Two Phenomena of Roughly Equal Importance

“The air on Mars—what there is of it—is leaking away,” he said. “About half a pound a second sputtering into space. P-p-poof. Stripped away by solar winds.” He was still in bed reading a NASA report in the Sunday New York Times.

It was a month since she’d moved into his house, more like a cottage, with a tiny yard. They’d dated in college, then hadn’t seen each other in ten years, happened to run into each other and remembered they liked each other. They were still learning how to talk to each other again.

“I got so stoned once,” she said, “I lay on the floor and listened to the air squeaking in the vents all day. I thought I was on another planet. That was about a year after I met my jerk ex-husband.”     

He said mp, waited a respectful five seconds, and put his iPad on the bedside table. “Mars’ early atmosphere used to be like Earth’s,” he said, “but it didn’t have a magnetic field like Earth’s to hold it close. Now it’s just wisps.”

It wasn’t working, she thought. Not that she was giving up.

In one motion, she slipped out of her exercise pants and panties, hopped up on the bed, and did a graceful half-roll toward him. “When I think of space, I think of the attic,” she said. “I thought I heard something up there last night, did you?”

He liked to kiss the inside of her knee. She couldn’t understand why but was patient about it.

In college, they’d had only three dates. On the third, he’d given her his engineering society pin and kissed her passionately. She said okay, weirdly pleased. He was not at all bad looking. But by the end of the evening, she was freaked out by the whole idea of the pin and gave it back when he took her home. He shook her hand, shook her hand. And they went on to other people. She’d liked him, though.

Now, in their early thirties, they were both divorced. She was childless, he had a daughter, who lived with his ex in a nearby city. He drove up, or flew up, every other weekend. He was an ecological engineer, worked for Boeing for a while, then went out on his own as a consultant. Lately, all he could get was low-level number crunching. Yesterday he was out at the lake evaluating a small dam, which he said beavers could have built better. She thought beavers were sweet, weren’t that important. Should he be competing with them? Before that, he had a job with a Bay Area steel mill, designing scrubbers for their smokestacks, but got laid off because the political winds had changed. That she could understand. Politics had been her life. She had a poly sci degree, from a good program, was a Democratic party girl (her words), then lost her way, marrying a conservative politician who cheated on her. Ever surrounded by ambition, she’d grown bitter and snarky. After the breakup, she had devised her own recovery program by temporarily working for an animal shelter and training for the Iron Man. She told friends it took an iron will not to bring home a pet from the animal control shelter. She didn’t want to bond with it. Another breakup would be too much pain.

Now, even though they only had three dates in college, they were like old lovers, with new ground rules. They agreed not to talk about love. She let him know how she felt by patting him down before he jogged out to the park, a joke, to make sure he didn’t have his engineering pin with him in case he wanted to kiss another woman. In response, he said, “It’s just chemistry, mine’s attracted to yours.” He had a tin ear, but she could live with it.

Then why was she feeling so nettlesome this morning? His wife and daughter hadn’t lived here for a year, but she felt like any minute, they’d come bustling in the door with groceries or after-school friends.

He had quit kissing her knee, and started working his way up the inside of her thigh. “Is that supposed to drive me crazy?” she said, not meaning to sound snarky.

“No, it’s to drive me crazy,” he said. “Think of me as a spacecraft coming in to dock.”

“I see,” she said. “Are we going somewhere? In space, I mean?” She sighed, “I’m not trying to ruin your day, I just like to make sense of things.”   

“None of it makes sense without us,” he said. “It makes sense if we want it to, you and me.”

He eased beside her, head even with hers, pinned her hand comfortably back, his fingers interlaced with hers.

“You sound like some poly sci theorist,” she said.       

He fell silent. She’d done it now. Again. Silenced him. His default was to not talk. She squeezed his hand and got no response. It could be over, she thought.                                

But he said, with effort, “As long as I have you … maybe I can figure out what’s important.”

It wasn’t something her ex had ever said. Or anyone else she could remember. This is a breakthrough, she thought.                       

She did a dope slap, to keep from crying, “Duh, of course, what’s going to prevent those particles from the sun from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, too? We have to save our atmosphere. Is there enough oxygen in the spacecraft? We have to dock together.” She was babbling.

He said mp softly in her ear. “You’re a good listener,” he said. “Module coming in to dock. Permission to enter,” he said.

She realized mp was a small laugh. “It’s so polite in space. It’s nice to ask permission first. Am I the spaceship?” she said. “Are you going to knock first?”

He let out a groan, having already entered. He managed to say, “What?”

“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll just keep talking and …\” It seemed right to begin to lose track of what they were saying. “Just keep … keep knocking.”