Picture Perfect (11 page)

The VCR was an impulse buy. He just didn't see how he could live in the movie capital of the world and not have one. He didn't know how to set the clock and he'd be damned if he was going to thumb through the manual to figure it out, so it had been flashing 12:00 for twenty-four hours now. It was his day off, Friday, and when these guys finished bringing in the furniture he was going to do the following things in this order: eat a bowl of cereal at his new kitchen table, flop down belly-first on his new bed, sprawl across his couch and flip on the TV with the remote, and then watch a movie.

It was past noon by the time he walked down to the convenience store to rent something. He wasn't looking for anything in particular. The Korean proprietor told him his first two choices were out, and then held up a beaten red box. “You try this,” he said. “You like it.”

Desperado
. Will couldn't help but laugh. It was a film from the early eighties, and it co-starred Alex Rivers. “Shit,” he said, pulling a five from his pocket. “I'll try it.” If Rivers was as young as he figured from the dates on the box, he probably wasn't very good, and after last night, Will felt like getting a laugh at his expense.

Will bought a bag of natural popcorn and walked home. He sat down on the new couch and started the movie with his remote, fast-forwarding through the warnings and the previews. When Alex Rivers first came onto the screen and let out a howl like a Sioux war cry, Will snorted and tossed a handful of popcorn at the TV.

He did not know what the movie was about, but he remembered all the controversy that had surrounded it. It was written up in a lot of tribal papers, opinions that had split down the middle: complaints for its inaccuracies, praise for its portrayal of Native American family life and the hiring of Indian actors. Will watched it long enough to see the actress who played Alex Rivers's sister marry some strapping Mandan brave. She was small and blond, and her face was very close to the one Will had seen at night as an adolescent, when he tossed under sheets in his grandfather's house.

“Fuck this,” Will said. He hit the little red button on his remote, getting great satisfaction out of seeing Alex Rivers's image wiggle and black out as the tape ejected from his VCR. He sat up, spilling the popcorn into the cushions of the couch. “They don't know a thing,” he muttered. “They make these shitty movies and they don't have a clue.”

Will switched off the TV, too, staring at the screen for a moment until the snow stopped dancing in front of his eyes. He looked at the video box lying on the floor on its side. Then he walked to the two boxes he'd moved out of the way for the delivery. Prying open the top one, he rummaged through the newspaper Cassie had tried to pack between the artifacts he'd so carelessly thrown inside.

He pulled out the medicine bundle that had belonged to his great-great-grandfather, who—like his grandfather—had dreamed of the elk, and that's what the pouch was made of. Will fingered the fringes; the skin of the bag itself. Elk Dreamers had been highly revered among the Sioux. People turned to them when they were looking for the person they should love.

Will had known a guy in the reservation's police department who had married a white woman, moved to Pine Ridge town, coached his kid's Little League team. Like all cops, he carried a piece, but he also carried a medicine bundle. In 1993, believe it or not, he wore the thing every day looped right around his holster. He said it brought him luck, and the one day his daughter borrowed it for show-and-tell he'd been shot in the arm by a drug addict.

There were other people on the reservation, people his own age, who still had bundles. Nobody batted an eye. Will had to admit, there were stranger things.

He walked into the kitchen and found a hammer and a picture hook. For a moment he sat with the medicine bundle, rubbing it against his cheek and feeling the soft chamois of history. It wasn't his medicine bundle, so it wasn't going to do him any good, but it wasn't going to do any damage, either.

Will tried to remember where Cassie had hung it that day, and he set the bag between his teeth to stand on the couch. He held his palms up to the smooth white wall, hoping to feel some of the heat her gifted hands had left behind.

 

L
IKE EVERY ONE ELSE IN THE
W
ESTWOOD
C
OMMUNITY
C
ENTER
, C
ASSIE
cried at the end of
The Story of His Life
. It was easy to see why Alex had been awarded his first nomination for a Best Director Oscar, although the nomination for Best Actor had raised some controversy about why Alex and not Jack Green, the veteran actor who portrayed his father, had gotten the nod. Jack had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor; it could have gone either way. L.A. bookies were saying Alex was a favorite in his two categories, Jack a dead lock for
his
, and the film would win Best Picture.

