Atmosphere

Fall 1981

Joan barely slept. Neither of them did. If the moon was out and the lights were low, they were together, wide awake in bed.

So many nights, Joan felt as if her heart might implode as she rubbed her leg against Vanessa’s, felt the softness and bone of her, the way her upper thighs were smooth, her knees knobby.

Joan had had no idea how quickly you could learn another’s body. How swiftly their legs become your legs, their arms your arms. She was no longer Joan, or no longer only Joan. She was also part of this larger body, this larger self. That could only exist when they were together.

And yet, when she was only Joan, that had changed, too.

Joan’s body felt alive—an electric current running from her chest down her legs.

She felt it when Vanessa was close to her. She felt it when she was waiting for her. When she was thinking about her. When she was entirely alone.

Joan did not need Vanessa in order to feel this current. Because it now lived in her. It was hers.

On the nights when Joan fell asleep with Vanessa in her bed, she was grateful for that charge. But on the nights when Joan fell asleep alone, feeling the soft sheets against the skin of her legs, grazing her own fingertips across her own belly, she was so grateful that she now possessed it. That it had possessed her.

From the outside, her life looked the same. She kept her dates with Frances. Neither she nor Vanessa were ever late to work, despite how tempted they were to stay in bed.

Joan said nothing to Barbara, nothing to her parents. When she hung out with Donna and Griff, she rarely mentioned Vanessa. When they were all at the Outpost together, Joan and Vanessa always sat at least one person away from each other. When they ran into eachother at JSC, they acted like they always had: two friends, catching up.

To everyone else except the two of them, nothing had changed.

Except on those perfect nights when, after saying goodbye at the bar or Frenchie’s or driving home separately from a barbecue, there would be a soft, perilous knock on Joan’s door an hour later.

God, that sound. The knowledge that the part of Joan’s day that was in black and white had ended, and color was about to bleed in and flood her night.

Vanessa’s voice, so smooth, so low. “Hi.”

Joan’s after, smaller, excitable. “Hi.”

—

“Can I ask you something ? ” Joan said one night as she gave Vanessa a massage. Joan was in her underwear and bra, Vanessa wrapped up in Joan’s bedsheets.

It was so easy, to be this close to someone. Why had it ever seemed out of reach?

“You can ask me anything,” Vanessa said without looking back at her.

“Does your mother know?”

Joan could feel Vanessa’s shoulders tighten. She dug deeper into them.

“Does my mother know what?”

Joan knew there was no need to clarify.

“My mother is Catholic,” Vanessa said, finally. “So no, she does not.” Her flat tone made Joan think there was nothing more to say but then, after a moment, Vanessa spoke again: “I think she has her suspicions. But she will never ask me directly. In exchange, I never do anything to make it obvious.”

Joan could not conceive of telling her own parents; she certainly was not going to tell Barbara. Sometimes, Joan felt as if the words were in her throat, desperate to leap out of her mouth. But she held them back.

No matter how easy it was for Joan to lose herself in this new life, she was constantly aware of the cold, hard borders of it. The world would not care for her and Vanessa as they cared for each other.

It wouldn’t matter how pure the warmth in her chest felt. It wouldn’t matter that Joan had loved and accepted so many others. There were people—many people—who would never return that kindness.

It was too early, in all of this, to know what the future held. But what Joan understood already was that what they had together was a lit candle, and the wind could be fierce.

“Are you Catholic?” Joan asked.

Vanessa turned over onto her back and pulled the sheets up over them both. “I no longer believe in God,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Joan grabbed Vanessa’s hand and started playing with her fingers, grazing her own through the gaps in Vanessa’s. She saw that Vanessa had a hangnail on her right middle finger, the skin reddening.

Joan thought of all the people she believed she had known well in her life. Her family, her old friends back in college, Donna and Griff. She would have said she knew everything about them. But it was only now, vulnerable in the intimacy of the middle of the night, that things turned granular. It was only now, in the quiet of this moment, that Joan’s eyes could see the redness around Vanessa’s cuticle.

“You don’t believe in any god at all, or just the Catholic God?” Joan asked.

“The Catholic one is the only one I know. And I will fight against it until the day I die.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean…sometimes my mother and I go months without speaking to each other because I refuse to go to Mass, and she refuses to drop it.”

“Months?”

“One time it was a year.”

Joan’s eyes went wide.

“She says I’m stubborn,” Vanessa said. “But it’s…it’s hard to pick up the phone sometimes when I’m mad. And that doesn’t come from nowhere—I got it from her.”

“Don’t you miss her? When you aren’t talking?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why not just go to Mass when you visit her and ignore what they say?”

Vanessa turned onto her side, to face Joan. “Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

Joan cracked a smile.

“What’s funny?”

“No, nothing’s funny. It’s just…you’re so…dauntless.”

“I’m dauntless?” Vanessa said.

“Yeah! I mean, you’re so bold. You seem so unafraid. And…I don’t know. I feel like I’m always trying to not cause problems, but you’re not like that. You stand up for what you believe in, and I love what you believe in.”

“You do?” Vanessa said.

“You’re saying you don’t believe in a God who would hate, right? And if that God does exist, you’ll remain defiant.”

“Yes, that’s…yes.”

“Yeah, that’s incredibly daring! And it’s beautiful.”

“What about you?” Vanessa asked, her voice quieting. “Do you believe in God?”

“I think I do. In a different way than you’re talking about, though.”

Vanessa lay back on the bed, parallel to the headboard, and Joan did the same.

