Love in Mid Air (39 page)

The woman shuffles away. She does not stop to talk to any of the other people at the other tables, who’ve been watching the
whole scene with casual alarm. You don’t see many homeless people in this part of town.

“You’re a sweet man,” I say.

He flushes. He doesn’t want me to think he’s sweet.

“No, really,” I say. “You’ve got a pure heart.”

He shakes the cuff off and it falls to the ground. Neither of us picks it up. Gerry begins to collect the bills from the tabletop.
“Blessed are the pure of heart,” he says, and his voice isn’t quite steady. “For theirs… theirs is what? What do the pure
of heart get?”

They get the kingdom of heaven, I tell him. They get it three or four times a day.

O
n the morning of the cookout Phil takes Tory over an hour early so they can help set up the yard sale. I stay home and make
cupcakes, seventy-two of them, all individually wrapped and priced, and then I load them into the car and drive to the church.

The parking lot is already packed and the lawn is full of people. I have to ease my car in behind the Dumpster. I’m heading
toward the kitchen door to get someone to help me with the boxes when I see Belinda walking down the sidewalk toward me. Walking
fast.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” she says. “He knows, he knows everything.”

“What do you mean? He knows what?”

“Don’t go inside. It’s not safe.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Where’s Tory?”

“She’s fine, she’s fine, but don’t go in there, Elyse. He’s really upset. Just get in the car.”

“I’m not going anywhere without Tory.”

I start toward the front door and Belinda lunges forward and catches my arm. “I’ll get her,” she says. “I’ll take her to Kelly’s
house. You go there too, go right now. Nancy said she felt like she had to tell him. You know how she is. She felt like she
had to tell him, but he’s very upset, Elyse, and you just need to get in the car and go.” I am on the first step leading up
to the sanctuary when the door flies open and Phil walks out.

His hands are full of letters, and I can see at a glance they’re Kelly’s, the ones I told her I would burn. He is walking
down the steps, the letters in his hands, and behind him I can see Nancy at the church door holding a bright pink bag. It
all comes to me. She went into my closet, just as I told her to, to get the clothes for the yard sale. She grabbed all the
bags, including a bright pink one from Frederica’s holding a camisole and pull-up hose and high heels that I bought months
ago in a botched effort to seduce my own husband. Why would she think I was donating lingerie to the church? But of course
she didn’t—she realized her mistake the minute she opened the bag, but then she saw the letters inside. Nancy’s human. She
read them. Those letters, those careful letters with no names and no dates. Of course she assumed they were written to me.
And then—you know how she is—she felt she had to tell my husband. How could any of this have ended any differently? I look
at her and the expression on her face is one of raw envy, the same expression that doubtless was on my face the first time
I read those letters, the same expression that comes to any woman’s face when she witnesses—or thinks she has witnessed—the
love story of another. She read the letters and then she gave them to the man who is coming toward me now, the man who failed
to recognize the camisole and hose I was wearing on that pivotal night when he smirked and asked me just what I was trying
to be. His face is ashen and he is taking the steps two at a time, almost running. The evidence against me is in his hands,
another woman’s love letters and a pile of tangled underwear I’ve worn only once. I look at the three of them, Belinda with
her arm still extended between us as if she can somehow hold Phil back, Nancy, clutching the pink bag, her face ablaze with
triumph, and Phil, who thinks he has lost something that he never had, and then I hear myself do the worst thing I could possibly
do. I hear myself begin to laugh.

The letters flutter from Phil’s hands.

I say, “I can explain,” and Phil pulls back his fist and hits me.

Here is what I understand. This is the day I will pay for what I’ve done. Not for the silly stuff like the handcuffs, but
for the big stuff, like trying to be happy. Phil pulls back his fist and Belinda’s husband is on my right, tossing a Nerf
football to the kids, the kind that makes a siren sound when you release it, and I think Tory might be with them. I say, “I
can explain,” and Phil says, “Not this time.” He opens his palm, shakes his hand as if he has lost circulation, and then he
reforms the fist and pulls it back and he hits me, so hard that I am spinning.

