Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid - 8

The morning of the first all-astronauts meeting, Joan, Donna, and Griff walked over to JSC together, already cracking up at their own inside jokes, overusing their new punch line: “But that’s not going to happen here.”

Griff had said it the first time a few days prior, talking about how he’d been the big man on campus at his New England prep school: valedictorian, class president, and captain of the lacrosse team. When Donna arched her eyebrows, implying that maybe he expected to be just as big a deal at NASA, he quickly added, “But that’s not going to happen here.” And all three of them laughed.

Donna then used the line not even a half hour later, when talking about her previously dramatic and volatile love life.

Then Joan told them about how she’d been considered an astronomy nerd by almost everyone she’d ever known and added, in a sarcastic tone that surprised her in how well she nailed the joke, “But I bet that’s not going to happen here.”

As they made their way onto campus that morning, they spotted Lydia Danes up ahead. She was slight—no taller than five-two, her body wiry—but to Joan there was something terrifyingly invincible about her. Perhaps it was the way she moved with such intense focus. As if enjoying the walk would threaten to waste her time.

The night before, Donna had asked Lydia if she wanted to walk over with them in the morning. Lydia had never given her an answer.

“There’s always one in a group who thinks their shit doesn’t stink,” Donna said.

“Oh, but Donna . . .” Griff said.

“Don’t!” Joan said.

“That’s not going to happen here,” he said.

Joan shook her head and smiled.

“I’m telling you,” Donna said. “She’s rude.”

Joan watched Lydia walk ahead of them. “You can’t take it personally,” Griff said.

“She thinks she’s better than everyone else,” Donna said. “As evidenced by the way she keeps clarifying for people that I’m only an ER doctor, but she is a trauma surgeon. ”

As Donna spoke, Joan began taking in the architecture around the campus. All brutalist, boxlike buildings made of windows and concrete. Somehow dated, and yet timelessly plain.

But as she glanced at the Mission Control building, something buzzed inside her. It had a personality to it, a spark of the ’60s Apollo program flair. And Joan nearly froze in her tracks.

I’m at NASA.

They got to the conference room one minute early, which Joan considered four minutes late.

The three of them crammed in along the sides of the room, obeying the clear and unspoken hierarchy that the chairs were only for the astronauts, and the candidates would remain standing on the periphery. There was already a tension in the room that Joan could not name. Some of the astronauts were seated with their legs extended, taking up as much floor space as possible, making no attempt to create room for the new candidates. Joan, Donna, and Griff stood wordlessly along the wall. Lydia barely looked at the rest of them. The last person to dash in, just before Antonio began to speak, was Vanessa Ford.

Her curly hair was pulled back, her posture was tall and straight, her shoulders broad. She took off her sunglasses and tucked them into her shirt pocket, with her eyes narrow, her jaw tight. Then she clasped both hands behind her back and faced forward, her full attention on Antonio, at the front of the room.

And the thought that went through Joan’s head was: That’s an astronaut.

Later that night, Griff and Donna headed out with some of the other astronaut candidates—which Joan now understood was what everyone meant when they said “ASCANs”—for drinks. They invited Joan, but she declined. She’d promised Frances she’d call her to tell her all about her first day, so she headed straight back to her apartment.

“Did you know that there are two pins I might get eventually?” Joan said to Frances over the phone.

“Like my Mickey Mouse pin?” Frances said.

“Yeah, close to that. But these pins are shaped like a star with three rays behind it, coming out of a halo. One is silver and one is gold.”

“And they give you them for being an astronaut?”

“Hopefully, but not yet,” Joan said. She was pulling at the twisted telephone cord in the kitchen, unraveling it as she spoke. Just two weeks ago, the phone had been brand-new. Now it was already tangled from use.

“A year or so from now, if I pass this program, they will make me an astronaut. And they will give me that silver pin, which means I am ready to fly. And then one day when I get chosen for a mission, and go up there and come back, that’s when they’ll give me the gold one. To symbolize that I have flown in space.”

“I can’t believe my aunt is going to space.”

“Maybe one day,” Joan said. “Yeah.”

Joan kept the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she pulled a frozen dinner out of the freezer and popped it into the oven.

“I want to be an astronaut,” Frances said.

What a time Joan lived in. To be able to tell her niece that she could be an astronaut.

