HOUSTON, TEXAS, 1966
The day they got word of Bisson’s assignment, an orbit—not a landing—was the last time they were photographed together, their foreheads kissing by the tank of a grill in Sam’s backyard. Nowhere in the set, published in full color in Life, was Bisson’s dense mood, the misery. The ongoing contract was a third of their income, essential considering the life insurance for which they couldn’t qualify, and it went to contingency funds for their families. As the program raced ahead, the distance between how their lives felt and how they photographed grew rapidly, until the only time they put on shorts or read was when stage-managed to do so. That their lives outside of work had become performances sent them deeper into who they were when inside it, a place without possessions or memories.
The first orbit of the moon was not nothing, Vincent said to Bisson when they were alone, after the announcement was made, strolling down the gray linoleum hallway where every step sounded off a report of echoes and their reflections swam gleaming near their feet. Bisson dipped his chin half an inch, the smallest agreement he could give, and passed a hand down the back of his neck, the buzz cut his wife had given him on their lawn the night before while his son and the Kahns watched. He had not spoken since the meeting.
The news came from Anderson, who had been one of the first to make the parabolic flight that qualified as space travel, and who had, shortly after, left a routine physical with the news he would not fly again. He had stayed on as head of crew operations, choosing the men who would go on each mission that he could not. A heart murmur, Vincent thought, was a term that aptly described the mood Anderson gave off, someone whose wishes were so accustomed to being swallowed that they became a defining quality of their own, a slightly sad forbearance he afforded everyone but himself. The gold tie clip that Kennedy had given him was ubiquitous, the only part of him that asked for attention. He was the first person any man called when he was feeling sore or childish. Tall and too pale, Anderson solved the problems of others because his were intractable, hidden away in the dark of his body.
Bisson had been named the commander of the trip that would circle the moon but not land on it because he was the best of them, a painful fact everyone in the room understood but would not mention. Being the best sometimes meant to be trusted with the worst, or at least the uncertain introductions. Of the thirty-six men, Bisson had wanted the landing the longest, had watched its inky beginnings sharpen into a striking line.
Anderson made the announcement first thing in the morning, no rap of the knuckles or campy whistle. They had discussed the wearable coolant in the suit, the issues with the latest command module hatch. Bisson’s nose fell three degrees, but—because Anderson loved what they all did so permanently that it seemed to have become a line on his face, and because he had taken countless calls from upset wives and turned them placid, and because he had fought with superiors just to get the astronauts naps or Cokes or a day off—Bisson thanked him, the disappointment changing even the way his mouth moved around his teeth. He stood up and offered his hand like he would a hero a slip of paper on which to sign an autograph. “It is and will be an honor, sir,” he had said.
They had commuted together that morning in Vincent’s Nova and they approached it together where it glowed blue-gold in the last of the afternoon. Knowing what the next-best thing to being alone would be—Sam loved to drive, enjoyed the minute theater of traffic, believed a cloverleaf on-ramp was the country’s great invention—Vincent slowed his pace, called out Sammo, and pitched the keys overhand. Bisson lit up involuntarily, receiving the crenulated jangle of metal in his hand, and then he gave the hood a little knock and stepped into the driver’s seat. The radio never went on. They had been separated.
Vincent had no more than stepped out of his stiff leather shoes and removed his socks, run a finger between his toes to remove the lint that had accrued there, when it went off, the red phone NASA had installed in his living room. On news of the assignment, Life wanted to come over and photograph Bisson. What if they all got together, perhaps some grilling and swimming? He was not allowed any answer but yes.
Elise he found in the bedroom, where she was perched on the window seat painting her toenails, her posture serene and the lacquer’s smell pervasive. He did not even need to explain, only to say, “Barbecue, thirty minutes.” In chignons and playful sailor’s trousers, she had become a master at last-minute appearances—those brittle years in the mountains were gone; he had watched her shed them. There was nothing about their time in California either needed to remember, and this was a promise between them, a more potent vow than any other. Evenings she read to him and he clutched her hand.
Beside him in their walk-in, her hair a shellacked topiary, she pushed at the clacking row of wooden hangers. “This one,” she said, pulling a shell-pink button-up, “with the tan slacks, the cotton, not the linen.” She set his coffee on the vanity without a word. They were ready in five minutes, passing through the gate that connected their yard to the Bissons’.
The first to greet them was Eli, eight, who daily papered Bisson’s windshield with drawings of guns and cougars. Today he paced the ring of adults in a New York Yankees cap, a Secret Detective glow-in-the-dark watch he had sent away for. A blue jay feather dangled from a leather string around his neck. He was bedecked like this always, in pieces that might make the difference in getting his name spoken aloud. Occasionally his voice broke through, piercing the conversation that happened a foot above him.
“Dad? Should we scuba-dive the pool?”
Soon they were splayed, Vincent and Elise and Marlene, in pastel lounge chairs by the chlorinated blue, the smoke from the grill hanging between them. Bisson wouldn’t move from his place by the barbecue, and the photographer was unhappy, pivoting aggressively because of it, every angle of attack, every adjustment of focus. He was a short man with a gap in his teeth that sometimes whistled, toes that pointed toward each other, and they hated him with delighted sport, mimicking his attempts at artistic direction the moment he left. I’d love one, Sam would say to Vincent, hand on his chin, where you’re looking constipated in the hammock. Don’t act constipated—be constipated.
“I’d love to get one where the men are talking while the wives look on,” he was saying now, “a little concerned, a little proud, maybe from the poolside, you know what I mean?” Leaning across the balsa-wood console that connected their chaises, Elise and Marlene began to whisper, their trust in each other real. No one had commented on Bisson’s silence. It was as if his life could go on without his participation in it.
The photographer had just pinched his pants up at the thighs and squatted, just begun to adjust his focus and to murmur directives at the women—“A little more somber,” “A little more scared,” “Marlene, are you frightened,” “Elise, are you relieved it’s not him”—when Eli’s backlit silhouette appeared twenty feet above them. On the roof his bike looked like something else, sleeker, the blue paint steely in the shadows cast by the peaks of the dormer windows. “Ittttt’ssss Eli,” he bellowed, undressed save a helmet and the snug Speedo he wore to swim practice and a throw blanket he’d tied like a cape. Marlene was up on her wrists in a second, scrambling to stand, straining her voice and yelling for Bisson, who was watching this unfold as though it were something televised. Vincent, next to him, slipped an arm around his neck.
Eli’s jaw was set as he pedaled off, his eyes fixed on the deepest part of the pool, and the clicks of the camera were all to be heard for the hardening moment that preceded the splash, which went on a minute and soaked an eight-foot radius. It took too long for the kid to resurface, a viscous revolution of time in which the broken water refused to return to glassiness.
The blue of the sky at six was frail, and this was something that happened in Texas, a feeling the land was more important.
“The moon,” Vincent was saying in Sam’s ear. “Who needs it?”
“Oceans and witches,” Bisson said, his first words in ten hours.
They were applauding like devoted fans as Eli rose up coughing, his hand with its woven summer camp bracelets preceding him. Marlene and Elise scowled at this, the danger their husbands could see as diversion.
Oceans and witches became a joke they’d say to each other in passing, code for anything they could not control and so would not offer another thought, the unhappiness of their wives, any future beyond the immediate, all that went on outside the program. The last photo taken of them was barely that, just their heads pressed together, just their posture the same, extras in an image of a shouting boy driving blind through pale dusk.