Love in Mid Air (7 page)

“He moved over me like a hummingbird,” I tell Pascal, who is sitting on the counter. He raises a leg and languidly begins
to clean himself.

Phil emerges from the bedroom a few minutes later. He seems surprised that I am making omelets. Swiss cheese and spinach and
a crumpled piece of deli ham. I found a counselor, I tell him. A woman. He does remember, doesn’t he? He remembers that he
promised? Of course he remembers, he says, and the omelets are a nice surprise. It’s a shame he doesn’t have more time. He
eats standing up at the counter.

I
n real life, women stay. Women stay better than they do anything else.

I
t’s Track and Field Day at the elementary school. Kelly, Nancy, and I are sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the playground,
watching the kids go through the events. Kelly has brought a gift bag for Tory, with a purple-and-orange rugby shirt inside.

“She’ll love it,” I say, and she will. It’s very much like the Gap Kids shirt that I bought her, but this one is a gift from
Kelly so Tory will happily wear it, just as she happily wears everything that Kelly brings her. She may even insist on sleeping
in it.

“Very cute,” Nancy says. She’s wanted to ask Kelly for years why she doesn’t have kids and she never believes me when I say
that I don’t know either. It’s obvious Kelly wanted them. Is Mark too old? He has adult children from a previous marriage
so there isn’t anything wrong with him physically. Is she the one with the problem or did they just make some sort of deal
before marriage that he wouldn’t have to go through that again?

Sometimes I think that Nancy looks like the heroine of a Victorian novel, and never more so than on a day like this when she
has swathed herself in a thin, long-sleeved white blouse and a loose cream-colored muslin skirt. She has a floppy straw hat
on her head and she takes great care to tuck her feet under her skirt. She is telling us about her mother’s best friend’s
daughter. I don’t know why she is telling us this story, since neither Kelly nor I know the woman in question, but Nancy is
full of stories.

Anyway, this particular woman had an uncommunicative husband. Her marriage was in trouble. I guess she’s secretly talking
about me, or maybe even Belinda. I glance at Kelly. Mark never speaks. Hell, it could be any one of us.

“He was a little like Phil,” Nancy finally says. Okay, great, we’re talking about me. She tells us how this girl followed
her husband from room to room, trying to get him to have a conversation. When he would shut the bathroom door she would lie
down and put her cheek on the carpet and talk to him beneath the crack. I wince with recognition. In the middle of the night
this woman would sit up in bed and cut on the lights and shake her husband’s shoulder and say, “Wake up, we have to talk.”

“She made him talk to her,” says Nancy, “and they’ve been together twenty years.” She says this last line with triumph, as
if it were the last line of a joke. Apparently this is what it takes to stay together for twenty years. You have to want a
marriage so badly that you’re willing to wrestle it out of a man while he sleeps.

“Some people find a way to make anything work,” Kelly says, in that sanguine sort of voice that I never can quite read. She’s
either being very agreeable or very sarcastic. Her ball cap is pulled down low over her face. “You’re always hearing about
people who don’t start with much but somehow they make it work.”

“Look at Megan,” Nancy says, referring to the choir director at church. “Her husband was so jealous he’d follow her to work
and sit in the handicapped space until he was sure she’d gotten into the building.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t have given you two cents for Megan’s chances when she first married that whack job,” says Kelly. “But they’re
still together, aren’t they?”

“They’re knocking out the whole back of their den and adding on a sunroom,” Nancy says, her voice rising with enthusiasm.
She picks up a stick and begins drawing the new floor plan of Megan’s house in the dust. “It’s going to double the size of
the first floor.”

“Amazing,” says Kelly. “Double the size.”

“She hung in there,” Nancy says. “Time helps everything. You’ve got to be willing to fight it out, talk it out, pretty much
build your marriage brick by brick.”

I don’t seem to have anything particular to contribute to this conversation.

“Have you considered counseling?” Nancy asks, abruptly turning toward me. “Because Jeff might be the perfect person for you
to talk to. I know he likes you, Elyse. He’s always trying to get you into some discussion about politics or religion. Have
you noticed that, Kelly?”

“He corners her at every party,” Kelly says, pulling out binoculars and turning them toward Tory. “What was it y’all were
talking about at that swim club cookout? The two of you sat over there by yourselves on a lounge chair for an hour.”

