The Actor and the Housewife (19 page)

Becky was on her knees hourly, just giving thanks.

“Thank you, Father, thank you for blessing us so mightily. Thank you for curing Mike. Thank you for sparing him and keeping him here. Thank you, thank you, thank you . . .”

It takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a

beginner.
Ladies’ Home Journal
, 1948

In which a peculiar plan becomes possible

Several times a week, they had cause to lock their bedroom door.

Besides this renewed love affair with her husband, the kids were at such fantastic stages. Fiona was cracking the boundaries of in dependence, and Becky was constantly amazed by her intelligence. Polly was ten, that unique age for girls when their personality snaps into place. She was reading, asking questions, comprehending more of the big picture, but hadn’t lost that little-girl innocence. Hyrum was full of energy and began to discover how fast he could run, how far he could throw, how high he could jump. (The answer: pretty fast, really far, impressively high.)And Sam so thrived on social interaction, Becky reluctantly signed him up for preschool three mornings each week. (Her boy! Her baby! Her littlest one, out of the house, engaging with that big scary world, on the move, never to return fully again. Aa!)

With everything perfect in her home, in her marriage, in the world, Becky was scarcely aware of the tiny void tickling her heart. At the video store, she saw Felix’s photo on a movie for rent, and she felt a cold jolt run through her, an unearthly sort of fear or thrill, as if she’d just seen her own self walking down the street.

I used to know him, Becky thought.

It was a pleasant reflection, but she didn’t rent the video. She might have stopped to read the synopsis, but Hyrum was teaching Sam how to do an army crawl through the Drama aisle, leaving a trail of fallen videos behind. Well, at least the brothers were playing together.

That afternoon the family drove the grueling hour and a half to Mike’s sister’s house because her family had inexplicably up and moved to Spanish Fork. Rounding the point of the mountain on I-15, Becky gazed down the hill to their right at the severe gray rectangles of the prison. Above the brown hill to their left was the local mecca for wind-sport fanatics. She could spot about twenty-five paragliders, bodies dangling from curved, parachutelike tops.

“Seems cruel, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Yeah,” Mike said, guessing her thoughts. “Floating around within view of the prison, kind of taunting them.”

“Like riding your bike back and forth in front of the house of the kid who broke his leg.”

“That was a pretty specific example. I don’t suppose when you were a kid, you ever—”

“Me? Never.”

Becky watched the wind riders, moving so slowly they appeared still, hovering in the ocean blue sky like a swarm of jellyfish. But for some reason, all she could think about was Felix.

“I wonder what Felix is up to.”

“Who?” Mike kept his eyes on the road but couldn’t hide a little smile. Becky found him adorable when he thought he was being funny.

“I used to feel so sure he needed me in his life, and then . . . I wonder if I should call him.”

“Call him. Why not?”

“I don’t know . . .”

She didn’t call. The prospect of committing to something so grand was a little unnerving. She wasn’t sure she was ready to be Felix’s best friend again, with her soul still skinny and tired from the exertions during the illness. Mike was in remission (in ecstasy! In serenity! The cancer routed, humiliated, vanquished!), but she had been living on reserves for months, in survival mode, and she needed to beef up before she could take on so much as a PTA assignment.

A few months later when she was feeling stronger, she tallied up the time since their last contact. It had been almost a year, just after the doctor’s final word. She’d come home to a message from Felix, inquiring after Mike’s health. She’d called back, relieved to get his voice mail, and left the good news (if completely inappropriate word) of remission. How could she call now out of the blue? Maybe he would be upset that she had dropped him so summarily. Maybe he would be sad that he hadn’t been important enough to her.

And maybe he didn’t miss her.

Now her reason for not calling was that it was summer, the Season of Becky, and there was a world of playing to do. And then she didn’t call because the kids were back in school and she was listless and had nothing interesting to report.

Then she started to go a little crazy.

All this time alone is a curse, she thought. A blight. An abomination. Maybe I should take up knitting.

