Picture Perfect (20 page)

 

H
E WAS TWELVE
,
AND HE
'
D BEEN SHOPLIFTING FOR YEARS
,
SO IN
theory he shouldn't have been stupid enough to get caught. But lately girls had been looking awfully good to him, and the blonde at the checkout with breasts the size of mangoes was giving him the eye, so before he could get the can of Pepsi into his pocket a beefy fist clamped over his wrist and spun him around. Alex found himself staring into the pitted face of the security guard for the second time that week, and when he let his gaze slide sideways he realized that the checkout girl hadn't been looking his way at all.

“Are you just plain stupid,” the guard said, “or is there some other reason you came back to this store?” Alex opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak he was tugged out the electronic door and marched to the police station.

The precinct was busy with pimps and dealers and felons, and the booking officer had little patience for a kid being brought up on shoplifting charges. The sergeant looked from Alex to the security guard. “I'm not gonna waste a lockup,” he said. Compromising, he handcuffed Alex to a chair in front of the booking desk.

They fingerprinted him and took down his information, but even Alex knew it was all just to scare the shit out of him; he was a minor, and in New Orleans shoplifting only earned you a slap on the wrist. The sergeant cuffed him to the chair again and Alex sat quietly, his knees drawn up to his chest and his free arm clasped around his ankles. He closed his eyes and pretended he was on death row, at the eleventh hour.

Some time later, the sergeant noticed him. “Shit,” he said. “Didn't someone come for you yet?”

Alex shook his head. The sergeant asked for his phone number and dialed it, leaning on the desk and staring into an arrest log. He glanced up at Alex. “Your mama and daddy work?” he asked.

Alex shrugged. “Someone should be home,” he said.

“Well,” the officer said, “someone's not.”

An hour later the sergeant tried again. This time he got Andrew Riveaux; Alex knew by the way he held the phone several inches away from his ear, as if whatever ran through his father's veins might be catching. After a minute the sergeant handed the phone to Alex.

The cord stretched to its limit. Alex put the receiver to his ear. He did not know what to say; “Hello” didn't seem quite right. His father began shouting an orange stream of Cajun curses, and ended by saying he was going to beat Alex's hide. “I'll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said, and severed the connection.

But Andrew Riveaux did not come in fifteen minutes, or even in an hour. From his position on the chair Alex watched the sun go down and the moon float into the sky like an old ghost's white, wrinkled face. He knew this was part of the punishment—the pity he'd get from the officers as they passed and the secretaries who pretended not to see him. He shifted uncomfortably, needing to pee but unwilling to call attention to himself by asking to be unlocked.

The sergeant noticed him on his way home at the end of the shift. “Didn't you call home?” he asked, puzzled.

Alex nodded. “My father's coming,” he said.

The policeman offered to call again, but Alex shook his head. He did not want the sergeant, whom he'd begun to consider an ally, knowing the problem was not that his father could not come to pick him up, but simply that he did not
want
to.

He wondered if his father had deliberately decided to leave Alex hanging, or if he'd found something better to do—haul his crawfish traps, drink, be a fifth in a poker game. His mother might have come—Alex tried to believe that—but if his mother had been sober enough to comprehend that Alex was at the station, she would have been kept in her place by her husband.

Alex put his head on the arm of the chair and closed his eyes.

After three in the morning, he was awakened by the strong smell of perfume. A whore was sitting on the chair beside his. She had cherry hair and skin the color of mahogany and eyelashes as long as his little finger. She wore a string of jet beads that looped over one of her breasts, as if to outline it. She was chewing gum—grape—and she held a fistful of money.

She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

“Hi,” she said to Alex.

“Hi.”

“I'm picking up my friend,” she said, as if she needed to justify being in front of a booking table. “How come you're locked onto the chair?”

“I went crazy and strangled my whole family,” Alex said, not batting an eye. “And they ran out of jail cells.”

The whore laughed. She had big, horsey white teeth. “You're a cute one,” she said. “What are you? Ten? Eleven?”

“Fifteen,” Alex lied.

The woman grinned. “And I'm Pat Nixon,” she said. “What did you do?”

