Love in Mid Air (33 page)

T
here is a ceremony for the goodbye. We’ve spent two days in his town, where there’s always a chance—slight but real—that someone
will recognize him as he sits across from me at the café or as we idle at a stoplight. But specifically here at the airport,
when he is dropping me off for the flight home. We have agreed in the car that we will not kiss goodbye, so, as we walk toward
the broad glass doors which obediently slide open, I am surprised to feel his hand on the small of my back. It presses into
me with a hint of possessiveness as we pause at the kiosk, wait for it to spit out my boarding pass. Our eyes drag past each
other, and then he is gone.

I go through security. I buy snacks, a Red Sox T-shirt for Tory, and some sort of mindless magazine, the kind I’d never buy
at home. I find my gate. I check my phone for messages. There are none, which is a good sign. Phil does not expect me to call
when I’m away and he only phones when there’s a problem. I used to resent this, the fact that just seeing his number on my
caller ID would make my chest go tight with fear, but now it strikes me as a logical and considerate position for a husband
to take. I sit here at the gate with my magazine in my lap and a bottled water in my hand, and gaze out at the plane that
will soon take me to my—for lack of a better term—real life. Tory has a field trip tomorrow. She will need to take a bagged
lunch and there probably is nothing in the refrigerator to pack. Maybe I should swing by the grocery on the way home from
the airport. Or maybe it would make more sense to run by the house first and check the kitchen, because we’re undoubtedly
low on something else too. The third batch of pots is ready to be packed and shipped and my mother’s birthday is coming up.
I mailed a card before I left but I must remember to run by tomorrow with flowers, and it’s a ragged shift, this transition
from the horizontal world of the mistress to the vertical world of the wife. Make it too quickly and you can find yourself
dizzy, so I need this time in airports, these useless hours I spend in the company of addicts and movie stars.

I flip to my favorite column, the one near the back where comedians say mean but funny things about badly dressed celebrities.
What Was She Thinking? What indeed. Nobody ever knows what anybody else is thinking. I rip open a bag of potato chips. It’s
easier to go the other way, you know. On the mornings when I’m flying to meet him I get out my good perfume, the Issey Miyake,
and my best underwear. I stand in the tub and shave all the way up. In the car I listen to Ella and Frank and in the airport
bar I drink one glass of the best wine they have and I drink it very slowly. I carry Jane Austen with me and I breathe and
I tell myself to open.

That’s easier. Of course it is. Easier to slow down and open up, easier to move into these smooth egg-shaped days I spend
with Gerry. But this, this part here, this flying away—it requires a different sort of ritual, somewhat like closing up a
beach house at the end of the summer. I cram a potato chip into my mouth, look at the stars in their drooping ruffles and
leopardskin prints. Yeah, that’s it. Good girl. This is what you do. This is how you leave. You flip your magazine, eat your
salt, inventory the contents of your refrigerator in your mind. Wash off your perfume in the chipped sink of the airport bathroom.
Take care not to invade the space of the person in the seat beside you. Tomorrow the phone will ring and people will come
and go and you will be all right, but for now you must open the second bag of potato chips and grieve the fact that Nicole’s
marriage is in crisis. Not her old one to crazy Tom but her new one, to that sweet-faced cowboy. Damn. She goes to all that
trouble to switch men and uproot her kids and set up dual housekeeping in Nashville and Australia—God knows that couldn’t
have been easy—and now the second one is going badly too. It’s almost more than you can bear to contemplate. You should have
gotten three bags of potato chips.

Perhaps Nicole is sitting somewhere just as you are now, at some departure gate in some unfamiliar city, for airports are
the great equalizers, aren’t they? The beautiful and the strong, the disheveled and the frightened, they are all sitting with
magazines and bottled water, waiting. You turn to the story of the rock star’s daughter who drunkenly rode her motorcycle
onto the patio of a Santa Monica restaurant. She hit a woman who later claimed to be her father’s greatest fan, and finally,
yes, it’s starting at last, that sweet numbness that slips over you in airports, that sense of being neither here nor there.
You need these pockets of time and you feel for Nicole and the woman who was hit in Santa Monica and even for the model who
sources say got pregnant just to avoid doing jail time. She assaulted a photographer who snapped her in an airport. They say
she kicked him, flew at him in a rage. She screamed profanities and the contents of her purse went flying. But you know how
she felt. There are times when a woman doesn’t want to be seen.

W
inter turns into spring. Tory’s softball team plays a few exhibition games. Her third time at bat she surprises everybody
by knocking one to the fence. “That’d be a triple if we were playing,” her coach shouts up at us and then he says to Tory,
“Sugar, hittin’ it is one thing, but now you gotta run.” She takes off toward first base and he walks a couple of steps up
the bleachers and says, “Your girl’s gonna be a big stick by the end of the summer, just you wait and see.”

