The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The gifts, homemade of course (or E2-made, I should say), went round the table, giver to receiver. All were decorated with flowers and wrapped in whatever scraps of paper were available or folded up in banana leaves, and all—or nearly all—were gifts of the one and only thing that mattered to us: food. Diane presided, her jumpsuit radically compressed and pinned up on her head to represent the sort of stocking cap Santa wore, though to my mind it looked more like a flame-red pallu and she less like the merry old elf than a pale-faced version of Indira Gandhi. “Who’s first?” she called out, and I said, “E.”

  Dawn was sitting beside Diane at the far end of the table from me. She’d washed and combed out her hair and it flared in the late-afternoon light—not in the way of all those Tropicana dye-jobs out there in the world, but more coppery, more gold. Like the rest of us, she’d changed out of her jumpsuit once the day’s public activities had been put to rest, and she was dressed now in a clean pair of jeans that had gone ever so slightly loose on her and a low-cut top, light blue or maybe turquoise, I’d never seen before. “Me?” she said, flushing, and covered herself with a laugh. She turned to Diane. “Why don’t you go? Or somebody?”

  I pushed the gift across the table, where Richard took hold of it and nudged it toward her. “Open it,” he said. “Come on, E., you’re holding up the proceedings here—”

  I’d wrapped E.’s present in a single banana leaf, using the slim elastic runners of our nuisance plant, the morning glory, for twine. Inside was a foot-long section of sugarcane I’d squirreled away from our last harvest—my own portion, which I’d hidden in the drawer of my oak entertainment center while the others had gnawed greedily at theirs till there was nothing left but sticky fingers and sucked-out fiber to feed to the goats. I’d wanted the sugar rush as much as anyone, of course, but I’d seen the value in that length of cane, and whether I was thinking of E. or not—or temptation or seduction or whatever you want to call it—I restrained myself and set it aside. I might have chewed something else that day—azolla, probably, with its earthy taste and rubbery texture—to take my mind off it. (By the way, azolla, if you don’t already know, is a tiny nitrogen-fixing aquatic fern that floats on the surface of freshwater ponds like duckweed and doubles its biomass every two to three days. It’s packed with protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, and Asian rice farmers have made use of it for centuries as a way of discouraging weed growth in the paddies and providing nutrients at the same time, after which it’s harvested for animal fodder. We used it as chicken feed for the most part, though toward the end you saw it ending up more and more in our soups and stews.) At any rate, let’s just say I chewed a cud of the stuff that day to keep my mind off the sugarcane. Which I was saving for some as yet unspecified purpose, which had now achieved specificity: it was for E.

  I watched her face as she undid the twine after shooting a quick glance at me, her benefactor, and then she had the cane in hand and was brandishing it aloft. “Sugar for Christmas!” she sang out, then looked me full in the face and said, “Thanks, Vodge.”

  “Who’s next?” Richard leaned into the table on his elbows, gazing round expectantly. He was excited, and why blame him—who doesn’t light up at the prospect of receiving a present? (Better to give than receive, though, that was what I was thinking, especially as it was Diane who’d drawn my name out of the hat and I didn’t want to feel beholden to her—or anybody else for that matter.)

  “Stevie, what about you?” Gretchen cried, a little too loudly, her second glass of arak already half-drained. She had an interest here, since she was the one who’d drawn Stevie’s name, and as everyone boisterously seconded the motion, I tried to catch E.’s attention. “E.,” I said, my voice a kind of elevated whisper, “there’s a note with that. I mean—see, tucked inside the banana leaf?—so don’t throw it away.”

  A momentary frown and then the smile. “Yes, oh yes, I’ve got it,” and she held up the little three-by-five envelope I’d fashioned from a sheet of lined yellow notepaper. As I’d hoped, nobody was really paying attention because they were all focused on Stevie, pretty Stevie, with her white-blond-going-to-dirty-blond tresses tucked behind her ears, as she unwrapped Gretchen’s gift: a selection of rain forest fruits and palm nuts only the galagos would have known where to find.

  What my note said was this: Meet me outside my room after the festivities—there’s more to come. Much more. And it’s not a jot less than you deserve, E. What I said now, in a whisper, was: “Later.”

  The whole thing with Gretchen was regrettable—I admit that up front. And if I was being honest with myself, I’d say I’d known it all along, say I should have known better, acted like an adult, restrained myself for the good of the mission. But the flesh is weak, and that first night, after the whole crazy business with the galago and the way she’d so patiently and skillfully tended to the thing while I looked on and her breasts gathered and released and her limbs flowed hypnotically beneath the filmy material of her nightgown, I just couldn’t help myself. And she initiated it, as hard as that may be to believe—she was the one who put my hand on her breast, and if she wasn’t my type exactly, or hadn’t been up till that very minute, the problem was that I was her type and that night set something loose in her. All right. I’m venal. A dog, just like my old roommate Jason Fourier said. She was easy, she was needy, and we were both locked up together with no way out.

