Love in Mid Air (13 page)

Although I never said this out loud, I couldn’t conceive of any way that Kelly and Daniel would end up together. Marriage
is not designed for that kind of passion. It would be like pouring boiling water into a glass pitcher. I imagined Kelly breaking,
flying into shards and bouncing in a thousand pieces across my kitchen floor. Part of me wanted to rouse myself from my stupor
and tell her to be careful, but another part of me knew that what I called protectiveness was really just envy. Romantic lightning
finally hits, after all these years of waiting, and it doesn’t strike me, it strikes the person standing right beside me.
Even if Daniel was a cad and an infidel, they were creating some phenomenal stories. And we needed those stories. She needed
to tell them, and as I sat in the dark, rocking, with my daughter fussing in my arms, I needed to hear them.

She was my best friend. It happened to one of us, and so, in a way, it happened to both of us.

T
heir plan was actually pretty simple. Daniel would ask for a transfer to St. Louis based on his theory that it would be easier
for him and Kelly to start fresh in a new town. When the transfer came through he would tell his wife he wanted a divorce.
Clean and quick, just like that. He’d go and his wife would stay here. He’d let her have the house, of course, that seemed
only fair. (“There’s always a guilt tax,” he once told me. “But when the time comes you’re more than willing to pay it.”)
Kelly would join him a few months later. His wife would never know he’d been having an affair. His kids would never think
of Kelly as the evil stepmother who broke up their somewhat happy home.

He went to St. Louis. He never sent for her. After a week of frantic speculation she finally called him, only to find that
his cell number had been disconnected. His company said that he was no longer in their employ. No, he hadn’t left any sort
of forwarding address. When we drove past his old house there was a
SOLD
sign in the yard.

“The only thing on earth that could possibly make this moment more pathetic,” Kelly said grimly as we sat in the end of the
cul-de-sac staring at the empty house, “is if I turned to you right now and told you I was pregnant.”

I was the one who took her to have the abortion. Tory was five months old by then and I may be the only woman who has ever
shown up at an abortion clinic with a baby in her arms. I felt funny sitting there nursing her in the waiting room, so once
they called Kelly back I carried Tory outside and walked her back and forth. When the women coming up the sidewalk would see
me, they probably thought I was there to stage some sort of protest. The only thing worse than me greeting them with pictures
of mangled fetuses was me greeting them with an actual infant. They were mostly girls, really, not women, mostly very young
and terrified-looking. For some reason Kelly had insisted on going to the public clinic where the chairs were plastic and
there were pamphlets about STDs and domestic violence and AIDS everywhere. Okay, I’d figured, if she’s hell-bent on punishing
herself by paying eighty-nine dollars for a cut-rate abortion, the least I can do is sit and wait for her. She’d looked over
at one point on the drive there and asked, “How’d you even know how to get here? This is hardly your part of town.”

“This is where I met Phil,” I reminded her.

“You met Phil at an abortion clinic?”

“Of course not.”

I said it too quickly, my voice too sharp with denial. I took a deep breath, glanced at Tory sleeping in the backseat, then
at Kelly’s profile. “He was volunteering at the free dental clinic and my mother asked me to take this kid—”

“Oh right, I remember,” she said, her voice vague as if she were slipping down the side of something. “The free clinic. That’s
where you met Saint Phil.”

I walked and paced and bounced Tory for over an hour, until I finally saw Kelly emerge from the door, pale and clutching a
bottle of orange juice. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said and I strapped Tory in the car seat and drove us all home.
We didn’t know that was the only time she would ever be pregnant.

She suffered for exactly one year.

She suffered so hard that she scared me. I would call her every morning and I saw her almost every day. She kept Tory when
Phil and I went out and each time she came to visit she brought her a gift, wildly impractical dresses and books more suitable
for a ten-year-old. And then—a year to the day after I took her to the clinic—she called me and said, “Enough.”

“Okay,” I said. “Enough.”

“It’s a long life, Elyse.”

“I know,” I said. “A very long life. And we have a lot of it left.”

“Do you know what day this is?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why I figured it’s time to say enough.”

She was true to her word. We very rarely spoke of Daniel and after a while it almost came to seem like she and I had experienced
some sort of collective hallucination. When I happened to go into the bathroom at the BP at the corner of Providence and Rama,
the sink looked like any other bathroom sink. Kelly got a better job and then an even better one. She began to date other
men—handsome men, men with good jobs, men who took her on exotic vacations. I could not count how many now if I tried, largely
because in most cases I never knew their names. She and I had a rule that until she had dated a man for a month, I didn’t
have to bother to learn his name but rather had permission to call him merely “the boy.” Even now when she and I speak of
that time we call it the Year of Many Boys.

And then one day she said that she was going to marry Mark. She had come to my house to tell me and she had brought something
with her, a packet bound with a rubber band. All the letters Daniel had written her during their affair.

“Burn them,” she said.

Flipping through, I could see that there were ten, maybe twelve of them and they were in chronological order, which surprised
me. Kelly isn’t usually that organized.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?” she said. “But then, when I stop and think about it, I didn’t know him for very long.”

Holding the letters made me feel a little sick. “Are you sure you want me to do this?”

“You have to. I can’t do it myself.”

That night, after Tory was down and Phil was asleep I got up and built a fire. Let me be very clear about this. I never intended
to burn the letters. It was more to set a mood. I poured myself a glass of wine and stretched out on the couch and began to
read.

I had seen Kelly and Daniel together several times and I had witnessed the desperate way his eyes followed her every movement.
God knows I had heard every detail of their sex, but I was still stunned by the raw passion in Daniel’s writing. The humor,
the openness, the sense of a shared history, the way he seemed to notice everything about her and remember everything she
said. Daniel had done to Kelly everything a man can do to a woman—he had pursued her and screwed her, worshipped her and betrayed
her, but somehow it had never occurred to me that he’d loved her.

