Love in Mid Air (35 page)

It surprised me when Phil said we were pulling each other under, surprised me he was just willing to spit it out like that,
but he’s right. We’ve both been drowning in this marriage, him as well as me, but now, maybe just because he is finally willing
to admit it, it’s like his head has popped out of the water and suddenly I see my old friend. The man I trust, the man who
always does exactly what he says he will do. The man who tries so hard to be fair that when we were young and poor and first
married we bought four new tires and put two on my car and two on his. “It only seems right,” he told the Firestone dealer,
“that we have an equal chance of blowing out.” Phil is blinking back tears. He is struggling, struggling like I am, but he
is still there. I am not delusional. I know that this moment will not last long. Phil cares too deeply about what other people
think and there’s no doubt that Jeff will come up with a plan. The books behind his head are lined up like soldiers whose
sole function is to keep me in this marriage. Jeff will read about some sort of pill I should take, some couples retreat in
the mountains of Colorado, some new exercise, some new study, some reason why we should hang on for another year. Jeff is
momentarily befuddled, but he will rally. He has staked his whole life on the belief that any marriage can be saved, and he
will not let anyone, not even his best friend and the woman he wants to climb, dissuade him from this belief. We have frightened
him, I can see that, but within hours or days or weeks Jeff will have thought of a new plan and Phil will be seduced into
that plan. I stare at Phil as if I am trying to memorize his face. I have to. He will be back under the water any minute.

You let go of people. Sometimes you find your way back to them and sometimes you don’t. Who had Kelly been talking about?
Not Mark. Possibly Daniel. She doesn’t talk about him, but yet, in another way, he’s all we’ve ever talked about. We had been
making soup, we had been comparing blow jobs, and somehow we got off on this whole thing about letting people go. Was she
talking about me and Phil or about me and Gerry? It’s funny how I can see her standing there, ladling white bean soup into
a row of plastic containers, but I can’t remember exactly what prompted her little speech. Most likely she was talking about
me and her, how many times we have lost and found each other. Kelly believes that she and I will end up together, living somewhere
out west where the sky is wide and bright. She says we’ll go there when we’re old and this part with the men is over. Over?
Does she mean when all the men are dead? But when I ask her that, she only shakes her head. She doesn’t like that word.

They’ll be finished before us. She’s pretty sure of that. Men usually do, you know, they usually finish before women.

Then that’s where we’ll have the final chapter, in the West, in the one direction where neither of us has ever followed anyone.
It’s our fate. She is so sure of this that she has decided how we will arrange our furniture, the pieces I will bring from
my life, the pieces she will bring from hers. She plans our house on nights when she cannot sleep. She has walked through
the rooms in her mind and she knows exactly how it will be. She says I can have the bedroom with the morning light.

The three of us sit in silence for a moment. Phil has finally begun to cry. Jeff’s hands are shaking as he reaches for his
appointment book, thumbs through a few pages, and then puts it back down. “Nobody’s dying,” he says. “Nobody’s dead. Whoever
told you two that marriage was supposed to be easy?”

T
he others are seated when I arrive. It’s been nice all week so a couple of days ago—before Pascal died, before I went mute—the
women made plans to have our Tuesday lunch at Café Edison where we can eat out on the patio beside the fake lake. They murmur
pleasantries as I sit down and apologize for being late. When the hostess hands me the menu I half expect the special of the
day to be a reality sandwich.

The women are talking. I don’t know about what. But it’s good that they’re talking because I am still rattled from the counseling
session, the way Phil drove out fast from the church parking lot, how he turned onto the street without looking and how I
couldn’t stop myself from yelling after him to be careful. How Jeff had followed us both outside and had stood watching as
Phil peeled off. I’d had trouble getting my key into the ignition. I’d had trouble remembering exactly where Café Edison was.

