Love in Mid Air (31 page)

“Cocaine?”

“That it takes a little more to get you off every time?”

“Was it that way with you and Daniel?”

She stands up straight, fiddles with the controls on the stove. “Maybe,” she finally says. “I mean desire increases… it has
to increase or else it…”

“Decreases?”

“I don’t know. The point is, it can’t stay still.”

“It’s the shark of emotions,” I say. I try to laugh. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you these stories.”

“No, I want to hear them. It’s just that—”

“You worry about me.”

She looks down into the soup. “I worry about both of us.”

L
ater, after I have transported twelve containers holding four different kinds of winter soups back to my freezer, I call Gerry.
I don’t actually want him, I want his machine, so I call the cell instead of the office, and when his cool businesslike voice
instructs me to leave a message, I spin out a long fantasy that begins with me going down on him in a hotel room. There’s
a knock at the door. Against his protests I answer it and my friend Kelly walks in. I explain that she and I are doing research
on the best way to give a man a blow job. We’re trying to decide which matters more—technique or attitude—and will he please
help us decide? Of course he will. I whisper into the receiver, “You will do it in a car, you will do it on a star… that’s
just the sort of man you are.”

After I hang up the phone I curl on the bed, depleted, as I often am when I talk about sex. As I lie there, half asleep, I
hear the muted slap of the pet door and the soft thud of Pascal landing in the laundry room. I call his name and he pads into
the bedroom and jumps up beside my pillow with a single silken leap. For all his wildness, Pascal comes when he is called.

It’s been a strange day. A strange phone message, even for Gerry and me. Maybe it’s just like Kelly says—cocaine sex, and
it takes more every time. But Gerry and I have always told each other stories and he doesn’t expect anything real to come
of them. It’s just how we comfort ourselves and today is no different from any other. He won’t consider it a promise. At least
I don’t think he will. And as for telling Kelly that bit about the angels—I’m just trying to get her to talk to me again.
Just giving her a yank to make sure that the bond between us still holds.

Pascal’s feet are wet and his nose is cold. God knows where he’s been or what he’s done. “Bad boy,” I say, but I’m aware that
my voice is gentle, already drowsy and thick. I may as well be saying, “Good boy,” and he knows that I am not really angry
with him, that I never really get angry with him, despite all the blood and feathers I find on the deck each morning, despite
all the things that he has hurt. “Bad boy,” I say again and he presses against my stomach, as small and round as a fetus,
and we both go to sleep.

M
rs. Chapman calls later that afternoon, just as Phil is walking in, to say that the pots arrived.

She says, “Well, it isn’t exactly what we discussed, is it dear?” and then, before I can explain, she says, “It’s better.”

I am weak with relief. She and I go through the shipping dates again for the rest of the order and I apologize for not warning
her that the pots would be different from the prototype, and then I begin to babble, confessing the whole story, telling her
how I broke the pots with my daughter’s bat and Lewis prayed over the pieces. But Mrs. Chapman says she knows how artists
can be. She expects changes, and she would never tie my hands. She’s just glad I got them to her on time at all.

“That was cool,” I say as I hang up the phone. “She liked the new pots. She’s going to pay me what we agreed.”

Phil looks up from the newspaper. “Speaking of money…”

Oh God.

“They called me from the bank today…”

Oh God for real.

“… and said you’d come in last week and opened up an account in your own name.”

“I told you about that,” I lie. “I told you the day I did it.”

He puts down the financial section and picks up sports.

“Why’d they call you?”

He bends back the page and peers at some sort of chart. “When they ran your social security number they realized we already
have accounts there and we keep a big balance. You shouldn’t have to be paying for the money market. I don’t know why they
didn’t tell you that the day you came in.”

And then he is silent.

“Kelly and I made soup today,” I say. “Do you want some of that corn chowder she does?” The blood is pounding in my ears but
I am surprised how normal my voice sounds. I’m getting better at duplicity.

“I know why you did it.”

Now I am silent.

“Shoes,” he says in triumph, turning the newspaper page. “After the bank called I walked out to the front desk and asked the
girls why a woman would open an account in her own name. They said it was because she doesn’t want her husband to know how
much she spends on shoes.” He looks up with a slight frown. “Are the good ones really two hundred a pair?”

I shrug. “You caught me,” I say.

I
t is 8:30 before Gerry calls back. Phil is watching basketball. I take the phone back to my bedroom.

“Baby, baby,” he says. “I’m in a ditch. I got your message and I ran off the road.”

“You liked my story?”

“Oh my God.”

He’s not really in a ditch, of course. He’s parked on the side of a road in his own neighborhood, two blocks from his house.
Cell phone reception is good on this hill, we know this from past calls, and it’s important that we don’t lose each other
tonight, when we’re both feverish. “Wait a minute,” he says and I hear a long zipper sound. Too long to be his pants. He’s
getting something out of his gym bag. I talk to him about what Kelly does with men and what I do until he suddenly yells out
and I think he’s been rear-ended. I have a vision that someone has crashed into his dark car parked there on the side of a
suburban street, but he says no, that he had just tried to unhook his seatbelt with one hand and it snapped loose and guillotined
his cock. That’s the word he uses, “guillotined.” We laugh and laugh. We laugh like people who see the rescue helicopter approaching
the desert island.

Later I curl up and we talk, mumbling our half-sentences to each other without purpose, as if we were really together in bed
and not on the phone. He swears that he can smell me on his hands. I lift my own hands to my face, tell him Mrs. Chapman liked
the pots. Then he is driving again, looking for a good place to trash his sticky gym sock. He asks me why Kelly and her husband
had the fight.

