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. ShePicture Perfect 91would 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?
CHAPTERNINE
MICHAELASnow, 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.”
“Flaubert,” the man repeated, in a voice that reminded Alex of the glide of a cat. “Like the writer.” He stuck the wooden ends of the brushes in his mouth like a seamstress’s pins and began to cover the bruise at the corner of Alex’s eye. “Nasty, nasty,” he said.
Michaela kept checking her watch. “Okay, Flo, that’s all.” She pulled Alex’s wrist, dragging him behind her toward the hospital. “I’ve got three major networks,People, Vanity Fair, and theTimesexpected to show. The story is that this is a charitable kind of thing you do every year, and only a leak to the press—thank you very much—has led to this coverage. Make something up about a long-lost cousin who died of leukemia.”
Alex grinned at her. “Or an illegitimate son?”
Michaela steered him through the glass doors of the hospital. “I’dPicture Perfect 93murder you,” she said. She handed Alex a sheaf of publicity photos fromTabooand a gaggle of balloons in blue and gold, then shepherded him into an elevator. Michaela reached in to push the button to the seventh floor. “Remember, act shocked to see all the cameras, but recover quickly, and feed them a sob story that will win you another Oscar nomination.” She winked at him and waved, her tiny red nails blinking in the flesh of her palm. “Ciao,” she mouthed.
Act? he thought, his smile fading as the elevator doors closed before him. He was already acting. It had taken nearly every imaginative skill he had to meet Michaela in the parking lot and pretend that this was just like any other PR engagement. For years Alex had studiously avoided hospitals, for years he’d buried his memories of a New Orleans pediatric ward. As he moved through the halls, the familiar ammonia stench and the spartan white walls began to close in around him. He tensed the muscles of his arms, expecting to feel the prick of a needle, the drain of an IV.
He had been born with a hole in his heart, a condition that consigned him to a childhood on the sidelines. The backwoods GP who’d heard the murmur had referred Alex’s mother to Charity in the city, where a specialist could check the severity of the defect, but when she forgot the appointment—more than once—he told her her son would have to play it safe, rather than sorry.Don’t run, Alex had been told.Don’t exert yourself. He could remember watching other kindergartners race across the damp playground. He could remember closing his eyes and picturing his heart—a punctured, red, child’s valentine. When he was five and still couldn’t play outside, he listened to soap operas in the afternoons with his mother, who did not seem to notice or care that he was there. Once on the TV a lady with the bright hair of a fairy had pressed her cheek to a man’s bare chest and murmured,Ilove you with all my heart. After that, when Alex pictured his heart, he did not just imagine the hole. He also saw the extent of the damage: all the love he’d gathered for and from other people draining out, an unstoppable sieve.
No wonder, Alex had realized, blaming himself for his parents’ indifference in that way young children have of twisting outcomes and events. That was the first time Alex decided to be someone else. Rather than face the flaws in himself, he’d pretend he was a swashbuckling pirate, a mountain climber, the President. He pretended he lived in a normal family, that during dinner his parents asked him,How was your day?instead of hissing in angry Cajun French. And at age eight, when he was pronounced cured, he brought those fantasies to life, preferring someone strong and bright to the frightened boy he had been.
He convinced himself that he was impervious to pain, mettled of superheroic proportions. He could remember holding his palm over a burning candle, feeling the skin welt and take fire, telling himself that anyone who could survive such trying feats would not be affected by his mother’s disinterest, his father’s taunting. He got very good at believing what he forced himself to believe. In fact, thirty years later, Alex had had so much practice at dissembling, he was hard-pressed to remember what would remain if all his careful masks fell away. With the self-control for which he had become famous, Alex shook free of his memories and steeled himself to the situation at hand. This was a hospital, true, but it had nothing to do with him; it meant nothing at all to him. He’d do his job, he’d pretend he liked being there, and he’d get the hell out.
It didn’t surprise Alex that to reach the kids he first had to struggle through a knot of doctors and nurses. He smiled politely, covertly glancing over their bobbing heads to find the quickest route to the patient wards, so that he’d look like he’d been there many times before.
They tugged at his coat, telling him how much they had loved this movie or that. They all called him Alex, as if sitting in a darkened theater with his image for two hours at a time made them think they’d known him all their lives.
“Thanks,” he murmured. “Yes, thank you.” He managed to make it down the hallway to the pediatric cancer ward, when the cameras rounded the corner. He looked up long enough to register faint disapproval, maybe a trace of surprise, but he recovered and smiled politely and said some children were expecting him.
Michaela hadn’t prepared him for the sight of the kids. One goddamned glance and he was five years old again, shivering in a thin johnny while he waited for the doctors to read him his future. Had he looked like this?
The children peppered the floor in their pajamas, some trailing open robes. Their eyes were too large for their heads. They were carbon copies of each other: thin, haunted, bald; evoking images of concentrationPicture Perfect 95camps. He could not even tell the boys from the girls until they spoke.
“Mr. Rivers,” one little girl lisped. She couldn’t have been more than four, but he was no good at judging these things, and he knelt down so that she could climb onto his back. She smelled of medicine and urine and surrender. “Here,” she said, dropping a wet cracker into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I saved this one for you.”
He would have thought they were too young to see his films, but nearly every kid there had seenSpeed, the one about the test pilot. The boys wanted to know if he’d really gotten to fly that F-14, and one even asked if the actress who played his girlfriend had tasted as good as she looked.
He gave balloons to the smaller children and autographed photos to anyone who asked. When a thirteen-year-old named Sally came closer for hers, he leaned toward her conspiratorially. “You know, the best way to remember the places you’ve been is to kiss a pretty girl wherever you go,” he said, just loud enough for the tape recorders to pick up his words. “Think you can help me?”
She blushed furiously and offered her cheek, but at the moment Alex went to kiss her she turned and landed her lips right on his mouth.
“Wow,” she breathed, holding her fingers over her lips. “I gotta call my ma.”
It had struck Alex at the moment the flashbulbs went off that not only had he given Sally her first kiss, but probably her last. He felt himself starting to sweat as the room swam around him, and he had to take several deep breaths to steady his nerves. Physically, he had gotten better; physically, he had been lucky. But there were all kinds of hidden dangers in childhood, things that reared up and stole your innocence before you were old enough to fight back. He wondered which was worse—a child whose spirit could not outlive a broken body; or, like himself, a man whose apparent health hid a soul that had died years before.
“JESUS CHRIST, JOHN,” ALEX SAID, STRETCHING HIS ARMS OUT OVER the back seat of the Range Rover. “Unless she was running off to meet some other guy, what’s the big secret?”
John looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know, Mr. Rivers,” he said. “I promised the missus and all.”
Alex leaned forward and grinned. “Ten bucks more a week for you if you give me the town where you dropped her off. Twenty bucks if you come completely clean.”
John chewed his upper lip. “You won’t tell her I said nothing?”
