God is an Astronaut (22 page)

I waited to see if he would continue, and when he didn’t, I cleared my throat. Carefully. Because he was awfully close to the edge, Arthur, and front-loaded with that heavy camera. How he hauled it up the ladder, all by himself, I haven’t the faintest idea. I said, “For a price.”

“Ah, Jessica.” I could tell by the way he said it that he’d known I was there the whole time. Still holding the camera, he turned around, step by step, until he was facing me. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

“Theo,” I said. “You can’t be up here. ”

“And yet here you are.” He was still holding out his hand, beckoning me closer, while he fiddled with a tiny foldout screen on the side of his camera. “The intrepid botanista.” He was clearly not listening to me. “Come, come, come.”

“No.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Not until you step back from the edge,” I said. “We’ve had an unlucky streak lately, remember? We don’t want to push it. We can’t afford to lose anyone else. Think how it would look.”

It was the first time either one of us had alluded to the accident. Liam and I, Arthur, are under strict instructions from the Spaceco legal department not to discuss this matter with Lacroix. “Not on the pain of death”
was the phrase Liam used, employing a rare bit of hyperbole.

“I would think it looked very clumsy of me.” He sat down, hoisted the camera up on his knees, and patted the shingles next to him. “Sit. Don’t sigh, Jessica. It’s very unbecoming.”

When I had slithered down next to him, he pointed to the screen. “I was admiring your particular sliver of sky. Look at this marvelous shot I got. No, you have to get closer.”

The screen couldn’t have been more than 3x5. I had to lean sideways and squint to pull the image into focus. At first it was nothing but an electric green flickering, but then it resolved into leaves, then into rippling treetops, a whole sea of them. The wind was traveling through them in odd gasping heaves. So steady-handed was Lacroix’s shot that it took a second to realize that he was panning out. Then a rooftop appeared, like a drab, lonely island, then another, a small archipelago of them gathering together. Far off in the distance you could see the highway, as clear as the boundary line on a map, glittering with distant speeding cars. The farther back he pulled, the more the clouds towered, until they seemed a kind of atmospheric tour de force. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than ninety seconds, tops, before Lacroix snapped the screen closed with a click.

“Beautiful,” he said. “If I was going to die while seeing with my own eyes all of this from up there—” He gestured with his free hand toward the sky. “I would say, well, that it would not be the most terrible way to go.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “How many of us human beings are allowed to witness something truly awesome? I do not mean
awesome
in the American sense of the word, you understand. I mean a glimpse of something that feels as though it was intended to stay hidden from our view.”

I jerked up, pulling away my cheek, which had almost come to settle against his knee, without my being aware. It was like I’d been in some sort of trance, Arthur, for just a few brief seconds, but then I snapped to. “What did you say?”

“It was a quick death,” he said. “Very quick. That’s more than most people get.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I said. “You weren’t on that shuttle.” Something about his equanimity was infuriating. It goaded me to add: “Or Elle.”

“I am not afraid of dying.” He was fiddling with his camera, making adjustments with one of its myriad buttons, but he was still looking at me. “There are worse things, you know.”

“Right.” I realized I was running my hands through my hair, and I had to start smoothing it all down again. “I suppose you know all about that.”

“Not all. Some. I’ve seen a few things. I’ve gotten around.”

He had lifted up the camera again, this time toward me. I could see the green light was on. “Stop that, Theo,” I said.

“Stop what?”

“You know what.” I said. “We had a responsibility to those people. To keep them safe. To bring them back. You and Elle, you have this boho lifestyle—”

He frowned. “I am not familiar with that expression.”

“‘Free spirit,’” I said. “But some of us have obligations—”

“We most certainly do,” Lacroix said. He had dropped the charming shtick. I had never seen him look so serious. “To be witnesses to one another, to think about how we exist in this world. To try to squeeze out a little bit of the fucking truth. It is very difficult.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say. But OK,” I said. He still had his camera running, Arthur, and I sighed and turned away—my unsightly left side to the camera—to look studiously out across my haphazard garden with its torn-up turf and its profusion of lavish flowers. “I was told you weren’t an idealist, Theo. I was told you were a money-grubbing opportunist.”

“Who told you that?”

Off in the distance I could hear a faint squealing, and I knew it was Liam. That serpentine belt in the Chrysler—or whatever problem it is that they don’t seem to be able to keep fixed—you can hear it from half a mile away. “All that stuff I just said,” I said, gesturing toward Lacroix’s camera. “It needs to be off the record. You got that?”

“They were mistaken,” said Lacroix.

“Theo.” I snapped my fingers at him, the way I do at Jack when he’s daydreaming. “The correct answer is yes. ‘Yes, Jessica, I’m going to delete it.’
Capisce
?”

“
Capisce
,” he said. “Your secrets are safe with me, Jessica.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “They’re not—” I was going to finish:
secrets.
But the squealing from Liam’s car was getting louder. He was almost to the driveway, and all I wanted to do was get Lacroix down from the roof before Liam found us. I didn’t want to have to explain to Liam what the two of us were doing up there. Over the past week or so, Liam and I have reached some sort of détente, and something told me that this would ruin that.

But it was too late. Lacroix went down first (so slowly, Arthur, so excruciatingly slowly), and by the time I slithered down to the ground after him, there was Liam, standing there with his laptop under one arm. He was looking at me and then Lacroix and the ladder like they were puzzle pieces he was trying to fit together.

