The Korean proprietor told him his first two choices were out, and then held up a beaten red box. “You try this,” he said. “You like it.”
Desperado. Will couldn’t help but laugh. It was a film from the early eighties, and it co-starred Alex Rivers. “Shit,” he said, pulling a five from his pocket. “I’ll try it.” If Rivers was as young as he figured from the dates on the box, he probably wasn’t very good, and after last night, Will felt like getting a laugh at his expense.
Will bought a bag of natural popcorn and walked home. He sat down on the new couch and started the movie with his remote, fastforwarding through the warnings and the previews. When Alex Rivers first came onto the screen and let out a howl like a Sioux war cry, Will snorted and tossed a handful of popcorn at the TV.
He did not know what the movie was about, but he remembered allPicture Perfect 87the controversy that had surrounded it. It was written up in a lot of tribal papers, opinions that had split down the middle: complaints for its inaccuracies, praise for its portrayal of Native American family life and the hiring of Indian actors. Will watched it long enough to see the actress who played Alex Rivers’s sister marry some strapping Mandan brave. She was small and blond, and her face was very close to the one Will had seen at night as an adolescent, when he tossed under sheets in his grandfather’s house.
“Fuck this,” Will said. He hit the little red button on his remote, getting great satisfaction out of seeing Alex Rivers’s image wiggle and black out as the tape ejected from hisVCR. He sat up, spilling the popcorn into the cushions of the couch. “They don’t know a thing,” he muttered. “They make these shitty movies and they don’t have a clue.”
Will switched off the TV, too, staring at the screen for a moment until the snow stopped dancing in front of his eyes. He looked at the video box lying on the floor on its side. Then he walked to the two boxes he’d moved out of the way for the delivery. Prying open the top one, he rummaged through the newspaper Cassie had tried to pack between the artifacts he’d so carelessly thrown inside.
He pulled out the medicine bundle that had belonged to his greatgreat-grandfather, who—like his grandfather—had dreamed of the elk, and that’s what the pouch was made of. Will fingered the fringes; the skin of the bag itself. Elk Dreamers had been highly revered among the Sioux. People turned to them when they were looking for the person they should love.
Will had known a guy in the reservation’s police department who had married a white woman, moved to Pine Ridge town, coached his kid’s Little League team. Like all cops, he carried a piece, but he also carried a medicine bundle. In 1993, believe it or not, he wore the thing every day looped right around his holster. He said it brought him luck, and the one day his daughter borrowed it for show-and-tell he’d been shot in the arm by a drug addict.
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 EVERYONE 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 seeAntonyand 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 neverPicture Perfect
89had 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 hand-fed 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 ActIII, 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.
A WOMAN 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 whoruled 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.
