CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“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.
“WHAT’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 resil- ience 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 atten- tion 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 class- room, 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.
IT HAD BEEN ONE MOMENT, ONE MISTAKE, AND AS ALEX 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.”
AFTER SPENDING A FULL YEAR WITH ALEX, 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. Of course, it is also a good star-crossed-love story: When Antony is wrongly convinced that Cleopatra has sided with Caesar, he accuses her, and out of fear for her life, she sends word that she’s already killed herself. When the messenger tells Antony she died whispering his name, he is guilt-stricken and runs himself through with his sword, only to die in the arms of a very much alive Cleopatra.
Cleopatra, then, rather than bow to Caesar, does truly kill herself with a poisonous asp. It is a story of misunderstandings and of lies that backfire; of a pair of lovers who can only be happy in a world where there is no one else to tempt their faulty judgment.
I was not ready to find an asp, but I understood Cleopatra’s claim about Antony being a madman. Sometimes where we were alone, Alex spoke in Shake- spearean accent. He would ignore me for hours at a time and then suddenly pull me into the bedroom, where he’d touch me with a need that bordered on violence. It got to the point where Alex would come through the front door and I would wait quietly, not even saying hello, until I could anticipate whether this time he’d invite me out to a moonlight dinner, or scream at me for moving a memo he’d scribbled to a spot where it wouldn’t blow away. He was driving the Range Rover himself tonight, and I was sitting in the front seat—a spot I hadn’t occupied in the entire year we’d been married. John had remained at the house to help tape the plate windows and tie down tarps over the shrubs in anticipation of the battering rains that were sweeping up the California coast. Alex glanced at the clock on the dashboard, and then at the clouds roiling in the sky. “It’ll be close,” he said. We were going to sandbag the beach at the Malibu apartment, and I knew it was the last thing in the world Alex wanted to be doing. That week, Brianne Nolan—Cleopatra—had backed out of her contract under the pretense of ex- haustion. But two days later Herb Silver told Alex he’d overheard at a power lunch that Nolan had wanted out of the production because playing second fiddle to Alex wasn’t as professionally lucrative as another deal that had just fallen into her agent’s lap. I had found Alex in his study at three in the morning, punching buttons on a calculator in an effort to see how much money had been wasted, how much time had been lost.
The production company was going to sue her for breach of contract, and Alex had been in meetings with lawyers for most of the day. As soon as he’d walked through the door he’d told me to find rain slickers and meet him in the garage. It was not just a matter of beach erosion, but of damage that might be done to the apartment. “Do you think we’ll be able to get back to Bel-Air tonight?” I asked quietly, testing the waters.
Alex didn’t even glance at me, but a muscle jumped along his jaw. “How the hell should I know?” he said.
The beach at the Colony was a mob of celebrities in yellow Helly-Hansen coats, reduced to ordinary physical labor by the cruelty of nature. Alex waved a producer who lived several buildings down from ours and then handed me two rolls of masking tape he’d stuffed into his pocket. “Start on the inside,” he ordered. “Then meet me out here.” I let myself into the apartment and called out to Mrs. Alvarez, who was upstairs in the kitchen organizing a parade of hurricane lamps and candles and prepared foods on the table.
“Oh, Mrs. Rivers,” the housekeeper said, tumbling down the stairs in a burst of energy. “They say this storm is going to leave the coast a national disaster.”
She wrung her hands in the white apron at her lap. I frowned. “Maybe you’d better come back to the house with us tonight,” I suggested. I didn’t like the idea of a fifty-five-year-old woman all alone during a major coastal storm.
“No, no,” she argued. “If Mr. Rivers says it’s okay, my Luis is coming to pick me up and take me to his place.”
“Of course it’s okay,” I said. “You get out of here as soon as you can.”
