The Actor and the Housewife

  He pulled his bicycle out of the back of her minivan.

  “I wouldn’t put it past you,” she called after him as he rode off . “And you really should learn to drive a car!”

  The next day was Sunday. Becky was in sacrament meeting when she felt someone sit on the bench beside her and turned to see a very stoic Felix Callahan in a black suit and white shirt. He looked outlandishly debonair in that Layton, Utah, congregation, even though he’d clearly put on a conservative striped tie in hopes of blending in. He stared straight ahead at the speaker.

  “Don’t you dare pretend to convert just for me,” she whispered.

  “Of course not. I’m here because I want to be here. With you.”

  She stewed for a time.

  “If this is—”

  “Shh,” he whispered. “Don’t you know it’s rude to talk in church?”

  After Hyrum and other boys his age passed around the bread and water of the sacrament, after Becky’s friend Jessie gave the first talk, the bishop returned to the podium.

  “Now we’ll have a special musical number given by a friend of the Jack family, Felix Callahan.”

  Becky gripped his arm. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  He just smiled at her before going down the aisle to stand by the piano. The pianist, eighty-two-year-old Ginny Castleton, played an introduction, and Felix began to sing.

  It was the children’s hymn Hyrum had sung at the ward potluck over nine years before—a simple melody, no sharps or flats, no trills or grace notes, just a steady, innocent tune. But somehow Felix’s voice lent it depth, gave the words wisdom.

  He didn’t look at Becky as he sang about being a child of God, about having a family on earth, about pleading for guidance so he could go home again one day. He took in the whole room, kept the entire congregation rapt with his voice. They’d heard that song sung a thousand times, but never like that. Polly was smiling sweetly, as if at a very dear friend. Hyrum was resting his head on the pew in front of them, but Becky could tell that he wasn’t asleep. Sam was mouthing the words.

  When Felix returned to the bench, Becky wiped her wet cheeks.

  “I’ll never understand why you cry at that song.”

  “I’m crying because you’re so aggravating.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “No, you don’t believe it,” she whispered. “That’s part of the problem. You don’t believe that you are a child of God.”

  “But I believe that you believe it,” he said.

  “Felix—”

  “Shh, I’m listening. Don’t you know it’s rude to talk in church?”

  He came over for Sunday dinner. She’d made a Crock-Pot roast with potatoes and carrots, and the smell and the animated talking and laughing felt so Sunday-ish, so natural and wonderful, that she kept expecting to see Mike at the head of the table. She saw Felix instead. It hurt her heart, but not as much as she’d supposed. Felix could never replace Mike, but he was there, and he was there because he wanted to be.

  He was pretending to be a stodgy old Englishman, calling for the butler and declaring the outing “rather jolly, pip-pip and all that,” and the boys were laughing too hard to eat. How could she feel sad when her boys were so happy?

  In which Felix risks it all

  Felix came over Monday night to help Hyrum with his history report, and Becky hung back and watched. Of all the children, Hyrum had taken the loss of his father the hardest, going quiet, hunkering down in his fifteen-year-old body, speaking in outbursts of anger. But there he sat at the kitchen table with Felix, chatting about Charlemagne, and if he didn’t smile most of the time, he also didn’t storm off . Sometimes, when Felix was reading from the book, Hyrum would look at Felix in a way Becky had seen before—the way he looked at his baseball coach, the way he had looked at Mike, that I-care-what-you-think-of-me way. In waves it delighted her and terrified her.

  As soon as they took a break, Becky yanked Felix’s arm and dragged him onto the back porch.

  “Tell me what’s cooking in your sinister little brain.”

  “Can’t a fellow—”

  “No. A fellow can’t.”

  He combed his hair with his fingers as if he were distraught, but it also made his hair stand up in a rakish and adorable way, and Becky suspected he was aware of that. She pretended not to notice.

  “Your children are your world. If I want to live in your world, I need to know them better, and they need to want me around.”

  “Yeah, well . . . what about me?” She glared. “I miss you. I miss talking with you.”

