Love in Mid Air (17 page)

“What are you reading?” asks the bartender.

“
Ulysses
.”

“Uh-huh,” he says. “How about some key lime pie?”

Tory has noticed the change in me but she is still young enough to notice things and not wonder at the reasons behind them.
Besides, she likes this new mommy who takes her on walks to waterfalls and lets her get the whole front of her shirt wet.
This mommy who sings Motown in the car, who screams “Olé!” every time the light turns green, who says we can skip the vocabulary
words just this once. This happy mommy who slaps misshapen pancakes onto her breakfast plate and asks, “Now just what does
that look like to you?”

O
kay, I get it, you’ve been high as a kite for a week,” Kelly says. “What happens after this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”

“I don’t want to see you get hurt.” We’re sitting on the patio outside our favorite coffeehouse, the one with the Frank Lloyd
Wright light fixtures. All the tables were taken so we have dragged three chairs to the only shady spot and now we sit facing
each other with our feet propped on the seat between us.

“You’re the one who told me I should have an affair.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“But you were right.”

“When are you going to see him again?”

“It’s one of those Zen things. It happens when it happens.”

“Oh shit, you’re getting ready to fall in love, I can hear it in your voice.”

Gerry is not my life, I tell her. We plan to see each other once a month, in different cities, a pace that we have agreed
shows continuity but not obsession. Tory will never know he exists. Phil doesn’t know anything, doesn’t have to know. It’s
just once a month. Gerry is not my life, I tell her. I hold my hands apart to show her what a small part of my life he is.
He is about the size of a fish.

“You’re dreaming,” she says. Kelly has this way of half sitting, half lying in chairs with her knees flexed and her legs slightly
open so that she always looks as if she’s just made love. As if her lover has just risen up and walked away from her. “I can’t
even figure out what you did that was worth a six-hundred-dollar hotel room.”

“I think it was a matter of how many times I did it.”

“Think he’ll ever be available?”

“Available?”

“Unmarried.”

I shake my head. “There was Paxil in his duffle bag. I saw it when he got out this special shampoo he brought.” I look away
from her, suddenly shy. “He washed my hair.”

“He washed your hair.”

“Yeah.”

“He brought a special shampoo to wash your hair.”

“Why is that so hard to believe? It can’t be you every time, Kelly.”

“What’s Paxil?”

“It’s what they give you when you’ve been on Zoloft so long that the Zoloft’s stopped working. Look, he’s depressed, and he
has been for years. He’s where I’d be if I let the first doctor who ever wanted to put me on drugs actually put me on drugs.”
And I know it’s true. As long as he’s taking those pills, Gerry is never going to get up a big enough head of steam to actually
break out of this life. He’s not contented enough to stay, he’s not miserable enough to leave. He’s in that gray band between
the two, vibrating in some frequency that only the unhappily married can hear.

“Do you think he washed your hair because he saw it in a movie?”

“Probably,” I say, remembering the warm trail of suds running from my shoulder blades down my spine, Gerry’s careful, climb-callused
hands cupped above my brow to shield my eyes as he rinsed. When a man puts Paxil and sandalwood shampoo into a duffle bag
and spends six hundred dollars for a hotel room just so he can wash a woman’s hair it only means one thing. That he’s a thoroughly
married man.

Kelly lifts her feet off the shared chair, balances her coffee mug on one of the light fixtures, and bends forward. I follow
suit until our foreheads are nearly touching. Despite everything we’ve been through and all the years we’ve been friends,
Kelly and I frequently don’t understand what the other one is talking about. It’s not like we think alike. We never have.
We are friends of the body. If I asked her to go with me to the bathroom and change shirts, she’d do it, no questions asked.
If she took off running toward me right now, her arms outstretched and her feet in a stutter step, I’d drop my cup of coffee
and catch her in mid air, without hesitation. Because the body, it remembers everything.

“How does he call you?”

“On the cell.”

“What’s the code to retrieve your messages?”

“1-2-3.”

She frowns. “You might want to think about changing that.”

I take her hands between mine and squeeze them. It’s a game we used to play where she’d press her palms together and chop
the air up and down between my hands and I would try to trap her. She was too quick for me back in high school but today she
is preoccupied and I catch her easily. We sit for a moment like this, hands meshed.

“It would probably be smart to slow it down,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe like talking once a week instead of every day.”

“Right.”

“It would be easy to let things accelerate, but that’s dangerous.”

“I know.”

“Because when you’re in these situations, like, you know, getting in planes and going places and somebody washing somebody’s
hair… you’ve got to be careful because sometimes people start feeling things.”

“I know, baby,” I say.

Winter

K
elly and I went to different colleges and spent our single-girl years in different cities. When she talks about this time
in our lives, the years between eighteen and twenty-seven, she always says that our paths were diverging. She likes the word
“diverging.” She likes to say it out loud, extending every syllable, but the truth of the matter is I don’t know that our
paths ever diverged. Wouldn’t that imply that she was out of sight? She was never out of sight.

