Read Online Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright - Free Book Online Page A

asks.
    Nancy twists around to look at her. “You think Megan’s husband is having an affair?”
    “No.”
    “Well, Megan certainly isn’t.”
    “You’re probably right. It’s just, why do you think people who have been sitting in the dark all these years suddenly get
     this urge to knock out a wall?”
    Nancy finally figures out that Kelly’s just jerking her chain and she sits back, relaxing. “If remodeling means you’re having
     an affair then I must be the whore of Babylon.”
    “No, I’m just thinking maybe Elyse should have an affair.”
    “Oh God,” I say. “With who? The only men I know are your husbands, and your husbands are worse than mine.” Kelly and Nancy
     both laugh.
    I’ve gotten as far as dialing nine of the ten digits in his phone number before hanging up.
    “Well, the coach-pitch coach certainly seems interested,” Kelly says.
    “Men like Elyse,” Nancy says idly. “I’ve always wondered why that is.” She squints at me. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
    “Are you kidding?” says Kelly. “It’s because she’s a sprayer. Always has been, always will be. Men can smell it a mile away.
     I’ve spent my whole life groping my way through this mist of sex she sprays everywhere going, ‘Elyse? Elyse? You in there
     anywhere, baby?’ ”
    “Please. Maybe I was once, but not now. Not for a long time.”
    Nancy is frowning, as if trying to reconcile the theory that I’m a sprayer with the theory that my husband and I are having
     trouble in the bedroom. “I just don’t see it,” she finally says.
    “That’s because it isn’t there,” I say, pulling the binoculars from Kelly’s hand.
    “Women never see it,” Kelly says. “Men do.” She drops her voice, does a good imitation of the coach’s low-country drawl. “I
     said to myself, ‘That little Bearden girl is fast…’ ”
    We laugh again. Tory has just finished the long jump and she is lining up for the hurdles. She waves and we all turn in unison,
     like gazelles at a watering hole.
    “I don’t know why,” I say, “being a mother would come so easily to me when being a wife seems so hard…”
    “On Monday things could look totally different,” says Nancy. “It’s bad luck to even be talking this way. Do you want to end
     up like Lynn?”
    “… or why Tory, my greatest success, would come out of my greatest failure.”
    “Don’t say failure.”
    “My marriage is a failure.”
    “You don’t have to use that word.”
    No, you don’t have to, but ever since I said it to Gerry on the plane, I can’t seem to stop.
    “It’s the right word,” I tell Nancy.
    She grimaces. “There are lots of words.”
    I didn’t start calling my marriage a failure all at once.
    At first I tried. I tried for years. I made all those little efforts, silly gestures like buying a CD called
It’s Not Too Late to Have a Great Marriage
. I ordered it from QVC because it had such a needy-sounding title that I was embarrassed to buy it from the local bookstore.
     With my luck someone would see me holding it in line and report back to all my friends. There’s just the tiniest bit of hypocrisy
     around the whole issue—everyone agrees you should Work on Your Marriage, but if you’re ever caught actually Working on Your
     Marriage, you look ridiculous.
    And the only thing worse than being unhappily married is being ridiculous.
    So the CD series arrived UPS. There was a woman on the front of the box who was pulling her husband by the tie—pulling him
     playfully toward a kiss. The back of the box explained that this man wouldn’t talk. This man was detached. This woman was
     weepy and frustrated. She was demanding things he couldn’t seem to give her. (Maybe she was demanding too much.) From the
     husband’s expression it wasn’t clear how he felt about being dragged against his will into this passionate new marriage.
    There were six discs. I was supposed to listen to them for six weeks in a row and I did,