Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid - 33

Joan and Vanessa were driving back from dinner in Vanessa’s convertible with the top down, the hot August wind in Joan’s hair.

Joan noticed that Vanessa had taken to driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Sometimes, Joan would watch Vanessa do a reverse three-point turn, her palm flat as it moved against the wheel. It never failed to light something up in Joan.

Vanessa pulled into her driveway and cut the engine.

“I want to take you somewhere special,” Vanessa said.

“I’ve always wanted to go away,” Joan said, and then more quietly as she moved closer: “Somewhere far from here where no one can see us, and I can kiss you in the sunshine.”

Vanessa closed the convertible top, and they walked inside. Once the door was shut behind them, Vanessa pushed Joan against the wall and kissed her. Joan never got tired of it, being pushed and pulled like that.

“Do you know what I want?” Vanessa said. “I want to be lying on a beach where we don’t know a single soul. And you are in a bikini. And I lay out this big blanket. And everything smells like suntan oil. And there are waiters bringing us French 75s. And the water is warm.”

“And we can go into the ocean together and I can put my arms around you as the waves come and put my legs around your waist and just rest there with you.”

“And I can kiss you and no one looks, no one cares.”

“I want that, too.”

“You know, my friend Eileen has an airfield outside of Miami. Sometimes she uses her client’s Hawker 400 and takes her partner, Jacqueline, down to Costa Rica. Maybe we could do that one day. Hitch a ride with them.”

“Or borrow a plane and you can fly us.”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that . . .”

“Are you going to fly us somewhere?”

“Would you like that?”

“I want to watch you do it. I’ve never gotten to fly with you piloting before. To watch you up close. I want to see it.”

“Well, I know we don’t have enough time to take a big trip at the moment. But I had a more manageable idea.”

“Tell me.”

Vanessa smiled. “In a little over a month it’s going to be Labor Day weekend.”

Joan’s heart throbbed.

“Last year, at that time . . . we went to Rockport.”

“Yes, we did,” Joan said.

“And it was great.”

“Yes, it was.”

“And I thought maybe to commemorate that, I could take you out to dinner.”

“Okay,” Joan said. “Labor Day weekend, take me out to dinner.”

“But not just anywhere, obviously.”

Joan copied her tone, smiling at her. “Well, obviously, it’s an important dinner.”

She laughed. “What if I flew you to Glacier Park in Montana, and we ate under the stars?”

“What if we did, Vanessa Ford?” Joan said. She could not contain the smile that was erupting across her face. “What if we did!”

Vanessa flew a plane like she drove her car. Quiet, focused, and confident. There was an ease about the way she moved the controller.

They were flying over Big Bend National Park and Joan had her forehead against the window, looking at the immenseness of the mountain range below.

“I love it up here,” Joan said. “I don’t know how I spent so much of my life down there, quite frankly. What a chump I was.”

Vanessa laughed. “Sometimes, with both feet on the ground I feel lost,” she said. “Does that make any sense?”

“Of course it does,” Joan said.

“I find it easier up here. It’s quieter, there’s less people. I can be myself in a way that I’m not sure I can down there.”

Joan nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

“But I think I also find flying to be really . . . hopeful.”

“Hopeful?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, right now you’re in a machine that eighty years ago they said couldn’t exist. In 1903, The New York Times declared that we were still one to ten million years away from a flying machine.”

“They said ten million years?”

Vanessa nodded. “The article was called ‘Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly.’ Some of the most notable engineers in the world said it was impossible to create a flying machine heavier than air.”

“I don’t think I knew that.”

“But then sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers did it.”

Joan laughed. And so Vanessa did, too.

“I know! It made them all look incredibly stupid. But the thing is, they had good reason to think it could never happen. So many people had failed. Samuel Langley had just crashed his Aerodrome into the Potomac. And engineers had been at it for a long time. They hadn’t been able to achieve anything approaching powered flight.”

