The Actor and the Housewife

by Shannon Hale

  So she kept the Saturdays in autumn so packed with amusement and frivolity that no one (especially Becky) could slow down to realize what they weren’t.

  One week after Felix’s sudden departure, the Jacks did something for everyone: a picnic up the canyon for Fiona, who loved the early autumn colors (though Becky refused to acknowledge them, the traitors); back to civilization to fetch ice cream sundaes for Hyrum; a jaunt farther west to look for buffalo on Antelope Island for Polly; and some free running on the white beaches for Sam, sending kamikaze kites into the frantic, gusty sky. Mike was magic with kites, keeping those be-tailed jewels aloft in hurricane or vacuum. He put Hyrum on his shoulders and chased down the wind, the string trying in vain to tear loose from his iron hand.

  It had been a sweater day, sunshiny with the sky a summer blue, the grasses a shy shade of green. It had been nonstop good times, and when they drove home, all the kids (except stubborn Hyrum) fell asleep in the car.

  Becky dressed sleeping bodies into jammies and tucked them in, leaving Mike to coax Hyrum down, and had just collapsed on the couch when the phone rang.

  You’ll never guess who it was. Becky certainly didn’t.

  “Hello, Rebecca.”

  “Celeste?”

  “This is not too late? I didn’t wake you?”

  “No, you’re fine. It’s about eight. Where are you?”

  “Milan.”

  “Isn’t it the middle of the night there?”

  “Is it? I never sleep. Felix is here with me.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes, he flew out. He must leave tomorrow. He can be impetuous, but only when he is running away from something. I think he was running away from you.”

  Becky sighed. “Yeah, he cut his visit short and fl ed like a rabbit from a fox.”

  “What happened, Rebecca?”

  “I think he glimpsed for the first time who I am, you know, here in my home with my people around me, and it disgusted him.”

  “Not disgust. Fear. He is a frightened little boy. He was afraid of who he was in that place, I would suppose, just as he is still afraid of who he was in Devonshire. What does it say about a man that he never returns to the town of his childhood? You see what I mean.”

  This was good stuff , and Becky didn’t so much as breathe, afraid to set Celeste off track. But Felix’s voice crackled in the background.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Rebecca, of course.”

  “What? What are you—” He began to rant in French, and Celeste ranted back. Oh, why hadn’t Becky studied French in high school? It almost killed her to know that intensely interesting things were being tossed around and she couldn’t understand a word. But she soaked up every inflection—Felix was annoyed, embarrassed, and Celeste was soothing but stubborn. Then she sighed.

  “I am apologetic. I have spoken quickly because I’m French and I love this man. This silly, silly man.” Celeste laughed. “They are so much trouble, aren’t they, Rebecca?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “I was curious what happened, but now he is standing here, wide awake with the jet lag, and looking at me in such a way—”

  Sounds of someone handling the phone receiver, a pause, then Felix’s voice. “Hello, Becky.”

  “Hi,” Becky said with a laugh. “You, uh, you’ve concerned your wife a bit.”

  “She’s fine. She’s used to me. Aren’t you, Celeste?”

  A faint voice shouted back, “The stories I could share, Rebecca!”

  “Yes, let’s just put a stop to that, shall we? Celeste, shoo. Shoo, my love. Yes, I worship your very shadow, your body is the Elysian Fields, I will fall upon a sword at your command—now please shoo before you say anything else.” There were shuffling sounds, Celeste calling something back, perhaps a farewell, then a door clicked shut.

  Felix groaned. “She means well.”

  “She’s fantastic!” Becky said, though mourning the stories Celeste could but didn’t tell. “So, it was that bad? That you couldn’t just leave Layton behind but had to flee the entire continent?”

  “Mm,” Felix said noncommittally. His voice went raw. “I am sorry I left like that.”

  “It’s okay. You don’t belong here. You were a wild toad caught in a mason jar.”

  “With a stick and a leaf.”

  “Hold on . . . am I the stick in this metaphor? Because I have lost some weight . . .”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing. There was something uncomfortable about it.”

  “I can’t imagine what.”

  “Certainly not The Little Mermaid comforter. That felt oh-so-right.”