“Ah, the spaceman returns,” said Lacroix. “I tried to call you earlier. Elle should be returning from her countryside ramblings around two. That means three Elle time. I was hoping we might come to shoot you and Tristan and some of the others unpacking the new equipment in the lab around sixteen hundred hours. Will that be too late?” As he was talking, I could see that he had a few leaves nestled in his hair, and I had to resist the urge to reach over and pull them out.

“That’s fine,” Liam said. He had stopped squinting up at the eaves and was studying us now, trying to decide how exactly to play along. “I hope Jess didn’t have you up there collecting footage of the sad state of our roof. It should have been replaced five years ago. I keep telling myself, one more serious storm and—” He let out a whistle, which was intended, I suppose, to indicate the top of our house sailing merrily away in the wind.

“I didn’t even notice,” said Lacroix. “Your wife and I were gathering some fresh air. Admiring the view. Having a nice philosophical chat.”

“Is that right?” said Liam.

“Quite,” said Lacroix. “You picked a good one. She’s sharp as a tack.” He reached up and pulled one of the leaves out of his hair and smiled at me. “Now. If you’ll excuse me.”

As soon as he turned away, Liam grabbed my arm. He couldn’t say anything out loud, so he mouthed it at me instead:
What the hell?
All I could do was point to my head and twirl my finger.

Speaking of which—I have to go too—More later—

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2014 12:01 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: As Guest, that would be gone—

Yeah, I know. That was a very Emily Dickinson sign-off. Also, an appropriate line choice. Kudos for that.

Thanks to some schedule wrinkles, the night Lacroix was supposed to film us at dinner got pushed back again to tonight. I’d been at the lab all day, trying to catch up on some overdue genome sequencing, and after racing across town at light-warp speed to pick up Jack and Corinne from day camp, cooking was the last thing I wanted to do. All I wanted was one of those dinners that Jack and Corinne and I have when Liam’s out of town—the kind where I heat up a pizza and dump out a bagged salad and then the three of us sit around the table, each of us with our head stuck in our own book. Remember how I told you that I was never going to do that? That’s exactly what my mother used to do with Paula and me, Arthur—she was always sticking her head into Austen or Tolstoy or Eliot and teleporting away. It was like she had unlocked the back door and slipped out without telling us. “You’ll understand some day,” she used to say. When Paula and I got into college, when we got to that age where we had figured out everything about her that she was too obtuse to figure out for herself, we used to take turns translating that phrase:
You’ll understand what it’s like to have children ruin your life. You’ll understand what it’s like to be menopausal and bitter. You’ll understand how to take the passive out of passive-aggressive.
We thought we were hilarious. It never once occurred to me that she might turn out to be right.

I decided to make salmon and roast potatoes. With the heat from the broiler, the kitchen felt like blazing summer out on the veldt. I’d ditched my jeans for a lightweight (and casual yet tasteful) cotton dress, and the sweat was still trickling down the back of my legs. Everywhere I turned, there was either Elle or Lacroix hovering with a camera lens.

Our kitchen, Arthur, was built before everyone (or, ahem, their husbands) needed to buy things like the latest espresso makers and self-cleaning blenders. Even with just me, it’s none too spacious. Now there was Liam, suddenly motivated to tinker with a raspberry vinaigrette he hasn’t concocted in years. (He’s a good cook, precise and meticulous as a chemist, if not inspired like you, Arthur.) And there was Jack running back and forth in heart-stopping zigzags with handfuls of flatware and plates. (In honor of the occasion, I had decided to ditch the Corelle, and bring out my beloved flea market china with the orchids around the rims.) And there was Corinne pliéing in the corner. (Maneuvering in a not-so-subtle effort to stay in Lacroix’s frame.) Yet somehow there were Lacroix and Elle, negotiating their cameras through the chaos, like the old hands they are. You would have no idea, looking at stiff, stocky Lacroix, that he had that kind of dexterity.

Somehow we managed to get ourselves situated, and then there we were, sitting at the table, the spaceman and his earthly nearest and dearest. As I sat there looking around at my family, Arthur, I had another one of those moments I keep experiencing lately. It’s like I’m not one of us, as though I’m an outsider or an impostor. I could see how beautiful they were, how extraordinary and oblivious. There was Corinne with those ephemeral butterfly tattoos flaking off her arms. There was Jack. His soccer jersey was still shimmering with red-gold soccer dust, like some precious mineral traces, collected in its wrinkles and seams. And Liam, who I will pass over here without comment. It was the feeling I had the first day you kissed me. (Ten indiscretions, ten fingers. You can count them on both hands.) I came home, and I sat at the table, still feeling the traces of your lips seared along my neck and clavicle, and I watched them carry on with their mundane acts of eating their carrots and drinking their milk, with a feeling of love so overwhelming that it made me queasy, and I couldn’t eat a thing.

For several minutes it was quiet. It was becoming readily apparent that spacemen don’t have much more to say at dinner than anyone else. I could have told Lacroix that. That after a while the glamor wears off everything. Even CIA operatives and lion tamers and those people who fall out of planes wearing nothing more than those nylon wings must eventually come to the dinner table and have nothing of interest to tell anyone.

My plan was not to speak until directly spoken to, and then as little as I could get away with, but I could see Liam fidgeting in his chair. He couldn’t stand our sitting there like some sort of monotonous still life (working title:
Disappointing Family at Dinner, Dullsville, 2014
) while the film rolled in Elle and Lacroix’s cameras. I knew eventually he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from breaking the silence. And then, sure enough, he did. He turned to the kids. “How was camp today?”