Love in Mid Air (36 page)

“I never said she needs to leave Jeff.”

“You don’t have to say it out loud, it’s your whole philosophy of life. You think if a woman is smart that automatically means
marriage is going to make her miserable.”

“She becomes disenchanted with the bourgeois life,” Belinda says. “Like Madame Bovary.”

It may be the one sentence she could have said that would shut both me and Kelly up.

“Yes… like Madame Bovary…” Kelly says, speaking slowly as she tries to regain her momentum. “So if you’re saying that the
smarter a woman is, the more she’s going to resent her marriage, it only makes sense that the opposite is true too. If a woman
is content, then she must be stupid, at least according to the world of Elyse.”

“You know the one thing I thought was funny in that book,” Belinda says. “Madame Bovary didn’t have any girlfriends.”

I take a gulp of my wine. Pinot Gris. “We all used to sit around…”

“Yeah,” says Kelly. “We all sat around and bitched about our husbands, we all bitched about our lives, and you bitched louder
than anybody. That was sort of your job. But I didn’t really think you were going to do anything about it, Elyse. Nobody did.
You’re scaring the shit out of people.”

“I know,” I say, and I really do know, and despite what everybody thinks, I’m sorry.

“Can I tempt you?” A server is pushing a three-tiered dessert cart toward us. It sways precariously on the cobblestone patio
and she begins to point out items with her shiny black fingertips. “We have butterscotch crème brûlée, margarita mousse, berries
in a Galliano broth topped with mascarpone and biscotti, grapefruit sorbet, chocolate pot pie with peanut butter ice cream…”

“Stop,” I say. I feel like crying.

“It’s obscene,” says Kelly.

“Or, if you’d prefer, Chef can make you a strawberry milkshake.” The server is young and very thin, and her hair is so blond
that for a moment I have to avert my eyes. It’s like looking directly into the sun.

“Just bring us a sampler platter,” says Kelly.

“Great choice,” she chirps and teeters away, pulling the cart behind her.

Kelly gazes after her. “Jesus, it really is all too much sometimes, isn’t it? We should tell those guys at the next table
to drag over their chairs and pick up a fork.”

“Do you think Madame Bovary would have gotten away with it if she’d had some girlfriends?” Belinda asks.

“I think Madame Bovary would have gotten away with it if she’d had a cell phone,” I say.

“Please,” Kelly says. “Don’t encourage her.” I’m not sure which one of us she’s speaking to.

“Actually, Belinda, you’ve got a point,” I say. “I didn’t even notice it, but Madame Bovary didn’t have any girlfriends.”

Nancy is back from the bathroom. It looks like she’s washed her face. “What did I miss?”

“We ordered a dessert sampler,” Kelly says. “And, oh yeah, Elyse is having some problems in her marriage.”

“It was your anniversary a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it?” Belinda asks.

I nod.

“Did you have sex?”

“Yeah. In the shower.”

“In the shower? You had that special shower sex where you were standing up? You gotta stop doing that, Elyse. Move him into
the guest room. As long as you’re giving him shower sex of course he’s not gonna take you seriously. ”

Kelly smiles at Belinda. “You’re really fired up today.”

I smile too. “She should have read
Madame Bovary
years ago.”

“We just make it way too easy on them, that’s all I’m saying.”

The sampler platter is upon us. Someone has squirted a grid of sauces across the white plate, caramel tic-tac-toed with chocolate,
a swirl of raspberry in a corner. Four desserts, four forks, a knife in case we want to get geometric about things. Enough
for everyone to have a little bit of everything. I drag my finger across the pattern of sauces on the plate and lift it to
my mouth. Paint it on my lower lip, wait a second, and then lick it off.

“But I didn’t kiss him when we were in the shower,” I say. The bright blond girl is pushing her three-tiered cart toward the
men. They look up at her, smiling and hopeful. “Why do you think that’s the first thing to go?”

“Oh Lord,” mutters Kelly. “Why don’t you just pick up that knife and stab us all in the chests?”

“Well, I guess you win some and you lose some,” Nancy says, stuffing a bite of the chocolate pot pie into her mouth. Kelly
and Belinda look down at their plates.

“What does that mean?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Nancy says sweetly, pushing her sunglasses back and looking at me, straight in the eye. “Now see, that’s
weird. I would have sworn you’d be the first to know. Lynn and Andy left for Belize this morning. She got him back.”

N
ot only wasn’t I the first to know, but it turns out I was the last to know. Throughout the rest of the week, the story comes
to me in pieces.

The thing with the secretary didn’t work out, Kelly tells me on Wednesday at the gym. The girl was so damn young, what did
Andy expect? Anyway, he called Lynn and he was abject. Bereft. Contrite. He’d moved into a Residence Inn, one of those pathetic
places out by the airport that are full of men who’ve screwed up.

She’s got him right where she wants him, Belinda adds, when she calls on Thursday. He told her to start looking for a new
house and that money was no object. They were even thinking about moving north of the city, up toward the lake. That would
mean the kids would have to change schools, but Lynn thought they needed a fresh start. Smart of her, Belinda says. She’s
playing it real smart, but then Lynn always did. The Belize trip is sort of a second honeymoon. They’re going to swim with
the dolphins.

Not exactly a second honeymoon, Nancy corrects me, when I see her in Trader Joe’s later that day. Lynn and Andy aren’t married
anymore—their divorce has been final for almost a year. So there will have to be some sort of ceremony, maybe a whole new
wedding, and wouldn’t that feel a little strange, to go through it all again with the same man?

The weirdest part, Kelly whispers, during coffee hour on Sunday, was that while Lynn was packing to go to Belize, this young
man shows up in the parking lot of her apartment complex and starts honking his horn. A boy, really. He’d evidently developed
a crush on Lynn, because there was some sort of scene…

The cops came, Belinda says. Can you believe it?

