Picture Perfect (30 page)

The sun slid behind the fence that at this point seemed to be supporting Alex. He closed his eyes; he bowed his head. The cameras kept whirring because no one had the presence of mind to call for a stop to the action.

Finally Jack Green stepped forward. “Cut, goddammit,” he yelled. After a second of silence, the crew burst into applause, realizing they had just seen something very rare and fine. “You better wrap that one,” Jack called to Alex, “because I don't get any better.”

A few people laughed, but Alex didn't even seem to hear. He moved straight from the fence through the filling darkness, pushing past people who stood in his way. He walked right into my arms, and with everyone watching, he told me that he loved me.

 

I
N
F
EBRUARY
, A
LEX AND
I
SAT IN BED AT THE APARTMENT
,
WATCHING
on television as the president of AMPAS and last year's Best Supporting Actress read off the nominees for the five major categories of the 1993 Academy Awards. It was just before six in the morning, since everything had to be done on Eastern Standard Time. Alex pretended he didn't much care one way or the other, but beneath the sheets, his feet were cold and restless.

Alex was nominated for Best Actor and Best Director. Jack Green was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
The Story of His Life
was up for Best Picture; overall it had garnered eleven nominations in different categories.

Alex shook his head, smiling from ear to ear. “I do not believe this,” he said. “I absolutely do not believe this.” He rolled toward the nightstand and disconnected the telephone.

“What's that for?” I asked.

“Herb's going to call, and Michaela, and God knows who else has the number here. Jesus, I'll be swamped till I go to Scotland.” He was going to start shooting
Macbeth
in a couple of weeks. He rolled back to face me, his eyes shining. “Tell me I'm not dreaming.”

I reached out to him. “Here,” I said. “I'll pinch you.”

Alex laughed and pressed me back against the bed. “I can think of better ways,” he said.

Before we'd even had breakfast, Alex had been scheduled to do a Barbara Walters pre-Oscar broadcast interview. John came by to tell us that a throng of fans and reporters had set up camp outside the gate of the house. And that afternoon, when I went to the OB/GYN to confirm my twelve-week pregnancy, the doctor congratulated me, and said Alex would be hard-pressed to decide which of the day's announcements was more exciting.

 

I
WAITED TWO WEEKS TO TELL
A
LEX ABOUT THE BABY
,
PLANNING TO
mention it the night before Barbara Walters was scheduled to interview us from the living room of the house. I hadn't told him right away, because I didn't want to steal his thunder. And it really did take two weeks for the obligatory interviews and fanfare to die down. I told myself that these were the reasons I had kept the news to myself; that it had nothing to do with the fact that tomorrow he could tell the world and give Barbara Walters the scoop of a lifetime.

We hadn't been trying, but I apparently fell into that two percent of women on the Pill for whom accidents happen. It never occurred to me that Alex might feel the same way about having children as he had three years earlier. As far as I could tell, he had laid the ghost of his father to rest in the past, where it belonged.

In the ten months since
The Story of His Life
had wrapped, he hadn't lost control. He'd finished a starring role in a light romantic comedy without incident. And even during these past two weeks when tension was building all around him, he'd shown no inclination to strike out at me. It had been so long that it was difficult for me to remember that it had ever happened.

I was nervous about telling Alex we were going to have a baby, so I took the coward's way out and decided to let something else do the speaking for me.

I asked John to take me to Rodeo Drive, even though I never shopped there. He dropped me off a few blocks from my intended destination. I put on my sunglasses and walked to a narrow store called Waddle-potamus, filled with dangling mobiles and Steiff bears. I picked out a stretchy cotton playsuit so tiny I couldn't believe anything alive would ever fit into it. It was embroidered with a dinosaur, and I pictured telling Alex that I had tried to find something appliquéd with the image of
Homo erectus
but I hadn't had much luck.

I was so excited by the time I got back to the house that I fairly flew up the stairs. I threw open the door of the sitting room and came face-to-face with Alex. “You're late,” he said tightly.

I beamed at him. “You're early.” I thrust the box behind my back, hoping he hadn't noticed it.

A muscle jumped at the edge of Alex's jaw. “You said you'd be here when I got home. You didn't tell anyone you were going out.”

I shrugged. “I told John,” I said. “I had an errand to run.”

Alex hit me so swiftly across the chest I didn't have time to see it coming. Stunned, I looked up at him from the floor where I had fallen, crushing the box, its festival of ribbons.

I did something I hadn't done in the three years this had been happening: I cried. I couldn't help it; I had believed that we'd started over, and now Alex, who had never disappointed me, had taken us back to the way it was before.

