CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs of the apartment, and now fully awake, I jumped up from the bed where I had been taking a nap. With my heart lodged at the base of my throat I smoothed the comforter, erasing the pressed image of my body so that he would never know.
It was April, and I was on sabbatical from UCLA, but Alex didn’t like the idea of my having nothing to do. He’d told me that more than once, sometimes teasing, sometimes so seriously that I would look for things to do to keep busy: dipping already clean crystal chandeliers, taking an aerobics class I hated, redecorating the apartment, which had been beautifully furnished to begin with. The truth was that the past year had been draining, between making full professor at the university and balancing those commitments with scattered lectures about the hand, which was currently on display at a museum in London. This month I had simply been looking forward to resting.
But I didn’t want to upset Alex, either.
I stood up and ran my hand over my hair, making sure that none of it had slipped out of its barrette while I was asleep. My pulse began to race and I counted off the seconds until Alex would throw open the door. Frantically I looked around for something that would make me look like I had been working, finally seizing a pad and a pencil. I sat down at the escritoire and mapped the first thing that came to mind:
a linear tree of man’s evolution.
One minute passed; two. I pushed back the chair and willed myself to cross the room and open the door. My face was flushed by the time I twisted the doorknob, and I flinched a little, not knowing what to expect on the other side.
There were curtains, fluttering in the waves of heat. Mrs. Alvarez had opened the windows before she left to go to Trancas Market. But it was dead silent in the house, which meant she hadn’t come back yet.
I walked down the stairs and opened the front door, peeking my head outside. I called out, waiting for an answer, and I checked the bathrooms and the study and the porch before I realized that I was nervous over nothing. I had only imagined the footsteps. Alex had not come home at all.
YOU KNOW, FOR SIX MONTHS AFTER THAT FIRST TIME, ALEX WAS THE model husband. He never failed to ask me what was going on at the university; he built me my own laboratory on the grounds of the house as a birthday present; he commissioned an artist to paint my likeness and he hung it in his study across from his desk, where he said he could always keep his eyes on me. When I gave lectures about my hand, he attended and clapped more loudly than anyone else; for a few months, he even hired a completely unnecessary secretary to record my speaking engagements and to organize the tear sheets about my discovery into some sort of scrapbook. At night he touched me reverently, and he held me very close when he slept, as if he still thought I might run away.
If anything, it brought us closer. I know you don’t understand, and I can’t explain any better than this: I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself. Physical pain was nothing compared to seeing the look that shuttered Alex’s eyes when he couldn’t live up to his own expectations.
I was not afraid of Alex, because I understood him. I tried to keep everything steady and smooth at home, as if that might give him a baseline from which to work. Sometimes that backfired—it gave him an excuse to explode. When I moved a pile of scripts so that his desk could be dusted, he yelled at me for over an hour. But he didn’t touch me, not in anger, not for a while.
He was filming Insufficient Grounds—a movie I knew nothing about because I hadn’t had time to read the script—the second time it happened. We had been staying at the apartment because I was having the walls repapered, and it was easier to just sleep there than to make the trip to supervise every morning. Alex came home around dinnertime,
when Mrs. Alvarez had already laid out the meal and gone to her son’s for the weekend.
I was standing in front of the table when I heard John drive up outside. Checking last-minute details, I stretched my hand out toward Alex’s place setting and realigned the knife, fork, and spoon, so that the edges all were level.
“Hi,” Alex said, coming up behind me to slip his arms around my waist. He smelled of the cold cream used to take off makeup at the end of the day. He was still wearing his sunglasses. “What’s for dinner?”
I turned in his arms. “What did you want?”
Alex smiled. “You have to ask?” He lazily started unbuttoning my shirt. “Aren’t you hot?”
“No,” I laughed. “I’m hungry.” I lifted the cover from a serving platter, letting the smell of fresh-steamed snow peas and kung pao chicken tantalize Alex. “Why don’t you get undressed?”
Alex started downstairs toward the bedroom and I spooned rice and chicken and vegetables onto our plates. I sat patiently with my napkin in my lap until Alex returned, now wearing shorts and a pale blue pocket T-shirt that took on the color of his eyes. “You seen my sneakers, pichouette?” he asked.
I furrowed my brow, trying to remember where they were. At some point over the course of the day, I had noticed them, tangled with the brushes and tubs and paste of the wallpaperers.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, remembering. “They’re on the porch.”
The porch at the apartment was really a lanai that overlooked the beach-level deck. We kept our plants out there, and a very ugly cigar store Indian statue that Alex could not remember acquiring. Alex walked to the sliding doors and stepped outside, locating his sneakers and slipping them on his feet.
