Picture Perfect (17 page)

 

H
E COULD MAKE MIRACLES
. I
STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF WHAT HAD
been a set only hours ago—the interior of his character's tent—and surveyed the fine white linen tablecloth, the tall bayberry candles in ivory holders, the champagne chilling in a silver bucket. Alex was standing at the opposite end of the tent, wearing a dinner jacket, black trousers, white bow tie.

I blinked. This was
Africa
, for God's sake. We weren't even staying at a motel, only a camping lodge twenty miles from Olduvai Gorge. How had he managed this?

“That's all, John,” Alex said, smiling at the man who had driven me back to the set in a jeep. He was a friendly man, big as a sequoia.

“He's very nice,” I said politely, watching John's retreating figure in the red glow of the standing torches outside the tent. “He told me he works for you.”

Alex nodded, but did not take a step toward me. “He'd give up his life for me,” he said seriously, and I found myself wondering how many others would as well.

I was wearing the black sleeveless dress that had arrived courtesy of Ophelia that afternoon, and low black flats that had at least a pound of sand in them. I had spent the past three hours showering and drying my hair and rubbing myself with a lemon after-bath lotion, all the while trying out different conversations where I took Alex Rivers to task for his performance that afternoon.

But I hadn't expected him in evening wear. I couldn't tear my eyes from him. “You look wonderful,” I said quietly, angry at myself even as I spoke the words.

Alex laughed. “I think that's my line,” he said. “But thanks. And now that you've seen the effect, can I get out of this before I melt?” Without waiting for me to answer, he stripped off the jacket, unlaced the bow tie, and rolled up his sleeves past his elbows.

He pulled out a chair for me and lifted a silver dome from a plate of crudités. “So,” he said, “what did you think of your first day on a movie set?”

My eyes narrowed, recognizing my opportunity. “I think that I've never seen so much time wasted in my life,” I said simply. “And I think that it's shameless to steal someone else's emotions for your own performance.”

Alex's jaw dropped, but he recovered himself just as quickly. He lifted the china platter. “Carrot?” he said calmly.

I stared at him. “Don't you have anything to say?”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Why do we keep getting off on the wrong foot? Do you just hate me, or is it all actors?”

“I don't hate anyone,” I said. I glanced at the crisp napkins and delicate crystal, thinking of all the trouble he'd gone to. This was obviously his attempt at an apology. “I just felt used.”

Alex looked up. “I didn't mean to hurt you,” he said. “I was trying to—well, hell, it doesn't matter what I was trying to do.”

“It matters to me,” I blurted out.

Alex did not say anything. He stared over my shoulder and then shook his head. When he spoke, it was so quietly I had to lean forward to catch his words. “The problem,” he said, “with being one of the best is that you still have to get better. But you're competing with yourself.” He looked at me. “Do you know what it's like to do a scene, to have everyone slap you on the back and tell you how great you are, but to realize that you've got to be just as good the next time, and the next?” His eyes glowed in the candlelight. “What if I can't? What if the next time is the time it doesn't work?”

I knotted my hands in my lap, not knowing what I was supposed to say. It was obvious that I had touched a raw nerve—Alex Rivers was not bragging; in fact, he seemed truly terrified that he might not be able to live up to the very image he'd created.

“I steal people's reactions—you're absolutely right. It keeps me from having to dig deeper into myself. I guess I'm afraid that if I stick to my
own
experiences, one day I'll be looking for something to draw upon and I'll find out instead that I've run dry.” He smiled faintly. “The truth is, I can't afford to let that happen. Acting is the only thing I'm good at. I don't know what else I could do.” He stared at me. “For what it's worth,” he said, “I'm sorry it had to be you.”

I lifted my hand as if I were going to touch him, but changed my mind. A faint flush covered Alex's cheeks as he realized what he had admitted to me. I looked away, wondering why if
he
had been the one to expose himself,
I
felt so vulnerable.

