The Dream Life of Astronauts Page 5

  —

  Clark’s house was on River Road, across from the island. The yard needed mowing and the paint on the shutters was flaking off, but it was a nice, two-story house with a front porch and windows that looked out over the Indian River. Frankie parked next to the Trans Am, checked his hair in the rearview mirror, then walked up the steps and rang the bell.

  The door opened a few moments later and a woman stood next to it, eyeing him. She wore jeans and a sleeveless white shirt that buttoned up the front. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was pretty and young-looking—though not young enough to be Clark’s daughter.

  “You must be Frankie,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m Pepper. Come in.” He stepped past her as she turned and hollered up the staircase, “Clark! Frankie’s here!”

  Clark’s voice called from above, “Can you come up here for a second, Pep?”

  “Make yourself at home,” she told Frankie, then bounded up the stairs.

  Frankie stood in the foyer, listening to the muffled sound of their voices. Then he wandered into the living room. There was a long, lipstick-red sofa with round, white pillows at either end. A black, lacquered coffee table on which sat a Sears catalogue, a copy of House & Garden, and a glass ashtray. A treadmill in one corner. Nothing about the room indicated that an ex-astronaut lived there—until Frankie reached the bookcase. There were no books, but every shelf was crammed full of framed photos, nearly all of them pictures of Clark in his NASA days: smiling alongside a trio of crew-cutted men in the launch room; dressed in an orange jumpsuit and waving on a tarmac; sitting inside some sort of simulator and staring at a panel of gauges with a stern look of concentration on his face. In one photo, he was shaking John Glenn’s hand. “For Clark,” the inscription read, “—with high hopes!” and underneath it, Glenn’s signature.

  Relieved, almost giddy, Frankie moved on to the kitchen. There were dirty dishes in the sink, Evans Realty magnets on the refrigerator. Over the toaster, a large picture frame holding patches from each of the Apollo missions, and over the coffeemaker, Clark’s framed NASA ID badge.

  In the dining room, Frankie found Clark’s official astronaut portrait. Standing before a backdrop of the moon, Clark wore a spacesuit and was looking not at the camera but slightly above and past it, his helmet under one arm, his eyes filled with glitter and promise. He looked godlike to Frankie, who had an erection.

  Adjusting himself in his jeans, he turned away from the portrait and spotted a bell jar nearly a foot high on the middle of a sideboard. Inside the jar was a pedestal, and on top of the pedestal was a jagged gray rock no bigger than a golf ball.

  “Buddy!”

  Frankie jumped and spun around. Clark and Pepper were standing at the entrance to the dining room, smiling at him. “Hi,” he said, folding his hands in front of his crotch.

  “You and I are becoming a habit. And good news: Pepper approves.”

  Pepper squeezed Clark’s elbow and ruffled a hand through his hair.

  Clark pointed toward the bell jar. “You know what that is?”

  “A moon rock?”

  Clark seemed disappointed that Frankie already knew. “A bona fide moon rock. Buzz Aldrin gave that to me.”

  “He won’t even let me touch it,” Pepper said.

  “I let you hold it once,” Clark reminded her. “How about you, buddy? Want to hold it?”

  “Yeah,” Frankie said. “I’d like to.”

  Clark stepped around the table, lifted the bell jar, and set it aside. Delicately, he picked up the rock and placed it on Frankie’s palm. Frankie imagined it humming against his skin, charged with some sort of space energy that would give him special powers here on Earth. His palm twitched and the rock rolled to the side.

  “Careful!” Clark said. His reflexes were quick; in the same instant that it moved, he grabbed it back.

  “Thanks for letting me hold it.”

  “I’d say ‘any time,’ but it probably won’t happen again,” Clark said, returning the rock to its pedestal and covering it.

  “He loves that rock more than he loves me,” Pepper said.

  “Not true. I love food more than I love you.” Clark rubbed his palms together. “Who’s hungry?”