Immediately he shook them off again, cursing a violent streak in French. He lifted one to his nose and grimaced, hurled it as far as he could into the living room. It hit the new white silk wallpaper, leaving a dark muddy patch.
Very deliberately, Alex closed the sliding door and then walked around the apartment, shutting the windows I had opened to let in the ocean breeze. When he had sealed us off from everyone outside, he started to speak. “Some goddamned cat peed in them,” he said. “What I want to know is what they were doing out there in the first place.”
I put down my fork on the edge of the plate, careful not to make the slightest noise. “You left them out there?” I suggested.
“You were here all fucking day!” Alex yelled. “It never crossed your mind to bring them inside?”
I didn’t understand why this was a crisis. I knew that Alex had another pair of sneakers, older ones, downstairs in his closet. At the house there were at least three more pairs. Unsure of what exactly he wanted to hear, I stared down at my plate, at the cooling chicken.
Alex grabbed my chin and forced it up. “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he said. Then he grasped my shoulders and shoved me sideways, toppling the chair so that I lay sprawled half beneath it.
I closed my eyes and curled up, waiting for what was going to happen, but instead I heard the key turning in the front door. “Where are you going?” I whispered, so quietly that I didn’t think Alex would hear me.
“For a run,” he said tersely.
I struggled to a sitting position. “You don’t have your shoes,” I said.
“I’d noticed,” Alex said, and he slammed the door shut behind him.
I sat for a few moments with my knees huddled to my chest, and then I stood up and began to clear away the plates. I left Alex’s in the microwave, but I scraped mine into the trash. Then I walked around opening the windows that Alex had closed. I listened to the drifting sounds of dogs barking at the incoming tide, of a volleyball game in progress. I waited to hear Alex running back to me. I convinced myself that nothing had happened, so that when he returned, there would be nothing to forgive.
HERB SILVER HANDED ME A SECOND GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE. HE STOOD with me in a corner of the crowded lobby, popping little rolled pigsin-blankets into his mouth. “You know,” he said, “Alex gets these just for me. Because he knows I won’t eat those fancy schmancy oysters and puffy things.”
“Quiches,” I said.
“Whatever.” He slung a beefy arm around my shoulders. “Take deep breaths, hon. He’ll be back soon.”
I smiled apologetically, wishing I weren’t so obvious. I enjoyed Herb’s company, and I appreciated Alex’s making sure I was being taken care of, but I would much rather have been with Alex himself.
And I would have been, if we were attending a premiere of anything that wasn’t his own film. Tonight, though, he had obligations and interviews to complete; people he needed to talk to about the financing of his next picture. I would only get in the way. Craning my neck, I tried to catch a glimpse of him through the milling throng of wellwishers.
Alex was nowhere to be found. Resigned, I turned to Herb. He was actually here with Ophelia, not because he was her agent but because he wasn’t about to turn down the pleasure of escorting a pretty woman to a media event. I had asked him as a personal favor, just as I had asked Alex if he could wrangle an invitation for her. I noticed her across the room, wearing one of my dresses, talking to an actor on the verge of breaking into the big time.
“Ophelia looks like she’s having fun,” I said, picking up the thread of the conversation.
Herb shrugged. “Ophelia could have fun at a funeral if it was packed with industry people.” His face blanched, as if he just realized that he’d insulted my friend. “I don’t mean anything by that, bubbelah,” he said.
“It’s just that Ophelia is nothing like you.”
I smiled at him. “Oh?” I asked. “And what exactly am I like?”
Herb grinned, showing the gold fillings in his back teeth. “You?
You’re good for my Alex.”
The lights blinked, and the guests began to shuffle into the theater.
Critics flipped open their memo pads and uncapped their pens. Herb glanced around anxiously, waiting for Alex to claim me before he went inside.
“Go ahead,” I urged him. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
“Ach,” Herb said. “I already know the story. What’s a minute or two at the beginning?” He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall.
My eyes scanned the stream of people, wondering if Alex had forgotten me. “I don’t even know what it’s about,” I confessed. “I was too busy to read the script this time.”
Herb raised his eyebrows. “Let’s just say it’s a departure for Alex. I doubt you’ve seen him like this.” Herb started to grin. “Speak of the devil,” he said.
Alex wound my arm through his. “Sorry,” he said. “Even movie stars have to take a leak every now and then.” He thanked Herb for taking me under his wing, and then walked me into the darkening theater.
I leaned toward Alex as the credits began to roll on the screen. “Herb says I won’t even recognize you.”
Alex sucked in his breath, caught my hand in his. “Cassie,” he said softly, “promise me you’ll remember that I’m acting.” He knotted his fingers with mine and squeezed, settling our hands on the armrest between us. He would not let go.
