In the ten months sinceThe Story of His Lifehad wrapped, he hadn’t lost control. He’d finished a starring role in a light romantic comedy without incident. And even during these past two weeks when tension was building all around him, he’d shown no inclination to strike out at me. It had been so long that it was difficult for me to remember that it had ever happened.
I was nervous about telling Alex we were going to have a baby, so I took the coward’s way out and decided to let something else do the speaking for me.
I asked John to take me to Rodeo Drive, even though I never shopped there. He dropped me off a few blocks from my intended destination.
I put on my sunglasses and walked to a narrow store called Waddlepotamus, filled with dangling mobiles and Steiff bears. I picked out a stretchy cotton playsuit so tiny I couldn’t believe anything alive would ever fit into it. It was embroidered with a dinosaur, and I pictured telling Alex that I had tried to find something applique´d with the image ofHomo erectusbut I hadn’t had much luck.
I was so excited by the time I got back to the house that I fairly flew up the stairs. I threw open the door of the sitting room and came face-toface with Alex. “You’re late,” he said tightly. I beamed at him. “You’re early.” I thrust the box behind my back, hoping he hadn’t noticed it.
A muscle jumped at the edge of Alex’s jaw. “You said you’d be here when I got home. You didn’t tell anyone you were going out.”
I shrugged. “I told John,” I said. “I had an errand to run.”
Alex hit me so swiftly across the chest I didn’t have time to see it coming. Stunned, I looked up at him from the floor where I had fallen, crushing the box, its festival of ribbons.
I did something I hadn’t done in the three years this had been happening: I cried. I couldn’t help it; I had believed that we’d started over, and now Alex, who had never disappointed me, had taken us back to the way it was before.
When he started to kick at me I rolled away from him, feeling his shoe strike me in the back, the kidneys, and the ribs. I crossed my arms protectively over my stomach, and when Alex came to his senses and knelt down beside me I would not look at him. I rubbed my palms over this life I was holding like a good-luck charm. I listened to his whispered pleas, his apologies, and I thought,I hope this baby hates you.
BARBARA WALTERS WAS MUCH PRETTIER IN PERSON THAN SHE WAS on the air, and she moved through our house with the self-assurance of a general, strategically moving furniture and flowers to make room for lights and cameras. She was planning to interview Alex for about an hour, and then she wanted me to step in so that she could ask me questions as well. In the meantime, I sat very straight next to the segment producer, trying to ignore the pain in my back and my side.
When the camera began to film, it was focused directly on her as she gave her prewritten rundown of Alex’s career, beginning withDesperadoand ending with the ongoing production ofMacbeth. “Alex Rivers,” she said smoothly, “has shown himself to be more than just another pretty face. From his very first feature film, and in nearly every movie thereafter, he has shied away from traditional romantic leads to play, instead, flawed and frightened men. It has set him apart from other talented actors, as has his unheard-of near sweep of the Oscar nominations with his first attempt at direction,The Story of His Life. I spoke with Alex at his Bel-Air home.”
At that line, the cameras swung to include Alex in the shot. “Many people use your name to define the word ‘star.’ What would you say characterizes a star?”
Alex leaned back against the sofa. He crossed one leg lazily over the other. “Charm,” he said. He grinned. “And whether or not you can get a table at the studio commissary.” He shifted slightly. “But I’d rather be thought of as an actor than a star,” he said slowly.
“Can’t you be both?” Barbara pressed.
Alex tilted his head. “Sure,” he said. “But one is a serious vocation, and one is smoke and mirrors, and it’s hard to be considered a dedicated professional when you’re labeled a ‘star.’ I never asked for all the trappings. I just happen to like doing what I do.”
“But unlike many actors, you weren’t a struggling waiter for ten years before you broke into the business.”
Alex smiled. “Two years. And I was a bartender, not a waiter. I can still mix a hell of a Long Island Iced Tea. But no, I got very lucky. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.” He glanced at me.
“Actually, that’s sort of been the story of my life.”
Barbara smiled at the neat segue. “Let’s talk about that—The Story
of His Life. How autobiographical is that?”
For the slightest moment, Alex looked unnerved. “Well,” he said slowly, “I had a father, but the similarity ends there.” I glanced away, staring out the window at the storm that was gathering. We were going to tape this outside by the pool, but the weather had been too risky.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware of Alex feeding Barbara Walters the lines he’d fed me in Tanzania about his childhood before he told me the truth. I blinked at a streak of lightning, and I thought of how very tired I was.
“Some critics say that you’ve pushed past being a sex symbol and that you use your looks to get to the chinks in the armor, so to speak—to expose what lies beneath a character.” Barbara leaned forward. “What sort of chinks are there in your own armor?”
A smile slipped sideways over Alex’s face, the same smile that was going to make a million women catch their breath when they watched on Oscar night and that, even now, had my heart racing. “What makes you think I have any?” he said.
Barbara laughed and said it might be the perfect time to introduce me, Cassandra Barrett Rivers, Alex’s wife of three years. She waited for me to settle myself on the couch beside Alex as I had been directed to do, and then let the cameras start up again. “You two have certainly been spared a great deal of the negative publicity that usually strikes couples in Hollywood.” She turned to Alex. “Is that, again, a matter of being in the right place at the right time?”
I sat as quiet as a stone, smiling up at Alex like an idiot. “It’s more a matter of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.
“But then again, we’re a pretty ordinary couple. We stay home a lot. I guess we don’t really give people much to talk about.”
“You think viewers out there believe that you two eat crackers in bed and watch cartoons on Saturday mornings and jog on the beach?”
Alex and I looked at each other and laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Except Cassie doesn’t jog.”
