Love in Mid Air (26 page)

It occurs to me the key might still be in the UPS box. “Call Kelly,” I say. “Tell her we’re running late.”

He nods, relieved to have a task, and while he is on the phone I go out to the cardboard box in the garage, rummage clumsily
through the packing peanuts, and finally find a square white envelope. The key is inside, small and filigreed, an uncanny
twin to the other. I come back into the house and toss it to Phil. I hold my wrists very still until he gets the handcuffs
unsnapped.

“You don’t really have a gun, do you?” I ask. “You’re kidding, right?”

He gives a funny little laugh. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“You spoke sharply to me. I didn’t like it.”

The cuffs spring open. “If you hadn’t found the key,” Phil says, “just exactly how were you planning to explain this to our
friends?”

W
hoa,” says Jeff, holding up his palms. “That’s way more than I needed to know.”

“That’s my wife,” says Phil. “Sometimes she’s absolutely crazy.” But he says it proudly, just like I imagine that he told
Lynn I was a pistol, and from the way Jeff flushes when he looks at me I realize that Phil has already told him this story,
told it to him on the basketball court or in the sauna of the YMCA. Here in the counseling room of the church Phil has pared
it down to a sanitized version, but earlier, in a different setting, I have no doubt that Jeff was given the fuller picture.
Me cuffed to my own bed by my own accord, me on my knees and practically begging, me flat on my back and happy to be taking
it hard, and now, magically, all our problems are solved. Everything I’ve ever said to Phil has been expunged from the record.

I could be angry but I should’ve expected as much. When you’ve been married as long as I have you know damn well that sex
hits the reset button, and besides, maybe this works for me. I’ve spent so many years trying to get Phil’s attention that
I keep forgetting that this is a new game, with different rules. This time I win by persuading him that things are fine. An
easier task. When a woman says things are fine, the man always believes her. He’d believe her if she was covered in blood.
They think of us as simple creatures who are easily placated by roses and shiny new shoes. Trusting, childlike, easily duped—willing
to trade them Manhattan for a handful of beads. Perhaps they’re right. My husband doesn’t understand me. So what? I don’t
understand him either, and besides, the fact that he doesn’t understand me has set me free. He can’t see that being sexual
with one man doesn’t sate me, it just makes it easier to be sexual with another. He doesn’t know how deep I can go, how relentless
I can be. He doesn’t understand that for women there is no natural stopping point to sex.

Jeff and Phil are smiling in opposite directions and I suspect that if they were indiscreet enough to meet each other’s eyes
they’d actually start to giggle. Fine, let them laugh. I should be able to coast on this handcuff incident for quite a while.
It’s a story that seems to make everybody happy. Jeff thinks he was right about what women really want. Phil thinks he has
his pistol back. And Gerry—because of course I told Gerry, of course I called him the very next day. I’d thought maybe it
would make him jealous that I used his handcuffs to fuck my husband, but it didn’t. He just stopped me halfway through the
story and said, “Wait a minute,” and then I heard a door close and he said, “Okay, tell me again. From the beginning.”

Apparently I just can’t get into trouble.

How does the saying go? The chains of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, and sometimes three. After all,
gossip and literature are made up of the unlucky ones, the people who aren’t good at covering their tracks. “You only get
caught if you want to get caught,” Gerry tells me. “I bet there are millions of people out there who have secret affairs for
years.”

Jeff smiles at me. I smile back. If Lynn could see us, she would pull me aside and whisper, “This can’t go on forever,” and
I would whisper back, “Of course not.”

But the truth of the matter is I don’t see why it can’t.

I
get my pots fired at a kiln about twenty miles from my house, one of those places where they make commemorative coffee cups
for businesses and sporting events. I found it one day in the yellow pages and a man answered the phone by saying, “Jesus
saves and can I help you?” His name was Lewis and he told me he used to be an artist “in the medium of concrete” but now he
pretty much spends all his time running the kiln and doing pulpit supply for the Southern Baptist Church. He said he could
fire stuff for me “dirt cheap” on Saturdays—he was sure I could understand why he didn’t work on Sundays—and I got the impression
that what Lewis would consider “dirt cheap” I could consider practically free. The first time I drove out there I stopped
three times thinking I was lost. You turn off the highway, then you turn off what Lewis called the main road, and then you
turn off the dirt road and you drive the last quarter mile following tire tracks through an open field. Charlotte is like
this. Make a couple of turns and you’re not only out in the country, you’re back in 1957.

On the Monday after New Year’s, Lewis calls and says we might have a little problem. He’s never said that before.

“A little problem like what?” I ask him.

“They busted.”

When I get there he greets me with a rectangular cardboard box whose resemblance to a coffin is impossible to overlook. The
box is full of broken pieces of ceramic. It’s hard to believe that twenty pots came down to such a small pile of rubble.

“What were you going to sell them for?”

“That’s the bad part,” I say. “I’d already sold them. A hundred a pot.”

“They’re bigger than the ones we usually do, aren’t they?” asks Lewis, who is clearly trying not to cry.

“It’s not the size, it’s the texture,” I say. “I didn’t use as much grout. It’s not your fault, Lewis, it’s mine. I got fancy.”

“You can tell they were going to be pretty,” he says, sliding the box into the backseat of my car.

Yeah. I drive off down the long bumpy gravel road, a driveway I normally take at a crawl to protect my darlings. But today
I drive fast, the box of green and copper shards bouncing and tinkling beside me. I am in big trouble.

