by T. C. Boyle
Richard dropped my arm, as arranged, when we got to the window, where my father touched his elbow to mine through the glass and led me the remaining three steps to where the groom stood, looking radiant—literally—in his Ferrari-red jumpsuit. The music ceased. The crowd out in the courtyard focused their attention on the window while my fellow Terranauts—Richard, Troy, Stevie, Gretchen, Gyro and Diane—arrayed themselves behind us. Vodge fixed his gaze on me, something like merriment in his eyes, as if this was all a big joke, which, in retrospect, I suppose it was. As I say, everything happened so quickly we really didn’t have time to talk things out—the good of the mission, that was all that mattered—but if I’d thought about it I would have wondered if any man in all of human history who’d got his girlfriend pregnant didn’t feel at least the smallest bit resentful.
Did it show in his face? Maybe. But I was so swept up in the moment I hardly noticed and before I knew what was happening, the presiding authority (Tom Yellowtail, one of Dan Old Elk’s Crow tribesmen) was beginning the ceremony with a Native American blessing projected through the phone that had been wired to loudspeakers inside and out. Vodge took my hand. We gazed into each other’s faces while the cameras rolled and flashbulbs detonated and Tom Yellowtail chanted:
From above house of heaven
where star people and ancestors gather
may their blessings come to us now
From below house of earth
may the heartbeat of her crystal core
bless us with harmony and peace to end all war
and from the galactic source
which is everywhere at once
may everything be known as the light of mutual love.
And then Richard presented the rings, G.C. stepped up to the mike to deliver the vows, Vodge said, “I do,” and I repeated it, and then we kissed and we were married, in the eyes of the TV cameras, in the eyes of my parents and fellow Terranauts, and most importantly, in the eyes of G.C., God the Creator himself.
Ramsay Roothoorp
So we got married. At G.C.’s insistence. And if it precipitated a whole shitstorm of intramural friction, so be it. We reaped the kind of press coverage we’d never dreamed of, even at closure, and if I felt put upon, cornered, prodded, forced into an arrangement I’d never have contemplated if it didn’t make such good sense for the mission, I told myself those were the terms I’d signed on for. I’m not saying I didn’t love E. at that point or that I wasn’t fully committed to her, because I did and I was, but that somehow our arrangement, our relationship, didn’t seem to carry the same erotic charge it had before all these complications set in. I didn’t go out and take a poll of married men—I hardly knew any, actually—but I suppose there’s got to be an inevitable letdown after the knot’s been tied, especially if your spouse is already pregnant (or embarazada, as the Mexicans so aptly put it), which basically rules out the extended period of stress-free sex play the traditional honeymoon is meant to offer up. We had no honeymoon, in any case. It was pedal-to-the-metal news conferences, photo shoots and TV interviews, the two of us gazing lovingly into the cameras and spouting sticky clichés about love and commitment before going on message about E2 and its salvational function as the very heartbeat of the planet.
As you can imagine, even as the press and the great swelling tide of ecophiles, retirees and schoolchildren around the world hung on our every word, nobody in the inner circle much liked our new status. The rest of the crew was almost hysterically resentful, shoved into the background at a single stroke and with nothing more to look forward to than cutting their already reduced rations in favor of providing for the mother-to-be while E. went on hiding her condition from the public because Mission Control—rightly—wanted to put a little distance between the nuptials and the official announcement of E2’s first successful Homo sapiens mating, which was just what this was, as clinical as that may sound.
How did E. look? You’ve seen the pictures. She was too thin, like some ectomorphic runway model, her arms and legs stripped of any trace of fat, but shapely still, and, of course, her face just seemed to glow on the page and screen both. When she undressed, I saw how the fifth month was settling into the flesh around her waist and I have to admit I found the whole thing maybe just a little bit of a turnoff, a downer, really, because I could see where this was heading and it didn’t make me feel loving or proud or protective—just, I don’t know, irritated. I won’t say “disgusted” because that wasn’t it, or not till near the end anyway, when the fact of her body, her swelling, seemed to dominate everything in our lives and she was like an upright piano made flesh and couldn’t seem to stop pissing. I wasn’t prepared to be a father—I’d had no interest in the position, zero, and for a while there in my early twenties actually considered a vasectomy because as an ecologist I felt it was nothing short of obscene to contemplate bringing yet another human into the world—and that was part of it, I suppose. The mission needed me to accept responsibility, publicly, and I did, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t have given anything to go back to that first night with E. and make absolutely one hundred percent certain she was on the pill and wearing her diaphragm too. I’m just trying to be honest here. I took one for the mission—and for E., of course—but the worst of it was I had to go around wearing a rhapsodic smile no matter how I felt, because that was what Mission Control wanted and what Mission Control wanted was what I wanted, quod erat demonstrandum.
Right. And then there was Judy. Let me give you a sample of Judy’s reaction, if you’ll bear with me a moment and reserve your judgment.
