Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

She told him she was sorry but that he had been absent from their marriage and their family for so long and that she simply did not want to be alone anymore and when he pressed her she finally told him the truth about what she had done, about what she had been doing. Even now his body shivered at the memory of it, that mixture of confusion, panic, anger, and grief flooding through him once more, the paint roller trembling in his hand. At the time he had been too shattered to do much more than float in the microgravity and listen without real understanding. He had suffered a migraine just before and was in that long period of recovery, his mind feeling soft, the numbers it held a jumbled collection of broken symbols signifying quantities that held no real import or meaning at all. When he had received the video call it had been as if he were watching a kind of static scene that included someone who looked like him and someone who looked like his wife: a man suspended in the closet-size compartment, staring at a computer in silence as a woman’s face spoke from the screen. “I need you to understand that it’s over,” she said to him.

“You keep saying that. Just wait until I’m home and we can talk about it.”

Then she said nothing for a time. She had been saying essentially the same thing for the course of the conversation and he had responded the only way he could think to respond. Their daughter was dead and now she was telling him — trying to tell him — that she did not want to be married to him anymore.

And then her voice returned from that silence: “I’m seeing someone else, Keith.”

“What?”

“I’m seeing someone else. I’ve been seeing someone else for a while.”

He drifted. He had been drifting. “You’re having an affair?” he said.

“Yes, I’m having an affair.”

The quiet that came seemed to have no beginning or end, as if it had existed forever and he had merely slipped into its flowing stream. What had she said? Could he have heard her wrong? Could she be making some kind of weird joke he did not understand?

“Say something,” she said to him at last.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything.”

And then not speaking for so long, his body floating in the compartment.

“You don’t know how lonely I’ve been,” she said. “You never talk to me.”

“I talk to you.”

“No, you don’t.”

Again the silence. Then: “You had … you had an affair?”

“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You had an affair?” His voice — the voice of this man who looked like him and who was him but somehow was not — this voice not even angry but flat and emotionless, as if discussing something tedious: a policy, a simple string of numbers, a procedure.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan it.”

“Does that even matter?”

“Yes, it matters,” she said.

“How?”

She did not respond.

“Who is it?” he said.

“You don’t know him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You don’t know him and you won’t ever know him. I’m not going to tell you that.”

Silence. Silence everywhere.

“I’m sorry but I thought you should know,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, Barb.”

“It isn’t working anymore.”

“Obviously.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“I’m not being fair? You’re sleeping with someone else.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Even though his words were angry, his tone was resigned, disappointed, as if he was reading the script of an argument, reciting the words he knew he was supposed to say and he did say them but without feeling or emotion.

“You’re never around,” she said.

“I wanted you and Quinn to move to Houston with me—”

“Don’t. Don’t even say her name. That’s not what this is about. This is about me getting my life back.”

“I wanted you both to move to Houston with me but you wouldn’t do it.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she said.

“Yes, it would have.”

“No, Keith. It wouldn’t have mattered because you still don’t really talk to me about anything.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t. It was the same with her. You pushed and pushed and pushed. And you didn’t listen to her. You made her miserable.”

“Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what? You just sit there thinking about math. That’s all you ever think about. I need someone to think about me, goddammit. I need someone to think about me.”

“Is that what this other man does for you?”

“Yes, since you asked. That’s what he does. He thinks about me.”

He said nothing for a moment. Then: “After all we’ve been through. Now this?”

“This started before … before Quinn …,” she said, and her voice cracked when she said their daughter’s name.

“Fantastic,” he said. “Even better.”

She was silent, staring at his face from the laptop screen. Then she said, “I told you because I want you to understand that it’s over.”

“What is?”

“Our marriage, Keith. Our marriage is over.”

He closed his eyes and then opened them slowly and as he did so it felt as if he was shifting into his own body, as if he had been away and now returned. “Jesus Christ, Barb,” he said. “Jesus Christ, can’t this wait? Can’t this just wait until I’m back home?”

“No, it can’t wait.”

“Really? It has to be right now?”

“Yes, it has to be now.”

“What do you want me to do about it? It’s not like I can just come down.”

“I know and I don’t want you to.”

“You can’t do this,” he said.

“I already have.”

“No, you can’t do this. You’ll be home when I get there and we’ll figure this out.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be like this.”

“Christ, Barb. Don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, so am I,” he said.

She had called him days later, also on the laptop, to tell him that she had already removed all her belongings from the house and that he would need to collect his own and then it could be put on the market and sold, told him this as if it was a simple business transaction. At the time, he found himself wishing that he could somehow remain on the space station but then another migraine would send him into a red jagged tunnel of pain and it would take days for him to recover and he knew, even then, that he was failing his first mission, perhaps the only mission he would ever have.

Had she not married him for his ambition, because he was going to achieve something beyond the range of most men? Had she not understood that reaching his own destiny would take time and discipline? And now she felt he had put too much time into his work and not enough time into his family. He was an astronaut and his daughter was dead and then his wife had told him that she was leaving him and would not return. What kind of universe would allow such a thing?

By the late afternoon he gave up painting entirely. He had followed a single wall from the kitchen to the living room and then halfway up the stairs, dripping paint all the while so that the carpet and stair rail were flecked with white spots. It was a mess and he knew he should have simply stopped painting long before but of course he had not done so. When he left the house he was so distracted and frustrated that he did not even clean the brushes, merely dropping them onto the plastic-wrapped kitchen counter and walking out the door.

He ended up at Starbucks again, mostly because he could think of no other place to go, taking a padded chair in the back of the room and listening to the quietly piped-in classic rock while he sipped his coffee from its paper cup. His anger had not subsided and he tried to direct his thoughts back to Jennifer but instead found himself wondering how well she had known Barb. And so there she was again, intruding upon his thoughts and bringing with her the unwarranted feeling of guilt that settled into his chest, as if he was keeping a terrible secret from her. Perhaps he was. He still did not even know the name of the man his wife had been sleeping with, as if knowing his name would change what had happened. He wondered if Quinn had known him, if Barb had brought him into their house, into their bed. My god.