Love in Mid Air (38 page)

I
t’s no longer possible to meet someone at the airport in a romantic way. Modern security measures forbid going to the gate,
much less standing on the runway with your arms full of flowers. Gerry and I have lost each other in airports all over the
country and when he flies into Charlotte we manage to get really separated. The arrivals board says his plane touched down
twenty minutes ago but I can’t find him in baggage claim.

My phone rings.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Upstairs, walking away from the US Airways counter.”

“Okay, we’re close. Oh, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t even try to get together today, because I’ve just spotted this gorgeous
woman. She’s walking right toward me, wearing this bright red jacket…”

I laugh, look around, but I still don’t see him. “Where are you?”

“Oh shit, forget it, she’s on the phone. Maybe she’s already got a boyfriend. Yeah, yeah, she’s definitely looking for somebody.
She’s turning, doing a 360 just like a ballerina…”

Then I see him, leaning against a ticketing kiosk with his carry-on thrown over his shoulder and the phone pressed to his
ear. His face is split open into a smile and it’s like looking into the world’s best mirror because I am smiling too and I
feel beautiful, incredible, bright, thin, young. I walk toward him and he catches me in a kiss, the cell phones still wedged
to our ears so that we are connected, through satellites high above us sending out signals through space and through our skin,
through a series of nerve impulses that still snap and shudder as he presses his mouth against mine.

Y
ou’ve changed,” says Gerry. He is looking at a picture of me and Tory, just a couple of Christmases ago.

“Not much. My hair’s shorter.”

“It’s more than that. Why are we here?”

“I’m not sure.”

He is standing in front of the refrigerator, reading Tory’s softball schedule, the list of upcoming Easter activities, menus
from the local Chinese and pizza places. Garcia weaves herself around his ankles and he bends down and picks her up. She settles
over his shoulder like a baby waiting to be burped. In this house even the cat is unfaithful. There is a cartoon on the fridge,
one I cut from the
New Yorker
months ago. A husband is sitting on a couch saying, “I really don’t understand what’s bothering you,” while behind him the
wife spray-paints on the wall
NOTHING EVER HAPPENS
.

I wait to see if he laughs. He doesn’t.

“I have to tell you something,” he says. I put my arms around his waist and listen to Garcia purr.

“I know.”

“If you do this, I can’t go with you.”

“I never expected you to.” And, like everything I’ve ever said to Gerry, I realize it’s true while I’m saying it. Does he
think I will cry? I don’t feel like crying. It’s not the end of anything, although it may be the end of the beginning of something.
I thought that bringing him here would help him see me more clearly, but the opposite has happened. He is so overwhelmed by
my pots and pictures and schedules of family activities, that he has shut his eyes. I pull him to me a little tighter and
shut my eyes too. My knees are slightly bent, my legs are apart, and I realize, not totally to my surprise, that I am holding
him up.

I planned to cook for us tonight. I’ve bought pasta and truffle oil and prosciutto and Parmesan but this sudden domesticity
has been too much for him. I tell him that it’s funny, considering I am such an old-movie buff, but I have never seen
Casablanca
all the way through. So I rented it for us tonight and I bought stuff to cook. But we don’t have to stay here. We can go
to a restaurant. We can find a hotel for the night.

He opens his eyes, lets his arms slide from my shoulders to my hips. “If that’s what you want,” he says, but his voice is
relieved. We are not pasta and Blockbuster. We are foie gras and wake-up calls.

“Actually bringing you to my house,” I say, “it was a little too much, wasn’t it?”

“No,” he says, “it’s just that it looks like my house. We’ve got the same stuff stuck on our refrigerator. You’ve got our
bathtub. I know exactly how much that bathtub costs.”

“You can’t believe there’s a woman in America stupid enough to leave that bathtub.”

“You know I’m not talking about the money. Not just the money. I’m talking about the way it feels when it’s all together.
You and this man—”

“Phil.”

“What?”

“My husband’s name is Phil.”

“If you’re willing to leave all this stuff that you and Phil have accumulated—do you think I’m just talking about money here?”

