker flying all over the place. Today was probably the first time I’ve sat
in coach in five years, can you believe that? I fucked up and missed my earlier flight, I wasn’t even supposed to be on that
plane. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I wasn’t even supposed to be on that plane and the money isn’t who I am. It’s
just, you know, energy, a kind of raw energy, and it could make things easier. That’s all I’m trying to tell you, that it
could make things easier.” He exhales sharply. “Are you mad at me?”

I shake my head. He kisses me again. This time he breaks away first and I am left hanging and abandoned in the space between
his chin and his shoulder, my eyes still closed and my mouth still open. “A card,” he says into my hair. “I need your card.”

I am trying very hard not to faint. I flatten my back against the stucco wall and open my eyes. Gerry is adjusting his pants,
looking away from me as he arranges things, his face as flushed as a teenage boy’s. I am digging in my purse and my hand is
finding ink pens, breath mints, Tampax, everything but the business card that could propel this madness into the future tense.

“I’m shaking,” I tell him as he presses something into my hand, and then we are running again, out the chapel door and through
the airport to Gate 37. People are lined up waiting to enter the tunnel.

“I’ll go with you to your gate,” he says. “If you’ve missed your flight, I’ll miss mine.” I look at the monitor behind the
desk. My flight was supposed to have left two minutes ago. There is nothing I can do about the situation one way or another
and this thought thrills me. We are walking now. Five numbers down to my gate and the sign says
CHARLOTTE
and there are no people except for one woman in a US Airways uniform. “Are you still boarding?” I ask her and I am amazed
at the neutrality of my voice. She asks me my name and I realize this is the first time that Gerry has heard it. She looks
down at the monitor and says, “They haven’t pulled back. I can get you on.”

Somewhere in the high thin air between Phoenix and Dallas we took turns reading the
Redbook
article about what a woman can do to a man in bed and Gerry picked three things from the list. The only one that I can remember
now is that he said he likes for women to show that they want it. Jump the guy. Take charge of the situation. All men like
that. I know he wants me to be the alpha female, the un-wife, the person you meet in strange cities who is cool and aggressive
and uncomplicated and self-assured, and so, right on cue, I burst into tears. Gerry kisses me again, only I am so weak that
I can hardly move my mouth. I slide off his tongue like a climber with bad equipment.

I break away and follow the US Airways lady down the tunnel. I don’t look back. As we walk I sniffle and she pats my arm and
says, “Airport goodbyes can be very hard.” I have never been the last person on a plane before. Everyone looks at me as I
bump my way down the aisle to the only empty seat. A nice-looking older lady is beside me and I want to tell her everything
but the overhead is full and it takes my last ounce of strength to shove my carry-on under the seat in front of me. Gerry’s
crumpled business card is in my hand. I never found a card so he can’t call me. I can only call him and this is no good. If
I call him first he will always know that I walked in free and clear, that I’m willing to have an affair, that I don’t care
that he’s married and I’m married, that I chose it, that I wanted it, that I knew what I was getting into before I picked
up that phone and made that call.

As we pull away from the gate I am calm, or rather I am in that strange state where you’re so upset that you behave as if
you were calm. I close my eyes and try to picture a flat thin Jesus holding up my plane. Gerry doesn’t like landings, but
I don’t like takeoff. I don’t like the feeling of being pushed back in my seat. This is the point where I pray things like,
“Into your hands I commit my spirit,” or maybe it’s “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Neither one makes a lot of sense
but I’ll say anything on a runway. I’d speak Hebrew or Arabic or Swahili if I knew them, anything to hedge my bets. But today
I am too exhausted to bargain with God. Hell, we all have to go sometime.

I open my eyes and look around. The nice lady beside me has bent her head forward and her lips are moving. Good. Let her pray
for all of us. The odds are if God chooses to spare her, I’ll live too, through sheer proximity. I look down at the card in
my hand and practice saying his name aloud. I’m not sure what has just happened to me. I don’t know what it means. I press
my palms against my trembling thighs and listen to the engines beneath me gain strength. Strength enough to thrust us into
the sky where we have no business being, but where we go sometimes, nonetheless.

I
n the morning Phil’s alarm goes off first. I lie in the bruise-gray darkness and wait for the sound of his shower, his zipper,
the jingle of his car keys, the opening of the garage door. At 7:05 the coffee begins to drip. Tory’s ride comes in thirty-five
minutes. She does not want to wear her new twenty-two-dollar rugby shirt from Gap Kids. She is not destined to spell the word
“scientist” correctly in this lifetime. Her vocabulary list hangs on the refrigerator with a magnet. It’s only Tuesday, so
I have to keep checking the list, but by Friday I will know the words by heart. I call them out to her while I refold the
Gap shirt and get out the old Target one that she loves. I bring her cinnamon toast to the recliner where she is curled up
watching TV. The Coyote is still chasing the Road Runner after all these pointless years.

One cat wants out, the other wants in. They rub themselves across the French doors, their tails flicking the glass. There’s
a station break, which means we should be farther along. I call to Tory to brush her teeth as I close the lunchbox, zip the
backpack. She dumps her crusts into the part of the sink that doesn’t have a disposal. I kiss her head and send her out to
the end of the driveway to wait for the mother who has this week’s carpool.

The cats’ morning kill lies on the deck, a small unblinking mouse. It’s the ultimate perversity—they’re so well fed and yet
they stalk. The mouse has already gone stiff and I sweep him to the edge of the deck where he freefalls into the bushes, into
a mass grave for all the animals that the cats have killed on previous nights. The plot of ground below the deck is dark and
rich with small curved skeletons and it gives up flowers in waves. Through the glass of the French doors the TV flickers.
The Coyote’s Acme rocket has failed him once again and he is falling into the canyon. He holds up a sign that says
HELP
.