Love in Mid Air

by Kim Wright

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

An intelligent, sexy, absorbing tale and an honest look at modern-day marriage, Love in Mid Air offers the experience of what it's like to change the course of one's own destiny when finding oneself caught in mid air. A chance encounter with a stranger on an airplane sends Elyse Bearden into an emotional tailspin. Suddenly Elyse is willing to risk everything: her safe but stale marriage, her seemingly perfect life in an affluent Southern suburb, and her position in the community. She finds herself cutting through all the instincts that say "no" and instead lets "yes" happen. As Elyse embarks on a risky affair, her longtime friend Kelly and the other women in their book club begin to question their own decisions about love, sex, marriage, and freedom. There are consequences for Elyse, her family, and her circle of close friends, all of whom have an investment in her life continuing as normal. But is normal what she really wants after all? In the end it will take an extraordinary leap of faith for Elyse to find--and follow--her own path to happiness.

Release date: March 29, 2010

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

“An intense, thoughtful novel.”

—Booklist

“Fresh… achingly honest… Wright gets the details exactly right.”

—BookPage

“Sharply written and emotionally accessible… a modern take on adultery.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Fascinating… fabulously well-written… Wright offers a nice array of flawed, struggling human characters.”

—RT Book Reviews

“From the first line I was drawn into Wright’s marvelous novel. This is a spare, intense, honest, and sexy book, simmering
with love, powered by the will of one woman who, despite the odds, demands that she choose her destiny.”


—Alison Smith,author of Name All the Animals

“An insightful study of a marriage in decline and no mere chick-lit romp… Wright makes clear-eyed observations of suburban
life, women’s friendships, and how couples interact in small communities, and rigorously investigates the reasons to stay
in a marriage and the reasons to go.”


—Sunday Telegraph (Australia)


“Funny, sexy, heartbreaking, wise… the kind of novel you will stay up late for. I read the first page and was hooked, I couldn’t
put it down.”


—Dawn Clifton Tripp, author of Game of Secrets

“LOVE IN MID AIR has great ingredients—unforgettable characters, a good story, and that ‘what if’ concept that one might think
about now and then.”


—BestsellersWorld.com

“Kim Wright’s brilliant first novel is not only funny and wise, but also illuminating in surprising and fresh ways… This is
a wonderful read, from first page to last, for anyone who has ever been married or has ever contemplated it.”


—Fred Leebron,author of In the Middle of All This

“This novel moves in a straight flight into our hearts… an amazing novel, never subtle, always brilliant… Kim Wright ascends
to the ground with truths that are universal to all women.”


—TheReviewBroads.com

“An honest, intense, sometimes funny look at a modern-day marriage struggling to survive… a very powerful read and a hit debut
for Kim Wright.”


—BookLoons.com

“A breath of fresh air for readers… It’s a candid, often painfully funny look at modern love and friendship, with some surprising
twists and turns along the way. A book to savor—and then share with your best friend.”


—Susan Wiggs,author of The Summer Hideaway



I wasn’t meant to sit beside him. It was a fluke.


It’s the last Sunday in August and I’m in Phoenix for a pottery show. I won a prize for my glazing and sold seventeen pieces,
so I’m feeling good. On the morning I’m due to fly out, I go for an early hike in a canyon behind my hotel. Arizona’s deceptive.
It’s cool in the morning so you climb all the way to the top of the trail, but an hour later, when the sun is fully up and
you’re winding your way back down, you can feel a pulse in the dome of your head and you remember that this is the West, not
the East, and out here people can die from the heat. By the time I get to the bottom I’m so dizzy that I bend my head over
a drinking fountain in the hotel lobby and let the water run over the back of my neck until my vision returns to normal.