Sam was so crazy for preschool she let him go five mornings a week and suddenly there was an entire half day free. Well, no time is actually free with four school-age children. After all, there was housecleaning and shopping, managing the finances, getting that gum out of the carpet, locating Sam’s lost shoe, carpooling to dance classes, soccer, chess club, tennis lessons, piano, co-oping in the classroom, tracking down that necklace-making kit for Polly’s birthday, making dinner for a sick neighbor . . .

But there were, incredibly and increasingly, moments of stillness, an hour without panic, a time to sit and think and wonder if she was becoming unessential. How many more years would she have before she ceased to be the sun in her children’s solar system? How long until she and Mike began to wither and were set aside? They talked about such things in muted tones when the bedroom lights were off . But it was not something that she would mention to Felix. Besides, how could he, in his Hollywood limo, with a whiskey sour and French model wife, surrounded by autograph seekers, understand what it meant to fear the quiet, to feel like a mother, a function, and worry that one day she would be nothing at all?

No, she was not going to call.

Instead she stuck a small television set on the kitchen counter and left it on all day. And the next. And the next. The seductive numbing was like a drug, the noise filling up the house with false energy. As soon as all four kids were out the door, on it went, always sputtering and complaining in the background. It became her routine for a week and might have continued in Definitely, but one Tuesday morning airplanes fell out of the sky.

Becky sat on the floor in front of the television watching the towers crumble again and again, her stomach plummeting with them. For some time it was all she could do, the haunting voices of newscasters repeating the same bad news all day long. She kept Mike on the phone for two hours until she couldn’t stand it anymore and went to the kids’ various schools to bring them home. It was a day for hugging and holding close.

They ate delivery pizza. The laundry stacked up. Becky didn’t hand-wash a single dish for a week. Still those newscasters’ voices crackled in the background, and the image of those towers falling and falling, mythical, like the phoenix rising from the ashes only to fall again.

Then Polly had a nightmare about an airplane crashing into their house. Becky unplugged the television.

That evening, thinking of the Blitz and darkened London homes, Becky turned on every light in the house. They ate breakfast for dinner under the blazing lamps and played Chutes and Ladders and Life until well past bedtime. Take that, terrorists.

After dropping off Sam at kindergarten the next morning, Becky entered her hollow house and shivered. It was habit to switch something on. She glanced at the television set but went instead to the office and clicked on the computer to check e-mail (yes, she’d had e-mail for almost a year now—she was
so
high tech). That didn’t take up quite enough time. She needed something more distracting, something that muffled the sensation that the whole world was coming apart, something that dulled the twinge of emptiness.

She opened old word processing files and read a couple of screenplays she’d written over the past few years, rediscovering one she rather liked. During the following weeks she fiddled some more, and fussed and puttered and dabbled, until she thought, this is pretty darn good. So she sent it to Bub and Hubbub. Gypsy Annette, the producer who’d bought
Arm Candy
(only to see it languish in development hell until its option expired), had moved on to a career in convention management, but another producer named Karen read it and made an offer.

“Does this seem impossibly lucky?” Mike said.

Becky nodded, still spinning after the phone call from Karen.

“I mean, it’s supposed to be really difficult to sell a screenplay, isn’t it? And here you’re two-for-two.”

She nodded. Still spinning.

“You must be really good.”

“Or lucky. You should take me to Vegas.”

Karen invited Becky to have lunch in Los Angeles and talk business. Should she call Felix? Just in case he was in town?

She didn’t.

Becky exchanged the deliciously cool sweater weather of Utah for sunglasses and a T-shirt in the City of Angels. It was faux-summer, but Becky couldn’t relish it, because summer didn’t mean heat—it meant kids out of school, the zoo, the amusement park, a household run like a summer camp. She was determined not to enjoy this trip; it was business. She would suffer through it then hurry back home to endure non-summer with her family and tuck herself in beside Mike and smell his wonderful smell.

