Love in Mid Air (30 page)

I try not to get my hopes up. I take it to Lewis for the final firing. He offers to pray over it.

Yeah, I think, let’s pray over it, and he and I stand, hands clasped in his dusty little coffee cup factory, and I listen
to him exhort Jesus to lift up Sister Elyse and set her free. Amen.

I’m back at eight the next morning.

“You’re gonna be happy,” Lewis says. “Shut your eyes.” I do, and when I open them he is holding the pot up for my inspection.
I feel a strange kick in the gut, some cellular acknowledgment that this is an important moment.

“Damn,” I say.

“Jesus helped you.”

“He sure did.”

“Between me and you,” Lewis says, “after you finish out this first order you need to go right up on that price. I mean shit,
girl, these are like art or something.”

I
have now been married for ten years.

The general consensus is that we should do something special to mark the milestone. Ten’s big.

“Europe maybe,” Phil says to a clump of people as we’re leaving church on the Sunday before our anniversary. We have never
discussed Europe. Not seriously, at least. “But of course,” he goes on, as everyone murmurs how nice that will be, “we’ll
have to wait for summer.”

“Where in Europe?” someone asks. A guy on the basketball team.

“Elyse has always wanted to go to Italy,” Phil says.

I’ve been to Italy. I spent a semester there in college and Phil well knows that, or at least he used to know that. But everyone
on the steps of the church seems to think that going to Italy is a great idea. Tuscany maybe. We can rent a car. Everyone
says it’s so beautiful. The food is fabulous, and the art—wouldn’t I like to see all that art? Well of course, who wouldn’t,
I say, although the thought of driving through Italy with this man, this man who forgets everything (except, of course, the
times I’ve screwed up)… the very thought of driving through Italy with this man sounds like hell.

A woman tells me I’m a lucky girl.

I smile.

In the meantime we go to an Italian restaurant. You have to do something to mark ten years, even if your marriage is caving
in around you. I give him a camera. He gives me a tape series called Conversational Italian. The owner of the restaurant brings
over a free tiramisu.

And then we go home and get into bed. He scoots toward me and begins. It’s anniversary sex—like he’s giving it a little more
than usual. He wants to kiss me but I have become a master of positioning bodies in bed—not just the X shape, but also asking
Phil to do it from behind. “It’s deeper that way,” I tell him, which he readily accepts, so there’s no need to add that the
true advantage of this position is that I cannot see his face. But tonight he has an agenda of his own. I let him kiss me
once and then I break away and slide my head down the length of his torso. Perhaps he will think I am going to go down on
him. Perhaps he will think I want to cuddle. Either way he will not stop me and I pause there, somewhere on the solid ground
of his chest, and close my eyes.

Between the wine and the garlic and the faint acridity of his underarm is a smell that is both familiar and unfamiliar. I
freeze. Really inhale.

I ask him if he’s wearing cologne and he says no, but he found some new soap under the sink and thought it smelled good, that
it smelled like something his grandfather used to use. Yeah. Yeah. He’d found the bar of bay rum soap from the Restoration
Hardware in New York. I don’t know how. I’d hidden it under the sink behind the big wall of toilet paper and sometimes I would
take it out and smell it.

But now, lying here on Phil’s chest, the bay rum makes me confused and disoriented, like you sometimes become when driving
a familiar road. A road you drive day after day, but then one afternoon—and who knows why—you look up and you think, “Where
am I?” And there’s that moment of panic, that feeling that you’re lost right here in the middle of the familiar. The scent
on Phil’s skin is faint, but I know what it means. I am cheating on my lover with my husband.

Because here, in this moment… The smell of bay rum, the feel of a nipple against my cheek, the reality of the larger form
beneath me and I think, just for this moment, that all men are alike in the dark. I remember Kelly laughing at me about the
twins at the drive-in, Kelly asking, “What makes you think they didn’t switch us?” Teasing me for being so slow to figure
out what she’d known at sixteen. Kelly laughing at me in book club, saying to the other women, “We’ve all got to be kind to
Elyse. She’s our romantic. She thinks if she was with a different man she’d be a different woman.” The others had laughed
too. Is that all a romantic is? I still want to believe it, that one man is different from another, that I am different with
one man than I am with another, but the smell of bay rum soap has confounded me and made me unsure, for just a moment, of
where I am or who I am with.

“I don’t like it,” I say.

“What?”

“That soap. I don’t like it.”

Phil lifts his head, cranes his neck to look at me. “Then why did you buy it?”

“I don’t know how it got there but I don’t like it. Please.” I push against him. “I think I’m allergic.”

“You’re not allergic to anything.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know.”

Phil drops his head back to the pillow. “Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll throw it out.”

I’ve been too harsh. I drag my hand across his shoulders, a conciliatory gesture, and try to think of something that will
please him. “The coach wants Tory to catch,” I tell him.

“Catch? Does that mean he’s thinking of starting her?”

“Evidently.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this? That’s phenomenal news, especially considering she’s the youngest on the team. Is she pleased?”

“Not really. She thinks catching is kind of a second-rate position, but I told her I’d been a catcher and—”

“You never played softball.”

“I mean I was a catcher in cheerleading. I caught the other girls.”

“That’s ironic.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not trying to start.” He pushes off the bed. “I’ll take a shower but you need to get in with me. Come on. Get up. It’s
our anniversary. That has to be worth something.”

M
ark’s smoking again,” Kelly says. It’s the one thing she can’t tolerate. At first he was doing it out on the deck, and then
he moved it into the den, and last night, he did the unthinkable. He brought a cigarette into their bedroom.

“He said this was his house and he’d do what he wanted, can you imagine?”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“He’ll cave.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because he says I give the best blow jobs of any woman he’s ever known.”

