“Hepburn couldn’t have done it better.”
Speechless, I turned from him. Did he think I was acting?
Michaela rattled off a list of things that apparently needed Alex’s attention and couldn’t wait even until morning. I moved woodenly at Alex’s side, carrying my big striped bag in front of me like a shield.
The reporters picked up their shoulder bags and their coats, dragging along cameramen and photographers in their wake. It seemed to me that the entire airport had cleared out now that Alex had given the word to leave. We moved through the quiet halls behind Michaela, toward an exit, to the car that would take me to a home I had never seen.
It was only because Michaela was twice as wide as most people that I didn’t immediately notice the figure directly in our path. Ophelia stood perfectly straight, unwilling to give an inch, her eyes locked not on me but on the celebrity at my side.
I had not called to tell her I was getting married, because I felt guilty about having a ceremony that she would not be able to attend. So I had wired her after the wedding, apologizing for having to tell her after the fact. As I scribbled out the note for the Western Union man, I had imagined her eyes going wide, her lips breaking into the perfect curve of a smile. I had wanted to tell her that I’d worn her black dress the first night I had dinner with Alex; that he’d removed the lacy bra she’d loaned me. Instead I’d settled for the ambiguous:HAVEMARRIEDALEXRIVERSSTOPHOMENOVEMBER14STOPBEHAPPYFORME.
I had expected Ophelia to live up to the stories I’d told Alex about her and do something outrageous when she first met him. Knowing her, I thought she might wrap her arms and legs around him and kiss him senseless, figuring it would be her only chance. She might beg him to get her a meeting with his agent atCAA, or grovel until he gave her a bit part in one of his movies. When it came to things like that, I had told Alex, Ophelia had no shame.
But Ophelia stood very quietly, not even saying hello to me. She stared at Alex, not with the pure hero worship I’d expected but as if she was sizing him up. My face flamed with pride—here was the first person to question if Alex Rivers was good enough forme, instead of the other way around.
I broke away from Alex and ran to Ophelia, hugging her tightly. “I am so glad to see you,” I said, grasping her hands. Ophelia, struck dumb, was still staring at Alex. I smiled—one day, when she knew Alex as my husband and not as a celebrity, we’d look back on this and laugh.
But as she continued to stand there, silent, I realized there was some current running between Alex and Ophelia that charged the air around me and made me afraid to move. In the ten years I’d known Ophelia, I had never seen her like this. I searched for a hint of the woman who’d lost her job as an office temp by stripping off her blouse and xeroxing her breasts on a co-worker’s dare; the woman who had painted a bikini on her body with ketchup and worn it to a casting call in hopes of shocking a director into a role in a Hunt’s commercial. The Ophelia I’d lived with did not know the meaning of the word “sedate,” had never been cowed by anyone in her life.
Ophelia dragged her eyes to my neck, and I knew what was keeping her quiet. Underneath the carefully painted base makeup she’d seen what none of the reporters had—the fading sallow fingers that still ringed my throat. Unwilling for her to get the wrong idea, I pulled Alex closer. “This is Alex Rivers,” I said softly. “Alex, Ophelia Fox, my roommate.”
Alex turned the full force of his smile on Ophelia. “Former roommate,” he clarified, holding out his hand to shake. Ophelia coolly pressed her palm against his and then turned to me, whispering so that only I could hear. “Not if I have anything to say about it,” she murmured.
SHE DIDN’T MENTION THE BRUISES. SHE DIDN’T NEED TO. THE TRUTH was that she’d been harboring doubts before our plane even landed, and she had her case prepared. Her argument was simple: Ophelia thought Alex was setting me up for some kind of terrible fall, or why else would he have insisted on marrying me so quickly in the middle of nowhere, instead of having a big Hollywood wedding everyone would remember for years? “And,” she hissed as we left Alex and John at the baggage claim area, “I saw that kiss for the cameras. Heupstagedyou, Cassie.
Everyone knows the woman gets to face the cameras.”
I laughed then. Of all the people watching, Ophelia was probably the only one who had noticed. “What about all those stars who run off to Vegas?” I pointed out. “God, look at how many reporters showed up at three in the morning just to see what I looked like—can you imagine trying to have a private little wedding here?”
