The Actor and the Housewife (10 page)

Maybe that was why Becky didn’t notice Mike at first—he wasn’t making the whole room laugh or wowing them with brilliant insights and obscure knowledge. But then again, all the other guys seemed to be trying so hard, flexing their muscles and wit anytime a girl was in the room. Mike just
was
—vulnerable and strong and goofy and nice.

Ultimately it had taken an “ah-ha!” moment. They’d been at a potluck in someone’s backyard, a pool party where no one had brought a swimsuit, the chlorinated body of water more of a large, awkward centerpiece. Mike and Becky were at the food table, standing side by side, reaching for the same spoon in the potato salad, and their hands touched.

“Sorry, I got greedy there.” He handed her the spoon and stepped back. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to her.

What a nice voice he has, she thought, noticing how deep and rum-bly, how she felt the sound in her ears and in her belly. While scooping the potato salad, she dredged up what she knew of this guy: spying Mike on campus with his freakishly smart sister Virginia, talking and laughing not like siblings but close friends; a movie night crammed into someone’s basement, when the host played a few moments of a pornographic movie and laughed at everyone’s surprise, and Mike quietly got up and left the room; Mike arriving late for a pizza-making party but still taking the time to crouch down and chat with the host’s five-year-old brother.

Mike. Michael Jack. She looked at him then, noticed him, the pleasing oval of his face, his straight blond hair falling down his forehead, how much larger he was than her, large enough that she’d feel tiny inside his arms. She liked how she felt standing next to him, and with a thrill that shocked her scalp and ran like lightning down her spine, she thought, I could be happy beside him for the rest of my life.

“Hey, Mike,” she said, meaning, Wow, I just noticed you and this could be happily-ever-after, pal.

“Hey, Becky,” he said with a smile, and she realized how often he was near her, quiet but leaning forward, listening, relishing.

“Want to go eat with me over there?” She nodded toward a cluster of trees hiding a bench, apart from the noise.

So they sat alone and ate and talked. Let’s be honest—it was a Potential Husband interview. Even at age twenty-one, Becky was auditioning guys for the post.

Soon they left the bench to ramble the yard, then went out into the neighborhood, wandering streets until they came upon an empty park. The air temperature was the same as Becky’s skin, making her feel embraced, just another part of the summer night.

Hope and expectation were bubbling inside her, and she felt thrills bigger than roller coaster drops. She wanted to kiss him. That was all she needed. Her friend Melissa was in love with any guy she was kissing at the moment, then complaining to Becky the next day that she’d been confused. But with that most perfect of touches, Becky’s mind and body just knew, and her heart followed.

She’d kissed five guys. Post-kiss, three of them disappeared from her life without a backward glance. Two had electric kisses, stay-and-hold-me kisses, and those boys she’d dated for a good amount of time before one or the other decided to end things. The kisses hadn’t lied, she reasoned—they’d both very nearly secured the post of Mr. Becky.

With Mike that night, it started with a held hand. He took hers as they climbed onto the jungle gym, and then he just kept holding on. Perfect, perfect sensation. A held hand was a hug to her whole body. The conversation drifted away, and she stepped in closer. She rested her head on his shoulder and breathed in. His smell was more delicious than hot chocolate. Gene tic Compatibility had spoken. They had the potential of having beautiful babies.

His brown eyes were warm with the sight of her. He seemed so big and yummy, manly and wonderful. But when his lips first met hers, they were tentative, intruder lips, uncertain lips. She kissed him back, inviting him to fall in love with her. And as he fell deeper and deeper into the kiss, Becky’s heart exploded. Her arms wrapped around his neck and pulled him as close as she could. The kiss left no doubt. She would never be without Mike again.

Smell and kiss aside, three things sealed the deal for Becky:

1. Two weeks later, Mike called to tell her about a new job he’d been offered. She said, “Sounds great. Did you take it?” He said, “I told them I wanted to check with you first.” So it was with Mike—he began to think of her as his partner from the top of that jungle gym and never stopped.

2. Everywhere they went, Mike opened doors for her. Melissa had scoffed at this detail, but truth be known, it made Becky melt.

3. Mike and Becky could curl up on a couch and talk for hours. It never got old.

She’d thought she was in love before, but now those faded relationships seemed quaint and childish. Being in love with Mike lifted her off the ground, swathed her in fuzzy blankets, kept her warm and cozy everywhere she went. Awake or asleep, her heart thrilled, her lips smiled.