“Not really.”

“But to leave this… you must have been unhappier all along than I realized.”

“It’ll be all right,” I tell him, and I feel something shift inside of me as if my heart is resettling into a different, deeper
part of my chest. He’s talking into my hair. I think he says that he’s sorry, but he has nothing to be sorry about. He was
clear with me from the start. He’s a climber. He is good at holding on to things but just for a second. He holds on long enough
to catch his balance and sight the next grip. And then he lets go.

Hold and release, hold and release. This is what my time with him has taught me, this rhythm of moving from one scary place
to another, this rhythm that allows you to cross great divides without falling. It’s the cliché of climbing—don’t look down—but
he has told me, many times, that looking up is risky too. Don’t think about what you’ve left or what’s ahead, because safety
comes only from focusing on the thing right in front of you. This is what my time with him has taught me, so why does he seem
so surprised that I know it now? I think of the first conversation that we ever had, somewhere in that dangerous air between
Phoenix and Dallas, how he told me that you never lose your grip on someone who’s in trouble. But if you are the one in freefall,
it’s considered honorable to pull your clip, to make sure that you do not take anyone else down with you. These sorts of games,
he told me, they require such a high level of trust. Not just believing that the other person will hang on, because hanging
on is the easy part. The harder part is trusting that the other person will know when to let go.

“We could drive over to the hotel now.”

He shakes his head. “You got the movie. Let’s watch it.”

“There’s not a happy ending. The lovers don’t end up together.”

He sighs. “I can take it if you can.”

We go into the den, start the DVD player. We sit on the couch and I put my feet in his lap. The Nazis threaten Paris. Ingrid
walks into a bar. Things there are quite shadowy. Sam plays the piano. Gerry lifts my foot and kisses the arch. Thirty minutes
into the movie the phone rings. Nancy. She asks me if I’ve had time to get lonely yet, and before I can tell her no, not really,
she starts describing the new curtains she’s putting up in the living room. She hasn’t really called about the curtains. She’s
called to get a read on the situation, to see if I want her to sit in on the next counseling session, if indeed Phil and I
are coming back to counseling at all. She’s called to show she’s forgiven me for causing so much trouble. She’s forgiven me
for being a nutcase and a malcontent. She doesn’t know that I’m a slut but if she knew, she might forgive me for that too.
Nancy says perhaps I’d like to ride to the outlets with her sometime next week and look at material. She values my sense of
color. This is what she says to me, that she likes my sense of color and that we never seem to do anything together, just
she and I. We could make a day trip out of it.

Ingrid Bergman is leaving Humphrey Bogart and I know enough about the movie to know that she’s going to have to leave him
at least twice, maybe more. Leaving a man is so hard that it doesn’t always take the first time, not even in the movies. Gerry
is absorbed by their story, and he holds my feet tenderly, one in each hand, while Nancy talks about valences and cornices
and how much it’s all going to cost. She says no matter how carefully you plan, it always ends up costing more than you think.

It’s not necessary to answer her, never has been, just to murmur once in a while, and I love Gerry for not asking who’s on
the phone, for not ever asking, even later when we have to go back and replay the parts I missed. Ingrid is crying. She cries
so beautifully. Perhaps almost as beautifully as Elizabeth Taylor, although it makes me feel disloyal to even think this thought.
Nancy says she likes a soft green, that color between moss and sage, but maybe green is too much, maybe it will exhaust her
over time, and she might be happier staying with blue, moving from periwinkle into more of a cobalt. “Jeff would think I’m
crazy,” she says, “replacing blue with blue. But you know how men are. You can’t make them understand that there are lots
of kinds of blue.”

“Right,” I say. “Lots of kinds of blue.”

By the time she hangs up I’m not mad at her anymore.

