The Dream Life of Astronauts (19 page)

W
endell told me plenty of stories about Loretta—all of them revolving around his suspicions that she'd grown tired of their marriage, that she'd fallen out of love with him, and, now, that she was trying to feed him poison one meal at a time. Loretta had little to say about Wendell. That seemed appropriate enough—I certainly wasn't chatty with her on the subject of Renee—and it occurred to me after one of our early-evening rendezvous in the elementary school infirmary that I was always the one who brought Wendell up.

“Does he seem different to you lately?” I asked her. (I didn't mention the poisoning thing because I wasn't sure Wendell had told anyone else, and if she brought it back to him, I'd be pegged as the source.)

She was checking herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. “Different how?”

“I don't know. Like—
more
of what he normally is?”

“Wendell is Wendell,” she said. “He'll always be Wendell.”

I was standing next to her, waiting to use the mirror. She didn't like meeting in motels, preferred the sequestered privacy of the infirmary with its narrow bed—just a cot, really, with a foam mattress covered by a sheet she would change when we were finished—and once it was over she was always eager to leave. Postcoitus, she was anything but affectionate. “He's an odd guy,” I said, retucking my shirt.

“You're one to talk. Can we get out of here?”

“Yeah, can I just—” I gestured toward the mirror.

She stepped aside.

As I combed my hair, I thought about how an affair can turn into a microcosm of whatever you're trying to escape. Surely I was not the first person to have that thought. Surely other men—and women—had realized the same thing, and what did they do once the realization hit? Find a third affair? Return, hangdogged, to square one? Loretta was holding her purse. I wanted to talk about Wendell; I was a little worried about him, in fact. But what I said was, “So I'm odd, huh? I don't think of myself as odd.”

“Please. You're the fussiest person I've ever met.”

“I'm not fussy. How am I fussy?”

“You're obsessed with your appearance, for one thing. How many times can you part your goddamn hair?”

I put my comb away. She reached for the door.

During dinner that night, there was an argument between Tania and Teddy about which show was better,
Murder, She Wrote
or
The A-Team.
Renee asked them if it wasn't possible that both shows could be considered okay by different people, and Teddy said that would be fine if some of those people were retarded.

“What about Dad?” Tania asked, looking at me.

There was nothing sarcastic in the question; Tania wasn't the smart-mouth; she was the sweet, even-keeled one. Tracy, who was away at college, was the mopey one. And then there was Teddy.

“Dad doesn't really like either one of those shows,” I said.

“What's your all-time favorite, then?” Tania asked. “Like, if they were going to ban every show in history except one, what would it be?”

“I don't know. Something classic,” I said.
“Sea Hunt.”

“Is Dad maybe a little brain-damaged?” Teddy asked.

Renee snapped at him, threatened to send him to his room. He stuffed a bite of meat loaf into his mouth.

“I also like
Riptide,
” I said, reaching for something a little more current.

This, for some reason, inspired Teddy to drop his head to one side and slap the backs of his hands together, letting the meatloaf fall from his mouth. Renee sent him to his room.

I thought about the sports car I didn't own. I thought about how terrible it was that I was thinking about that, and how decent it was of Renee to defend me, but how she wasn't meeting my eyes now. And how she really hadn't been defending me; she'd just been scolding Teddy. And how she'd maybe cheated on me, and how I was cheating on her with my boss's wife. And how my life had had a shape once, and then a different shape after that, and how now it had no discernible shape at all.

F
lorida isn't built for cold. That's why, during the harder winters, pythons roll up dead in the Everglades and iguanas drop out of trees in Monroe County. It's why an orange tree laced with icicles makes for an exotic, even beautiful photograph in the newspaper, but it also makes for a dead orange tree. The temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees the night before the launch, and it was only ten degrees higher than that by morning. None of us were prepared for it. Some of us didn't even own coats. The students at Merritt Island High School weren't given a choice, Tania later told me; they were all led out to the football field just before lunch and corralled into the north-facing bleachers on the home side so that they could watch the historic event. (TISP, it was called. The Teacher in Space Project—touted by Reagan, sought after by 11,000 applicants and filled by one: a brave, ambitious, and unlucky young woman from New Hampshire.) Somewhat closer to the launch site, Wendell and I were holding Styrofoam cups of coffee, wearing sunglasses, shivering in our windbreakers. The cold was all anyone could talk about. How the mission had already been delayed several times because of the weather. How there had never been a shuttle launched in temperatures this low. How fucking cold it was. There were icicles all over the launchpad, we heard. Icicles all the way up the tower and across the catwalk.