The thing that made this film different from the others Alex had done was that here he was a villain. His other characters had had flaws of some kind, but not enough to be cast into such black relief. It took me very little time to realize what Insufficient Grounds was about.
Alex was playing a man who beat his wife.
I did not realize how tightly I was gripping Alex’s fingers, or that I felt so dizzy that if I had stood and run out of the theater like I wanted to, I would have collapsed. I watched the very first scene unfold in a pristine bathroom, where the counters were spotless and white and the towels were neatly folded over their racks. Alex pulled back the shower curtain to reveal the hot-and cold-water faucets, one of which was not set at a ninety-degree angle to the ceiling. Alex dragged a woman who was not me into the bathroom, forced her to see her mistake, and threw her on the tile floor.
I was watching the story of my life.
But on movie sets they had stunt doubles; they taught the actors to choreograph false punches. I tried to remind myself that the actress had not been hurt at all.
Then I turned toward Alex, who was looking at me and not at the film. His eyes reflected back the characters that were going through our motions on the screen. Promise me you’ll remember that I’m acting. “Why?”
I asked, but Alex only bent his head toward mine and whispered he was sorry.
AFTER THE MOVIE WAS PUBLICLY RELEASED AND ALEX WAS GIVEN glowing reviews for accepting a role that altered his image as a character actor, we went to the ranch in Colorado. Of Alex’s three residences, it was my favorite. Sprawled across three hundred acres of lush fields, it was bordered by the blue swells of the Rockies. It was cut into ribbons by a clear, winding stream so cold that it numbed your ankles. I knew the facts about the elevation in Colorado, but as soon as I stepped through the gates of the ranch, I found it much easier to breathe.
Even the stables and the main house were built along different lines from the L.A. residences. They were Spanish style, stucco and red tile roofs, geraniums tumbling over the edges of hand-fashioned window boxes. The skeleton staff that took care of the horses and the ranch when Alex was in California seemed to hide in the folds of the hills when we came to stay, making me feel that only Alex and I had access to this little sliver of heaven.
The first few times we’d been to the ranch, Alex had taught me how to ride. It was something he’d learned years ago for Desperado. I was good at it, and I liked it.
Alex had bought me a mare named Annie, who was ten years old but acted like a skittish filly. Two out of three times when I mounted her, she’d try to buck me off. Still, she was nothing compared to the horses Alex preferred. There seemed to be a new one every time, just green-broke, and half the thrill for Alex was keeping himself in the saddle.
“Race you,” I said, watching Alex pull back on the reins to keep Kongo stepping lightly. I danced Annie around in a tight circle. “Or are you afraid you aren’t going to be able to control him?”
I was teasing Alex; I knew that if he felt confident enough to set himself in the saddle, he’d manage to bend the horse to his will. But Kongo was a monstrous stallion, eighteen hands and black as pitch, and he showed no inclination to do anything Alex wanted. “I think you ought to give me a handicap,” Alex said, grinning, and as if he understood English, Kongo turned and started trotting in the wrong direction.
“Not on your life,” I said, and I dug my heels into Annie’s flanks, flying through the gate toward the valley where the stream took three hairpin turns to a little grove shaded by aspen trees, whose silver leaves tinkled on the wind like the bells of a tambourine.
Alex made it to the grove a full four lengths ahead of me, and then broke down to a trot, circling to cool off his horse. He slid off Kongo’s back and tied him to a low branch of a tree, then helped me off Annie.
He lowered me slowly down the length of his body, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him. “What I like about you,” he murmured, smiling, “is that you’re not a sore loser.”
We let the horses graze and sat at the edge of the stream, dangling our bare feet in the frigid water. I stretched back, leaning my head in Alex’s lap.
I woke up when my skull thumped against the stones at the edge of the water. Alex had vaulted onto Kongo’s back. “Annie just tore loose,”
he said. “I’m going after her.”
I knew that Alex would be able to overtake Annie. I wondered how she had gotten free. It was possible that she’d chewed through her reins;
with her temperament that wasn’t out of character. But it was just as possible that I’d done a shoddy job of tying her up, and that when Alex came back, there would be hell to pay.
By the time I saw Alex thundering toward me, I was standing very still. He stopped the horses three feet away, panting, not looking at me. Then he dismounted and knotted Annie’s reins and Kongo’s around the trunk of a different tree.
He hadn’t said a word during this entire prelude, and I knew that he was taking his time before he dealt with me. He turned around, but I couldn’t read his expression. When he took a step closer, I instinctively backed away.
Alex’s eyes opened wider. Then he held out his hand, the way you would to a dog that is unsure of your scent. He waited until I placed my palm against his, and then he jerked me into his arms. “Jesus,” he said, smoothing my hair. “You’re shaking.” He stroked the side of my neck. “Even if I hadn’t caught her, she would have made her way back to the stables. You had nothing to worry about.” But I couldn’t stop shivering, and after a moment he gently pushed me away, still holding my arms. “My God,” he said slowly. “You’re afraid of me.”