  Pounders was one town over, in Rockledge. Just inside the door, a hostess stood next to a large scale that had a digital readout. Her T-shirt had a cartoon pig on it, its mouth smeared with barbeque sauce. She welcomed them and invited Pepper to weigh in first. Pepper stepped onto the scale.

  “One-eighteen and twenty-four ounces,” the hostess said. She asked Pepper’s name, then wrote it and her weight on a card with a red Sharpie.

  “One-seventy-one and six ounces,” she announced when Clark stood on the scale, and “One-oh-nine on the dot,” when it was Frankie’s turn.

  “Lighter than me.” Pepper feigned jealousy.

  “Nobody’s hiding lead in their pockets, I hope,” the hostess said.

  “Not us,” Clark told her. “We’re tried and true.”

  She smiled, opened her hand to the dining room, and said, “Pig out!”

  They chose a table, sat down and ordered drinks (iced tea for Pepper and Frankie, bourbon and Coke for Clark), and then got up again and stood in a buffet line. There was barbeque, fried chicken, fish squares, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and four different kinds of dessert, including an enormous pan of banana pudding, which was half gone and sliding forward like lava. “Want to compete?” Clark asked Frankie as they filled their plates.

  Frankie still didn’t get it. “How?”

  “We weigh in again at the end of the meal. They charge by the ounce. Whoever gains the most wins.”

  “I don’t eat much,” Frankie said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pepper said, reaching for the banana pudding spoon. “I’m going to win.”

  Clark drank three bourbons. Both he and Pepper went back for seconds before Frankie was halfway through his plate of food. He’d taken too much because he’d wanted to try everything on the buffet, but he realized it didn’t matter because if he didn’t eat it, it was free. “This restaurant makes the most sense of any around,” Clark said, chewing. “Eating out should be like buying a shirt. You go into a store and try on a few shirts, but you only pay for the one you actually walk out with.”

  Frankie sipped his tea from a cup so wide he had to use two hands to lift it. He was beginning to doubt Clark was gay. Pepper smiled whenever he caught her eye. He smiled back, but felt uncomfortable. “Are you two married?” he asked.

  She waved her left hand and showed Frankie her wedding band. “Seven years.”

  He spotted a matching band on Clark’s finger and was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before. “Do you have kids?”

  This, for some reason, made Clark laugh, and Pepper reached over and lightly slapped his arm. “No,” she said.

  Clark wiped his mouth with his napkin. Then he downed the last of his bourbon, pushed back from the table, and lit a cigarette. “Frankie’s interested in space travel, but he doesn’t want to do it through NASA.”

  “You want to be a cosmonaut?” Pepper asked.

  “I’d like to have my own space ship,” Frankie said. He looked at Clark. “Can we talk about Gordon Cooper now? The sighting?”

  Clark winced. “You’re not going to bring up that did-we-descend-from-aliens business again, are you?”

  “No. I’d just like to hear about what he saw.”

  “Look, call it what you want, but my theory is that being out in all that space does something to people’s heads. Certain big-ego types, that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It can make certain kinds of people a little—” Clark seesawed the hand holding the cigarette, zigzagging the smoke.

  “But what’s the story?”

  “The story is, there is no story. Cooper saw ice, or something like ice, coming off the back of his ship. From what I heard, the boys in Ground Control groaned big-time
over that one. Same thing happened with Carpenter.”

  “Scott Carpenter photographed a saucer,” Frankie said. “I read about it in a book, and saw the picture.”

  “He photographed a tracking balloon. He said it was a saucer.”

  “He believed it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s my point. Certain kinds of people—with an inflated sense of their own importance—get blasted up there and then get a little, I don’t know, light-headed. They start seeing things. It’s loony tunes.”

  “Clark’s a little bitter,” Pepper said around her last spoonful of pudding.

  “I’m not bitter. I’m realistic.”

  Frankie said, “I read that NASA officials told reporters not to ask questions about that stuff.”

