Picture Perfect

  Alex didn't answer. He stared down at her hand on the sleeve of his coat as if it were a tarantula.

  "Kids, kids," Herb bellowed from the seat facing them. "Let's kiss and make up," he said. "Remember, this is good publicity."

  Alex knew that Herb was right; rumors were flying about the former shutdown in production ofMacbeth , so many that Alex was beginning to remember the hell he'd gone through withAntony and Cleopatra . Maybe he was just doomed when it came to Shakespeare.

  "Yeah, Alex," Melanie breathed, inches away from his face. "Let's kiss and make up."

  Alex twirled his wedding ring around his finger, a habit he'd taken to lately, as if it were a necessary reminder.If you win , he warned himself,no matter what, do not jump up and embrace her .

  Herb patted Melanie's knee. "Leave him alone," he sighed. "He's brooding."

  "I know," Melanie said huskily. "That's what we all love about him."

  Alex ignored their senseless patter until their limousine was next in line. "Ready for the vultures, darling?" Melanie asked, snapping closed her compact.

  Alex stepped into the afternoon sunshine first, squinting and holding his hand up in a half-wave, half-sunshield. He reached into the bowels of the limousine to help Melanie out, watching her turn on a smile with the wattage of a nighttime beacon at a maximum-security prison. She lightly placed her hand on his arm, and at his low growl, removed it.

  There were too many shouts and catcalls to hear the reporters or to notice the flashbulbs and the rolling tape. He walked beside Melanie, nodding and grinning, trying for a facial expression that said he was not too sure of himself, but still confident about his chances.

  The man walking in front of him was a producer over at FOX, and although Alex could not remember his name, his stooped gait and liver-spotted hairline were familiar. He and his wife were tiny and hunched over, and Alex wondered if that was the burden of age or simply of a long Hollywood marriage. They meandered down the red carpeting so slowly that several times Alex was forced to stop with Melanie and simply stand, smiling like an idiot. The man turned and noticed for the first time that Alex was behind him. He stopped dead in his tracks, holding out a hand. Alex shook it. "Golf balls," the man said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Golf balls. When I saw your movie, I had golf balls in my throat. That's how much it moved me." He reached up and squeezed Alex's shoulder. "The best of the best tonight, eh?"

  Alex had heard that kind of comment before aboutLife . Everyone had an estranged father or sister or friend, and Alex's role had encouraged them to make their peace. Alex Rivers, king of mending fences. Sultan of reconciliation. With the ultimate skeleton in his closet: a wife he had driven away.

  As he waited on the red carpeting he heard the word "sweep," and he knew that people were talking about the potential forThe Story of His Life to walk away with an Oscar for each of its eleven nominations, including the golden trio of Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture.Sweep. Sweep. Sweep . The syllable fell onto his ears over and over, lulling Alex into a daydream of what this could have been like, how it would have felt to have Cassie standing close to him, what the reporters would have said when he pulled her into his arms and swept her down the aisle in a Cinderella waltz, as if nothing this night could matter more than her.

  THEY HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE SAME ONE-ROOM HOUSE FOR THREE days now, so it was ridiculous to call it a date, but Cassie still felt self-conscious about wearing an old shirt of Cyrus's and a pair of Dorothea's chartreuse elastic-waist polyester pants. Will knocked on the front door as if he weren't temporarily living there. When Cassie opened the door, his gaze took in her neatly braided hair, her oversize clothes. "Well," Will said. "Aren't you pretty as a picture."

  "Give me a break," Cassie said, bursting into laughter. "I have no waist and I've never put anything this color on my body before."

  It was the first time Will had come back to Pine Ridge since leaving her a month ago. He'd told his supervisors there had been a death in the family, which bought him a week of bereavement leave. He wanted to believe that nothing short of a funeral would induce him to return to Pine Ridge, but in truth, he only wanted to take Cassie to the Oscars. The nearest TV was twenty miles away in a bar, and he knew that she'd never have gone herself.

  "So," she said, pulling herself up into Will's rented truck. "What am I missing in Los Angeles?"

  Will shrugged. "You know. A lot of smog, some torrential rains, Hollywood hype." He glanced at her quickly, hoping she understood he did not mean to include her in the last of that list. In fact, he had been listening closely to those ridiculous entertainment reports, but nothing had been said about the disappearance of Cassie Rivers.