“If you work hard at it, then you will,” Joan said. “Now go brush your teeth. Every quadrant. You remember what the dentist said now that your molars have come in.”

“I know,” Frances said. “I will.”

Once Joan hung up, she looked in the oven at her still-half-frozen dinner and felt a familiar sadness creeping over her. She turned off the oven, put the food in the fridge, and headed out to Frenchie’s for dinner on her own.

She walked straight up to the bar and ordered a Caesar salad and the chicken marsala, then grabbed a book from her bag and began reading. But before she even got to the second paragraph on the page, someone sat down next to her.

Joan knew who it was before she saw her face. She also knew there was a scientific explanation for these moments in which she felt she could sense the future. Information was being received at such a rapid speed that it felt as if the reaction was coming in before the stimulus. But the sensation was eerie, nonetheless. She understood why people got confused sometimes, started calling things fate.

“Hi,” Vanessa said.

“Oh.” Joan put away her book. “Hi. I’m Joan. I’ve seen you around, but I don’t think we’ve officially met.”

“Vanessa.”

Joan looked at Vanessa and tried not to stare. Vanessa’s eyes were light golden brown, almost amber. Her hair was such a dark shade of brown it was verging on black. And there was so much of it, the curls taking up so much space.

“It is nice to formally meet you,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa seemed more stoic than Donna, less high-strung than Lydia. Joan started to wonder what she must seem like to Vanessa. Bookish.

“No one has really introduced themselves to me,” Vanessa said. “But you all seem to know each other already.”

“Oh,” Joan said. “It’s because we all met about a week and a half ago. We moved into the same apartment complex.”

“The one right next to campus?” Vanessa said, nodding. “Makes sense.”

“Where do you live?”

“A bit further out.”

“Didn’t want to bunk with the rest of the us?”

“No, it’s not that,” Vanessa said. She smiled out of the left side of her mouth and then laughed. “Or maybe it is. I like my privacy. Not sure I’m going to be good at this whole ‘living in a fishbowl’ thing.”

Joan laughed as the bartender brought her salad and put it down in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to him.

Vanessa leaned forward, gestured to the bartender. “Can I have a glass of cabernet and a steak, medium rare?”

Joan’s salad seemed so boring now.

“I really am sorry none of us have spoken to you,” Joan said. “It wasn’t on purpose, but I regret it.”

Vanessa sat back on the barstool, waved her off. “It’s perfectly all right. I figured it was up to me to say hello. So, hello.”

“Hello,” Joan said. She speared a piece of romaine on her fork. It was disarming—a little confusing, maybe—to think of Vanessa as in want of company. She was the sort of woman who seemed like she could have any friend she wanted. Didn’t the world revolve around women like her? She was tall and lean, with big eyes. Her hair was so shiny. That way she smiled out of the side of her mouth—certainly that pulled people in.

“Settling in okay?” Joan asked.

Vanessa shrugged as her glass of wine arrived. “I mean, it’s hot as hell out here. But otherwise, it’s going okay.”

Joan nodded. “July is the worst of it. The humidity is brutal. You get used to it.”

“Do you?”

Joan laughed. “No, I don’t know why I said that. It’s miserable.”

Vanessa chuckled and sipped her wine.

This made no sense at all. Vanessa was the one who had come up to her and said hello. But now, somehow, it was Joan leaning toward her, as Vanessa sat there, cool in every sense of the world.

Detached. Effortless. Aloof.

Joan thought about Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke —and got the sense that it would not end well for her if she challenged Vanessa to eat fifty eggs. If she challenged Vanessa to anything at all.

“How about you?” Vanessa asked. “How is it for Miss Popular over here?”

Joan laughed so loud that it startled the man a few seats down. She covered her mouth. Vanessa reached over and gently took her by the wrist, pulling her hand away from her mouth. Joan looked at Vanessa’s fingers on her.

“You did him a favor,” Vanessa said. “He was falling asleep in his beer. But, really, how are you settling in?”

“Well, wildly incorrect assumptions about my social status aside . . .” Joan said. “It’s going all right.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Joan wasn’t sure why she was still talking—what she was thinking, saying this out loud? “Though . . .”

“Hm?”

“Did you sense an . . . undercurrent today?” Joan asked, turning toward Vanessa. “When talking to almost anyone in the astronaut corps?”