“Shoplift,” Alex murmured.

“And they're keeping you overnight?” Her eyebrows shot up.

“No,” Alex admitted. “I'm waiting to get picked up.”

The whore smiled. “Story of my life, babe,” she said.

He had not told her anything, really; not about his family, or how long he'd been sitting there, or how he'd rather be cuffed to this chair for a year than have to own up to the fact that the man who would walk into the station the next day at noon to claim him was indeed his own father. He knew about whores; knew part of their appeal was the way they accepted any baggage that came with you and made you believe you were more than you actually were. He knew they made a career of pretending to feel things they did not feel. All the same, it seemed natural when she put her arm around Alex and pulled him closer, as if their individual chairs did not stand in the way.

Alex pillowed his cheek on the whore's breasts, thinking of the blonde checkout girl and letting his cuffed arm twitch, handicapped in the dead space between them. It took only fifteen minutes before her friend was sprung from the cells below, hissing and spitting like a cat as she walked with the security matron. But during those minutes, Alex closed his eyes and took in the heavy smells of the whore's hair spray and cheap perfume, letting her sing old Negro spirituals to him until the world fell away, until he could believe that affection was a birthright.

 

F
ILMING STOPPED UNEXPECTEDLY FOR THREE DAYS AND
A
LEX DISAPPEARED
. I was too embarrassed to show my face around the rest of the crew, and I hadn't really spent much time with anyone other than Alex, so there was no one to talk to. I stayed in my room at the lodge, coming out only for meals and eating alone. I thought about breaking my contract, and flying home to L.A. before Alex had a chance to return to the set.

But instead I sat on my bed and read every romance novel I had brought, casting myself as the heroine and Alex as her lover. I heard the dialogue in the pitch and cadence of his voice. I pretended and pretended until I couldn't remember what had really happened and what I had imagined while reading through the dark, cool corners of the night.

One night when the moon was settling, the doorknob to my room turned. There were no locks; the lodge was too old for that. I saw the door swing on its hinges and I got up from the windowsill, remarkably calm about facing a stranger.

Instinctively, I must have known it was Alex. I watched him step into my room and close the door behind him. It was dark, but my eyes had adjusted, so I could easily see the shadows under his eyes and the wrinkles in his clothes, the two-day growth of beard. My blood began to sing with the thought that maybe he had been as miserable as I had.

I didn't notice the jar in his hand until he set it on the bureau across from the bed. “I brought this for you,” he said simply.

It was an ordinary jelly jar, the kind Connor's mother had used every summer for canning the wild grape jam she boiled down. It was filled halfway with a clear liquid that looked like nothing more exotic than water.

Alex took a step forward and touched the jar. “It's not cold anymore,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I flew to New York and then got on a puddle jumper to Bangor, but there aren't any mountains in Maine cold enough in September. And I couldn't come back empty-handed, so I took a plane to the only place I could be sure of finding it—I know people who've heli-skied in the Canadian Rockies in August.” He propped his elbows on his knees and rested his face in his hands.

“Alex,” I said quietly. “What exactly did you bring me?”

He looked up at me. “Snow,” he said. “I brought you your snow.”

I reached for the jar and turned it over in my hands, picturing him on the top of a glacial mountain, scooping a handful of snow into a jelly glass to bring back to me, thousands of miles away. I could feel myself smiling from the inside out. “You traveled halfway around the world to get me a jar of snow?”

“Sort of. I couldn't think of anything else to make you understand the other day. I didn't want—I didn't—” He stopped and took a deep breath, thinking over his words. “I've never met anyone like you, but I didn't have a chance to tell you that before I had to shoot that damn love scene. I wasn't crazy about leaving the way I did, but you wouldn't have listened to me anyway. So I figured, you know, actions speak louder than words.”

I sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, still holding the jar of water. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, wondering what I was supposed to do now. I folded my hands in my lap. “Thank you,” I said.

Alex turned to me and smiled. “That's only half your present,” he said. “I also wanted to get you something that wouldn't melt.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gift I could not quite see in the shifting light. But at that moment the sun broke over the horizon, and it caught in its soft pink glow the shine of a diamond solitaire.