But from the moment she met Karen, Becky felt a tickle of hope that this experience would outshine the previous Bub and Hubbub meeting—no pretentious high-rise office this time, no jangling bracelets or expensive bathroom with no place to perch a purse. They met instead at a café near the production office and sat outside in the sunshine, barely talking business at all they were so enjoying each other’s company. Karen was darling, skinny and tall with strawberry blonde hair and the sweetest freckles just so across her nose and cheeks.

The meeting wasn’t totally necessary, Becky came to realize. Karen had recommended Becky to an agent, a white-haired, bug-eyed woman named Shelley, whom Becky had met that morning over breakfast. Shelley and Karen would hash out the details and make official counters and addendums. But Karen liked to meet the writers she signed, so they sat and lunched and chatted, and were just easing into the topic of movies when Becky heard someone call her name.

Across the crowded sidewalk, leaning against the waist-high fence that enclosed the café’s patio, was a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, wearing a very familiar, very wonderful grin. Her blood rushed from her belly outward, tingling her toes and feet, making her face feel hot. She stood up, her napkin sliding off her lap and onto the ground.

“What the hell are you doing here?!” he called.

“What the heck are
you
doing here?”

“I live here, you beautiful thing. But I’m in Sydney this month—I’m just in town overnight for a meeting.”

“Australia? Is that why you aren’t as pasty as a true Englishman? You’d better get over here right now.”

“Can’t. I’m already late for that aforementioned meeting. Stay here until I get back.”

“I’m leaving from here for the airport. Don’t make me swear at you. Get over here.”

“Hang on.” He ran off .

“Was that—” Karen started.

“Felix Callahan. He’d better come back. He’d better.” Becky couldn’t look at her food. Her stomach had gone hard and small. Now that she’d glimpsed his face, she needed to see him, she needed to hug him this instant. How had she ignored that pull on her heart for so long? It was such a strong tug now, and it made her tremble with impatience. She forced herself to sit, but she kept scanning the crowd while trying to pay attention to Karen’s conversation.

Finally she interrupted. “Sorry, Karen. That man’s my lost puppy and until I know he’s okay, I can’t concentrate on anything but fretting.”

“Sure,” Karen said, taking a bite of salad and giving Becky that knowing look she’d received so many times in the past when it came to Felix.“

“ He’s my best friend,” Becky explained, and realized that it was still true.

“Wow,” Karen said. “I mean—wow. I didn’t know Felix Callahan had best friends. That’s—Wow.”

Then there he was, sprinting back to the café. Becky squealed and ran toward him. Without slowing his stride, he put a hand on the fence and vaulted over, landing before her. He picked her up and swung her around while she screeched, putting her down again only to hug her more fiercely.

“Don’t leave again, ever,” she said, her face smooshed against his chest. “I won’t either. I promise. I’m sorry.”

“Mike is okay?”

“He’s perfect.”

“How old is our Polly now?”

“She’s eleven, the sweetie pie.”

“Eleven! So . . . wait, how old does that make Sam?”

“Four.”

He squinted. “That’s impossible. How could you let that happen?”

“I know. We’ve taken him to the doctor, but there’s nothing they can do.”

Felix couldn’t stop hugging her. “Can I eat you for lunch? Nothing crude, I assure you. I just want to swallow you whole so you can’t get away.”

“Please do,” she said against his chest. “Aah, I hadn’t realized my heart had been torn in half. We weren’t supposed to be apart anymore, remember? You’re a terrible heartbreaker and I hate you.”

“I hate you too,” he whispered against her head, then kissed her hair.

She wondered if she should feel bad for hugging him like that. She’d had such careful rules about physical touch with Felix. But hugging him felt about as smutty as
Sesame Street
. Besides, she was so outlandishly in love with Mike, and Mike was healthy (Remission! Remission!), and all was well.

Still, last time they were together, in Los Angeles and hugging, Mike had been there too. To stay on the safe side, she shimmied out of his hold.

“What’s with the hat and glasses?”

“I’m in disguise.”

“As what, a famous actor?”

“I have to shield myself from my fans lest they swoon at the mere sight of me.”

“You are such a dork.”

“And as ever, my lady, you are a poet.”