Picture Perfect (25 page)

He stepped out of the pool, stalking me. My breath caught as he suddenly stood inches away, soaking the hem of the white gown. He hauled me up against him, wrapping one arm around my waist and gripping my chin with his other hand. He was holding my jaw so tight that the skin stretched, beginning to sting.

His eyes had gone nearly black and I couldn't move my mouth enough to speak and it was getting harder and harder to breathe. He was twice as big as me, and drunk, and I couldn't be sure he knew exactly who I was. A cold curl of fear unraveled at the base of my stomach, and that was when I felt Alex start to shake.

It wasn't just the chill of night on his wet body; it was something that came from the marrow of his bones. It worked its way upward from his knees to his hips to his arms, and I knew he couldn't control it, because suddenly he seemed as terrified as I was. He locked his eyes onto mine, as if I would know what to do.

Without thinking, I wedged my hands between us to the tie of my robe and pulled it free. I pressed myself against Alex, my skin heating his, selflessly absorbing his cold until my body was racked by shudders, while Alex's became calm and warm.

He let go of my jaw, and I rubbed my face from side to side against his chest, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks. When he pulled away from me, his eyes were silver and shot with awareness. Sighing, I relaxed. I knew this stage.

Alex let me take the bottle of bourbon from his fist, and he didn't say a thing as I poured it over the grass near our feet. He watched it steam up and hiss, and then he took the empty glass from my hand and stared at it as if he had no idea how it had ever gotten there.

It was so easy to see him as a little boy when his defenses came tumbling down. I thought of the childhood friends he'd told me about, conjured from books and drawn in the richest colors, taking him on adventures that made him forget where he was. I pictured him hauling up traps of crawfish his father was too drunk to retrieve; wearing a white shirt two sizes too small to an uncle's funeral because his mother hadn't bothered to replace the one he'd outgrown. I gently pulled him down to the green striped chaise we'd been sitting on earlier that afternoon, and I brushed the wet spikes of his hair away from his eyes. He swayed forward a little, unconsciously craving a gesture that should have come years before.

“You know, I never had an in-between,” Alex said. “My own
maman
and papa didn't give a damn about me, and I went straight from that life to people who pick through my trash, trying to figure out what I eat for breakfast.” He pulled me onto his lap, burying his face in my hair. “You know what I'd like?” he murmured. “I'd like to go meet the guy who tailors my suits, instead of having him come here. And I'd like to buy you daisies from a street vendor who hasn't seen my last three films. I'd like to go out to dinner and have your goddamn friend tip off the press and have them say, ‘Alex
who
?'”

He lifted his hand to cover my breast, and it rested in his palm like a simple, solid truth. “I used to lie in my bed at night as a kid and wish that someone cared if I woke up the next morning, and not just so there'd be someone to kick around.” He kissed the crown of my head and tucked me closer to his chest, as if he could protect me from his own past. “Be careful what you wish for, Cassie,” he said softly. “It might come true.”

“I
brought this for you.”

Alex's voice came from behind me, and without meaning to, my fingers gripped the armrests of the white wicker chair. I did not turn around, staring instead over the balcony of the upper veranda, counting the steps it took for Alex to walk from the door of the bedroom to me.

He set the tea down beside me, centered on a simple saucer with the milk already poured in, which told me that Alex had gone to the trouble of preparing it himself, rather than asking the cook to do it. In the distance, I could hear the sounds of late-afternoon traffic and crying gulls, as if this day had been just like any other.

Alex knelt in front of me and rested his folded arms on my knees. I stared at him as if I was in shock, which I suppose I was. My mind registered the flawless symmetry of his features as if seeing them for the very first time. “Cassie,” he whispered, “I'm sorry.”

I nodded at him. I believed him; I
had
to.

“It's not going to ever happen again,” he said. He laid his head in my lap and of their own volition my hands began to stroke his hair, his ear, the line of his jaw that I knew so well.

“I know,” I said. But even as the words came I saw behind my closed eyes the image of those midwestern storms that rip up the world as you know it, and leave, like a sacrifice, a rainbow to make you forget what has come before.

 

“W
HAT
'S
IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE NATURE OF BONE
, ” I told the sea of faces in the lecture hall, “is that it's not the way we always imagine it to be.” I stepped from behind the podium, coming to stand at a little demonstration table I'd set up before my field anthropology class. We were nearly two months into the course, and I was working hard to give the students the background they'd need for the site excavation we'd do later in the semester. “When we dig up a bone, we assume it is something solid and static, when in fact it used to be every bit as alive as the other tissues of the body.”

I listened to the scratch of pens on lined notebooks as I counted off the properties of bone in a living organism. “It can grow, it can be stricken by disease, it can heal itself. And it adapts to the needs of the individual.” I lifted up two femurs from the display table. “For example, bones become stronger when necessary. This femur came from a thirteen-year-old girl. Compare its width to that of the other bone, which belonged to an Olympic weightlifter.”