Alex reached his hand around to brush the back of my neck. He pulled me forward until our foreheads were touching, bent over this brilliant ring that was even brighter than his eyes. I listened to his words, searching for a hint of my future, but when he spoke, he sounded for all the world like he was grasping at a lifeline. “God,” he said hoarsely. “Please say yes.”

I
NSTEAD
of a wrap party, we had a wedding. After thirteen weeks of filming, Alex stood up on the platform that had held a small set and announced to the cast and crew the secret we'd kept for weeks. Even Bernie, the director, was shocked. He broke the stunned silence by leaping onto the platform and clapping Alex on the back. “Holy shit,” he bellowed, grinning. “How come you didn't tell me?” And Alex laughed. “Because you, Bernie,” he said, “were the first person I expected to wire the tabloids.”

Everyone had known we were seeing each other; it was obvious in the way that Alex treated me. But I think people were surprised that it had turned out to be more than it seemed. I had to believe that flings between actors and others were commonplace. Marriages, though, were a different story.

I had believed Alex when he told me whatever shortcomings a simple ceremony in Tanzania had would more than cancel out the nightmare of trying to keep unwanted reporters and crazed fans away from a wedding in the States. Besides, the only people I would have invited were Ophelia and a few colleagues and maybe, out of filial duty, my father. I had never spent hours dreaming of myself wrapped in white satin, sweeping down an aisle littered with rose petals. It didn't matter to me, I told Alex, if he wanted a justice of the peace.

But in Africa, you know, it's easier to find missionaries than judges. “I want you to get married in a church,” Alex had insisted. “And you're not wearing khaki, either.”
Really
, I tried to tell him.
That isn't me.
But something kept me from pressing my point. I was marrying Hollywood's crown prince, and like everyone else, he expected a transformed Cinderella. And when you got right down to it, what I wanted more than anything was simply to be whatever Alex wanted me to be.

The six weeks between the time when I accepted Alex's proposal and when he announced it were the best six weeks of my life. Part of the magic was the feeling that we were doing something illicit. Alex would meet me in the food tent, sneaking away from the cameras and creating enough of an uproar with his disappearance to guarantee time for a fast, hard kiss. We spent three days of torrential rain locked in my room at the lodge, making love and playing backgammon. We showered together before the sun came up; we spoke of cinematography, of the substance of bones. One cool night, in Bernie's room, as I sat between Alex's spread legs and watched the daily rushes, he wrapped a light blanket around us, and then with everyone just a breath away, slipped his hands under my shirt and beneath the waist of my shorts, stroking me to a fever.

Alex made me feel like someone I had never been, and even the promise of a wedding couldn't keep me from thinking that one morning I would wake up and find that this had never happened. So in much the same way as I catalogued my anthropological samples with India ink, I found myself mentally filing away each memory I made with Alex, until they curled through my mind like a string of rosary beads, waiting to offer comfort.

A flash startled me back to the scene at hand. Joey, the site photographer, had just taken our picture. He handed the Polaroid to Alex, but not before I caught a glimpse of my own white face, slowly gaining color as the chemicals set. Alex's face was taking longer to come into focus. “A keepsake,” Joey said, and then he leaned forward and kissed me right on the mouth.

I spent the better part of the next hour letting Alex do the talking to all the people offering congratulations. Meanwhile, I watched him. The sun flashed off his hair and outlined the familiar curve of his shoulders. Most of the women narrowed their eyes at me, wondering what I could possibly have to attract Alex that they didn't. People whose names I still couldn't remember made lewd comments about the narrow beds at the lodge and glanced toward my flat stomach when they thought I wasn't looking. But still, they were looking at me—to see what they had missed the first time around. Suddenly, I had status. Alex's power and prestige rubbed off on me simply by association.

“Next Wednesday,” Alex was saying. “We'll give you all the details.”

I felt a peck at my shoulder, and turned to see Jennifer, Alex's little assistant, hovering beside me. “I just wanted to tell you,” she said hesitantly, “if you need anything, you know, like for the wedding or whatever, I'd be happy to help you out.”