“He wanted to smoke.”

“Cigarettes?”

“Yeah. He’s gross.”

“Has he apologized?”

“Not yet, but he will. If she gives the best blow jobs he’s ever had, there’s no way a man is going to give up on that.”

Gerry is quiet for so long that I think we’ve lost the connection. Then he says, “Oh, I don’t know. You’d be surprised what
people leave behind.”

I start to ask him what he means, but he’s relaxed and happy tonight, spinning out stories like fishing line. He could always
come to Charlotte, he says teasingly. He wishes it were possible for him to meet all my friends. Maybe he could show up at
book club. The ladies would be dressed in white lace with gloves and veiled hats—no, perhaps better that our hair is piled
up on top of our heads. We sit in wicker chairs with a ceiling fan making a slow arc above and we’re discussing—what would
we be discussing? Ah, yes, we’d be discussing Virginia Woolf and her use of time in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Someone would serve cucumber sandwiches and champagne from a silver tray—no, maybe tea would be better, tea in very thin
china cups, and then the doorbell would ring. He’d be standing out on the porch in a seersucker suit with a straw hat in his
hands. I would rise, skirts rustling, and say, “But ladies, you must meet my friend Gerald…” and I would go to the door and
let him in.

“It won’t work,” I tell him. “I could never get my book club to read Virginia Woolf.”

D
o you ever think about his wife?”

Lynn and I have finished the sixth grade room, and the seventh, and are now on the last classroom in the row. We have developed
a system—we both scrape and then I tape and she comes behind me, painting. We’ve gotten fast.

“When you were married,” I respond, “did you and Andy sleep entwined?”

She shakes her head.

“Neither do Phil and I. And with this new guy… do you sleep entwined with him?”

The question makes her uncomfortable, but she doesn’t ask how I knew she was dating. “He’s never spent a single night at my
apartment,” she says. “I wouldn’t put my boys in the middle of that.”

“I know you wouldn’t. But when Andy has the kids and he’s at your place, do you sleep entwined?” She shakes her head again.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t think so, because I’ve got this theory that you’re either the kind of person who likes to sleep touching
somebody or you’re not. I don’t think it indicates how much you like the person, or how great the sex was, or whether they’re
a spouse or a lover. I think you’re just either an entwined sleeper or you aren’t.”

“You’re probably right, but what does this have to do with his wife?”

I pull the ladder over to the windows and climb up with a roll of masking tape. “This is how I know that Gerry and his wife
are still a couple. He’s an entwined sleeper. He wants us to sleep on our sides like spoons with his top leg stretched over
my hip. You know how men like to do that, throw their leg over your hip, like they’re trying to climb into you, like you’re
some kind of canoe or something? I can’t stand it. It’s like he’s pinning me down. I can only go to sleep if I’m lying flat
on my back like a corpse.”

“So how do you and Gerry sleep?”

“Badly. I tried it at first. I didn’t want to push him away or make him feel rejected so the first few nights I really tried
to go to sleep with him all wrapped around me. It didn’t seem like too much to ask. Because that’s the way it is in the movies,
right? You fall asleep in each other’s arms and nobody moves until morning. But it drove me nuts. I’d wait until he was asleep
and then I’d ease my way out from under him and scrooch across the bed, but he’s a chaser…”

She moves the can of paint. “Oh no.”

“Yeah. He’s one of those chaser people. He’d go scrooching his way after me in his sleep. I’d end up right on the edge of
the bed, one cheek of my ass hanging in mid air, and I’d wait until he got settled again, and then I’d disentangle myself
and get up and walk around to the other side of the bed. That would work for an hour or so and then he’d flip onto his other
side and come after me again. Finally, after a couple of nights of pure torment, I tell him I just don’t like to be touched
when I sleep.”

“And he was okay with that?”

“Basically he was. He didn’t take it like some big symbol or something. So the next time we get into bed I give him this big
fat goodnight kiss and roll over to my side of the bed and go right to sleep. But every time I woke up through the night he
was awake. Half the time he wasn’t even in the bed. He’d get up and pace.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I said, ‘Are you still awake?’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ because of course he was, he was standing up looking out the window.
I asked him what he did on all the nights that he traveled for business and he finally tells me—I swear I think this almost
killed him—that he would line up three pillows end to end like a fake wife and put his leg over her and go to sleep. I said,
‘So, okay, we need to make a Susan,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ but I got all the spare pillows out of the closet
and we made a Susan between us right down the middle of the bed. He threw his leg over her and I lay down flat on my back
on the other side and we both slept straight through to morning. We do it automatically now. I even request extra pillows
when we check in. Three of them. I think she’s taller than me.”

Lynn looks up at me. “That’s a very weird story, Elyse.”

“I know. But you asked me how I feel about his wife and I’m trying to answer your question. It’s not like I ever forget she’s
there. She’s literally in the bed between us, for God’s sake. That’s what it is when you’re nearly forty and you’re married
and you have a lover. You do whatever it takes to make it work for everybody, for all the people in all the beds. You realize…
you realize that nobody deserves to get hurt, not your husband or his wife or sure as hell not these four little kids who’ve
never done anything wrong. So you find yourself doing whatever it takes.”

“The day I got divorced…” Lynn says. “I don’t know… Do you want to take a break?”

I nod. We go outside, across the playground and past the cabin where the youth group has their meetings, and to a bench, the
only part of the churchyard that is in shade. Lynn sits down and unscrews her bottle of water.

“Okay,” I say. “What happened the day you got divorced?”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”