  “I hoped so.”

  “That was part of your plan?”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m devious, cunning, and unscrupulous. I will do anything to win your heart and hand.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Oh but I will,” he said matter-of-factly. “I really will. Try me.”

  “Yeesh, I’d rather not.”

  “I don’t know how you persist in being so stubborn—”

  “It’s a superpower. I was bitten by a radioactive mule.”

  “—but you’re going to succumb in the end.”

  “I have no choice?”

  “Oh, you have a choice. And you will choose me.”

  He leaned in, and their bodies were inches apart, his face close to hers. Then he bent and kissed her bare neck. She got goose bumps up and down the entire side of her body and thought angrily, He shouldn’t be able to make me feel this way.

  “Come to New York with me,” he said, now touching her shoulder. “One weekend, the two of us.”

  Her breathing was shallow. “If I do, will you stop stalking me and return to being my friend?”

  “Yes. If after the weekend that’s what you want, then yes.”

  “Okay.”

  She stuck out her hand to shake, because he was still leaning in that way, as if he wanted to kiss her more on the neck, or elsewhere, and it was making her toes curl. He took her hand, shook it, and said, “Agreed,” then grabbed her and kissed her neck one more time, slowly, before returning to the house.

  She stood on the porch a few minutes, feeling a sensation that started on her neck but slithered inside her, curling into her gut. Why was she feeling like this? Was it really possible that she could love Felix in that—no, no. No! No, that was wrong. She never had, she never could, she was halved and there could be no one else.

  Then why was she shaking? Or maybe she was just imagining it. She held out her hand to see if she could see the tremble. And there was her wedding band. Usually she didn’t even notice it, but now the sight of it stung.

  “Ouch,” she whispered. “Ouch, Mike. It still hurts.”

  She heard Felix and Hyrum laughing inside the house and thought she couldn’t go to New York with this man. She couldn’t be alone with him. She felt stretched between two men, both impossible to have, and the pain seemed empty and cruel.

  I promised to go, she thought. I even shook his hand.

  Well, it would be the end of the wooing, she was certain of that. She’d have a wonderful weekend with her best friend and then find a way to make him understand.

  As the date inched closer, she panicked and tried to find an excuse to skip out on the trip, double and triple checking with her children, carefully watching for any sign of sorrow in their eyes. She couldn’t even detect a glimmer of melancholy.

  “Are you sure it’s okay if I leave?” she asked.

  Hyrum blew air through his lips. “Geez, Mom, it’s three days. Give me a break.”

  But then Felix’s carefully planned “Weekend O’ Wooing Extravaganza” began, and she forgot why she’d been dragging her feet. First off , they fl ew first-class. She’d never admit it, but she could really get used to first-class.

  And second, it was Felix. It was impossible to do anything with him but relax and laugh. He didn’t lean. He didn’t kiss her neck. He just took her arm and led her in a dance.

  They stayed at the
Plaza (which she discovered has great breakfasts, the number-one factor in her opinion of any hotel), and stayed up late in their connecting rooms laughing and talking.

  By golly, she thought, but I love to laugh with this man.

  Felix knew the city, and he didn’t bore her with Broadway revivals or excursions to the Statue of Liberty. Instead it was plays at the Circle, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants, downtown walking tours of hidden architectural wonders. Becky had never seen New York like this, and she strolled around and around the Frick Gallery in awe, color and brushstrokes filling her with an oceanlike rhythm.

  Felix held her hand. And she held his, even though she knew he held it not as a friend, but as a . . . (gah, could she really say it?) . . . as a boyfriend. Yes, she was in New York with her potential boyfriend. He really was more than just a best friend now. So she became conscious of every touch, every embrace, every time his arm was around her shoulder.

  Once, as they left a restaurant, a photographer raced up to snap a few shots. Felix didn’t shy away. With his arm encircling Becky’s back, he turned toward the photographer and smiled. The fl ash flared in her eyes.

  She stared at him as they walked away, mystified by his fearlessness, the pressure of his arm still around her shoulder.