When he started to kick at me I rolled away from him, feeling his shoe strike me in the back, the kidneys, and the ribs. I crossed my arms protectively over my stomach, and when Alex came to his senses and knelt down beside me I would not look at him. I rubbed my palms over this life I was holding like a good-luck charm. I listened to his whispered pleas, his apologies, and I thought,
I hope this baby hates you
.

 

B
ARBARA
W
ALTERS WAS MUCH PRETTIER IN PERSON THAN SHE WAS
on the air, and she moved through our house with the self-assurance of a general, strategically moving furniture and flowers to make room for lights and cameras. She was planning to interview Alex for about an hour, and then she wanted me to step in so that she could ask me questions as well. In the meantime, I sat very straight next to the segment producer, trying to ignore the pain in my back and my side.

When the camera began to film, it was focused directly on her as she gave her prewritten rundown of Alex's career, beginning with
Desperado
and ending with the ongoing production of
Macbeth
. “Alex Rivers,” she said smoothly, “has shown himself to be more than just another pretty face. From his very first feature film, and in nearly every movie thereafter, he has shied away from traditional romantic leads to play, instead, flawed and frightened men. It has set him apart from other talented actors, as has his unheard-of near sweep of the Oscar nominations with his first attempt at direction,
The Story of His Life
. I spoke with Alex at his Bel-Air home.”

At that line, the cameras swung to include Alex in the shot. “Many people use your name to define the word ‘star.' What would you say characterizes a star?”

Alex leaned back against the sofa. He crossed one leg lazily over the other. “Charm,” he said. He grinned. “And whether or not you can get a table at the studio commissary.” He shifted slightly. “But I'd rather be thought of as an actor than a star,” he said slowly.

“Can't you be both?” Barbara pressed.

Alex tilted his head. “Sure,” he said. “But one is a serious vocation, and one is smoke and mirrors, and it's hard to be considered a dedicated professional when you're labeled a ‘star.' I never asked for all the trappings. I just happen to like doing what I do.”

“But unlike many actors, you weren't a struggling waiter for ten years before you broke into the business.”

Alex smiled. “Two years. And I was a bartender, not a waiter. I can still mix a hell of a Long Island Iced Tea. But no, I got very lucky. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.” He glanced at me. “Actually, that's sort of been the story of my life.”

Barbara smiled at the neat segue. “Let's talk about that—
The Story of His Life
. How autobiographical is that?”

For the slightest moment, Alex looked unnerved. “Well,” he said slowly, “I had a father, but the similarity ends there.” I glanced away, staring out the window at the storm that was gathering. We were going to tape this outside by the pool, but the weather had been too risky. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware of Alex feeding Barbara Walters the lines he'd fed me in Tanzania about his childhood before he told me the truth. I blinked at a streak of lightning, and I thought of how very tired I was.

“Some critics say that you've pushed past being a sex symbol and that you use your looks to get to the chinks in the armor, so to speak—to expose what lies beneath a character.” Barbara leaned forward. “What sort of chinks are there in your own armor?”

A smile slipped sideways over Alex's face, the same smile that was going to make a million women catch their breath when they watched on Oscar night and that, even now, had my heart racing. “What makes you think I have any?” he said.

Barbara laughed and said it might be the perfect time to introduce me, Cassandra Barrett Rivers, Alex's wife of three years. She waited for me to settle myself on the couch beside Alex as I had been directed to do, and then let the cameras start up again. “You two have certainly been spared a great deal of the negative publicity that usually strikes couples in Hollywood.” She turned to Alex. “Is that, again, a matter of being in the right place at the right time?”

I sat as quiet as a stone, smiling up at Alex like an idiot. “It's more a matter of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “But then again, we're a pretty ordinary couple. We stay home a lot. I guess we don't really give people much to talk about.”

“You think viewers out there believe that you two eat crackers in bed and watch cartoons on Saturday mornings and jog on the beach?”

Alex and I looked at each other and laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Except Cassie doesn't jog.”

“You're an anthropologist,” Barbara said to me, swiftly turning the conversation. I nodded. “What attracted you to a celebrity as ‘big' as Alex Rivers?”

“I wasn't attracted to him,” I said flatly. “The first time I met him I intentionally poured a drink in his lap.” I told the story of my arrival on the movie set in Tanzania, and while Alex squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, most of the crew Barbara had brought with her started laughing. When filming picked up again, I leaned imperceptibly closer toward Alex, a show of support. “I suppose I don't see him as a lot of other women do,” I said carefully. “He's not a celebrity to me; he never really has been. It wouldn't have mattered if he sold used cars or worked in a coal mine. He's someone I happen to love.”