I hover on the edge of the church steps. I have never been struck before, never been in a fight. Two days from now Kelly will
take pictures of my face, three of them to send to my lawyer and put in my file. She will be crying as she looks through the
lens of the camera, she will tell me over and over that she can’t believe this has happened and I will end up fixing her a
drink. She will stand in the middle of her guest bedroom and whisper that the bruises look so much worse in person than they
do in the picture and maybe we should use makeup. A bit of dark eyeshadow to bring out the color and it wouldn’t be lying,
not lying at all. She will lean toward me and ask why didn’t I burn those letters, why didn’t I, why? As soon as I get on
my feet I must call Kelly. I must call Kelly, she will come and get Tory. Where is Tory? Is she over with the kids chasing
the football or is she inside? Please God let her be inside.

Someone is screaming. I see Nancy’s face frozen as I spin past her and I know what went through her mind when she found the
letters, because I’ve felt it too. She thought, just for a minute, “Why her and not me?” And I know how it feels to give yourself
up to this envy, to hold in your hands the evidence that another woman has been loved in a way that you have not. Is this
all we want in the end? Are we really so shallow and stupid that our need to be loved overrides everything else, that it can
make our work and our homes and our god and even our children just seem like ways to kill time? Nancy’s face is very pale
and she puts her hands to her jaw and leans back slightly, almost as if she is the one who has been punched. She felt like
she had to tell him, that’s what she felt, because you know how she is, and I am almost righted. I almost catch my balance.
I stand for a moment wavering, and then Phil’s form comes closer, falling over me like a shadow, and he hits me again.

Here, on the lowest step of the church I have attended for eight years, I give my body up to the air like a diver. In the
moment of impact, in this moment where his fist meets my cheek, I know exactly what to do. I am not willing to fall flat and
risk hurting my back so I turn, stretching my arms out in front to brace myself, and in the moment of the turn I look into
Phil’s eyes and I know this is the worst thing I have ever done to him, striking his hand with my face like I have. Later
he will run into the wooded area behind the fellowship hall, crying, because he was not raised to hit a woman any more than
I was raised to be hit. I should have burned the letters. How cruel of me to keep them, how cruel of me to fall and pull him
down with me, to take a man who never wanted to be anything but ordinary and turn him into a man who beats his wife. Tomorrow,
from Kelly’s guest bedroom, I will call a lawyer, and I will tell this lawyer that I want to take the high road. I will tell
this lawyer that there’s no need to be vindictive, and I turn just enough, because I was a cheerleader once—on the bottom,
yes, but still a cheerleader—and I know how to correct a position in motion. I know how to flex my knees and tuck, tuck just
enough so that when I hit the ground I will roll onto my shoulder, protecting my face but landing just hard enough to make
the bruise I must have. I will fall hard enough to do what I have to do but not hard enough to render myself seriously hurt.
Because this is what I have come to understand, that I do not intend to be seriously hurt. Years from now Phil and I will
sit side by side at graduations and weddings and the baptisms of our grandchildren and it will be okay in that way that things
that are over always are okay, so I throw out my arms and reach forward to whatever future lies on the other side of this
ground.

There are three reasons a woman can leave a man. He must hit her or drink or run around, and Phil does not drink or run around
so my head snaps back as his fist meets my jaw, makes the sharp pop of a starting pistol, the familiar sound of something
breaking, and the only horror is that Tory is seeing it all. Because she is there, yes, standing beside Belinda’s husband.
She is frowning, as if over a hard math problem, her mind furiously working, trying to make it all right. She thinks she does
not see what she’s seeing. She is already rewriting it in her mind. She does not want to stand witness to the sight of her
father hitting her mother and even before I reach the ground she will have decided that she must have seen something else.
And Belinda has moved beside her, she is pulling Tory back, and in her other hand she already has her phone. In three years,
maybe four, it will be okay. Phil will be remarried and I will have a lover—someone undoubtedly black or female or younger
or older or married or Muslim or somehow wildly inappropriate, for that is my karma, and they will all shrug and say, “Well,
you know how Elyse is. Can’t be settled, never could.” In two years, maybe three, it will be okay, and that is why I stretch
toward the future as if it were like the surface of water and I must enter it with the smallest splash possible. I am sorry
Tory is here but Belinda seems to be handling it. She seems calm. She seems, in fact, the calmest I have ever seen her. She
is pulling Tory back, turning her head away from us. I should have burned the letters, I should have gotten in the car and
left, but here I am, falling, and the ground is rushing toward me, rising up to meet me like an old friend. Somewhere someone
is screaming, or perhaps it is just the football.

