“I steal people’s reactions—you’re absolutely right. It keeps me from having to dig deeper into myself. I guess I’m afraid that if I stick to myownexperiences, one day I’ll be looking for something to draw upon and I’ll find out instead that I’ve run dry.” He smiled faintly. “The truth is, I can’t afford to let that happen. Acting is the only thing I’m good at. I don’t know what else I could do.” He stared at me. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to be you.”
I lifted my hand as if I were going to touch him, but changed my mind. A faint flush covered Alex’s cheeks as he realized what he had admitted to me. I looked away, wondering why ifhehad been the one to expose himself,Ifelt so vulnerable.
THEGOINGSTORYABOUTALEXRIVERSINHOLLYWOOD,COURTESYof Michaela Snow, was that he had graduated from the drama department at Tulane, had come to L.A., and was tending bar at a hot nightspot one evening when a big-time producer proceeded to get shitfaced. Alex had driven the man home, and a day later the producer had screentested him. The movie wasDesperado; he’d won the part and had stolen the film. People in the business believed that everything had come easily to Alex Rivers. That if he hadn’t been in the right place at the right time, there would have been a second coincidence, or a third.
It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction, so most of the time Alex did not try. He left his childhood in a puddle on a back lot at Paramount and re-created himself to fit the mythic proportions drawn by the press. The truth was, he became a workaholic—not because of the money or fame, but because he did not like himself as much as the characters he brought to life. He did not let himself believe that there was anything remaining of the vulnerable boy he had once been. The other truth was that the closest Alex had ever come to a stage at Tulane was mopping it as a custodian. His unheralded arrival in L.A. was as a hitchhiker on a meat truck. And he never would have left Louisiana in the first place if he hadn’t believed that he’d killed his own father.
It had been one of those weeks in New Orleans when the humidity grabbed you by the balls and blew its fetid breath into your lungs.
Andrew Riveaux had been gambling for three consecutive days and nights in a back room off Bourbon Street, although at first his family did not notice. Alex was too busy working at the university, trying to amass enough money to support his mother and to set himself up in his own place. He barely lived at home as it was; he spent most nights in the narrow dormitory beds at the invitation of rich daddy’s girls who found him brooding and intemperate, an adventure from the wrong side of the tracks.
Likewise, Lila Riveaux did not mark her husband’s absence. She slept most of the time, incubated and buffered by a Valium haze, so drugged she could not distinguish the days of the week, much less which ones Andrew bothered to put in an appearance. On that afternoon when Alex stopped in at the trailer park to check on her, she was so pale and still that he forced himself to feel for her pulse.
Alex was in the closet kitchen, cutting vegetables to add to a can of broth for dinner, when he heard his father laugh outside. His father had two laughs: one mean one, used for degradation; and one fake one, used for sucking up. This was the second kind, and after the briefest pause, during which Alex nicked his own finger, he went back to his task.
Andrew Riveaux had brought someone home. Alex listened to the heavy footsteps, the rumbling voice. He heard his father open the folding panel door to the only bedroom and yell out his wife’s name. Alex stepped from the kitchen in time to see his father ushering this fat, florid man toward Lila, unconscious on the bed. He noticed that his father’s gold chain and crucifix were gone, that his skin was yellowed with alcohol. He watched the stranger stroke his hands over the roll of his belly, and then turn to Andrew. “She gonna wake up?” he asked, and that was how Alex understood how much his father had lost.
Alex stood like a witness to a raging fire, both mesmerized and immobilized by shock, knowing that he had to move or be heard, and understanding at the same time that these simple acts were beyond his control. His breath came in hoarse, square blocks, and finally the paring knife he was holding dropped to the floor.
Andrew paused in the act of sliding closed the bedroom door. He glanced at Alex. “She won’t know,” he said, as if this made it all right.
His first punch folded his father in the middle. His second broke his father’s nose. The bedroom door cracked open, and the stranger stood gaping in his boxers. He looked from Alex to his father and back. Then he pointed a finger at Andrew. “You owe me, you fucker,” he yelled, and pulling up his pants, he slammed out of the trailer.
Alex’s third punch toppled his father into a curio cabinet that had been Lila’s pride and joy. Andrew Riveaux struck the back of his head on the corner, opening a flow of blood that seeped between his fingers.
He fell unconscious, but not before he’d smiled—smiled—at his son.
He did not say the words, but that didn’t prevent Alex from hearing them:Well, shit. Youcanfight.
Through the open bedroom slider, Alex could see his mother. Her shirt was open, her bra pushed up and cutting into her neck, her nipples red and exposed and obscene. She had slept through the whole thing.
He took back the money he’d left on the kitchen table for his mother and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he stared at his father’s body until the blood leaking from his skull touched the edge of Alex’s shoe. He waited for some emotion to claim him: regret, dismay, relief; but he felt absolutely nothing, as if the man who had committed this deed were in no way connected to himself.
And even after learning that his son-of-a-bitch father had not died that day, Alex did not admit for years that what had stayed with him all this time was not the sound of his father’s skull cracking, or the smell of his blood on the wet commercial carpet, but the fact that when Alex had least been trying, he had momentarily turned into exactly the kind of son Andrew Riveaux had wanted him to be.
ALEXSTOODANDBEGANTOWRESTLEWITHTHECORKINTHECHAMpagne bottle. As he moved, I could sense him shutting away the part of himself I had just seen, turning once again into a celebrity. “You know, I’ve been acting for seven years now, stealing expressions and experiences from my friends and my family and people I meet on the street. If they even notice, they’re flattered by it. No one’s ever had the nerve to say anything to me like you did.” His voice gentled, and I waited to see where this was all leading. “You surprise me,” he said quietly. “Not many people surprise me anymore.”
I looked at him carefully until all the polish and flash fell away, leaving only the man himself. “Well,” I admitted softly, “you’ve surprised me, too.”
The cork flew out of the bottle, exploding into the soft underbelly of the tent and falling to land in my lap. Champagne ran down the sides of Alex’s hands, onto his trousers. “I’m running up quite a drycleaning bill for you,” I said.
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 entreés 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 doingsomethingright.”
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.
