Love in Mid Air (25 page)

“What’s the matter?”

What’s the matter? Doesn’t he see how easily, how casually, he could fuck up my whole life? I stretch the phone cord into
the kitchen, look at the small square brown box on the counter. “I don’t want you to call me on this line again,” I say. “You
know it’s dangerous. Use the cell.”

“Don’t do this.” He doesn’t remind me that I called him. He doesn’t want us to have two bad conversations in a row. Something
like that can jettison a relationship as fragile as ours.

I know this too, but I’m still upset. “You just don’t send something like that to a woman’s home. You’ve crossed a boundary.”

“Well, excuse me if I don’t know exactly where the boundaries are. You were fine about getting a box at your home when you
thought it was a Christmas gift.”

“What if I had opened it in front of Tory or Phil? What if I thought it was something I’d ordered for Tory?”

“You wouldn’t have done that. Look at the address. I sent it to your maiden name.”

“Shit, that’s the one thing that would draw even more attention to it. The one thing that would make Phil open it.”

“According to you, he’s never there. According to you, you spend every day alone.”

“Are you going to be here to pick up the pieces?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You take evidence that I’m having an affair and you wrap it up and ship it to my house. So I’m asking you—when I lose my
child and when I lose my home are you going to be there to pick up the pieces?”

“You said you were leaving him.”

“I am. On my own time frame and when I’m ready. Not forced out because some man in Boston has decided to be a total idiot.”

“It was a joke, Elyse. You thought it was funny as hell when we were in Miami.”

“I confide in you and I trust you and then you tell me everything’s a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s just the day I was ordering them… I was having a bad day, that’s all. I didn’t think about your daughter.
It made me feel good to go on the Internet and pick them out.”

“I’m throwing them away.”

“Fine. If you feel like that, I think you should. And, just for the record, I don’t think you’re ever going to walk out that
door. You like talking about it. You think it makes you tough.”

“I’m going to hang up the phone now. I’m going to hang up the phone without saying goodbye.”

“Yeah, do that. I’m not going to say goodbye to you either.”

I put the phone down and the stretched cord pulls it off the counter and across the hardwood floor, bouncing loudly back toward
the bedroom. The sound is strangely satisfying. I pick up the box. It’s light, mostly packing materials. He says it’s a joke.
He says it’s not a joke. I turn the carefully wrapped brown cube over and over in my hands. Pascal, who likes boxes, jumps
up on the counter to watch me. When did I tell him my maiden name? I’ve told him too much and there’s always the question—the
question of how far to let Gerry in. He knows my address. He knows my social security number. He knows the hours that my husband
works, the time my daughter leaves for school, the amount of money I have in the bank, the way I like to be kissed and how
many pots I have left before I’ve honored the Charleston order. The box is very light, almost as if nothing is in it. It’s
almost as if he has sent me a box of air.

L
ook at this,” I say to Phil, dangling the handcuffs in front of his face.

He is immediately intrigued. “What are those?”

“Handcuffs, silly.”

“I know, but… are they for you or for me?”

We are in our bedroom, getting ready for Kelly’s New Year’s Eve party. I’ve been at her house all day, shucking oysters and
wiping out champagne glasses.

Phil and I are alone. He has already driven Tory to Nancy’s house where she and Jeff have hired a couple of teenagers from
the church to keep the kids overnight. There are eleven of them in total and they are having their own party. Nancy has rented
movies and ordered pizzas and moved the ping-pong table from the garage into the house. So now the adults can stay out as
late as they want without worrying. The funny thing is, it’s not New Year’s Eve. We are so cautious that we do not like to
stay out all night on this alcohol-sodden holiday. We like to spend the real eve at church, with our children beside us, lighting
candles in a watchnight service. Our revelries, such as they are, take place on some random night between Christmas and New
Year’s. It’s one thing our circle has always agreed on.

My new red dress lies across our unmade bed. I carefully push it aside and climb over the mattress to the headboard. If Gerry
wants to send them to my house, then damn it, I’ll use them in my house. I snap one end of the handcuffs around my right wrist,
weave the short chain around the bedpost, and snap the other end on my left wrist. “Oh dear,” I say. “I seem to be held captive.”

Phil is smiling slightly, his hand running along the top of the towel tied around his waist. “What are you doing?”

It is, of course, a pivotal moment. Only two months ago that same question sent me to the closet in tears. I have always felt
so vulnerable when I’ve tried to be sexy with Phil. A single word of sarcasm, a single suggestion that this isn’t how he sees
me, and normally it would all be over. But something has shifted between us. I no longer care what he’s thinking. This, after
all, is merely a rehearsal. I close my eyes, toss my head back and forth like some beautiful victim in a movie, and say, “I
couldn’t get away even if I tried.”

It is a faux capture, of course. At any point I can rise up on my knees and simply slip my wrists over the top of the bedpost.
But something in my helplessness, feigned or not, seems to excite him. He climbs onto the bed behind me, pulling off the towel.

“Am I the good guy or the bad guy?”

“What do you think?’

His voice is low, almost as if he is talking to himself. “I think I’m bad.” I look over my shoulder. He’s already hard.

“Punish me,” I say. “You know you want to.”

That’s all he needs. He is on me with one move, entering me from behind so roughly that my knees slide from the bed and the
upper half of my body is hanging in mid air from the bedpost. I struggle to get one foot on the floor. “Watch it,” I say.
“We’re going to break the bed.” Even though I have invited it, I’m surprised by the fierceness of his assault.