So it’s good that they’re talking, and even if they’re faking this normalcy I’m still grateful for it. I sit down and look
around. Spring is coming early. The air is wet and warm with the smell of bulbs regenerating. The sidewalks are bordered in
yellow tulips, outlining the division between the stone and the brick so that when the well-heeled housewives back up, we
do not dent our SUVs. There’s a Barnes & Noble in this shopping center, and a Ben & Jerry’s, a Smith & Hawken, and a Crate
& Barrel. Near the fountain a group of boys from a neighborhood soccer team are spending their spring break selling candy,
trying to raise money for an international camp this summer. I bet every one of those boys has a biblical name—they’re all
Joshuas and Gabriels and Adams and Nathans.
SEND US TO PERU,
their sign says.
WE’LL HAVE A BALL
. I listen to the recorded sounds of Mozart, the drone of the water in the fountains beyond, the still fainter sounds of car
engines and children. Women driving slowly, slowly, slowly over the speed bumps and in the seat behind them there are shopping
bags tied at the top with curly multicolored ribbon. The bags hold tunics made from a kind of hemp that’s processed to feel
just like silk, overalls for the kids, gourmet cheeses and exotic fruits, the novel that was reviewed in the paper last Sunday.
This is a pretty world. This is the world the immigrants die trying to get into.

“I hear you’re getting some time off,” Belinda says.

“Yeah, Phil’s taking Tory to see his mom over spring break.”

“How’d you get out of that one?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m going crazy.”

Everyone laughs.

“But they’ll be back for Easter?” Nancy says. “You haven’t forgotten the cookout and yard sale on Saturday, have you?”

“Of course not. I’ve got a million things for the sale. It’s all bagged in my bedroom closet. You can come by and get it whenever
you want.”

“When’s convenient?”

“Good grief, just come anytime, you know where the key is. I think there are like ten or twelve bags.” I can’t figure out
what the hell Nancy is wearing. It’s some sort of gauzy caftan thing with flowing sleeves and a white hood that makes her
look like a bride. A bride in a burka.

“Well, good, because we’ve got to have a new van for the Friendship Trays. The last time I took it out—”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something about the Friendship Trays,” I say. “Why do you take casseroles to divorced men and
not to divorced women?”

Nancy turns to me, her face inscrutable. “So maybe it’s not going so well right now?” So maybe it’s not going so well. I guess
Jeff told her that I used the D-word and everybody ran out of therapy screaming. Or hell, for all I know Phil called her.
He’s probably got her on speed dial. Either way, the story beat me across town, that’s the only explanation for why everyone’s
acting, now that I think of it, so abnormally normal, why there’s been such excessively lively chatter since the moment I
arrived. I’ve sat in Jeff’s office and cried a hundred times, but now Phil has cried and that’s different. The tears of women
are cheap, a cheap kind of currency like yen or rupees and it takes hundreds of them, even thousands, to buy a single cup
of tea. But the tears of men… they’re worth everything. A single one can cancel out the most enormous kind of debt.

Kelly looks pained. “If he still cares enough to cry…”

“Exactly,” Nancy says. “That’s exactly my point.”

“It was one tear. He cried one goddamn tear.” The women all look away as if they might be struck blind in the face of such
excessive feminine cruelty, as if blood might start flowing from my breasts instead of milk.

The waiter brings our salads. As he sets them down, one in front of each woman, we murmur a thank-you. All except for Nancy.
For all her surface politeness, Nancy often ends up giving waiters a hard time. Something is never quite right—the wine is
too warm, the fish is too cold, she requested the dressing on the side. She detects a bit of raw onion and she specifically
asked the server about it before she ordered. Raw onion interferes with her sensitive palate. She claims she can taste it
for hours, that a single sliver can ruin her enjoyment of dinner that night.

I watch her lift her fork and pick through this salad that she is not particularly thankful for and I think, for the thousandth
time, that Nancy should work. She is smart and ambitious and she has that boundless energy and heaven knows they probably
need the money. She’s the kind of woman who could make a million a year selling real estate, she has that kind of blind drive.
But she also has three children and a husband who’s a minister, so instead of making money she redecorates constantly and
chews out servers when they bring her the wrong salad dressing.

“Have you talked to a lawyer?” Belinda asks.

I shake my head. The question shocks me. It seems to come out of nowhere. Maybe it shocks everyone else too. It’s hard to
tell when we’re all wearing sunglasses.

“Whatever you do, don’t leave the house,” Belinda says.

“I have to. Phil’s not going anywhere.”