  There was a curl in his voice that implied a smile. So she smiled back across two continents and an ocean. Maybe he heard the smile, because his voice relaxed, and she was talking to Felix again.

  They fell into their old rhythm of conversation, though at first it was more habit than sincere, a stale awkwardness filling in the spaces between words. Becky tried to keep the conversation light, harmless, deftly skirting the topic of her aggressively happy neighbors, or Hyrum singing “I Am a Child of God,” or how Becky could possibly be at home both at the church potluck and as Felix’s chum. Their conversation wandered from The Little Mermaid to dinosaurs, comic book superhero movies to the reasons Canadians weren’t as neutral as they seemed. Then before the energy could start to dwindle, before there was a pause where they’d have to listen to the silence and consider what hadn’t worked, they said good-bye.

  Becky stayed on the couch for a few moments, just feeling glad. So glad. She’d never given that word much thought before, never paused to experience it as a valid emotion, a stable kind of happiness, a glow that warmed but didn’t overwhelm. It used to seem like a throwaway emotion that just sat in her chest, smiling awkwardly. But now it was perfect.

  She went in the bedroom where Mike was dumping himself onto the bed with a groan.

  “Long day,” he said. “Good day.”

  “Tired?” she asked.

  “Yeah. But good tired. How do you feel?”

  “Yeah. But “Glad.”

  “Mmm,” he said, rolling over. She thought he might be near sleep, so she didn’t explain. Sometimes he took a twenty-minute nap in the evening to sustain him, then he was good again till midnight. But Becky wasn’t tired anymore. She dimmed the bedroom lights and went down to the kitchen, cleaning out the fridge while humming “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Glad was not a boring emotion after all. Glad was awfully nice.

  Becky wasn’t surprised when Felix phoned on Sunday, and they talked for five minutes about nothing. She was surprised, however, when he called Monday as well. She picked up the telephone to clean refried beans off the receiver, accidentally answering it before it had rung. She was using her fingernail to loosen dried brown smears out of the mouth speaker when she heard a British voice say, “Hello? Hello, is someone there?”

  She dropped the phone then brought it hurriedly to her ear, smearing refried beans on her cheek.

  “Hi! Um, Felix? Is that you?”

  “It was.”

  “Sorry, I was cleaning the phone. There was a refried beans incident and—”

  “Those qualify as ‘incidents’?”

  “They do when your marvelous toddler manages to get bean gunk into every crevice of a crevice-prone phone.”

  “That’s all I needed. Good-bye.”

  The line went silent, and she stood, stunned, gloppy phone in hand.

  He called again on Tuesday, and they spoke a little longer. Soon almost every day included a quick conversation with Felix. His calls were like polishing off a Snickers bar at four in the afternoon to hold her over till dinner.

  Felix rarely offered info about the movie business and his exotic exploits; their talks maintained a fluffy, frivolous tone. But curious about what stories Celeste could have told, Becky got Felix to reveal slivers of his past. Eventually she was able to piece together a snapshot.

&nbs
p; It would seem that as soon as Felix was old enough to think about girls as anything other than pests, his good looks won him admirers. The older girls pulled him into corners at school, grabbed him in the corridors, sent him witty love notes. Felix studied the movies of Sean Connery and Cary Grant and picked up some charmer skills, playing up his youth and innocence, feigning sheepishness to lure them in. At age fifteen, a girl about to leave for Oxford took it upon herself to teach him the ways of the world. He didn’t go into great detail about this event (not that Becky would have allowed it), but she gathered it was at once shocking and life altering. A new world opened up—easy, uncommitted love. Theater, and eventually film, became a means of widening the playground.

  “Before Celeste, I thought committing to one woman was complete rubbish,” he said.

  Then in 1992 he attended a charity banquet, and the model Celeste Bodine shared his table. He was fascinated—the words she spoke, the movement of her body. She was gorgeous in every way. She spurned him that night. The infatuation grew hotter and he pursued. Surely once the chase ended, he would grow tired of her. He didn’t.

