But on Christmas Eve we got drunk on a bottle of Glenfiddich, and when Ophelia thought I had fallen asleep she began to talk. She spoke of the stepfather who had been feeling her up since she was twelve. She spoke of the smell of his aftershave. She spoke of the insomnia she cultivated so that she would be able to hear the slightest breach of her bedroom door. When the sun came up we did not unwrap presents, but instead shyly treasured this gift of each other.
We were unlikely friends, but we were inseparable. When Ophelia began to remake herself in a different image, I stood by her. After all, I understood what she was trying so hard to disguise. She bought herself breast implants as a graduation gift and legally changed her name; and while I started work on my master’s, she threw herself into the task of finding us an apartment close enough to the studios for her and toUCLAfor me. It was a small place, but the rent was low, and we’d been there now for almost seven years.
“Go ahead,” the operator said.
“Ophelia?”
I heard her let her breath out in a rush. “Thank God you called,”
she said, as if I were a half-mile away. “I’m having a crisis.”
I grinned. “You’re always having a crisis,” I pointed out. “What’s the problem today?”
“I’m supposed to meet my therapist at four o’clock, you know?”
Ophelia had been seeing someone to enhance her self-assertiveness ever since she had decided the sessions with the psychic weren’t working.
“Right now I’m seeing him twice a week, and I’d really like to cut back to once, but I don’t know how to tell him that.”
I didn’t want to laugh, I didn’t mean to, but the sound leaked out.
I covered it with a cough.
“Maybe I just won’t go,” she sighed. “I’ll tell him Thursday.” She was quiet for a moment, and then seemed to remember where I was.
“And how’s Africa?” she dutifully asked.
Ophelia did not understand my attraction to anthropology—to her it was a glorified way of getting filthy—but she knew how much it meant to me. “It’s much more interesting than I expected,” I said. “I’m moonlighting.”
“As a safari guide?”
“As a technical advisor on Alex Rivers’s new movie.”
I heard a crash in the background. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod,”
Ophelia said. “Howdid this happen?”
Relating the entire story to Ophelia brought back my original doubts. “I know I’m going to regret this,” I said. “If it wasn’t for the money—and for a chance to screwUCLA—Iwouldn’t be doing it.” I grimaced. “I bet he won’t even want to get his hands dirty.” I let my breath out slowly, mulling over the consequences of a hasty decision. I didn’t like Custer, but I could avoid him when I was at the university.
I wasn’t going to like Alex Rivers, but I had committed myself to being his shadow for ten hours a day.
“I’m sending you clothes,” Ophelia announced. “My black sleeveless dress and the pink satin bra and—”
“Ophelia,” I interrupted, “I’m his technical advisor, not his mistress.”
“Still,” Ophelia countered, “you never know. Just sign for the damn package and you can stuff it into your bag and forget about it.” She took a shaky breath. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this. IknewI should have majored in anthropology.” Her voice tumbled over her words, racing with excitement. “God, Cass,” she said.“Alex Rivers!”
I smiled. If I even wore that bra within twenty yards of Alex Rivers, Ophelia would probably frame it when I got home. “He’s just a person,”
I reminded her.
“Yeah,” Ophelia said. “A person who makes four million per film and has the entire female population casting him in their fantasies at night.”
I thought about this: Alex Rivers had not been in any of my fantasies, but then again most of my dreams had to do with chipping away at piles of dirt and finding men who’d lived millions of years ago. I tried to remember which of his films I had seen. I must have gone to them with Ophelia, because she was really the only person I spent my free time with, and she usually forced me to see the latest box office hit.
Vaguely I rememberedDesperado, some Western made when we were in college, andLight and Shadows, which had been one of the token Vietnam coming-of-age pictures of 1987. There were a few action films whose titles I couldn’t remember, and then the last one I’d seen, about six months ago, that love story.Applewild. I’d forgotten about that one.
It had surprised me, because I’d never seen Alex Rivers cast as a romantic hero, and he had made me believe in him. The film’s message had stayed with me the whole drive home: Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I wondered if it was really true. Love, to my knowledge, was nothing more than a planned seduction. In college, I had lost my virginity to a fraternity boy, just because I wanted to know what it was like. There hadn’t been any great ache around my heart, or a connection of the spirits. There was the speeding of my blood, the mix of our hot breath, and the simplicity of sex.
