The Infinite Tides (16 page)

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s probably too much information. It’s just … your house is really similar to mine inside, but Barb took all the furniture. So my house is empty. I mean completely empty.”

“Completely empty?”

“There’s a sofa and the bed.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful,” she said. She actually reached out toward him, not quite touching him, her hand just inches from his on the tiles. He wondered momentarily if he should slide his own across that gap but then she returned her free hand to its hunt for a bottle opener. “I guess you have some shopping to do,” she said.

“I guess so,” he said. “I can’t decide if I’m staying or going. Or where I’d go if I’m going.”

“You’re trying to sell it, though.”

“Well, it’s on the market.”

“Any interest?”

“I don’t know. The realtor showed it to some people or said she was going to but I don’t know if anything came of it.”

“Fingers crossed,” she said. “Sounds like you have a lot of decisions to make.” She uncorked the wine bottle with a loud pop. “We’ll let that breathe a bit.”

“OK.”

Nicole’s voice came from upstairs, a thin piercing sound calling, “Mom!”

“Hold that thought,” Jennifer said. She smiled at him briefly and he nodded and then she disappeared out of the room and up the stairs.

He had never been nervous during the mission, not even during the launch, and yet now, here, in this woman’s house, a thin stream of adrenaline ran through him from the pit of his stomach to his fingertips. The room was very quiet. He thought that he should have already left her house, but then wondered why he had such thoughts at all. There was nothing for him in the empty house across the street. Indeed, over the preceding two days since he had dropped the television down the stairs he had even stopped painting, instead sitting at
the Starbucks in the dark corner and flipping through the newspaper without any real interest, feeling his anger and frustration at Jim Mullins and the others at NASA fade into a dull sense of irritation and then disappointment. He might simply have left the house in the cul-de-sac, might have actually gone away for some kind of vacation as both Mullins and Eriksson had told him to do, but he had remained for no reason he could define and now sat in a house across the street from his own and waited for the woman who lived there to return from upstairs, his fingers drumming anxiously on the tabletop. He looked around the room without purpose or direction. The decor and furnishings did not seem as similar to those of his house as he had first thought. A vague similarity in style, perhaps, but nothing specific.

He poured wine into the two glasses and looked at the label but he knew little of wine and noted only that the name was French and that the bottle was three years old. He sniffed at it and started to take a sip but then thought that it would be more polite to wait for her and so he did.

After a moment he could hear her on the stairs and then she reappeared in the room again. She was barefoot. He did not recall if she had been barefoot before or if she had taken off her shoes when she was upstairs.

“I poured the wine,” he said.

“Good thinking.”

He handed her one of the glasses and she took it.

“To new friends,” she said.

“To new friends,” he repeated. They clinked the two glasses together.

Keith sipped his wine. It was fruity and slightly bitter and left his tongue dry.

“When do you go back to being an astronaut?” she said.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Taking some time?”

“Maybe. A little break, I guess.”

“That’s a good idea. You need time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just trying to get the house sold now. Then we’ll see what happens next.”

“No big plans?”

“I guess not.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a silence in the room, a softness that descended over them. Then she said quietly: “So how are you doing?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

She actually reached out and placed her hand on his arm. It was a warm thing there, and soft. Then she pulled it away again. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m being really forward.”

“It’s OK,” he said.

“I’m a really physical person,” she said. “I can’t help it. You looked sad.”

“Did I?”

She blushed. Had he said something to make her blush? “Yes,” she said.

“I’m not sad right now,” he said.

“Well, good then.” She seemed to shake off whatever had entered her thoughts because she was smiling again. “Like I said, if you need anything just let me know. Even if it’s just a good home-cooked meal.”

“I’ll do that. I can always eat.”

“I can see that.” She smiled at him. “Stop me if I’m being too personal,” she said. “I like to know what’s going on.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“We looked you up on the Internet today. For Nicole’s report. That’s all I really know about you.”

He said nothing. Her eyes locked to his. “My daughter’s name was Quinn,” he said at last.

“Quinn,” Jennifer said. “I remember seeing her a few times. Coming and going.”

“They went off to my mother-in-law’s. She was driving back from some teen party out there. And she apparently went off the road on her way home. They think she was going eighty miles an hour. Hit a tree in someone’s yard in the middle of the night. Coming back from the party.”

“That’s terrible,” she said. There were actual tears in her eyes.

The information felt abstract to him, even now, as if he was relating the plot of a film he had seen and had there been any instinct in him to acknowledge the folly of this abstraction it was quelled in the moment he looked at her. Her hand had left his arm and had not returned but he could feel a sense of the warmth it left behind. He knew he should say something, should try to steer the conversation away from his sense of tragedy, but his mind was empty.

She suggested they move to the couch and they did so and she curled her legs under her body and sipped at the wine and at some point he rose and retrieved the bottle—the second bottle—and refilled the glasses. He was not sure how many glasses of wine he had drained, but he had taken a painkiller earlier that day and the combination had set the room to tilting slowly as if the house had become awash on a gently rocking sea.

She asked him about his work for NASA and when he asked if she was not already tired of hearing about that subject, she told him that she wanted to hear about it for herself and he tried to tell her what it had been like at the end of the robotic arm looking down at the space station, but his memory of it could not be put into words. He told her it had been beautiful, so very beautiful. What could he say? He had opened upon an infinity and it had become an infinity of loss.

When she leaned forward to kiss him his mouth was closed and she slid her tongue between his lips and he thought, in actual words: Well, OK then. It was in a voice that was his own sober voice still in
his head and it did not tell him to stop and so he kissed her back and she pressed her hand against his chest and his arms went around her.

“I’m pretty drunk,” he said.

