Picture Perfect Page 25

  Mrs. Alvarez left with her son just as we finished doing everything we could inside. Tugging on my slicker, I stepped through the sliding doors I had crisscrossed with tape and ran across the beach to Alex. Without speaking, I dragged a heavy sack of sand toward the barricade he had begun. My muscles strained with the effort, and sweat ran down the back of my neck under the pulled hood of my coat. I stacked the bags as high as I could, one placed neatly on top of the other, a series of pillars.

  The rain began to shriek around us, blowing wet sand from the edge of the ocean into our eyes and making the tide surge up to our hips. Overhead, in the condo next door to ours, I heard the shatter of glass.

  I was looking up, trying to note which window had broken and why, when Alex grabbed me by the shoulders. He shook me so hard my neck snapped back. "Jesus!" he screamed, his voice nearly lost in the wind. "Can't you do anything right?" He kicked at the piles of sandbags I'd meticulously made, and when they didn't topple he threw his weight into them, knocking them over into the raging surf. "Notlike these," he bellowed. "Like mine."He pointed to the barrier he'd crafted, a neat overlay like an interlocking wall of bricks. Roughly, he pushed me aside and began to add onto his wall with the drenched sacks of sand he'd knocked down from my piles.

  I shielded my eyes and looked to the left and the right, wondering if my neighbors had heard or seen Alex yelling at me. I stared for a moment at my hour's worth of work, now draining in a heap at the edge of the ocean.

  It was my fault; I hadn't been thinking. A strong gust would easily tear down standing piles, but a staggered wall like Alex's could withstand much more abuse. Soundlessly I stepped up beside Alex, carefully mirroring his movements and his placement and even his stride so that he would find nothing lacking in me. I ignored the sharp ache in my shoulder and the knot in my back, determined, this time, to do it right.

  ALEX STEPPED ONTO THE VERANDA, WATCHING OPHELIA CHECK ME for a fever. "Cool as a cucumber," she said, but she was staring at Alex. She set her hands on her hips. "Cassie isn't feeling great," she said. "Maybe you should leave her home tonight."

  Alex smirked. "And take you instead?"

  Ophelia flushed and looked away. She squeezed my shoulder, a goodbye. "I was just going," she said, and she deliberately pushed past Alex on her way out.

  I watched her go, pretending to see her long after her shape had disappeared through the gauzy curtains of the bedroom. I stared at the patterns in the lace. I didn't want to look at Alex.

  "Did you tell her?"

  "What do you think?" I turned my face to him, noticing the lines of pain that shattered the clear gray of his eyes, and I knew I couldn't hurt him any more than he hurt himself. I swallowed and glanced away.

  Suddenly Alex had me cradled in his arms, the blanket falling away to reveal the red marks on my arm and the swelling near my ribs. He carried me into the bedroom and stretched me gently on the bed, so carefully I did not even stir the comforter. He unbuttoned my blouse.

  He brushed his lips over each spot, each ache, taking the pain and leaving behind a salve of tears. I held his head against my chest, thinking that this tenderness hurt even more. "Shh," I said, stroking his forehead. "It's all right."

  WHAT STRUCK ME FIRST ABOUT THE HAND WAS THAT THE BONES stretched out toward me, as if they meant to pull me back if I happened to have any intention of walking away. I took out a small brush and began to clear away the twigs and loose fragments of dirt, revealing a nearly intact wrist, and five metatarsals still curled around a stone tool. I ran my fingers over the fragments, the tiny chisel, and then I smiled. Maybe it wouldn't have pulled me back. Maybe it would have attacked me.

  The hand was set in sedimentary rock as high as my shoulder, and it was noticeable enough for me to wonder how it had managed to remain undiscovered all these years. The site wasn't a new one in Tanzania; for decades, it had been combed by anthropologists.

  I was dizzy. I knew instinctively that this was Something Big, even before sending samples for dating. My pulse began to race as I realized that this discovery would prove that hominids had the mental capacity to create their own tools, rather than just using those naturally shaped by water or fossilization. I would go home a hero. I would tell Archibald Custer to go fuck himself. I would be as famous as Alex.