I liked giving this lecture. Part of it was the sensationalism of the displays, part of it was breaking down most of the preconceptions the students had about bone in general. “Bone isn't made of inorganic matter, either, like chalk. It's an organic network of fibers and cells that happen to contain inorganic matter, like calcium phosphate. It's the combination of the two that gives bone its resilience and also its hardness.”

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Archibald Custer leaning against the doorframe. Last year, he had said to me that I treated science like a
National Enquirer
story. And I had argued, no pun intended, that a dissertation on the nature of bone was too dry to keep kids awake for an hour, much less get them interested in anthropology. Since Alex's grant, Custer hadn't had the guts to criticize my teaching methods, or to move me to a different course. I could probably have lectured naked without there being any backlash.

My eyes roved the back of the classroom, just below Custer's tightly crossed arms. A kid wearing headphones, two girls whispering to each other, and Alex.

Sometimes he came to watch me teach; he said it amazed him how much I knew. He always slipped in after the class started, to keep from drawing attention away from my words; he usually wore sunglasses, as if they were something to hide behind. Most of the students knew I was married to him—I think some of them took the class just to find out what I was like, or in hopes of seeing Alex.

I grinned right at him, and he took off his sunglasses and gave me a wink. When Alex came, I was at my very best. I suppose, in a way, I was acting for him. “Now, you can see just how much of a bone is organic if you soak it for a while in an acid. This will remove the salts, leaving the organic matter behind in the shape it was before it was placed in the acid. But,” I said, drawing the fibula from a glass tray where it had been soaking, “once you remove the salts, it's completely pliable.” I picked up each end of the long bone, letting it sag a bit in the middle before I tied it into a loose knot.

“Holy shit,” whispered a freshman in the front row.

I smiled at him. “My thoughts exactly,” I said.

Glancing at my watch, I stepped back behind the podium and began to shuffle together my notes. “Don't forget the quiz next Thursday.”

Custer had left, and the students began to stream down the aisles of the hall. Usually after this lecture, a group would cluster around the display table, touching the jellied bone, untying it, running their fingers over the edges. In the past I had answered their questions and let them stay as long as they liked. After all, anthropology was a hands-on discipline.

But this year, in spite of the rapt attention the class had given me and the fact that my lesson hadn't changed a bit, nobody seemed interested. Quietly, I began to straighten up the table, packing away the exhibit bones in layers of soft cotton wool. I wondered if I was losing my touch.

I looked up, remembering that Alex was probably waiting, and saw a knot of students milling around him in the aisle, offering up their anthropology notebooks for autographs.

The blood drained from my face.
Wait,
I wanted to say,
they belong to me.
But the words were stuck in my throat, and even as I let the first wave of anger flood past I realized that I had nothing to be jealous of at all. Alex hadn't deliberately gathered them near, and even if he hadn't been in the classroom, there was no guarantee that any of the students would have come forward to look at my display.

He pushed past the students and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking over the table and the bones lying neatly in transport crates. “Don't some of the salts seep out into the soil when a bone gets fossilized?” Alex said loudly.

I laughed; in spite of his apparent undivided interest, I knew exactly what he was doing. “Sure,” I said.

“So how come you never dig up anything as limp as that?” He pointed to the bone, still knotted, swimming in its acid solution. Two students wandered back down the aisle of the lecture hall, coming to stand on either side of Alex and touching the display femurs in the spots where his fingers had brushed them seconds before. Several other kids joined the group.

“First of all, it's going to take centuries to happen. But even when the calcium content is reduced, it's not quite as drastic, so the bones usually retain their shape. Of course, every once in a while the climate and the soil are right”—I rummaged through a half-packed carton—“and you get something like this.” I held up an Iron Age jawbone that had been excavated from an Irish peat bog, which was twisted neatly in the shape of a cruller. “The way other bones were lying on this one was what caused it to take this shape.”

For a while, then, the soft pads of a dozen hands ran over the bone samples I'd brought, and above the heads of the students I caught Alex's eye. He really did know how to ask the right questions. In fact, if he hadn't been such a good actor, he would have made an excellent anthropologist. He walked behind the table and slipped his arm around my waist. As if the students had been cued, they glanced up and dribbled out of the classroom, chattering.

“Happy anniversary,” Alex said, kissing me lightly.

I kept my eyes open. Around us, the dust motes danced in the light that spilled through the windows. “Happy anniversary,” I said. I stepped out of the circle of his arms and carefully rewrapped the samples the kids had been examining. “Just let me clean this up and we can get out of here.”

He caught me by the shoulders and pulled me between his legs. “I want to do an experiment,” he said. “Are you game?”