  “Let me see if I can explain without sounding like a nancy boy,” Felix said. “Being with her, I felt myself change, as if down to the atoms I was rearranging, becoming a person who only needed one woman. I lost the desire to conquer lovely young women or go out at night and get pissed as a newt. Even bad reviews, which used to unsettle me for days, barely touched me anymore. I felt myself become, first, the man who loved Celeste, and second, everything else. I never in my younger years imagined this would happen, but I knew I had found my soul mate.” He cleared his throat. “So much for not sounding like a nancy.”

  Becky in turn couldn’t help gushing about Mike now and then. She seldom mentioned the children, because it seemed to make Felix uncomfortable, and covered the handset when she spoke inevitable asides such as “We don’t eat gravel, Sam. We are not chickens.” If Polly was home from school with a stomachache when Felix called (as she was about once a week), she would speak with him or sing a duet across fiber-optic lines.

  One time Becky started to tell Felix a mothering story, thinking it was funny, but it morphed into something else altogether.

  “This morning Hyrum came to me with a booger hanging out of his nose, hollering ‘Mom, help! Help, Mom, help!’ He refuses to wipe his own nose. He’s so independent in so many ways, but with his nose, he’s still a baby.”

  “That is revolting.”

  “I know! I mean, I know it should be. But what was funny was how I felt a rush of warmth at the privilege that I was the one this boy would go to for help. I know that sounds ludicrous, but I felt so happy I kissed him all over his face. After I wiped his nose.”

  “Yes, I was going to ask that.”

  “I’m continually shocked by how much I feel for these kids. I don’t know if I can even explain it, let alone comprehend it. You know Michelangelo’s La Pietà?”

  “Of course I do. I own it.”

  “What do you mean you own it?”

  “Well, I’ve seen it. And I purchased the ticket to see it with my very own money. So in a sense—”

  “Anyhoo, the first time I saw it—”

  “You were in Italy? I can’t imagine you in Italy.”

  “No, not in Italy. I’ve never even been out of the country, unless Arizona counts.”

  “Never? Are you mad? That’s—”

  “Shush, I’m telling you a story! I was young, maybe ten or fourteen, and I saw a photograph of La Pietà in a textbook. I remember being stunned by its beauty. But after I had children, I saw a photo of it again, and this time I actually sat down and cried. As a mother, the meaning of Mary holding her son’s body changed for me so completely, I wondered how I’d seen any significance in it before.”

  There was a pause.

  “That got kinda serious, didn’t it?”

  “So . . .” Felix said. “Seen Nubbin lately?”

  Sometimes she happened to be talking to Felix when Mike got home from work.

  “Gotta go, my man’s here,” she’d say and hang up.

  “Felix?” Mike would ask.

  “Yep.” And she’d repeat some bite of conversation to help Mike feel included.

  “Felix went bowling last night because Celeste had never been. Time after time he knocked down every pin except the one right in the middle, and he thinks that’s the bowling equivalent of getting the bird.”

  Or, “Felix spent twelve hours in a milk sauna because Entertainment Weekly used the word ‘weathered’ to describe his face. Celeste said he smelled like goat for a week.”

  Mike was being awfully good natured about his wife’s male friend, and she tried to be careful not to push it. Most of the time, anyway. One fateful Thursday in the spring, two-year-old Sam pried open a childproof cabinet and knocked a jar of pear preserves onto the linoleum. Fortunately Becky arrived in time to pull him from the disaster area before he’d taken a step, but in the process a glass shard stuck between her toes. There was something entirely vulgar about glass and jam mixed with blood. She locked Sam in his room to keep him safe while she bandaged herself then scraped up preserves and glass.

  And things went downhill from there. The furnace stopped working, the car wouldn’t start, Fiona and Polly missed piano lessons, two separate neighbors had emergencies and asked Becky to watch their kids, so she had eleven children running around her house—one of them had a penchant for yanking on blinds, and another climbed on the kitchen table, disrupting her careful piles of tax papers. At five thirty P.M. she ushered all non-Jack children home, peeled a frozen lasagna out of the freezer, and answered the phone. Felix. She felt her body soften from shoulders to knees.

  Then Mike walked in.

