Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

She stared at her fingernail for six and a half hours.

It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all. Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there. Humans had gone to the moon. And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be. Look what we humans had done. We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly. It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt. Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions? When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.

this may have just changed my life

But she knew what she had to do.

she’s going to break up with vanessa isn’t she

I’ll sneak into your house just to kiss you once a week if that’s what I can get. I’ll wait until Frances is in college if that’s what I have to do. Are you insane, Joan? I want you. Forever. I told you that. I don’t care what it takes.”

“But you might lose everything you dreamed of.” “Then I’ll lose it,” Vanessa said. “Let them take it. Just don’t let them take you.”

so henren of them

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Vanessa said. “But if it’s you or the space shuttle…fuck the space shuttle.”

She cannot love Vanessa without understanding why she will do what she does next. But she is also furious.

He puts his hand on Joan’s shoulder. “Tell her what you need to tell her,” he whispers.

We wanted to touch the stars, and look what we did. There’s nothing more we could ask from the universe, or this God you always talk about, than that. So it’s okay. It’s fine. Okay, Joan? For me, as long as you all know what you meant to me, it all worked out fine.”

“When he says, ‘Tell my wife I love her very much…’ ” Vanessa says. “And then he says, ‘She knows,’ ”

“Yeah,” Vanessa says. “That’s it. That’s the best part of that song. But do you think she knows? Do you really think she knows?” “She knows,” Joan says. “She absolutely knows.” “Okay,” Vanessa says. “I can live with that.”

She should have said that. Oh, she should have said that.