God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  But Liam already had his phone back up to his ear. He shook his head at me.

  “I know, I know,” he was saying. “That’s what Legal will say, but he’s not there, is he? He’s standing in the middle of my backyard right now. What am I supposed to do? Chase the guy off with a baseball bat?” He opened the closet and jerked a dress shirt off its hanger. “I don’t want to be caught on camera telling him to piss off, whatever the reason. It’ll look hostile, or like we’ve got something to hide.” He rolled his eyes at me. “You know what I think— Listen. I think we should show him that two can play this— Fine, fine, fine. I can’t have a heart-to-heart about this right now, Tris. Call Jeff and put him in the loop. I have to go deal with this guy.”

  He hung up the phone, walked over to the mirror, and began buttoning up his shirt. He was staring at his reflection, but clearly not seeing a thing. It was the exact same expression of rapt concentration he wears when he’s working, when he’s staring at a computer screen, watching a simulation unfold, working his way through a chain of cause and effect. There are moments when I’m afraid, Arthur, that there’s some part of him that thrives on this. The crisis, I mean.

  When he finished, he turned to me. “Are you coming?”

  An image of Lacroix’s smile flashed in front of me. “I think I’m going to shower.”

  “All right.” Liam turned to the door. “I have no idea what his plans are, but I told Tristan we’d welcome him with open arms. Kill him with kindness. Resort to any and all clichés that will be required. We may need dinner tonight. Can you take care of that?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. To his already-disappearing back.

  That’s all I have time for now, but more later.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 4:58 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: life on the movie set

  It’s been . . . interesting. Theo’s wife, Elle, came up yesterday. She appeared promptly at 2:00 p.m. at the Livonia office, thus proving that at least one Lacroix knows how to stick to an itinerary. The woman is clearly Theo’s better half. Or at least his younger one. That picture I sent you was taken more recently than I thought—she can’t possibly be much older than thirty. She arrived in a camper, tailed by two friends in a van—Nigerian guys, I think. Amidst all the chaos, no one bothered to introduce us, but I did manage to catch their names: Abah and Ikenna (sp?). They both had musical accents and a Protestant work ethic like you’ve never seen before. They spent the better part of this morning doing nonstop laps up and down the driveway, transferring the contents of the van into our house. Floodlights filled with intricate filaments. Clamps and stands and sound equipment. Stacks of duct tape. Miles of extension cords. At least three MacBooks. A thirty-six-inch monitor. Those were just the things I could identify. They worked well past lunchtime, and then they declined the deli sandwiches Liam offered them, choosing instead to sit on the hood of the van and smoke and confer with one another and study the house with carefully neutral expressions.

  As far as Elle goes, well . . . She dresses in tastefully faded T-shirts and cargo pants and some kind of designer track shoes, but it doesn’t matter. She still looks like Rapunzel, right down to the spun-gold braid and the periwinkle eyes. Corinne’s head over heels for her, and so are most of the Spaceco swains. We had gotten the house back to ourselves, but Elle’s been here for just a few hours and they’re back en masse. (What is the proper plural for nerds anyway? A gaggle? A flock? A herd?) Even the barely divorced Tristan showed up on our doorstep, claiming that he wanted to “just check things out.”

  “Right,” I said. “Things.” But I stepped out of the doorway and let him inside. “Last I saw her, she was out in the back,” I said. “Why are you even ringing the doorbell? Nobody else bothers to.”

  “Atta girl, Jess,” he said. He picked up Corinne, gave her his best suave look, and hoisted her expertly up into the air while she practically swooned. Six years old, and even she’s susceptible to his charms.

  I have to go now. More exciting updates to come.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 7:18 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: snooping, sleuthing

  Arthur,

  Today officially ends day four of the Tour de Lacroix. So far, not much to report. Elle and Lacroix seem to be following a pretty grueling schedule, which goes more or less like this: Leave a little after seven with Liam. Arrive at the Spaceco office before eight. Spend the day filming, asking a slew of questions, taking notes, and hashing out the details of the upcoming launch. Come back to the camper parked in our driveway sometime after nine. Hole up there for a few hours. Lights out around twelve. All that sweeping and dusting and bee-spraying and screen-repairing, and so far they haven’t done much more than duck in through the front door, sling a coil of extension cord over their shoulder, and then duck back out.

  Lacroix acts as though we’ve never had a conversation. He just hurries past me on the porch, loaded down with a camera on one of his shoulders—or sometimes one on each—and gives me a perfunctory, professional nod.

  I did catch him at something once, just once. I’m not exactly sure what it was. I had terrible insomnia on Wednesday night, and sometime around one in the morning, I decided to get up and write you. I was coming downstairs when a noise made me freeze on the landing. I looked over the railing, and there was Lacroix, standing in the living room. He was standing in front of our defunct fireplace and studying our collection of family photographs. It’s a pretty meager display compared to what most people have nowadays, mostly school portraits of Jack and Corinne. There’s just one photograph of Liam and me, the one snapshot we got from our wedding. It’s not terribly flattering. In it, I’m wearing a pair of blue jeans, and my ridiculously long hair is blowing in the wind. I have on this crown of flowers, the only bride-like detail I insisted on. We both look a little drunk, although we’re not. We’re stone-cold sober.

  That was the picture that seemed to have caught his eye. As I stood there watching him, he picked it up off the mantel and held it up to a stray beam of light, turning it from side to side as though he was trying to commit the details to memory.

  When I cleared my throat, he jumped.

  “Looking for something?” I said.

  “No, no.” He picked up a laptop from the chair next to him and waved it at me. “Just picking up the computer. I was going to get some editing done.” It was too dark to make out his face, to see if he looked embarrassed at being caught in the middle of his flagrant snooping. All I could see was the shrug of his shoulders. “To burn a little of the midnight oil. You know how it is.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” I said. Or started to, but something stopped me. Suddenly I remembered that I had left my shorts upstairs—all I had on was on a T-shirt that barely covered me. It was so dark that I doubted he could see me, but I took a step back from the railing anyway. “Lock the door behind you, please,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. I could see him waving his hand as he pushed open the screen. “Good night, Jessica.”

  I’m not wrong in finding that whole scene a bit creepy, am I, Arthur? Gone was the elaborate e-mail to you that I had been composing in my head for the past hour. (My sleepless epiphanies about possible greenhouse flooring. You should count yourself lucky.) Instead I turned around and snuck back upstairs. I was hoping to crawl back into bed next to Liam, like I’d never left, but I could tell as soon as I opened the door, by the sound of his breathing, that he was awake.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “It’s Lacroix,” I said. “He was down there in the dark, staring at our pictures. When I caught him, he claimed he was coming
in for his computer. Didn’t you lock the door?”

  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.

&
nbsp; 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