Picture Perfect Read online

  There were other people on the reservation, people his own age, who still had bundles. Nobody batted an eye. Will had to admit, there were stranger things.

  He walked into the kitchen and found a hammer and a picture hook. For a moment he sat with the medicine bundle, rubbing it against his cheek and feeling the soft chamois of history. It wasn't his medicine bundle, so it wasn't going to do him any good, but it wasn't going to do any damage, either.

  Will tried to remember where Cassie had hung it that day, and he set the bag between his teeth to stand on the couch. He held his palms up to the smooth white wall, hoping to feel some of the heat her gifted hands had left behind.

  LIKE EVERY ONE ELSE IN THE WESTWOOD COMMUNITY CENTER, CASSIE cried at the end ofThe Story of His Life . It was easy to see why Alex had been awarded his first nomination for a Best Director Oscar, although the nomination for Best Actor had raised some controversy about why Alex and not Jack Green, the veteran actor who portrayed his father, had gotten the nod. Jack had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor; it could have gone either way. L.A. bookies were saying Alex was a favorite in his two categories, Jack a dead lock forhis , and the film would win Best Picture.

  Many of the senior citizens shuffled out after the film, having come primarily to see the movie that all the speculation centered on. But Cassie couldn't have been dragged from that theater. She realized the reason she had come to the festival in the first place was to seeAntony and Cleopatra , the epic movie that Alex had made shortly after their marriage.

  The credits started scrolling over the screen, accompanied by the sad notes of a sitar. Cassie pulled her hair out of its ponytail and fanned it over the back of the seat. She closed her eyes just before Alex spoke Antony's first words, and she willed herself to remember.

  IT WAS THE FIRST INDICATION SHE HAD THAT ALEX WAS NOT THE man she had married. He came home from Herb Silver's office clutching a script. She had been in her laboratory at the house, scanning her itinerary for the upcoming trip to Tanzania, when Alex burst through the door and planted himself in front of her. "This," he said, "is the part I was made for."

  Later, Cassie had thought about what he said; it would have made more sense to say,This part was made for me , instead of the other way around. But like Antony, from the minute he first touched that script Alex had become a megalomaniac.

  The lines came easily to him, falling from his lips as if he'd never had to study them, and although Cassie knew Alex had a photographic memory, she had never even seen him crack open the script. "I am Antony," he told her simply, and she had no choice but to believe him.

  He was not the favored actor for the role. He hadn't even been considered until he'd asked Herb to submit his name. Cassie knew he was nervous about it. So on the morning he was to meet with the casting director, she waved the cook away from the kitchen and made him an omelette herself. She put in peppers and ham and Vidalia onions, cheddar cheese and Colby and a dash of paprika. "Your favorite," she said with a flourish. She laid the plate in front of him at the table. "For good luck."

  Alex would have looked up at her, maybe grabbed her by the hips and swung her onto his lap for a kiss. He would have offered her half and handfed it to her from his own fork. But that morning his eyes darkened, as if he had devoured something whole that was now burning its way out. He swept the plate off the table with his arm, not even glancing as it shattered against the pale veined-marble floor. "Bring grapes," he whispered, already in accent. "Plums and sweetmeats. Ambrosia." He turned away from Cassie, who stood frozen at his side. He stared over the length of the table at something she could not see. "Bring a feast for a god," he said.

  Cassie ran from the table. From the bedroom, she called in sick to the university, truly believing she was on the verge of throwing up. She heard John come in to get Alex, and when the door closed behind them, she curled up on the mattress and tried to make herself as small as humanly possible.

  Alex did not come home until after dinner. She was still in the bedroom, sitting at the window and watching the horizon swallow the sun. She kept her back to Alex when he opened the door, waiting rigidly for his apology.

  He did not speak. He knelt behind her and ran his fingers from her jaw to her neck, stroking lightly. He let his lips run the path of his hands, and when he tipped her chin back to kiss her, she gave herself up to him.

  He made love as he never had before. He was rough with her until she cried out, then so gentle she had to press his hands against her, craving more. It was not an act of passion but possession, and every time Cassie tried to pull herself an inch away from Alex's fever he drew her tighter. He held himself back until he felt her closing around him, and as he pushed her down into the bed he whispered into the shell of her ear. "You did know," he said, "how much you were my conqueror."

  When he was breathing steadily, asleep, Cassie slipped from the bed and picked up the script he'd dropped by the window. She walked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid for hours skimming the play she had last read in high school. She cried when Antony, in love with Cleopatra, married Octavia for peace. She whispered aloud the scene where Antony, realizing Cleopatra had not betrayed him after all, begged a serving soldier to run him through with his own sword. She closed her eyes and saw Antony dying in Cleopatra's arms; Cleopatra poisoning herself with the asp. In Act III, she found it: the line Alex had murmured to her in the quiet after. But she had not made love with Alex. It had been Antony touching her, obsessed with her, filling her.

  AWOMAN TO CASSIE'S LEFT BEGAN TO COUGH VIOLENTLY, AND CASSIE opened her eyes only to realize she had missed the bulk of the movie. Alex wasn't even on the screen anymore. The actress who had played opposite him, a very beautiful woman who had gone on to do nothing else of great merit, was singing Antony's praises. Cassie whispered the words with her: "His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm crested the world; his voice was propertied as all the tuned spheres." It had been the role of a lifetime for Alex, the one that opened Hollywood's eyes enough to realize here was an actor who could do anything at all, who could sell gold to Midas himself. And was it any wonder?A man who ruled the world. Unparalleled ambition . There were so many similarities between Antony and Alex, it was difficult to know if he had had to act at all.

  She wanted to see him. Not as he was on screen, filled to the skin with a character's thoughts and deeds, but as himself. She wanted to talk to the man who told her he had threatened kidnapping as an alternative to marrying him, the one whose dimples her children would have, the one who bought her ancient skulls and plasticine. She wanted to stand on the moors of Scotland with him, his arms around her, their pulses slowing to match.

  Not waiting for the end of the movie, she pulled Alex's sweatshirt closer around her and started up the aisle of the amphitheater. She would meet him after his engagement at the hospital, and they'd ride together to Bel-Air, and she'd tell him about the forty-two senior citizens who had come to see him that morning. He would kiss the warm spot the sun crowned on her hair and she would lean against him, letting the whole back seat fill up with the wonder of them, together.

  Cleopatra's words trailed behind her like a bridal train as she stepped into the humid afternoon.Think you there was, or might be, such a man as this I dreamed of ?

  CHAPTER NINE

  MICHAELA Snow, Alex Rivers's publicist, met him in the parking lot of the hospital. "Alex, Alex, Alex," she said, her heavy arms seeming to move of their own accord to wrap around his neck. "If I didn't love you, I'd kill you."

  Alex kissed her cheek and embraced her as best he could--she weighed much more than he did, so his arms didn't make it the whole way around her middle. "You only love me because I make you so much money," he said.

  "You've got me there," she said. She snapped, and a small, thin man tumbled out of the back of her van. He held three brushes threaded between the fingers of one hand, and a sponge dabbed in pancake in the other. "This is Flaubert Halloran," Michaela said. "Freelance makeup."