“I recited him the prologue to
The Canterbury Tales
,” I say. “In Middle English.”

“That’s exactly what I figured you were doing,” says Kelly.

“Jeff was a history major back a hundred years ago before divinity school,” Nancy says.

“Yeah,” I say. “He told me.”

“He likes you,” Nancy says, her voice a little flat. “He says he’s intrigued by the intricacies of your mind.”

Kelly makes a sound, somewhere between a cough and a snort.

“We’re seeing someone at ten on Monday,” I say. “A woman. We thought about Jeff, of course, but then we decided it would be
easier to talk to someone we didn’t know.” This is a small lie. It had taken a lot of pushing to get Phil to agree to meet
with anyone at all and we’d never discussed seeing Jeff. Even I can’t imagine us talking to a man who is (a) Phil’s best friend,
(b) Nancy’s husband, (c) our minister, and (d) intrigued by the intricacies of my mind.

“I guess I can see that,” says Nancy, so slowly that it’s clear she can’t. “The important thing is that you’re working on
the marriage.”

There’s a sudden scream from the field and we all sit up straight. It isn’t one of our kids but Nancy still stands and walks
toward the fence.

“I’ve got ice if you need it,” she calls, and the teacher bending over the wailing child waves and nods. Nancy always brings
ice in a cooler and ziplock bags to any even vaguely athletic event, whether it’s our daily walks at the track or the volleyball
games at church. We tease her about it, but she says that if life has taught her anything, it’s that sooner or later somebody’s
going to get hurt.

The teacher pulls the little girl to her feet and gives us a thumbs-up. We settle back into our chairs. It’s a beautiful day,
the sort of Indian summer Carolina is known for, and we sit for a moment in companionable silence. The field is crowded with
kids and the school has rented one of those big inflatable castles for them to jump in. There’s a machine that makes funnel
cakes and a clown twisting balloons into shapes. Kelly is humming, a sound so low that it almost sounds as if she’s purring.
I stretch my legs out, half close my eyes.

One of the fathers comes by, a guy I recognize from the athletic association. He tells me he’s starting a girls’ coach-pitch
team and he sure would like to see Tory at the conditioning camp. She’s fast, he says. He just watched her run the 440 and
thought to himself, “That little Bearden girl is fast.”

I must have slept funny last night because when I look up it feels like my whole head is getting ready to snap off. I shift
in my seat and tell him I’m confused. Isn’t softball in the spring? But he says if the girls want to be competitive they need
to start getting ready now, and then he says something about Tory’s “athletic career,” which makes me want to laugh. She’s
too young for coach-pitch at all, but it seems pointless to argue. This is the sort of thing that appeals to Phil’s ego. If
he gets wind of the fact that a coach is trying to recruit his daughter, he’ll drop anything to get her to those practices,
even if it means canceling every appointment in his books.

“Okay,” I say, “I’ll tell her daddy.” The coach makes a little tipping motion with his sun visor and walks away.

“Did you hear that?” I say, when he’s out of earshot. “He’s talking about a seven-year-old having an athletic career. These
people are crazy.”

“She really is fast,” Kelly says. “Sometimes I wonder if you even see it.”

“Just remember, Jeff wants to help,” Nancy says. “He blames himself for what happened between Lynn and Andy.”

“No one could have seen that coming,” Kelly says.

“That’s what I tell him,” Nancy says, sighing. “But now he feels like he has to…” She doesn’t need to finish the thought.
We all know that Jeff hired Lynn because she needed a job where she could get health benefits and still be able to meet the
bus when her kids get home from school. There wasn’t even a staff position called Director of Grounds and Maintenance until
he proposed it, and I doubt that anyone, including Jeff and Lynn, could tell you exactly what her duties are. But the session
agreed to fund the job and hired her on the spot. Feeling sorry for Lynn has been our collective smugness since the day her
husband walked out. I suspect that in the bag where Kelly has the rugby shirt for Tory there are two more shirts for Lynn’s
boys, whom she hardly knows. Their mother can’t come to Track and Field Day, so Kelly will bring them a gift.

“I’m sure Jeff’s a great counselor,” I say. “I just don’t want to talk to someone we know socially.”

“Yeah,” said Kelly. “In case the trouble turns out to be in the bedroom.” I’m glad I can’t see her eyes beneath the ball cap.
It’s all I can do to keep from bursting out laughing.