  “Exactly. Because it was embarrassing. Glenn started it on his Mercury orbit with voodoo fairy lights zipping around his head, and a bunch of the other boys jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them couldn’t go up there without thinking they saw some alien whatever. It’s nonsense.”

  Frankie thought of the photograph of Clark shaking John Glenn’s hand, and Glenn’s inscription.

  “Lovell and Aldrin?” Clark continued. “You know what they were looking at when they cried UFO? Their own jettisoned trash bags. If that had been me, and reporters had been allowed to question me about it, I’d be ashamed to show my face. ‘I saw a UFO! I saw a UFO!’ Please.”

  “Buzz Aldrin gave you the moon rock,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah. Well.” Clark snubbed out his cigarette in a plastic ashtray. “Even a loony can give a nice present.”

  They weighed themselves again before leaving. Clark paid the bill. On the drive back to Cocoa, in the backseat of the Trans Am, Frankie decided he was still attracted to Clark, but no longer liked him. There was something mean about him. As for his opinions on the UFO sightings, he was just—wrong. In their driveway, Frankie thanked them both for dinner and started to say good night, but instead of shaking the hand he held out, Clark said, “Whoa, buddy, what’s the hurry? Don’t you want to come inside?”

  “What for?”

  Pepper looked out over the river and adjusted the purse hanging from her shoulder.

  Clark shrugged. “Wild times. A little excitement.”

  Frankie looked at Clark in the moonlight. His solid shoulders, his treadmill-tended waist. The shaggy brown hair falling over his forehead.

  “Come on in,” the astronaut said, nodding toward the house.

  He sat in the living room on the sofa and accepted the beer Pepper offered him. He’d never drunk alcohol before, but stepping over the threshold into the house for the second time felt like crossing a border into another country, where a whole new set of rules and customs existed. The beer tasted awful, but he drank it, while Pepper sat next to him and talked about the kindergarteners she taught and Clark drank another bourbon and smoked, standing next to the picture window. Clark’s mood had changed. A redness had come over his face, and he stared at Frankie as if he might not even want him there. But when he’d taken the last swallow of his drink, he nodded toward him and said, “Why don’t you chug that thing and the three of us go upstairs?”

  Frankie followed them up the staircase. Expect nothing, he told himself, even as he became aroused. This is a tour of the house. Clark’s a realtor, after all. Maybe they’re selling the place. But Pepper led them into the master bedroom, where she turned around and smiled and said to him, “If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s okay. You just tell us. But I thought I’d take my clothes off now.”

  Frankie felt Clark’s hand rest on his shoulder.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Pepper asked.

  “No,” Frankie said.

  “Do you want to take yours off?” She asked this in a polite way that really did seem to leave the matter open.

  “Okay,” Frankie said.

  “How about you, Clark?”

  “Why not,” Clark said, releasing Frankie’s shoulder. He began to unbutton his shirt.

  Pepper moved slowly but efficiently; she was naked in what seemed like no time. Frankie liked her body as a scientific wonder: the movement of her breasts as she bent to pull back the bedspread; the patch of hair between her legs. He matched Clark item for item, pacing himself against the astronaut’s progress, and by the time he was naked, his dick was sticking straight up against his belly. Clark’s was soft and hanging like a third ball.

  “You look sexy,” Pepper told Frankie. “Do you want to lie down here with me?”

  “What about Clark?” Frankie asked.

  “I’ll be in this chair,” Clark said and dropped down into a floral-patterned, wingback chair in the corner.

  Frankie hesitated, watching him.

  “Come lie down with me,” Pepper said.

  “But—” Frankie began.

  “Go on, buddy,” Clark said. He put his hand on his dick and started squeezing it as if it were the bulb of a blood-pressure cuff.

  Pepper had pulled down the top sheet along with the bedspread and was stretched out flat on her back now. “It’s okay,” she said. “This is what we do. Clark likes to watch.”

  “Pretend I’m not here,” Clark said.

  Frankie felt a little dizzy—from the beer, maybe. “I can’t—touch you?”

  “Not if I’m not here,” Clark said.

  “But you are here.”

