Picture Perfect Part 13

Alex Rivers was still sitting on his royal throne, leaning toward a woman who was dusting his face with a light powder. When he noticed me, he reached out his hand for his drink and awarded me a second smile. "Ah," he said. "I was beginning to think I'd never see you again."

I smiled at him and dumped the juice and the ice, even the cup, into his lap. For a moment, I watched the stain spread over his trousers. "No such luck," I said, and then I turned and walked away.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

I expected Alex Rivers to curse under his breath, demand my name, order me to be fired. As for me, I kept walking, with every intention of leaving the set, even leaving Tanzania. But Alex Rivers did the one thing that could make me turn around: he laughed. He had a deep, rich laugh, the kind that rained down warm. He caught my eye the moment I looked back. "So," he said, smiling. "I a.s.sume you felt my temper needed to be cooled off?"

I probably could have withstood his wrath, but his understanding was my undoing. My knees began to shake and I grabbed onto a piece of lighting equipment just to stay upright. I was struck by the full force of what, exactly, I'd just done. I had not spilled a freezing drink on some a.s.sistant, some costume designer. I had deliberately antagonized the man I was supposed to be working with. The man who was paying me three hundred and fifty dollars a day just to be helpful.

He stood up and walked toward me, holding out his hand as if he knew very well I was seconds away from falling down. "Alex Rivers,"

he said. "I don't think we've met."

From the corner of my eye, I noticed the crew pretending very hard to look busy while they watched the scene unfolding before them. "Ca.s.sandra Barrett," I said. "From UCLA."

His eyes brightened to a shade of silver I had never seen before. "My anthropologist," he said. "It's good to meet you."

I glanced down at the crotch of his wet khaki pants, soaked in a stain the shape of a b.u.t.terfly. I smiled right at him. "The pleasure was all mine," I said.

He laughed again, and I found myself h.o.a.rding the sound so that I would be able to remember it later when I was in my bedroom at the lodge, the old yellow ceiling fan spinning over my head. He took my arm. "Call me Alex," he said. "And I'll get you a script so you know what's going on. Bernie!" he called out. "Come over here and meet our technical advisor."

The director of the film, who looked for all the world like a shadow ready to jump at Alex's commands, shook my hand politely and excused himself to find someone in the cast. It was easy to see that this was Alex Rivers's show. He started talking to me before I registered the importance of his words. "You want me to dig something up?" I said.

"Now?"

Alex nodded. "The scene we're shooting this afternoon involves my character's initial discovery of the skeleton. I mean, I could sort of go on instinct, but I know I wouldn't be right. There has to be a method, doesn't there? You don't just reach into the sand and pull up a leg bone?"

I winced. "No," I said. "You certainly do not."

He had taken my arm and was pulling me toward the gaping hole where most of the finds from Olduvai Gorge had been unearthed. "I just want to watch you for a little while," he said. "I want to see your movements, and your concentration, those kinds of things. That's what I need."

"What you need is a tarp," I said. "If you were really going to find something of value, you'd have set up a black tarpaulin over the site so that whatever bones you do locate don't get bleached out by the sun."

Alex grinned at me. "That's exactly why I wanted you here," he said.

He motioned to two men who were standing off to the side, fixing the leg of a tent. "Joe, Ken, can you guys find some kind of tarpaulin to stretch across this thing? It has to be-" He glanced at me. "Does it have to be black?"

I shrugged. "Mine usually are."

"Black, then." As the men turned to go, Alex called back the one named Ken. "Congratulations on the little girl," he said. "I heard you got the news last night. If she looks like Janine, she'll be a beauty."

Ken broke into a big smile, and ran off after the other prop man. I stared at Alex. "Is he a good friend?"

"Not particularly," Alex said. "But he's a member of the crew. It's my business to know something about everyone on the crew."

I squatted down at the edge of the site and sifted through the chalky dirt. If he was trying to impress me, he wasn't going to get very far.