I drive to the airport, turn in my rental car, go through security, call home, eat a burrito, and drag my carry-on to the
plane. There’s a man beside me in 18A, a man with a strong accent who immediately begins explaining to me that his son is
stuck in 29D and he doesn’t have much English and would I mind switching seats with him? Twenty-nine D is a hell seat, near
the back and in the middle of a row. I don’t want to switch. There’s burrito juice all over my shirt and my hair has dried
funny from being washed in a water fountain. I’m hot and tired and all I want to do is get home. But when Tory was little I was always asking strangers
to help me in airplanes and most of them were nice about it. So I say sure, shove my magazine into my bag, and go trudging
to the back of the plane.


The kid in question turns out to be about thirty years old. I try to explain that we’re switching seats by showing him my
boarding pass and pointing to his and saying, “Papa, Papa,” but his dad wasn’t lying. He doesn’t speak a word of English.
Everyone in the vicinity of the twenty-ninth row of the aircraft gets into the act and for some bizarre reason the flight
attendant begins speaking French. We’re almost ready to pull back from the gate when he finally stands up and heads toward
Papa in the front of the plane. I crawl over the guy in 29C and drop into my seat, thinking this is one of those times that
you regret trying to do the right thing, only I’m wrong. This is one of those times that karma turns around faster than a
boomerang.


The man sitting beside me in 29E says, “That was a nice thing to do.”

He’s tall, so tall that he is turned slightly in his seat, his knees just on the edge of my space. I ask him why he was in
Arizona and he says he was on a climb. He’s an investment banker, he climbs mountains on weekends. He doesn’t like to fly.


He turns slightly more toward me in the seat and I turn slightly more toward him. I tell him it seems strange that a person
who can climb mountains is afraid to fly, and he shakes his head. It’s a matter of control, he says, and he tells me about
the scariest thing that’s ever happened to him on a climb. Years ago, when he’d just begun the sport, he’d found himself linked
to a guy who didn’t fix the clips right and something broke loose and both of them slid. There’s nothing worse, he says, than
to be halfway up the face of the mountain, past the turnback point, and all of a sudden to realize you can’t count on the
other person. I ask him what the turnback point is and he says there’s a place you get to in every climb where it’s as dangerous to retreat as it is to advance. I nod. It seems I should have known this.


He asks me if I’m married and I say yes, nine years. “Nine,” he says slowly, as if the number in itself has a kind of power.
“Nine is sort of in the middle.” I don’t feel like I’m in the middle of my marriage—but I don’t feel like I’m at the beginning
or the end of it either. I find marriage immeasurable, oceanic. The man in 29C has put on headphones. We have our vodka and
pretzels by now.


“It’s such a funny sport,” he says. It takes me a minute to realize what he’s talking about. “Each time I summit I think the
same thing, that we shouldn’t have come here, that human beings have no business being in the sky. Every time I think, ‘This
will be my last climb,’ but then I get home and in a couple of weeks I want to do it again.”


“I guess once you start, it’s hard to stop,” I say. I’ve never met anyone who used the word “summit” as a verb. But he has
shut his eyes and leaned back in his seat, as if just telling the story has exhausted him.


I pull the Redbook magazine from my bag and the cover says “48 Things to Do to a Man in Bed.” I bought the magazine just for this article. Defying
all logic, there is still a part of me that thinks I can save my marriage through sex. Gerry—his name is Gerry—opens his eyes
and begins to read over my shoulder. His minute-long nap seems to have revitalized him because he suggests that we go through
the list and each write down three things we’d like to try. Wouldn’t it be something if they were the same three things?


I strongly suspect they will be the same three things. He’s married too, of course, married to someone he met in the drop-add
line his freshman year at UMass. At one point they’d been together so long that they just looked at each other and said, “Why
not?” Two boys and then a girl, and the daughter especially, she’s the love of his life, he says—but his wife, that’s a whole
other issue. He has pressed his thigh against mine, opened his legs as if I am a weight he must push away in order to make himself stronger.


“Marriage is difficult,” I tell him. “It’s the only thing in my whole life I’ve ever failed at.”

