God is an Astronaut (13 page)

I know, but it gets worse.

I had a million little administrative bullshit fires I was supposed to be putting out on campus today. Instead I had to spend the day running errands: picking up my suit from the dry cleaners, getting a haircut, hunting down that damn pearl necklace. When I finally broke down and called Paula to find out where it was, she informed me that she had put it in a shoebox in the master bedroom closet. It was clear that she thought my call was a flimsy pretense for something darker and more nefarious, and the more I tried to get off the phone, the harder she tried to grill me. “I know something’s going on,”
she said. “What is it? You can tell me.”

“Maybe later,” I said. I couldn’t think of a simple way to tell my sister that I was getting ready to go watch my husband lie on national television, or to explain, exactly, what I was about to be a party to. I keep thinking that we just need to get through the end of the week. I can practically hear the clock ticking. Forty-seven hours and forty-two minutes to go.

“Jess,” she said.

There’s a little mirror hanging over my dresser, and I stopped pacing for a minute to inspect myself. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t looked at myself—really looked—in weeks. It’s like every time I lean in toward my reflection, there are a thousand other things flashing in front of me, and I stop being able to see what’s right there in front of my face. There was a woman in a pilling fisherman’s sweater and a silky, unfamiliar haircut, holding a phone and staring back at me with a deer-in-the-headlights expression. The stylist had convinced me that the pixie hairdo made me look chic. At the moment, the adjective sounded promising—like it could describe a woman who had her shit together—but standing there in my bedroom, all I could think was, How the hell did I get here? Dr. Paula told me once that she used to have patients ask her that question all the time, and that, honestly, it’s a pretty stupid one. “I just want to tell people: think back,” she said. “No, think harder. You know the answer. You always do.”

“Someone’s at the door,” I said.

“I know that’s a lie, Jess,” she said. But I hung up.

What Paula failed to mention, though, was
which
box. We have a huge collection of antique shoeboxes, Arthur, and most of them don’t even have shoes. They’re these dioramas Jack made. He went through this phase last year where dioramas were his art project of choice. He spent hours detailing them—drawing treads on a racecar’s tires, cutting tiny curlicues for shoelaces, making aluminum foil buttons for the control panel of a spaceship. I ended up saving most of them. Their obsessive, meticulous attention to detail filled me with this feeling of dubious awe. I can’t remember if I ever told you this, but I used to think up allegorical names for the various people I know. It was a game I’d sometimes play, if I was bored and trying to pass the time—while I was scrubbing the grout in the bathroom, say, or sitting through a sexual harassment seminar. Thom was always Tact. Moira was Stridency. Corinne was Pragmatism. Liam was Brilliance. Or Fanaticism. It depended on the day. For Jack, I usually settled on Discernment, although occasionally it would be something closer to Harebrainedness. Or Melodrama.

Anyway, for a moment I got distracted from my search by looking at these boxes. I began picking up one after another, holding them up toward the lightbulb dangling above me and peering through the jagged little peepholes at these fanciful, intricate construction-paper scenes. There was a boy fighting a dragon, and a jungle filled with birds and some sort of bizarre, blue-faced apes, and one that looked like pilots in a cockpit flying their plane through the yellow zigzags of a thunderstorm. Arthur, I know I’m biased—and that it’s in poor taste to brag about one’s children—but they were really beautiful.

Finally, I came to the last one in the pile. As soon as I looked it, I knew it was one I hadn’t seen before. In it, there was an astronaut hanging from the lid of the box, which was covered in orange crayon stars. He was waving down at a house that looked like ours—same droopy gutters, same tire swing tied to a tree in the front yard. There were a few people standing out on the driveway, and they were looking up and waving back. All except one—a woman who’s staring dead ahead at the peephole. Her little red mouth is turned upside down in what appears to be a frown.

I remember what you wrote me: “When someone’s in dire straits, every little thing seems like a sign. Resist that urge, Jess.”
This is so sensible, Arthur, and it’s so hard to do.

Just then, the doorbell rang. Some knee-jerk superstition or premonition made me jerk open the closet door and holler out, “Don’t answer it!”
But it was too late, and no one heard me. Jack was thumping down the hall, and a second later I could feel the suck and shudder in the walls that you can feel anywhere in our house when the door is pulled open and someone comes in or goes out. A second later he was calling for Liam.

But here’s where it all leads. The person at the door was a process server. Robert Kahn—that would be Kelly Kahn’s father—is suing Spaceco. Liam has been named as a defendant in the suit.

I have to leave off now. Class is in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . .

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:12 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: allegories

You were Kindness. Or Gregariousness. Or Savoir Faire. Or Disarming Charm, maybe. Or Empathy. Or Common Decency. I don’t know, Arthur. Do you see now how the game is harder than you’d think? How you could spend a lifetime playing it?

