The whole of it comprised one long moment in his memory now, the moment after Quinn had been born and the three of them had been a family at Stanford and Quinn was an infant and then a toddler and his marriage to Barb was still new. They were broke and there had been arguments about money and, sometimes, already, about the workload that kept Keith so often away from their apartment. And yet what he remembered was an overriding sense of contentment, each day dawning on a California that seemed as blessed and magical as any place they could conceive of, the sun slanting crossways through the wild golden grasses and red-tiled roofs of Stanford’s architecture, the arcs and lines and towers of which were decorated with tiny and innumerable mosaic tiles. They woke in the early morning when Quinn climbed into bed between them, the three of them radiating the golden glow that was the glow of his memory, magnificent and endless, and Keith would ride his squeaky ten-speed bicycle from their apartment to the campus as he settled into a world filled with research facilities that were among the very best in the world.
Perhaps his marriage had already begun its slow stumble into entropy. Perhaps it had been crumbling from the very first moment and he had been unaware of it or had been unable to see it. He wondered sometimes if he might have forestalled her leaving had he been able to return from the mission, wondered this even though he knew she was already gone. But of course he had not wanted to return. In the days after Quinn’s death Houston told him that it was their intent to get him home and his response had been to refuse, explaining that while he appreciated their concern he intended to complete the mission he had been trained to do. They might have left him alone then had the migraines not begun but this medical reality made his return to Earth a priority for the agency, or at least this was what they had told him. But then his return had been delayed by weather and then by a technical problem and then by weather again and so he had remained on the space station with the rest of the crew and had continued with his tasks and experiments, such as he could between the agony of the migraines. In that time his anger at Barb had faded into a kind of liminality that was a reflection of the situation itself: he could do nothing but ask her not to leave and he did so and she told him she was already gone. All the while he continued to float in that low orbit, working when he could and huddling in the dark pain of his shattered mind when he could not.
She told him she was sorry but that he had been absent from their marriage and their family for so long and that she simply did not want to be alone anymore and when he pressed her she finally told him the truth about what she had done, about what she had been doing. Even now his body shivered at the memory of it, that mixture of confusion, panic, anger, and grief flooding through him once more, the paint roller trembling in his hand. At the time he had been too shattered to do much more than float in the microgravity and listen without real understanding. He had suffered a migraine just before and was in that long period of recovery, his mind feeling soft, the numbers it held a jumbled collection of broken symbols signifying quantities that held no real import or meaning at all. When he had received the video call it had been as if he were watching a kind of static scene that included someone who looked like him and someone who looked like his wife: a man suspended in the closet-size compartment, staring at a computer in silence as a woman’s face spoke from the screen. “I need you to understand that it’s over,” she said to him.
“You keep saying that. Just wait until I’m home and we can talk about it.”
Then she said nothing for a time. She had been saying essentially the same thing for the course of the conversation and he had responded the only way he could think to respond. Their daughter was dead and now she was telling him—trying to tell him—that she did not want to be married to him anymore.
And then her voice returned from that silence: “I’m seeing someone else, Keith.”
“What?”
“I’m seeing someone else. I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.”
He drifted. He had been drifting. “You’re having an affair?” he said.
“Yes, I’m having an affair.”
The quiet that came seemed to have no beginning or end, as if it had existed forever and he had merely slipped into its flowing stream. What had she said? Could he have heard her wrong? Could she be making some kind of weird joke he did not understand?
“Say something,” she said to him at last.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything.”
And then not speaking for so long, his body floating in the compartment.
“You don’t know how lonely I’ve been,” she said. “You never talk to me.”
“I talk to you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Again the silence. Then: “You had … you had an affair?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You had an affair?” His voice—the voice of this man who looked like him and who was him but somehow was not—this voice not even angry but flat and emotionless, as if discussing something tedious: a policy, a simple string of numbers, a procedure.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan it.”
“Does that even matter?”
“Yes, it matters,” she said.
“How?”
She did not respond.
“Who is it?” he said.
“You don’t know him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You don’t know him and you won’t ever know him. I’m not going to tell you that.”
Silence. Silence everywhere.
“I’m sorry but I thought you should know,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Barb.”
“It isn’t working anymore.”
“Obviously.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“I’m not being fair? You’re sleeping with someone else.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Even though his words were angry, his tone was resigned, disappointed, as if he was reading the script of an argument, reciting the words he knew he was supposed to say and he did say them but without feeling or emotion.
“You’re never around,” she said.
“I wanted you and Quinn to move to Houston with me—”
“Don’t. Don’t even say her name. That’s not what this is about. This is about me getting my life back.”
