I nodded; I would walk across hot coals and breathe fire if Alex wanted me to. I would give up my soul. I loved him.
It’s hard for you to understand, but I knew it wouldn’t happen a second time, because I realized that I was partially at fault. It was my job to keep Alex happy; that was what my vows had amounted to over a year ago. But I had done something wrong, something that upset the balance and pushed him over the edge. I would find out what that was, so he would never feel that way again, so it would never come to this.
Alex pulled me into the bedroom and helped me into a skintight black dress that was cut out at the shoulders but covered virtually every other part of my body from my neck to my ankles. “You look beautiful,”
he said, leading me to a mirror.
I stared at my bare feet, my twitching hands, and at Alex’s eyes, which still looked so wounded. You could not see the bruises on me at all. “Yes,” I said. “This is fine.”
We arrived at the premiere with twenty other chauffeured cars, and we waited in turn to pull up to the spot where everyone was getting out. Fans and paparazzi had formed two lines leading to the door of the theater, and a couple of reporters were positioned right at the curb, so that their voice-overs could catch the moment the celebrities stepped from their cars.
It was nothing new; Alex and I had been to many premieres in the past year. He stepped out of the car first, tall and striking in a crisp white shirt and tie. He waved to the crowd, and the sun caught his wedding band, shooting off a bright ray that temporarily blinded me.
Then he gently helped me out of the back seat, anchoring his arm around my side, careful to let his hand rest lower on my hip than usual, where it wouldn’t hurt.
It was common procedure to stand there for a moment like a reigning king and queen, so that people could take their pictures and cheer and get a good long look. The entertainment reporter beside me was practically yelling over the crowd that was roaring Alex’s name. “Here’s Alex Rivers and his wife, Cassandra. Rumor has it thatAntony and
Cleopatra, Alex Rivers’s new film, is in dire straits,” she said. “But as you can see, his fans have no doubt that whatever problems the production’s run into, Alex will find a way to iron them out.” She threw a meaningful glance back over her shoulder, meant to be caught by the camera. “It seems,” she said, “that everything Alex Rivers touches turns to gold.”
Alex guided me forward, his hand light and gentle on my back. I took one last look at that reporter, and then I threw back my head and laughed.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs of the apartment, and now fully awake, I jumped up from the bed where I had been taking a nap. With my heart lodged at the base of my throat I smoothed the comforter, erasing the pressed image of my body so that he would never know.
It was April, and I was on sabbatical fromUCLA, but Alex didn’t like the idea of my having nothing to do. He’d told me that more than once, sometimes teasing, sometimes so seriously that I wouldlookfor things to do to keep busy: dipping already clean crystal chandeliers, taking an aerobics class I hated, redecorating the apartment, which had been beautifully furnished to begin with. The truth was that the past year had been draining, between making full professor at the university and balancing those commitments with scattered lectures about the hand, which was currently on display at a museum in London. This month I had simply been looking forward to resting.
But I didn’t want to upset Alex, either.
I stood up and ran my hand over my hair, making sure that none of it had slipped out of its barrette while I was asleep. My pulse began to race and I counted off the seconds until Alex would throw open the door. Frantically I looked around for something that would make me look like I had been working, finally seizing a pad and a pencil. I sat down at the escritoire and mapped the first thing that came to mind:
a linear tree of man’s evolution.
One minute passed; two. I pushed back the chair and willed myself to cross the room and open the door. My face was flushed by the time I twisted the doorknob, and I flinched a little, not knowing what to expect on the other side.
There were curtains, fluttering in the waves of heat. Mrs. Alvarez had opened the windows before she left to go to Trancas Market. But it was dead silent in the house, which meant she hadn’t come back yet.
I walked down the stairs and opened the front door, peeking my head outside. I called out, waiting for an answer, and I checked the bathrooms and the study and the porch before I realized that I was nervous over nothing. I had only imagined the footsteps. Alex had not come home at all.
YOU KNOW, FOR SIX MONTHS AFTER THAT FIRST TIME, ALEX WAS THE model husband. He never failed to ask me what was going on at the university; he built me my own laboratory on the grounds of the house as a birthday present; he commissioned an artist to paint my likeness and he hung it in his study across from his desk, where he said he could always keep his eyes on me. When I gave lectures about my hand, he attended and clapped more loudly than anyone else; for a few months, he even hired a completely unnecessary secretary to record my speaking engagements and to organize the tear sheets about my discovery into some sort of scrapbook. At night he touched me reverently, and he held me very close when he slept, as if he still thought I might run away.
If anything, it brought us closer. I know you don’t understand, and I can’t explain any better than this: I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself. Physical pain was nothing compared to seeing the look that shuttered Alex’s eyes when he couldn’t live up to his own expectations.
I was not afraid of Alex, because I understood him. I tried to keep everything steady and smooth at home, as if that might give him a baseline from which to work. Sometimes that backfired—it gave him an excuse to explode. When I moved a pile of scripts so that his desk could be dusted, he yelled at me for over an hour. But he didn’t touch me, not in anger, not for a while.
He was filmingInsufficient Grounds—a movie I knew nothing about because I hadn’t had time to read the script—the second time it happened. We had been staying at the apartment because I was having the walls repapered, and it was easier to just sleep there than to make the trip to supervise every morning. Alex came home around dinnertime,
when Mrs. Alvarez had already laid out the meal and gone to her son’s for the weekend.
I was standing in front of the table when I heard John drive up outside. Checking last-minute details, I stretched my hand out toward Alex’s place setting and realigned the knife, fork, and spoon, so that the edges all were level.
“Hi,” Alex said, coming up behind me to slip his arms around my waist. He smelled of the cold cream used to take off makeup at the end of the day. He was still wearing his sunglasses. “What’s for dinner?”
I turned in his arms. “What did you want?”
Alex smiled. “You have toask?” He lazily started unbuttoning my shirt. “Aren’t you hot?”
“No,” I laughed. “I’mhungry.” I lifted the cover from a serving platter, letting the smell of fresh-steamed snow peas and kung pao chicken tantalize Alex. “Why don’t you get undressed?”