Many of the senior citizens shuffled out after the film, having come primarily to see the movie that all the speculation centered on. But Cassie couldn't have been dragged from that theater. She realized the reason she had come to the festival in the first place was to see
Antony and Cleopatra
, the epic movie that Alex had made shortly after their marriage.

The credits started scrolling over the screen, accompanied by the sad notes of a sitar. Cassie pulled her hair out of its ponytail and fanned it over the back of the seat. She closed her eyes just before Alex spoke Antony's first words, and she willed herself to remember.

 

I
T WAS THE FIRST INDICATION SHE HAD THAT
A
LEX WAS NOT THE
man she had married. He came home from Herb Silver's office clutching a script. She had been in her laboratory at the house, scanning her itinerary for the upcoming trip to Tanzania, when Alex burst through the door and planted himself in front of her. “This,” he said, “is the part I was made for.”

Later, Cassie had thought about what he said; it would have made more sense to say,
This part was made for me
, instead of the other way around. But like Antony, from the minute he first touched that script Alex had become a megalomaniac.

The lines came easily to him, falling from his lips as if he'd never had to study them, and although Cassie knew Alex had a photographic memory, she had never even seen him crack open the script. “I am Antony,” he told her simply, and she had no choice but to believe him.

He was not the favored actor for the role. He hadn't even been considered until he'd asked Herb to submit his name. Cassie knew he was nervous about it. So on the morning he was to meet with the casting director, she waved the cook away from the kitchen and made him an omelette herself. She put in peppers and ham and Vidalia onions, cheddar cheese and Colby and a dash of paprika. “Your favorite,” she said with a flourish. She laid the plate in front of him at the table. “For good luck.”

Alex would have looked up at her, maybe grabbed her by the hips and swung her onto his lap for a kiss. He would have offered her half and hand-fed it to her from his own fork. But that morning his eyes darkened, as if he had devoured something whole that was now burning its way out. He swept the plate off the table with his arm, not even glancing as it shattered against the pale veined-marble floor. “Bring grapes,” he whispered, already in accent. “Plums and sweetmeats. Ambrosia.” He turned away from Cassie, who stood frozen at his side. He stared over the length of the table at something she could not see. “Bring a feast for a god,” he said.

Cassie ran from the table. From the bedroom, she called in sick to the university, truly believing she was on the verge of throwing up. She heard John come in to get Alex, and when the door closed behind them, she curled up on the mattress and tried to make herself as small as humanly possible.

Alex did not come home until after dinner. She was still in the bedroom, sitting at the window and watching the horizon swallow the sun. She kept her back to Alex when he opened the door, waiting rigidly for his apology.

He did not speak. He knelt behind her and ran his fingers from her jaw to her neck, stroking lightly. He let his lips run the path of his hands, and when he tipped her chin back to kiss her, she gave herself up to him.

He made love as he never had before. He was rough with her until she cried out, then so gentle she had to press his hands against her, craving more. It was not an act of passion but possession, and every time Cassie tried to pull herself an inch away from Alex's fever he drew her tighter. He held himself back until he felt her closing around him, and as he pushed her down into the bed he whispered into the shell of her ear. “You did know,” he said, “how much you were my conqueror.”

When he was breathing steadily, asleep, Cassie slipped from the bed and picked up the script he'd dropped by the window. She walked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid for hours skimming the play she had last read in high school. She cried when Antony, in love with Cleopatra, married Octavia for peace. She whispered aloud the scene where Antony, realizing Cleopatra had not betrayed him after all, begged a serving soldier to run him through with his own sword. She closed her eyes and saw Antony dying in Cleopatra's arms; Cleopatra poisoning herself with the asp. In Act III, she found it: the line Alex had murmured to her in the quiet after. But she had not made love with Alex. It had been Antony touching her, obsessed with her, filling her.

 

A
WOMAN TO
C
ASSIE
'
S LEFT BEGAN TO COUGH VIOLENTLY, AND
C
ASSIE
opened her eyes only to realize she had missed the bulk of the movie. Alex wasn't even on the screen anymore. The actress who had played opposite him, a very beautiful woman who had gone on to do nothing else of great merit, was singing Antony's praises. Cassie whispered the words with her: “His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm crested the world; his voice was propertied as all the tuned spheres.” It had been the role of a lifetime for Alex, the one that opened Hollywood's eyes enough to realize here was an actor who could do anything at all, who could sell gold to Midas himself. And was it any wonder?
A man who ruled the world. Unparalleled ambition
. There were so many similarities between Antony and Alex, it was difficult to know if he had had to act at all.