“And then the Wright brothers just figured it out?”

“The Wright brothers figured out a lot of things that Langley and the others didn’t. Three-axis control, balance, you name it. But one massive thing that the others hadn’t understood that the Wright brothers did was that it wasn’t just about the plane, it was about the pilot.”

Joan smiled and then closed her eyes. “Of course.”

“It’s not just about making a machine that can fly. It’s also about understanding the way to fly it. The pilot matters. Knowing how to be a part of the machine is what makes the machine possible.”

“Ooooh,” Joan said. “Okay. Okay, I get it.”

Vanessa looked at her. “You do?”

“I do. You’re bigger than just human,” Joan said. “When you’re flying.”

Vanessa blushed and then looked forward again, nodding to herself. “The Wright brothers didn’t have funding or even college degrees. They had a bike shop and a younger sister named Katharine, who deserves way more credit than she gets because she took care of everything for them as they tinkered around. But they just wanted to see if they could learn how to fly. And that’s why they stuck with it, because they loved the pursuit. When I think about that . . . I guess that’s what I mean when I say ‘hopeful.’ Because when I think about that, I wonder—”

“What else everyone has said is impossible that you could try to do just for fun?”

“Yes!” Vanessa said. “Can you fucking imagine what’s possible if this is possible? Can you imagine what the shuttle can do?”

“I think you’re going to be the one to find out,” Joan said.

Vanessa bit her lip and did not look at Joan. “Do you really think that?” It was the smallest Joan had ever heard Vanessa’s voice.

Joan put her hand on Vanessa’s knee. “I really do.”

Vanessa nodded and then inhaled. “Hey,” she said, her voice back to normal. “Can I add a pretty big detour and fly you over the Grand Canyon?”

“A thousand times yes,” Joan said.

And with that, Vanessa nodded and turned the plane so smoothly that if Joan hadn’t seen her do it, she was not sure she would have known they were changing course.

Joan watched her some more, watched her change the controls, reset her sights. She watched Vanessa’s chest as it rose and fell. So calm, so controlled, so free.

As they flew over the Grand Canyon, Joan pressed her forehead to the window and looked as far down as she could at the vastness of the chasms below. She marveled at the millions of years of time Earth had existed without humans on it, at how unhurried the Earth had been to unfold.

Joan looked back at Vanessa. She watched the smile erupt on Vanessa’s face as she kept them steady just over the North Rim, the calm that took over as she pulled them up, back to altitude. Joan saw Vanessa’s ears move back, her eyes soften, her shoulders drop, all nearly imperceptibly. This was the woman she loved.

And Joan could find no fault with her, no complaint that didn’t, in that moment, feel so small. Joan had not ever believed that God sent down two halves of a soul in separate bodies, destined to meet. She did not believe in a God that could.

But she did believe in a God that had led them here. That led their lives to intersect. That led Vanessa to need what Joan had to give. That led Joan to have what she needed.

That led the North American tectonic plate to shift, causing the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, pushing former seabeds nine thousand feet above sea level. Joan believed in a God that, indifferent and unknowing, sent the Colorado River cutting through those rock formations.

She believed in a God that put a young girl without a father in proximity to a family friend with an airplane. She believed in a God that had pulled her to Joshua Tree to fall irretrievably in love with the stars. She believed in a God that had led them to this very moment: the two of them flying together, so safe, above the Grand Canyon.

And Joan loved that God.

Later, Vanessa laid out a blanket under the stars in Montana. She brought out Joan’s telescope, which she had carefully packed up. And a picnic basket she’d picked up from a deli, and a glass bottle of sparkling water.

“I forgot cups,” she said.

“I don’t care,” Joan told her.

They drank out of the bottle, passing it back and forth.

“There’s Pegasus,” Vanessa said, pointing east.

“Vanessa,” Joan said. “I want to do this forever.”

Vanessa turned to Joan and smiled. And then kissed her temple and said, “Wouldn’t that be something?”

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