After that disastrous night out at Nicky Blair’s over a year earlier, Ophelia and I had slowly regained ground with each other. I needed her; except for Alex, I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. I don’t know that she ever said she was sorry, but then again, I stopped apologizing for marrying Alex, and I let her know that my loyalties were with him.
As long as they didn’t cross paths when Ophelia came to visit, things were usually all right. In fact, our relationship assumed its usual course:
Ophelia would come over and talk about herself, and since my life meant discussing Alex, I would sit quietly and simply listen.
Ophelia’s head peeked out from the French doors that led into the bedroom. “Thereyou are,” she said. “And here I was beginning to think you’d made some move without telling John first.”
I tried to smile at her. “This isn’t a very good time,” I hedged.
Ophelia waved the idea away. “I know, I know. The illustrious Riverses have a premiere to attend tonight. I wanted to know if I could borrow your red evening gown.”
I wrinkled my forehead; I couldn’t even rememberowninga red evening gown, but then Ophelia had a better idea of the inventory of my closets. “What for?”
“I’m singing at a blues club tonight.” Ophelia leaned against the supporting balustrade of the veranda, slinking her arm up over her head in the fashion of a vamp.
“You can’t sing,” I pointed out.
Ophelia shrugged. “Yeah, but the owners don’t know that yet and won’t find out until I’m already on stage. And you never know who’s going to be in the audience, the way I figure it.” She smiled. “Besides, they paid me up front.”
I couldn’t help but laugh; Ophelia was truly the best medicine. “How in God’s name did you convince them you could sing the blues?”
Ophelia started back toward the bedroom, ostensibly to rummage for the evening gown. “I lied,” she called out.
I pulled the blanket closer around my shoulders, drawing my secret to myself. “How can you just do that?” I said. “I mean, don’t you ever get your stories crossed?”
Ophelia waltzed onto the veranda with the dress draped over her shoulder. “Your problem is that you’ve been too honest for too long.
Once you start doing it,” she said easily, “lying is simpler than breathing.” She held the dress up under her chin and pirouetted for me.
“Billie Holiday would be jealous,” I said. I shifted in the rocker, wincing as my side pressed against the arm of the chair.
Ophelia glanced down at me, and her eyes clouded. “You’re not getting sick, are you?” She tugged at the corner of the blanket. “I mean, are you cold?”
I let her press her palm against my forehead as I had taught her to do years before, and I pulled the afghan tight around my shoulders. I hated Alex for making me do this. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I may be coming down with something.”
AFTER SPENDING A FULL YEAR WITH ALEX, I CAME TO SEE THAT I HADreally married many different men—Alex being the stand-in when no one else was around. He couldn’t really leave his work at the office, so every character he played made its way into my bed, or sat across from me at the breakfast table. I’ll say this—it certainly added variety to our relationship. During the quick eight weeks he’d been shootingSpeed,an action film about a pilot, he’d been cocky and quick and bursting with energy. When he did a summer run as Romeo for a professional theater group, he had come to me at night with all the passion of a young boy in love with being in love. I hadn’t liked the character of his pilot, but he had been tolerable. And Romeo made me a little edgy, more prone to check in the mirror for new lines and to wonder how I could get so tired in the course of a normal day while Alex seemed to keep going forever. But now that Alex was doingAntony and Cleopatra,I had come up against the first character I wanted nowhere near me. On my desk calendar at the university, I kept count of how many more days were left of production, how many more days I had to wait before Alex became just Alex again.
In many ways, playing Antony wasn’t much of a stretch for Alex, which is what I think made the role so attractive to him in the first place. Antony was driven by power and ambition, a man who had chosen a queen; a man who, in Shakespeare’s words, could “stand up peerless.” But Antony was also obsessive, judgmental, and paranoid. It was his fixation with Cleopatra that created a chink in his armor—jealousy—which made it that much easier for his enemies to bring them down. Convince Antony that Cleopatra has betrayed him for Caesar, and his world will come crumbling. Of course, it is also a good star-crossed-love story: When Antony is wrongly convinced that Cleopatra has sided with Caesar, he accuses her, and out of fear for her life, she sends word that she’s already killed herself. When the messenger tells Antony she died whispering his name, he is guilt-stricken and runs himself through with his sword, only to die in the arms of a very much alive Cleopatra.