  Now, Mike never noticed if the toilet bowls developed hard-water stains or the counters were sticky, but clutter made his neck cramp. Before even greeting the kids, his gaze fell on the floor littered with blocks and various and sundry plastic ponies, then jumped to the table smeared with receipts, bills, and bank statements, and the kitchen counter teeming with food-encrusted dishes. He looked at Becky, the phone in her hand, and his features tightened in barely restrained condemnation as he said, “This place is a disaster.”

  She bristled.

  Normally Becky would have hung up the phone and said to Mike, “Honey, can you help me reach something in the closet?”—their code for “Please come into the bedroom so I don’t have to yell at you in front of the children.” Did he think she couldn’t see the mess? He had to rub it in with that self-righteous little gleam? And after the day she’d had? While he was leaning back in his cozy office chair making calls and answering e-mail, did he imagine she had her feet up too, sipping cold drinks and watching Oprah? Well. She was revving up to throw some blame back at her quick-to-judge-an-untidy-house-and-blame-the-wife husband. Then her hand tightened on the receiver and she realized she held in her hand the ultimate weapon.

  “Oh hi, honey,” she said casually, already leaving the kitchen. “Dinner’s in the oven. Mind cleaning up for me while I finish this call?”

  Teach him to glare at me, she thought, plopping down on the couch, the long cord stretching the coils smooth. Teach him to judge my housekeeping skills. Let him wallow around in the mess for a bit.

  “I’m back, Felix,” she said.

  “That’s fine, darling, just fine,” he said in his best Cary Grant voice.

  She laughed loudly enough that Mike was sure to hear from the kitchen.

  Okay, so that was a little low, but she’d had eleven kids in that house. It’d been rainy, so they’d stayed indoors, blowing from room to room like a twenty-two-legged tornado, twisting blinds, dumping every book off the shelf, waking Sam early from his nap and putting him in a block-throwing and hair-pulling mood. And besides, her foot was throbbing.

  When the oven timer chimed, she said good-bye to Felix and waltzed into the kitchen, gently clicking the receiver back on its cradle. Mike had managed
to tidy up the dishes a tad, but the kitchen table still groaned under the weight of a hundred dead trees.

  “We’re eating outside tonight, guys,” she said.

  “But it’s cold,” Fiona said, frowning at the April night.

  “Then put on a coat!”

  They had to sit on towels because the patio furniture was damp from the rain. When Hyrum spilled his milk, Becky watched the white stream fl ow down the concrete patio into the grass and thought, we should eat outside every night.

  “My lasagna’s cold,” Fiona said in the kind of high, tight voice that only an eleven-year-old girl can truly master.

  “It’s not lasagna; it’s Pasta Chilla, a delicacy in southern Italy. To be really authentic, we should be eating it on a bed of ice. Anyone care for some?”

  “I do!” Hyrum said.

  Becky scooped some crushed ice from her water glass and sprinkled it over Hyrum’s lasagna. He dug in, crunching and grinning. Fiona rolled her eyes, so Hyrum took another bite, chewing loudly by her ear.

  “Yummy!” he said.

  Normally at such times, Becky would share a smile with Mike, but she still felt like a wounded bird, so she kept her eyes on her plate. She could feel him looking at her. She knew he was parsing through everything he’d done recently, clueless and searching for fault, deciding whether he needed to apologize or whether Becky’s mood was ignorable. All through dinner, he wisely kept silent.

  When Becky trudged into her bedroom after tucking in Hyrum for the third time, was Mike out cleaning up the mess he so vehemently despised? No, he was reclining in their reading chair. Becky grumbled.

  “You’re in a mood,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” She stomped around the room, stuffing junk into drawers, ripping her pajamas free of the dresser. “I’m in a mood. How unaccountable, how womanly of me, must be my cycle or something, couldn’t possibly be a reaction to anything specific, because all I do is sit around enjoying my life of leisure.”

  She grabbed the blinds’ cord and yanked it too hard. She startled as the blinds snapped on the sill like the drop of a guillotine. The cord lay disconnected and limp across her palm. She had a flashback to a southern Utah vacation as a little girl when she’d made a snatch for a small gray lizard, pulling back to find the lizard gone but its tail between her fingers.