Who knows what the kid got in his head, Nancy murmurs. You know Lynn. She’s always been too nice for her own good. Obviously
he’d misread the situation, he’d interpreted her kindness toward him as something else…

Situations can get out of hand so fast, Kelly says.

Can you imagine the cops showing up at Lynn’s door? Belinda asks. Lynn, of all people?

No, she’s not coming back to her job at the church at all, Nancy explains. Jeff was a little upset about it at first—he’d
gone out on a limb to convince the council to cough up the money and hire her. But if this is what’s best for Lynn and Andy
and the boys then of course he understands. Because that’s all that really matters. What’s best for Lynn and Andy and the
boys.

Twenty-three, Belinda says, raising her eyebrows. That’s how old the boy in the parking lot turned out to be. Twen-ty-three.

Look, Nancy says, waving a postcard of a jungle under my nose. She says it’s beautiful there. Like some sort of Eden.

Kelly got a postcard from Belize too.

So did Belinda.

L
ynn had been a good wife—probably, I think, the best of us all. She was the one who had the greatest mastery of the myriad
skills the job requires. Not just running the house, raising the kids, cooking, or providing her husband comfort and pleasure.
That’s the easy part. Lynn was also gifted at the interior tasks of marriage. She knew how to create pockets to disappear
into, places to tuck her true mind away, like an extra set of car keys.

But it didn’t seem to matter in the end. One morning her husband informed her, with the stickiness of his semen still on her
thighs, that she had been replaced. When he walked out the door that day, walked out and turned left and started down the
block, she followed him. Followed him until he was no longer in sight. “I lost him,” she told me. “Literally lost him.” What
is this, some sort of muscle memory that all women have, some dark part of our brain that takes over and compels us, apart
from all logic, to follow men? If it compelled Lynn—sensible, disciplined Lynn—then it must be a very strong impulse indeed.

But then, at some point—probably not the first year, possibly the second—she had begun to like being alone. Maybe it was that
bald boy from the Starbucks, but I suspect it also had something to do with her hard solid work at the church. The smell of
turpentine, the weight of the trash sack on her shoulder, the comforting heft of the hammer in her hand. Each day this week
I have gone out to my mailbox and looked for my card from Belize, half believing that Lynn would write something on the back
that would explain everything to me. She would tell me why it is so hard to leave and—here’s the shock that has me now standing
flat-footed and numb in my kitchen, a cup of coffee raised to my lips—why it is apparently so hard to stay gone. That’s the
part I didn’t bargain for. I understand the gravitational pull of marriage. But I believed that if I ever got up enough power
to break out of it… What am I to think now? That Jesus and Elvis and a team of wild horses must have shown up and dragged
her back into this marriage that everyone honestly believed to be over?

He came after her. That’s what men do, apparently. Once you’re gone, really gone, finally gone, then that’s the point when
they decide that they want you back.

On the morning that he left her, Lynn followed Andy until he was out of sight, then she turned and walked back to her house.
She got the kids up and dressed and ready for school. She made the beds and loaded the dishwasher. She strapped on her heart
monitor and did her four-mile lap around the neighborhood. She opened a bank account in her maiden name. She ordered a college
catalog online. She cut her hair. She got an apartment, she got a job, she got a new boyfriend. She began wearing her pink
Chanel jacket with jeans and boots.

At what point did Andy notice she was no longer following him? At what point did he turn around and see that the woman who
had always been there no longer was? I can imagine her picking up the phone one night, her heart a little in her throat, wondering
what could be wrong that someone would call so late. His voice is on the line. He says he’s sorry. It’s all been a mistake.
He says he still loves her. Nothing has been done that cannot be undone. And then there’s the fact that her children call
him Daddy.

People can change, he says.

He tells her he wants to come home.

I carry my coffee out onto the deck, superstitiously stepping over the spot where we found Pascal. Everyone thinks that Andy
has learned his lesson but Kelly says no, that Lynn is really the one who’s different. (“I’m basing this theory,” she says
archly, “on the fact that it’s always the woman who changes.”) Kelly is on that dark path where she believes marriages work
best when women expect little. She thinks Lynn has seen how hard it is on the outside and adjusted her expectations. But I
remember Lynn saying that it wasn’t until Andy left her that she’d remembered how reasonable he could be. For the first time
in years they had begun making joint decisions—the selling of the house, the divvying up of funds, the scheduling of their
sons—and she had to wonder. Why couldn’t they do that when they lived together? “It takes divorce,” she said, “to show you
how to be married.”

Garcia ambles up. She does not jump into my lap as her brother used to do but instead curls around my feet and begins a loud
purr. In his absence she has gotten sweeter. It’s almost as if her personality has expanded to fill the space where Pascal
once was. When I picture divorce my mind leads only to the threshold and no farther. Try as I might, I can’t quite visualize
that first day alone and I think, sitting here on this sunny deck, that perhaps my sanity depends on not trying to. It has
taken too much effort to build up my escape velocity, it has taken me too long to put together the right combination of momentum,
anger, and money, and now that I can finally, finally feel the engines beneath me I can’t afford to stop and think. At least
not about Lynn.

“She got him back,” Nancy said, in her heartless way, and it’s strange how the language of revenge echoes the language of
reconciliation. Nancy considers this some sort of victory for our entire gender. Lynn gained an advantage, she leveraged her
position, she won a free trip to Belize. It can only be a matter of time before she’s knocking out walls and putting a sunroom
on the back of her house. “I’m so proud of her,” Nancy said, and I think, finishing my coffee and pulling Garcia against her
will into my lap, of Belinda’s mother down in that trailer park in Alabama with a picture of Belinda’s big red-brick house
stuck on her refrigerator door.