  The building was unnamed and unmarked, because everyone knew where and what it was. It was fairly full since it was the closest place off the dry reservation where you could get a drink, and Will hoped that wouldn't be a problem. He had not told Cassie, but it was known that knifings and rapes were frighteningly common in the parking lot, that the police stayed away instead of asking questions. Behind the scarred bar hung an old, faded sign,Lel Lakota Kin Iyokipisni , "No Sioux Allowed." It was sliced through the middle by a tomahawk that was wedged into the rafter behind it.

  Cassie was the only white person in the bar, and one of a handful of women. She fluttered nervously behind Will, trying to ignore the stares thrown her way like challenges. She followed him to a corner table where there was an unobstructed view of the television. Her chair was pressed beside the jukebox, and while Loretta Lynn warbled, Cassie held her hands to the lit-up selection box, seeing her fingertips glow pink with the light.

  "They're watchinghockey ," Cassie said. It had never occurred to her that anything other than the Academy Awards would be the selection of choice. True perhaps in L.A., but not in Pine Ridge, where the nearest movie theater was an hour away.

  Will stared blankly at the fuzzy screen, watching the puck zip across the grayish ice. "Leave it to me," he said. He stood up and lifted one leg over the back of his chair, like a dismounting cowboy. Walking up to the bar, he leaned his elbows on the sticky wooden counter. "Hau, kola," he said, trying to catch the bartender's attention.

  The man was very fat and wore his hair in two long black braids wrapped with shoelaces at the ends. He was drying a shot glass. "What can I do you?" he said dispassionately.

  "I need a Rolling Rock and a glass of water," Will said. "And the lady would like to switch the channel."

  "Fuck that," the bartender said, uncapping a cold bottle on the edge of the bar. "Three bucks."

  Will had been expecting this. He handed the bartender a fifty-dollar bill straight from his pay envelope, the likes of which he would have been willing to bet the man had never seen before in his life. "You put on ABC by nine o'clock," Will said, "you get to keep the goddamn change."

  When he handed Cassie her water, she was sitting on the edge of her seat. "Will they watch it?" she asked, her voice thin and breathless.

  "No problem," Will said. He tipped the neck of his beer to Cassie's glass in a toast, thinking that, miraculously, this hellhole corner of South Dakota agreed with her. "Rumor has it you've become some Big Indian," he said.

  Cassie flushed. "Thanks," she said.

  Will laughed. "To a lot of Lakota, that's an insult worthy of a fistfight," he said. "It wasn't meant as a compliment."

  Rolling the glass between her palms, Cassie glared up at Will. "At least I'm trying to fit in," she said pointedly.

  Like you never did. The gibe hung in the air in front of them, and although Will had believed that the thick skin he'd cultivated could protect him, he was shocked to see how much the things Cassie hadn't said could still hurt. His grandfather was half in love with her; his grandmother couldn't stop talking about her. It stung to know that someone with no Sioux blood running through her veins could carve a niche for herself when he'd never even gained a toehold.

  Narrowing his eyes, Will did what had come naturally during all t
he years he'd lived second-class in Pine Ridge: he struck back. He nodded slowly, as if he'd been considering Cassie's daily routine for quite some time. "You've got the elders wishing allwasicu* were like you. Tagging along with Cyrus; asking the medicine man about berries and roots. Quite the little squaw."

  Cassie lifted her chin, unwilling to defend her actions to the very person who'd brought her there. "What am I supposed to do all day? Lie on the couch and watch my waist disappear? Besides, it's like Girl Scouts--surviving in the forest overnight and all that. It's good to know. Suppose I got stuck in the woods and twisted my ankle--"

  "Suppose there were woods in L.A., and that all the twenty-four-hour pharmacies were closed?" Will snorted and took a long pull of his beer, finishing it. "Youare planning on going back, aren't you?"