"That's impossible," I said. "I mean, there have to be at least a hundred people around."

Alex stared at me so forcefully I felt myself looking up at him before I even wanted to. His voice was tight and controlled. "I know everyone's name and everyone's wife's name. Back when I was bartending I learned that if people think you're paying attention to them, they're more likely to hang around. It's easy for me to remember, it makes them feel important, and things get done twice as fast because of it."

He spoke as if he was defending himself, as if I had challenged him, when that wasn't my intention at all. The truth was, I was shocked. It was hard to reconcile the man who had thrown a tantrum over a length of rope with the man who made it a point to know the names of everyone working for him. "You didn't know my name," I pointed out.

"No," he said, and then he relaxed. He offered me a brilliant smile.

"But you made sure I'll never forget it."

We settled down to the task at hand, kneeling in the excavated pit.

I showed Alex the different tools used to dig, the gentle brushes used to clear the excess earth. I tried to explain the markings on the plain that would indicate the presence of fossils, but this was difficult to understand unless you had been trained. "There," I said, sitting back on my heels. "That's pretty much all I can show you."

"But you haven't shown me anything at all," Alex complained. "I need to watch you excavate a skull or something."

I laughed at him. "Not from this site," I said. "Everything's been stripped dry."

"Pretend," Alex urged. He grinned. "It's easy. I've built a career on it."

I sighed and bent into the pit again, trying my best to imagine a bone fragment that was not there. I was starting to see why my predecessor had left. Maybe pretending was easy for Alex Rivers, but-as he'd said-this was his career. Mine was based on hard evidence and physical proof, not an overactive imagination. Feeling like an idiot, I swept away a top layer of red dust and ran my fingers over the b.u.mpy ground. I took a small pick and began to dig in a circle around this nonexistent skull. I brushed the earth with my fingers and wiped away perspiration on my forehead with my shoulder.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how big this invisible skull might be. I could not picture it at all; I felt ridiculous trying. I had been trained too fully in the literal to even consider the figurative.

"Look," I said, planning to tell Alex this wasn't my cup of tea.

But before I could finish my sentence, Alex Rivers crouched down behind me. He reached his arms around my shoulders, almost like an embrace, and covered my hands with his own. "No, you look," he said, and he nodded toward the site I had been digging. I blinked, and what was only earth now looked like bone. A trick of the light, I thought, an illusion. Or maybe the sheer power of Alex Rivers's imagination.

HE WAS UNLIKE ANYONE I'D EVER MET. HE DID KNOW EVERYONE'S name; that was apparent as soon as the set was being readied for filming.

He politely left me sitting next to his a.s.sistant, Jennifer. As he went to crouch behind the camera and talk with Bernie Roth about the best way to approach a particular shot, he joked with the male stand-in who had to sweat in the hot sun while the lights and reflective panels were set up around him.

He was a hundred places at once; I got tired just trying to find him here and there. But every time I glanced down at the script in my lap or wandered to the low table stacked with storyboards, I'd feel his eyes on me. I would turn around and sure enough, there was Alex Rivers, fifty feet away, staring at me as if I were the only other person for miles around.

The scene they were filming was exactly what Alex had said it would be: his character, a Dr. Rob Paley, finding the bones of what he thinks is a fossilized hominid. Bernie had climbed onto the crane that held the Panavision camera, and was walking Alex through the scene. "I want you to come in . . . that's right, a little slower . . . and crouch down, good, like that. Now what are you doing with your hands? Try to remember, you haven't had any luck for a good three weeks now, and suddenly you strike gold." Alex stood up and shouted a question at Bernie, but the wind carried it away before I could make out the words.

When they were ready to film, all the people holding walkie-talkies stood in a spread line, shouting "Quiet!" one after the other, a human echo. The cameraman murmured, "Rolling," and the sound technician, bent low over his electronic oasis, said, "Speed."

