Picture Perfect Read online

  Alex smiled and poured some into my glass. "This doesn't stain as badly as papaya," he said. He lifted his own glass and clinked it against mine. The sound, like the lightest of bells, carried on the wind.

  "I guess we should toast to the movie," I said.

  "No." Alex leaned so close I could smell the spice of his aftershave. "I think we should definitely toast to you."

  I watched the fluted glass come up to his lips, and then I turned away to stare at the flickering candles. Our entrees were sitting beneath silver domes on the cot across the tent. Perched on a rickety shelf were two individual fruit tarts. "You're making it very hard for me to stay angry," I said.

  "Well," Alex said, "at least I'm finally doingsomething right."

  I blushed, staring down at my plate. I wanted him to serve the food. Sing. Shout. Anything but look at me like that.

  I could find my way across a desert by noting the position of the sun. I knew how to put a skull back together when it was split into fifty pieces. I could run complicated computer analyses that explained the significance of a bone's dimensions. But I could not sit at a dinner table across from a man and feel at ease.

  I just didn't have much practical experience with it. And any fantasies I'd harbored didn't cover the pitfalls that cropped up in reality: the long moments where there was nothing to say, the horrible echo of a dropped spoon against my plate, the way Alex could stare at me as if he saw right through my skin. I thought about the heroines in those books I had read during the flight to Tanzania. Most of them would have tossed their long, flowing hair over their backs by now and parted their cherry lips and leaned invitingly over the table. All of them knew how to tease and how to flirt. At the very least, they'd be able to make conversation without looking like fools.

  But Alex knew nothing about anthropology, and I knew nothing about movies. Talking about the weather in Tanzania was pointless, since it stayed constant for months. He didn't want to hear about my flight over. Without the shield of anger I had worn into the tent as protection, I had very little to say to Alex Rivers. He probably was wondering what had made him invite me to dinner in the first place.

  "So tell me, Cassandra Barrett--"

  "Cassie," I said automatically. I looked up at him. "You can call me Cassie."

  "Cassie, then. Tell me how you wound up chipping away at rocks in the African desert."

  I leaped into the conversation, grateful for the chance todo something. "I was a tomboy," I said. "I liked to play in the dirt."

  He walked toward a low wooden crate I hadn't noticed and pulled out two small silver bowls packed in ice. "Shrimp cocktail?" he said.

  I smiled as he set the plate in front of me. "How did youdo this?" I said, shaking my head.

  Alex lifted a shrimp on the tiny fork. "If I told you, it wouldn't be magic anymore."

  We ate quietly, and I watched the candles dance shadows on his cheeks and light the edges of his hair. He was golden, that was the word. I'd look at him one moment and see a man asking me about my courses at UCLA, and then I'd take a breath and see Apollo himself.

  During the main course, Alex mentioned that he had been born outside of New Orleans. "My father was a doctor and mymaman , well, she's just the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." He smiled. "I remember watching her in her garden when she thought no one else was around. She'd pull off her straw sunbonnet and turn her face up to the sky and laugh like she was the happiest woman in the world."

  I looked into my plate, thinking of my own mother, who would have traded everything she owned to get back to the South. I thought of how I'd watch her when she thought no one was looking, bent over her tumbler of bourbon, toasting herself. I closed my eyes, trying to picture what it must have been like to grow up as a child in Alex Rivers's family.

  "My daddy didn't much care for acting," Alex said. "But then he saw me in a play in college--Tulane--and he became my number-one fan. Up till he died a few years back, he kept the promotional posters of every film I was in hanging on the walls of his office."

  "And your mother still lives in New Orleans?" I said.

  "Tried getting her to move to L.A., but she wouldn't do it. She said her roots have grown too deep to dig up now."

  I tried to conjure the pictures my mother had colored in my mind of the South, a land of grace and blue-leafed willows and iced drinks with crushed mint. It seemed as different from L.A. as I was to Alex Rivers. "You must miss New Orleans," I said. "Hollywood's got to be a different world."

  Alex shrugged. "I grew up in one of those old French mansions," he said. "Black shutters and climbing roses and scrolled iron benches in the garden. When I came to L.A. and made it big, I built a house just like it in Bel-Air." He smirked. "Of course, if you've been on one of those Star Tours, you've probably even seen the mailbox."

  I smiled at him. "And just how did you know you'd made it big?"

  Alex laughed. "One day I was at the grocery store. It was just afterLight and Shadows was released--that was the Vietnam film. Anyway, I was in the produce aisle and I was squeezing cantaloupes, you know, like my mother showed me when I was in college, to test them for ripeness. So I finally chose two and made my way down to the scallions, and I looked back to see a crowd around the melons. All these women were grabbing the cantaloupes I'd picked up but didn't take--the damngreen ones--and telling each other they'd gotten one Alex Rivers had touched." He grinned. "That's the worst part," he said. "I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything. I have absolutely no privacy. That day, in 1987, was the last time I went grocery shopping."

  "What do you do for food?" I asked, horrified.

  "I hire people. I have someone to buy my food, buy my clothes, make my phone calls, drive me around. Christ, I could probably hire someone to go to the bathroom for me if I wanted to."

  "Ah," I said, smiling. "The advantages of being in a position of power." I stood up and cleared the two plates away--a delicious goose in plum sauce with a candied rice stuffing. "So what do youdo all day?"

  Alex laughed. "Come to think of it," he said, "very little."

  He refilled the champagne glasses while I carried the dessert to the table. "Blueberries," I said. "That's my favorite."

  I wasn't saying it just to be nice. You couldn't grow up in Maine andnot like blueberries; they grew wild in the woods between my house and Connor's. These weren't nearly as good--not that I was about to tell Alex--but they reminded me of summer and a life I'd had a hundred years before. I lifted the fork to my mouth and took another bite. "We used to pick blueberries in Maine," I said to Alex. "They grow all over the place, and we'd pluck them right off the bushes to eat." I smiled. "The warm ones were the best, because they tasted like the sun and they left purple stains on our fingers."

  Alex reached across the table to take my hand. He turned it over in his, slowly rubbing his fingertips across mine. "Here," he said, touching my palm as if he could see the marks. "And here." He glanced at me. "I wish I'd been the one with you."

  I pulled my hand away. I could feel a stream of sweat breaking across my back. "I think I'd better go," I said quickly. "Thank you for a wonderful dinner." I stood up before I could change my mind; before he could change it for me.

  Alex stared at me for a long minute, and then he got to his feet and unrolled his sleeves. He pulled on his dinner jacket and walked me outside the tent. The twin torches flaming at the entrance to the set painted the earth in shades of red that shimmered and started and burned. "I told John I'd drive you back," Alex said quietly. "I hope you don't mind."

  "I don't want to put you out," I said, but even as I did I knew there was no alternative. I would have been terrified to drive to the lodge myself this late at night; and it wasn't as if I could simply call a taxi.

  Alex helped me into the jeep and swung into the driver's side. He lit a cigarette, and that surprised me--I hadn't expected him to be the type to smoke. But he only took a few drags, and then he threw it out the window, so I was left without its glowing crimson tip t