I’ve never said this to anyone, never used the word “failed,” but it rolls off my tongue like a fact. Maybe this is the way
you should always confess things—just like this, in mid air, and to a total stranger. I wait for him to convince me that it
isn’t true. God knows if I tried to say this back home, a hundred people would rush in to correct me before the words were
even out of my mouth. They would say it’s just the vodka talking, or the altitude. Or maybe my desire to intrigue this man
by saying something dramatic, anything that will keep him turned toward me in his seat. Any marriage can be salvaged, my friends
would tell me—especially a clean, well-ordered little one like mine. No, of course I haven’t failed. We’re just going through
a rough spot.


But this man doesn’t correct me. He is smiling as he screws the top off his second bottle of vodka. His hands are very beautiful.
I need for a man to have beautiful hands, hands you can imagine slipping down you at once, hands that can make you feel a
little breathless even as they go through the most mundane of tasks, even as they rip open a package of pretzels or reach
up to redirect the flow of air.


“The list?” he says, pointing toward the magazine.

“Do you have paper?”

He digs something out of his pocket. “You can type it into my BlackBerry.”

“I’m supposed to type three things I want to do in bed into your BlackBerry? Are you going to delete it?”

He smiles. “Eventually.”

The flight goes fast. When the pilot comes on to say we are beginning our descent into Dallas it startles me so much that
it’s like I’d forgotten we were even on a plane. “Can I hold your hand?” Gerry asks me. This is the part he hates, the landing.
This is the part where you are statistically most likely to crash, and he explains that this is true for climbers too, that most are killed on the way down. He smiles again as he tells me this, flashing
strong white teeth. I have visions of them ripping flesh from bone. Good hands and good teeth. He’s a type, of course. He’s
a player. He’s the kind of man who meets women at 30,000 feet and persuades them to type sexual fantasies into his BlackBerry,
but for some reason I don’t care. He asks me how long I’ll be laid over in Dallas.


Almost two hours. He thinks maybe we should have a drink. There’s definitely time for a drink. At least a drink. He says he’s
a little lightheaded too, the result of the climb. It’s been so strange, such an intense day. He changed planes at the last
minute, and maybe he needs something to press him back into himself. This is probably all quite meaningless. He’s probably
the sort of man who does this all the time. People meet in planes and do it all the time, huddled under thin airline blankets
or in those cheap hotels that offer shuttle service from the terminals. An in-flight flirtation, nothing special, and I shouldn’t
even be talking to him. I have not had sex with any man other than my husband in nine years.


“I suppose we could have a drink,” I say.

“Here comes the dangerous part,” he says, and he reaches out to hold my hand.

We land without dying. He helps me retrieve my bag from the bin above row 18. We walk down the tunnel and find a departure
board. The time at the bottom flashes 5:22.


“That can’t be right,” says Gerry.

We were supposed to land at 3:45. We were supposed to have a two-hour layover in Dallas. I look at my watch but I’m still
on Phoenix time and when I find Charlotte on the departure board I see that my flight is scheduled to leave in fourteen minutes.
“What time is it?” Gerry asks the guy standing beside us, who got off our flight and presumably is privy to no more information
than we are. He looks at us with a kind of pity and says, “Five twenty-three,” and then adds, “We circled fucking forever.”


I am leaving out of Gate 42 and this is Gate 7. Gerry lives in Boston. He is leaving out of Gate 37 in twenty minutes. “Come on,” he says. “We’re going to have to hurry.” It seems easier
to follow him than to think, so I do. Follow him, that is, away from the departure board and down the long corridor that leads
to the higher numbers. We put our bags over our shoulders and begin to run, run full out until we get to the moving sidewalk
and hop aboard. My chest hurts and I feel sick.


“We’re being cheated,” Gerry says. “We could just forget our flights and find a hotel. This is Dallas. Nobody knows us. We
could say we missed our connection.” We are walking fast on the sidewalk, cutting right and left around couples and old people,
blowing past them like they were obstacles on a video screen, until we come up behind a woman with a baby stroller and we
have to stop.


He glances at me. “I’ve offended you.”

