“No,” Alex admitted. “I’m waiting to get picked up.”
The whore smiled. “Story of my life, babe,” she said.
He had not told her anything, really; not about his family, or how long he’d been sitting there, or how he’d rather be cuffed to this chair for a year than have to own up to the fact that the man who would walk into the station the next day at noon to claim him was indeed his own father. He knew about whores; knew part of their appeal was the way they accepted any baggage that came with you and made you believe you were more than you actually were. He knew they made a career of pretending to feel things they did not feel. All the same, it seemed natural when she put her arm around Alex and pulled him closer, as if their individual chairs did not stand in the way.
Alex pillowed his cheek on the whore’s breasts, thinking of the blonde checkout girl and letting his cuffed arm twitch, handicapped in the dead space between them. It took only fifteen minutes before her friend was sprung from the cells below, hissing and spitting like a cat as she walked with the security matron. But during those minutes, Alex closed his eyes and took in the heavy smells of the whore’s hair spray and cheap perfume, letting her sing old Negro spirituals to him until the world fell away, until he could believe that affection was a birthright.
FILMING STOPPED UNEXPECTEDLY FOR THREE DAYS AND ALEX DISappeared. I was too embarrassed to show my face around the rest of the crew, and I hadn’t really spent much time with anyone other than Alex, so there was no one to talk to. I stayed in my room at the lodge, coming out only for meals and eating alone. I thought about breaking my contract, and flying home to L.A. before Alex had a chance to return to the set.
But instead I sat on my bed and read every romance novel I had brought, casting myself as the heroine and Alex as her lover. I heard the dialogue in the pitch and cadence of his voice. I pretended and pretended until I couldn’t remember what had really happened and what I had imagined while reading through the dark, cool corners of the night.
One night when the moon was settling, the doorknob to my room turned. There were no locks; the lodge was too old for that. I saw the door swing on its hinges and I got up from the windowsill, remarkably calm about facing a stranger.
Instinctively, I must have known it was Alex. I watched him step into my room and close the door behind him. It was dark, but my eyes had adjusted, so I could easily see the shadows under his eyes and the wrinkles in his clothes, the two-day growth of beard. My blood began to sing with the thought that maybe he had been as miserable as I had.
I didn’t notice the jar in his hand until he set it on the bureau across from the bed. “I brought this for you,” he said simply.
It was an ordinary jelly jar, the kind Connor’s mother had used every summer for canning the wild grape jam she boiled down. It was filled halfway with a clear liquid that looked like nothing more exotic than water.
Alex took a step forward and touched the jar. “It’s not cold anymore,”
he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I flew to New York and then got on a puddle jumper to Bangor, but there aren’t any mountains in Maine cold enough in September. And I couldn’t come back emptyhanded, so I took a plane to the only place I could be sure of finding it—I know people who’ve heli-skied in the Canadian Rockies in August.” He propped his elbows on his knees and rested his face in his hands.
“Alex,” I said quietly. “What exactly did you bring me?”
He looked up at me. “Snow,” he said. “I brought you your snow.”
I reached for the jar and turned it over in my hands, picturing him on the top of a glacial mountain, scooping a handful of snow into a jelly glass to bring back to me, thousands of miles away. I could feel myself smiling from the inside out. “You traveled halfway around the world to get me a jar of snow?”
“Sort of. I couldn’t think of anything else to make you understand the other day. I didn’t want—I didn’t—” He stopped and took a deep breath, thinking over his words. “I’ve never met anyone like you, but I didn’t have a chance to tell you that before I had to shoot that damn love scene. I wasn’t crazy about leaving the way I did, but you wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. So I figured, you know, actions speak louder than words.”
I sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, still holding the jar of water. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, wondering what I was supposed to do now. I folded my hands in my lap. “Thank you,” I said.
Alex turned to me and smiled. “That’s only half your present,” he said. “I also wanted to get you something that wouldn’t melt.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gift I could not quite see in the shifting light. But at that moment the sun broke over the horizon, and it caught in its soft pink glow the shine of a diamond solitaire.
Alex reached his hand around to brush the back of my neck. He pulled me forward until our foreheads were touching, bent over this brilliant ring that was even brighter than his eyes. I listened to his words, searching for a hint of my future, but when he spoke, he sounded for all the world like he was grasping at a lifeline. “God,” he said hoarsely. “Please say yes.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
INSTEADof a wrap party, we had a wedding. After thirteen weeks of filming, Alex stood up on the platform that had held a small set and announced to the cast and crew the secret we’d kept for weeks. Even Bernie, the director, was shocked. He broke the stunned silence by leaping onto the platform and clapping Alex on the back. “Holy shit,”
he bellowed, grinning. “How come you didn’t tell me?” And Alex laughed. “Because you, Bernie,” he said, “were the first person I expected to wire the tabloids.”
Everyone had known we were seeing each other; it was obvious in the way that Alex treated me. But I think people were surprised that it had turned out to be more than it seemed. I had to believe that flings between actors and others were commonplace. Marriages, though, were a different story.
I had believed Alex when he told me whatever shortcomings a simple ceremony in Tanzania had would more than cancel out the nightmare of trying to keep unwanted reporters and crazed fans away from a wedding in the States. Besides, the only people I would have invited were Ophelia and a few colleagues and maybe, out of filial duty, my father.
I had never spent hours dreaming of myself wrapped in white satin, sweeping down an aisle littered with rose petals. It didn’t matter to me, I told Alex, if he wanted a justice of the peace.
But in Africa, you know, it’s easier to find missionaries than judges.
“I want you to get married in a church,” Alex had insisted. “And you’re not wearing khaki, either.”Really, I tried to tell him.That isn’t me.But something kept me from pressing my point. I was marrying Hollywood’s crown prince, and like everyone else, he expected a transformed Cinderella. And when you got right down to it, what I wanted more than anything was simply to be whatever Alex wanted me to be.
The six weeks between the time when I accepted Alex’s proposal and when he announced it were the best six weeks of my life. Part of the magic was the feeling that we were doing something illicit. Alex would meet me in the food tent, sneaking away from the cameras and creating enough of an uproar with his disappearance to guarantee time for a fast, hard kiss. We spent three days of torrential rain locked in my room at the lodge, making love and playing backgammon. We showered together before the sun came up; we spoke of cinematography, of the substance of bones. One cool night, in Bernie’s room, as I sat between Alex’s spread legs and watched the daily rushes, he wrapped a light blanket around us, and then with everyone just a breath away, slipped his hands under my shirt and beneath the waist of my shorts, stroking me to a fever.
Alex made me feel like someone I had never been, and even the promise of a wedding couldn’t keep me from thinking that one morning I would wake up and find that this had never happened. So in much the same way as I catalogued my anthropological samples with India ink, I found myself mentally filing away each memory I made with Alex, until they curled through my mind like a string of rosary beads, waiting to offer comfort.
A flash startled me back to the scene at hand. Joey, the site photographer, had just taken our picture. He handed the Polaroid to Alex, but not before I caught a glimpse of my own white face, slowly gaining color as the chemicals set. Alex’s face was taking longer to come into focus. “A keepsake,” Joey said, and then he leaned forward and kissed me right on the mouth.