“You mean the feeling that any of them would slit your throat for ten bucks?”

Joan laughed, this time at a completely reasonable volume. “Exactly!”

“Yeah, I suspect we have a horse race ahead of us,” Vanessa said.

“Am I supposed to compete with you?” Joan asked. “And Donna and Griff and everyone? It seems like a lot of work, to do all that and still put all my time into training.”

Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Spoken like a real killer.”

Their food arrived at the same time, and as Joan looked at her chicken, she wished she’d ordered Vanessa’s steak.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you and I are going to have a problem,” Vanessa said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to put us up against each other like they would Donna and Lydia. I mean, I’m an aeronautical engineer. But . . . you’re the astrophysicist, right?” Vanessa said.

Joan corrected her: “Astronomer.”

“What’s the difference?”

Joan shook her head. “There barely is one.”

“But there is a difference, clearly.”

“An astrophysicist studies the physics of space, whereas my focus is on space itself, the sun in particular. Then again, you can’t study space without studying the physics of space. And time. Or math. Or anthropology and the history of humans’ understanding of the stars. Or mythology and theology, for that matter. It’s all connected.”

Vanessa nodded. “And that’s why you like it.”

“Hm?”

“You’re smiling as you’re talking.”

“I am?”

Vanessa grinned out of the side of her mouth again, and Joan wondered if it was one of those quirks she was born with or if she’d practiced it, knowing how captivating it would be.

“Yes,” Vanessa said. “You are. I love that. I love when people love what they do.”

“I do love what I do. I have been . . . I don’t know . . . obsessed with the stars since I was in elementary school. During the winter, when it got dark out early enough, I would lie in the backyard and look up at the night sky, just aching to touch the stars. I’d sit there with my hand stretched out as far as I could reach, trying to convince myself I could scoop them into my hand. I begged my parents to buy me a Unitron telescope for my twelfth birthday. I had never made a fuss about anything before, never asked for so much as a doll, I don’t think. But I had to have that telescope. I had to see the stars up close. And that was before we landed on the moon, mind you.”

“You’re like the girls who liked the Beatles before they went on Ed Sullivan .”

Joan laughed. “Yes, the moon landing was, for us space nerds, exactly like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ! I liked the moon first.”

“Good for you.”

“But I cannot claim to be cool enough to have liked the Beatles first. I barely like the Beatles at all.”

“You don’t like the Beatles?”

“I am . . . indifferent to the Beatles.”

Vanessa’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, it’s not that big a deal,” Joan said.

“It’s . . . an illegal opinion to have.”

Joan laughed. “The melodies are good, obviously. It’s good music. But . . . it was a little simplistic, don’t you think? I don’t understand why it worked so well.”

“Why what worked so well?”

“The pandering. To what little girls think love is like. It was just a bit much. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Blackbird’ is a great song. And ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ But the cheesy stuff just struck me as, well, cheesy.”

Vanessa finished her steak. “You are a curious one, Joan.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, it’s all very interesting.”

Joan wasn’t sure if Vanessa was making fun of her. But her gut said she wasn’t.

“So, obviously, you like the Beatles,” Joan said.

“I liked the Beatles when I was a young girl, hopelessly in love. . . . They explained it better than I could.”

Joan looked away and sipped her water. What was she thinking, going on and on like this? Was it really that intoxicating, being asked about herself?

“So, we aren’t going to have to compete,” Joan said, changing the subject. “Me and you. You and me, I mean.”

“Well, look, anything’s possible. But they want us for different purposes, if I had to guess. They’ll want you for designing and running experiments in space. They’ll want me to help build the payloads. They aren’t going to be measuring you against me, or vice versa.”

Joan nodded. “I like that theory.”

Vanessa nodded and then looked Joan in the eye. “Did it kind of kill you today?” she asked. “To be so close to it all? It killed me. I want to get up there almost as much as I want to breathe.”

Something about the openness of Vanessa’s face made Joan realize that, sitting on her barstool, her feet didn’t touch the floor.

Joan blinked. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it did kill me a little.”

“I want to fly the fucking thing,” Vanessa said. “Though God knows, since I’ve only flown privately, and not as a military pilot, it’s going to be an uphill battle. But I want to go somewhere so few people have ever gone that you could name them all—and when people do name them, I want them to name me.”