And Jeff. Jeff is here, moving across the lawn. Once he and I had an argument about whether or not women belong in military
school. Once we had an argument about whether a clue was acceptable in Charades. Jeff and I have often quarreled but today
he will be the first one to reach me. He is already starting to run. He will yank me to my feet with one swift movement, a
gesture more violent and surprising than the one that knocked me down in the first place. That will be the pain I feel first
tomorrow morning. When I roll over in the bed in Kelly’s guest room, this is what will make me wince, this arm he nearly dislocates
in his eagerness to get me back on my feet. There is a certain irony when the man who comes to save you hurts you more than
the man he was saving you from, but I will not contemplate this for weeks or months or years. Not until I am a much older
woman, living out west with my best friend. Jeff will pull me up in one strong gesture as if by getting me upright he can
erase everything that has just happened, as if he can make all these witnesses forget what they’ve seen, and then he will
reach toward Phil, to pull him away. This last will be a somewhat empty gesture, for Phil is turning even as I am, he is getting
ready to run into the woods. It is Jeff who will go into the kitchen for ice. He will wrap it in a paper towel and hold it
to my face. It is Jeff who will say, repeatedly, that he is sorry.

Belinda is calling Kelly and Kelly will come fast. She will take Tory and put her in the car and she will want to take me
too but I will say no, that I can drive, that I don’t want to leave my car here. In my almost comical numbness I will insist
on unloading the cupcakes before I go. I will tell everyone that I have made seventy-two of them and Belinda will finally
take the cupcakes just to shut me up. She will carry them up the steps while I stand, alone for a minute in the emptying churchyard,
looking all around me. I will fight the urge to run into the woods and make sure Phil is okay. His new wife will be nice.
I will like her, Tory will like her. In two years, maybe three, she will come by some Friday to pick up Tory for the weekend
and mention that she’s going to run by Domino’s and get pizza and I will say there’s half a pizza in my fridge, that she can
just take it. She will say, “I hate to think that I took your husband and your pizza too,” and I will say, “Please, I was
finished with both of them.” And we will laugh, because she is a nice woman and her presence makes my life easier. We will
pretend not to notice how much alike we are and we will be a kind of friends. Above me I see a single high band of blue, like
a child’s drawing of the sky. Music is coming from a parked car. I can smell the charcoal of the barbecue and the ground is
rushing toward me and I exhale, just enough that there is a slight scream at the moment of impact. I can take this. It’s not
so bad. It hurts a little, but it’s nothing I can’t take. It’s surprising, definitely surprising, to find myself here in mid
air, and yes, it’s a shame that this had to happen here and now, at the cookout, on the eve of Easter, but it had to happen,
right? I could not have been allowed to get away with it. I think we’re all in agreement on that. Jeff is saying he’s sorry,
he’s so sorry, and he is pulling me up, pulling me roughly. I am now officially pitiful and a woman who has been struck (much
less on the steps of the church) is certainly entitled to leave. Even the Christians admit that much, so I turn toward the
ground and for a moment it feels as if my seams are splitting open and pieces of me are exploding out like beans from a rag
doll. I will have to find so much more work. I will have to call every gallery owner I’ve ever known, I will have to figure
out a way to get health insurance. Who is in that car? Why are they playing the radio and what is that song? I think it is
Miles Davis, but then I think everything is Miles Davis.