The whole world was gilded, water was nectar, cloth was silk on her skin, every child was an angel and every stranger her best friend. Yay! Yay for love and the perfect man and the absolute complete gorgeousness of everything, everything!

Beyond the rich emotions pouring through her, she felt herself change at the core. Mike merged into her every thought and action and hope and plan, her existence transforming from Becky-ness to Becky-with-Mike-ness. Five months after their first kiss, they were married. And the explosion of Mike in her life only expanded with each baby. They were a
family
. That word alone felt stronger in Becky’s mind than “army” or “fortress” or “Justice League.”

That’s why it never crossed Becky’s mind that Felix’s friendship could threaten her marriage. That little kick she got after talking with Felix was a star prick compared with Mike’s sunlight.

So when Felix returned to Los Angeles, she didn’t hesitate to call the number he’d given her just to check on his trip. He called a few days later when he was bored during a break in some production meeting. Soon she was phoning him whenever she thought of something that would amuse him, and they’d have brief, bright conversations. She didn’t need to talk long—five minutes, and she’d get that jolt, that goofy happiness that made the day a little better. It took a few weeks before “Hi Felix, it’s Becky” turned into “Hey, it’s me,” and eventually . . .

“Hello?”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes.” Felix groaned. “I was hoping you hadn’t.”

“Did you really tell
Vanity Fair
that you’re more Cary Grant than Sean Connery?”

Another groan.

“And say, and I quote, ‘I think women love me because of my world-weariness, my droll outtake on this absurd life. They feel that emptiness in themselves and recognize it in me. Mutual understanding is sexy.’ ”

“For the love of—please, not another word!”

“I’m going to put that on a T-shirt—Mutual Understanding Is Sexy.”

“Interviewers coerce you into these statements,” he said, his voice a little desperate. “They ask you leading questions and push you into saying something idiotic, and then print your stuttered reply as if it represented your core philosophy.”

“Yeah, I understand what you’re saying.” She paused. “Wait . . . I
understand
. That means I’m sexy!”

“Stop! I’m begging you!”

“Do you know what’s funny? I mean, besides that interview. I thought everything you said was adorable.”

“Adorable. That’s just what I was going for.”

“No, really. Every word you said. Even when you were being arrogant and narrow, I just wanted to pinch those three-days-unshaven cheeks. I must be completely smitten with you—I mean . . .” That had sounded wrong. “Platonically. Smitten platonically.”

His voice was low and sweet when he answered, “I know what you meant.”

She exhaled. “Good.”

Felix knew. And Mike understood too, or so she thought. This would work. Becky was going to keep her new Augie.

In which Becky employs a positive reinforcement lollipop

She thought of phoning her parents, sister, brothers, sisters-in-law, neighbors, the local news—not to brag to them, mind you, but it was
such
a story and she was bursting to spill the beans. In the end, the first to hear was the last person Becky wanted to tell: her oldest friend, Melissa.

Melissa was in the movie business, a freelance second assistant director in Salt Lake City. Being in the off-off Hollywood movie biz, she not only knew who Felix was; she would care
very
much about Becky’s news. Melissa had already heard about Felix Callahan showing up to the screenwriting presentation—her face had turned almost as purple as her hair. If Becky didn’t come clean about the whole story, the day Melissa found out from another source would mark the end of their friendship. It almost did anyhow.

“What the hell do you mean Felix Callahan is your friend?” Melissa demanded over the phone.

Becky couldn’t help smiling—not at Melissa’s question, but at the way it sounded. That sweet baby voice, that squeak of anger in the upper registers. Endearing.

“He is, sort of. Well, not really, he’s—”

“Oh, you really had me for a second! You goofball.”

“What I mean is, Felix and I . . . you know how sometimes you meet someone and
bam!
Just like that there’s some connection and it feels as if you’ve been friends for years? Is there a word for that? Like ‘metabuddy,’ but something real?”

A pause. “Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish? Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Felix Callahan and me. We’re sort of friends now.”

“Elucidate the ‘sort of’ part.”

“We took a pinky pledge.”

“You took a pinky pledge.”

“Yeah, it was funny but kind of sweet too.”

“What are you saying? Do you guys, like, hang out or something?”

“Well, he’s in England right now, but we talk.”

