Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“I’m pretty drunk,” he said.

“Shhh,” she said. “No more talking.”

Her force was something to be reckoned with almost immediately, as if he had uncorked a bottle that had been no bottle at all but was a dam that uncorking had pressed to bursting and she climbed astride him, her face somewhere between anger and joy, determined and feral. A wild creature.

It felt as if it had been an eternity since he had touched a woman and he thought of nothing else, his hands on her beautiful tan breasts, encircling them and feeling her breath suck in just as he had imagined it would. When she lifted her arms so that the tight fabric slid up over her and away and he looked at her and leaned in and took one of her pink nipples in his mouth, his own breath was pulled away with hers, his heart thumping in his chest like an ancient, enormous machine that had been resurrected after so many years of forgetting.

They stumbled to the bed, practically at a dead run, his drunken feet staggering up the stairs and then their twin bodies crashing sideways onto the mattress, clothes awkwardly strewn about them, she much more adept than he at undressing under alcohol although who could say how drunk she was in comparison. How many times had he refilled his glass? He could not recall and indeed it mattered little. All that mattered was the thought that there are moments like this in real life, and he was amazed by the realization, as if there was another world inside of this one that was hidden in plain view and then her mouth was on his belly and then his chest and then finding his mouth at last and clamping onto it. Her body was something amazing to him: a hard and muscled creature that for reasons he could not even begin to understand had allowed him to take possession of it even as he grasped her around the waist and threw her over to her back and she moaned, her teeth clamped together in a kind of sneer surrounded by full red lips.

When he entered her it was like falling into a memory: like a body flashing through the surface of a lake and disappearing under the surface, the surface itself remaining silent only for that final instant and then, almost imperceptibly, the slow undulation of ripples rolling out from that central point, the body itself already disappeared in some otherworld of muffled and dimly lit fishes and reeds. Then he was above her and her entire body tightened and loosened, her hips and her waist curving around him, her eyes half closed and then closed tight as she made her sounds and he above her looking down at her face, her shoulders, her breasts, the way her legs were wrapped around his hips, this woman who was not his wife, who was a woman he did not even really know.

And when he came he actually shouted and she clamped her hand over his mouth and her voice too was a kind of cry that twisted up and out of her body. Her hand slipped from his mouth then and their breathing was heavy and whipped past their ears and slowed and quieted as he rolled to the side. She made no motion to cover herself and after a moment she said, “Fuck, I needed that.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Shower?” she asked at last.

“OK,” he said.

She rose and stood for a moment at the side of the bed, completely naked and looking more like a goddess than any mortal woman, her body a perfect thing that he had held in his hands. “Come on, then,” she said.

“OK,” he said again.

She stepped to the other side of the room and he heard the shower in the darkness. He could see the edge of the glass door from the bed and he closed his eyes and felt his own breath and after a moment he opened his eyes again and rose and walked through that tilting darkness. When he reached the shower door she emerged from the doorway of the bathroom and smiled at him. “Hello, neighbor,” she said.

He smiled and said, “Hello.” She smiled at him again and he thought that she might kiss him or that he might kiss her. Perhaps he should kiss her. Perhaps that was what he should do. Instead he said, “I’m not sure what I should be doing now.”

“In there,” she said, and she pulled the shower door open behind him and her hand was warm on his hip as she steered him through the door. She stood there, not speaking at first. Then she said, “Mind if I join you?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

She shook her head but said nothing as she came through the door.

The shower was not quite big enough for two so their bodies continued to bump against each other and he surprised himself by thinking that he would be able to make love to her yet again but then she stepped out of the shower and dried herself and returned from the closet wearing a terrycloth bathrobe. She handed him a towel and he dried himself. He found himself looking at her with a kind of longing that was already something like nostalgia. The room continued to slosh around him in its slow, drunken rhythm.

He dressed in the clothes that were in the bedroom, his shirt and shoes downstairs somewhere, strewn about the house like a crumbtrail to the exit. “I didn’t expect this,” he said suddenly, more to himself than to her.

“Neither did I,” she said.

“Fun,” he said.

“It was that,” she said.

“I’m pretty drunk.”

“So what?”

“OK. So what,” he said. Then: “Let’s do this again sometime.”

She laughed.

“I didn’t just mean that. I meant having dinner. All of it.”

She smiled. “Oh, you didn’t mean that? Not interested?”

“No, I meant that too.”

“You know where I live.”

“Maybe you can come over to my place next time.”

“You’d need furniture.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then: “Well, I have all the furniture we used.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Probably time for you to go now, Astronaut,” she said.

He did not want to leave her bedroom but even through the increasing winedrunk drift he knew that he had arrived as a dinner guest and had shared her bed and her body and that now it was over. She led him downstairs and he stumbled much of the way and leaned heavily on the banister and then found his shirt and his socks and shoes and ran his hands through his wet hair. “You want a glass of water?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, and then: “Wait, no, I think I’d better head out.”

He half hoped that she might invite him to stay longer. Maybe the glass of water was just this invitation and he had missed it. The clock on the wall read ten: still early. “Well then, neighbor, it was nice to get to meet you,” she said. Her body was covered by the robe, but he could still make out the shape of her, a rare and wondrous thing that even now he could not believe he had held naked in his arms, a vision already fading from him as if a dream he had awakened from.

“Thanks for dinner,” he said. He was not sure if he should kiss her.

“My pleasure.”

“Good night,” he said. He felt warm and wide awake and stared into her eyes for a moment longer and then he turned without touching her and moved in a slightly tilting path into the cul-de-sac and toward his own empty house. He wondered if Jennifer was still watching him from her door but when he turned and glanced back he saw that the door was already closed. The house so similar to his own and yet containing within it a woman, a girl, and furniture.

He paused there in the darkness of the street, still facing her house, the street tilting beneath his feet. Above, the dim stars cast upward from the horizon of rooflines and into their dome of pinpointed light and he staggered below them in the center of the street. Up there somewhere was the ISS with the retinue of astronauts who had replaced him: Yoshida and Eichhorn, both of whom had been part of his ASCAN group. Who else? Jones. Collins too. Someone else, but he had forgotten. Why have a daughter only to be told of her death two hundred and seventeen miles above the surface of Earth? Why have a wife at all if the end result is a house without furniture? Why become an astronaut only to end standing in a cul-de-sac in the darkness?