Ophelia jabbed her finger at my chest. “My point exactly,” she said, leaving me to figure out the faulty logic. Exasperated, she rolled her eyes. “Itshouldn’thave been a private little wedding,” she said. “It should have been a media blitz. Every woman in this country wants to know who Alex Rivers married. So why does he hold a ceremony in the fucking Amazon and then sneak into the airport in the middle of the night like he doesn’t want anyone to see you?”
“Maybe because he loves me?” I countered. “The last thing on earth I would have wanted was a huge wedding on a studio’s back lot.”
Ophelia shook her head. “But that’s not the way it’s done, not in Hollywood. There’s something wrong here.” She glanced up at me from beneath lowered lashes, and suddenly I understood just what Ophelia felt was wrong: In the natural order of the movie industry, Alex Rivers should have been matched with a woman who was stunning and ostentatious and larger than life; a woman who would never have agreed to a quiet ceremony; a woman who understood intuitively that a kiss was also a photo opportunity. Alex Rivers should have married someone like Ophelia herself.
I had never had anything Ophelia wanted before. When we went out, she had been the one to turn heads, the one to make people whisper behind their hands. If anything, I had been the foil to her beauty.
But as we waited for Alex and John to bring out the baggage, I could see Ophelia’s eyes darting around to the few other cars and limos, hoping to spot someone who recognized a celebrity’s chauffeured car and who, by association, was watching her. It was probably the first time she hadn’t been the center of attention when she was out with me, and the bottom line was that now, she neverwouldbe.
I had misread Ophelia’s reaction to Alex. She was measuring him up, yes, and the traces of bruises on my neck had thrown her off, but her original objection to him had been his choice of mates. Ophelia didn’t intentionally mean to slight me—she hadn’t thought that far into it. She just could not understand why someone who had his pick of brightly colored macaws would choose, instead, a simple wren.
My hands clenched at my sides. It seemed my whole world had been reversed. Ophelia, whom I’d considered my best friend, was jealously carping about my marriage. Alex, whom I’d expected to be a shallow, conceited megalomaniac, had protected me, bared his secrets, and stitched himself so neatly into the weave of my heart that letting him go would mean unraveling myself.
As if my thoughts had evoked him, he stepped into the rosy outside light with John, each of them carrying a suitcase. Immediately Alex scanned the limousine island. His eyes reached mine, and the muscles at his shoulders seemed to relax. He had been looking for me.
I kept my eyes on Alex while I answered Ophelia. “This isn’t wrong,”
I said quietly. “And he’s not what you’re expecting.” I glanced back at her to gauge her reaction. “We have a lot in common,” I added, but that’s all I would say, because I wouldn’t break Alex’s trust.
“I hope so,” Ophelia said. She stretched out her hand to brush the vanishing spots on my neck that she knew I could not discuss. “Because you’ve just moved into a whole different world, and he’s the only person you know there.”
ALEX’S HOUSE IN BEL-AIR SPRAWLED OVER TWELVE GATED ACRES AN looked exactly like the plantations I’d sketched in my mind when my mother used to tell me about her childhood in the South. It was nearly five in the morning when we arrived, and I stirred from Alex’s shoulder as the car made its way down the long gravel driveway, wishing that my mother had seen where I ended up.
It was not the type of house most actors kept in L.A. Modesty had replaced the grandeur of the Golden Age of Hollywood, simply because it bought the celebrities a measure of solitude. But Alex, who had grown up in a trailer park, would want something like this. My throat tightened as I realized that Alex, who so valued his privacy, was willing to trade it all for the opulence he’d missed as a child. I wondered briefly if it worked for him; if cultivating this image for the public erased the memories.
Although it was early, there was a steady hum of activity around the house. A gardener was clipping at a hedge that ran the length of the left side of the house, and a thin stream of smoke arched from one of the small white buildings out back. “What do you think?” Alex said.
I drew in my breath. “It’s magnificent,” I said. I had never seen a residence like this in my life; and I realized that I would do everything in my power to keep Alex from seeing the tiny apartment I’d lived in with Ophelia, simply so I wouldn’t feel embarrassed.
