God is an Astronaut (20 page)

Liam rolled over and looked at his phone. “I told him I’d leave it unlocked in case he needed anything.”

“Well, apparently what he needed was time to do reconnaissance on all our knickknacks,” I said. “While skulking around at one in the morning.”

“Well, that makes two of you then.” He rolled back and lifted the phone over his head, so that we were both cast in its spooky spotlight. “You seem to be doing an awful lot of prowling yourself these days. Are you still taking that Ambien?”

“It gives me hellacious dreams.” I pushed away the phone. I didn’t want to change the subject. “This seriously doesn’t bother you, Li? You don’t think he’s, I don’t know, a little off?”

“Of course he’s a little off,” Liam said. “He runs around sticking a camera in people’s faces for a living. What normal person does that? Look.” He put the phone down. “The film is supposed to have—what did he call it? A personal side. He’s probably just trying to, I don’t know, get a feel for things. He came in and got distracted.”

I’m not convinced, Arthur. But my opinions about our French filmmakers-in-residence aren’t the ones that matter. I think Liam’s being seduced. Not by the exquisite Mrs. Lacroix (or whatever the hell her last name is) but by Theo. All those questions Theo’s been asking? Liam keeps telling me how good they are. Not just good questions. Great ones. Industry-insider questions. The kind laymen don’t even know enough to ask. Questions about the angle of the thrusters, about fuel weight and payload, about the new alloy in the
Goddard
’s reusable booster rockets. Hell, he even knew the
Goddard
reference—and was able to rattle off the man’s contributions on three-axis control. Liam tells me that he retains every single detail you tell him. This is extremely fortunate for Lacroix, because it just so happens that there is no better way to win the hearts and minds of Spaceco men than to listen to them rhapsodize about rockets, all that ferocious technological power at their disposal.

“What do
you
think of him?” I asked Corinne last night. She was taking a bath, and I was sitting on the floor next to our old claw-foot tub, basking in her soothing presence. She doesn’t really need me there anymore, handing her the soap and shampoo; soon she’ll be booting me out. That’s probably why I want to stay. She was wearing a tiara of soapsuds, but she just lost another tooth, and you can see already how it’s changing her face, clues to its adult architecture.

She wrinkled her nose. “I think he’s
weird.
” She rearranged the neckline on her bubble bodice and reconsidered. “But I guess that’s OK if he helps us to be famous.”

So there you have it, straight from the mouth of babes.

~jf

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2014 10:49 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: space, lies, & videotape

OK. Not
seduce
seduce. But Arthur, you should see it. I came downstairs this morning to find Liam and Lacroix sitting next to one another at the breakfast table. They were hunched over their respective laptops and eating cereal in companionable silence.

“Good morning, Li,” I said. “And Theo.” It was like I’d accidentally wandered onto the set of
The
Odd Couple
.

“Morning,” said Li, looking up and smiling at me for the first time in I don’t know how long.

“Good morning, Jessica,” said Lacroix. “Can I get you something? Coffee, perhaps?” He pushed his chair back from the table. “I noticed some eggs in the refrigerator that looked like they should perhaps be used sooner rather than later. Maybe I can make you an omelet?”

“Sounds good,” said Liam.

“No, thank you,” I said. I yanked the tie on my bathrobe tighter and frowned. It seems that in our newest family drama, I’ve been cast in the role of suspicious hausfrau, and Arthur, I am acting the hell out of it.

Re: the flooring: Thanks for your suggestion, but I’ve decided on slate. Maybe it’s less practical, but you should see the tiles I’ve picked out. They’re stunning.

jf

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 11:22 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: rocks

Yeah, I just ordered all the gravel and slate online. The color’s called rustic gold, and it’s beautiful. Blue with these brown and golden swirls. It looks like coastlines and oceans. The Internet is amazing. Are you sure you don’t miss it?

Jesseeeca

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 10:49 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: rocking it, sort of

That’s what Lacroix calls me. I’ve told him at least five times that no one calls me that (with the exception of you, darling colleague, when you are trying to deliberately piss me off), but he won’t stop, and I’ve given up. There is something about his accent, the soft S, the long wistful E, that makes it almost sexy—but sexy with a whiff of sophistication, not in the trashy soap opera blond way that I’ve always loathed.

It still doesn’t make him any less annoying, Arthur. Nor does it help that he’s been hanging around the house more and more these past few days. He’s starting to become ubiquitous. Everywhere you turn, there he is: smoking out on the stoop in front of the camper, or pacing around the yard at sunset with a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, even when it’s too dark to read. When I was out there last night, making measurements for the flooring, he wandered by in a ghostly cloud without noticing, lost, I presume, in some sort of cinematographic rumination. It looked like his head was smoldering.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could laugh at his pretensions. Like when I come home and find him lying out in the grass under the tire swing and shooting the thunderclouds through the branches of the birch trees, say. Or when I look out the kitchen window and see him prowling around through the greenhouse plants. But I can’t  . . . quite. It’s the
way
he films, Arthur, the way he looks. He hunches into his camera, and his head tilts with this almost canine acuity, like he’s tuned in to something out of the normal human sensory range, like he’s seeing something that other people can’t.