  “Hi there,” he said and kissed her forehead.

  “You let them take a picture.”

  “With pride. It does my career good to be seen with a tasty nugget of arm candy.”

  “Yeah right.” She fl ashed him a goofy smile, but he wouldn’t budge. “I always thought you didn’t consider me a . . . uh, a human woman.”

  “Perhaps at first. But you changed, or I did, or everyone else did, because now I think you are more of a woman than any other woman I’ve known.”

  He began to sing “More Than a Woman” in a falsetto-perfect Barry Gibb as they walked, stopping to do a fancy spin. In truth, she was so impressed she had to keep her mouth shut or she’d gush. Who can do a dead-on Barry Gibb? Felix was a genius.

  The last night he took her to one of those ridiculously fabulous restaurants named after its own chef where each menu item was a paragraph of description: “Mustard dry-rubbed and slow-roasted free-range bantam breast, paired with crisped organic loin of rabbit, green parsnip butter, black truffle and butterbread porridge, red corn panisse, smoked strawberries, and three-year-old Moroccan olives, simmering in a candied shallot broth.” After asking the server for an explanation, Becky said, “Oh, so it’s chicken? But then why isn’t it fried?”

  But then The server was not amused.

  “Uh, I’ll have the third item there, the one that has the longest description. That’s gotta mean something fairly hearty.”

  She had very little idea what exactly she was ordering, and actually seeing the food on the plate didn’t clear up the issue—there was a tiny strip of some kind of meat, artfully arranged with a greenish paste and a yellow crumbly substance, garnished with some vegetable curled like ribbon. It was a museum of different tastes and left her feeling more intrigued than full.

  “Mike would’ve taken one look at this plate and said, ‘Could you ask the chef to mush it all together and stick it on a bun?’ ”

  Felix chuckled. “I would have paid to see that.”

  Becky smiled as the thought of Mike’s absence, for the moment at least, didn’t sting.

  For dessert they shared “avocado and olive oil ice cream on a cornbread wafer drizzled with mulberry coulis and topped with sugared rose petals.” And Becky learned, add enough sugar and cream to anything, and you can call it dessert.

  After dinner, instead of returning to the hotel, the limousine pulled up to the last place Becky expected to be—a certain club with a line out front, bouncer, and neon sign.

  She scowled. “The Blue Note.”

  “Oh, right, we’ve been here before, haven’t we?” Felix asked, his tone casual.

  “I’m not going in there again. You may think this is funny somehow in your sick little mind, but I’m not reliving that—”

  “We’re going back to the scene of the crime, just for an hour.”

  “I hate that place. I was so ugly in there. And tired. Man, I was tired. And you . . .” She glared at him. “You were a stupidhead!”

  “Please, Becky.” He was standing beside the limousine, holding out his hand, his eyes pleading. “Please come in with me.”

  She made a show of resisting before taking his hand and stepping into the pleasantly chill May night. The doorman let Felix and Becky right in, and a young woman in go-go boots escorted them to a reserved table by the dance floor. Immediately a waiter brought over a plate of cheesy potato skins and two Shirley Temples.

  Felix sipped one, watching the band. “Mm, nothing like a Shirley Temple to curl the hair on your chest.”

  Becky rolled her eyes. He held her hand under the table.

  Two girls came over. Bounced over. One was a blonde, one a redhead, both in their early twenties—not the same two as before, but there was a remarkable resemblance in all the right places. They wore little halter tops, butt-tight jeans, high heels. And they wore them well. Becky sniffed.

  “Hi, aren’t you Felix Callahan the actor?” the blonde chirped.

  “I am.”

  “Wow, I love your movies. Isn’t he cute, René?”

  “He’s so cute,” René agreed with pouty lips. She rested her hands on the table, and parts of her gushed forward. “Very cute.”

  The blonde leaned against Felix’s back, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Why don’t you come dance with us? We’ll have lots of fun. I promise.”

  Felix’s eyes were bored as he said, “Please disengage yourself from my neck. Can’t you see I’m already with the most beautiful woman in the room?”