  I was dying to tell him. Since the base camp didn't have a phone, I would drive into town tonight and call home. I had not liked the idea of being away from him for a full month, but I was doing my field study during intercession at the university, and Alex was filming twelve hours a day anyway. I spoke to him on Sundays and Wednesdays, sitting on the dirt floor of the all-purpose store in town. I'd tuck the receiver into my ear and scratch his name in the red earth with a twig; store up the sound of his voice so that I could draw it out late at night and pretend that he was lying beside me.

  I squinted into the hot midday sun, touching the striated gray areas to the left of the hand. In the distance I could hear the ting of picks and the sound of laughter tripping on the wind. There were several graduate students working with me, one of whom had found a mandible the other day, but there had been no other startling discoveries. I smiled and stepped around the corner of the cliff, where I could be seen by them. "Wally," I called. "Bring a tarp."

  The rest of the day was spent in painstaking excavation, because it was so rare to find something as fragile as a fossilized hand that risking even the tiniest digit of a finger would be unthinkable. I worked with two of my students, one helping me do the removal and the cleaning, one labeling the bones with India ink for later reconstruction. Another student was sent into town to wire UCLA of our preliminary findings and to bring a packed sample to the general post office to be sent out for dating. Dinner, a celebration, consisted of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and three bottles of local wine.

  I watched the students build up the campfire and weave scenarios in which I became the most highly touted guru in physical anthropology and they became my disciples. When one of their ploys involved burying Professor Custer alive so that some poor graduate student could dig him up millennia from now, I laughed with them, but mostly I watched the flames leap in time to the blood inside me. I came alive on excavation. It wasn't just the discovery of the hand, although that had my senses singing. It was the joy of looking for the unknown, like you were onto a buried treasure, or sifting through the Christmas presents to find the one you'd been hoping for. When Alex's movie had come out, the one we'd met on, that was the strongest personality trait his character had shown. I could remember watching the dailies, and telling Alex how impressed I was, and Alex saying that he had taken that from me.

  It took the operator ten minutes to get a line to the States, and even then I only had a marginal chance of catching Alex at the house. When he answered himself, his voice groggy with sleep, I realized that it must be the middle of the night. "Guess what?" I said, listening to my own voice in a tinny echo at the edges of the line.

  "Cassie? Is everything all right?"

  I could almost see him sitting up, switching on the light. "I found something. I found a hand, and a tool." Without letting him interrupt to ask questions, I launched into a monologue about the odds of a discovery like this, and what it was going to mean to my career. "It's like an Oscar, for you," I said. "This is going to put me over the top."

  When Alex didn't say anything at first, I thought maybe I had lost the connection and had been too busy talking to hear. "Alex?"

  "I'm here." The resignation and the stillness in his voice made my breath catch. Maybe he was worried that this was going to take me away from him even more. Maybe he thought I would actually put my career first, instead of him. Which was an entirely ridiculous idea, and if anyone should understand that, it was Alex. They were on equal footing in my life. I needed them both; I couldn't live without both.

  Belatedly I rememberedAntony and Cleopatra.The film seemed to be cursed. Although they'd replaced Brianne Nolan with another actress, last Sunday Alex had mentioned someth
ing about the director walking out because of a dispute with the cinematographer. Closing my eyes against my stupidity and my insensitivity, I gripped the receiver of the phone. I swallowed, putting as much brightness into my voice as I could. "Here I am rambling on and on," I said, "and I haven't even asked about the movie."

  There was a beat of silence. "It's very late," Alex said. "I'd better go."

  When he hung up, I listened to the dead line until the Tanzanian operator got back on and asked in her musical voice if I wished to place another call. Then I drove back to the base camp and walked into one of the work tents, turning on the overhead light so that it bathed the table in a soft yellow glow. My hands were lead-clumsy as I touched the thin bone chips that were going to change my life. I lined them up by number, this half of the hand that had been excavated, and tried not to wonder why Alex had not even said "Congratulations."

  THREE DAYS LATER I HAD RECEIVED WIRES FROM ARCHIBALD CUSTER and from two museums expressing interest, but I had not heard from my husband. The hand lay in all its glory, itemized and recorded for posterity, reconstructed on a bed of coarse black cotton. We had been taking the obligatory photographs, the ones we could send out before the actual bones went around for exhibit. I stood with my hands braced on the edge of the table, sweat running down my back. Wally, a graduate student who was writing his thesis under my tutelage, was packing up the Leica and its lenses. "So what do you think, Professor Barrett?" he said, grinning. "We gonna be mobbed at the airport?"

