The Infinite Tides (22 page)

The second time it had begun in the shower and ended with them both returning to the bed and when it was done he lay back, his legs extended over the edge of the mattress, her body poised over his, her breasts still touching his chest. She kissed him on the neck and breathed
out, long and beautiful, a kind of sigh mingled with a moan of release. “You just keep on coming by, neighbor,” she said.

She was beautiful there, perched above him, his body still penetrating hers even as he softened. There were tiny freckles on her shoulder and he stared at them, so close to his face. “That sounds like something I’d like to do,” he said.

“I’ll bet you would.” She lifted herself up, sliding him more deeply into her for a moment and he tightened under her and sucked in his breath and then she lifted herself off. “I think I was showering before I was so rudely interrupted,” she said, smiling.

“Rudely?”

“You coming?”

“Yes.” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her as she stood there, the curves of her body, the hardness of muscle.

She turned and walked to the far side of the bedroom and he heard the shower start up again and the click of the door and she stepped out of sight.

His own body looked pathetic, his penis a weird pale worm that had wriggled up from some dark underground. Yes, he was free to date the pretty woman across the street, as Peter had said, and indeed here he was and Peter was probably still out there in the field with his telescope looking up at some nebula or another. Here he was, reclining on her bed, a fine slick of sweat cooling under the overhead fan, his member shriveling.

He rose and stumbled forward to the shower and she stood there under the spray, a bar of soap in her hand. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said.

He opened the glass door. A blast of hot steam. “Hmm,” he said. “You take a lot of showers.”

“Twice a day at least,” she said. “Sometimes more if there’s time.”

“Really clean,” he said. The water was the temperature of fire. “Damn,” he said.

“Too hot?”

“No,” he said. “Christ, yes.”

She reached out and turned the knob, just barely. He could not perceive a change in the temperature. “Sissy,” she said.

She finished with the soap and handed it to him and again it was too small a space for the two of them and their soapy bodies were slick against each other and when he tried to kiss her again she held him off with a gentle hand to his chest and said softly, “I think we’re done for tonight,” and he looked at her and she said, “Don’t be disappointed. It was fun.”

“I’m not,” he said, but he was.

She stepped out of the shower and into the closet and put on her white robe again and he showered quickly, turning the water temperature down until it was no longer scalding. When he was finished she handed him a towel and he dried himself and she moved past him back into the bedroom as he dressed. A moment later he heard the voices of the television in the room: a talk show with its occasional wave of laughter and applause.

She was seated on the bed against the headboard and glanced over at him as he entered the bedroom again.

“What are you watching?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Letterman.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Who’s the guest?” he said.

“I don’t know.” She paused and then she said, “I’m just going to go to bed now, Keith.”

He did not understand what the statement meant at first and then he spluttered, “Oh, OK, yeah,” and stopped again and looked around the room, at the television, then back at her.

“Right,” he said. He stood. “I’ll see you later, then.”

“All right,” she said. She rose from the bed and embraced him briefly and then separated from him again. “See you later in the week, I’m sure.”

“Maybe next time you can enjoy my lack of furniture,” he said.

She smiled as if patronizing a small child. “Maybe,” she said. “You
can let yourself out, right?” She turned, climbed back onto the bed, settling once again into her TV-watching position but continuing to look at him.

“Yeah, OK.” He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Bye then.”

“Turn the lock on the doorknob, would you?” she said. She smiled at him once more.

He looked at her but her attention had already returned to the television. He turned and paused and then turned the rest of the way and walked out of the room. Behind him the applause rose up momentarily as if in response to his departure and then muffled back into the voice of the host. Words he could not make out.

At the end of the hall, Nicole stood in the open doorway of her bedroom in her nightgown, rubbing one of her eyes absently. “Where’s my mom?” she said.

“In there,” he said, pointing behind him. She did not move and after a moment he said, “Are you OK?”

“Why are you here?”

“Just visiting.”

“Mr. Corcoran was just leaving,” Jennifer’s voice came from behind him, the words clipped and quiet. She moved past him and picked up Nicole in her arms and the bedroom door closed abruptly behind them.

Keith stood alone in the hall, the muffled sounds of television and mother and daughter murmuring around him. Then he turned and walked down the stairs in the darkness. The lower floor quiet. He stood at the foot of the stairs, the silence complete, and then stepped forward through the plaster arch and into the living room. The sofa and the television like giant creatures that had fallen into a deep slumber. Knickknacks on the mantel cast into a collection of angles and shadows. Everything in the house had a place and each place had been chosen not for utility but for display: towels in the bathroom that could not be used, floral soaps that would never be unwrapped from their unbleached paper wrappers, pillows on the bed that could
not be slept on. An entire life organized based upon the notion of being watched, of being monitored and judged by neighbors, by friends, perhaps even by himself, and here he stood in the quiet, shadowed and frozen as if part of it somehow: a man from one house in the darkness of another.

“What are you doing?”

The voice startled him and he spun around abruptly. She was standing behind him on the last stair, holding the neck of her bathrobe in one hand, the other still gripping the banister.

“Oh,” he said. He looked into the darker shadows of the living room. “I was … I’m not doing anything.”

“And?” she said. There was an edge to her voice.

“And I’ll see you later,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

He turned toward her, toward the door, and she stared at him as he passed. There was no pleasure or joy in her eyes. He opened the door and turned the lock on the handle as he had been told and stepped outside. He thought she would say something to him before the door closed, a simple parting word or words, but she did not and he pulled the door closed.