I don’t know why watching him do this makes me so uneasy. There was even one time after he had finished in the greenhouse space—I probably shouldn’t admit to this—I went to see if I could tell what he had been staring at so raptly for the past ten minutes. I unlocked the deadbolts on the dining room door and pulled it open and stood looking down into my veritable jungle. There was the new batch of roses I haven’t had a chance to de-pot yet. The planters of lettuce. The impatiens. The teacups of basil and dill and cilantro. The twin gardenia trees. (I’d only meant to buy the one, but there was a sale.) And that’s just to name a few things on the list. It was a small leafy fortune, staring back at me, and I think that’s when the exorbitance of my little project truly hit me, Arthur. I slammed the door shut and leaned against it and tried to catch my breath. That was it. From now on, I’m going cold turkey on Home Depot.

Now Lacroix’s asking Liam for what he calls some “domestic scenes.” He’s asked if he can come in and film a few shots of us at dinner one night. Of course, Lacroix being Lacroix, he did his best to make his request sound much more high-flown than that. What he said was something along the lines of “I would love some footage of the spaceman at the dinner table. With the wife. With the children. You know, home from a day in space.”
(Imagine a grand arm wave here, Arthur.) “Home from a day of crafting spaceships.” They were out on the porch talking, and this is what I overheard as I was hauling a lazy man’s load of grocery bags up the steps. I would have rolled my eyes, but I didn’t want to risk losing my balance.

So I finished Lacroix’s sentence for him: “‘The sweat dripping off his heroic brow into his plateful of steak and potatoes.’”

They both turned and saw me then.

“Ah, Jessica,” said Lacroix.

I shook my head at Liam. “Absolutely not, Li,” I said. “Do you hear me? Absolutely not.”

“We’ll think about it,” said Liam.

Famous last words.

Gotta go.

Jess.

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, July 2, 2014 1:08 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: lead with your left side

Yes, well, in case you were wondering who won that one: our dinner with Theo is now scheduled for next week.

Arthur, I’m losing ground every single day to that man’s charm offensive. After Liam, Corinne was the next one to succumb. Trying to keep her away from the camera is almost a full-time job. I have resorted to carrying around an old lab timer. If it dings after five minutes, and she’s not in the room, then I get up and go find her. I’ve managed (I think) to make it clear that Lacroix doesn’t want endless footage of her dance routines, so she is now resorting to stealthier tactics. She hangs out for a while in her bedroom, and then when she knows I’m distracted, she swaps out her T-shirt and shorts for her Sleeping Beauty ball gown or the purple tutu from her last dance recital, and then she goes to find Lacroix. She sidles into his frame by pretending to be distracted by some other innocuous activity—fiddling with the blinds, say, or restacking the books on the coffee table, or flicking her hair, like a movie extra gone rogue—and someone has to go grab her.
What?
she protests.
What?
This cunning side of her is new, and I’m not sure whether to be impressed or disturbed by it, Arthur.

Jack looked as though he was going to be a holdout, but Lacroix won him over by showing him how to fasten a tiny fish-eye camera into the elbow of the dining room chandelier with a handful of bread-bag twist ties. When I came downstairs the other day, the two of them were standing on chairs, making faces into the lens—Jack pulling open his nostrils as far as he could with his fingers, and Lacroix baring his teeth like fangs.

“Jack,” I said. “I walked by the hermit crab tank, and they’re sniffing each other hungrily. Would you mind feeding them, please, before they resort to cannibalism?”

He heaved a long, extravagant sigh—that’s at least one way he takes after me—and jumped down from the chair with a crash. When he left the room, I turned back to Lacroix, who was adjusting the twist ties, twirling the ends around one another with a surprising delicacy. You wouldn’t think someone with fingers like rolls of quarters would be able to pull off something so finicky.

“Don’t you have some spacemen to film?” I said.

He pushed his glasses up into his hair and peered appraisingly down at me. “Of course,” he said. He let go of the chandelier and started to make a heavy-footed descent, but I tapped his knee and pointed up to the camera, which was spinning above our heads in plumes of disturbed chandelier-dust.

“Don’t forget to take that with you,” I said.

I suppose it’s paranoid to think that Lacroix would accidentally-on-purpose leave cameras up without announcing their presence. After all, he made a point of telling Liam three times that he was putting one up in the library where the occasional Spaceco confab is still being held. But Lacroix has taken over the living room, clearing Jack’s Erector set off the coffee table so he can fit his mega-trillion-pixel monitor on it. Half of the nights now, he’s in there, sitting in the armchair with his headphones on, watching the brilliant history of the day flicker past in some kind of trance. Which means the dining room is
mine.
Last night I was sitting in there, writing to you, and when I looked up, he was standing there in the dark doorway—no warning, just boom. He should have been accompanied by one of those forte horror-movie piano chords. I was so startled that I fumbled a keystroke and somehow hit the delete button. And—
poof
—my e-mail vanished into the ether.