“Have you considered making it more… interesting?” Nancy scoots her chair a couple of inches closer to mine. “Because sometimes
you have to do that.”

“Phil doesn’t like it when things are interesting. Phil’s perfectly content with the way things are right now, you know that
as well as I do. The problem is me.”

“You could have an affair,” Kelly says.

My body jerks. I pretend to brush away a bug. Gerry’s business card has been in my purse for three weeks, in the side pocket
where I keep my keys, so that I see it and touch it several times a day. Sometimes I take it out and stare at it, run my finger
over the raised lettering. I’ve memorized the number, even though this is a number I’ll never call. I’m Working on My Marriage.
My husband I have an appointment with a counselor this Monday. Women who are Working on Their Marriages have no business daydreaming
about strangers they meet on airplanes.

“Why do you think people add on sunrooms whenever somebody’s having an affair?” Kelly asks.

Nancy twists around to look at her. “You think Megan’s husband is having an affair?”

“No.”

“Well, Megan certainly isn’t.”

“You’re probably right. It’s just, why do you think people who have been sitting in the dark all these years suddenly get
this urge to knock out a wall?”

Nancy finally figures out that Kelly’s just jerking her chain and she sits back, relaxing. “If remodeling means you’re having
an affair then I must be the whore of Babylon.”

“No, I’m just thinking maybe Elyse should have an affair.”

“Oh God,” I say. “With who? The only men I know are your husbands, and your husbands are worse than mine.” Kelly and Nancy
both laugh.

I’ve gotten as far as dialing nine of the ten digits in his phone number before hanging up.

“Well, the coach-pitch coach certainly seems interested,” Kelly says.

“Men like Elyse,” Nancy says idly. “I’ve always wondered why that is.” She squints at me. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Are you kidding?” says Kelly. “It’s because she’s a sprayer. Always has been, always will be. Men can smell it a mile away.
I’ve spent my whole life groping my way through this mist of sex she sprays everywhere going, ‘Elyse? Elyse? You in there
anywhere, baby?’ ”

“Please. Maybe I was once, but not now. Not for a long time.”

Nancy is frowning, as if trying to reconcile the theory that I’m a sprayer with the theory that my husband and I are having
trouble in the bedroom. “I just don’t see it,” she finally says.

“That’s because it isn’t there,” I say, pulling the binoculars from Kelly’s hand.

“Women never see it,” Kelly says. “Men do.” She drops her voice, does a good imitation of the coach’s low-country drawl. “I
said to myself, ‘That little Bearden girl is fast…’ ”

We laugh again. Tory has just finished the long jump and she is lining up for the hurdles. She waves and we all turn in unison,
like gazelles at a watering hole.

“I don’t know why,” I say, “being a mother would come so easily to me when being a wife seems so hard…”

“On Monday things could look totally different,” says Nancy. “It’s bad luck to even be talking this way. Do you want to end
up like Lynn?”

“… or why Tory, my greatest success, would come out of my greatest failure.”

“Don’t say failure.”

“My marriage is a failure.”

“You don’t have to use that word.”

No, you don’t have to, but ever since I said it to Gerry on the plane, I can’t seem to stop.

“It’s the right word,” I tell Nancy.

She grimaces. “There are lots of words.”

I
didn’t start calling my marriage a failure all at once.

At first I tried. I tried for years. I made all those little efforts, silly gestures like buying a CD called
It’s Not Too Late to Have a Great Marriage
. I ordered it from QVC because it had such a needy-sounding title that I was embarrassed to buy it from the local bookstore.
With my luck someone would see me holding it in line and report back to all my friends. There’s just the tiniest bit of hypocrisy
around the whole issue—everyone agrees you should Work on Your Marriage, but if you’re ever caught actually Working on Your
Marriage, you look ridiculous.

And the only thing worse than being unhappily married is being ridiculous.

So the CD series arrived UPS. There was a woman on the front of the box who was pulling her husband by the tie—pulling him
playfully toward a kiss. The back of the box explained that this man wouldn’t talk. This man was detached. This woman was
weepy and frustrated. She was demanding things he couldn’t seem to give her. (Maybe she was demanding too much.) From the
husband’s expression it wasn’t clear how he felt about being dragged against his will into this passionate new marriage.