  We were not scheduled to leave Tanzania for another two weeks, and I knew that Wally was joking, since the anthropological community was too small to generate more than an occasional article in theWall Street Journal.Unbidden, a memory of my first return to LAX with Alex came to mind. I imagined that kind of media circus for a dusty, tired scientist holding a crate full of bones. "Somehow," I replied, "I doubt it."

  Wally stood up, brushing the red earth from his shorts. "I'm going to bring this back to Susie before she pitches another fit," he said, and he moved to the front flap door of the tent. He lifted it partway, then let it fall as if he'd seen a mirage he couldn't quite face. He blinked, and pulled aside the canvas again.

  In the middle of the base camp was a pickup truck, and Koji, one of our native scouts, was unloading boxes stamped with the seal of Les Deux Magots, the Parisian restaurant. My little group of assistants stood in awe, watching crates of lobsters and fresh fruits and wheels of Brie being gently lowered to the ground. I had seen the likes of this only once before. Wally stepped into the sunshine, leaving me an unobstructed view. "Now I know," he murmured, "there is a God."

  "'God' is a bit much," a voice said. "But I'll settle for sainthood."

  I whirled around at Alex's first words. He stood a few feet behind me, having entered through the rear flap of the tent. His hands moved restlessly at his sides, and I realized that he was more nervous than he wanted me to see.

  "I thought,What do I bring a woman who's about to change the course of human evolution?And flowers just didn't seem to cut it. But I remembered from the last time I was in Tanzania that the local cuisine leaves a little to be desired--"

  "Oh, Alex," I cried, and I threw myself into his arms. His hands roamed over my back, relearning my body. I breathed in the familiar smell of his skin and smoothed the wrinkles of his traveling clothes. "I thought you were mad at me," I said.

  "Mad at myself," Alex admitted. "Until I realized I had deliberately acted like an asshole just so that we could kiss and make up."

  I held his face in my hands. I was filled to bursting now that he was standing in front of me, wondering how I hadn't noticed how very empty I had been. "I forgive you," I said.

  "I haven't apologized yet."

  I rested my forehead against his chin. "I don't care."

  He gently tipped my face up toward his. Outside, I could hear the splintering of a crate being split open, and the delighted cries of the graduate students ripping out its contents. "If this is truly like winning an Academy Award," Alex said, "then I'm more proud of you than you can possibly imagine."

  I leaned against him, thinking that the praise I had received from Archibald Custer and all the accolades the hand would bring me paled in comparison to Alex's words. His was the only opinion that mattered.

  We had a sumptuous meal that night, even if the smoky flavor the campfire gave the veal piccata was a little unorthodox. Alex talked easily with my assistants, making them laugh with stories about the mistakes he'd made playing an anthropologist on film until I came along to correct him. When the five kids took a few bottles of Bordeaux and suggested moving the party to the raw ground near the excavation site, Alex declined their offer. He picked up the last bottle of wine and then held out his hand to help me up, as if by prearrangement.

  He tied the flaps of my tent shut, and I stood with my back to him, glancing at my comb and my toothbrush and tube of Crest beside the chipped washbasin. I frowned; there was something I had to tell Alex that I couldn't seem to remember. His hands came to rest on the sides of my waist. "What is it with you and me and tents and Tanzania?" he said.

  It was impossible not to think of the first night we had made love--not with the fire dancing orange on the canvas, and the low wind moaning through the hills, and the heavy, sable folds of an African night pressing us even closer.

  We came together the same way the rains come to Central Africa: quickly, without warning, bringing a fury so intense that for the days it lasts you stare out the window and wonder if the world has ever been any other way. When it was over we lay in each other's arms, half dressed and drenched in sweat, fingers restlessly moving over bare skin just to keep the connection.

  We drank the Bordeaux straight from the bottle, watching the silhouette of the fire with a lazy contentment born of knowing there would be a slower, sweeter next time. I absently traced my fingers along Alex's wrist. "It means a lot to me," I said. "Your coming here."