  Cassie's face closed in on itself, and for an awful moment Will thought she was going to cry. Out of nowhere, he remembered being in second grade, when a new kid had entered the school. Horace was only one-quarter Indian, and Will had made friends with him, figuring that he owed it to someone who took him out of the scapegoat position. It worked: the same bullies who'd stepped on his sandwiches at lunch and broken his pencils were now asking him to pitch their baseball games and inviting him over on weekends. Will could remember the warm feeling that grew from his stomach when he understood he was being accepted, and before he knew it he was acting like them. He didn't even realize it until one day after school he hid behind a copse of trees, waiting for Horace to round the bend, and with all the other kids he threw stones and twigs until Horace ran.

  But not before Will had seen his face. He was looking straight at Will, at nobody else, like he was plainly saying,Not you too .

  Will shook his head to clear it, unsure what that had to do with Cassie, except for the horrible feeling that had seized him when he realized just how much he'd hurt someone who'd done absolutely nothing to him. "Hey," he said, trying to lighten the mood. He nodded in the direction of the television. "You're going to miss your show."

  As he had asked, the bartender had switched the channel fifteen minutes before the broadcast of the Academy Awards. Will didn't have a clue what was on beforehand; he figured it was some stupid sitcom. But looming over his head was Alex Rivers's face, and sitting beside him on a couch was Cassie herself.

  "The Barbara Walters interview," Cassie murmured. She was holding her cocktail napkin so tight her knuckles blanched and the wet paper ripped down the middle. Then she started to laugh hysterically. "He was supposed to be on second. Not last. Second."

  A thousand things were cutting through her mind: What if he'd known he was scheduled third all along? Would they never have had that argument? Would she not have had to run away at all? She stared at the familiar curtains of her living room, at the storm whipping through the azalea bushes outside. She took in the bouquet of lilies that some set dresser on Barbara Walters's crew had placed on the coffee table where there was usually a big book ofNew Yorker magazine covers.

  But most of all she looked at Alex, who was sitting right next to this shadow of herself, looking fresh and clean shaven and just as he did every morning when he came out of the bathroom and took her breath away. On the television, his hands strummed restlessly over her shoulder. He was telling the world that Alex Rivers and his wife watched Saturday morning cartoons in bed.

  Oh God, Alex. Cassie fought back the urge to let the tears well into her eyes, to stand up and touch her fingers to the TV set as if she could stroke warm flesh. Until she saw him again, she had not realized what she had been missing.

  Then she heard her own voice. Cassie blinked, forcing herself to turn from Alex's reactions to her own mouth forming the words. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, thinking how odd her voice sounded, not like hers at all. "I expected him to be a hotshot celebrity pushing around his weight to show who was in control," Cassie heard herself say, "and I'm sorry to say that at first, he didn't disappoint me." She saw Alex's eyes flash at the turn of her sentence, which really did make him sound like a fool. Even though it had happened weeks ago, Cassie flinched. She wondered if the rest of the world could see that quick anger just below the surface; if they noticed that she leaned a little to the left, away from her injured side; if they recognized the ghost of a bruise beneath the gauzy sleeve of her blouse.

  They cut most of the interview when Cassie talked. In fact, Barbara Walters ended with Happily Ever After, asking Alex, "Why Cassie?" And Alex stared right at the camera and said, "She was made for me." Cut, clip in the quick kiss he'd given her at the end of the interview, which some editor had frozen so that Alex's lips were fused to hers eternally even as Barbara Walters started her wrap-up to the commercial.

  Will glanced at Cassie. She was staring at the Pampers ad as if she did not understand the mechanics of how Alex had disappeared from the screen and was still wondering how to get him to come back.

  He stood up and walked to the bar, ordering another beer. "And chips or something," Will added. "It's going to be a hell of a long night."

  "I CAN 'T BELIEVE HE BROUGHT SOMEONE ELSE."

  Cassie had been saying that since the montage at the beginning of the Academy Awards, where Melanie something or other had stepped out of the same limousine as Alex. She had drunk her second glass of water in its entirety before Alex had even made it through the doors of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. "That bitch," she whispered, all the while tracking Alex, only Alex.

  It looked promising: in the first major award of the evening, Jack Green had won Best Supporting Actor, and had metaphorically toasted Alex with a wave of his little gold statuette. From there on, for two and a half hours, the name of the film would come up every now and then--cinematography, editing, sound mixing. Will had lost count of the number of Oscars actually won about an hour ago, when he'd finished his sixth and final beer. He didn't know how Cassie was still sitting up, much less staying awake.