When her team’s not at bat, she catches. This doesn’t go as well at first—in fact, whenever the other team has a runner at
third the coach yells, “Back,” and she obediently stands up, pulls off her caged mask, and moves to the side, so that the
pitcher can run in to cover any throws to home. “Can’t he tell she’s blinded by that damn mask?” Phil says.

But by the end of the exhibition month, something begins to change. Tory graduates from lying in the red clay dust to kneeling,
from kneeling to squatting, and she begins to catch more of the balls, even the bad throws. A couple of times she manages
to reach up and snag the ball from mid air and toss it back to the pitcher without standing. “Atta girl,” the coach yells.
“They’re gonna know what you are before this is over.”

Phil never mentions the handcuffs or asks where they went. Kelly and Mark go on a cruise through the Panama Canal. Lynn and
I finish the junior high rooms and move on to the teenager wing. The Friendship Tray van finally gives up the ghost and the
church plans a fund-raiser to get a new one—a barbecue and yard sale over Easter weekend. I browbeat the book club into reading
Madame Bovary
.

And I work on my pots. It turns out there are many ways to break things. You can do it fast, with a single, wrenching snap,
or carefully, with a hammer and chisel in hand. You can do it wildly, like a piñata, or methodically, like tapping an egg
against the side of the bowl. Or—and this turns out to be the most effective way of all—you can just hold the pot over your
head and drop it. Throughout the winter and into the spring I watch as the pieces fly across my concrete floor.

Spring

W
ake up,” Phil says. “I think the cat’s dead.”

I stumble behind him out to the deck, where a long smear of blood ends in the slumped shape of Pascal. He has been ripped
open from his chest to his belly, a ragged uneven wound.

“Oh Jesus,” I say.

Phil has a towel in his hands that he drops over the cat. “I guess he finally tangled with something bigger than him,” he
says. “We’ve got to get him off the deck before Tory wakes up.”

“I’ll do it.” I bend over and scoop up the soft, yielding, still warm shape of the cat. He pulls away from the deck with a
small sticky pop and I feel something shift in my arms. I turn him over so that he is swaddled like a baby and see that his
breath is still in him, more of a shudder than an exhalation.

“He’s alive.”

Phil shakes his head. “The abdominal wall is ripped though. Just wrap him up and put him in the grass. He’ll be dead soon.”

Pascal still hasn’t made a sound but I can feel him tremble. I’m lightheaded. There is blood all over the porch, as if something
much bigger than a cat has been killed.

“Leave it in the corner of the yard,” Phil repeats, his voice level and firm like it is when he’s correcting Tory. “I’ll take
care of it when I get home.”

I turn and carry Pascal through the kitchen and I’m reaching for my car keys, digging in my purse with one hand.

“Calm down,” Phil says, reaching out to stop me, and it seems that this is all he has ever said to me over the last ten years.
It is the command of our marriage, the endless echo that circles the walls of this house, even when neither one of us is here.
I push past his arm and I am surprised at the effort it takes, surprised at how much he flexes his muscle against me. But
I twist my hip and break loose and then I’m out in the garage and walking toward the driveway.

“What are you doing?” Phil calls from the door. “It’s pointless to take him to the vet. If the abdominal wall is ripped, you’re
not going to save him.”

I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I’m in the car still holding the cat in the crook of my left arm. I back up awkwardly, trying
to steer with one hand, trying to hook my seatbelt. My neighborhood looks bizarre and unrecognizable to me as I roll through
it and I am talking to the cat, making promises about how I’ll fry eggs for him when we get back from the doctor. Fried eggs
with cheese like I do sometimes on the weekend. They’re his favorites. He is rumbling, making a noise that is disturbingly
like a purr. The morning commute has already started and traffic is bad. I inch down Providence Road and am at a stoplight
within a couple of blocks of the vet’s office when Pascal’s paw suddenly breaks free from the towel and makes a single straight
jab into the air.

When I got Pascal and Garcia from the Humane Society they were just kittens. I put them in a deep cardboard box for the short
drive home and it was Pascal who fought his way out first. It was Pascal who somehow figured out how to climb the slippery
sides until his small head butted through the flaps of the cardboard. Tory had squealed with excitement, the funny and unexpected
sight of the kitten, neck straining as he blinked in the unaccustomed light. At the time I had pushed him back down. “Bad
boy,” I’d said, and I laughed. From that moment on he was my favorite.

But this movement is not a gesture of exploration, it is a final spasm. I open the towel. The cat is still, his eyes partially
closed, his mouth locked in a grimace. His gums are showing. The car behind me beeps. For a moment I feel as if my ribs are
exploding in my chest one by one, but I give the car gas, jerking forward, still going toward the vet. I can’t think of anywhere
else to go.

The receptionist is unlocking the door as I pull up. The doctor isn’t here yet but this young girl, who is sweet and country
as so many veterinary assistants seem to be, sees me struggling my way out of the car cradling the bloody towel in my arms
and she says, “Oh, Mrs. Bearden, this doesn’t look good.”