All Our Wrong Todays(18)
Back at the hover car, Xiao and Asher were synthesizing sandwiches and beer. We flew back to the city in silence, Asher switching off the autopilot to steward us home himself, Deisha staring down at the treetops below us, Xiao napping on my shoulder in the back, me trying to focus on my grief to keep from imagining what it might feel like to kiss my closest female friend. Is there a word for a thing you know you absolutely shouldn’t do, that would be wrong in every way that matters to you, but that you’re pretty sure you’re going to do anyway? Or is that just—human?
I suddenly realized the antique watch was in my pocket. I hadn’t intended to take it with me. By international law, you weren’t allowed to remove anything from a biosphere preserve. I’d accidentally committed my first crime. There were more to come.
After we said good-bye to Asher and Xiao, I told Deisha we could really talk now, if she had time. I’d already had my funereal nights with Hester, Megan, and Tabitha, so I can’t pretend I had no idea where it could go. Back at my place, I told her about my mom’s last words, I cried, she held me, I kissed her, we slept together. Could I have found another way to alienate someone that cared about me? Probably. But I like to stick with the classics.
The next day I took the job at my father’s lab. Three days later I met Penelope Weschler. I only ever saw Deisha, Xiao, and Asher one last time and then never again—a bar, dumb jokes, and sad smiles, Deisha keeping her distance, tensing when we hugged good-bye, old friends drifting apart because that’s what old friends do.
27
Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure. I’ve never succeeded at anything, so for me failure is pretty much synonymous with life itself. But for other people, people who more or less succeed at everything they attempt, people like my father and Penelope, their reactions to failure can be unpredictable.
For example, after washing out as an astronaut, Penelope had a lot of unprotected sex with strangers. She’d meet them wherever, go back to their homes, and if the question of contraception came up—and hilariously few of them even broached the subject, assuming if she didn’t mention it she must be on an appropriate gametic suppressant—she’d never lie. She’d just say she didn’t use protection, and if they wanted her, they’d roll the dice and see what happened. Most of them went for it without hesitation, too caught up in being desired by this hungry, beautiful woman to fret over the implications, and the few who did hesitate were easily seduced by her hunger and beauty.
Why have unprotected sex when it was so easy to avoid conception? Because, you know, fate or something. Penelope figured that fate had wired her brain to make her the perfect astronaut while also giving her an undetectable neurological flaw that ensured she’d never be able to soar through the cosmos. Fate had fucked with her. And so she would fuck with fate. She’d wager her body, and every morning she didn’t wake up pregnant was another day she’d kept a step ahead of destiny.
She told herself if it happened, she’d keep the baby. Whoever the father was, she’d try as hard as she could to make it work with him as parents. She’d focus her prodigious ambitions on motherhood. She might never travel between planets, but she’d be the best mom who ever lived.
Except Penelope never actually got pregnant. No matter how many men she went home with, she couldn’t screw away her destiny.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this when we slept together. I thought I was special. That maybe because she was about to embark on a pioneering experimental mission through space and time from which she might not return, she wanted to get laid one last time. And, for some inexplicable reason, she liked the look of me.
When she didn’t mention anything about protection, well, I was one of those guys who just assumed she was taking care of it. Nobody ever expected me to take care of anything. Let alone something as obvious as ensuring my sperm didn’t fertilize her egg.
If any of this sounds like I’m moralizing, then I’m not expressing myself clearly enough. It doesn’t bother me at all that Penelope slept with a bunch of strangers. I was one of them. What bothers me is that I was too dumb to realize it didn’t matter to her. At least not the way I wanted it to.
28
Penelope and I spent the night together and it’s possible I’m an adequate enough writer to convey something of its giddy eroticism. But I don’t want to. I’d seen her naked before, but sight really is the least alluring sense. The way she felt, her skin on my skin, the weight of her on top of me, my body inside her body, taste and scent, the sounds we made, the density of all that sensory experience makes the way she looked kind of beside the point. Although I remember everything about the way she looked because she told me to leave the lights on.
I’ve already said too much. I want it to be private, that if nothing else. I know it doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter, but it did matter, it still does matter, to me.
Let me try this again—we slept together.
Afterward, lying in my bed, because she came to my place so she could leave whenever she wanted, we talked.
That’s what I want to say about it, that it wasn’t just thirty-eight minutes of aerobic thrusting and a strained good-bye. She stayed for almost three hours. We lay curled up in each other and talked about our lives. Mostly she talked about her life and I listened, tried to ask the right questions and memorize her answers in case this wasn’t just a one-off, in case it became something more.