“It makes me think of automobiles. Maybe because I’m a New Yorker.”
“And robocalls. And smartphones.”
“And paperless voting machines.”
“And traffic lights. Half of the intersections in Ithaca would work more efficiently with four-way stop signs.”
The beverage cart has arrived. Mark gets his tomato juice, Saskia asks for hot water. “I’ve never seen that before,” he says.
She sips. “Well, now you have.”
He munches on his peanuts. The oil, like potassium, helps to calm him. Saskia gives him hers.
“I’m going to try to sleep,” she says. She pulls a neck pillow out of her carry-on bag, arranges her blanket, closes her eyes. After a minute she opens them again. “You don’t have any idea why Mette took off?”
“No.”
“She didn’t mention anything to you in the days or weeks right before? Frustrations with work?”
“Nothing.”
“Did she ever . . . Has she ever said anything about a boyfriend or girlfriend? Having one, wanting one, breaking up with one? Anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“And you never thought to ask?”
Once again, she sounds irritated. “No. It sounds like you didn’t, either.”
“But I thought about it.”
“As you irrefutably remarked a few minutes ago, I’m the way I am.”
“You’re right, my bad. I just thought . . . I don’t know, thinking of you two as buddies, again. That you’d have had more opportunity than me.”
“Perhaps I did. But unfortunately I wasn’t aware of it.” He ponders for a little while. “I’m getting the idea that we both thought the other knew more.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should communicate more.”
“Maybe.”
She closes her eyes. After a minute or two it sounds like she’s asleep. He remembers this about her, from all those years ago, her ease at falling asleep in chairs and other cramped spaces. Presumably her small size is an advantage. He’s seen big men sleeping in chairs, too, but he can never do it. He would rather not even try, so he gets up and sticks his head in the rear galley and asks the two stewardesses chatting there if he could have a cup of coffee. One of them complies with that gratifying enthusiasm that fools foolish men such as himself into imagining she might be willing to be his girlfriend.
He returns to his seat with his coffee and tries to read more of that extremely long novel, but brief bouts of turbulence keep distracting him with jolts of adrenaline. Eventually he gives up. He avoids looking at Saskia for a while, then looks at her. She seems deep asleep. He had a dream several years ago about two women he dated for a brief while in his twenties, first Stephanie, then Janice. In both cases they initiated the relationship, for which he was surprised and grateful, and also ended it, by which he was pained and puzzled. In reality they were fellow graduate students in astronomy, but in his dream they were musicians. Obviously, he had conflated them with all those girls he’d had crushes on during his adolescent summers at music camp. In his dream, Stephanie and Janice were performing the Kodály duo in a recital, Stephanie on violin, Janice on cello. Mark was in the audience listening, and he knew, in the dream, that both of them had been anxious beforehand about not doing well, but they played beautifully, and when he met them afterward they were happy. They were also tired, so he took them home to his apartment, where he kept a bed for each. He put on fresh sheets while the two women lolled sleepily in chairs. Then he carried each to her bed. Their eyes were half closed. He tucked them in and kissed them good night. Each had just enough energy to murmur thanks before falling asleep. Then he sat in one of the chairs and watched them both sleep and felt terribly alone.
Saskia told him once, during the years after their relationship when they occasionally communicated regarding Mette, that he often struck her as an extraterrestrial, examining human life with a curiosity that seemed benevolent, but also creepy. She joked that he’d become an astronomer because he was searching for his home planet. Far from being offended, he found the idea flattering. One strives as a scientist to be clear-eyed, not to be enmired in distorting human emotions. (That’s the word that always comes to him regarding emotions: “enmired.”) It depresses him when he observes teams of scientists competing with each other to be the first to make a discovery, prejudicially denigrating the work of the other team. It depresses him when he observes prominent scientists motivated by personal ambition, fame, awards—paltry things in comparison with establishing a single true fact about the nature of reality. Most of the more famous scientists, even today, are male, and it depresses him to contemplate how much human male achievement is sublimated sexual display, fanning the peacock tail, lining the nest with bright objects, gaining access to more females.
When he was still a graduate student he was part of a team that came to suspect it had discovered the first brown dwarf, causing the team leader to dance with visions of sugarplums. Suddenly there was paranoia about what the team at the University of California was doing, and eventually there was a media circus, and then scientists who were peripheral observers criticized the findings with points that were partly valid and partly envious, and Mark had a revelatory vision of this mysterious low-temperature gaseous body, indubitably out there, with no awareness that it needed a designation, simply itself, a marvelous fact, and on a rocky planet 103 light-years away a bunch of chimpanzees were jumping up and down and hitting one another on the head for the right to call it an M dwarf or an L dwarf so that they could get more bananas in the form of a bigger chair in one of the congresses of learned chimps, or five minutes on TV with an ooh-ooh-ah-ah-ing host who thought light-years were units of time.
He’s always been temperamentally attracted to unsexy