“I understand that,” Joan said. “I understand that completely.”

Vanessa looked at her, her gaze intense. “You do?”

“Absolutely. To do something so few people have ever done? No one will ever be able to take that away from us. If we do it, if we leave the planet, we will carry that with us into every room we enter for the rest of our lives.”

Vanessa’s shoulders relaxed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s . . .” She shook her head and exhaled. “That’s exactly it.” She grew more animated by the second. “Every time Antonio talks about the program, I can feel this ache in my chest. Like I’d die to get that chance. Like nothing on Earth will ever matter to me as much as getting up there. It’s what I was born to do.”

Vanessa was so lit up that Joan forgot for a moment that she was right there next to her, that Vanessa was not onstage in a play or on a TV show.

“I want to make my niece proud,” Joan said when she remembered herself. “I want her to know that she can do anything.”

“See, even if I did want to screw you over to get assigned before you, I certainly can’t now. You’re too noble,” Vanessa said.

Joan laughed. “No, please, I insist you take the opportunity if it presents itself.”

Vanessa pretended to consider this. Then she said, “I mean, joking aside, if it does come down to you versus me, or me versus that guy Griff, or whatever—I hope I don’t do it with both elbows out, knocking everyone down. I hope I wait until I fully earn it instead of trying to steal the chance out from under someone. I want it bad, but still, I hope I do it right.”

“You know, my mom used to say something to me when I was a kid,” Joan said. “That you’re reminding me of.”

“What?”

“I always had the top grade in the class. And I would come home and brag about how I helped this boy who sat next to me who was struggling with times tables. Or I helped this girl with her spelling. Then one day, this boy joins our class and he’s really good at math. Not as good as me, but almost. And he asks me for help. And I told him I’d think about it. But . . . I didn’t want to. Bobby Simpson. I was so scared that he’d take the top score from me. I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Vanessa looked at her. Joan shrugged. “Maybe that’s you. Character when it counts.”

“So I have character?” Vanessa said. “That’s a nice thought. Not sure I’ve been accused of that before.”

Joan smiled. “Well, let’s see what you do, then. Just how honorable you turn out to be.”

“What did you do?”

“Hm?”

“With Bobby Simpson.”

“Oh, I helped him,” Joan said.

“And did he beat you?”

Joan laughed. “No.” And then: “I am very, very good at math.”

Vanessa threw her head back and cackled, and Joan blushed at the attention it drew. But when Vanessa raised her hand to give her a high five, Joan laughed and returned it.

Two days later, Joan walked into the first class on the space shuttle’s design to see that Donna and Lydia were sitting at the front. Griff was talking to naval pilot Hank Redmond and mission specialist Harrison Moreau. There were more guys she didn’t know well yet, mingling in the center. Vanessa was seated in the back.

“This seat free?” Joan asked her.

Vanessa barely looked up as she opened her notebook and grabbed her pen. “Wide open. You’re my only friend so far, Goodwin, you know that.”

“Well, as your friend, don’t call me Goodwin.”

Vanessa glanced up at her. “Oh, c’mon.”

Joan sat down. “Goodwin feels like . . .” Joan said, trying to explain it. “I’m not sure.”

There was a part that Joan was going to have to play at NASA. She understood that. Wearing the navy polos and khaki chinos she and Donna had gone out and bought together to fit in. Going out drinking together most nights. Hanging with the guys. Entertaining the posturing from the military side. Fine. She could sense what was expected of her. She was ready for it. But for it to extend to what should be the more honest moments . . .

“It feels like I’m pretending to be somebody else. I call people by their first names. I’d be playacting calling you Ford,” she said. “When really, you’re a full person, with a first name.”

Vanessa put down her pen. “Are you always this earnest?”

Joan had not meant to be particularly earnest, but this was what she was like. “Yes, I believe so.”

Vanessa shook her head and laughed.

“Look, I’ll call you Ford when it’s appropriate,” Joan said. “I’m not entirely opposed to it. I just . . . you know, if we’re going to be friends, let’s be friends.”

“All right,” Vanessa said with a smile. “Fine, Jo, if that’s what you want, that’s what you got.”

Joan shook her head and rolled her eyes, ready to tell Vanessa that she didn’t go by Jo. That no one had ever called her Jo in her life. But she couldn’t quite make it come off her tongue.

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