God is an Astronaut (18 page)

I didn’t say that Lacroix was coming here for sure. Although it’s looking more and more like it could happen, Arthur. Spaceco thinks we’d make “good ambassadors for the brand.” (Again, I ask you, what does this
mean?
This corporate space jargon is even worse than what you like to call “the froth of academia.”) We have two kids and one-point-five hermit crabs. We drive an honest-to-God minivan. Liam, when he gets around to his shave-and-a-haircut, can pull off a photogenic, clean-cut Everyman. When I scrub the dirt out from under my fingernails and trade in the galoshes for a pair of flats, I can pass for a dutiful wife. Or something like that.

As sad as this is to say, we’re more camera-ready than several of the other Spaceco employees. They don’t want, for example, Tristan, who’s been living out of a suitcase over in some rat-shit hotel in Ypsi since he and Helen split up. And the PR people don’t want Lacroix to go anywhere near several of the board members and their Bloomfield mansions. He wouldn’t even need to set foot inside one of those palaces. The landscaping alone screams out 1 percent.

In other news, my summer class has been going like shit. The dud students are even duddier than usual. I wish you were here to remind me again why you like these kids. When you tell me there’s hope for them, I actually believe you. A little, anyway.

Nighty-night.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 10:46 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: The SBD stench of disapproval in the air

Radio silence. Does this mean you’re already working on your paper? That would be a little hard to believe. I’ve never known you to once sit down and start cracking on a grant proposal with more than ninety-six hours between you and a deadline. Since it seems I’m going to be the first one to take a crack at the airing of grievances, I’d just like to say that I always found your procrastinating to be show-offy and a downright pain in the ass. Why should the wicked prosper? Why should they rake in all the NSF money?

There. I took the first shot. Now write me back and say whatever it is you want to say. I know you’re dying to.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2014 10:55 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: crickets chirping

Ok, fine, I get it.

It’s probably for the best. Your productivity has probably gone up 200 percent since you’ve stopped writing me. I know mine has. Today I vacuumed the entire house
and
patched up all the holes in the screen door (a defensive play after our recent bee infestation)
and
scrubbed the kitchen floor (more like an archaeological excavation than housework). It was easier than I thought. All I had to do was get started and then, voilà, physics took over. Bodies in motion, etc.

I know none of these accomplishments are as dramatic as your recent biplane trip or gathering data on the coming arboreal zero hour, but they are—it turns out—necessary. On Thursday Spaceco finalized a deal with the Lacroixs that will allow them to film, starting as soon as next week. Some of that filming will be taking place here, and the PR people keep reminding us that “appearances will be of the utmost importance.”
As though we’re idiots. One of them even called to ask me if I wanted them to send over someone from Merry Maids, but I told them no, I was perfectly capable of operating a vacuum cleaner, that it’s like riding a bicycle—no matter how long you go between doing it, you don’t forget. Also that they had probably other things they needed to spend the two hundred bucks on. Like rocket fuel, perhaps. Or legal counsel. With that kind of money we can buy another fifteen minutes of advice and a couple of Xeroxes.

Actually, I didn’t say any of that. I’m trying out the whole unified-front routine, practicing for the camera. No, I politely said, no thank you
,
and then I hung up the phone and got to work cleaning our “artfully disheveled” house. (Thank you, Melissa Kramer, for saddling us with that fucking adjective. It stuck like glue to everything yesterday while I played Holly the Happy Housekeeper, and formed a damning mantra: Windexing the “artfully disheveled” windows, Pledging the “artfully disheveled” newel post. And so on and so forth.)

We did, however, get wrangled into hiring a gardening service to tend to our artfully disheveled lawn. Those Lawn Pro men came this morning, and they took such drastic measures that it was like the foliage equivalent of a police academy haircut. I opened the front door after they left, and I actually gasped out loud. We now look just like our neighbors in Eden Estates. The Queen Anne’s lace foaming down in the ditch by the birches, the tender beginnings of the dandelions, the lovely-but-technically-an-invasive-species clover: gone, gone, gone.

That’s all I have time for now, Arthur. It’s time to go slather on some more elbow grease.

If you feel the urge to end the silent treatment, don’t, you know, resist it.

Jess;

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, June 23, 2014 3:13 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: black hawk server down

You’re right—I should have guessed. How ridiculous of me to assume that you were giving me the silent treatment, especially since there’s no precedent whatsoever of you having done any such thing in the past . . .

Oh, wait.

OK, I’m sorry. I was projecting about your being pissed off. But a projecting clock is still right twice a day, and you have to concede that this is one of those times, no?

Arthur, before you say that I’m not listening to you, I want to say,
I am
. I read your e-mail last night while I was milling around in the flower lot at Home Depot. I abandoned my cart and plopped down onto a stack of discounted Adirondack chairs, and I read every single word. Then I read them all again  . . . and then a harried-looking man in an orange apron went rushing by and said, “Ma’am, you can’t sit there.”