Throughout the whole business, Judy had been quietly (and not so quietly) seething, but when we talked it was always in crisis mode and always in a group setting, worrying the details of the press releases and the nuptial ceremony and the parties afterward, both inside and out, and a few weeks went by before she managed to pin me down, one on one. It would have been toward the end of the month—May, that is—when E. was dropping terms like “lanugo” and “vernix” into our conversation and expanding to the point where we were going to have no choice but to announce her condition to the world, especially now that she was the subject of pretty much nonstop photographic scrutiny. The time was night, late night, when not a creature was stirring, not even the original rent-a-cops and the two backups Dennis had hired to ensure that no one attempted to breach the glass in an excess of enthusiasm over the newlyweds. Earlier, in the interval between chores’ end and dinner, I’d been called to the phone for a message delivered by Josie Muller, the secretary at Mission Control. All she’d said, keeping her voice professionally neutral, was, “Judy wants to arrange a meeting. At the glass. Midnight. Tonight.”
And what had I said, thinking of E. in bed beside me, snoring lightly over the bump in her abdomen that was now beginning to move and shift under her skin like a sea creature plowing along just beneath the surface? I said, “I’ll be there.”
Outside the glass was the deep void of a moonless night in the Sonoran Desert; inside, things were still, or as still as they could manage to be when your existence depended on the regimented working of a concatenation of pumps, conduits and gauges. I thought I’d get there early so I could occupy the power position and watch Judy emerge from the darkness before she’d had a chance to compose her face, and with that in mind I left the room at quarter of twelve to make the two-minute trek down the stairs and past the orchard to the visitors’ window (my room, that is; E. and I still maintained our separate rooms, but most nights we slept together, usually in her room), which should have given me the advantage. But didn’t. Judy must have been thinking along the same lines as me because when I turned the corner and pushed through the curtains, there she was, seated in a folding chair, her bare legs crossed. She was wearing a scalloped top, a skirt as short as a cheerleader’s, and, of course, the heels that had so inflamed my imagination the last time we’d met like this.
We just stared at each other a minute before we reached for the phones and I watche
d her uncross her legs and then cross them again, her head tilted ever so slightly to pin the phone to one shoulder. She spoke first. She said, “So how’s married life treating you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s it treating you?”
“I’m not married.”
“Might as well be.”
She let out a sigh. “You ought to know, huh, Romeo? You and your wandering dick?”
“You want to know? You really want to know? Everything’s fine.”
“Don’t make me laugh. You fucked up big-time and now you’re paying the price. And so are your crewmates. But what’s it like screwing a woman with a tire around her waist, who smells like what, yeast? A brewery? Who’s just going to get bigger and bigger? You finding that fun?”
“Come on, Jude, that’s just tired and you know it. We did what we did for the good of the mission—and because G.C. wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Right. And you fucked her for the good of the mission too.”
“Accidents happen.”
“Hm-hm, so I’m told”—and here she uncrossed her legs and flipped back her skirt so I could see the point of departure there, the locus, and observe, even in the poor light, that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. “But we never had any accidents, did we?”
It was one of those moments. Like showing a starving man a ham-on-rye or an incarcerated sex fiend a porno. But then, I was an incarcerated sex fiend, or the closest thing to it. I knew what Judy was doing. Did it matter that I knew, that I saw right through her (or, actually, right into her)? No, because in that moment E. didn’t exist, had never existed, and if Judy had left it there she would have made her point ten times over, but she didn’t leave it there. She spread her legs even wider, her pale muscular legs arching away from the twin fulcrums of her heels so that they glowed against the creep of the shadows, and began to stroke herself, ever so slowly, just to rub it in.
When she was through with me I went straight to E. If I’d been thinking about sleeping in my own bed that night, just to get a full night’s rest without awakening over and over to the heavy shift of buttocks and the fluty gargling snore of the thickening woman beside me, that wasn’t what I was thinking now. I stripped off my shorts and T-shirt as I came up the stairs, switched on the lamp and tried to displace as much volume as I could when I hit the mattress.
“What?” she gasped, starting awake.
I didn’t paw at her or tear off her nightgown or anything like that, but I have to admit I was feeling a real sense of urgency as I hovered over her and began stroking her hair and kissing the side of her face.
“My god, Vodge,” she said, her voice numbed with sleep. “What have you been doing?”
“Listening to the frogs,” I murmured, my hands all over her, and if she was a little groggy still and not fully present, that was all right because I had a need and she was my wife and this, I reminded myself, was what was called connubial bliss. It was all right. It was fine. But once I worked the nightgown up around her breasts and saw the way she was lying there all wrapped up in herself, I hesitated. I won’t say I was intimidated or turned off—or not quite, or not exactly—but I did reach over her and shut out the light.
We made our official announcement in mid-June, well into her sixth month. Rumors had been coalescing in the press and I’d been asked two or three times point-blank if she was, indeed, pregnant, as she appeared to be, and I’d only managed to make things worse by saying, “No comment.” A series of candid pictures appeared in People, showing E. bent over a basket of sweet potatoes, her shirt stretched tight across the middle, above the caption, WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON INSIDE? And there were cartoons, of course, the most recent caricaturing E. and me on our wedding day, with G.C. standing just behind us loading a shotgun on the other side of the glass. So really, the time had come. We talked it over, as a team, in a PicTel conference with Mission Control, and ultimately decided to keep the announcement simple, sans marching bands, TV cameras, caterers, celebrities, gurus and Native Americans dangling from meathooks, not only because we were afraid of a backlash from the PG crowd who were quite capable of doing the math but because we didn’t need any of that claptrap—the very notion itself, of the first child born off-earth in the history of humankind, was enough to get us everything we could ever hope for.