I smiled at her as warmly as I could. “Thanks,” I said. “I'll let you know.”

She looked away before I'd even finished my sentence, and I turned to see Alex nodding at her. “Just the person I wanted to find,” he said, and Jennifer scurried to his side. He put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her a few feet away from me. “Sorry,” he said to me, grinning, “but if you listen in, you'll spoil the surprise.”

I watched Jennifer whip a notebook out of nowhere and extract a pencil from the folds of her long, dark hair. She scribbled furiously as Alex counted off points I could not hear from this distance. Once, when she asked him a question, Alex glanced at me and ran his eyes over me from head to toe, then turned back. I tried to watch them but people milled between us, pumping my hand up and down and speaking platitudes that could have been a foreign language. I lost my view of Alex in a sea of suntanned faces. I thought I might actually faint, although I'd never done that in my life, and then out of nowhere Alex stood at my side again and I realized that I hadn't been ill at all; it was just that half of me had been missing.

 

S
EVERAL NIGHTS BEFORE THE WEDDING
I
DREAMED THAT
C
ONNOR
met me on the Serengeti at dusk and told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

“It's not like you think,” I told Connor in my dream. “I'm not just infatuated with him because he's an actor—”

“I
know
,” Connor interrupted. “That's what's worse. It's like you don't even notice the things the rest of the world does because you're so busy seeing him as a little wounded bird whose broken wing you can fix—”

“
What
are you talking about?” I exploded. “He's not some charity case.” I concentrated on seeing things as Connor would. I wasn't trying to replace him, but there were enough similarities between my relationship with him as a child and my relationship with Alex now to make me realize that I couldn't help but compare the two. Like Connor, Alex protected me—and he was the only person I let close enough to do it. Like Connor, Alex could finish my sentences before I did. But unlike Connor, for whom I had ultimately come too late, I was just in time to take care of Alex.

In the dream, a run of zebras skirted the edge of the plain, and when they distracted me Connor leaned forward to press his suit. “You're just the one to make it all better, Cassie, don't you see that? That's what you do best. You took care of your mother and your father and me and Ophelia. You collect other people's problems the way some people collect rare coins.”

At this point in the dream, I tried to wake up. I didn't want to believe Connor; I didn't want to listen.

“There's a problem with wounded birds, Cassie,” Connor said. “Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.”

After that, I could feel myself drifting toward consciousness. I kept my gaze on Connor as he began to fade. I looked him square in the eye. “I love Alex,” I said.

Connor stepped back as if he'd taken a blow. He stretched out a hand toward me, but as things often are in dreams, he could not quite reach, and I realized that it had been that way between us for a while. “God help us,” he said.

 

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE OUR WEDDING
, A
LEX AND
I
DROVE TO ONE OF
the many small lakes dotting the area to camp out overnight. In our jeep we'd packed two sleeping bags, a nylon tent, various pots and pans. I didn't question Alex about how he'd gotten these supplies—I was coming to see that Alex could draw blood from a stone if he wanted to. He unpacked beneath the embrace of a low, flat-leafed tree and began to set up the two-man tent with the grace of a practiced outdoorsman. I sat on the soft ground, shocked. “You know how to do that?” I said.

Alex smiled at me. “You forget I grew up on the bayou. I've been running around outdoors all my life.”

I
had
forgotten. But it was easy to forget, when the polished, urbane Alex Rivers was what the world saw most of the time. It was difficult to reconcile the man who brought evening attire to Olduvai Gorge with the man who crouched before me arranging a tripod over a Sterno. “You're a study in contrasts, Mr. Rivers,” I said.

“Good,” Alex murmured. He came up behind me and strummed his fingers down my ribs. “Then you won't be getting tired of me too soon.”

I smiled at the thought of it. When I turned around to help with the rest of the things in the jeep, Alex gently pushed me down to sit in the shade. “Rest,
pichouette
,” he said. “I can do it.”