 

T
HE GOING STORY ABOUT
A
LEX
R
IVERS IN
H
OLLYWOOD
,
COURTESY
of Michaela Snow, was that he had graduated from the drama department at Tulane, had come to L.A., and was tending bar at a hot nightspot one evening when a big-time producer proceeded to get shitfaced. Alex had driven the man home, and a day later the producer had screen-tested him. The movie was
Desperado
; he'd won the part and had stolen the film. People in the business believed that everything had come easily to Alex Rivers. That if he hadn't been in the right place at the right time, there would have been a second coincidence, or a third.

It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction, so most of the time Alex did not try. He left his childhood in a puddle on a back lot at Paramount and re-created himself to fit the mythic proportions drawn by the press. The truth was, he became a workaholic—not because of the money or fame, but because he did not like himself as much as the characters he brought to life. He did not let himself believe that there was anything remaining of the vulnerable boy he had once been. The other truth was that the closest Alex had ever come to a stage at Tulane was mopping it as a custodian. His unheralded arrival in L.A. was as a hitchhiker on a meat truck. And he never would have left Louisiana in the first place if he hadn't believed that he'd killed his own father.

It had been one of those weeks in New Orleans when the humidity grabbed you by the balls and blew its fetid breath into your lungs. Andrew Riveaux had been gambling for three consecutive days and nights in a back room off Bourbon Street, although at first his family did not notice. Alex was too busy working at the university, trying to amass enough money to support his mother and to set himself up in his own place. He barely lived at home as it was; he spent most nights in the narrow dormitory beds at the invitation of rich daddy's girls who found him brooding and intemperate, an adventure from the wrong side of the tracks.

Likewise, Lila Riveaux did not mark her husband's absence. She slept most of the time, incubated and buffered by a Valium haze, so drugged she could not distinguish the days of the week, much less which ones Andrew bothered to put in an appearance. On that afternoon when Alex stopped in at the trailer park to check on her, she was so pale and still that he forced himself to feel for her pulse.

Alex was in the closet kitchen, cutting vegetables to add to a can of broth for dinner, when he heard his father laugh outside. His father had two laughs: one mean one, used for degradation; and one fake one, used for sucking up. This was the second kind, and after the briefest pause, during which Alex nicked his own finger, he went back to his task.

Andrew Riveaux had brought someone home. Alex listened to the heavy footsteps, the rumbling voice. He heard his father open the folding panel door to the only bedroom and yell out his wife's name.

Alex stepped from the kitchen in time to see his father ushering this fat, florid man toward Lila, unconscious on the bed. He noticed that his father's gold chain and crucifix were gone, that his skin was yellowed with alcohol. He watched the stranger stroke his hands over the roll of his belly, and then turn to Andrew. “She gonna wake up?” he asked, and that was how Alex understood how much his father had lost.

Alex stood like a witness to a raging fire, both mesmerized and immobilized by shock, knowing that he had to move or be heard, and understanding at the same time that these simple acts were beyond his control. His breath came in hoarse, square blocks, and finally the paring knife he was holding dropped to the floor.

Andrew paused in the act of sliding closed the bedroom door. He glanced at Alex. “She won't know,” he said, as if this made it all right.

His first punch folded his father in the middle. His second broke his father's nose. The bedroom door cracked open, and the stranger stood gaping in his boxers. He looked from Alex to his father and back. Then he pointed a finger at Andrew. “You owe me, you fucker,” he yelled, and pulling up his pants, he slammed out of the trailer.

Alex's third punch toppled his father into a curio cabinet that had been Lila's pride and joy. Andrew Riveaux struck the back of his head on the corner, opening a flow of blood that seeped between his fingers. He fell unconscious, but not before he'd smiled—
smiled
—at his son. He did not say the words, but that didn't prevent Alex from hearing them:
Well, shit. You
can
fight
.

Through the open bedroom slider, Alex could see his mother. Her shirt was open, her bra pushed up and cutting into her neck, her nipples red and exposed and obscene. She had slept through the whole thing.