“You talk.”

“Yeah, every so often. About once a week.”

“Who calls whom?”

“We take turns. He called last night.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“But . . . but you’re the last person . . . I mean, I can imagine Shauna or Ava going off to California and coming back with some famous best friend, but you? I know you liked him in that movie, but you’re just not the type.” She took a breath. “Are you still serious?”

“Still serious.”

There were rustling and stomping sounds, then Melissa’s voice strained as though it hurt her throat to talk. “Do you know that at this very moment I have a picture of Felix Callahan taped to my headboard? Between Johnny Depp and Bono?”

“I know.”

“I think I hate you.”

“He’s married and so am I, obviously. Mike’s met him. There’s nothing remotely romantic about this. We just clicked, somehow.”

“Okay, I know I hate you.”

At that point, Melissa availed herself of more colorful diction—especially of the color blue. Per usual, Becky tried to shush her back to the straight and narrow but without much fervor. She couldn’t help herself—she found Melissa’s squeaky voice speaking those words just as cute (and wrong, but still cute) as a waterskiing squirrel.

The same sort of conversation went on for a month, straining the friendship to the point of ripping.

“It hurts her,” Becky told Mike.

Mike didn’t have much patience with the sob story. “If I’m putting up with it, then so should she. What right does she have to get mad at you for making other friends?”

Becky glowed when he got riled up on her behalf. The big sweetie. But it was easier for her to feel tolerant of Melissa’s occasional tantrums, knowing her history. They had met at a community theater where Becky’s parents dragged the whole family several months out of the year. Alice and Casper Hyde swore it was so the family could spend quality time together making art, but Becky had often suspected her parents just wanted to perform in plays without having to pay babysitters. Becky often won speaking parts because she was fearless and had personality, though she didn’t get any particular high from it.

On the other hand, Melissa’s home felt like a half-dug grave. She dove headfirst into theater with a duffle bag full of needs. Her unusual voice relegated her to bit parts, but she dreamed of a playbill with her name at the top and a script so thickly highlighted with her own lines it glowed. It wasn’t fair that Becky didn’t care and yet still got her photograph in the program.

Unfulfilled and too often rejected, Melissa abandoned live theater for film production. Now, here was Becky making friends with a film star—that should be Melissa’s territory. Again, it wasn’t fair. Becky agreed, but she wasn’t going to give up her famous friend to placate Melissa’s jealousy.

Still the tension got exhausting, so Becky tried to work out the resentment from another angle, engaging Melissa in the “why” discussions.

“I don’t understand why he wants to be my friend.”

“Pheromones,” said Melissa.

“No. No! No way. No chance Felix is attracted to me. Not all men are shallow about physical appearance, but I would bet my dishwasher Felix is. He doesn’t even think of me as a woman—more as some kind of large, humanoid insect.”

“What do you guys talk about anyway?” Melissa was sitting on Becky’s counter, sorting through a bowl of popcorn for the half-popped kernels.

“Nothing.” Becky smeared peanut butter on toast for Hyrum. “That’s the thing. It’s not like we’re unloading deep secrets and purging our souls onto each other. We just . . . laugh, I guess.”

“So there you go—you make him laugh.”

“But he could hang out with the likes of Chris Farley and Lily Tomlin if he wanted.”

“Maybe there’s some novelty about a guy like him having a random Utah housewife for a friend.”

“Sure, he’s the reverse of me in L.A. In Utah he’s the anthropologist, taking notes home to Celeste Bodine to make her laugh. ‘Four children she has,’ he’ll say, ‘and no help! She actually cleans her own house and makes her own dinner!’ ”

“ ‘And she dresses like a circus tent,’ ” Melissa said in strained, lower tones, as if imitating Felix’s tenor.

It was true. Becky was in a red and white striped shirt, a choice made even more regrettable by the fact that it was three sizes too large, as her body was still pulled and stretched in so many directions as to make her pre-pregnancy wardrobe look like doll clothes.

“Send in the clowns.” Becky smoothed her hair around her face. “But at least I have a rockin’ hairdo, thanks to my best friend.”

Melissa leaned forward and gave Becky an uncharacteristic hug. A heavily hair-sprayed lock of Melissa’s purple-streaked hair stabbed Becky in the eye, but other than the pain, it was a tender moment.

