The flight doesn’t leave till nine tonight; it’s a redeye.”
Mrs. Alvarez wrinkled her forehead as she spread a napkin over Cassie’s lap, so white she couldn’t see its edges against the bedsheet. The housekeeper poured two cups of coffee and added cream to one, handing it to Alex. “Well,” she said, “you yell if you change your mind.” Smiling at Cassie, she backed her way out of the room.
Alex fed Cassie a piece of muffin and kissed her hard on the lips.
“So,” he said. “The prodigal memory returns.”
“In fits and starts,” Cassie admitted. “Who knows? By the time we get to the house, I may even be able to find my own way to the bedroom.”
Alex skimmed the front page of the Friday paper and then handed it to her. “I’m going to take a run down the beach,” he said, reaching under the covers to find her leg. “Feel free to stay in bed until I get back.”
She pretended to read the national news while Alex was stretching his hamstrings, but the minute he closed the door behind him, she flipped to Liz Smith’s column.TA-BOO-BOO, the subheading announced.Alex Rivers and Nick LaRue, who play, in this recent release, in- separable buddies, proved to the patrons of Le Doˆme last night that what you see on screen is only an act. According to a reliable source, these two came to blows over Rivers’s wife, Cassandra. When it comes Oscar night, will everyone be thinking of Rivers’s nominated performance inThe Story of His Life,or of his celebrated right hook?
Shaking, Cassie turned the page. She closed her eyes but could not clear from her mind the anger that had seared through Alex last night.
Nothing Nick LaRue said had caused the fight. Cassie knew that as well as she knew Alex, she supposed. Anyone else would have had an argument, or issued a tight, quiet threat, but Alex had been pushed over the edge. There had been something running hot in his system that had fanned the tiniest spark into a conflagration. It wasn’t Cassie herself—he’d said so, and he seemed to be happy with her that morning.
Maybe it had to do with the pressure of the Academy Awards. Maybe it was being away fromMacbeth.
She glanced down at the newspaper and noticed that she had folded the paper to the Friday movie listings section. She scanned the ads forTaboo, teasers that matched the billboard she’d seen on the night Will found her. She saw that the Westwood Community Center was offering a one-day Alex Rivers film festival as part of their tribute to the Academy Award nominees.
Smiling, Cassie ran her finger over the listings. A trio of Alex’s movies, starting at nine o’clock in the morning. They’d be showingAntony and Cleopatra, the Shakespeare film that had proved his range, and one of the first movies he’d made after they were married.Desperado, a revisionist Western that had been his first film. And alsoThe Story ofHis Life, the family drama for which Alex had received three Oscar nominations.
Cassie glanced at her watch. She had two hours to get to Westwood.
She jumped out of bed and took a quick shower, pulled on jeans and the sweatshirt Alex had worn yesterday. She found John in the kitchen with Mrs. Alvarez and asked if he’d be able to drive her, and they practically collided with Alex on their way out the door. “Where are you off to?” he panted, sweat running down the sides of his neck.
“I’ll see you at three,” Cassie said, throwing him her widest smile and slipping past him before he had a chance to ask more.
She settled into the back seat of the Range Rover, giddy as a teenager.
Closing her eyes, she buried her face into the overlong arms of Alex’s sweatshirt, breathing Malibu, sandalwood, him.
THE WESTWOOD COMMUNITY CENTER WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A recreation hall for senior citizens, who made up the lion’s share of the early-morning audience for the Alex Rivers Film Festival. Cloaked in the anonymity of an outsider, Cassie moved through the knots of elderly women in the lobby. “Like Gary Cooper,” one woman said. “He can do anything on screen.”
She smiled, realizing she had experienced something no one else in the room had. She wanted to stand spread-eagled on the black and white linoleum tiles and scream,I am Alex Rivers’s wife. I live with him. I eat breakfast with him. He’s real to me.
When they started to let people into the amphitheater, Cassie held back and counted the number of fans Alex had here in Westwood. She imagined herself laughing with him later, telling him about the lady with the muffin-shaped hair who carried an autographed eight-by-tenPicture Perfect 85of him and stuck it to the seat beside her, and about the old man who had yelled at the admissions booth, “Alexwho?”
She sat in the back row, where she could watch and listen to everyone else.Desperado, the Western that everyone in Hollywood had predicted would be a dismal failure, was the first movie to be shown. Cassie hadn’t known Alex when he made the film, and actually, it hadn’t been Alex’s movie. The lead actress had top billing—Ava Milan. She played a woman who’d been taken prisoner as a child by a group of renegade Indians, and who had grown up with the nomadic tribe, found a husband and a decent life. Alex was her brother, who had seen his entire family shot and grew up swearing vengeance. The whole movie spiraled to a climax in which Alex found his sister in the Indian camp and went on a rash of senseless shooting, killing most of the village and Ava’s character’s husband in the process. After a chilling soliloquy where she told her brother the life he’d just taken from her was better than anything she could have hoped for as a white woman in 1890, she slit her own throat in front of him.
The critics had gone wild. Westerns were not in at the time, but Native Americans were.Desperadowas the first movie to portray them as individuals, not as a faceless enemy. Alex Rivers, twenty-four, moved ahead of a pack of current young actors to become a standout, and his character, Abraham Burrows, became the first in a long line of complex, flawed heroes.
Cassie slipped low in her seat as the screened names rolled over the red dust of the Western set.ALEXRIVERS. A chill ran from her collarbone to her fingertips. The first moment Alex stepped onto the screen, she drew in her breath. He looked so young, and his eyes were lighter than they seemed now. He stood with his feet apart, his hands fisted at his sides, and he let out a yell that shook the red-curtained walls. Not even a word, just a syllable that made his presence undeniable.
It struck her how much her perception of Alex had changed in just a few days. When he had come for her at the police station, she had seen him as he was on screen: ten feet tall and unapproachable. But she knew better now. Cassie smiled. She’d have a hell of a time convincing even one other person in this theater of the truth, but Alex Rivers was just like anyone else.
WILL WAS WAITING FOR A FURNITURE DELIVERY. HE’D HAD IT WITH using his mattress as a dining room, living room, and general allpurpose recreation area. He had bought stuff at the first place he’d seen, a little store with decent prices that let him pay on monthly installments.
The furniture van came just when they said it would, at ten o’clock.
Two big men brought each piece to the door and said, “Where’s it go?”
When they got to the living room, Will kicked the extra boxes out of the way. He disconnected his brand-new television andVCRand waited for the movers to bring in the teakwood entertainment center. He’d bought that just because of its name: entertainment center. Kind of sounded like you were having a party in your house, even when you were alone.
TheVCRwas an impulse buy. He just didn’t see how he could live in the movie capital of the world and not have one. He didn’t know how to set the clock and he’d be damned if he was going to thumb through the manual to figure it out, so it had been flashing 12:00 for twenty-four hours now. It was his day off, Friday, and when these guys finished bringing in the furniture he was going to do the following things in this order: eat a bowl of cereal at his new kitchen table, flop down belly-first on his new bed, sprawl across his couch and flip on the TV with the remote, and then watch a movie.
It was past noon by the time he walked down to the convenience store to rent something. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular.