“No,” I say. “I’m thinking.” We might run like this and miss our planes anyway. If we stopped running right now it would be
one of those lies that isn’t much of a lie, and they’re my favorite kind. He’s quite right, this is Dallas. Nobody here knows
us. He is sliding his hand up and down my spine and I lean into him a little, feel the sharp angle of his hipbone cutting
into my waist. The moving sidewalk carries us past Gate 16 and the clock there says 5:27. There’s a very good chance we won’t
make it.


“I just have to be back for a meeting on Monday,” he says.

“Monday’s tomorrow.”

He frowns, like maybe I’m wrong.

The moving sidewalk ends, spilling us in front of Gate 22. I see a cart that sells bottled water, but there isn’t time. I
put my bag over my right shoulder, he puts his over his left, and we join hands and start running again. The airport is interminable,
it’s like a dream, and he looks over to me at some point and says, “It’ll be all right.” What? What will be all right? I catch
a glimpse of myself in a mirrored wall as we pass. My shirt is stained with burrito juice and my hair has dried really strangely
and I start to tell him that usually I don’t look this bad. Which isn’t exactly the truth. I often look this bad but I guess what I want to tell him is that I am capable of looking much better. I am watching him for
a sign that he does this all the time, for surely he is the sort of man who does this all the time. He’s strong and tall,
with the kind of teeth that are designed to rip flesh from bone, and just then—the clock says 5:32—he pulls me to the side
and I go with him, unquestioning, into the Traveler’s Chapel where he drops his bag, puts his hands on my shoulders, and kisses
me.


It’s one of those kisses that gives you the feeling that you’re falling, that the elevator floor has dropped out from under
you, and when I finally break away I see a mural of Jesus, a sort of Hispanic Jesus looking all flat and distorted, with long
thin hands reaching out to hold a 747. His eyes are sorrowful but sympathetic. Here, in the Traveler’s Chapel of the Dallas
airport, apparently he has seen it all.


“I need your card,” Gerry says. “Your business card.”

“Okay,” I say. The blood has rushed to my face and my ears are ringing. Gerry and I are practically screaming at each other,
as if we are climbers high on a mountain, as if we have to yell to be heard over the sound of the whipping wind. “But you
can’t call me. I’m married.”


“I know,” he says. “I’m rich.”

“You’re rich?”

“I make a lot of money, that’s all I mean. I don’t know why I make a lot of money, I don’t really understand why they pay
me what they pay me, but it could make things easier.” He glances over at Jesus.


What does he mean, it could make things easier? For the first time I am wary. He’s like an actor suddenly gone off script
and I don’t know what to say. He has been so smooth up to this point, so smooth that I could imagine he would slide right
off me when we parted, never leaving a mark. I have already been practicing the story I will tell Kelly on the phone tomorrow,
imagining how she will laugh at the cliché of it all. Elyse drinking two vodka doubles and getting herself picked up on a
plane. (“That’s a vodka quadruple,” Kelly will say. “Exactly what did you think was going to happen?”) Elyse making out in an airport chapel.
(“With some Tex-Mex Jesus watching you the whole time.”) Elyse walking toward her plane while the man walks away in another
direction, toward another plane that will carry him to a different town and a different life. (“It’s just one of those things,”
she will tell me, as I sit on my kitchen countertop with the phone pressed to my ear and my legs swinging. “Nothing really
happened so there’s no point in feeling guilty.”) Kelly is the only one who knew me when we were both young and pretty, when
we were impulsive and the world seemed full of men, and we would find ourselves sometimes transported by sex, picked up and
carried into situations that, in the muddle of memory, seem a bit like movie scenes. She is the only one who would understand
that I am relieved to find a sliver of this girl still inside me. Relieved to find that, although older and more suspicious
and heavy with marriage, under the right circumstances I can still be picked up and carried. That I remember how to kiss a
man who doesn’t seem to have a last name.


But now, suddenly, this man standing before me isn’t acting like a player. He’s awkward and embarrassed and real. He is determined
to make me understand something, something that I suspect will not fit well into the story I’ve planned to tell Kelly. I raise
my fingers to his mouth to stop the words, but it has been a long time since I have been in a situation like this and perhaps
the lines have changed. If a mistake is being made here, it is undoubtedly mine.