Alex called me
pichouette
, a word I did not understand, but I liked the way it sounded, rolling from his lips like a trio of smooth pebbles. He spoke his Cajun French sometimes in bed, which I liked. For one thing, it meant he was forgetting himself, since the language came only when he let down his guard. And I liked the rhythm and honey of the words. I'd listen to the whispers against my neck and I would pretend that he was telling me how lovely my skin was, how beautiful my eyes, how he could never let me go.

When Alex finished making camp, I patted the ground beside me. But instead of sitting down, he rummaged through a backpack and extracted a three-piece fishing rod, which he fitted together, threaded, and baited. For another half hour I watched him stand knee-deep in the water, reeling and then casting again, the neon line whizzing through the air like a missile's trajectory. “Incredible,” I mused. “You seem so at home here. How do you ever suffer Los Angeles?”

Alex laughed. “Marginally,
chère
,” he said. “But I'm not there when I can help it. The ranch in Colorado is three hundred acres of heaven and I can fish and ride and whatever. Hell, I could run around naked if I wanted to, and not come in contact with another soul.” He cursed his bad luck, and threw down the fishing pole. “Never got the hang of these things,” he said. He turned to me, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I'm much better with my hands.”

He stepped out of the lake, stalking toward me with his fingers outstretched, but ducked to my side at the last minute to disappear into the woods at the edge of the shore. When he returned he was holding a long, thin branch and a sharp fillet knife. He crouched and laid the branch over one knee, whittling one end to a point. Then he waded back into the water.

Alex stood perfectly still, his shadow rippling on the surface, his arm poised with his makeshift spear. In the time it took for me to draw a breath, he plunged the branch through the water, lifting it to reveal a skewered fish still thrashing on the end. Triumphant, Alex turned to me. “When in Tanzania,” he said, “do as the Tanzanians do.”

I was amazed. “How—how did you know how to do that?”

Alex shrugged. “It's all patience and reflexes,” he said. “I'm used to doing it without a stick.” He walked away from me so that I could not see his face, and tossed the fish into a canvas bag. “You could say my papa taught me.”

We ate several pan-fried fish for dinner and later made love and wrapped up in the blanket, my back pressed to Alex's chest. When he fell asleep I turned toward him, studying his face in the shadow of a silver moon.

A piercing cry made Alex bolt upright, throwing me back onto the ground. He shook himself free of sleep and reached for me, making sure I was all right. “It's far away,” I told him. “It just sounds like it's next door.”

Alex lay down again, but his heart was pounding against my shoulder like a jackhammer. “Don't even think about it,” I soothed, remembering the first times I'd slept outside in the African night. “Listen to the wind. Count the stars.”

“Do you know,” Alex said quietly, “how much I hate camping?”

I sat up and blinked at him. “Then why are we here?”

Alex reached up his hands and pillowed his head upon them. “I thought you'd like it,” he said. “I wanted to do it for you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I spend enough time in makeshift huts to appreciate clean sheets and a sturdy bed,” I said. “You should have told me.” When I looked down at Alex, his face was turned up to the sky, but his eyes were staring past the moon. I wondered what I had said to upset him. I touched my hand to the smooth white inside of his upper arm. “For someone who hates camping, you're quite a pro,” I said softly.

Alex snorted. “I had a lot of unwanted practice,” he said. “You ever been to Louisiana in the summertime?” I shook my head. “Well, it's hell on earth,” he said. “It's so hot the air sweats all over you, and the atmosphere is so heavy you can't breathe right. There are mosquitoes the size of quarters. And it looks like I figure hell looks, too—least down by the bayou. All swamps, dark and muddy, overgrown with cypress and willow, Spanish moss and vines hanging like curtains over the branches. When I was a kid, I'd climb the cottonwoods on the water's edge and listen to the bullfrogs, thinking it was the devil belching up whiskey.”

Alex smiled, although in the limited light it could have been a grimace. “My papa used to take me out in his pirogue most nights, so it wasn't like I didn't know anything about the bayou. He'd haul up the crawfish traps and take them down to Deveraux's, this restaurant that sits half over the swamp on these huge old cypress stumps. He'd give the catch over to Beau, who owns the place—there isn't anyone who can make crawfish like Beau—and then he'd go in for an hour and drink off his pay.”