He took back the money he'd left on the kitchen table for his mother and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he stared at his father's body until the blood leaking from his skull touched the edge of Alex's shoe. He waited for some emotion to claim him: regret, dismay, relief; but he felt absolutely nothing, as if the man who had committed this deed were in no way connected to himself.

And even after learning that his son-of-a-bitch father had not died that day, Alex did not admit for years that what had stayed with him all this time was not the sound of his father's skull cracking, or the smell of his blood on the wet commercial carpet, but the fact that when Alex had least been trying, he had momentarily turned into exactly the kind of son Andrew Riveaux had wanted him to be.

 

A
LEX STOOD AND BEGAN TO WRESTLE WITH THE CORK IN THE CHAMPAGNE
bottle. As he moved, I could sense him shutting away the part of himself I had just seen, turning once again into a celebrity. “You know, I've been acting for seven years now, stealing expressions and experiences from my friends and my family and people I meet on the street. If they even notice, they're flattered by it. No one's ever had the nerve to say anything to me like you did.” His voice gentled, and I waited to see where this was all leading. “You surprise me,” he said quietly. “Not many people surprise me anymore.”

I looked at him carefully until all the polish and flash fell away, leaving only the man himself. “Well,” I admitted softly, “you've surprised me, too.”

The cork flew out of the bottle, exploding into the soft underbelly of the tent and falling to land in my lap. Champagne ran down the sides of Alex's hands, onto his trousers. “I'm running up quite a dry-cleaning bill for you,” I said.

Alex smiled and poured some into my glass. “This doesn't stain as badly as papaya,” he said. He lifted his own glass and clinked it against mine. The sound, like the lightest of bells, carried on the wind.

“I guess we should toast to the movie,” I said.

“No.” Alex leaned so close I could smell the spice of his aftershave. “I think we should definitely toast to you.”

I watched the fluted glass come up to his lips, and then I turned away to stare at the flickering candles. Our entrées were sitting beneath silver domes on the cot across the tent. Perched on a rickety shelf were two individual fruit tarts. “You're making it very hard for me to stay angry,” I said.

“Well,” Alex said, “at least I'm finally doing
something
right.”

I blushed, staring down at my plate. I wanted him to serve the food. Sing. Shout. Anything but look at me like that.

I could find my way across a desert by noting the position of the sun. I knew how to put a skull back together when it was split into fifty pieces. I could run complicated computer analyses that explained the significance of a bone's dimensions. But I could not sit at a dinner table across from a man and feel at ease.

I just didn't have much practical experience with it. And any fantasies I'd harbored didn't cover the pitfalls that cropped up in reality: the long moments where there was nothing to say, the horrible echo of a dropped spoon against my plate, the way Alex could stare at me as if he saw right through my skin. I thought about the heroines in those books I had read during the flight to Tanzania. Most of them would have tossed their long, flowing hair over their backs by now and parted their cherry lips and leaned invitingly over the table. All of them knew how to tease and how to flirt. At the very least, they'd be able to make conversation without looking like fools.

But Alex knew nothing about anthropology, and I knew nothing about movies. Talking about the weather in Tanzania was pointless, since it stayed constant for months. He didn't want to hear about my flight over. Without the shield of anger I had worn into the tent as protection, I had very little to say to Alex Rivers. He probably was wondering what had made him invite me to dinner in the first place.

“So tell me, Cassandra Barrett—”

“Cassie,” I said automatically. I looked up at him. “You can call me Cassie.”

“Cassie, then. Tell me how you wound up chipping away at rocks in the African desert.”

I leaped into the conversation, grateful for the chance to
do
something. “I was a tomboy,” I said. “I liked to play in the dirt.”

He walked toward a low wooden crate I hadn't noticed and pulled out two small silver bowls packed in ice. “Shrimp cocktail?” he said.

I smiled as he set the plate in front of me. “How did you
do
this?” I said, shaking my head.