The Infinite Tides (19 page)

He managed to complete the table and the chair and sat looking at this makeshift furniture. Then he kicked the detritus of cardboard sheets and nuggets of broken Styrofoam out of the way and poured himself a bowl of cereal and sat at the table to eat it, the bowl resting on its laminated wood surface. When he had finished he set his spoon in the bowl and sat back in the chair and surveyed his work: a particle-board table and chair amidst the dusty plastic wrap and blue masking tape of the kitchen. He had begun painting nearly two weeks ago. At what point would he actually admit that he would never paint the second coat or complete any of the upstairs?

It took two armloads to get all of the cardboard packaging to the garbage can outside and it was during the second armload that he saw Peter’s wife on the sidewalk, her two children clutching her legs.

“Hello,” he said, his surprise evident in his voice. He dumped the cardboard scraps into the plastic bin and then rearranged them in an attempt to close the lid.

“Luda,” she said. “My name. Luda Kovalenko.” She was carrying something in front of her, a glass dish like a casserole.

“Luna?”

“Luda,” she said again. “Short for Ludmila.”

“Luda.”

“Yes.”

Nothing for a moment. Then: “Keith Corcoran.”

“Yes, Astronaut Keith Corcoran.”

He gave up on the rearranging and tipped the garbage can lid so that it rested on the protruding bits of cardboard and Styrofoam and brushed his hands on his pants and walked down to the edge of the sidewalk, glancing up at Jennifer’s house as he did so. All the blinds were closed.

“I wanted to thank you,” Luda said. “So I made you this for dinner. For you.” She held the dish out toward him and he took it.

“Oh,” he said. “Really?” It was covered in foil and he could feel the warmth of the oven still radiating from it.

“I hope you like.” She had a few sheets of paper that had been tucked under her arm as she walked and now she transferred them to her hand and smoothed them.

“Uh … I … ,” he began, then stopped, then said, “Thank you.” The gesture was unexpected and he actually found himself emotional, standing before this woman and holding a casserole dish of food she had cooked with her own hands while her two children swarmed around her legs and her husband slept off a bender on the sofa.

“Peter. He is not like this,” she said.

“No?”

“Not ever. Not like this. It is hard for him here.” She paused a moment, looked away from him. Then she said, “He was assistant to scientists in Ukraine. Here he works for Target. It is …” She paused for a long moment and then said, “humiliating.”

Keith did not know if the pause was because she could not find the word or because she did not know if she should say it. But there it was. Humiliating, indeed. He said nothing, continuing to look at her, her eyes casting up and down the cul-de-sac as if avoiding his gaze and his silence, the children still clutching at her legs. Embarrassed perhaps. It was later in the day now and the sun was beginning to creep toward the roofs of the houses, toward the distant trees on the opposite
side of the field where Peter sometimes sought the darkness with his battered telescope.

“He has no respect in this country,” she said.

“How long have you been here?”

“Three years. I thought he would learn to be here but he has not. He is still in Ukraine in his heart.” Now she did look at him, perhaps wondering if she was being understood properly, perhaps to gauge his reaction.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“You are his friend?”

He looked at her, saying nothing for a long moment: the wife of a man he did not know in any substantive way at all. He wondered what Peter Kovalenko had told his wife. Had he told her that he had become friends with an astronaut? If so, it was not true. They had exchanged a few words, but that did not make them friends. Indeed, the last time he had spoken with Peter Kovalenko, Keith had brushed him off in irritation. But that had been right after dropping the television, right after that frustrating conversation with Jim Mullins and whatever kindness he had possessed had been freshly bled out of him.

He might have tried to avoid this whole situation but people had looked to him for leadership and so he had embraced that role because he was an astronaut and Jim Mullins could not take that away from him.

And so he stood in front of Luda Kovalenko, a woman who had made him a casserole, and she was waiting for an answer and so he gave her one: “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

“You help him then,” she said. She handed him the papers and Keith took them awkwardly with two fingers, still holding the glass dish. “You help him,” she said again.