I nodded, already seeing his head bend down to kiss me again. His lips moved against mine, making me whisper with him, and he deepened the kiss, cradling my head, keeping me from pulling away.

By the time he lifted his head, I was lying across him, not entirely sure of where I was. “Just as I thought,” he murmured. “I wanted to see if bones could go all soft without the acid.”

I smiled into the warmth of his chest. “Absolutely,” I said.

 

I
T HAD BEEN ONE MOMENT
,
MOMENT MISTAKE
,
AND AS
A
LEX SAID
,
IT
would not happen again. I whispered those words over and over, thinking that these things happened to other people, the ones you heard about on the news, but certainly not to Alex and me.

“Cassie?”

At the sound of Ophelia's voice, I grabbed the afghan that was draped over the other wicker rocking chair and wrapped it around my shoulders. I was not cold, but it would keep her from seeing what had happened.

After that disastrous night out at Nicky Blair's over a year earlier, Ophelia and I had slowly regained ground with each other. I needed her; except for Alex, I didn't really have anyone to talk to. I don't know that she ever said she was sorry, but then again, I stopped apologizing for marrying Alex, and I let her know that my loyalties were with him. As long as they didn't cross paths when Ophelia came to visit, things were usually all right. In fact, our relationship assumed its usual course: Ophelia would come over and talk about herself, and since my life meant discussing Alex, I would sit quietly and simply listen.

Ophelia's head peeked out from the French doors that led into the bedroom. “
There
you are,” she said. “And here I was beginning to think you'd made some move without telling John first.”

I tried to smile at her. “This isn't a very good time,” I hedged.

Ophelia waved the idea away. “I know, I know. The illustrious Riverses have a premiere to attend tonight. I wanted to know if I could borrow your red evening gown.”

I wrinkled my forehead; I couldn't even remember
owning
a red evening gown, but then Ophelia had a better idea of the inventory of my closets. “What for?”

“I'm singing at a blues club tonight.” Ophelia leaned against the supporting balustrade of the veranda, slinking her arm up over her head in the fashion of a vamp.

“You can't sing,” I pointed out.

Ophelia shrugged. “Yeah, but the owners don't know that yet and won't find out until I'm already on stage. And you never know who's going to be in the audience, the way I figure it.” She smiled. “Besides, they paid me up front.”

I couldn't help but laugh; Ophelia was truly the best medicine. “How in God's name did you convince them you could sing the blues?”

Ophelia started back toward the bedroom, ostensibly to rummage for the evening gown. “I lied,” she called out.

I pulled the blanket closer around my shoulders, drawing my secret to myself. “How can you just do that?” I said. “I mean, don't you ever get your stories crossed?”

Ophelia waltzed onto the veranda with the dress draped over her shoulder. “Your problem is that you've been too honest for too long. Once you start doing it,” she said easily, “lying is simpler than breathing.” She held the dress up under her chin and pirouetted for me.

“Billie Holiday would be jealous,” I said. I shifted in the rocker, wincing as my side pressed against the arm of the chair.

Ophelia glanced down at me, and her eyes clouded. “You're not getting sick, are you?” She tugged at the corner of the blanket. “I mean, are you cold?”

I let her press her palm against my forehead as I had taught her to do years before, and I pulled the afghan tight around my shoulders. I hated Alex for making me do this. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I may be coming down with something.”

 

A
FTER SPENDING A FULL YEAR WITH
A
LEX,
I
CAME TO SEE THAT
I
HAD
really married many different men—Alex being the stand-in when no one else was around. He couldn't really leave his work at the office, so every character he played made its way into my bed, or sat across from me at the breakfast table. I'll say this—it certainly added variety to our relationship. During the quick eight weeks he'd been shooting
Speed,
an action film about a pilot, he'd been cocky and quick and bursting with energy. When he did a summer run as Romeo for a professional theater group, he had come to me at night with all the passion of a young boy in love with being in love.

I hadn't liked the character of his pilot, but he had been tolerable. And Romeo made me a little edgy, more prone to check in the mirror for new lines and to wonder how I could get so tired in the course of a normal day while Alex seemed to keep going forever. But now that Alex was doing
Antony and Cleopatra,
I had come up against the first character I wanted nowhere near me. On my desk calendar at the university, I kept count of how many more days were left of production, how many more days I had to wait before Alex became just Alex again.

In many ways, playing Antony wasn't much of a stretch for Alex, which is what I think made the role so attractive to him in the first place. Antony was driven by power and ambition, a man who had chosen a queen; a man who, in Shakespeare's words, could “stand up peerless.” But Antony was also obsessive, judgmental, and paranoid. It was his fixation with Cleopatra that created a chink in his armor—jealousy—which made it that much easier for his enemies to bring them down. Convince Antony that Cleopatra has betrayed him for Caesar, and his world will come crumbling.