Cleopatra, then, rather than bow to Caesar, does truly kill herself with a poisonous asp. It is a story of misunderstandings and of lies that backfire; of a pair of lovers who can only be happy in a world where there is no one else to tempt their faulty judgment.
I was not ready to find an asp, but I understood Cleopatra’s claim about Antony being a madman. Sometimes where we were alone, Alex spoke in Shake- spearean accent. He would ignore me for hours at a time and then suddenly pull me into the bedroom, where he’d touch me with a need that bordered on violence. It got to the point where Alex would come through the front door and I would wait quietly, not even saying hello, until I could anticipate whether this time he’d invite me out to a moonlight dinner, or scream at me for moving a memo he’d scribbled to a spot where it wouldn’t blow away. He was driving the Range Rover himself tonight, and I was sitting in the front seat—a spot I hadn’t occupied in the entire year we’d been married. John had remained at the house to help tape the plate windows and tie down tarps over the shrubs in anticipation of the battering rains that were sweeping up the California coast. Alex glanced at the clock on the dashboard, and then at the clouds roiling in the sky. “It’ll be close,” he said. We were going to sandbag the beach at the Malibu apartment, and I knew it was the last thing in the world Alex wanted to be doing. That week, Brianne Nolan—Cleopatra—had backed out of her contract under the pretense of ex- haustion. But two days later Herb Silver told Alex he’d overheard at a power lunch that Nolan had wanted out of the production because playing second fiddle to Alex wasn’t as professionally lucrative as another deal that had just fallen into her agent’s lap. I had found Alex in his study at three in the morning, punching buttons on a calculator in an effort to see how much money had been wasted, how much time had been lost.
The production company was going to sue her for breach of contract, and Alex had been in meetings with lawyers for most of the day. As soon as he’d walked through the door he’d told me to find rain slickers and meet him in the garage. It was not just a matter of beach erosion, but of damage that might be done to the apartment. “Do you think we’ll be able to get back to Bel-Air tonight?” I asked quietly, testing the waters.
Alex didn’t even glance at me, but a muscle jumped along his jaw. “How the hell should I know?” he said.
The beach at the Colony was a mob of celebrities in yellow Helly-Hansen coats, reduced to ordinary physical labor by the cruelty of nature. Alex waved a producer who lived several buildings down from ours and then handed me two rolls of masking tape he’d stuffed into his pocket. “Start on the inside,” he ordered. “Then meet me out here.” I let myself into the apartment and called out to Mrs. Alvarez, who was upstairs in the kitchen organizing a parade of hurricane lamps and candles and prepared foods on the table.
“Oh, Mrs. Rivers,” the housekeeper said, tumbling down the stairs in a burst of energy. “They say this storm is going to leave the coast a national disaster.”
She wrung her hands in the white apron at her lap. I frowned. “Maybe you’d better come back to the house with us tonight,” I suggested. I didn’t like the idea of a fifty-five-year-old woman all alone during a major coastal storm.
“No, no,” she argued. “If Mr. Rivers says it’s okay, my Luis is coming to pick me up and take me to his place.”
“Of course it’s okay,” I said. “You get out of here as soon as you can.”
As I raced upstairs to tape the tremendous glass walls that faced the ocean, the rain began. Instead of coming down gradually, it hit in a torrent. I stood with my hands pressed against the window and watched Alex working below, hauling sacks and stacking them with a rhythm born of natural grace. Mrs. Alvarez left with her son just as we finished doing everything we could inside. Tugging on my slicker, I stepped through the sliding doors I had criss- crossed with tape and ran across the beach to Alex. Without speaking, I dragged a heavy sack of sand toward the barricade he had begun. My muscles strained with the effort, and sweat ran down the back of my neck under the pulled hood of my coat. I stacked the bags as high as I could, one placed neatly on top of the other, a series of pillars.