“I wanted you both to move to Houston with me but you wouldn’t do it.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she said.
“Yes, it would have.”
“No, Keith. It wouldn’t have mattered because you still don’t really talk to me about anything.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. It was the same with her. You pushed and pushed and pushed. And you didn’t listen to her. You made her miserable.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what? You just sit there thinking about math. That’s all you ever think about. I need someone to think about me, goddammit. I need someone to think about me.”
“Is that what this other man does for you?”
“Yes, since you asked. That’s what he does. He thinks about me.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then: “After all we’ve been through. Now this?”
“This started before … before Quinn … ,” she said, and her voice cracked when she said their daughter’s name.
“Fantastic,” he said. “Even better.”
She was silent, staring at his face from the laptop screen. Then she said, “I told you because I want you to understand that it’s over.”
“What is?”
“Our marriage, Keith. Our marriage is over.”
He closed his eyes and then opened them slowly and as he did so it felt as if he was shifting into his own body, as if he had been away and now returned. “Jesus Christ, Barb,” he said. “Jes
us Christ, can’t this wait? Can’t this just wait until I’m back home?”
“No, it can’t wait.”
“Really? It has to be right now?”
“Yes, it has to be now.”
“What do you want me to do about it? It’s not like I can just come down.”
“I know and I don’t want you to.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“I already have.”
“No, you can’t do this. You’ll be home when I get there and we’ll figure this out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“Christ, Barb. Don’t do this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, so am I,” he said.
She had called him days later, also on the laptop, to tell him that she had already removed all her belongings from the house and that he would need to collect his own and then it could be put on the market and sold, told him this as if it was a simple business transaction. At the time, he found himself wishing that he could somehow remain on the space station but then another migraine would send him into a red jagged tunnel of pain and it would take days for him to recover and he knew, even then, that he was failing his first mission, perhaps the only mission he would ever have.
Had she not married him for his ambition, because he was going to achieve something beyond the range of most men? Had she not understood that reaching his own destiny would take time and discipline? And now she felt he had put too much time into his work and not enough time into his family. He was an astronaut and his daughter was dead and then his wife had told him that she was leaving him and would not return. What kind of universe would allow such a thing?
By the late afternoon he gave up painting entirely. He had followed a single wall from the kitchen to the living room and then halfway up the stairs, dripping paint all the while so that the carpet and stair rail were flecked with white spots. It was a mess and he knew he should have simply stopped painting long before but of course he had not done so. When he left the house he was so distracted and frustrated that he did not even clean the brushes, merely dropping them onto the plastic-wrapped kitchen counter and walking out the door.
He ended up at Starbucks again, mostly because he could think of no other place to go, taking a padded chair in the back of the room and listening to the quietly piped-in classic rock while he sipped his coffee from its paper cup. His anger had not subsided and he tried to direct his thoughts back to Jennifer but instead found himself wondering how well she had known Barb. And so there she was again, intruding upon his thoughts and bringing with her the unwarranted feeling of guilt that settled into his chest, as if he was keeping a terrible secret from her. Perhaps he was. He still did not even know the name of the man his wife had been sleeping with, as if knowing his name would change what had happened. He wondered if Quinn had known him, if Barb had brought him into their house, into their bed. My god.
On the adjacent table was a newspaper and he reached for it for no reason other than to divert his mind, staring at headlines on foreclosures, the imploding real estate market, the rising price of oil, the increasing unemployment rate. Servicemen captured in Iraq. Bombs in Afghanistan. It might have been yesterday’s paper or the week before for little seemed to have changed. As if to confirm this fact he found a brief article on the comet on page four, apparently somewhat more important than it had been but still not quite worthy of the cover. The tagline read: “Comet Set to Hit Earth?” Perhaps when scientists removed the question mark from their sentences the paper would move it to the front page. The story noted that it would take nearly two months before it would make impact, if it was indeed on an earth-bound trajectory. It simply might have been too many weeks away for page one.
He had sat there for perhaps thirty minutes in the calm quiet semi-darkness when the door opened and the loud Russian man entered. Fantastic. He was the same man Keith had seen and briefly spoken to the morning after he had first returned to the cul-de-sac and he made a mental note to try a different Starbucks next time, lest he continue to overlap with what was, apparently, this man’s break from work.
The blonde barista—Audrey, he remembered—looked up from the counter as the man came through the door and greeted him and immediately the man looked around as if the source of the greeting was somehow inexplicable. “Who said this to me?” he said. He mocked looking around the room the way a parent might to entertain a very small child. In his hands: a white department store box.
“It’s me, Peter,” she said. She was clearly playing along with a kind of strange, childlike flirtation.
