Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright Page A

least of hovering. He is above me, like a hummingbird. He moves from
     one part of my body to another and I can feel the rapid flap of wings against my skin. He lowers his head, over and over,
     as if to drink.
    I can’t seem to move. I don’t want to move. A phone is in my hand. He drops his head to my breast and I see the wings growing
     out from his shoulder blades and the strong taut tendons running from his back into the rippling white feathers and then I
     am up, off the ground and trembling beneath him, seemingly held by nothing but his mouth.
    The phone rings.
    No, it’s the alarm. I hear the sound of Phil’s hand slapping the clock, I hear the bed creak as he rises. I wait until he
     is in the bathroom and has the shower going before I get up too. Wrap his robe around me and shuffle into the kitchen.
    “He moved over me like a hummingbird,” I tell Pascal, who is sitting on the counter. He raises a leg and languidly begins
     to clean himself.
    Phil emerges from the bedroom a few minutes later. He seems surprised that I am making omelets. Swiss cheese and spinach and
     a crumpled piece of deli ham. I found a counselor, I tell him. A woman. He does remember, doesn’t he? He remembers that he
     promised? Of course he remembers, he says, and the omelets are a nice surprise. It’s a shame he doesn’t have more time. He
     eats standing up at the counter.
    I n real life, women stay. Women stay better than they do anything else.
    I t’s Track and Field Day at the elementary school. Kelly, Nancy, and I are sitting on folding chairs at the edge of the playground,
     watching the kids go through the events. Kelly has brought a gift bag for Tory, with a purple-and-orange rugby shirt inside.
    “She’ll love it,” I say, and she will. It’s very much like the Gap Kids shirt that I bought her, but this one is a gift from
     Kelly so Tory will happily wear it, just as she happily wears everything that Kelly brings her. She may even insist on sleeping
     in it.
    “Very cute,” Nancy says. She’s wanted to ask Kelly for years why she doesn’t have kids and she never believes me when I say
     that I don’t know either. It’s obvious Kelly wanted them. Is Mark too old? He has adult children from a previous marriage
     so there isn’t anything wrong with him physically. Is she the one with the problem or did they just make some sort of deal
     before marriage that he wouldn’t have to go through that again?
    Sometimes I think that Nancy looks like the heroine of a Victorian novel, and never more so than on a day like this when she
     has swathed herself in a thin, long-sleeved white blouse and a loose cream-colored muslin skirt. She has a floppy straw hat
     on her head and she takes great care to tuck her feet under her skirt. She is telling us about her mother’s best friend’s
     daughter. I don’t know why she is telling us this story, since neither Kelly nor I know the woman in question, but Nancy is
     full of stories.
    Anyway, this particular woman had an uncommunicative husband. Her marriage was in trouble. I guess she’s secretly talking
     about me, or maybe even Belinda. I glance at Kelly. Mark never speaks. Hell, it could be any one of us.
    “He was a little like Phil,” Nancy finally says. Okay, great, we’re talking about me. She tells us how this girl followed
     her husband from room to room, trying to get him to have a conversation. When he would shut the bathroom door she would lie
     down and put her cheek on the carpet and talk to him beneath the crack. I wince with recognition. In the middle of the night
     this woman would sit up in bed and cut on the lights and shake her husband’s shoulder and say, “Wake up, we have to talk.”
    “She made him talk to her,” says Nancy, “and they’ve been together twenty years.” She says this last line with triumph, as
     if it were the last line of a joke. Apparently this is what it takes to stay together for twenty years. You have to want a
     marriage so