  “No, I’m not. You’re doing this, just you and her. I’m not even in the room, buddy.”

  “It’s going to feel so horny to have you lying here with me,” Pepper said.

  Frankie’s bare feet felt weighted to the floor. His toes gripped the carpet. But he made himself walk the several steps it took to get to the foot of the bed and climbed onto it. Pepper turned onto her hip, patted the mattress, and he scooted up alongside her.

  “Really nice,” she said.

  Was it? Frankie supposed so. At least, it wasn’t gross, lying naked in the air-conditioning, in the company of people who had invited him, who wanted him to be there. And for as disappointed as he was that he wouldn’t get to touch Clark, it actually helped him relax to imagine Clark was there, watching, and that Pepper was enthusiastic. Pepper, whose voice had dropped to a whisper as she’d said Really nice and who was petting the top of Frankie’s head, the way his mother used to when she put him down for his afternoon nap.

  But then her other hand moved to his dick, and his dick, he realized, had gone soft.

  When she began to pet it—much the same way she was petting his head—he flinched.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked sweetly.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  She touched him down there again, and he flinched again, and moved a hand to cover himself, both embarrassed by his limpness and wanting to be left alone.

  “Do you not want to do this?” Pepper asked.

  “It’s just—I thought maybe with all three of us. But—maybe not?”

  She exhaled through her nose. “I think I get it,” she said.

  “What’s going on over there?” Clark asked from the corner.

  Pepper rolled over. She moved backward until she was sitting against the headboard and drew her knees toward her chest. “Nothing,” she said.

  Frankie heard the wingback chair creak. “Nothing?”

  “He doesn’t swing my way, Clark.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “I swing,” Frankie said, suddenly conscious of wanting to be a good guest. “But toward guys, mostly. Mostly only, I mean.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Clark asked.

  Pepper pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. For a while she just sat there, glancing around the dimly lit room. Then she got out of bed and reached for her panties and bra. “Jesus, Clark, can’t you do anything right?”

  “How was I supposed to know?” Clark asked.

  “You’re such a screw-up,” she said. “I don’t know why I expect anything different.” She was as smooth at dressing as she was at undressing. She was alre
ady buttoning up her shirt. “Sweetheart,” she said to Frankie, “you swing any way you want. That’s just fine. I’m really sorry about the misunderstanding.” She cut her eyes over to Clark again and said, “Jesus.”

  “So I’m supposed to be a mind reader that he’s a closet case?” Clark asked.

  “I’m not in the closet,” Frankie said.

  “Well, you might have told me that, buddy.”

  “He shouldn’t have to tell you,” Pepper said. “You could intuit, you know? You could learn for once in your life how to read people. Then maybe you’d get somewhere.” She turned to Frankie again. “Get dressed, honey. And please don’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Hey, you didn’t do such a great job, either,” Clark said. “And what’s that supposed to mean, ‘get somewhere’?”

  “In your life,” Pepper said. “In your marriage.”

  “I’m somewhere.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re not even here, remember?”

  Clark shifted his gaze from Pepper to Frankie, and for a moment he just stared at Frankie as if trying to make sense of him. Finally, he said, “Guess it’s time for you to leave, buddy.”

  Frankie gathered his clothes and clutched them in front of him as he made his way down the stairs.

  —

  “There’s no end to the sickness and depravity of the human spirit,” Melissa said upon hearing the story before lunch the following Monday, on a bench in the commons. “I guess that’s the good news.”

  “Maybe,” Frankie said.

  “I wonder if people like that would go for a chubby girl like me.”

  “He’s not nice. She is, but not him. You think he’ll come after me?”

  “Did you give him your phone number?”

  “No.”

  “Does he even know where you live?”

  “No.” Frankie had his backpack open on the ground between his sneakers and was holding the moon fragment, turning it in his hands.

  “You’re a minor and they tried to have sex with you,” Melissa said. “And they gave you alcohol. If they came after you, you could go public and expose them as extreme molesters.”