“Tell me,” Vanessa said.

“Well, my parents are Protestant. They believe that God made the world in six days. Eve came from Adam. The Earth is six thousand years old.”

“But that doesn’t work for you.”

Joan shook her head. “The Earth is at least four and a half billion years old. We know that, objectively. So I had to start asking myself different questions.”

“Because science and God don’t mix?”

Joan sat up. “No, no, no. Not at all. I don’t feel that way at all.”

“But why not? Why, when they tell you that God created man out of thin air and then you learn about evolution, why does the whole thing not crumble for you?”

“Because there are so many ways to define God and there’s still so much unknown about the universe. I could never say that science has obliterated the possibility of God. Certainly I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. And I think something would be lost, if it did. Or maybe I should say that I hope that if it did happen, it would only be because something even more incredible was discovered.”

Vanessa smiled. “You’re so passionate about the subject of God,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“I’m passionate about the Milky Way,” Joan said. “And I think God’s in it.”

“I’m listening…”

Joan looked at her askance. “You really want to hear all of this?”

“Yes, I’m fascinated,” Vanessa said.

“Really?”

“Desperately. I want to hear it all.”

Joan beamed and tried to hold back her smile. In all of her time spent watching others, she hadn’t picked up on this part of falling in love, that someone could look at you as if you were the very center of everything. And even though you knew better, you’d allow yourself a moment to believe you were worthy of being revolved around, too.

“Okay,” Joan started. “Well, the larger questions we ask when we talk about God seem to be ‘Why are we here?’ And ‘Is there an order to all of it? Is someone or something in charge?’ But the thing is, science is largely about figuring out answers to those very questions.”

“Science is about figuring out the meaning of life?”

“Science is about figuring out the order to the universe. Yes.”

“Okay…”

“The theory of general relativity explains the rules of the physical world at large scales, the world we can see with our eyes. Quantum mechanics explains the subatomic world, like electricity and light.”

“Gravity and electromagnetism—I’m with you.”

“You combine them with the two other forces we know of in the universe, the strong force and the weak force—”

“I’m familiar.”

“Well, okay then: that’s already a pretty significant order to the universe right there! Everything that we know of since the Big Bang is ruled by those four forces. We are all connected by these four rules. That’s the beginning, at least, of learning how we are here. Now, we still need a unifying theory—our understanding of the laws of gravity and quantum physics are not currently compatible.”

“It’s a big caveat.”

“But the unifying theory does exist. It must. We just haven’t figured it out yet. And I think the pursuit of finding one law to explain the universe is, yes, science, but it’s also the pursuit of God.”

“Not the God that most people are talking about,” Vanessa said.

Joan considered this. “The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.”

“And we are a part of God because we are a part of the universe,” Vanessa said.

“Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time —when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria—it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.

“When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of this Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another?”

Joan thought about this so often that it startled her now to realize she’d never put it into words before. What a thrill it was, to say it all.

“The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”

Vanessa smiled at her. “Is there more?”

Joan bit her lip. “I don’t know. No?”

“You know,” Vanessa said, “when you’re flying a plane, you can’t see people on the ground. All you can see are the towns they live in and the neighborhoods they fall asleep in. From up there, everyone is so alike, they have so much in common, and they can’t see it. But I can, when I’m up there.”

“That’s exactly it! We are each other. I guess I’m too blown away by it all—too moved by it—to not feel a sense of awe that other people feel in a church.”

Vanessa looked at her. “Someday, I want to take you flying over the Rockies early in the morning, when the sun is rising over the mountains and it hits the ridge just right and…it reminds me of the light coming through the stained-glass windows at the church my mother took me to every Sunday. And I just know you’re going to say, ‘That’s God.’?”

“I am going to say, ‘That’s God’! Not just because it’s beautiful, but because sunrise over the mountains is part of the universe itself. Everything, all of us, is God.”

She noticed Vanessa staring at her, smiling.

“I probably sound like I’m high,” Joan said. “Not that I’d know.”

Vanessa laughed. “Don’t worry, I followed it perfectly.” She folded both arms behind her head. “Have you told anyone this whole theory of yours?”

“It’s not my theory! Einstein believed it. Many civilizations have considered some form of it. But…no, nobody’s ever asked.”

Vanessa looked at her and smiled. “Well, you’re brilliant,” she said. “You are wasted being a scientist. You should be an Evangelical preacher with that kind face and all this compelling proselytizing.” She pulled Joan back down onto the bed.

Joan laughed. “I’m pretty sure they don’t let people like me be Evangelical preachers.”

“Yeah, you might have a few disqualifying attributes,” Vanessa said as she buried her face in the crook of Joan’s neck. Then she said something that took Joan a second to process: “I love you, you know.”

Joan froze, trying to contain herself. She thought she might break out in hives again.

“I did not know that,” Joan said back, as cool as she could.

“I’ve never said it to anyone before.”

Joan pulled back and looked at her. “I love you, too.”

“You do, huh?” Vanessa said with her lopsided smile. “Wow. Imagine being so lucky as to be the girl Joan Goodwin loves.”

“Imagine that,” Joan said, putting her arms around Vanessa’s torso, holding on to her. She could hear Vanessa’s heartbeat through her chest.

A few minutes later, Vanessa asked if Joan thought it was too early to get up and find a diner open for breakfast. But Joan did not move. She just held Vanessa tighter. All she could think about was how grateful she was that the Earth was ninety-three million miles away from the sun today, far enough to be warm but not too hot, just the right distance for life on this planet.