Now you have to listen to me. There are certain times when principles are luxuries. Now is one of those times. We’re in this, Arthur. We’re in it up to our necks. Don’t you understand? I’m tenured now, and we could (probably) keep our heads above water on the mortgage, even if Spaceco folded. But there are other pieces of our lives in play here. There’s still the Kahn lawsuit, which is sitting out there like a huge wild card. Even if no evidence of Spaceco negligence comes out, our lawyers are still worried about what will happen if it goes to trial. They’re worried (“seriously concerned”
is the phrase, I believe) about jurors that don’t even exist yet. They’re “seriously concerned” about those hypothetical jurors’ hypothetical sympathies. (Which they claim to be able to predict—never mind how impossible that seems. Shouldn’t any one person’s sympathies—made up of all those churning, complicated, and infinitely varied factors—shouldn’t they be as difficult to forecast as that climate modeling your resident “expert” seems to keep fucking up, or one of those out-of-the-blue heart attacks? But that’s their job, I suppose.) They say those jurors will think,
grieving father.
They’ll think,
pregnant woman
. They’ll think,
dead baby.

And they’re probably right. That’s what I would think, even though I don’t admit it. Because like I said, Arthur, we’re practicing for the cameras here. Whether you approve or not.

I’ve got exams to grade, so I’m signing off at our end. Good luck with all your technical problems. If it happens again, you might try engineer Liam’s tried-and-true method of slapping around the hardware a few times. We’ve gotten results using that tactic in the past. Though not always desirable ones.

J

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2014 2:25 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: the unexpected guest

Um, OK. I didn’t realize that you were so offended by the use of the first-person plural. If that’s the case, then you must hate the recent spate of department “mission statement” e-mails that have been spawning in your in-box with a passion. (I know you’re getting them; I looked for your e-mail in the cc list, and there it was.) Yes, Arthur. To answer your stupid-on-purpose question: yes. Yes, I am perfectly capable of speaking in the singular. So don’t be an ass—you know that one-letter pronoun is a luxury as well as a curse. I’m sure you’re happy singing the song of yourself up there in the pine forests of the wild north, go ahead and yawp away, but remember that being one of a tribe isn’t a weakness. I know you think so.

But all of these arguments are moot since Lacroix’s here now. As in here at our house, Arthur. He materialized in the middle of our backyard yesterday—or more specifically in the middle of our carrot patch.

If this strikes you as sooner than expected, you’re not alone. Lacroix wasn’t supposed to show up until Thursday. No one was expecting him, and to say he caught us off guard would be an understatement. Liam was upstairs, and I was out back, trying to get in what I thought would be the last of the digging before I had to go in to campus for a meeting. I’ve finished two sides of the knee wall trench, and I’m almost done with the third—there’s just one small gap left until the foundation.

In order to get the full effect of this scene, you have to picture it. The weather is piss-poor—fog, drizzle, a temp in the mid-fifties, and I’m out there in a sweaty, shrunken Spaceco T-shirt of Liam’s. I’m up to my knees, heaving and flinging, flinging and heaving, and thinking, mercifully, of nothing, when suddenly, right behind me, a man clears his throat.

It happens at the worst possible moment—right on the upswing—and I’m so startled that I completely let go of the shovel. It goes flying, dirt and all, like a javelin, surprisingly high and far. All this digging has made me stronger without my even realizing it, Arthur. The other night, in the Home Depot parking lot, was the first time I noticed. I was standing there, unlocking the car door with a forty-pound bag of fertilizer on each shoulder, when it dawned on me. I’d been so busy composing my response to you that I had hoisted them up and carried them out of the store without even being aware of what I was doing.

But to continue:

The throat-clearer has to duck to avoid the flying projectile, which he does with impressive agility. It’s almost like this is the way he’s always greeted—with people throwing objects at his head.

Then he straightens up and smiles at me. And just like that, I recognize him. It’s Theo Lacroix, our deus ex machina in the flesh. Except now there are dirt clods resting in his hair and the shoulders of his sweater, which looks like it was, once upon a time, expensive. The only thing I can think is—all that time spent perfecting appearances, all that trying to scrub the grub off the newel posts and pasting up the wilting wallpaper corners—good-bye to all that. It’s just been ruined in one fell swoop.

He speaks first. “Jessica Callahan,” he says. “We officially meet at last. I am so sorry to have startled you. I should have made my presence known.”

He really does talk like that, Arthur, with that kind of formal, borderline grandiose cadence. Maybe it’s because English isn’t his native tongue, although he doesn’t sound quite French either. His accent is some sort of unidentifiable West European patois.

He went on: “I was reluctant to disturb you. You were so focused on your task. Which appears to be—” He jabbed at the edge of my trench with his toe, and looked around at what has become, Arthur, my rather spectacular plant collection. “Some of the most ruthless gardening I believe I have ever seen.”

First things first. “My name is Jessica Frobisher,” I said. “My husband and I have different last names.” I don’t know why there was an edge to my voice. Maybe I was disconcerted by the fact that I had no idea how long he had been standing there watching me. Maybe it was the fact that I had to crane my neck to look up at him; I had dug myself down about three feet. Something about the way he was looking down at me, a little too intently, made me reluctant to scramble up. I was wearing Jack’s galoshes and there was no way I was going to make it to ground level with my dignity intact.