Of course, that didn’t explain why he fled to St. Louis, or wherever it was that he actually went. It didn’t explain how she
ended up in that tawdry public clinic, or why she was now marrying a man who I could only think of as Plan B. But the more
I read the less I seemed to care how their story ended. Of course I couldn’t burn the letters. She had known that all along.
She had entrusted them, in fact, to the one person who she knew would protect them with her life. I carefully put Daniel’s
letters back in chronological order, bound them up, and hid them in a bag in the back of my closet.

Occasionally, even now, I take them out and read them. When it’s late and I’m lonely or sad. Daniel had followed the rules
of infidelity beautifully—the letters contain no names and no dates, which makes them perfect for my purposes. Over time it
has become easier and easier to pretend that these are my letters. Over time it has become easier and easier to pretend that
someone had written them to me.

*    *    *

I
heard from Daniel one final time. We’d been born on the same day, and that had always given us a funny sort of connective
tissue. A sense of shared destiny, he once told me, when we’d met at Kelly’s apartment to blow out the sixty-eight candles
she’d stuck on a cake—thirty-one for me, thirty-seven for him. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been completely surprised when
he called me, a couple of years after his disappearance, to wish me a happy birthday. Talking to him was so bizarre that it
took a while for the reality to sink in and me to become really angry. We chatted as if we had seen each other just the week
before, and finally he came to the point.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s getting married.”

I will never forget the sound he made next, a sort of raw animal sound, almost a wail. I was hit with a wave of anger. I started
to tell him she’d been pregnant when he left, did he even know that? And how she had wasted away in the weeks and months that
followed and if he cared so damn much how could he have just walked out?

But then he got himself together and asked, “Does she love him?”

“He’ll take care of her.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It seems to me you’ve forfeited the right to ask anybody anything.”

“She’s really going to do this?”

“We’re going lingerie shopping tomorrow. For her honeymoon. He’s taking her to Paris.” Actually he was taking her to Vegas,
but I figured Paris would sting more.

“Should I come back?”

“Why? Has anything changed?”

“Are you even going to tell her that I called?”

On the day of the wedding, Tory was Kelly’s only attendant. She walked carefully down the makeshift aisle of the hotel ballroom
in her blue organza dress, dropping white rose petals one by one. I couldn’t stop looking at the door. Maybe this was the
day that all the romantic hysteria was finally leading up to. Maybe Daniel was going to burst in like that scene in
The Graduate
, scoop Kelly up, and carry her away.

He didn’t, of course, and at the reception Kelly came up to me and said, “So now I’m married.”

“Yeah, you’re one of us.”

“It doesn’t seem real,” she said. “How long does it take before you actually start feeling like you’re somebody’s wife?”

“I’ll let you know.”

I think I was right not to tell her about Daniel’s call, although my decision is one I still wonder about, even after all
these years. Kelly looked happy, borderline radiant. “White’s your color,” I said, and we were laughing as we linked arms
and turned to gaze at our husbands. It was a pleasant little scene. Mark was quite handsome in his tux, very stately with
his cigar. He waved it expansively as he talked to Phil, who was leaned back against the silk-covered wall, holding Tory.
She had been wound up with excitement for days and she’d fallen asleep nearly the minute the ceremony was over. She lay sprawled
in her father’s arms, her head thrown back, her mouth open, still clutching the basket of rose petals. Kelly sighed.

“Do you think it will work out for me this time?”

“I hope so.”

“I’d never do anything to hurt Mark.”

“I know that.”

“It’s different, but it’s good in its own way. He’s there for me and that’s worth something.”

“It’s worth a lot.”

“You burned the letters, right?”

“Of course I burned the letters.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. She knew I was lying.

O
ctober comes and goes. He continues to call.

Not every day. But often enough that we develop a sense of continuity, a strangely detailed knowledge of each other’s lives.
He listens to me talk about the sort of things that are either so big or so small that you ordinarily don’t discuss them.
The pot that came out more blue than green, the expensive shoes that Kelly gave me because they pinch her feet, the dream
where my mother turned into a bear. This strange white patch of hair that has shown up in my eyebrow, seemingly overnight.
It means I’m getting old. It means I’m going to die. I tell him I’m afraid to die. I tell him I’ve lost my favorite ink pen.

“I’ve never done this before,” he says. “Whatever this is we’re doing.”

The phone lies on the kitchen counter, a constant temptation, like a cake on a plate. Just a nibble here, a smear of icing
on my tongue. This, of course, is the most enormous kind of cheating there is, the fact that I have made this man my confidant,
the fact that I have become his. The fact that he reads me road signs as he drives by them, the fact that I open the refrigerator
and tell him I forgot to get cream. The fact that I know his best friend’s sister tried to kill herself or that he helps me
solve the Sunday crossword when they have a word in Latin. He knows when I start my period. I know it took eleven hundred
dollars to fix that dent in his car. I tell him that the red and yellow peppers in my frying pan smell like summer, smell
like the last of summer, like the end of something, and he tells me he’s in line at the drive-thru but he wishes he was there
in the kitchen with me. He wishes he could walk in the door, come up behind me, and put his arms around my waist. I close
my eyes and hear the surprisingly clear voice of some teenage girl in Boston asking him if he wants any sauce with that. “My
life sucks,” he says and I unclench my fist, releasing the pine nuts into the pan. There’s not a word for what Gerry is to
me, although Kelly, when I finally broke down and told her the whole story, arched her brow and called him “the distraction.”