  For the first week or two it was nice, her room right next to mine and no one the wiser. I came to her, late, at her signal—a coded knock at the wall that separated our rooms, three beats, two beats of silence, three beats more—and believe me I might have sat there pretending to read or work or whatever but my every cell and fiber was just burning for the moment when that knock would come. Unfortunately—and isn’t this the adverb that inevitably descends on just about any love affair, especially one as lopsided as ours?—she started to turn spooky on me.

  Jesus, I look at that line and wonder what it means. Spooky? Let me try for something a little more precise: she was demanding, possessive, moonstruck, never happy unless I was there at her beck and call. She began coming up with projects in the rain forest or the marsh biome that just couldn’t do without a man’s help—mine—and by the second or third week she’d given up all pretense and kept wanting to hold hands like a teenager or bump hips as we passed in the hall, which made me shrink down to a nugget inside because the last thing I wanted was for anybody to know what was going on between us, least of all E. Or Judy. Christ, I could only imagine what Judy would have to say about it—and how she’d make me pay too.

  But Gretchen was hard to shake. More often than not she’d wind up sitting next to me at meals, once even snaking a hand under the table to take hold of me where I was most vulnerable, all the while making a game of joining in the general conversation as if she didn’t have my cock in her hand at all and things were just as normal as normal could be. I hated her then. Hated the way her face looked, smug, as if she were getting away with something, which she wasn’t, as it turned out, and she had nothing to be smug about. She was childish. Needy. Told me she couldn’t live without me. Worse: she began to talk of long-term commitment, every other minute mentioning some couple she knew who’d been together for ten years, twenty, old people in love still after a lifetime. Her parents. Her grandparents. What I mean is, she began talking about marriage, which came as a shock to my system, because marriage was a state of being I’d never really contemplated, not with her or anybody else, but especially not with her. One night, out of nowhere, as we lay there naked in my bed, she said, “Let’s get married. Inside, I mean. Wouldn’t that be great? I mean, Vodge, think what you could do with that in terms of publicity—a Terranaut wedding? We could hold the ceremony at the glass and G.C. and everybody—the press—could be there with the cameras rolling, right? What do you say?”

  I tried to back off. The next night, when she rapped at the wall, I didn’t respond. She waited fifteen minutes, then tried again, and
the sound of her knuckles tapping at the plaster was nothing but an irritant now and I wished I could lock the door and keep her out, but of course, there were no locks on our doors because a lock, by its very nature, connoted a failure of mutuality and trust. I tiptoed up the stairs and got into bed and when I heard the whisper of the hinges and her soft furtive tread first on the carpet and then the stairs I pretended I was asleep. But I wasn’t asleep and she knew it. “Vodge? You awake?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  She was naked. I could just make out her form hovering over me like a succubus, and I’m sorry for that image, but there it is. She put one knee on the bed and the bed sank under her weight. “Don’t you want, you know—? It’ll help you sleep.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t want anything to do with this and I wished I’d never started it, wished I’d smuggled in a quart of saltpeter or gone Gyro’s route, strictly. “Vodge?” She laid a hand on my shoulder and it was like a hot iron, like a claw, and I just snapped. I rolled over, sat up, peeled off her hand and flung it away from me.

  “Get out,” I said before I even knew what I was saying, and then I tried to soften it by claiming I was exhausted—and sick, feeling sick—and just needed to be alone, that was all.

  It was dark, but I could make out her face in the glow of the night-light, her face that was still heavy, jowly, despite her weight loss, her old woman’s face that showed what she was going to become in a few years’ time, her face that had always looked old, probably even when she was young and none of us had yet to lay eyes on her. She began to cry, very softly, a sound like rain in the gutters on a night when you never suspected a storm was brewing.

  I listened to this for a while, both of us silent, her effort to keep from sobbing out loud radiating through the mattress and right into the core of me. “What are you saying? Don’t you”—she choked back a sob—“want me anymore?”

  I should have been harder, colder, should have broken it off right there and chased her out into the dark night of the biomes, but I didn’t. Coward that I was, fool, and let’s face it, shit—shit too—I whispered, “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  The party wound down by eight or so, all of us moving in slow motion by then, too exhausted by the demands of keeping our world together to really let go. We had to be up and at work first thing in the morning, as usual, no winter break here, no bank holiday—no bank, for that matter—the twelve days of Christmas shrunk down to one, and that was just about over. Mission Control had opened up the phone line so that we could schedule times to call friends and relatives and wish them the best of the season and have those wishes returned, and we’d all taken advantage of that. I called my grandmother, who, along with my grandfather, had raised me after my parents’ accident, and she sounded like her old self despite the fact that she was a widow now. She told me she was glad to hear from me and that she was proud of me too. “Everywhere I go, I can’t help bragging, you know that, don’t you?” she said in her voice that seemed more fractured and reduced with every breath she took (she was a smoker and I couldn’t help seizing on the implications—if god forbid she should die over the course of the next fifteen months I wouldn’t be at the funeral, that was for sure, and of course I’d had to lie to Mission Control right from the outset about the force of my attachment to her). “Did you see him on Good Morning America? I say to people like Evelyn Porter down at the library and Dorie Stachowitz across the street and just about everybody else I can grab hold of—or where, in Time magazine? Evelyn’s got a big Terranauts poster on the wall over the checkout desk, did I tell you that?”

