Vincent’s interest in the program had not begun as a little dream, but occurred to him like an injury does, sudden, impossible to ignore.
It was a quarter after ten on a morning that had begun at four thirty, and he edged an X-15 with a violent jerk onto a patch of sand, the voices in his ear going whoa-ho and joking again.
—I’m not saying you have to act like a ballerina, Kahn, but maybe not like a toasted hillbilly throwing a punch, either.
They tended to treat his stoicism like an invitation, the fact that he would almost never respond an encouragement to continue.
He climbed out, squinting, waiting for the truck that would take him back to the base, listening as the life went from the engine. He’d lost his follow plane, probably on purpose. The pinch of morning was gone from the weather already, and he was forty miles south of where he had meant to land. He was tired of Edwards, of the broad-backed Air Force monkeys who hated him and the pencil he carried, of the commute back up the mountains to his listless wife, and he was going to apply to become an astronaut, a title that was sweet on the tongue of the American public before they even knew what it would become. The organization that employed him had quietly changed its acronym, subbing an S for a C, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics transmuted into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and he was going to follow it up the rest of his life.
They radioed to say there was a delay in retrieving him, a flat on the way out, and he said no problem and there wasn’t one. He wasn’t eager to explain why he’d overshot by so much, why he’d failed to lower the nose when it was crucial that he do so, where his mind had been when he’d roared past the landing site at two thousand miles an hour.
Elise had been stunned into grief when she lost the baby, it was true, but it wasn’t as though before that they were happy, spending the mornings in bed making long plans, taking road trips documented in Kodachrome. They had never hosted a dinner party and told stories in unison, the ends of his sentences courting the beginnings of hers. She had become pregnant on one of the few times they had come together in that way, and it was a shock, some cosmic slap on the wrist that said there were consequences for feigning love. They had begun to curate that waiting life together, pinky-sized yellow socks and wooden rattles, and then it was gone, then it was a great deal of blood, in the bathroom of the rented house, that he scrubbed and bleached. The smell of ammonia became a taste in his mouth, then a clawed pain at his temples.
It was not long after that the offer from the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards had come, and he had sold it to her as a new start. The word California had seemed to reach her, if briefly, seemed to make a tender swipe at the lines around her mouth. He could already imagine how she would age, which tics of despair would become permanent. She didn’t sleep or smile enough, and that was going to come through.
The whole long state was a mistake, he thought now, for them and in general. Elise was not the type of person who did well when left with her own head, not a girl who found peace in the bigness of the natural world. She needed a parked row of polished cars on the main drag, a town where people watched her run errands, friends who dropped by to remind her of who she was. An annotated calendar, a telephone that woke you ringing.
He considered this as he waited, walking the periphery of the plane, surveying the damage one more time. It would be weeks before it flew again. In truth he had already come so far from the first machines he loved, the propellers, a comprehensive taxonomy of jerks and shudders whose meaning he knew. The X-15s hardly gave a shiver. Through the windshield you couldn’t see any part of the machine, only sky, as though the goal were to make a pilot forget that the thing he flew, by extension himself inside, was separate from it at all.
By the time the truck pulled up his decision was made, and in his head he was already making the necessary phone calls and coughing for the doctor during one of many examinations and packing, again, the mementos he brought with him everywhere. A photo of his grandmother, a young wife in a new country. Postcards from Ernie, who had become a widower and set out to camp in all fifty states. A violet sock that belonged to the baby they didn’t have. It had somehow evaded the box of donations he’d put together, and it was a thing he hated and needed to keep, its precious, evil irrelevance.
He thought of the two of them as though he’d known them in different times of his life, Fay and Elise. To meet Fay he arrived with a head full of facts and anecdotes, with plans for an ideal viewing of the eclipse or a rock-polishing kit for the limestone and citrine they’d found hiking. To come home to his wife was to drop into another kind of attention, passive, absolute. In the trunk by their bed were the wool blankets he had folded, in the kitchen window the lemon jam he’d jarred. He solved, he arranged, he repaired.
Sometimes he believed he had become better with Elise for the hours he spent with Fay. It was as though the exuberance he gave to Fay—the pressure he put on the gas pedal to see the thrill on her face, the sweat-dampened time he spent licking her and trying to break her porcelain look—abraded him of his oldest wish, a life that was always becoming bigger. He came home softer, carved out of ardor. For the first time in their marriage, he was the man his wife needed. She built a trellis and he brought her grapes as she painted it, telling her it was beautiful, touching the back of her neck.
He knew it was not a long-term solution, that if he made the cut for the next class of astronauts, extrication would be delicate. The break with Fay would have to be firm and certain: he would do it just before he left.
Vincent thought he could pull it off, two women, for the little bit longer that was required, and in the truck back to the base that day the resolution of it made him cheerful, amenable to the banter of his escort. As they pulled up he slapped the exterior door.
It was not the first time he had underestimated Elise, what she could gather from small changes in him, where she was driving at that moment in her car.