She wanted to see him. Not as he was on screen, filled to the skin with a character's thoughts and deeds, but as himself. She wanted to talk to the man who told her he had threatened kidnapping as an alternative to marrying him, the one whose dimples her children would have, the one who bought her ancient skulls and plasticine. She wanted to stand on the moors of Scotland with him, his arms around her, their pulses slowing to match.

Not waiting for the end of the movie, she pulled Alex's sweatshirt closer around her and started up the aisle of the amphitheater. She would meet him after his engagement at the hospital, and they'd ride together to Bel-Air, and she'd tell him about the forty-two senior citizens who had come to see him that morning. He would kiss the warm spot the sun crowned on her hair and she would lean against him, letting the whole back seat fill up with the wonder of them, together.

Cleopatra's words trailed behind her like a bridal train as she stepped into the humid afternoon.
Think you there was, or might be, such a man as this I dreamed of
?

M
ICHAELA
Snow, Alex Rivers's publicist, met him in the parking lot of the hospital. “Alex, Alex, Alex,” she said, her heavy arms seeming to move of their own accord to wrap around his neck. “If I didn't love you, I'd kill you.”

Alex kissed her cheek and embraced her as best he could—she weighed much more than he did, so his arms didn't make it the whole way around her middle. “You only love me because I make you so much money,” he said.

“You've got me there,” she said. She snapped, and a small, thin man tumbled out of the back of her van. He held three brushes threaded between the fingers of one hand, and a sponge dabbed in pancake in the other. “This is Flaubert Halloran,” Michaela said. “Freelance makeup.”

“Flaubert,” the man repeated, in a voice that reminded Alex of the glide of a cat. “Like the writer.” He stuck the wooden ends of the brushes in his mouth like a seamstress's pins and began to cover the bruise at the corner of Alex's eye. “Nasty, nasty,” he said.

Michaela kept checking her watch. “Okay, Flo, that's all.” She pulled Alex's wrist, dragging him behind her toward the hospital. “I've got three major networks,
People, Vanity Fair
, and the
Times
expected to show. The story is that this is a charitable kind of thing you do every year, and only a leak to the press—thank you very much—has led to this coverage. Make something up about a long-lost cousin who died of leukemia.”

Alex grinned at her. “Or an illegitimate son?”

Michaela steered him through the glass doors of the hospital. “I'd murder you,” she said. She handed Alex a sheaf of publicity photos from
Taboo
and a gaggle of balloons in blue and gold, then shepherded him into an elevator. Michaela reached in to push the button to the seventh floor. “Remember, act shocked to see all the cameras, but recover quickly, and feed them a sob story that will win you another Oscar nomination.” She winked at him and waved, her tiny red nails blinking in the flesh of her palm. “
Ciao
,” she mouthed.

Act? he thought, his smile fading as the elevator doors closed before him. He was already acting. It had taken nearly every imaginative skill he had to meet Michaela in the parking lot and pretend that this was just like any other PR engagement. For years Alex had studiously avoided hospitals, for years he'd buried his memories of a New Orleans pediatric ward. As he moved through the halls, the familiar ammonia stench and the spartan white walls began to close in around him. He tensed the muscles of his arms, expecting to feel the prick of a needle, the drain of an IV.

He had been born with a hole in his heart, a condition that consigned him to a childhood on the sidelines. The backwoods GP who'd heard the murmur had referred Alex's mother to Charity in the city, where a specialist could check the severity of the defect, but when she forgot the appointment—more than once—he told her her son would have to play it safe, rather than sorry.
Don't run
, Alex had been told.
Don't exert yourself
. He could remember watching other kindergartners race across the damp playground. He could remember closing his eyes and picturing his heart—a punctured, red, child's valentine.

When he was five and still couldn't play outside, he listened to soap operas in the afternoons with his mother, who did not seem to notice or care that he was there. Once on the TV a lady with the bright hair of a fairy had pressed her cheek to a man's bare chest and murmured,
I love you with all my heart
. After that, when Alex pictured his heart, he did not just imagine the hole. He also saw the extent of the damage: all the love he'd gathered for and from other people draining out, an unstoppable sieve.