I was living in Baltimore, teaching art and sleeping with an artist when, out of nowhere, I was swept away in a tide of baby
fever. This sort of thing happens to women in their late twenties, everyone knows it, but I didn’t expect it to happen to
me. I’d never played with dolls as a child or babysat as a teenager but suddenly I found myself in supermarkets staring at
other people’s children. “Excuse me,” I would say, “but how old is that baby? Is it a boy or a girl?” It was like remembering
a past life, one I’d spent in a hut by the sea with a wooden bowl for grinding corn and long strips of bright cloth tied around
my hair, a life where I had babies one after the other, always pregnant or nursing. It was all I could go toward. It was like
I was possessed, caught in some sort of lunar pull.

And then, sometime in the spring of the year I turned twenty-eight, my mother broke her foot. I was teaching at one of those
post-hippie-quasi-Montessori-rich-kid schools and spring break was coming up. They didn’t talk about Easter up there—they
called it the Equinox Festival. Either way I had a week off and it seemed unkind not to use the time to drive down and check
on Mom, so I did. What was bothering her most was that she’d been forbidden to drive, which meant she couldn’t do all her
volunteer work. Funny, but it’s lately hit me how much my mother is like Nancy, how completely she throws herself into all
her good causes. She stays so busy that no one can ever criticize her, or say they really know her.

After three days I was screamingly bored with being in my childhood home, and I wondered why I’d never noticed that my parents
kept the TV too loud and the heat too high. It was easy for Mom to talk me into driving a little boy named Keon to the free
dental clinic. I borrowed her Volvo, picked Keon up at his preschool, and followed her carefully detailed instructions to
a medical complex that was in the middle of a block of public housing.

Keon was a silent child. He had no idea who I was, but went with me willingly enough. Even at the age of four he seemed to
be accustomed to taking the hands of strange white ladies and climbing into station wagons. When we got to the clinic there
was a chalkboard in the waiting room with the doctors who were volunteering that day listed on it, as if they were specials
at a restaurant. Phillip Bearden was the dentist du jour and I remember thinking it was a pleasant name. A pleasant name for
a pleasant man, for who else but a pleasant man would volunteer at the free clinic?

When they finally called us back, Keon, who had been playing with blocks in the waiting room, panicked. I don’t think he’d
realized where he was or what was getting ready to happen until the moment he saw the big hydraulic chair. He dug in his small
heels with surprising ferocity and Dr. Bearden, a broad shaggy man with an unkempt beard and a gentle voice, was only able
to persuade him into the chair by promising I would climb up too and Keon could sit on my lap.

That’s how I met Phil. He was one year out of dental school. I did the math. That made him at least a year younger than I
was, maybe two. “The kids call me Dr. Phil,” he said, and it was before the TV show, so I didn’t laugh. Keon clutched my wrists
with his small hands, pressing in as if he were trying to take my pulse, and Dr. Phil rubbed his cheeks until he was finally
able to coax his mouth open. “This little guy was hurting,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Two of them need to go.”

You could tell he was used to children, good with them, so careful to cup his large palm around the novocaine needle that
Keon never really saw it coming. He gave one little twitch as it slipped into his gum, and when Phil pulled his hand back,
Keon spoke for the first time. He said, “Sing.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It stings a little bit but it’s over now.”

Phil shook his head. “He wants you to sing.”

“What am I supposed to sing?”

“Sing,” Keon said again.

“Apparently,” Phil said, and his eyes crinkled so that I thought he might have been smiling under his mask, “there’s someone
who sings to him when he’s scared.”

“I don’t sing. I never sing.”

“Sing,” Keon said more forcefully, twisting his body so hard that he almost pulled loose the cotton bib.

“It looks to me like you’re going to have to sing,” said Phil.

So I started singing. I sang “Happy Birthday,” which was the first thing that came to my mind. I have a bad voice. My bad
voice, in fact, is legendary among my friends, but I realized that Phil was right and that somewhere, sometime, somebody had
sung to this child to keep him calm. Almost immediately his body slumped against me and when Phil told him to open his mouth,
he did. So I sang “Happy Birthday” and then I sang “Camptown Races” and “Free Bird” and “Jingle Bells” and “Girls Just Want
to Have Fun.” Every time I stopped Keon would say, “Sing,” and I’d start up with another song, something always different
but always inappropriate, and I could tell Phil was trying not to laugh.

But he got the one tooth out and then the other, and as I was sitting there, holding this boy in my arms and singing and looking
at Phil’s large hands, I began to wonder exactly where I was going with my life and why I was still teaching when it didn’t
pay worth shit and didn’t give me time to do my own pots. The idea after art school had been that I would teach part-time
and spend my afternoons in the studio, but none of this seemed to be working out. The kids didn’t want to learn about weaving
or watercolors. The kids were all stoned on better stuff than I could afford and it was the kind of school where I was expected
to say everything they did was wonderful. They got certificates of completion just for showing up and their art was exhibited
in the lobbies of buildings that their fathers owned, even if I sometimes suspected this work was done by the family domestics.
I could only afford to rent six hours a week in the studio and I didn’t have health insurance. I started thinking that after
Dr. Phil finished with Keon I should ask him to clean my teeth too. God knows how long it had been.