“I hear beautiful voice, but I see nothing,” he said.
“I’m right here,” she said again. She was smiling.
The man, Peter, jumped back, his face appearing startled, eyes wide. “My goodness! Audrey! How you sneak up on me!” Peter glanced toward the back of the shop, to where Keith sat with his paper. “Hello, famous astronaut Keith Corcoran!” he boomed.
“Hello,” Keith responded, trying to suppress both his surprise and his annoyance. Had he told the man his name? If so he did not remember it. Unlikely.
“I would speak to you soon but first my attention is diverting here to counter,” Peter said.
As if on cue, Keith’s phone began to ring. He fished it out of his pocket. Eriksson.
Audrey laughed. “You’re so weird,” she said to Peter.
“Hello?” Keith said into the phone.
“Not weird. You mean charming,” Peter said. “This word I am learning in English class.”
Audrey laughed.
“Chip, Eriksson here.”
“Look here what I have got,” Peter said to Audrey. “Like a present maybe. You open.”
“Hi, Bill.”
“Where are you? At the airport?”
“No, I’m at Starbucks,” Keith said. He glanced up from the paper again. Audrey took the white box slowly, as if handling something dangerous. Chemicals. Something that might explode. She said something but Keith could not hear it.
“Starbucks again? Is that how you’re spending your time off?”
“No,” Keith said.
Eriksson laughed briefly.
Across the room, Peter’s voice continued to boom: “You are so sweet to me. You deserve something nice. Is that not right, famous astronaut Keith Corcoran?”
Keith waved him off, pointing at the phone. Peter bowed to him. “Hey, have you checked with Mullins about those files?” Keith said.
“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m calling about.”
“OK.”
Across the room, Audrey opened the box. Her “Oh” was audible even through Eriksson’s voice but her face revealed no emotion.
“So it doesn’t sound like he’s going to send them,” Eriksson said.
“What?”
“He says it’s against protocol. It’s hard to argue because he’s technically right about that.”
Keith was silent for a moment. Then he said, simply: “Crap.”
“Yeah, probably not what you wanted to hear, but I thought I should let you know what was going on.”
“OK.”
“Sorry about that, pal.”
“Sorry about what?”
“Just sorry he won’t do it. No big deal though, right? You’re supposed to taking a break.”
“Yeah, I’m taking a break.”
“At Starbucks.”
“At Starbucks.” A series of ones and zeroes crossed through his mind, affixed themselves to the surfaces of the visible world before him, and then faded from view. “Is that all?” he said into the phone.
“Well, yeah,” Eriksson said. “That’s all. Just wanted to give you a quick call to let you know what was happening.”
“OK,” Keith said.
They exchanged a few more brief words and the call was over. He snapped the phone shut and sat staring into the air-conditioned atmosphere before him. He should be in Houston right now. Thi
s was what he told himself. He should be in Houston.
Across the room, Peter was mid-monologue and his voice was loud enough to bury all else under the onslaught of volume: “I think of you when I see this. I know it is hot, it is hot outside, but in here always so cool and quiet. I think of my Audrey.”
In a voice that was, by comparison, the chirping of a tiny bird: “That’s really sweet, Peter. Thank you.”
“And now,” Peter said, half turning toward Keith, “I visit famous astronaut Keith Corcoran.” And with these words Peter turned and crossed the room quickly, his hand already extended. “I want to shake hand of famous astronaut,” he said. He grasped Keith’s hand in his own and shook it vigorously twice before letting it drop again. “I look up pictures of astronauts on Internet until I see you,” he began, his voice trailing off as if looking for the correct word and then finding it: “Magnificent.”
“Oh … thank you,” Keith said.
“You are famous man.”
Keith looked at him but said nothing.
“I have much to ask you but now I must work,” Peter said.
Again Keith did not answer, only looking back at him without words, without expression.
“Peter Kovalenko. From Kiev. Ukraine.”
And now Keith said: “OK.” And then: “Keith Corcoran.”
“Of course this I know,” Peter said. “We’re like old friends already.”
Keith did not say anything in response. He thought perhaps he should dissuade this man of such a notion but could think of no method that would not sound abrupt or cruel so he simply sat there, quietly waiting for Peter Kovalenko to leave.
“Astronaut. And right here,” Peter said at last.
Keith nodded.
“You cannot resist Audrey either,” Peter said. “But she is all mine.” He said the end of the sentence loudly and turned toward the front of the store. Audrey looked up from the box and smiled, that smile turning to something else as Peter turned back around. Pain or confusion, Keith could not tell.
The Infinite Tides Page 7