Barbara turned to Alex. “Why Cassie? Out of all the women in the world, why her and only her?”

Alex pulled me closer, and my eyes glazed a little as my sore side touched him. “She was made for me,” he said simply. “That's the only way I can explain it.”

Outside, there was a roll of thunder. “One last question,” Barbara said, “and it's for Cassie. Tell us what America doesn't know about Alex Rivers that you think they ought to know.”

Shocked, I stared at her, my mouth slightly ajar. The air in the room became heavier, and the rain hit like a fall of stones against the French doors. I could feel Alex's fingers digging into my shoulder, and with every breath there was a quick ache under my ribs.
Well, Barbara
, I could say,
for one thing, he hits me. And his father was terribly abusive. And he's going to have a baby, but he doesn't even know that yet because I'm too afraid of his reaction to tell him the truth
.

I forced myself to relax in Alex's grasp. “Nothing,” I said, my voice just over a whisper. “Nothing you would ever believe.”

I
used to think my suicide note would have read,
You won
. Not that it had been a game—but at the very worst times, I knew that Alex could always act better than I could; that when I cracked under the pressure and told someone the truth he would still be able to save face. And in Los Angeles, a city he commanded, who would people believe?

But the real reason I could never tell anyone the truth about our marriage had less to do with my fear of not being believed than with Alex himself. I just didn't want to hurt him. When I pictured him, it wasn't standing with his fists above me. I saw him slow-dancing with me on the veranda, latching the clasp on an emerald necklace he'd just brought me, moving inside me with a striking sense of wonder. This, to me, was Alex. This was the man I still wanted to spend my life with.

I never would have left him if there weren't somebody else involved. But I forced myself to set an ultimatum in my mind.
One more time
, I thought,
one more threat to this life inside me, and I will go
. I tried not to think of it as leaving Alex; I imagined it instead as saving my child. I didn't let myself think about it any more than that, because so much of me was hoping that it wouldn't happen.

But then Alex had heard, the day he left for Scotland, about being placed second on the Barbara Walters broadcast, instead of third. And he was superstitiously sure that it was a forecast of what was to come at the Academy Awards in March. He wouldn't win his Oscars; he would be a failure. He had told me these things, and then he had lashed out.

Well, you know the rest. I must have passed out from the head wound sometime after I left the house, because I knew enough to leave. I met you purely by accident at St. Sebastian's cemetery and you took care of me until Alex came charging in from Scotland and took me home.

So I had come full circle: in late February, several days after you'd turned me over to Alex at the police station, I was standing in my bedroom closet getting ready to pack so I could return to Scotland with Alex. Then I found the box with the extra pregnancy test. And I tried to make myself believe that I would be taking a piece of Alex with me when I ran away again.

 

A
N HOUR AFTER
I'
D LEFT THE HOUSE
I
WAS WELL OUT OF
B
EL
-A
IR
, but I had nowhere to go. The banks were closed and I had less than twenty dollars in my wallet. I didn't think of you, not right away. Again I considered running to Ophelia; and again I couldn't, because it was where Alex would expect me to go.

I didn't feel comfortable enough to turn to a colleague from UCLA, and I couldn't hide in my office, since that would be the second place Alex would check. And then I remembered what you said to me Wednesday morning, and the way you looked at me after Alex's fight at Le Dôme. I knew you would take me in; I knew it maybe even before I left the house, so I waited at the corner for a bus that would take me toward Reseda.

Your home could fit into a corner of ours, and the trees on your front lawn are all in varying stages of death, but I have never seen any place so inviting. A warm yellow light floods the front porch, and when I step under its glow I feel protected, not on display.

You open the door before I have a chance to knock. You don't seem surprised to see me; it is as if you have been waiting all along. You pull me into the tiny entry hall and close the door behind me. It seems perfectly natural that you haven't spoken a word when you begin to run your hands gently over my back, my ribs, my hips, hesitating at the spots where I have been bruised. You sense the places through the cotton of my shirt, as if you are feeling for the change of temperature that comes with pain.

And Will, when you are finished, you look at me. Your eyes are as dark as Alex's during a rage. I stare back at you, not knowing how or where I am supposed to begin.

I don't have to. You put your arms around me, giving me the simple beat of your heart to measure time. I keep my hands balled at my sides, stiff in another man's embrace. “Cassie,” you whisper into my hair, “I believe you.” Outside, an owl sobs. I close my eyes, lean into your faith, and I let myself go.