Emma Rathbone: Losing It

He moved his chair forward. “When it was all going down, I didn’t want to tell anyone at work — you know how people talk. Just for a little while. I was going to, I really was. Then I just never did. I kept wearing my ring to keep up appearances, and then it just seemed like too much effort, almost, to take it off. And so, I didn’t really know how to say that. To you.”

I looked out over the rooftops. “You’re not married,” I said slowly, almost to myself. A train passed below us. The roar of it drowned out my thoughts. I listened to the steel grind, the high gritty whine. On a rooftop in the distance an old woman beat two outdoor chair pillows together. When I looked back at Elliot he was studying me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

He exhaled. “It’s okay.” He looked tired. And older. He had a small gold clip on his tie. I pictured myself putting my hand on his stomach.

“So you had to tell them after my note,” I said. “I blew your cover.”

He laughed uncomfortably. “I didn’t have to do anything. It’s none of their business. But, yeah, I thought it was a good time to come clean.”

“What did they say?”

“Oh, you know.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “No one says anything.”

For a while we just sat there. I was in the sun. I looked at the horizon. I touched my hair and my hair was hot.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sighed. “I’ve been in Durham for a long time now. Might be time for a change.”

Slowly we began talking about other things. I told him about Vivienne’s project, about how excited she was for her show, and the car accident, leaving out everything about Jack, of course. And how I wanted to make it up to her.

“I think there’s usually more of a process,” he said. “As far as I know, you have to apply to get your work displayed. But I’ll ask my friend. Sure, of course I’ll ask her.”

I exhaled. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, thanks.”

I ordered five glasses of fizzy water. No alcohol. We talked about the office. I told him about my swimming career. I asked him how he’d ended up in Durham.

“It’s where Devon wanted to move,” he said. “She went to grad school here. I just sort of haven’t left yet.” He flickered with sadness.

“Oh, okay,” I said.

We stood outside the restaurant, both squinting, not sure what to do. He looked at me quizzically and said, “Do you want to come up to my apartment? I live just over there. We can look at the data. From the radio telescope.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, thinking I should just get home, and that there wasn’t supposed to be another chapter with Elliot, not after everything that had happened, that I’d done. “I’ve got things I have to do.” I turned around and started walking away. A moment later I looked back. He was still standing there, staring at me.

—

It was mesmerizing. The blown, scattered lines of light coursed down the wide flat screen. Every ninety seconds they slightly changed their grain. You were supposed to sift for something out of the ordinary. Something that could qualify as unusual. Something that could be anything other than our world’s rote buzzing. Something that could mean an inquiry, an actual out-of-this-world head nod from another civilization. I’ve never been one for alien stuff, but sitting there for a moment, with Elliot explaining it to me — anyone could be the first person to intercept this signal, which would be the biggest discovery of humankind — for a second I believed, I watched. I searched for something outside myself.

I’d turned around and gone back to Elliot and said yes, on second thought, I’d like to see the radio data. We’d walked to his apartment, his blazer slung over his briefcase. He was right, it wasn’t far, just a couple of blocks away, and upstairs in an old yellow building. I flashed back to Gerald, driving me miles out of town in his silent car.

It was a long, open-plan apartment, with wooden floors and lots of natural light. We put our stuff down and Elliot went to the fridge to get us a drink. I walked around, looking at things. The fastidious cleanliness of his office seemed to have carried over — nothing was out of place and even the art books on his coffee table were stacked with precision. There was a watercolor painting of an Indian chief with a colorful headdress made of streaks and feathers fading into the sunset as if the whole sky was a part of his finery. There was another of the chief contemplating some pyramids in the distance. I studied a triangular porcelain vase with some glass stalks sticking out of it.

“That’s my ex-wife’s,” said Elliot. “A lot of this stuff is.”

“Oh, okay,” I said thoughtfully, and decided to leave it at that.

He had a hand towel slung over his shoulder and was holding a bottle of champagne.

“Want some?” he said, wrapping the towel around it.

I looked at my watch. “Really?”

“It’s the only thing I have to drink.”

I thought about it for a second. “Sure.”

“I’m not trying to seduce you, and this has nothing to do with your e-mail,” he said.

“Cool!” I said, starting to blush.

We went over to the sofa in front of a large flat-screen television that was attached to a laptop on the floor. He turned off the lights and shut all the blinds until it was as dark as it could be during the day. He came over and sat down next to me and switched it all on. Vertical dashes of light, a Serengeti of them, filled the screen.

“How does it work?” I said.

“It’s picking up electromagnetic radiation,” he said. “All those specks you see, they represent radio signals from, just, satellites, other planets, broadcasts.”

“Other planets?”

“The wavelengths they give off. Every object does that, to an extent.”

“Okay. So that’s not the sky.”

“No, no. Well. It’s just data. From a huge radio telescope, the one I told you about, in California? It’s picking up signals from things that are in the sky. So what you’re seeing is a kind of vast amount of indifferent, clashing reverberations.”

I nodded.

“What we’re looking for, waiting for, is something that’s not random. Something that signals intent and meaning. It would take the form of a straight line, or two lines, down the center. Something targeted. A pattern. Something trying to reach us.”

I sipped from my glass and stared at the screen. “Got it,” I said.

Elliot leaned back in the sofa and nudged his shoes off and then put his feet on the coffee table. He sighed. “So yeah,” he said. “This is pretty much what I’ve been doing since my divorce.”

I laughed. I sank down into the sofa with him. He took my hand. We watched the screen. We were like that for about ten minutes, and then he kissed me. Just like that, we were kissing.

The feeling of staring at the screen, the roar of the universe, was still in my head. I felt him being cautious, and I thought it had to do with the e-mail — how he’d known that I sent it in some addled state, and probably hadn’t really meant it, and so he really didn’t want to be seen as taking advantage of all that. I knew that if this was going to progress in any way beyond kissing, I was going to have to be the one to sanction it. I wasn’t quite sure how.

But then he blazed over all that by putting his hand up my shirt. It felt good, all of it — the tilting feeling of the champagne, the silver glow of the screen, the oceanic warmth of the moment.

I pulled away and said something I’d been meaning to say. “I have to pee.”

“Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth. There was something very intimate in the torn tissue of that moment, and that’s when I realized that it wasn’t just actual mechanical sex I’d been missing out on, but this feeling of free-falling trust, of liking someone and having them like you so much that there was no end to the liking.