In the seconds before Bernie called for action, I watched Alex slip into his role. All the light drained out of his eyes, and his body relaxed so dramatically it seemed as if he'd been sucked dry. And then, within seconds, the energy snaked back through his body, straightening his spine and flashing in his eyes. But he didn't have the same face. In fact, if I had pa.s.sed him on the street, I would have taken him for someone else.

He moved differently. He walked differently. He even breathed differently. Like a tired old man, he made his way across the yellow strip of plain, carefully lowering himself into the excavated pit. He pulled a pick and brush from his pocket and began to dig. I smiled, watching my own idiosyncrasies being played before the camera: the habit I had of picking left to right, the methodical sweep of the brush like an umpire at home plate. But then came the moment when his character discovers the skeleton, skull first. Alex's hands swept over the spot he'd cleared, and he paused. Moving faster now, he began to chisel away at the earth. A fragment of bone appeared, planted minutes before by a set dresser. It was yellowed and cracked, and I found myself leaning forward in my seat to get a better look.

Alex Rivers lifted his face and looked directly at me, and in his eyes I saw myself. His expression was the same one I'd worn at that dazzling moment when he held his arms around me and, out of nowhere, I'd seen a skull. I recognized my own surprise, my dedication, and my wonder.

I began to feel hot. I pulled at my loose cotton collar and lifted my hair off the back of my neck. I took off my baseball cap and fanned myself with it, wishing he would turn away.

He threw back his head and turned his face to the sun. "My G.o.d,"

he whispered. He looked like any scientist who knew, in his heart, he had made the discovery of his life. He looked like he'd been doing this for ages. He looked, well, like me.

I had spent years working toward the anthropological discovery that would raise my status among colleagues. I had fashioned the moment over and over in my mind the way most women picture their weddings: how the sun would feel on my back, how my hands would spread through the earth, how the bone would flow smooth beneath my palms.

I had envisioned my face turned to the sky, my prayers offered up in exchange for this gift. Although I'd certainly never discussed it with anyone, least of all Alex Rivers, he had played the scene exactly the way I had imagined mine.

He'd robbed me of the most important moment of my life, one that hadn't even happened yet. It was this injustice that made me spring from my canvas chair the moment the director called "Cut." I could barely hear the claps and whistles of the crew over the pounding within my own head. How dare he, I thought. He said he'd only wanted to watch me dig. He didn't say anything about mimicking my expressions and my instincts. It was as if he'd climbed inside of me and sifted through my mind.

I ran to the hospitality tent, complete with cots and electric fans and pitchers of ice water. Dipping a paper towel into a bowl, I dripped water down my neck. I felt it run in the valley between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, down my stomach, into the waist of my shorts. I leaned closer to the bowl and splashed some onto my face.

He knew me so well. He knew me better than I know myself. In the distance I heard Bernie Roth make the decision to use that single take, since Alex couldn't possibly be any better. I snorted and threw myself down on a cot. I had made a contractual commitment; I would see it through. I would show Alex Rivers whatever technical moves he wanted; I would let him know what props he'd need and what was inaccurate in the script. But I wouldn't let him get close, and I would never show him my heart. I'd already done that once because he'd taken me by surprise, but it wasn't going to happen again.

I fell asleep for a little while, and when I woke up a fine sheen of sweat covered my body. Sitting up, I reached for the paper towel I'd used before. I wet it again and set it across the back of my neck.

The flap of the tent that served as a door whipped open to reveal a young man with a ponytail of bright red hair. His name was Charlie; I'd talked with him earlier. "Miss Barrett," he said, "I've been looking all over for you."

I gave him my nicest smile. "And here I thought no one cared."

His fair skin flushed and he looked away. He was a gaffer-something to do with lighting. He'd told me that earlier and I had whispered the word several times to myself, just liking the way it lay on my tongue. "I have a message for you," he said, but he wouldn't meet my eye.

To put him out of his misery I took the note he was holding. It was a simple piece of brown paper, the kind the rolls of backgrounds were wrapped in for transport. Please join me for dinner. Alex.

