7. Ed
SEVEN
ed
The view from the top of the Space Needle is vast and sweeping. Ed stands on the observation deck with the rest of the group he’s come with, looking out over the grim and rainy city. He misses Frankie.
“Everything is so…gray,” Hubert says. Hubert is an engineer from Kentucky, and he, too, has been flown to Seattle to work on this special NASA/Boeing project. “There’s no color anywhere.”
“Oh, I bet there is,” Ed says. “They’ve got mountains and trees here, and all this rain has to make something turn green.”
“Well, I haven’t seen it yet.” Hubert puts his hands into his pockets as he walks around the circular observation deck.
Ed opens up the brochure he’d been handed after buying his ticket. The Space Needle’s opening on April 21, 1962, was attended by various celebrities and dignitaries from all areas of life. Elvis Presley attended, as well as… Ed’s eyes skim the page until he lands on Neil Armstrong. “Hey,” he says to Jack, another engineer he’s come to like, and who is the third person in their trio for the day as they check out some of Seattle's high points. “Did you know Neil Armstrong was here when this thing opened?”
Jack, who is ambling by, looking down at the streets laid out far below, gives a shrug and a nod. “Sounds about right. I mean, it is called the ‘space’ needle.” Jack pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and keeps walking.
So far it’s been thrilling to work on the project at Boeing. Ed and a group of engineers and scientists are testing out different ideas and theories about extended space travel, testing to see what sorts of extreme measures and circumstances they can come up with, and theorizing different survival strategies for astronauts who might find themselves in these conditions. It’s exciting and demanding and it’s raising a lot of questions for Ed.
“So you don’t want to go to space after all?” Frankie had asked the evening before during their short phone call, which has become a part of Ed’s evening ritual. He usually has dinner at a restaurant by his hotel—sometimes with Hubert and Jack, sometimes alone—and then he goes back to his room and stretches out on the bed with a cigarette to call his wife.
“It’s not that, Frank,” he’d said, shifting the receiver from one ear to the other as smoke drifted up from his cigarette. He set it in the heavy glass ashtray on his nightstand. “It’s just that this is so interesting . We’re coming up with solutions to what might be real problems that our men encounter in space.”
Frankie stayed silent.
“I could be useful here, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll ever get chosen for a mission anyway.”
“Right,” Frankie said, and he could picture her twirling her hair around her finger as she listened to him. “So do you want to back out of the space program? What are you saying?”
“No!” Ed sat up on his bed, leaning against the pillows and the headboard. He reached for his cigarette. “I’m not saying that. I’m just being realistic. Formulating a back-up plan. It can destroy a man to work for something and then discover that it’s out of his reach. This is within my reach. I fit in here, Frank. These people are interested in the same things that I’m interested in.”
“Okay,” she said. In the background, he could hear her parents talking loudly to one another.
“How are the folks?” Ed asked. Frankie sighed deeply and he could hear the flick of her lighter. “Wait—are you smoking again?”
She exhaled on her end of the line. “Yep. I needed an excuse to go outside every half hour.” Frankie laughed softly. “They’re good though. I took Enzo golfing today.”
“Golfing? I didn’t picture your dad on the links.”
“Well, be that as it may, he thinks he’s going to be an Italian golf champ. He could be up to worse things, I guess.”
“True. And how’s Allegra holding up in the Florida sun?”
“She’s mostly been cooking and trying to keep me away from open windows.”
“Why, have you threatened to jump?” Ed teased.
Frankie laughed. “No, it’s an old Italian wives’ tale about pregnancy. Oh, and she makes me thirteen of everything.”
“Another wives’ tale?”
“Indeed. Thirteen is the number of fertility, so this evening I got thirteen ravioli and thirteen green peas on my plate.”
“If you eat all thirteen peas, can you get thirteen more? Will that make you twice as fertile?”
“I would laugh,” Frankie said, clearly laughing, “but it’s driving me bananas.”
Ed had closed his eyes, picturing his wife’s face. “She’d have better luck getting a grandbaby if we actually tried to give her one.” He knew the words were the wrong ones the minute they were out of his mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
There’d been the night of the NASA Christmas party and it had been wonderful, but those moments together came all too infrequently for Ed’s taste. Of course, before they’d even married, Frankie had told him something that he always reminds himself of when he feels impatient with her inability to truly be intimate with him, but even still, yeah, okay, a guy can get frustrated. And every so often that frustration boils over and comes out at the wrong moment.
“It’s fine. I should get going anyway.” The laughter had left Frankie’s voice, and she’d grown terse. “Have a good day tomorrow. I’ll wait to hear from you in the evening.”
Now, as he stands at the window of the Space Needle, looking out at Mount Rainier and the Puget Sound, Ed realizes that it had been cruel to goad her. He hadn’t meant to upset his wife, but he himself feels a certain amount of pressure when it comes to having children. His parents ask about it less often than hers do, but other people nudge him gently, wondering about when he and Frankie are going to start bringing babies into the world. And it bothers him because of course he wants to be a father—it’s the natural order of things, after all. But it also nags at him because their continued childlessness is a symbol of dysfunction. It tells the world that something is wrong—maybe with him--and Ed can't stand that thought.
He presses one hand to the cold glass in front of him as January rain speckles the other side of it, and he wonders if maybe it is him after all. Maybe there's something wrong with him--either physically, god forbid, or emotionally--and Frankie doesn't want to have his children. It hurts him to think that maybe he's not living up to her expectations as a husband, but he isn't sure what else to do. He doesn't pressure her, he tries not to make her feel bad about the fact that she hasn't gotten pregnant, and he attempts to understand even the things she has not told him.
All he knows is that something bad happened to his wife before he met her, and he wants to do everything in his power to make sure she knows that it's not her fault. Ed will be there at her side, protecting her, loving her, and waiting patiently for her to feel okay again.