No wonder
, Alex had realized, blaming himself for his parents' indifference in that way young children have of twisting outcomes and events. That was the first time Alex decided to be someone else. Rather than face the flaws in himself, he'd pretend he was a swashbuckling pirate, a mountain climber, the President. He pretended he lived in a normal family, that during dinner his parents asked him,
How was your day?
instead of hissing in angry Cajun French. And at age eight, when he was pronounced cured, he brought those fantasies to life, preferring someone strong and bright to the frightened boy he had been.

He convinced himself that he was impervious to pain, mettled of superheroic proportions. He could remember holding his palm over a burning candle, feeling the skin welt and take fire, telling himself that anyone who could survive such trying feats would not be affected by his mother's disinterest, his father's taunting. He got very good at believing what he forced himself to believe. In fact, thirty years later, Alex had had so much practice at dissembling, he was hard-pressed to remember what would remain if all his careful masks fell away.

With the self-control for which he had become famous, Alex shook free of his memories and steeled himself to the situation at hand. This was a hospital, true, but it had nothing to do with him; it meant nothing at all to him. He'd do his job, he'd pretend he liked being there, and he'd get the hell out.

It didn't surprise Alex that to reach the kids he first had to struggle through a knot of doctors and nurses. He smiled politely, covertly glancing over their bobbing heads to find the quickest route to the patient wards, so that he'd look like he'd been there many times before. They tugged at his coat, telling him how much they had loved this movie or that. They all called him Alex, as if sitting in a darkened theater with his image for two hours at a time made them think they'd known him all their lives.

“Thanks,” he murmured. “Yes, thank you.” He managed to make it down the hallway to the pediatric cancer ward, when the cameras rounded the corner. He looked up long enough to register faint disapproval, maybe a trace of surprise, but he recovered and smiled politely and said some children were expecting him.

Michaela hadn't prepared him for the sight of the kids. One goddamned glance and he was five years old again, shivering in a thin johnny while he waited for the doctors to read him his future. Had he looked like this?

The children peppered the floor in their pajamas, some trailing open robes. Their eyes were too large for their heads. They were carbon copies of each other: thin, haunted, bald; evoking images of concentration camps. He could not even tell the boys from the girls until they spoke. “Mr. Rivers,” one little girl lisped. She couldn't have been more than four, but he was no good at judging these things, and he knelt down so that she could climb onto his back. She smelled of medicine and urine and surrender. “Here,” she said, dropping a wet cracker into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I saved this one for you.”

He would have thought they were too young to see his films, but nearly every kid there had seen
Speed
, the one about the test pilot. The boys wanted to know if he'd really gotten to fly that F-14, and one even asked if the actress who played his girlfriend had tasted as good as she looked.

He gave balloons to the smaller children and autographed photos to anyone who asked. When a thirteen-year-old named Sally came closer for hers, he leaned toward her conspiratorially. “You know, the best way to remember the places you've been is to kiss a pretty girl wherever you go,” he said, just loud enough for the tape recorders to pick up his words. “Think you can help me?”

She blushed furiously and offered her cheek, but at the moment Alex went to kiss her she turned and landed her lips right on his mouth. “Wow,” she breathed, holding her fingers over her lips. “I gotta call my ma.”

It had struck Alex at the moment the flashbulbs went off that not only had he given Sally her first kiss, but probably her last. He felt himself starting to sweat as the room swam around him, and he had to take several deep breaths to steady his nerves. Physically, he had gotten better; physically, he had been lucky. But there were all kinds of hidden dangers in childhood, things that reared up and stole your innocence before you were old enough to fight back. He wondered which was worse—a child whose spirit could not outlive a broken body; or, like himself, a man whose apparent health hid a soul that had died years before.

 

“J
ESUS
C
HRIST
, J
OHN
,” A
LEX SAID
,
STRETCHING HIS ARMS OUT OVER
the back seat of the Range Rover. “Unless she was running off to meet some other guy, what's the big secret?”

John looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don't know, Mr. Rivers,” he said. “I promised the missus and all.”

