Leaving Orbit (45 page)

“Do you like the worm?” I ask, just to have something to ask. The things I really want to ask him are unaskable.

“Yeah, I guess,” he answers. “It’s pretty seventies. I like the meatball better.”

“Me too.”

We stand for a long time feeling—what? The mandatoriness of emotion, I guess. All the people waving little American flags and the little kids wearing their astronaut suits and the grown-ups wearing their red I WAS THERE shirts and the press shouldering past one another steadying their enormous cameras, all of us trying to tell ourselves that this is the last time we are ever going to be able to see a thing like this, that nothing like this will ever happen again.

Later, when we are standing inside the hangar where
Discovery
has been parked, the brand-new rope to keep visitors at a safe distance being installed all around it, Omar and I glance at a map of the room, a schematic with labeled outlines corresponding to the artifacts. In the center of the rectangle representing the room is an outline of a space shuttle orbiter, the word
Enterprise
printed next to it. Omar points to it.

“Wrong,” I say, and we laugh.

A couple of hours later, I hug Omar good-bye and wish him safe travels. He’s headed to the airport to catch his flight back to Florida. I’m not sure when I’ll see him again, and it’s the first time since we met that this is true.

In the car on my way home from DC, I hear a new pop song, “Starships.” It’s a generic dance hit, an attempt to build on the popularity of the “baby, you’re a firework” song, which is still getting radio play. I hear “Starships” enough times that I start to learn the words: “Starships were meant to fly. / Hands up and touch the sky. / Let’s do this one last time.”

As with “Firework,” this song is not about the space shuttle, only a pop confection urging us to dance and to think much of ourselves, like all the other pop songs. Still, it’s hard not to hear in it a reference to what I’ve just seen, an odd confluence of disparate emotions, a celebration of something sad.

When I get home, my family has already gone to sleep. I stay up for a while to organize my notes and upload data from my phone. As I noticed at the
Atlantis
landing, it seems to be NASA policy to consistently thumbs-up the decision to retire the shuttle program, to always emphasize the importance of looking ahead. And I still can’t fault them for this—it’s really their only choice. Criticizing the decisions of lawmakers who determine its future budgets is not judicious for any government agency. Yet I can’t help but feel there has to be a way of conveying a more complex reaction to these retirements than this false celebration. NASA will always do as much as they can with what they are given. We saw this to be the case at the end of Apollo, when the grand visions of an orbiting shipyard and transports to Mars were compromised down to the space shuttle. Surely Charles Bolden believes, as I do, that when we are sending American astronauts to space again in American spacecraft launched from Florida, that will be better than what we are doing now, which is putting our only working spacecraft in museums and paying the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station. This is why it meant so much to me to hear John Glenn say what he said. Just to hear the words
unfortunate
and
prematurely
at one of these events, in front of God and Charlie Bolden and
Discovery
herself.

I realize now how much I was hoping to see Omar betray some emotion, but as always, Omar chooses to see the best side of things. Certainly he doesn’t seem as angry as I am.

As I scribble notes, the pictures and videos and voice memos in my phone are uploading into my computer, each of them showing itself briefly before being replaced by the next. I become distracted watching my own photographic experience go by: A picture of
Enterprise
alone wearing its tail cone. A picture of a row of folding chairs, each of them marked by a sign reading RESERVED FOR ASTRONAUTS and a little American flag. A picture of the two orbiters nose to nose; from this angle, they seem to be kissing. A picture of John Glenn I snapped surreptitiously, standing close enough to reach out and touch his arm, though I didn’t. Pictures of children wearing miniature orange astronaut suits posing in front of the two orbiters nose to nose. I have no pictures of Omar with
Discovery
—I offered repeatedly throughout the day, but each time he refused.

The last video is taken from within the dark interior space of the Udvar-Hazy Center and shows
Discovery
moving, bit by bit, into the museum. It’s broad daylight outside, so the first seconds of my video are too bright, crushed out to white. But as
Discovery
slowly creeps inside, its nose and wings become visible in sharp detail. As I shoot this video I’m as close as I’ve ever been to a space shuttle orbiter.
Discovery
gets bigger and bigger in my frame, then the massive hangar door slides closed behind it. Once the door is shut, the light changes, the camera adjusts,
Discovery
is suddenly sharply detailed in the newly balanced light. I take in the spaceship before me. It will never move again.

Good-bye,
Discovery.

When he came back from covering the moon landing and finished writing his space book, Norman Mailer embarked on an experiment. He rented a house in Maine and spent part of the summer there with five of his six children to demonstrate that he could care for them and run a household himself. He had something to prove, because his fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, had just left him, claiming that her career as an actress had been buried under the domestic work necessary to let Norman Mailer go out into the world and be Norman Mailer.

