The Astronomer’s Wife
fiction by Risa Mickenberg
The strongest force in the universe isn’t gravity. It’s jealousy. At night, my husband is always out, bouncing radio waves off the stars, looking through a telescope into the deep past. Seeing what man has never seen. While I sit at the kitchen table reading the back of a Celestial Seasonings tea box. The box quotes George Washington Carver: “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.” And I see: I’m jealous of my husband’s relationship with the universe.
Nights, he works at the Very Large Array, an astronomical radio observatory. Twenty-seven giant radio dishes in a Y in the desert, in-between Socorro and Pie Town, New Mexico, an hour from each and next to nothing: that’s why we’re here. He needs to be away from interference.
If you want a laugh, take a Google Street View tour of Socorro by day: motor lodges and Bank of America, liquor stores and parking lots, the Mission, the Circle-K supermarket and the Sonic and, boom, you’re back on the road, surrounded by dead volcanoes.
That is, if the Street View works. Often, the picture breaks up into a digital bouquet of fiber optics. One of the world’s most powerful radio observatories fucks things up on earth. I can tell you that.
The Circle-K is cold and it’s somewhere to go. In the meat aisle, I see a sign that says Special Flap Meat. I take a picture of it with my phone so I can try to make him laugh. Maybe I’ll surprise him with it for dinner.
Judging from the air-conditioned aisles at the Circle-K, it seems like people here survive on cheap meat and rice and beans and Slim-Fast and frozen things that melt in your car on the drive home.
There’s precious little around here in the way of fruit or leafy greens but there’s uranium and silver and coal and gold and coal and crude and pumice and potash and mica and the mining college and the reservation and the border police and pit bulls tied up in yards.
When I met my husband, the idea of dating an astronomer seemed sexy. It was beyond my grasp: all of it. The atomic weight of anything, the awesomeness of our insignificance. That I knew none of that didn’t seem to matter to him in the salad days, back in Providence, in the beginning.
Back at our rental home, I put away the groceries. My contributions to our marriage: my folded garbage bags, our vacuumed carpet, cleanliness of our sheets, the cleanliness of our temporary housing house, they’re my in-his-face sacrifice. He can’t eat and sleep without feeling it: the blatant, wasted human potential of me.
My husband’s on a quest for extraterrestrial knowledge and I’m on a quest for attention. Both make you feel small, but his insignificance seems to suit him. He’s never been happier. More radiant. More distant. I hate it.
Sometimes I Google map other places at night- view the Street View of places we could have lived instead if he hadn’t “lucked out” by being here: Berkeley. Even New Haven.
By day, I paint screen grabs from my laptop while he sleeps. Gouaches on paper of my computer desktops: cluttered and text-heavy with too many open windows of ugly web pages and photo landscapes of other places and cheap, colorful icons against a NASA screen saver.
The sunsets here are spectacular in terms of their disappointment: he wakes up and gets in the shower to get ready for work and his mind is already elsewhere.
The local Socorro weekly rag tries to paint the town as having a “thriving art and music scene.”
Before we moved here, I thought I might partake, but early on, I found myself grossed out by the long-haired jam sessions and gallery openings with their inevitable sagebrush landscapes. I long for the civilized world of the artificial.
I’ve developed a bitter taste for Milky Ways. At night, while the real thing emits radio waves for his viewing pleasure, I bite my fun-sized version of it, hard from the freezer, and never enough. He either doesn’t notice I’m getting fat or he doesn’t say. Measurements are his thing, so he ought to know, if he were paying attention. Maybe I’m testing him. Maybe marriage is just a test.
Nearby, the government tests explosives. They blow up vans for first responders. They make pipe bombs and explode fertilizer. We are a hundred miles from where they did the Trinity test.
People celebrate chemicals in their town names here. Visit scenic Vanadium, New Mexico. Pack a lunch and explore what’s left of Old Chloride. Watch missile trails in the sky.
Predator drones fly overhead at night, looking for border jumpers and drug smugglers, not finding enough to justify the cost but, in Congress, they’re so popular, local Republicans say you could elect a drone president.
I sometimes watch my husband when he sleeps during the day. His back: that expanse that I love and hate, simultaneously. Shades down, sheets kicked off, his body sometimes twitching like a dog’s, dreaming of chasing black holes and white dwarves, I imagine, and I feel him pulling away from me and I think about how it’s all a mystery. I am not a down-to-earth person, but he makes me one. He doesn’t mean to, I know. It’s a big world but it’s a bigger solar system, a bigger galaxy, a bigger universe. And it’s lonely as shit when you think about it; when you’re in a space where that’s all you have time to do.
I’ve read that Einstein had theories first and proved them later. Loneliness either makes you intuitive or superstitious. I hate that I read my husband’s horoscopes. I hate that he probably doesn’t even know my sign.
Pre-Copernicus, astronomy, and astrology were the same thing. Then astronomy was proven measurable, and astrology became just an unproven belief: that the stars have some effect on mundane matters of the heart. Even if astrology can’t prove it, I’m here to tell you that they do.
I find myself believing in signs. Road signs that say things like It’s Time For A Change: Jiffy Lube. Handwritten on a pump: We Are Out Of Gas.
Spouses of astronomers are no fun at parties. We’re all bright; you’d think we’d connect, but we never do. While they discuss the “previously unimaginable smallness” of the planets orbiting Formalhaut, we eat hummus and talk about television. Other peoples’ kids tug at other peoples’ sleeves, wanting to go home. I tug at his.
I am a distraction to the ecstasy of understanding. I cook meat and watch him bang out the door and I am left with the Tonight Show.
It sucks to try to make a life in the outposts of great observatories, in the middle of nowhere, among nuclear testing sites and mineral mines and the darkness of army bases.
Sometimes, when he comes home, he tries to tell me what he’s seen. He’s ecstatic. I can’t possibly react the way I should. I know how impossible it must be to come home, after what he’s sees every night, to little old me. At least he tries.
I fall asleep on the sofa. I don’t remember what I dream.
There are these once-in-a-lifetime occurrences; that’s part of what he’s looking for. I respect the hell, and the heaven, or the heavens, out of it. However you’d say it. I do. I respect his powers of observation. So when he comes home this time, and I wake at the sound of the screened door, and, for the first time in a long time, he pulls me off the sofa and down onto the carpet that I keep meaning to steam clean and he shows me he still has imagination and longing and that I’m somehow involved, I understand that I matter.
We try to connect, not just collide. We keep our eyes open. I feel him trying to take me somewhere, trying to meet me somewhere beyond space and time, where only we could go, where no one else and nothing else could interfere. Where we were part of everything and all that jazz. He still had it in him to try to take me there, god bless him.
I try to put my petty, domestic resentments on the back burner, but sex is still the place for us where I am unable to make myself less than understood.
It’s clear: there is something bigger out there for him. Something that doesn’t try to bring him down and spend time wishing he would think about things as mundane as sour sponges in the sink, or us, or T.V., or me.
Like the planets orbiting his precious Formalhaut, I was smaller than I could have previously imagined. I was ashamed and properly insignificant. I don’t know why I wanted to be the brightest star in someone’s sky.
He came outside me. He knew I wanted him to. We were never going to reproduce. It was never his thing.
In the daylight of the bathroom, under the powerless shower, I knew it was over. I knew, and I knew he knew, and it was fine, and I knew that he knew that too. On earth, there’s no lonelier life than to be an astronomer’s wife. That much wasn’t beyond his comprehension.
The Astronomer’s Wife © 2019 by Risa Mickenberg. Published inDel Sol Review 2019.