“Nobody’s saying that it’s over,” says Nancy.

“She still needs to talk to a lawyer,” says Belinda. “If he won’t get out of the house, at least make him go to the guest
room.”

“Come on, Belinda,” I say. “It’s no secret what I’m up against. Dynamite wouldn’t blow Phil out of that house, so if anybody’s
going anywhere it’s gotta be me. I’m the one who is going to be like goodbye patio, goodbye lake, goodbye ducks and BMWs and
tulips and little boys with biblical names and American Express gold cards and goodbye Ben & Jerry’s.”

Kelly smiles faintly. “I’m pretty sure they let divorced women into the Ben & Jerry’s.”

“When did the word ‘divorced’ get thrown on the table?” Nancy snaps. “They’ve had a little setback, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry about Pascal,” Kelly says.

“I just can’t,” I say, rubbing my eyes, “I can’t seem to remember why I married him.”

“Don’t drive yourself crazy,” says Belinda. “We all feel like that sometimes.” Nancy is running her finger around the rim
of her wineglass.

“I’ve had a bad decade.”

“What you fail to understand, my dear,” says Kelly, “is that we’ve all had the same decade.”

We sit for a minute without conversation, just eating. Kelly signals to the server for another glass of wine. We all have
a glass of wine when we meet somewhere nice for lunch and sometimes we have two, although this is rare, and I’m a little surprised
at how fast Kelly has thrown down her first one. Belinda is near the bottom too. I haven’t touched mine and I look at it,
pale in the glass, and wonder exactly what kind it is. I usually go first and then the others get whatever I’m drinking, but
I was late today and someone else must have looked at the list.

The wine at lunch is one of our things. We’ll order four glasses but we would never think to order a bottle. Somehow drinking
a bottle of wine at lunch seems completely different than drinking four glasses. There’s no numeric logic to it, but this
is how we do things, one of the ways we hide from ourselves and each other how much we’re really drinking, that there are
times—not too often, but maybe once or twice a year—when we have no business leaving these cafés and heading straight for
the carpool line.

“You look pretty today,” Belinda finally says to Kelly.

“Thank you,” says Kelly. “We all look pretty.” And it’s true enough. Despite the palpable strain at the table, despite the
fact that Nancy has wrapped herself like a mummy and my eyes are puffy and red, we are an attractive group of women. For all
the good it does us.

“Those men sitting over there,” I say, pointing with my head, “why do you think they don’t look at us?”

Nancy shifts a little in her chair. “This isn’t exactly a pickup joint.”

“No, I know that. I know they’re not going to come up and start talking to us or pay for our lunch or anything like that.
But why do you think they don’t even look at us?” The other women turn slightly in their seats, glancing at the men with extreme
nonchalance. I’ve been buying stuff lately—calcium tablets and better bras and ergonomically designed bedpillows and the whole
La Mer skin care line. Pointless gestures, futile attempts to hold back the inevitable. I see a horizon going narrow, hear
a window slamming shut. “Time’s running out,” I say. “I’ll be forty next year. Anything that doesn’t happen to me right now,
maybe it’s never going to happen.”

“Time isn’t running out,” Nancy says.

“Of course it is,” I say. “It’s time. What else is it supposed to do?”

“People go in and out of stages,” Nancy says, her voice a little singsong, as if she’s repeating something Jeff had told her.
“Tory will grow up and she’ll leave and you and Phil will be in a whole different stage.”

“No. He’ll still be the same man. I’ll still be the same woman. I’m sorry to be like this, really I am, I’m sorry to ruin
this lunch and all the other lunches that I’ve ruined through the years, but it’s true, and you all know it. I married the
wrong man.”

“Elyse…” Kelly says.

“Excuse me,” Nancy says abruptly. She stands up, pushing her chair back with a squeal, and heads in the direction of the bathroom.
I have a bad effect on Nancy. She’s always walking out.

“It’s hard on her when you talk like this,” Kelly says. “Jeff is so much like Phil.”

He is?

“You do at least get that, don’t you?” Kelly goes on. “If you leave Phil it’ll be like you left Jeff. It’ll be like you’re
saying she should leave Jeff, and she doesn’t want to leave Jeff.”