Picture Perfect Read online

  "Okay," Alex announced. "Everyone, undress."

  Bernie started muttering in Yiddish, but Alex kept talking, drowning out the sound of the director's voice. "It's only fair that if Janet and I are down to skin, the very least you all could do is strip to your underwear." He looked over his shoulder, to where Janet was starting to smile.

  One of the cameramen was the first to do what Alex had asked, pulling off his T-shirt and pants to reveal a huge belly hanging over Jockey shorts. LeAnne, Janet's assistant, shrugged off her clothes until she stood in her bra and panties. "It's like a bikini," she said to no one in particular.

  Clothes flew into piles at the edges of the set, and by now Janet Eggar was laughing out loud. Alex sat on the cot, talking to her. With a sigh, Bernie unzipped his shorts to reveal purple silk boxers, and that left only me.

  Everyone was staring, wondering why I deserved the special treatment, so without even thinking twice I reached for the bottom of my shirt. Alex caught my eye and shook his head very slightly, but I smiled at him. I pulled the shirt over my head and tugged off my shorts, knowing that the entire time, his eyes were on me.

  When filming resumed, Janet seemed much better. I watched her fall back against the cot, her hair spread over the pillow. I watched Alex's breath steal over her skin. I wondered how much of her he was touching; how many times he'd have to shoot this; whether the sheets still smelled like us.

  After the sixth take, when Janet and Alex were laughing as if they'd been doing this forever, I saw how my nails had cut into the soft wooden armrests of my chair. In the stifling heat, the scene being played before me kept turning into the one I had lived the night before. My throat became so dry I could not swallow. I watched Alex with another woman, holding her the way he should have been holding me, and that's when I realized I had fallen in love.

  I knew he would come after me the moment he finished, but I didn't want to see him. I never wanted to see him again. I had tried--I had really tried--but a casual liaison just wasn't my style.

  I had spent all last night preparing myself to face the truth, but that didn't keep me from feeling its pain. Alex hadn't felt a whole world open up at my touch. Alex hadn't lain under the circles of a ceiling fan, praying for time to stop before it all went downhill again. To Alex, I had been nothing more than a rehearsal.

  I was halfway to the remaining jeeps, planning to get into one and drive myself as far away from this production as possible, when Alex caught up with me and grabbed my arm. "Wait," he said. "You've got to give me a chance."

  I whirled around and glared at him. "You've got one minute," I said.

  "I didn't know we were going to film this today, Cassie. It's terrible timing. If I had, I never would have brought you back here last night. I didn't want you to watch that, but I didn't want you to think I was sending you away, either."

  "Youenjoyed it," I said. "Isaw you."

  "I didn't enjoy it," he yelled. "It's my job."

  "Well, what does it matter to you anyway?" I shouted back. "You've already had me. You've got Janet Eggar foaming at the mouth. Why don't you just go on back and finish what you've started while everyone else goes to lunch?"

  Alex took a step back. "Is that what you think of me?" he said tersely. His fists were clenched at his sides, white with stress. His eyes flashed, and for a moment I thought he would lash out or push me aside as he stormed back to the set.

  I did not say anything for a while, stunned silent by the strength of Alex's checked rage. "I wish I knew what to think of you," I whispered. "I kept seeing us. The same tent, Alex. The same cot. The same everything, except this time it wasn't me." When his face started to swim in front of my eyes, I turned away. "Please don't make me watch that again," I said. I pushed past him, running until I couldn't hear his voice over the hammer of my heart. And I told myself over and over I should have known that someone who could love so hard and so well could also hate, and hurt, as deeply.

  HE 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 notwant 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.

  FILMING STOPPED UNEXPECTEDLY FOR THREE DAYS AND ALEX 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."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INSTEAD 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 rush
es, 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."