  The girls tottered off , disappearing into the crowd.

  Becky felt a sly smile curl her mouth. “You paid them to do that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said as he sipped his Shirley Temple, his lips tense to keep from smiling.

  “You actually hired a couple of models to come here to night and play out that little scene.”

  “I don’t need to pay admirers. I have to beat them off with a stick. But now that you mention it, wasn’t it serendipitous that I met with a nearly identical situation and responded the way I should have the first time?”

  “Miraculous even.”

  The band began to play “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” Felix looked up, acting surprised. “Why, this is the song we danced to the day we first met. What a coincidence.”

  “Yes, amazing.”

  He stood and offered his arm. “May I escort you onto the dance floor?”

  “I’m a pretty good dancer, you know.”

  “I know.”

  As they stepped out, the rest of the dancers withdrew. A blue spotlight drenched them and the bandleader announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the legendary Becky Jack.” The watchers applauded.

  She almost slugged him then. But he wasn’t laughing.

  “You are legendary,” he whispered.

  He put his hand on her lower back and swung her out, spinning her back in and against his side. He was adept at leading, and she felt as if she floated across the floor. His hand was so light on her waist, and yet so firm that she always knew which way to turn. It was no fl ashy tango or jaunty fox-trot—just a gentle two-step, a dance that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything else, a dance that keeps a steady movement and yet allows a bit of spinning fun.

  “Tell me that you weren’t a little tempted by those young beauties.”

  “I was not tempted, not a little, not a lot. I’m nearing fifty, and I’m knackered trying to keep up. I sought out the taut young things after Celeste because I didn’t want to get entangled with a woman who had children or wanted them. Then I realized there was one woman and four children I did care about a great deal. It’s time for me to settle into my adult skin. It’s time for me to be happy
, and I’ll be happy when I’m with you.”

  “But I’m no bouncy girl, you know. I don’t look like the women you’ve been dating these years.”

  “I’m quite eager to gaze upon your naked body and confident that the sight will thrill me—”

  “Oh stop it!”

  “—to no end, but I know I can’t convince you of that, so here’s a thought. What if I went blind? I could lay my hands on some sulfuric acid, splash it round. Just think of the made-for-telly movie they would make about us one day. I can only dream that it will be titled Blind Love.”

  “I wonder who will play me. Probably Gwyneth Paltrow. Ooh, or Penélope Cruz!”

  “If only Lucille Ball were still alive . . .”

  “Felix . . .” She paused, aware of his hand holding hers, his other hand on her back. The touch felt nice, but doubt swam through her. “Felix, how can we possibly—”

  “We’ll buy a house near Layton, so you can be close to your family and Hyrum and Sam can finish school with their mates. When I’m filming on location, you can be home. We’ll have a house in Los Angeles, and as Fiona seems to have settled into the City of Angels, we can let her live there and take care of it when we’re away. We’ll spend the summers and some holidays in England. I am impatient to see the entire Jack family with passports, and won’t it be good for the boys to grow up knowing another country?”

  “Wow, you have thought it through.”

  “I have a real estate agent in Salt Lake City awaiting your call.”

  There was no floor beneath her feet. Felix held her up, and they danced on solid air. It gave her a queer, tickly sensation, dancing so high above the ground. Freeing in one way, and yet frightening too, because the ground was still down there, hard and unforgiving.

  It’s not a prank, she realized. She’d let herself believe that this was some silly game Felix was playing, a joke on her, something to distract her from her mourning, so she never had to take it seriously. But he meant it. All of it.

  Could I be with him? Could I really? Maybe I could, really really?

  He spun her, and even when she was back in his hold, she was still spinning.

  She kept right on floating and spinning for the rest of the next song, soaring back to the limousine, hovering over the seat as he held her hand, sure that her eyes were sparkling. She didn’t remember entering the hotel, getting into the elevator, but the upward pull made her feel so light she thought she might keep going up forever. He was still holding her hand, keeping her with him, stopping her from rising right through the roof.