I lifted up my chin and shook my head, but I was trembling, which ruined the effect. Alex sank to the ground and bowed his head. I sat down beside him, miserable that I had ruined what had been a perfect afternoon. I realized that it was up to me to bring us back to center, so I took a deep breath. I stood up and waded into the stream again, bending at the waist and reaching my fingers into the water. “Rumor has it,” I said, “there are trout in this stream.”
Alex’s head lifted, and he smiled at me gratefully, running his eyes appreciatively from my hair to my bottom to my bare feet. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard that.”
“And rumor has it,” I continued, “that you can catch a fish with your bare hands.” As I spoke, a skinny spotted trout slipped between my palms, making me gasp and splash backward.
Alex came to his feet, stepping into the water behind me. “Assuming you wanted to learn,” he said, fitting his thighs to the backs of mine, “the first thing you’d do is stop moving around so damn much.” He bent over me, so close that his lips brushed my ear. His arms pressed the length of mine, down into the water, where my hands rested in his.
“The next thing you’d do is stay perfectly still. Don’t even breathe—a trout’ll run away if it even thinks that you’re here. And now you close your eyes.”
I turned in his arms. “You do?”
“That way you can just feel the fish.”
I obediently closed my eyes, letting the cool air fill my lungs, enjoying the sensation of Alex’s body cradling mine at so many different points.
When the trout slid over the palm of my hand, a quick silver tickle, Alex’s fingers tightened. He jerked back our arms and the fish slapped against my chest, thrashing in the hollow between my breasts. Together we fell backward onto the banks of the stream, laughing.
We stared at each other, inches apart, Alex’s hands still holding mine. Where his wrists pressed against me I could feel his pulse, a simple steady match to my own. We did not try to extricate ourselves from the knot made by our bodies, not even when Alex reached over to set the trout into the stream again. Together we watched it navigate a rocky shore, disappearing as quickly as a doubt.
WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR FIGHT WAS NOT WHAT had caused it or even how Alex came after me. I just know that it happened in the big bedroom at the house, and that one of us hit the dresser during the struggle. So the image that stayed with me was not the heat of Alex’s words or the sting of his palm across my shoulder; it was the moment that the jar of snow Alex had brought me in Tanzania rolled from the dresser and shattered on the smooth wooden floor.
It was an accident that could have happened long before if a maid had been clumsy or if I had turned around too fast when getting dressed.
But it hadn’t. For two and a half years, the little glass jar had stood, tightly capped, between my hairbrush and Alex’s, as if it were the link that held them together.
Alex stood over me, breathing heavily, watching the water spread across the floor. I sluggishly wondered if it would leave a stain, and I found myself hoping it would, just so there would be something left.
Instead of apologizing or gathering me to him, Alex knelt down and began to pick up the larger fragments of glass. One of them cut his thumb, and I watched with fascination as his blood swirled in the puddle of water.
I think that was the thing that put me over the edge. “If you touch me like that again,” I said softly, staring at the water, “I’ll leave.”
Alex did not stop what he was doing. He picked up those pieces as if he truly thought he’d be able to put them back together. “That,” he said quietly, “would kill me.”
I took my purse and a jacket and walked down the stairs, shaking my head when John asked if I needed a ride. I wandered down the streets of the neighborhood, gulping in the stale, processed air.
When I came to St. Sebastian’s—yes, our church—the first thought I had was that I could seek refuge. I could hide inside and never come out again. Maybe if I sat long enough in the cool, dark pews, tracing the shadows cast by stained glass, the world would go back to the way it had been.
I wanted desperately to be a Catholic, or any denomination, really—
but I could not honestly say I believed in anything. I had my doubts about a merciful God. I closed my eyes, and instead of praying to Jesus, I prayed to Connor. “I wish you were here,” I whispered. “You don’t know how much I need you.”
I sat on the pew until the unforgiving wood cut into the backs of my thighs, and by that time the only light in the little church came from the glowing white candles that sat on a table toward the rear. I stood up, dizzy, and understood that I still believed in one other thing.
I believed in Alex and me. In spite of this cycle, I believed in us, together.
I slipped out the heavy door of the church and hailed a taxi to take me home. When I touched the front door, it swung open. The parlor was pitch dark. Alex was sitting on the bottom stair, cradling his head in his hands.
I realized two things that night: that Alex thought I’d left for good, and that no matter what I had said in the heat of the moment, it had only been an empty threat. From the very second I’d walked out that door, I’d simply been making my way back.