His handwriting was very neat, as if he'd spent hours getting it just right. I wondered if he signed his autographs as precisely. I crumpled the paper in my hand and looked at Charlie, who was obviously waiting for an answer. "What if I say no?" I asked.

Charlie shrugged, already starting to leave. "Alex'll find you," he said, "and he'll make you change your mind."

HE COULD MAKE MIRACLES. I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF WHAT HAD been a set only hours ago-the interior of his character's tent-and surveyed the fine white linen tablecloth, the tall bayberry candles in ivory holders, the champagne chilling in a silver bucket. Alex was standing at the opposite end of the tent, wearing a dinner jacket, black trousers, white bow tie.

I blinked. This was Africa, for G.o.d's sake. We weren't even staying at a motel, only a camping lodge twenty miles from Olduvai Gorge.

How had he managed this?

"That's all, John," Alex said, smiling at the man who had driven me back to the set in a jeep. He was a friendly man, big as a sequoia.

"He's very nice," I said politely, watching John's retreating figure in the red glow of the standing torches outside the tent. "He told me he works for you."

Alex nodded, but did not take a step toward me. "He'd give up his life for me," he said seriously, and I found myself wondering how many others would as well.

I was wearing the black sleeveless dress that had arrived courtesy of Ophelia that afternoon, and low black flats that had at least a pound of sand in them. I had spent the past three hours showering and drying my hair and rubbing myself with a lemon after-bath lotion, all the while trying out different conversations where I took Alex Rivers to task for his performance that afternoon.

But I hadn't expected him in evening wear. I couldn't tear my eyes from him. "You look wonderful," I said quietly, angry at myself even as I spoke the words.

Alex laughed. "I think that's my line," he said. "But thanks. And now that you've seen the effect, can I get out of this before I melt?"

Without waiting for me to answer, he stripped off the jacket, unlaced the bow tie, and rolled up his sleeves past his elbows.

He pulled out a chair for me and lifted a silver dome from a plate of crudite's. "So," he said, "what did you think of your first day on a movie set?"

My eyes narrowed, recognizing my opportunity. "I think that I've never seen so much time wasted in my life," I said simply. "And I think that it's shameless to steal someone else's emotions for your own performance."

Alex's jaw dropped, but he recovered himself just as quickly. He lifted the china platter. "Carrot?" he said calmly.

I stared at him. "Don't you have anything to say?"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Why do we keep getting off on the wrong foot? Do you just hate me, or is it all actors?"

"I don't hate anyone," I said. I glanced at the crisp napkins and delicate crystal, thinking of all the trouble he'd gone to. This was obviously his attempt at an apology. "I just felt used."

Alex looked up. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he said. "I was trying to-well, h.e.l.l, it doesn't matter what I was trying to do."

"It matters to me," I blurted out.

Alex did not say anything. He stared over my shoulder and then shook his head. When he spoke, it was so quietly I had to lean forward to catch his words. "The problem," he said, "with being one of the best is that you still have to get better. But you're competing with yourself."

He looked at me. "Do you know what it's like to do a scene, to have everyone slap you on the back and tell you how great you are, but to realize that you've got to be just as good the next time, and the next?"

His eyes glowed in the candlelight. "What if I can't? What if the next time is the time it doesn't work?"

I knotted my hands in my lap, not knowing what I was supposed to say. It was obvious that I had touched a raw nerve-Alex Rivers was not bragging; in fact, he seemed truly terrified that he might not be able to live up to the very image he'd created.

"I steal people's reactions-you're absolutely right. It keeps me from having to dig deeper into myself. I guess I'm afraid that if I stick to my own experiences, one day I'll be looking for something to draw upon and I'll find out instead that I've run dry." He smiled faintly. "The truth is, I can't afford to let that happen. Acting is the only thing I'm good at. I don't know what else I could do." He stared at me. "For what it's worth," he said, "I'm sorry it had to be you."