“Shhh,” she said. “No more talking.”

Her force was something to be reckoned with almost immediately, as if he had uncorked a bottle that had been no bottle at all but was a dam that uncorking had pressed to bursting and she climbed astride him, her face somewhere between anger and joy, determined and feral. A wild creature.

It felt as if it had been an eternity since he had touched a woman and he thought of nothing else, his hands on her beautiful tan breasts, encircling them and feeling her breath suck in just as he had imagined it would. When she lifted her arms so that the tight fabric slid up over her and away and he looked at her and leaned in and took one of her pink nipples in his mouth, his own breath was pulled away with hers, his heart thumping in his chest like an ancient, enormous machine that had been resurrected after so many years of forgetting.

They stumbled to the bed, practically at a dead run, his drunken feet staggering up the stairs and then their twin bodies crashing sideways onto the mattress, clothes awkwardly strewn about them, she much more adept than he at undressing under alcohol although who could say how drunk she was in comparison. How many times had he refilled his glass? He could not recall and indeed it mattered little. All that mattered was the thought that there are moments like this in real life, and he was amazed by the realization, as if there was another world inside of this one that was hidden in plain view and then her mouth was on his belly and then his chest and then finding his mouth at last and clamping onto it. Her body was something amazing to him: a hard and muscled creature that for reasons he could not even begin to understand had allowed him to take possession of it even as he grasped her around the waist and threw her over to her back and she moaned, her teeth clamped together in a kind of sneer surrounded by full red lips.

When he entered her it was like falling into a memory: like a body flashing through the surface of a lake and disappearing under the surface, the surface itself remaining silent only for that final instant and then, almost imperceptibly, the slow undulation of ripples rolling out from that central point, the body itself already disappeared in some otherworld of muffled and dimly lit fishes and reeds. Then he was above her and her entire body tightened and loosened, her hips and her waist curving around him, her eyes half closed and then closed tight as she made her sounds and he above her looking down at her face, her shoulders, her breasts, the way her legs were wrapped around his hips, this woman who was not his wife, who was a woman he did not even really know.

And when he came he actually shouted and she clamped her hand over his mouth and her voice too was a kind of cry that twisted up and out of her body. Her hand slipped from his mouth then and their breathing was heavy and whipped past their ears and slowed and quieted as he rolled to the side. She made no motion to cover herself and after a moment she said, “Fuck, I needed that.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Shower?” she asked at last.

“OK,” he said.

She rose and stood for a moment at the side of the bed, completely naked and looking more like a goddess than any mortal woman, her body a perfect thing that he had held in his hands. “Come on, then,” she said.

“OK,” he said again.

She stepped to the other side of the room and he heard the shower in the darkness. He could see the edge of the glass door from the bed and he closed his eyes and felt his own breath and after a moment he opened his eyes again and rose and walked through that tilting darkness. When he reached the shower door she emerged from the doorway of the bathroom and smiled at him. “Hello, neighbor,” she said.

He smiled and said, “Hello.” She smiled at him again and he thought
that she might kiss him or that he might kiss her. Perhaps he should kiss her. Perhaps that was what he should do. Instead he said, “I’m not sure what I should be doing now.”

“In there,” she said, and she pulled the shower door open behind him and her hand was warm on his hip as she steered him through the door. She stood there, not speaking at first. Then she said, “Mind if I join you?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

She shook her head but said nothing as she came through the door.

The shower was not quite big enough for two so their bodies continued to bump against each other and he surprised himself by thinking that he would be able to make love to her yet again but then she stepped out of the shower and dried herself and returned from the closet wearing a terrycloth bathrobe. She handed him a towel and he dried himself. He found himself looking at her with a kind of longing that was already something like nostalgia. The room continued to slosh around him in its slow, drunken rhythm.

He dressed in the clothes that were in the bedroom, his shirt and shoes downstairs somewhere, strewn about the house like a crumbtrail to the exit. “I didn’t expect this,” he said suddenly, more to himself than to her.

“Neither did I,” she said.

“Fun,” he said.

“It was that,” she said.

“I’m pretty drunk.”

“So what?”

“OK. So what,” he said. Then: “Let’s do this again sometime.”

She laughed.

“I didn’t just mean that. I meant having dinner. All of it.”

She smiled. “Oh, you didn’t mean that? Not interested?”

“No, I meant that too.”

“You know where I live.”

“Maybe you can come over to my place next time.”

“You’d need furniture.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then: “Well, I have all the furniture we used.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Probably time for you to go now, Astronaut,” she said.

He did not want to leave her bedroom but even through the increasing winedrunk drift he knew that he had arrived as a dinner guest and had shared her bed and her body and that now it was over. She led him downstairs and he stumbled much of the way and leaned heavily on the banister and then found his shirt and his socks and shoes and ran his hands through his wet hair. “You want a glass of water?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, and then: “Wait, no, I think I’d better head out.”

He half hoped that she might invite him to stay longer. Maybe the glass of water was just this invitation and he had missed it. The clock on the wall read ten: still early. “Well then, neighbor, it was nice to get to meet you,” she said. Her body was covered by the robe, but he could still make out the shape of her, a rare and wondrous thing that even now he could not believe he had held naked in his arms, a vision already fading from him as if a dream he had awakened from.

“Thanks for dinner,” he said. He was not sure if he should kiss her.

“My pleasure.”

“Good night,” he said. He felt warm and wide awake and stared into her eyes for a moment longer and then he turned without touching her and moved in a slightly tilting path into the cul-de-sac and toward his own empty house. He wondered if Jennifer was still watching him from her door but when he turned and glanced back he saw that the door was already closed. The house so similar to his own and yet containing within it a woman, a girl, and furniture.