There was a brightness to the sounds outside. The humming streets beyond the roofline of darkened houses. From the field: crickets. The brush of the air against his face was just barely cool and he looked across the street at his own bleak house. Nothing there. No one home. Never anyone home. It occurred to him that he had been summarily dismissed from Jennifer’s house but he found himself more surprised than irritated or angered. Maybe it was the second time, when they had sex in the shower; maybe he had been too insistent. But then he knew he had not been too insistent, that it had actually been Jennifer who had instigated that second time and indeed had instigated the first. What was it then?

He stepped across the street toward his house but then swiveled and moved instead toward the dark streetlamp at the farthest edge of
the cul-de-sac. It was akin to the end of the world, the light fading out. He looked into that emptiness for Peter and it was not until he took his first tentative step past the sidewalk and into the thistle-lined path that he realized he was disappointed that he could neither see nor hear him. No one in the field but himself and no telescope to justify the night.

(
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Δ
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= (Δ
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)
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(Δ
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= 0

It had always been part of his plan to make captain before resigning for a position with NASA and it worked out as he knew it would, although that first position would not be at Johnson Space Center as he had hoped. The head researchers there told him they were very interested in his skills and qualifications but that there were few positions open and none that he was particularly suited for. It was disappointing, but he knew there were advantages to coming into the astronaut program from some other NASA facility. And so he settled on Dreyfuss Research Center, a smaller facility but an important one. The position there was a perfect match for his mathematics and engineering skills and would extend the kind of work he had been doing at Wright-Patterson during his time in the air force: low-energy / high-power propulsion and guidance systems. There was the further incentive that the research at Dreyfuss fed exclusively into various ongoing missions and this meant, at long last, that his work would be going directly into space.

A month before his start date at Dreyfuss he flew out to look at neighborhoods in the vicinity of his new employment, touring the endlessly sprawling metropolitan area on the arm of a realtor. Barb’s opinions had always been strong in regards to house styles, floor plans, shopping proximity, school districts, and the like and now those opinions saw the three of them—he and Barb and Quinn, the latter sullen and quiet in the backseat, angry at having to move away from her friends in Ohio—driving in seemingly endless circles, farther and farther from the research center until they finally happened upon a suburb that met her standards. It was a relatively new neighborhood across from a small park but what made this area different from any of the other twenty or so neighborhoods they had already driven through he could not begin to understand and he argued against the location with some vigor even though he knew that he would ultimately lose. With traffic, the commute to Dreyfuss would be a full hour and a half in each direction on four lanes of freeway blacktop through an endless maze of chain stores and parking lots, and through five apparently separate but identical communities. He told himself he was unconcerned with the tedium of the drive, but each evening on his way home he would pass a freeway sign that read: “If you lived here you would be home by now.” It was savage irony that the community the sign advertised appeared to be exactly like the one in which they had settled.

The lone upside was that they were close to a high school for gifted students, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. At least Quinn would have some place to study, a school that might match her talents and which would push her forward on her own unbound vector, the magnitude of which had yet to be measured. She had been examined for the gifted program at the end of her fourth-grade year—the earliest she could at the grammar school she had attended in Ohio—and had tested at the tenth-grade level in math.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Barb had told him then.

“Ideas about what?” he answered

“You’re going to try to turn her into a math geek or something. I just know it.” Her tone was playful and she was smiling, proud of her daughter, of their daughter.

“I think she’s already a math geek,” he said.

She looked at him. “Well, don’t make it worse.”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I won’t.”

Of course she excelled in her math classes. It was what he expected of her. And she had a gift for it so how could it be any different? Was she not her father’s daughter? Sometimes, when he arrived home early enough in the evening for her to still be awake, he would watch her do her homework, watch the numbers she wrote down and the numbers she did not, the gaps in the process that nonetheless led to accurate answers: her tiny girl’s hands skipping along the page, answering another problem, moving on to the next. Her pencil like a butterfly alighting here and there: a symbol, a number, a variable, and then, finally, the answer. He had not been so adept at her age. She was better than he was and she would go further. This was what he had decided, but there had been few classes at her school to develop her gift. Her last teacher had given up entirely on having her follow the curriculum, instead bringing a college algebra textbook from home and having her work through those problems during class time.

And yet when he brought up the academy to Quinn her immediate response was to call it “nerd school.”

“Oh come on,” he said. “What does that even mean?”

They were at the dinner table now and Quinn did not even look up from her plate, stirring green mushy peas around the outer edge, slowly, as if working out a problem or a design of some kind. “It means it’s nerd school.”

“Honey, don’t call people names,” Barb said. “I’m sure they’re very smart.”

“That’s what
nerd
means, Mom. Smart.”

“That can’t be a bad thing, then, can it?” Barb said.

“No, it’s not
bad
,” Quinn said. “It just
is
.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Barb said.

Quinn said nothing for a long moment and in the silence Keith speared a cube of pork chop with the end of his fork. “I think it would be really good for you,” he said. “Going to a school like that.”

“Sounds like it’s for super-smart kids.”

“You don’t think you’re smart enough?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He looked up at her now. His daughter. “Then what is it?” he said.

“Because it’s nerd school.”

“You mean the reputation of the school?”

“Yeah, it’s for nerds.”

“Who cares?”

“I do,” she said.

And then Barb, from across the table: “Really, Keith?”

“She’s smart,” he said.

“I know she’s smart,” Barb said, “but
private
school? Do you know how much something like that costs? Maybe we should talk about this later.”

“It’s probably expensive,” he said. “But that’s not a good reason not to do it.”

“It’s not?”

“We’d have to make some sacrifices.”