He pushes my hand aside, squeezing it for a moment to soften the rebuff. “No,” he says. “I need you to hear this. My first
car was a fucking AMC Pacer, do you even remember those? They blew up if somebody ran into you. I spent a whole summer sleeping
in a tent on my friend’s grandmother’s back porch because a bunch of us were going to move to New Orleans and start a blues
band but we couldn’t half play and we were stoned all the time and you know how it is with the blues… I used to eat those
ramen noodles, do you know what I’m talking about, those kind that were like four packages for a dollar? I didn’t think I
was going to turn out to be some rich asshole banker flying all over the place. Today was probably the first time I’ve sat
in coach in five years, can you believe that? I fucked up and missed my earlier flight, I wasn’t even supposed to be on that
plane. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I wasn’t even supposed to be on that plane and the money isn’t who I am. It’s
just, you know, energy, a kind of raw energy, and it could make things easier. That’s all I’m trying to tell you, that it
could make things easier.” He exhales sharply. “Are you mad at me?”


I shake my head. He kisses me again. This time he breaks away first and I am left hanging and abandoned in the space between
his chin and his shoulder, my eyes still closed and my mouth still open. “A card,” he says into my hair. “I need your card.”


I am trying very hard not to faint. I flatten my back against the stucco wall and open my eyes. Gerry is adjusting his pants,
looking away from me as he arranges things, his face as flushed as a teenage boy’s. I am digging in my purse and my hand is
finding ink pens, breath mints, Tampax, everything but the business card that could propel this madness into the future tense.


“I’m shaking,” I tell him as he presses something into my hand, and then we are running again, out the chapel door and through
the airport to Gate 37. People are lined up waiting to enter the tunnel.


“I’ll go with you to your gate,” he says. “If you’ve missed your flight, I’ll miss mine.” I look at the monitor behind the
desk. My flight was supposed to have left two minutes ago. There is nothing I can do about the situation one way or another
and this thought thrills me. We are walking now. Five numbers down to my gate and the sign says CHARLOTTE and there are no people except for one woman in a US Airways uniform. “Are you still boarding?” I ask her and I am amazed
at the neutrality of my voice. She asks me my name and I realize this is the first time that Gerry has heard it. She looks down at the monitor and says, “They haven’t pulled back. I can get you on.”


Somewhere in the high thin air between Phoenix and Dallas we took turns reading the Redbook article about what a woman can do to a man in bed and Gerry picked three things from the list. The only one that I can remember
now is that he said he likes for women to show that they want it. Jump the guy. Take charge of the situation. All men like
that. I know he wants me to be the alpha female, the un-wife, the person you meet in strange cities who is cool and aggressive
and uncomplicated and self-assured, and so, right on cue, I burst into tears. Gerry kisses me again, only I am so weak that
I can hardly move my mouth. I slide off his tongue like a climber with bad equipment.


I break away and follow the US Airways lady down the tunnel. I don’t look back. As we walk I sniffle and she pats my arm and
says, “Airport goodbyes can be very hard.” I have never been the last person on a plane before. Everyone looks at me as I
bump my way down the aisle to the only empty seat. A nice-looking older lady is beside me and I want to tell her everything
but the overhead is full and it takes my last ounce of strength to shove my carry-on under the seat in front of me. Gerry’s
crumpled business card is in my hand. I never found a card so he can’t call me. I can only call him and this is no good. If
I call him first he will always know that I walked in free and clear, that I’m willing to have an affair, that I don’t care
that he’s married and I’m married, that I chose it, that I wanted it, that I knew what I was getting into before I picked
up that phone and made that call.