As to your second question: I never chose for myself. At first it seemed too hard, and then later it became too easy. I’d be Guilt, I suppose, or maybe Deceit. I’m not interested in having you refute this. I’m telling you that it doesn’t matter if you think you agree (grudgingly) with Liam. I’m not wise. I’m not anywhere close. I gave up that aspiration a long time ago.

I don’t know any more details about the suit right now. Everyone aboard the
Titan
signed releases, and Legal is still telling us that they’re ironclad, but with the Norell Ops allegations, all bets are off.

I had another bad dream last night. The Ambien makes them practically apocalyptic. This one was about Kelly Kahn. The two of us were sitting in the clearing of a pine forest, and there was lightning off in the distance. You could smell the electricity in the air. I remember that she was smoking a cigarette very casually, never mind that she must have been seven months pregnant. She was wearing a Spaceco space suit, just like the one she died in, and holding one of those bubble astronaut helmets on her stomach, even though no one who goes up in the Spaceco shuttle actually wears one of those things. Something about her aura was much more salt-of-the-earth than you would have guessed from her polished corporate photos, and I liked her for that. She had freckles. I had the feeling that we understood one another perfectly, that intense camaraderie you have in dreams that’s so pure and intense that it’s like a stronger version of love, and something that isn’t possible to experience in real life.

Something was bothering me, though, making me more and more anxious. I thought it was the cigarette. I started trying to tell her that the smoking was a bad idea, pregnant as she was, but I was doing a terrible job explaining, and she wasn’t listening to me anyway. She was patting a golden retriever and watching the lightning move toward us across the trees (which I suddenly noticed were dying, were brown and exploding with millions of tinder-dry needles) and smiling a sly, wise smile. “You should worry about yourself,” she said in a way that sounded profound, and then she put her lit cigarette down to the pine needles, and everything went up into flames . . .

And then I snapped awake. It was a little after one, and I could hear Liam downstairs, practicing his speech for the conference tomorrow.

T-12 hours.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 12:15 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: in transit

The Town & Country is in the shop right now, so I’m riding the bus home to meet the electrician. The greenhouse construction has slowed to a crawl during the past week, although that hasn’t stopped me from buying another batch of plants to put inside its imaginary four walls. To Li’s great annoyance.

You may or may not have noticed. This is my first attempt at e-mailing on the run. I think it will be my last. Liam gave me this iPhone for my birthday (note the product placement signature at the bottom, I can’t get it to go away). He’s so smitten with his handheld technology that he can’t even imagine anyone not feeling the same way. It’s true that this phone is better than I am at everything. It knows it. I know it. We don’t even need to argue the point.

So maybe Li is right, and technology will save us all. I have my doubts—but maybe this tech marvel is just making me insecure and aware of my deficiencies. My sturdy proletariat fingers may have been a benefit to my potato-picking Irish ancestors, but soon they’re going to be a liability. It was 11:42 when I started writing this e-mail. That was 5 miles ago and my stop is coming up, so

adios -Jesss

Sent from my iPhone

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 11:06 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: modern “conveniences”

I know, right? But Liam keeps telling me I can’t fall into that trap. Pretty soon, he said, hating technology will mean hating every single thing about modern life: how we eat, how we sleep, how we talk to other people, how we drive, how we read, how we write. How we carry out our dalliances. How we construct our lies. OK, I added those last ones. And Liam and I haven’t discussed anything in a long time. He’s hardly been doing much talking to me at all, except for responding to questions of the “Can you pick up Corinne after ballet?” variety and his
don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it
,
which neither one of us believes.

Re: greenhouse additions: snapdragons and tiger lilies. Or dragon and tiger flowers, as Corinne and I call them. I saw some giant sequoia seeds for sale online, but I resisted the urge.

Later, you.

~j

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2014 9:11 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: bloodsuckers

Jesus.

I’ve only seen mosquitoes like that once before. It was the summer after Corinne was born and we’d had all that rain—remember that? One evening I put her in the sling and took her outside with me to pull some weeds. We were out there for about five minutes, and I came running back inside. I’d thrown down the trowel and was shielding her with both arms. They were devouring us alive. There were dozens of them nestled in her blond baby hair, and I kept crushing them against her head with my thumbs as gently as I could, trying to restrain myself, trying not to slap.

I may or may not have been a little hysterical—it was the postpartum hormones. And I made the mistake of telling Liam about the bugpocalypse. And he went out the next night and mowed down the whole back lot, then soaked it down with DEET. I tried to stop him. I’d calmed down by then and come back to my senses, but he wouldn’t listen to me. “Be sensible, Jess,” he said. “We have a baby, and mosquitoes carry West Nile. We can’t just cross our fingers. We have to do something.” He slung the pesticide container over his shoulder and went outside, and I stood up in the bedroom and watched him. Even in the dusk you could see the swarms billowing up from the grass, like a force field that had been disturbed, thousands of them, smelling death. Some superstition made me put my hand over Corinne’s eyes, and eventually I put down the blinds and walked away.

I’m not ignoring your question, Arthur. I just haven’t felt like writing about it.

Do take care of yourself.