*    *    *

E
xactly one hour and twenty minutes later, although we mustn’t measure and we mustn’t count… Exactly one hour and twenty minutes
later, after I have leaned back against Gerry in the shower and let him wash my hair… after I have pressed my palms against
the tile wall and bent forward so that he could soap my legs, first one and then the other, saying “Change” as I shifted back
and forth, the gentleness in his voice reminding me that he is a father… Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, after
we’ve found the remote under one of the couch pillows and watched the first round of
Jeopardy!
… after he has called his office to check messages… after I have shown him the two boxes I already have packed and hidden
in the guest room closet…

Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later I pull a pair of handcuffs out of a drawer and hold them up.

“Hey Pepé,” I say. “Do these look familiar?”

W
hen I was a child I read the superhero comics, just like everyone else, and I decided—living as I was in my small country
town with my sweet anxious parents—that the power I’d most like to have was invisibility. This would have to be the ultimate
freedom, I thought, far greater than the ability to fly. This power that would let me walk through the world unjudged and
unseen.

What I couldn’t have predicted was that someday I would have that power. It’s easy. It works like this. Get married, give
birth, put on certain clothes and drive a certain kind of car, and then, somewhere just before the age of forty, you awaken
one morning to discover that your childhood wish has been granted. You’ve become invisible. You can walk down the street holding
hands with your lover and no one notices the handcuffs at your wrists. But then no one really ever notices anything, do they?
The last nine months have taught you that if nothing else.

*    *    *

W
e decide to just pick up food. We leave my house and drive to the shopping center where Belinda and I saw Lynn eating scones.
In the parking lot he connects his left wrist to my right wrist and we struggle out the same door of the car, and then we
walk, unnaturally joined, toward the Dean & Deluca.

“I’m starving,” Gerry says and he pulls back the wax on a puck of Gouda so that we can eat it as we shop. It feels like we’re
doing something very bad, very outlaw, although he carries the price sticker to the cashier when we check out and says, “This
too.” We have bought too much, like people who will never eat again. Two small meatloafs, a piece of grilled salmon, a carton
of four-pepper salad, and another of stir-fried pea pods. A baguette, a jar of olives, an oversized cream cheese brownie,
a large bottled water, a split of champagne, and a banana. Food designed to be eaten with one hand.

Gerry and I take the bag outside to the fountain across from the store and begin to spread it out along a table. I must remember
this for the next time I try to lose weight, that if I eat with my left hand it slows everything down and I find that I am
not nearly as hungry as I first thought myself to be. I find that I can make do with a little less, that it does not vex me
when a bite of salmon or a triangle of red pepper slides through my fork. He feeds me at some point, and I imagine a woman
across the courtyard watching us, watching him lift his fork to my mouth. It is clumsy, not like a movie. His tine jabs the
corner of my lip, the rim of his plastic champagne flute clicks against my teeth. Beneath the table he runs his hand inside
my thigh, dragging my hand along with it. The logistics of collectively unpeeling the banana almost undo us. We are giggling,
enjoying the latest in our silly, giddy secrets.

I am so preoccupied that for a moment I don’t see the homeless woman who is approaching us.

“Do you want some candy?” she says. She is selling candy.

Gerry seems similarly confused. “No,” he says, “no, thank you, we’re fine,” as if she were a waitress. There are so many cartons
and bags on our table. The woman keeps standing there. She is wearing a trenchcoat and she looks as if she’s pregnant. The
tie of the coat is stretched across her hard belly, but she is much too old to be pregnant. I put my free hand on Gerry’s
arm.

But he is already reaching for the money in his back pocket. Gerry carries his bills with a rubber band wrapped around them
and the woman notices this and says, “Do you want a wallet?” Evidently she sells wallets too. Wallets and candy. With my right
hand and his left, we peel the rubber band off the wad of money and it pops open before us like a flower. Ones surrounded
by twenties, twenties surrounded by fifties. He hesitates. If the homeless lady thinks it is odd that a man and woman are
handcuffed together outside of a Dean & Deluca she makes no comment. The events of her life have evidently taught her a great
tolerance.

I reach into the side pocket of my purse and pull out the little filigreed key.

“I’ll do it,” Gerry says, but I have already released him.

He fishes two fifties out of the pile of money. “I don’t need a wallet, ma’am,” he says. “But take this and thank you very
much.”