The Infinite Tides (8 page)

“Why aren’t you with her? Did you have an affair?”

“An affair? Do you know what that means?”

“It means when you go be in love with someone else and you want to marry someone else. It’s what my uncle did. I heard my mom talking about it.”

He leaned against the doorframe, wondering if he should step outside but he had removed his shoes while he was painting and now stood in his socks between the interior of his empty house and the seemingly less empty exterior of the cul-de-sac. His thoughts went
again to the neighbor across the street, the tan woman who had sent her daughter here. “What’s your name anyway?” he said.

“Nicole,” she said.

“I’m Captain Corcoran.”

“Hi, Captain Coco-ran.”

He smiled. “Maybe Captain Keith would be easier.”

“Captain Keith,” she said. “Hi, Captain Keith.”

“Hi,” he said.

Across the street the garage door hummed open. He might have expected the neighbor’s red car to slide out onto the street but instead the neighbor herself appeared out of the shadows and stepped toward them. She was not dressed in her workout clothes this time but her T-shirt was tight across her chest, the neckline low enough that her tan breasts nearly spilled out of it.

“Does that mean I can do my report on you?” Nicole said.

He stared at Jennifer as she approached. It was not unlike watching some jungle cat. A panther. He glanced down at his shirt and pants, both of which appeared clean but for a few flecks of eggshell paint, and at his shoeless feet, gray socks on the threshold of the open door. Behind him lay the vacant entryway, tiles smeared with dust and dirt and littered with curls of masking tape. Beyond: the living room he had been in the process of painting. He glanced in that direction only briefly before stepping forward and closing the door behind him.

“What?” he said.

“I said,” she repeated, clearly impatient with his lack of attention, “can I do my report on you?”

“OK,” he said, “but it might have been better if you had asked me that first.”

“Why?”

He paused. “I don’t know,” he said. Then: “That’s just usually how it’s done.”

Jennifer had arrived by her daughter’s side, smiling widely. He had
initially thought she might be slightly older than he was but now, with her standing before him, it was impossible to tell, her body uniformly smooth and tight and tan as if she was a being constructed entirely of suede.

“Hey neighbor,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“Is she bothering you?”

“No,” he said. “She asks a lot of questions.”

“Jennifer,” she said, extending her hand and shaking his.

“I remember,” he said. Then he added, “Keith.” Her hand felt smooth and warm.

“I’m afraid I put her up to it,” Jennifer said. “She had this report to do and I just thought you’d be perfect. I mean you’re so close. Right across the street.”

He nodded but did not answer. Smiled.

“The other kids will all have their local mailman or something and Nicole will have our astronaut. That’s pretty special, don’t you think?”

He smiled again, turning his eyes toward the sidewalk. “I guess so,” he said.

“You’re a bit bashful about being famous.”

“I’m not famous.”

“It’s not a very big town.”

“Seems pretty big to me.”

“Well, you’re still new here,” she said. “Small town with big shopping.”

“I guess so.”

“It’s cute that you’re bashful.”

He wondered if he was blushing, hoped in fact that he was not. He glanced down at Nicole, who looked up at him expectantly.

“We’re just headed out so I won’t keep you,” Jennifer said.

“OK,” he said. Then he paused and stammered, “I mean, it’s OK. It’s not a problem.”

She held eye contact with him and he only broke it when Nicole
called up at him from the concrete, her words punctuated by a short hop as if the sentence caused a physical reaction: “Will you be here later?”

He wondered if her mother might intervene but Jennifer said nothing. “When later?” he said.

“Mom, when?” Nicole asked.

“Maybe it would be more convenient if we invited Mr. Corcoran over to our house for dinner,” Jennifer said. “That way you can ask him your questions and he can eat something and everyone’s happy.”

“Yeah, Captain Keith can come over!” Nicole said.

“What do you say, Captain Keith?” Jennifer said. “We can’t do tonight. Homeowners association. Maybe you’re going to that too?”

“No, I didn’t know about that.”

“You’re welcome to come, you know. You’re a homeowner, after all, even if you’re selling.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I don’t want to go to that.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “A lot of busybodies mostly.” She giggled, the sound of a much younger woman, a girl. “I do like your honesty,” she said. Then she giggled again.

He looked at the ground in embarrassment. No words would come.

“How’s Thursday?” She looked at him and smiled and once again did not break the contact and he felt a short surge in his lower gut. The concrete felt warm under his feet even though the air around him was still cool and there was the faintest hint of a breeze. He could feel the little girl looking up at him but he continued to stare into Jennifer’s eyes and she stared back at him, her smile closing into a mischievous grin. He did not know if he should break the contact, knew only that he did not want to do so.

“Thursday?” he said at last. “I think that sounds fine.”

He tried to resume painting but the attention to detail that was nearly automatic when he had first begun the task had become difficult to
find, his strokes wobbling and sloppy. At first he was merely distracted because he was thinking of the woman who lived across the street. But there was something else too: a kind of intrusion that overlay those thoughts and would not be ignored. When his phone began to buzz and he looked at it and saw that it was Barb—her timing perfect as always—his irritation reached a pinnacle and he clapped the phone closed and returned it to his pocket. She had continued to call him every day or two, although he could not determine to what purpose. It had not been to share her grief, or at least if that had been her purpose it was unclear. Instead she would simply engage him in some variety of small talk, asking about his day, telling him about her own. At first, when he was still in Houston, he welcomed the calls because her voice was familiar and even though she had already told him that she had moved out of their home and would not return, he needed that familiar contact. Now, though, her telephone calls had come to feel like increasingly futile exercises. Why call him every day if only to remind him that she was gone and that it was, in some way he could not identify, his fault?

“Shit.”

He had dragged the roller against an outlet and stood there surveying the chaos of new paint on the living room wall, a ragged block of eggshell in a field of yellow. Guilt. That was what the intrusion was: simple guilt. It was as if his wife—or ex-wife or whatever she was now—was somehow peering into his thoughts, watching him as he secretly fantasized about the woman across the street. There was no logic to the feeling at all. She had been the one to leave, not him. He had asked her to stay long enough to at least discuss what had happened and how they might proceed into some future neither of them could imagine, but she would not wait for him to return from the mission. Her own return to the house—this house—would be only long enough to collect its contents into a U-Haul to drive back to the Atlanta suburb where she had grown up and where her mother still resided, and this she had done while he was still in orbit, two hundred
miles above the surface of Earth. And now a woman had asked him to dinner, a woman who was not Barb. He should have felt elation, triumph, a sense of release from his marriage, but what he felt was guilt. To compound his irritation, there was also a small dull lump of pain at the base of his skull, a fact that he tried not to focus on but which was present nonetheless.

He knew the marriage had been far from perfect. Had it not been for Quinn they might have dissolved their partnership long before. But it could not be denied that there had been a time when she had been by his side, that she had helped press him in the direction of his goals, of their goals. Even what he thought of as their honeymoon—their real honeymoon—had been part of that progress, her excitement at the adventure of their move to Palo Alto for his graduate work fueling his desire to choose that school over MIT. That drive—from Georgia to California—had been a lovers’ journey filled with tiny hotel rooms and gas stations and roadside attractions and Barb paging through the AAA guidebook incessantly, circling things to see, hotels to stay the night in, restaurants that were good and were near enough to the freeway to actually stop at. There had been a trip to Hawaii funded by Barb’s parents but he remembered the road trip as the real honeymoon, and somewhere amidst those long days of gas stations and fields and farms and deserts they had conceived their first and only child, although they would not know that Barb was pregnant for another month, after they had settled into their tiny Palo Alto apartment and Keith’s first semester of graduate school had begun.

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.