“Watch it,” I say again, but he’s gone deaf with his own pounding. He hits my cervix and a shudder runs through my body. I
jerk my hips—no, that isn’t right. I don’t jerk my hips. My hips jerk of their own volition, jerk to the left and for a second
I almost dislodge him. My mind is scattered all over the place. We’ve never been like this together, not even back in the
early days, and what was it Jeff asked me last week? He asked me what I thought femininity was and I said it’s a willingness
to be penetrated. Phil gets us aligned and rams into me again, this time with so much authority that I can’t help but bow
my back and push my head up like a porn star.

A willingness to be penetrated. It’s a good answer, but I’m not sure Jeff understood what I meant. I wasn’t talking about
being penetrated by a penis, but by the whole world. Noticing the way the flowers fall against the side of the vase, that’s
feminine—yes, come to think of it, maybe that was where I waded into this river, back in that restaurant in Phoenix when I
only thought I was brave to eat alone and I didn’t see the future, couldn’t have seen how it would pick me up and wash me
away. I never finished
Ulysses
. I just skipped to the end where Molly Bloom becomes lost in this stream of yes, yes, yes… and that’s what we’ve all been
talking about all along, isn’t it, this wave of yesness, this prayer that begins with the words “fuck me,” this absolute joy
that comes in the moment where you let your life go? “I didn’t read the whole book,” I mumble, sounding just like Belinda,
but Phil doesn’t seem to be listening, and besides it isn’t just fuck me, it’s like wear me down, erase me, grind me off the
page and let me start all over. I exhale and animal air comes out of my body.

And then there is the sudden sensation that someone else has entered the room. Yes. We’re being watched. I twist around to
look over Phil’s shoulder.

“Who are you looking for?” he asks, his voice rough and breathless. I turn a little more, try to focus on the doorframe.

“We’re the only ones here,” says Phil, who’s picked a damn funny time to start reading my mind. He grabs me under the hips
and flips me onto my back. My wrists are crossed now and stretched straight over my head so that I am like a martyr on the
rack and it occurs to me that in this position I really couldn’t get away, even if I tried. Each time he lifts my hips toward
him I am stretched a bit farther down the bed until my armpits ache and the handcuffs cut into my hands. I shut my eyes, then
open them again and then close them. He presses his fist against my pubic bone to help me come, and I grind hard against his
hand. Phil watches me with narrow eyes.

“Are you a slut?” he says. “Are you a whore?”

“You know I am,” I say. “I betray you with other men. I bring them to the house and fuck them when you’re not home.”

He roars and begins to pump so hard that I am driven farther up the bed with each thrust until my face is crammed against
the headboard. It would be comic… all these circus noises that are spilling from his throat, how he’s pulled me first one
way and then pulled me the other. It would be comic… if my head wasn’t being pounded, if my wrists weren’t aching, but I manage
to lift myself into a better position. and just as I do, it’s there. A strange, dark sort of orgasm that falls over me like
a curtain drops at the end of a play. When I open my eyes I see that Phil is arching his back and pulling out of me, shooting
across my stomach as if we were teenagers without protection. As if I truly were a whore.

Afterwards we’re both a little stunned. We don’t talk. He is gentle, careful with me. He helps me turn back over and slide
my hands up the bedpost until I am free. Or mostly free. My wrists are still tethered. At some point we must have rolled onto
my new red dress because there is a dark smear across the skirt. I walk to the closet and pull out another one, a loose black
shift that fastens with two bone buttons on the shoulders.

“You’re going to have to dress me.”

“I don’t know how to dress a woman.”

“Figure it out.”

I saw this once in a movie, a man dressing a woman after sex, rolling up her hose and buttoning her blouse, and it struck
me as so sensual, so the opposite of what sex usually is, that the image has always stayed with me. Phil didn’t see that particular
movie, but he seems to warm to the idea nonetheless. He rouses himself and climbs off the bed. He takes the black dress and,
with some instruction from me, holds it low where I can step into it and then he pulls it up and fastens it, one button at
a time, on each shoulder.

I let him brush my hair, buckle my shoes, and thread the earrings through my lobes. We go into the bathroom where I am momentarily
shocked by the redness of my face. “You want the works?” he says, and I shake my head. Just lipstick and mascara. He has steady
hands, the hands of a dentist, and he darkens my lashes and traces the outline of my lips with a putty-colored gloss. We stand
side by side, staring into the mirror. Just for a moment he catches my eye and something passes between us. Something… unmarital.

I sit on the bed watching silently while he dresses, and just as we start to leave, Phil gets a small silver filigreed key
from the bedside table to take the handcuffs off my wrists. It doesn’t fit.

“Where’d you get these handcuffs?” he asks, his voice suddenly suspicious. “They’re not the ones I gave you.”

I am flummoxed. When did he ever buy me handcuffs? Surely I’d remember that. For a dizzying moment I think maybe he has me
confused with some other woman, some lover he meets in Miami or New York. I do remember seeing the key in the top drawer of
my bedside table a while back and wondering what it went to. Phil tries it again and then he tries another key, one from the
desk drawer in the kitchen, and finally the blade of his Swiss Army knife. He’s shaking so badly it takes several attempts
before he gets the knife anywhere near the slot.

I am not as upset as Phil. It isn’t like him to speak sharply to me, and he says that if we can’t find the key we’ll have
to take a pistol and go in the yard and shoot the handcuffs off. “Or we could call a locksmith,” I say. “Jesus Christ.” We
were supposed to be at the party twenty minutes ago. He votes for the gun solution.

“We don’t have a gun,” I say, but then again I didn’t know we had handcuffs. Apparently there are all sorts of things in this
house that I knew nothing about. Phil is distraught, walking back and forth between the kitchen and the den with the Swiss
Army knife in his hands. I stand perfectly groomed in my black silk dress and try to think of some way to calm him down.