Judy arranged the press conference, which took place, like our wedding, in the evening, when the light still held its clarity and the temperature was a little more bearable. She invited ten journalists, all from print outlets—TV would come later, once the news had been quietly digested over America’s collective breakfast—and they ranged from the highbrow (Wall Street Journal, New York Times) to the middlebrow (Time, Newsweek) to the popular rags (People, Us, USA Today) that out-circulated them all. We were both wearing our red jumpsuits, which I thought was a bit excessive, but which G.C. and Judy insisted on, as a way of rebranding the team image. Mine sagged on me a bit, but as you can imagine, E. couldn’t even get into hers without doing a little alteration (but not too much: the pendulum of her midsection was what this was all about and we wanted the photographers to capture it). For once, G.C. resisted the impulse to preside, and he let us do the talking, though he was there, along with Judy and Dennis and the full complement of the Mission Three hopefuls, seated in folding chairs behind the select group of journalists.
I was feeling . . . neutral, I guess, both keenly aware of my new role as progenitor and chief human animal of E2, male division, and all the possibilities for advancement now and after reentry that came neatly wrapped up with it, and thoroughly sick of it too. I didn’t always feel like grinning, all right? Or portraying wholesomeness when I didn’t feel wholesome at all—just the opposite, really. More like the subversive that some of my crewmates, inside and out, tried to portray me as after the fact. For her part, E. looked terrific, the Madonna in red, finally able to admit the truth—and show it off too.
We stood together at the phone, holding hands. Gyro had rigged it so our voices were projected to the reporters gathered there against the fading glow of the sun, while the swallows dove for insects in mad loops and plunges and the iced drinks Mission Control had provided sweated in their hands. “Good evening,” I said, grinning—or no, not grinning yet, hold that just a beat—“and welcome to Ecosphere II.” Now the grin. “Dawn and I have some very good news for you, news that should, I hope, gladden the hearts of all those who’ve been tracking our progress and giving us their love and support since we stepped through the airlock on March sixth of last year.” A pause, a wide-eyed scan of the expectant faces, and then a nod for E. as I handed over the phone. “I think I’ll let my wife deliver the news, since she’s the one who’s going to be doing the heavy lifting here.”
She gave me a loving look and raised the phone to her lips. “We’re going to have our first child,” she announced, “E2’s first child, and we’re absolutely thrilled.”
Then I took the phone from her to reiterate how absolutely thrilled we were and opened the floor for questions.
The first question, delivered by a sweating woman from Us Weekly who was wearing what looked to be a terrycloth pool robe and turquoise-encrusted sandals, was the obvious one, the one we’d been dreading: “When’s the due date?” she asked, tugging at the phone cord and looking first to us and then over her shoulder at the sun-draped forms of the audience behind her. “And is there a chance the baby’ll be born inside?”
Dawn took the question and she didn’t hesitate: “Dr. Lack says late September. So yes, definitely, our child will be born in E2, the first of what we hope will be many.”
One of the photos that appeared in the next day’s papers showed me giving her a startled look, though I don’t remember acting out in any way. I did take the phone—lovingly—to supply a little clarification: “Among future Terranauts,” I said, and got a laugh. “Don’t forget, the human experiment is as vital to the project as any of the systems functions or the well-being of any of the thirty-
eight hundred species of plants and animals making this new world in here with us. There are forty-eight closures to come after this one—and by then, in ninety-seven years’ time, I have no doubt we’ll be doing this on Mars, in earnest, for real, and all the children of E2, like our son, will be pioneers to the stars.”
I’d worked on that line the night before and had expected a little applause here, but none was forthcoming, so I called for the next question and summoned the Newsweek reporter, Gordon Saltonstall, to the phone. Gordon wanted to know if we had any concerns about having the baby outside of a modern hospital, and both E. and I assured him that E2’s facilities were absolutely top-notch and that we were absolutely (the catchword of the day) confident in Dr. Lack’s abilities. Gordon thanked us and as he backed away from the glass to resume his seat in the first row of folding chairs, I began to realize this was going to be softball all the way, nobody expressing outrage or questioning our morals or the timing of our marriage or the fact that we were putting our unborn child at risk by insisting on closure though we weren’t really on Mars or Pluto or anywhere else but Tillman, Arizona, with a modern hospital right down the road in Tucson. But if they had asked, if they’d insisted, I was prepared to give them the party line—i.e., that crew safety was the guiding principal of E2 and that we wouldn’t hesitate to break closure if the life of any crewmember was in danger. Though that was a lie. Because I would have endangered everybody’s life, would have killed, to keep that from happening. Nothing out, I told myself, nothing, already seething though the question hadn’t even come up.