  Alex kissed my ear. "What makes you think I did it for you?" he said. "Three weeks of abstinence is hell."

  I smiled and closed my eyes, and then I stiffened and bolted upright. Abstinence. Suddenly I remembered what I had forgotten to tell Alex.

  When I had unpacked in Tanzania, I realized I had left my birth control pills at home. At first I'd considered having a prescription filled here, if they even had that at the local pharmacy; then I'd realized that if I was half a world away from Alex there was little chance of my getting pregnant. But now Alex was here, and we had slept together, and there were no guarantees.

  "Just out of curiosity," I said, turning around to face him, "how do you feel about fatherhood?"

  Alex's eyes darkened and something in them closed off from me. "What the hell are you trying to tell me?" he said, biting off each word.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, realizing this sounded much worse than it actually was. "I left my Pill at home. So I haven't been taking anything for a few weeks." I smiled at him. "I'm sure nothing at all's happened," I said. "I'm sure I'll be fine."

  "Cassie," Alex said slowly, "I donotplan on having children."

  I don't know why we hadn't discussed this before; I had assumed that he'd want to wait awhile, but that eventually he'd want a family. "Never?" I said, slightly shocked.

  "Never." Alex ran a hand over his face. "I have no intention of being like my own mother and father."

  I relaxed; I knew Alex, and there was no chance of that happening. "My parents weren't exactly Ozzie and Harriet either," I said, "but that wouldn't keep me from having kids of my own."

  I closed my eyes, picturing a beautiful little boy running across the lawns at the house, his feet picked up by the sheer joy of the wind. I imagined him here in Tanzania, digging at my side with a plastic shovel and bucket. I knew, given time, I could bring Alex around.

  He pulled me down into his arms, taking my silence for rebellion. "Besides," he pointed out, "how are you going to become the next Margaret Mead if you're about to give birth? You can'
t take your hand on a lecture circuit if you're barefoot and pregnant."

  I questioned the validity of that, but in some ways Alex was right. Maybe soon, but now was not the time. I rolled over and faced him on the narrow cot. "So which one of us is going to sleep on the floor?"

  Alex laughed. "Chere,"he said, "you ever hear of Russian roulette?"

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE STATES, I WENT ON A SERIES OF LECTURES at several universities, discussing the implications of the hand and tool on the evolution of the human mind. I did not like being away from Alex for so long, but he was busy filmingAntony and Cleopatra.It did not matter if I was in Boston or Chicago or Baltimore. Alex was working twenty-hour days, so even if I'd been in L.A., I wouldn't have been able to spend time with him.

  Alex's voice rolled down the stairs from the bedroom. "Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish, a vapor sometimes like a bear or lion, a towered citadel, a pendant rock, a forked mountain, or blue promontory with trees upon it, that nod unto the world and mock our eyes with air."

  I sighed with relief as the taxi driver set my bag inside the front door. I hadn't kept him up waiting; he was doing what he usually did the night before filming a critical scene--rehearsing. I knew that I'd find him stalking the sitting area of the bedroom, wearing a ratty Tulane T-shirt and his boxer shorts, and I smiled at the comfort of the familiar.

  My plane had been delayed from Chicago because of thunderstorms, and at around nine o'clock I called to tell Alex that I didn't know if I'd even make it into L.A. tonight. "Just go to sleep," I said. "If I come home, I'll get a cab and let myself in." I knew that he had a draining day tomorrow, filming the scene where Antony realizes Cleopatra's betrayal and then learns of her apparent suicide. Plus, there had been more trouble with the film. Initial rushes used as teasers for movie previews had had a negative audience reaction. Alex had told me over the phone. "Theylaughed,"he had said, shocked. "They watched me running myself through the gut with a sword and they laughed."

  I wished I had been here to help him with his retakes and to offer the bright side to all the bad press the movie was getting in entertainment shows and gossip columns. Even in Chicago, there had been a short item in theTribunesaying that Antony and Cleopatrawas rumored to become one of Hollywood's most expensive flops. When I'd read it over a room service breakfast at the hotel, I'd had to fight the urge to call Alex right away. I knew that in a week this first rush of publicity would be over. Better to soothe Alex face-to-face, I thought, than to spill words over a cold, crackling telephone line.