I lifted my hand as if I were going to touch him, but changed my mind. A faint flush covered Alex's cheeks as he realized what he had admitted to me. I looked away, wondering why if he had been the one to expose himself, I felt so vulnerable.

THE GOING STORY ABOUT ALEX RIVERS IN HOLLYWOOD, COURTESY of Michaela Snow, was that he had graduated from the drama department at Tulane, had come to L.A., and was tending bar at a hot nightspot one evening when a big-time producer proceeded to get s.h.i.tfaced. Alex had driven the man home, and a day later the producer had screentested him. The movie was Desperado; he'd won the part and had stolen the film. People in the business believed that everything had come easily to Alex Rivers. That if he hadn't been in the right place at the right time, there would have been a second coincidence, or a third.

It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction, so most of the time Alex did not try. He left his childhood in a puddle on a back lot at Paramount and re-created himself to fit the mythic proportions drawn by the press. The truth was, he became a workaholic-not because of the money or fame, but because he did not like himself as much as the characters he brought to life. He did not let himself believe that there was anything remaining of the vulnerable boy he had once been. The other truth was that the closest Alex had ever come to a stage at Tulane was mopping it as a custodian. His unheralded arrival in L.A. was as a hitchhiker on a meat truck. And he never would have left Louisiana in the first place if he hadn't believed that he'd killed his own father.

It had been one of those weeks in New Orleans when the humidity grabbed you by the b.a.l.l.s and blew its fetid breath into your lungs.

Andrew Riveaux had been gambling for three consecutive days and nights in a back room off Bourbon Street, although at first his family did not notice. Alex was too busy working at the university, trying to ama.s.s enough money to support his mother and to set himself up in his own place. He barely lived at home as it was; he spent most nights in the narrow dormitory beds at the invitation of rich daddy's girls who found him brooding and intemperate, an adventure from the wrong side of the tracks.

Likewise, Lila Riveaux did not mark her husband's absence. She slept most of the time, incubated and buffered by a Valium haze, so drugged she could not distinguish the days of the week, much less which ones Andrew bothered to put in an appearance. On that afternoon when Alex stopped in at the trailer park to check on her, she was so pale and still that he forced himself to feel for her pulse.

Alex was in the closet kitchen, cutting vegetables to add to a can of broth for dinner, when he heard his father laugh outside. His father had two laughs: one mean one, used for degradation; and one fake one, used for sucking up. This was the second kind, and after the briefest pause, during which Alex nicked his own finger, he went back to his task.

Andrew Riveaux had brought someone home. Alex listened to the heavy footsteps, the rumbling voice. He heard his father open the folding panel door to the only bedroom and yell out his wife's name. Alex stepped from the kitchen in time to see his father ushering this fat, florid man toward Lila, unconscious on the bed. He noticed that his father's gold chain and crucifix were gone, that his skin was yellowed with alcohol. He watched the stranger stroke his hands over the roll of his belly, and then turn to Andrew. "She gonna wake up?" he asked, and that was how Alex understood how much his father had lost.

Alex stood like a witness to a raging fire, both mesmerized and immobilized by shock, knowing that he had to move or be heard, and understanding at the same time that these simple acts were beyond his control. His breath came in hoa.r.s.e, square blocks, and finally the paring knife he was holding dropped to the floor.

Andrew paused in the act of sliding closed the bedroom door. He glanced at Alex. "She won't know," he said, as if this made it all right.

His first punch folded his father in the middle. His second broke his father's nose. The bedroom door cracked open, and the stranger stood gaping in his boxers. He looked from Alex to his father and back. Then he pointed a finger at Andrew. "You owe me, you f.u.c.ker," he yelled, and pulling up his pants, he slammed out of the trailer.

Alex's third punch toppled his father into a curio cabinet that had been Lila's pride and joy. Andrew Riveaux struck the back of his head on the corner, opening a flow of blood that seeped between his fingers.