And that was fine. Most of the time, Carmen took great pleasure in the reality that she was a Hollywood actress, even if she was never going to have her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She knew how fortunate she was. She knew the breaks she’d had to get where she was and how easily it could all disappear. Careers dissipated because of low grosses and bad choices, and they disappeared beneath the pounds of pancake and clown makeup they’d put on Bette Davis the year before last for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She knew the euphemism: aging out.
When she thought of her mother or her sister back in Westchester or got letters from them, she would breathe a sigh of relief that she was here and not there. Neither worked. Neither had ever worked. Her mother still mailed her magazine recipes that she cut from Women’s Day in which the ingredients were canned pineapple, mayonnaise, and cream cheese. Her sister sent her housekeeping articles from Ladies’ Home Journal that supposed she cared so much about a polished floor that she’d spread the wax evenly on the brush with a butter knife. Her sister was married now and had a three-year-old son, and both her mother and her sister sent her the same Good Housekeeping essay by a woman who rued the loss of her husband to another woman because she had chosen not to have babies.
Her mother and father had visited her and Felix in August, and it was clear to Carmen that they were proud of her but uneasy with her career. They were suspicious of her neighbors, who all seemed to be involved in the movie business and all seemed to have—at least based on the stories they’d read in the Hollywood fan magazines—questionable morals. She could tell that her father had the same doubts about Felix he’d had since she had first introduced the writer, then her fiancé, to him. There was something about Felix that rubbed Richard Tedesco the wrong way, something the older man didn’t quite approve of. It may have been the way that Felix tried to ingratiate himself to her father. “Sucking up” was the expression Carmen herself had used after their first dinner together, when she was explaining to Felix that her father had spent enough years making up crap to sell cigarettes and soap that his bullshit meter was infallible. She understood Felix’s insecurities, but he should have had the spine or the common sense to stop dropping names as soon as he mentioned Clayton Moore—the Lone Ranger—and her father observed, “We did a Cheerios commercial together. He was a consummate professional. Quiet and good with the kids on the set. Never said a word about himself.”
But once again that past August, Felix had fortified himself with bourbon before meeting his in-laws for dinner their first night in California, and by the time they’d all finished their appetizers, her parents were exchanging glances or her father was sitting back against the leather booth, his arms folded across his chest, and staring over Felix’s shoulder at the fish in the restaurant’s aquarium. Felix just couldn’t stop pretending he was the Crown Prince of Hollywood because his father was an A-list director and he himself had a few screenplay credits. By dessert, Felix was getting the rapier-like slice of the Richard Tedesco side-eye.
She wanted to tell Felix, this isn’t who you are. This isn’t the man I married. This isn’t how you are when we’re alone, and this isn’t the man I love.
And so when they said good night to their parents and sent them off to the hotel, when it was just the two of them in their jazzy little Thunderbird （a wedding gift from Felix’s parents）， she started to tell him all that. But he was morose and drunk and she wanted him to focus on the road, especially when she thought of how his poor sister had died. And so she said nothing, and an idea came to her and it gave her pause: what if this is the man that I married?
* * *
.?.?.
And now these white men with their Russian accents were telling her to get up off the ground, this dry Serengeti soil, barking their orders. They were commanding her and Reggie and Felix to stand up. She looked at her husband and the tawny dust that his tears had glued to his face, and how he wasn’t moving.
“Get up!” one of the men hollered at him, kicking him in the ribs with his foot, the sound of his boot against Felix’s side reminiscent of the thud of her mother’s mallet on chuck steak on the cutting board. （What women’s magazine recipe was that? The one with the dry onion soup mix? That revolting powder that came in the packet?）
Instead, Felix curled up into a ball, but Reggie took him by his arm and whispered urgently into his ear, “You’re going to stand up and I’m going to be right beside you. You’re okay, Felix, and Carmen’s okay.” Then, with a strength that Carmen had always suspected Reggie had but had never seen, he practically lifted her husband to his feet.