M
ark’s car is in the driveway when I arrive at Kelly’s house. An unusual occurrence and I glance at the clock. Damn. It’s not
even nine. But I’m here and I can’t think of anywhere else to go. Besides, there are vehicles parked in front of the house—landscapers
and some sort of stonemasons too, judging by the writing on the side of the truck. I walk up the back steps, the ones that
lead to the kitchen, and rap on the glass.

One of the maids is wiping the counter, the taller one whose name, I think, is Rosa, and she waves at me in a way that seems
to be an invitation to enter. I push open the door and am enveloped in music, the easy listening that Kelly plays constantly,
that pours through speakers in every room of the house, music that makes it seem like you’re in some sort of eternal waiting
room. “Is she here?” I ask and Rosa points toward the ceiling.

I don’t think I’ve ever walked through this house without Kelly, and it feels like a school in the summer or a museum at night.
Hollow and empty, and I remember when Kelly told me she was engaged. She just said, “I’m marrying Mark,” as if this were the
most logical thing in the world, as if moving into a gated community was the sort of thing she’d planned to do all her life.
No one had met him. She herself, in fact, had only been working for him for three months. “Working under him” was the phrase
she used, with a sharp little laugh obviously meant to forestall any questions. There was no polite way to ask why she was
doing this. She was the last person on earth who would marry for money, yet there seemed to be no other explanation. Well,
maybe one other explanation.

Right after Kelly moved in, Phil and I came over for dinner. I was nervous. Back then I was still afraid that my friends would
see my husband as foolish or unloving and I told many small lies. Sometimes I would pretend it was him on the phone when it
was not. If someone said I was wearing a pretty sweater I would smile and tell them that Phil had picked it out. On the drive
over I coached Phil on what not to say. It was especially imperative that he not mention their lawn. Phil was obsessed with
lawn care and one of the happiest days of his life was the morning we’d awoken to find that the Yard of the Month sign had
been hammered into our shrubbery while we slept. But Mark and Kelly had hired a landscape architect and I knew that if Phil
started asking him how he got his hedges so even, Mark would say something like, “Our man does it,” and Kelly and I would
both have to be ashamed of our husbands, albeit for different reasons.

Phil didn’t say a word about the lawn but it was still a bad night. Kelly cooked Cornish game hens, something I have never
known her to eat before or since, and she led us on a tour of the house, a style Mark had referred to as Tuscany Tudor. “What
the hell does that mean?” Phil muttered as we followed her up and down all three flights of stairs, watching her stiffly indicate
points of interest along the way: the skylight above the whirlpool tub in the master bath, the humidity-controlled wine storage
unit, the built-in shoe racks, the sensory-activated water faucets, the underlighting buried in the sod of the lawn.

“It’s a frigging starter castle,” Phil said on the ride home, and then, when I didn’t answer, he added, “I guess you think
you married a loser.” I told him that I didn’t want all that stuff. That I didn’t understand why Kelly wanted it and that
I certainly hadn’t dragged him over there to rub it in his face. “Mark’s a million years old,” I told him. “That’s the only
reason they live like they do.”

Now I walk through this house, hushed and perfect, with the arrangement of tulips and crocuses on the foyer table, the pillows
plumped and dimpled on the neighboring chair. It’s pretty, of course it is, and I understand it, of course I do, this need
for a husband and a house and tulips on the table. Just minutes earlier, bumping down the rutted driveway that leads away
from the pottery, I had found my hand reaching for my cell phone. It’s amazing how automatic it is to call the husband when
something goes wrong, amazing how fast my finger goes to the number 2 on my speed dial. It will always be this way. No matter
what happens between us, a part of my brain will always cry out for Phil in times of trouble. Years from now, in a bed far
from here, I will have a nightmare and awaken screaming his name.

The marble of the foyer floor is so shiny that I can see the reflection of my legs as I cross. It’s disconcerting, as if I
am walking on water, and I call out, “Kelly?” but there’s no answer. Way too early to drop in, I think, but there are breakfast
dishes and an abandoned newspaper on the kitchen table. They must be awake. I call her name again and start up the stairs.

Halfway up the curved steps I enter a zone without music, a spot between speakers, and it is there, floating in that silence
between the first and second floor, that I hear the voices.

They’re arguing.

No, it’s just Mark’s voice, but he’s angry. One word comes through: “Ridiculous.”

I freeze in midstep. It’s one thing to hear about your best friend’s fight with her husband after the fact, in a moment of
calmer recollection, when she’s had time to edit out the most upsetting parts and maybe think of a few witty observations
on the unreasonableness of men. It’s one thing to hear about it at the coffee shop after she has washed her face and put on
her makeup and rewritten everything in her mind. It’s quite another to walk into it while it’s happening, to hear the tone
in the man’s voice, and to witness, for the first time, the depth of his contempt.

I could leave, go down the steps and out the door. The odds are that Rosa will never say that I was here. But just as I am
doing that, putting my hand on the banister to turn, the double doors at the top of the stairs yank open and Mark is standing
there in his underwear.

I don’t know what had made him mad but my presence seems to confirm something to him, seems to be an illustration of everything
he resents about living with a younger woman who has ridiculous hobbies and ridiculous friends who come by too early in the
morning. I say I’m sorry, but he has already shut the double doors, and I turn, dash down the steps and back through the kitchen,
nearly colliding with the maid. I wrench open the door and see that the stonemason’s truck has pulled into the driveway and
blocked me. Great. While I’m telling the guy he’s going to have to back up and let me out, Kelly comes down the front steps
and walks across the lawn. She is wearing Mark’s bathrobe.

“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she says.

“I really didn’t hear anything.”

“So you ran out the door for exercise?”

“I shouldn’t have come this early. I should have called.”