Though the original challenge was to show he could do everything himself, Mailer almost immediately hired a local woman to do cleaning and laundry. He also depended on the oldest three children, all girls, who “did their chores and helped the boys to dress and go to bed, aided with the cooking and the dishes and the pots and with the wire perambulators in the shopping marts.” Then he called in his sister for two weeks and, after she’d left, a “mistress” who at first came for a brief stay, but soon returned for the rest of the summer. It’s hard not to imagine that the sister and the “mistress” took over much or all of the work of running the household, the very work Mailer had meant to demonstrate he could do. Some scorekeepers might say he cheated at his own game—my husband certainly would. But when I imagine which aspects of Mailer’s account of this challenge would most frustrate Beverly, it’s that the experiment had an end date, that it required him to do this work for only a finite and predetermined period of time. Even on the worst rainy afternoons, he knew that at the end of the summer he could give the children back to their mothers and go back to being Norman Mailer. None of his children’s mothers had that luxury, had any end point in sight. They wouldn’t be able to set down this burden for the years or decades until their children were grown. This distinction Mailer seemed to have missed altogether, or chose to miss. Yet he did claim to have taken one lesson from the experience: “Yes, he could be a housewife for six weeks, even for six years if it came to it, even work without help if it came to it, but he did not question what he would have to give up forever.”

What he would have to give up forever: his writing. His life’s work, his ego, his fame. His travels, his affairs, his one-night stands, his television appearances, his campus lectures, his outrageous interviews. His freedom to accept when
Life
asks him to go to Cape Canaveral to cover the launch of Apollo 11. All the powerful and ruthless men I’ve been reading about—Juan Ponce, James Cook, von Braun, the Mercury astronauts—had this freedom; they also had wives and children who carried on without them with varying degrees of success. This admission of Norman Mailer’s does not carry the power of transformation, or even of any type of insight, because he attributes his freedom to the biological fact that he’s a man: “[H]e could not know whether he would have found it endurable to be born a woman.” He guessed that being a woman might have driven him insane.

An interesting thing happened at the end of the summer of 1969: more than the usual number of marriages in Norman Mailer’s social circle broke up, including his own. There is a weird moment toward the end of
Of a Fire on the Moon
when, just home from Cape Canaveral, Mailer catches sight of Beverly at a party.

Something had touched the moon.
Mailer reminds us throughout his book of the possibility that some spiritual balance would be altered by the violation of man’s boot touching a celestial body, the feminine moon. Something magical, mystical, astrological. He does, after all, refer to himself as Aquarius throughout and gives a great deal of attention to the astrological signs of the astronauts. Why not blame on the boots of Armstrong and Aldrin the tectonic shifts in a woman’s heart, rather than his own failure to take seriously his wife’s work?

Immediately after the launch of Apollo 11, the press corps was taken around to visit the wives of the three astronauts then on their way to the moon. Norman Mailer found Jan Armstrong appealing in a plain and hardworking way; Pat Collins he found unremarkable. But Joan Aldrin he found quite captivating. He didn’t fail to notice that, like his own wife, she was an actress who had given up her craft for a husband with an overwhelmingly public career. He saw in the theatricality of her answers to reporters’ banal questions a hint of the frustration he saw in his own wife. Mailer couldn’t have known that Buzz and Joan Aldrin were to divorce, just like Beverly and himself, shortly after.

What would Norman Mailer think of me, a mother and wife, following in his footsteps at Kennedy? If time could fold back upon itself, if he and I could both be standing on that field of grass by the countdown clock at the Press Site on the same hot Florida day rather than days separated by forty-two years, what would we see in each other? I doubt very much that our encounter would be anything like those I’ve had with other space people in my own time—I doubt we’d swap stories of slips and delays, of lonely nights in Space Coast motels, of bad food and sunburns, of the finer points of liquid fuels and hypergolic thrusters. Would he walk right by me, assuming me to be somebody’s secretary, somebody’s wife, a nonwriter, nonartist, non-ego with nothing to contribute to the world but to care for and feed a male ego and his babies? He’d said not long before that “the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.”

Or would he, out of boredom and isolation and the lowered standards that come with launch conditions, attempt to bed me? Would he corner me at a space party, ask me to dinner, ply me with wine? Does it make me shallow that of these scenarios, the latter seems least depressing, because in trying to seduce me he’d at least have to pay attention to me, look me in the eye, talk to me and pretend to listen?