He tried to look at the pages caught between his fingers but it was difficult to do so with the casserole dish in his hands. It appeared to be a résumé of some kind. Yes. Peter Kovalenko’s résumé. “Oh,” he said. He looked up at her, her eyes wide and darkly luminous before
him, and he waited for her to say something more but she did not. “I guess I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

She reached for him then, so quickly that he had to shift the dish away to avoid a collision as she embraced him. She did so totally, as if he was someone she had known for a long time—a family member, a brother, maybe even a lover—her body against his for that brief moment, there on the sidewalk in that cul-de-sac as he held the casserole dish awkwardly to the side. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Astronaut Keith Corcoran. Thank you.”

“OK,” he said. He nodded, unable to even pat her on the back lest he send the dish to the concrete. Her entire body pressed against his own. “It’s OK,” he said again, but he was not sure that was true.

He had gone out for a run, an activity he had come to enjoy while training for the mission and which he had attempted earlier that week, the result of which had been an immediate and brutal calf cramp that left him staggering in his driveway, his face racked into the pained visage of a Greek tragedy mask. This time, though, there was no cramping. He rounded the cul-de-sacs, concentrating on the steady pounding of his feet and the undulating curvature of the sidewalk before him, this cul-de-sac drawing into the next and the next after that and each containing earth-toned houses of four or five designs, his own house amongst them, repeated and repeated and repeated again, a landscape he had initially tried to think of as some scientific design that had been rendered incomplete but now which seemed only an unsettling and cruel fractal geography, the entrance of which was marked by two stone pillars and an empty gatehouse. The Estates. What did that even mean? He turned onto Riverside again, a street so-named for reasons even more obscure. If there had
been a river it had been diverted somewhere else to make room for this warren of cul-de-sacs. Underground into some subterranean pipe-works perhaps. The only water apparent was sprayed into the air to moisten the scattering of perfectly green lawns or appeared briefly and then descended back to the earth via sidewalk gutters, the black holes of flushed toilets, the metal grid of shower drains.

He still had not seen Peter since returning him home from Starbucks, a fact that was surprising only because he was certain that Peter would come to him the following day or the day after as if they were now the best of friends. He distinctly sensed that Peter Kovalenko would feel that he owed him something—maybe even his very life—but it was just not so. He dreaded the conversation that would follow and for several days afterwards had expected a knock on the door, imagining that when the knock occurred, probably late in the evening, he would open it to find his Ukrainian neighbor, smiling and then magnanimously clapping him on the shoulder and fishing for an invite inside so that he could apologize for his behavior. That would be Peter’s entrée into Keith’s life: a loud, boisterous drunk who made a daily fool of himself by flirting with the teenage girl who made his coffee, who had even bought the girl a present, and now had made an even bigger fool of himself by showing up at that girl’s workplace and professing his love before passing out in a chair outside.

Such were his thoughts as he passed Peter’s silent home and slowed his pace, turning from Riverside onto his own cul-de-sac, slowing further until he was walking, hands on hips, breathing the already warm morning air. His head felt clear. He had realized a few days before that he had been migraine-free for over a month and wondered if the shrill whining he sometimes heard in the morning was only his memory replaying some dark and uneasy fear. Maybe he was cured, although at this point he was not even sure if that would change anything for him at all.

The sun bright and warm and the sky a deep and luminous blue. He was still standing in front of the house finishing his quad stretches
when the garage door across the street hummed open and Nicole ducked under it and came bounding outside, waving to him. “I got an A on my report!” she yelled.

“What report?”

“The report about you!”

“Ah! Good job!” he said.

A moment later, Jennifer emerged from the interior of the garage in her characteristic, skintight workout uniform. “Hi neighbor,” she yelled across to him.

He waved at her, but said nothing. Just looking at her there made his stomach tighten at the memory of her naked body. He had waved to her departing car earlier that week but apart from that he had not seen her a single time since their one night of drunken sex, the blinds always closed, the house always quiet.