Then the countdown started.

I had surprised my family with our first VCR the previous Christmas, then had decided I didn't like the idea of renting movies from the one video store that had opened up on the island. All those rental tapes going in and out of strangers' machines, and then going into ours, seemed unwise to me. Renee and the kids thought I was being silly, but I told them the VCR was delicate. I showed them the new, blank tapes I'd bought, explained to them how to use the timer, told them we could tape any show we wanted without having to compromise the system. “Well!” Teddy said in a fake British accent, “we certainly wouldn't want to compromise the system!”

He'd set the timer before leaving for school that morning. He and Tania and Renee were all watching what had happened when I got home. They asked me to watch it with them, asked me what it had looked like, up close, but I told them I didn't want to see it, didn't want to talk about it.

That night after they'd all gone to bed, I sat on the couch clutching the remote, and I watched it over and over again.

Seventy-three seconds between liftoff and explosion. Viewed forward and back, forward and back, the breakup began to look like a flower blooming in a time-lapse nature film.

The solid rocket boosters began to look like a divining rod made of smoke.

The cloud that had just been a ship—a beautiful, streamlined, carefully put-together ship—began to look like a long-tendrilled jellyfish hanging in the sky.

And then it was done looking like anything.

F
our months after it happened, three months after Wendell first told me about his Loretta suspicions, the Troups held their annual Memorial Day gathering. Their house was nicer than ours in that it was two stories and had a garage instead of a carport. But inside, it was ramshackle. Dusty. Cluttered with magazines and newspapers, a seam in the hall carpet repaired with duct tape, the dining room table taken over by Loretta's sewing machine and Wendell's jigsaw puzzles. Because of her work at the animal shelter, their home was the last refuge for unclaimed cats and dogs—the rattling, ghost-eyed ones too old for most people to get excited about. That day, there were four cats roaming the floors and one ancient, shivering Chihuahua. “That's Urine Andropov,” Wendell said, pointing to the dog as I was picking something—a hair, maybe—out of my drink. “He gives Hubba Bubba a run for her money.”

Hubba Bubba, I knew from the previous party, was a tabby ballooned with tumors. Urine Andropov was a more recent arrival. I didn't care about the pets, nor did I care about Wendell's theories on how their personalities interacted. I always regretted coming to these parties. But Renee wouldn't go to them—she was allergic to cats—and it was hard for me to pass up an opportunity to see Loretta. Wendell stuck to the den, for the most part, where his framed jigsaw puzzles hung crooked on the walls. Loretta, playing hostess, roamed.

An hour or so after I arrived, I caught her alone in the kitchen, arranging deviled eggs on a tray.

“Hi,” I said, patting her on the back.

“Not here.”

“I'm just saying hello.”

“Hello,” she said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Not especially,” I said, but that sounded rude, so I forced a little laugh and added, “Sure, I'm having a great time. When can I see you again?”

She repositioned an egg on the tray, licked her fingers, repositioned another. “You and I aren't on a schedule. You know that, right? It's a whim thing.”

I'd walked out of my own house that afternoon not particularly liking where I was. I'd driven to the Troups' house not particularly liking
who
I was. And now I was here, bored by Wendell, spurned by Loretta, and feeling like an idiot.
You know what?
I wanted to say.
Your husband isn't just eccentric anymore. He's crossed over. He chews my ear off about how you're trying to poison him. And maybe that means he trusts me more than he trusts you. There's something ironic about that, isn't there?

“Earth to Kevin,” she said, and held up the tray. “Deviled egg?”

“No, thanks,” I said, thinking about how she'd licked her fingers and then touched the eggs. “Wendell loves those things, though. Why don't you bring him one?”