Alex leaned forward and grinned. “Ten bucks more a week for you if you give me the town where you dropped her off. Twenty bucks if you come completely clean.”

John chewed his upper lip. “You won't tell her I said nothing?”

Alex crossed his fingers over his chest. “And hope to die,” he said.

“She went to the movies.”

“That's the big secret?”

John smiled at him. “She went to
your
movies. Some festival in Westwood.”

Alex started to laugh. She could have watched anything he'd made—from the rushes to the uncut versions to the screen copies themselves—in the privacy of her own home. But then again, maybe that's why she didn't want him to know. Maybe the real show was seeing other people's reactions to Alex on camera.

“You have a copy of today's paper, John?” Alex reached for the
Times
as John handed it through the partition in the Plexiglas. He skimmed through the entertainment section until he reached the movie listings.
Desperado, Antony and Cleopatra
, and of course,
The Story of His Life
. He smiled. If Cassie wanted to see him at work, he could make it that much easier.

He asked John to turn off the radio and he closed his eyes, tuning out the world and in to his senses. Before the film rolled, he always found a quiet corner where he could slip into character. It was a matter of breathing; of concentrating so hard on the pattern and then altering it just slightly to match the way his character would.

Where breathing started, life followed. Antony drank in the air, as if taking in the entire world with one single breath. When he opened his eyes he saw a world of green and gold that had been spread at his feet. He murmured the names of the exits on the highway in a precise British accent. He did not deign to look at John; he would not do so with his servants. He rolled down his window and let the wind gust over his face, blowing his hair back and scalding his eyes. He touched the smooth leather seats and thought of the curves of his queen.

At the apartment, when Alex made no move to get out of the car, John shrugged and ran up the walk to collect Mrs. Rivers. He was used to this sort of thing from his employer. It wasn't his nature to talk, but sometimes he'd pick up Mr. Rivers and drop off a completely different man.

Cassie was laughing as she stepped into the car. “Move,” she said. “You're hogging the back seat.” Alex was sitting in the center, and he stared at her but made no effort to shift to one side or the other. Assuming this was some game, she flopped down beside him, landing half on his thigh.

She felt his hand on the back of her neck, gentle and tense at the same time, as if even a caress could serve to remind her how easily he could overpower her. She narrowed her eyes and turned to him. “What in God's name did they do to you at that hospital?”

His fingers tightened almost to the point of pain, and she cried out softly before she could stop herself. He was looking directly at her but she had the sense he was seeing someone else. Panicked, she clawed at Alex's wrist. “Cut it out,” she whispered, and before she could ask him again what was the matter, his body pinned her to the seat and his mouth seared over hers in a kiss that was not like Alex at all.

He's acting
.

She dug her nails into his arms and bit down on his lip until she had enough force to push him away. “Stop it,” she ordered. “Just stop it now.”

For a moment he froze, his eyes paling to the gray of Arctic ice and then slowly draining of life until all that sat across from Cassie was a shell. And then something shuddered its way up his body, moving like a blush, bringing color to his skin and settling as a spark in his eyes. He was Alex again, and he shrugged. “You didn't have to bite me,” he said. “I just figured you'd like a firsthand performance, too.”

Still cautious, Cassie curled up at the far side of the back seat. “Who told you where I went?” she accused, her eyes sliding to John in the front.

Alex reached for her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “I know everything about you,” he said, smiling.

She was beginning to think that he did. He was back to being the Alex she'd grown accustomed to in the past few days, funny and gentle and comfortable as a worn armchair. Cassie wondered if this was just another character he'd played along the line, one he kept himself wrapped in most of the time.

She shook her head to clear it. What was she thinking? She had seen Alex with his guard down—when he talked about his parents, when he tried to teach her karate on the shallows of the beach, when he reached for her in his sleep and whispered her name. It was impossible to act all the time; it was ridiculous to think that what she saw was not real. She squeezed his hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I don't usually bite.” He turned slightly, patting his side, and she willingly slid closer to him. “But what made you pick
Antony
, for God's sake?”

Alex smiled. “You used to love Antony when we were first married,” he said.

Cassie opened her mouth to object, but changed her mind. Alex was right. He did know everything about her, and at the present moment she still knew next to nothing, and the only choice she had was to believe him.