  He put his head down on the table in front of her. "Wake me in the last fifteen minutes if he wins anything big," Will said.

  Cassie nodded, swallowed. She ran her finger through the salt at the bottom of the peanut bowl. "You know why they're called Oscars?" she said some time later, to no one in particular. "A secretary who worked at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it reminded her of her uncle Oscar. Isn't that the stupidest thing...that you've ever heard?"

  Because he heard the hitch in her voice, Will squinted open one eye. Tears were running down Cassie's cheeks; for all her ramrod-straight posture she was falling apart. He pushed his chair around the sawdusted floor until it touched the side of Cassie's, and he pulled her into his arms. "It's okay," he said, wondering how long he'd been asleep, if Alex had already lost, if he'd just missed it.

  "It's not okay," Cassie said against Will's shoulder. "It's never been okay.I ought to be sitting in the second row there.I ought to be the one whose face comes into the viewfinder every time the camera runs across his row."

  "Look at the bright side," Will said. "You'd probably be fast asleep by now."

  "But I'd be fast asleepthere ," Cassie said. "It's the most important night of his life and I'm a thousand miles away."

  But you're not, Will wanted to say.You're here with me . He looked at her so intently that she stopped crying and simply stared back.

  And then they announced the nominations for Best Actor.

  As easily as she would step out of the front seat of a car, Cassie disengaged herself from Will. She shrugged off his arm and leaned her elbows on the table, inches closer to her husband. When the television replayed a short scene fromThe Story of His Life , Alex's reflection shimmered in a pool of condensation caught on the table between Cassie's flattened palms.

  And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to...

  Cassie stopped breathing. The televised light bathed her face, making its planes and angles shine.

  Alex Rivers.

  Cassie's eyes gleamed, and with a palpable hunger she watched Alex walk up the aisle to the
podium to accept the little statue. Will wondered if she realized that she was reaching toward the television with her right hand, as if she'd be able to touch him.

  He didn't give a damn about Alex Rivers's Oscar, but he could not tear his gaze from Cassie. He'd thought she looked good when he first brought the truck around at his grandparents', but before his eyes she had turned into a creature of grace and glow. When Alex was on that screen, she came alive.

  Will had never been so angry in his life.

  Four weeks ago when Cassie had shown up on his doorstep, he had seen the evidence of the illustrious Alex Rivers's rage; he had understood the burden she'd been left with. But until now, Will had had no idea just how much of Cassie herself Alex had taken away.

  Alex's golden hair was brighter than the Oscar, and Cassie watched his hands flex around the statuette's body. He was looking right at her. "I'd like to thank Herb Silver, and Warner Brothers, and Jack Green and..." Cassie tuned out his actual words, watching instead the lines of his mouth, pink and sculpted, and imagining it coming over hers. "But this award is for my wife, Cassie, who found me the script and convinced me that it was something the public would want to see, as well as something I needed to do. She's with her father tonight because he's ill, and when I spoke to her a few hours ago, she was upset that she couldn't make it back here. Well, I was a little nervous, so I didn't get to say everything I needed to before I hung up the phone. What I wanted to tell her is this:You could be halfway around the world, Cassie, and you'd still be with me ." He cleared his vision, now looking at the sea of faces staring up at him. "Thank you," he said, and all too quickly, he was gone.

  Cassie watched him accept his two other Oscars. It was clearly Alex's night, and yet he never failed to mention her. The second time, he told the world he loved her. The third time, he whispered, "Hurry home," so softly Cassie wondered if anyone else watching had even heard.

  When Will pulled her up and propelled her out the door of the bar, she tried to picture what her night might have otherwise been like. She would have worn a froth of a gown--Alex would have seen to that--and every time his name was called he would have turned to her and lifted her out of her seat in his embrace. She could feel his strong arm, the itch of his tuxedo jacket under her fingertips, as she moved through Spago and The Gate with him, circulating the post-Oscar parties. She would hold two statues, still warm from where Alex's hands had wrung their naked necks. Then she would go home and drop the awards onto the carpet and Alex would pour himself into her, hot, frantic, the very essence of success.