Alex started downstairs toward the bedroom and I spooned rice and chicken and vegetables onto our plates. I sat patiently with my napkin in my lap until Alex returned, now wearing shorts and a pale blue pocket T-shirt that took on the color of his eyes. “You seen my sneakers,pichouette?” he asked.
I furrowed my brow, trying to remember where they were. At some point over the course of the day, I had noticed them, tangled with the brushes and tubs and paste of the wallpaperers.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, remembering. “They’re on the porch.”
The porch at the apartment was really a lanai that overlooked the beach-level deck. We kept our plants out there, and a very ugly cigar store Indian statue that Alex could not remember acquiring. Alex walked to the sliding doors and stepped outside, locating his sneakers and slipping them on his feet.
Immediately he shook them off again, cursing a violent streak in French. He lifted one to his nose and grimaced, hurled it as far as he could into the living room. It hit the new white silk wallpaper, leaving a dark muddy patch.
Very deliberately, Alex closed the sliding door and then walked around the apartment, shutting the windows I had opened to let in the ocean breeze. When he had sealed us off from everyone outside, he started to speak. “Some goddamned cat peed in them,” he said. “What I want to know is what they were doing out there in the first place.”
I put down my fork on the edge of the plate, careful not to make the slightest noise. “You left them out there?” I suggested.
“You were here all fucking day!” Alex yelled. “It never crossed your mind to bring them inside?”
I didn’t understand why this was a crisis. I knew that Alex had another pair of sneakers, older ones, downstairs in his closet. At the house there were at least three more pairs. Unsure of what exactly he wanted to hear, I stared down at my plate, at the cooling chicken.
Alex grabbed my chin and forced it up. “Lookat me when I’m talking to you,” he said. Then he grasped my shoulders and shoved me sideways, toppling the chair so that I lay sprawled half beneath it.
I closed my eyes and curled up, waiting for what was going to happen, but instead I heard the key turning in the front door. “Where are you going?” I whispered, so quietly that I didn’t think Alex would hear me.
“For a run,” he said tersely.
I struggled to a sitting position. “You don’t have your shoes,” I said.
“I’d noticed,” Alex said, and he slammed the door shut behind him.
I sat for a few moments with my knees huddled to my chest, and then I stood up and began to clear away the plates. I left Alex’s in the microwave, but I scraped mine into the trash. Then I walked around opening the windows that Alex had closed. I listened to the drifting sounds of dogs barking at the incoming tide, of a volleyball game in progress. I waited to hear Alex running back to me. I convinced myself that nothing had happened, so that when he returned, there would be nothing to forgive.
HERB SILVER HANDED ME A SECOND GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE. HE STOOD with me in a corner of the crowded lobby, popping little rolled pigsin-blankets into his mouth. “You know,” he said, “Alex gets these just for me. Because he knows I won’t eat those fancy schmancy oysters and puffy things.”
“Quiches,” I said.
“Whatever.” He slung a beefy arm around my shoulders. “Take deep breaths, hon. He’ll be back soon.”
I smiled apologetically, wishing I weren’t so obvious. I enjoyed Herb’s company, and I appreciated Alex’s making sure I was being taken care of, but I would much rather have been with Alex himself.
And I would have been, if we were attending a premiere of anything that wasn’t his own film. Tonight, though, he had obligations and interviews to complete; people he needed to talk to about the financing of his next picture. I would only get in the way. Craning my neck, I tried to catch a glimpse of him through the milling throng of wellwishers.
Alex was nowhere to be found. Resigned, I turned to Herb. He was actually here with Ophelia, not because he was her agent but because he wasn’t about to turn down the pleasure of escorting a pretty woman to a media event. I had asked him as a personal favor, just as I had asked Alex if he could wrangle an invitation for her. I noticed her across the room, wearing one of my dresses, talking to an actor on the verge of breaking into the big time.
“Ophelia looks like she’s having fun,” I said, picking up the thread of the conversation.
Herb shrugged. “Ophelia could have fun at a funeral if it was packed with industry people.” His face blanched, as if he just realized that he’d insulted my friend. “I don’t mean anything by that,bubbelah,” he said.
“It’s just that Ophelia is nothing like you.”
I smiled at him. “Oh?” I asked. “And what exactly am I like?”
Herb grinned, showing the gold fillings in his back teeth. “You?
You’re good for my Alex.”
The lights blinked, and the guests began to shuffle into the theater.
Critics flipped open their memo pads and uncapped their pens. Herb glanced around anxiously, waiting for Alex to claim me before he went inside.
“Go ahead,” I urged him. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