He expected her to step into her car and drive away but she did not do so, instead ushering Nicole into the car and then stepping toward him. She looked miraculous even when simply walking across the street. “Going out for a run?” she said. She stood next to him by the rental car now, one hand on a spandex-clad hip.

“Just finished,” he said.

“You ought to come to the gym with me sometime. You’ll have a lot more fun.”

“I’m sure I would.” He looked at her, her smiling face and the swell of her suede breasts.

“Something on your mind?” she said.

“Oh,” he said. Just that. He glanced down to the sidewalk, then returned to her face. “Maybe dinner tonight?” he said.

“Your place?”

“Could be.” His mind ranged over the fact that the downstairs was still mostly covered in plastic, that there was essentially no furniture, and that he had done no cleaning whatsoever since returning to the house.

“I’m kidding,” she said. “Anyway, no dinner, but if you want to
come by at, say, eight thirty or nine we can have dessert. How does that work for you?”

“Dessert?”

“Don’t you eat dessert?”

“I do,” he said and he smiled.

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“Oh, I won’t,” he said. “Dessert works just fine.”

Nicole’s voice came from across the street: “Mom, we’re going to be late!”

“See you tonight, then.” Then she turned and her thin, muscled frame moved back across the street. In a moment, her red sports car passed and Nicole’s hand waved at him as the car roared around the corner and out of sight.

It occurred to him that he should be running more often.

He was just out of the shower when his phone began to vibrate. He lifted it from the dresser, the heat of his hand steaming the surface in a brief disappearing arc. The tiny screen read “Barb”. Seeing her name there made him think of Jennifer and a sharp lurch of guilt ran through him yet again. Shit. He let it ring through to voice mail and then finished drying himself. A moment later there was the chime tone indicating a new message and when he had finished dressing he dialed into his voice mail and listened.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said. Then a pause. “Listen, I wanted to tell you this in person. I mean not on a voice mail. But you’re not there.” Another pause, a longer one this time. He thought that she might have hung up the phone but then her voice came again, with a sense of resolve and finality that he had not anticipated: “I wanted to tell you that I filed divorce papers,” she said. “So someone will come to serve you papers. Officially, I mean. OK? All right. Bye then.”

The background hiss of the message ended and the computer voice indicated that there were no additional messages. And so there went
his marriage, with a voice mail not even a full minute in length. Over and gone. A zero sum. He looked at the phone as if it were some inexplicable life form he had never encountered before and then slowly lowered himself to the edge of the bed. He had known she was not going to return. She had told him as much. And yet it now felt as if some equation of finality had scrolled out before him and had been solved in the only way it could ever have been solved. He had simply failed to reach that solution.

He did not know how long he sat there but he did not move until he had reached the next part of the same equation. He had been staring through the window into the neighboring yard where a patch of yellowed, dead grass was boxed in by a fence only a few years old, and when he came to the next variable his solution was not meant to be vindictive or malicious, or at least he did not think of his actions in those terms, but rather was a simple act of logic. She did not live with him anymore. She had made the decision to have an affair and to move out and to leave him in this empty house and he was simply following out the logical endpoint of the equation she had formed. She had called to tell him she had filed for divorce. She had solved for one variable; he would solve for another.

So he dialed the payroll office at JSC and asked what he would need to do to change the direct deposit of his salary to a new bank account and found it was as easy as filing a sheet of paperwork that the payroll office would be glad to mail him.

When the call was over he set the phone on the table and sat looking at it. Once again there was a silence in the room, in the house, perhaps in the whole cul-de-sac. He had seldom thought about himself as making decisions that were right or wrong—his work had not allowed for the attachment of such a moral compass—but now that was exactly where his mind went, into that gray tenuous area between one variable and the next. He did not know what Barb’s financial situation was in Atlanta. He had assumed she was living with her mother at her parents’ house but it was clear to him that there was no
reason she should have access to his paycheck. Not anymore. She had left him; he had not left her, perhaps would never have left her even had he known about her affair. But was that even true? Once again he wondered if she had brought him into his house. Into the bed that was, even now, upstairs. Once again he wondered if Quinn had known this man. My god.