  I thought of calling Judy, for reasons that were complicated, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. Somebody would be listening in, you could bet on that, and just the fact that I’d placed the call would raise red flags over in Mission Control, even if all I wound up doing was wishing her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. So I didn’t make the call and she didn’t call me either, whatever that meant. And frankly, as the day wore on and others were getting called to the phone, I began to realize I wouldn’t be hearing from her, and good riddance, that was what I was thinking. I had E. now, or was going to have her, and the whole thing with Judy was just worse than bad, a kind of tiptoeing around disaster neither of us needed.

  I’d had maybe two or three glasses of Richard’s latest batch of arak, which seemed smoother and less astringent than the batch he’d cooked up for winter solstice, especially if you squeezed half a lemon into it, which I did, and after dessert—my banana crème pie—I ignored the way Gretchen was ignoring me and sat down next to E. “Merry Christmas,” I said, and it was the most natural come-on line in history. “You having fun?”

  She opened up her megawatt smile, her lips—have I mentioned her lips?—so ripe and wet and full I almost kissed her right there with everybody looking. The thing that got me about her lips was how they always seemed ever so slightly parted, as if she were about to whisper something dirty or at least seductive, and tonight she’d put on lipstick and done her eyes and brushed on a fine layer of makeup to hide the orangeing glow of her skin. The effect was devastating, especially considering what I had in mind for the rest of the evening. “Absolutely,” she said. “This is like the best Christmas ever.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I mean, Christmas inside. A year ago—” I didn’t finish the thought, but she knew what I meant. We were talking about privilege here, intimacy, the brother and sisterhood of E2 that brought us together in a way nothing else ever could have. If we were on the outside, we might never even have met. Or no, we would have met—we did, of course, as members of the extended crew—but if one of us had been excluded from E2 we would never have had this moment, this feeling I could sense deepening between us. She’d had a bias against me, I knew that, and it stemmed from an incident long before Gretchen—or Johnny—but that was behind us now. I had a present for her, a very special present even rarer than a stick of sugarcane and it was meant to show her how much I cared about her—once I got her to my room, that is, and hopefully without being too obvious about it. “Did you get my note?” I asked, even though I knew she had, but I was asking by way of reinforcement.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah.” The smile, the lips. “You have something else for me? I mean, really, the sugarcane was more than enough, and thank you, did I say that?” She leaned in and pecked a kiss to my lips, an official thank-you kiss, one the others could register for what it was. It came to me in that moment that she was drunk, drunker than I was at any rate, and that this was a good thing, a happy let-go-of-it-all sort of moment that was to be prelude to all the rest. If I could get her to my room.

  The incident I referred to above had come during the first month or so after the extended crew had been chosen. We were on our first cruise on The Imago, it was one of those magical Caribbean nights, and everybody was stuffed to the gills with conch fritters, black beans and rice and flying high on local rum mixed liberally with the real Coca-Cola sweetened with real sugarcane in some no doubt unsanitary bottling plant in San Juan or Santo Domingo and all the better for it. We were just feeling each other out at that point, men and women alike, and I’d naturally gravitated toward Stevie because Stevie was like one of those cheap disco balls, all glitter and shining facets, and in my shallow go-straight-for-the-target brand of inveterate male obliviousness I was dazzled by her. I sat with her on deck and we shared a drink. Thinking I had a read on her, I steered the conversation around to what I had in mind, but before I could gain any traction her face tensed up and I saw my mistake. I tried to cover myself with a joke but the joke fell flat and she just gave me a long withering stare. If you quizzed me about it now I’d say that she lacked a sense of humor—still does—but that would only be scratching the surface of the situation: it was my bad, I admit it. I was the one out of bounds.

  Anyway, she got up abruptly and went off to throw her golden head back and laugh with a group gathered round the stern railing and I sat there feeling like an idiot. But an idi
ot who doesn’t learn, an idiot who happened to spot E. sitting alone in the bow and went up to her and tried the same approach with the same result. Ever after, E. had been wary of me—she considered me a player, I guess, or that was what I gathered from talking to some of the others, from hints dropped, body language, the way she dealt with me, neither particularly friendly nor unfriendly either. Wary. Just wary.

  All that changed, or began to change, once we were inside. There was the elaborate praise she’d given me that first night over my cuisine—and the pie, oh, the pie!—praise that was rightly deserved because I’d put my all into that lunch and that dinner too. And then there’d been the night in her room when we opened up to each other for the first time and really talked—beyond the self-congratulation and the party line and the usual self-replenishing stream of gossip, I mean—and after that, as I say, we’d become closer and closer so that I really did feel things building toward the moment of truth, and never mind the detours with Judy, which she didn’t know about, and Gretchen, which she did.

  I stood and offered her my hand and she rose lightly from the chair, still with that smile in place, but there were the beginnings of a frown there too now, a quizzical expression working its way into her eyes and brow, as in What now?

  “Just give me a minute,” I said. “I’ll go ahead. I’ll leave the door open.”

  “Vodge,” she said, holding on to my name as if it were something sweet to lick off her lips, “you really have something for me? Seriously?”