As I raced upstairs to tape the tremendous glass walls that faced the ocean, the rain began. Instead of coming down gradually, it hit in a torrent. I stood with my hands pressed against the window and watched Alex working below, hauling sacks and stacking them with a rhythm born of natural grace. 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 criss- crossed 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. “Not like 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 move- ments 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 frag- ments, 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 remembered Antony and Cleopatra. The film seemed to be cursed. Although they’d replaced Brianne Nolan with another actress, last Sunday Alex had mentioned something about the director walking out because of a dispute with the cinematographer. Closing my eyes against my stupidity and my insen- sitivity, I gripped the receiver of the phone. I swallowed, putting as much bright- ness 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. 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 the Wall 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. Absti- nence. 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 do not plan 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. “Che`re,” 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 filming Antony 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. “They laughed,” 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 the Tribune saying that Antony and Cleopatra was 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. Besides, I had something that was going to completely take his mind off the movie. I couldn’t be entirely sure yet, since I hadn’t had time to go to a doctor, and I was only a week late. But still, I had a hunch. I had considered this over and over on the flight home, realizing that Alex was going to have a fit when I told him about the baby, but I’d worked out a dozen scenarios in my mind. In one, he just stood speechless. In another, I said that the best-laid plans don’t always work the way you want. In a third, I patiently reminded him that he’d been the one who wanted to play with fire. All the scenes ended the same way, with us curled up together in the window seat, Alex’s hand pressed against my stomach, as if he could help me to carry our child. I stared at my suitcase, deciding to leave it right there in the parlor, because after all I wasn’t supposed to be lifting heavy things. With every step, I heard Alex testing another line, sometimes repeating it with the emphasis on different words: I made these wars for Egypt . . . She has robbed me of my sword.
I smiled, thinking of Antony’s crisis of masculinity, and then of the news I had for Alex. Drawing in a deep breath, I stepped across the threshold of the bedroom suite. “Hi,” I said.
Alex turned to me, his eyes black with anger. “She has robbed me,” he said more slowly, “of my sword.” He took two steps toward me, coming to stand perfectly still only inches away. “Well,” he demanded, “I suppose you’re going to try to explain.” My mouth dropped open and my arms ached, waiting for a homecoming that did not materialize. “I told you I’d be late,” I said. “I called you as soon as I knew.” Carefully edging past Alex, I slipped my coat onto a chair. “I thought you’d be happy that I made it home tonight.”
Alex spun me around by the shoulder. “Your plane wasn’t late,” he said. “I called the airport.” “Of course it was,” I snapped. “Whoever you talked to read the computer wrong. Why in God’s name would I lie to you?”
Alex’s mouth tightened. “You tell me.”
I rubbed my temples, wondering what kind of stress Alex had to be under to dream up whatever wild schemes were running through his head. “I can’t believe you checked up on me,” I said. The corner of Alex’s mouth tipped up. “Well,” he said, “I don’t trust you.”
The flat truth of his statement cut through my anger; the strain of a whole week of appearances caught up with me. My eyes filled with tears. This was not the evening I had planned; there would be no late-night snack in bed, no simple touches, no stunned wonder at the life we had created. I stared at Alex and wondered what had happened to the man I knew. As soon as the first tears ran down my cheeks, Alex started to smile. He grabbed my shoulders hard. “Which one is it, pichouette?” he said, his voice spilling like silk. “Did you come from some other man’s bed? Someone you picked up in Chicago? Or were you just wandering the streets, holding on to your little week of glory, in case failure is catching?”
I heard in his words how much he hated himself, and even as I was shaking my head I reached toward him, offering me, the only thing I had. Alex caught both of my wrists in one hand and punched me in the side, his chest heaving with the effort. I did not move; I did not even let myself breathe. I simply couldn’t believe I was watching this happen, feeling it happen to me. No, I thought, but there weren’t any words. When he pushed me away from him I hit the edge of a bookshelf, and as I fell to the ground a rain of hardcovers and glass paperweights followed. I scooted backward, trying to get away, but when he kicked me I took the blow in my abdomen, and then rolled to my other side. I covered my face and I tried to make myself as small as possible—so small that Alex would not see me, so small that I could forget myself.