We’re in her kitchen making soup. It’s something we do every few months—get together and make large batches of four or five
kinds of soup. Then we divvy it up, freeze it in small square Tupperware containers, and eat away at it until it’s time to
do it again. Making the soup is my favorite domestic ritual. Kelly puts on Miles Davis in the background, and now, after so
many seasons of doing this, we have a system. I sit at the end of the counter with a small paring knife, a panorama of cutting
boards, and all the vegetables and meats piled up around me. I like to chop. Kelly mans the burners, the recipes we’re working
on that day lined up along the countertop between us, although we’ve been through the soup cycle so many times that at this
point recipes are a bit of a formality.

“What exactly do you do?” I ask her. Men have told me I’m good but nobody’s ever told me I’m the best he’s ever had.

“There’s nothing to it, really. You just lie flat on the bed and let you head hang off the end. It turns your throat into
a long, straight canal.” Kelly demonstrates, throwing her head back like she’s going to scream.

“The man stands up?”

“Yeah, the man stands up.”

“Damn,” I say, surprised and impressed. “I could never do that. I’d gag.”

“That’s the hard part. Getting your throat to relax.”

“No wonder you drive a Jaguar.”

She laughs. We have four different kettles of stock going. I push the first of the chopped onions and garlic toward her and
she slides them from the cutting board into the kettles then turns down the burners. We have never discussed the morning of
the retaining wall.

“What do you do?”

“With Gerry?”

She shrugs. “I have a feeling that’s the more interesting story.”

“Totally different. Gerry lies back and I get on my knees between his. I nuzzle. I lick that puckery road of skin that runs
between his ass and his balls.” I make a fist and run my tongue along it to illustrate and Kelly looks at me quizzically,
her hand at her throat. “And when it comes to the cock—”

“It always comes to the cock,” she says.

“But not right away. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It can be very slow. It can take a week or a year, and I use my hands
and mouth together to simulate the canal you make with your throat. I know, I know, it’s not exactly the same. It’s a subtle
thing. It’s about texture. It’s about worship.”

“Worship?” she asks, smiling slightly, her head tilted to the side.

I tell her about the last time Gerry and I were together. It’s not exactly compassionate, I know. I’m forcing her to be the
docent of my sex life just as I was once the one who kept all the secrets for her. We haven’t talked like this for years,
but now she leans forward, her chin in her hand, and listens so intently that I can’t tell if I’m entertaining her or breaking
her heart.

We had two hours left before we had to leave for the airport. It turns out that the morning Gerry killed the clock in New
York was an anomaly; that we are not, in fact, destined to live this affair in some sort of Zenlike world of the eternal moment.
Quite the contrary. As the weeks and months go by I have learned the most important rule of infidelity: You must always know
what time it is. How many hours have we been here, how long do we have left? Sometimes I catch him glancing at the bedside
clock with a feigned casualness, the way a man glances at the form of a passing woman. I am not jealous of his wife, but I
am always jealous of the clock. The clock, his other mistress. The one who has more power to move him, the one he always obeys.

“You had two hours,” Kelly prompts me.

“Gerry said he was spent. He had nothing left, he was drained dry. He’d been telling me that since breakfast. There was something
silly on TV—ESPN, I guess, it’s what he always watches, and this show comes on about bass fishing. We’re laughing like crazy
because the beginning is so dramatic. All the men strapping on their gear and the music sounds like something out of a cowboy
movie. The announcer said, ‘There are days when you conquer the lake and there are days when the lake conquers you,’ and Gerry
was being totally goofy, walking around in his underwear, bowlegged like a gunfighter, and imitating that deep announcer-type
voice. He does voices, have I ever told you that? He’s really pretty good. I looked at the clock and I saw we had a little
time left. Gerry kept saying, ‘Listen to that music, it sounds like they’re going to go out in the middle of Main Street and
throw the bass in the air and shoot their fucking heads off.’ ”

“But he was spent.”

“Did you turn that burner down?”

“You know I did. Get on with it, Elyse. I swear, the way you keep stopping and starting it’s like… And I’m ready for the chicken,
by the way.”

“Okay, so I do everything I tell you about, only even more slowly, and he’s being absolutely silent. Or maybe it was the bass
fishing show muffling everything else out. The men had pulled off from shore and I could hear the lake water slurping against
the side of the boat. We were fucking quieter than fishing.”

“That’s cool.”

“And when he came it was unexpected—”

“Unexpected?”

“Well, not totally unexpected, of course, but usually he makes this little gasp and he puts his hands on my head, but this
time there was none of that. It was just—this doesn’t make any sense, but it was very slow. I mean we both completely stopped
moving and it happened and it was different. I’m not explaining this right. You know what Milton says?”

“Of course I don’t know what Milton says.”

“There’s this part in
Paradise Lost
when Adam asks Michael—you know the archangel Michael, I think Nancy has his figurine—but Adam asks him how angels make love
and Michael says, ‘Easier than air…’ ”

“Easier than air?”

“That’s what this was. The sex was easier than air.”

“Wow,” Kelly says. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Elyse. That was one romantic blow job.”

She is looking at me, her chin once again tilted in her hands. Sometimes I think everything in the world changes except Kelly’s
eyes. They’re as blue as they’ve ever been, as blue as they were back in high school. There is still the hint of a displaced
California girl about her—with her rumpled blond hair and the scattering of freckles across her cheeks. Her coloring, in fact,
is very much like Tory’s, so much so that when we all go out together, waitresses and sales clerks assume that Tory is Kelly’s
daughter. “Do you ever worry,” she asks, “that it’s like cocaine?”