I watched the two of them from across the den. When she offered up the tray, he smiled and bent forward and kissed her on the cheek, then took one of the eggs and said thank you. He was going to eat it, I thought, and I felt a mild jolt of panic—as if I, too, believed the egg might be poisoned. But as soon as she turned away, he fed it to the Chihuahua.

T
he cats would have nothing to do with Loretta's cooking, Wendell told me. Not even Hubba Bubba, who, with all that cancer to feed, would eat almost anything. So Wendell had to rely on Urine Andropov to eat the suspect food. And Urine Andropov, after a few weeks of eating oatmeal, mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, angel food cake, and everything else Loretta prepared for Wendell, along with the bowl of dry dog food that sat out 24/7, lay down under the coffee table and died.

Loretta was devastated when she found the dog. She cried while Wendell dug the hole in the backyard, and she cried as he tamped down the dirt. “He just got too old, I guess,” she said, wiping her nose with a tissue. “He just decided it was time.”

“Right,” Wendell said.

He started sleeping downstairs, in the den, lying to her about how their mattress was hurting his back. He started making his own food and casually refusing to eat whatever Loretta fixed for him. But the springs on the couch were shot and kept him from getting a decent night's sleep, and he didn't know how to cook. Nothing could be trusted to the refrigerator, he told me, because nothing going into his body was going to leave his sight until he was chewing it. “From store to mouth,” he said, pointing to his eyes. And so his diet became reduced to the likes of McDonald's hamburgers, Taco Bell tacos, and something called Yum-Yum Pies from the convenience store near his neighborhood.

I did what I'd always done with Wendell: I let him talk. I asked questions now and then, inquired as to whether he was maybe taking this suspicion of his to the extreme, but mostly I just let him talk. I was his trusted friend, after all.

Not long into this new way of living (fast food, poor sleep), he began to look run-down. He lost weight in his face and shoulders, even while his stomach was starting to push out over his belt. The back pain he'd lied about became real after several weeks on the couch, and his posture suffered for it. His skin started to look a little gray.

Loretta, he told me, had surprised him by noticing all this and seeming to care. But her concern only irked Wendell. She asked him, one morning while he was getting dressed for work, why he wasn't eating at home anymore.

He told her he didn't want to.

That was insane, she said. Nobody stopped eating in their own home.

Wendell said he did.

But why? And why the sudden problems with their mattress? She was fed up, she said; she really wanted to get to the bottom of things. She wanted them to talk about what was going on. (Was it hard for her, I wondered, to confront him while concealing so much herself? Or was it easy?)

There was a heavy rain that day, and Wendell and I were eating lunch inside, in one of the break rooms. There were four guys at the table in front of us, three at the table behind us. Another handful sitting off to the side, near the snack machines. From what I could tell, Wendell and I were the only people in the break room not talking about the Rogers Commission findings on the Challenger disaster.

“So I said, ‘Okay, little miss, let's do that. Let's have a talk. Why is it I don't feel safe in my own home anymore? Why is it I get the feeling you'd be just as happy if I was dead? Happier, even?' ”

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said I ought to talk to a shrink.”

There may have been a snicker from one of the neighboring tables, but I doubt it. They were discussing O-rings, at least one of which had cracked on the aft seal joint of one of the rocket boosters, according to the Commission Report. Hot gases had escaped and had turned into flame, and the flame had made contact with the external fuel tank.

I'd never been aware of the O-rings before. They might have been as wide around as the rocket boosters, or as small as the wedding bands Wendell and I were wearing. “Design flaw” was a phrase I heard more than once from the other tables. The O-rings had a design flaw. The manufacturer was claiming it had warned the NASA administrators that cold weather was a potential problem because the rings weren't designed to function in low temperatures. The NASA administrators were claiming that the warning hadn't reached them in time. But we all knew they'd been itching to get Challenger off the ground. The launch had already been delayed several times, and delays were costly. Delays looked bad. The conversations I overheard in the break room that day stretched all the way back to Apollo 1 and the deadly fire that had resulted from the rush to stay on schedule. “Go fever,” it was called. There was a design flaw in the O-rings, according to the report, but there was also a design flaw in the administration's decision-making process. “Heads are going to roll over this one,” someone said from a nearby table, and I thought,
Heads have already rolled.