I knew that it was over only because I heard the sound of Alex’s crying over the throb of my body. He touched my shoulder, and God help me, I turned toward him, burying my face against his chest and heaving with sobs, seeking comfort from the person who had caused the pain. He rocked me back and forth in his lap; he whispered that he was sorry. When there was nothing left inside me Alex stood up and went into the bathroom. He came back with a washcloth and wiped my face, my nose, my throat. He tucked me under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. When he thought I was asleep he spoke again. “I didn’t mean to,” he murmured, and his raw voice cracked in the middle. He started to cry again; then he walked into the sitting room and put his fist through a wall.
WHEN THE BLEEDING STARTED LAST NIGHT, I TOLD MYSELF THAT IT was just my period, and I squeezed my eyes shut and whispered the sentence like a prayer until I believed it was true. And it might have been: I knew nothing about miscarriage, but I wasn’t in much pain—although that could have been because I had simply gone numb.
I allowed myself to think of what might have been a baby only once, when it wasn’t even light outside this morning. I decided not to tell Alex. There was no need; he felt awful enough. When he woke up, he lifted the sheets and looked at the swelling marks on my arms and the purple bruise on my stomach. “Don’t,” I told him softly, touching his cheek, and I watched him leave for the studio under the burden of his own guilt.
But now he was home again, and we were supposed to go out to a premiere. I turned to Alex, lying on the bed beside me where he had fallen asleep after Ophelia left, his arm possessively draped over my waist. Very gently I lifted his hand, slipping out from underneath him, and I walked into the adjoining sitting room.
I had cleaned up the books and the paperweights this morning, but I could still see them splayed across the hardwood floor. Mindlessly I sat down on a love seat and picked up the television remote control, switching on the power. On the screen were two misshapen animals, a cartoon. One was beating the other over the head with an anvil. The second one smiled, and then his body shattered and fell away, leaving only a skeleton.
So, I thought, it is like this everywhere. Alex came out a few minutes later and sat down beside me. He kissed me so sweetly that I pictured my heart like that cartoon animal, falling away to leave an aching core. “Will you go with me?” he asked.
I nodded; I would walk across hot coals and breathe fire if Alex wanted me to. I would give up my soul. I loved him.
It’s hard for you to understand, but I knew it wouldn’t happen a second time, because I realized that I was partially at fault. It was my job to keep Alex happy; that was what my vows had amounted to over a year ago. But I had done something wrong, something that upset the balance and pushed him over the edge. I would find out what that was, so he would never feel that way again, so it would never come to this.
Alex pulled me into the bedroom and helped me into a skintight black dress that was cut out at the shoulders but covered virtually every other part of my body from my neck to my ankles. “You look beautiful,”
he said, leading me to a mirror.
I stared at my bare feet, my twitching hands, and at Alex’s eyes, which still looked so wounded. You could not see the bruises on me at all. “Yes,” I said. “This is fine.”
We arrived at the premiere with twenty other chauffeured cars, and we waited in turn to pull up to the spot where everyone was getting out. Fans and paparazzi had formed two lines leading to the door of the theater, and a couple of reporters were positioned right at the curb, so that their voice-overs could catch the moment the celebrities stepped from their cars.
It was nothing new; Alex and I had been to many premieres in the past year. He stepped out of the car first, tall and striking in a crisp white shirt and tie. He waved to the crowd, and the sun caught his wedding band, shooting off a bright ray that temporarily blinded me.
Then he gently helped me out of the back seat, anchoring his arm around my side, careful to let his hand rest lower on my hip than usual, where it wouldn’t hurt.
It was common procedure to stand there for a moment like a reigning king and queen, so that people could take their pictures and cheer and get a good long look. The entertainment reporter beside me was practically yelling over the crowd that was roaring Alex’s name. “Here’s Alex Rivers and his wife, Cassandra. Rumor has it that Antony and
Cleopatra, Alex Rivers’s new film, is in dire straits,” she said. “But as you can see, his fans have no doubt that whatever problems the production’s run into, Alex will find a way to iron them out.” She threw a meaningful glance back over her shoulder, meant to be caught by the camera. “It seems,” she said, “that everything Alex Rivers touches turns to gold.”
Alex guided me forward, his hand light and gentle on my back. I took one last look at that reporter, and then I threw back my head and laughed.