As we pull away from the gate I am calm, or rather I am in that strange state where you’re so upset that you behave as if
you were calm. I close my eyes and try to picture a flat thin Jesus holding up my plane. Gerry doesn’t like landings, but
I don’t like takeoff. I don’t like the feeling of being pushed back in my seat. This is the point where I pray things like,
“Into your hands I commit my spirit,” or maybe it’s “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Neither one makes a lot of sense
but I’ll say anything on a runway. I’d speak Hebrew or Arabic or Swahili if I knew them, anything to hedge my bets. But today I am too exhausted to bargain with
God. Hell, we all have to go sometime.


I open my eyes and look around. The nice lady beside me has bent her head forward and her lips are moving. Good. Let her pray
for all of us. The odds are if God chooses to spare her, I’ll live too, through sheer proximity. I look down at the card in
my hand and practice saying his name aloud. I’m not sure what has just happened to me. I don’t know what it means. I press
my palms against my trembling thighs and listen to the engines beneath me gain strength. Strength enough to thrust us into
the sky where we have no business being, but where we go sometimes, nonetheless.




In the morning Phil’s alarm goes off first. I lie in the bruise-gray darkness and wait for the sound of his shower, his zipper,
the jingle of his car keys, the opening of the garage door. At 7:05 the coffee begins to drip. Tory’s ride comes in thirty-five
minutes. She does not want to wear her new twenty-two-dollar rugby shirt from Gap Kids. She is not destined to spell the word
“scientist” correctly in this lifetime. Her vocabulary list hangs on the refrigerator with a magnet. It’s only Tuesday, so
I have to keep checking the list, but by Friday I will know the words by heart. I call them out to her while I refold the
Gap shirt and get out the old Target one that she loves. I bring her cinnamon toast to the recliner where she is curled up
watching TV. The Coyote is still chasing the Road Runner after all these pointless years.


One cat wants out, the other wants in. They rub themselves across the French doors, their tails flicking the glass. There’s
a station break, which means we should be farther along. I call to Tory to brush her teeth as I close the lunchbox, zip the
backpack. She dumps her crusts into the part of the sink that doesn’t have a disposal. I kiss her head and send her out to
the end of the driveway to wait for the mother who has this week’s carpool.


The cats’ morning kill lies on the deck, a small unblinking mouse. It’s the ultimate perversity—they’re so well fed and yet
they stalk. The mouse has already gone stiff and I sweep him to the edge of the deck where he freefalls into the bushes, into a mass grave for all the animals that the cats have killed on
previous nights. The plot of ground below the deck is dark and rich with small curved skeletons and it gives up flowers in
waves. Through the glass of the French doors the TV flickers. The Coyote’s Acme rocket has failed him once again and he is
falling into the canyon. He holds up a sign that says HELP.


I make it a point not to think about how the mouse died. He and the birds and squirrels and openmouthed moles I’ve found on
other mornings or the baby bunny that I wrapped in a dishcloth and buried in the soft ground behind the swing set. I put down
the broom and scoop Friskies into the green bowl. The cats are brother and sister, Pascal and Garcia. They fall upon the food
as if they’ve never eaten, their heads nudging my hand away from the dish.


I go into the kitchen, pour another cup of coffee, and stand at the sink eating the crusts of Tory’s toast. The house is silent.
This is the part of the day I like, the only part I can truly control, and my thoughts run, swift as water, to the place where
they’ve been collecting for the last forty-eight hours. I deposited the checks from my Phoenix trip in the bank yesterday.
Paid the bills that Phil had left stacked neatly on the kitchen counter. Unpacked my suitcase, threw the little lotions and
soaps that I always swipe from hotel rooms into the wicker basket under my sink, rinsed out my green silk blouse. All evidence
of the trip has been wiped away and there is nothing but a single business card to prove that the man was real. Thinking about
him is addictive, I know that from yesterday when I became so drunk with memory that I took to my bed like some old-time Hollywood
starlet. I look at the clock. I give myself five minutes, exactly five, to think about how much and how little my life has
changed. Five minutes to indulge this ridiculous and intoxicating notion that there is a man somewhere up in Boston who wants
me. Five minutes, and then I will start work.


*   *   *

When we moved in here seven years . . .