“Melissa’s okay with it now, I think,” Becky told Felix on the phone a few days later. “But if Celeste doesn’t work out, she says she’d like to buy you a plate of cheese fries and discuss your future together. Or just skip to the making out.”

“Excellent.”

“Yeah, I think it’d be best to avoid Melissa next time you’re in town.”

“Oh, will I be in town?”

“Friends should visit each other. Haven’t you seen
Beaches
?”

“It’s my all-time favorite film.”

“Really?”

There was such absolute silence Becky imagined Felix didn’t breathe, blink, or swallow.

“That’s what I thought,” Becky said. “Anyway, if we don’t get to see each other, it won’t make sense for me to take care of you someday when you die slowly of a terrible illness. Besides, it’s logical for you to come here. Salt Lake is between London and L.A., and my family of six won’t be making a trip to En gland anytime soon. Even if we had the cash, imagine entertaining an infant and a four-year-old on a transatlantic flight.”

“I lack the imagination, Zeus be praised.” He paused. “I’d pay for your airfares, you know.”

“Please. That is never going to happen, Mr. I’m-So-Wealthy. Don’t run up your platinum card on me—go save some endangered species.”

“It wouldn’t be a—”

“Never.”

“It’s not as though—”

“Not gonna happen.”

“It would be—”

“In your dreams.”

After one phone call that broached the subject of religion, Becky sent Felix a copy of
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus
Christ
. Before it had even reached him, Becky received a package from Felix—
The Invention of Religion: How the Powerful Few Made Fools Out
of the Ignorant Many
.

She tried to read it for Felix’s sake, and to prove mightily to him and everyone else that she
was
open-minded, thank you very much! So what that she belonged to the same church as her parents had before her—it wasn’t blind following or laziness; she’d made a choice! Every night she tackled a chapter, even going so far as to make notes in the margins. But she found the book so boring and irrelevant to her life that she soon relegated it to some lower shelf. She gathered that her gift to him had embraced a similar fate. They didn’t bother about spiritually enlightening the other again, except for the occasional jabs.

“Hello, this is your liver speaking,” Becky said when he answered the phone. “Lay off the booze, bozo, or I’m shutting down and cutting you off from all that sweet, sweet bile.”

“I’ll climb aboard the hideously dull temperance wagon when you confess that god is a scam and we’re merely the off spring of evolved apes.”

“You are hysterical! Anyone ever tell you that you could be in show business? I mean it, baby. You’ve got potential.”

When weeks sloughed off since the last phone call, Becky thought about Felix in a distant, dreamlike way. Were they really friends? It couldn’t be. She changed Sam’s poopy diaper and thought, what on earth does such a man have to do with my mothering, house keeping day-after-day life? She glimpsed his face on a magazine cover and thought, what on earth do I have to do with his glitzy fast-lane highbrow life?

So she determined not to bother him anymore, and really believed, in the exquisite way she had of innocently playing the martyr, that he would never call again.

Then a few days later . . . “Hallo, you loon. What passes as news?”

His voice was cozy against her ear, his conversation like play, and she ran loose with it, happy as a toddler in a room full of balls.

“Yo ho ho!” she said, holding the phone on her ear while unloading groceries.

“Repeat that?”

“It’s National Talk like a Pirate Day. Didn’t you know?”

“Somehow I missed the memo.”

“You mean, ‘Somehow I missed the memo, arrr!’ ”

“Precisely. Arr. So, Mrs. Jack . . . er, is that still your name? Or, I tremble to ask, have you adopted a pirate identity?”

“Arr, matey, of course I have! It’s . . .” She pulled an eggplant from the grocery bag. “. . . Captain Eggplantier.” She needed to stop speaking the first words that popped into her mind.

“Captain Eggplantier.” He sounded very doubtful.

“That’s right. A family name. It’s Belgian.”

“You don’t say. I didn’t realize there was a
Belgian
language.”

“Most definitely.”

“And what is this language called?”

“Waffle.”

“Ah-ha.”

“And this brings me to today’s burning question, Mr. Callahan. Why on earth are you calling me? Why haven’t you run for your life?”

“No one crosses Captain Eggplantier and lives! Arrr!”

“Ooh, that was good!” She was sincerely impressed. It had been a superb pirate accent.

Felix sighed as if getting serious. “Lord knows I have tried to run, Mrs. . . . er,
Captain
Jack. I’ve gone to every doctor in England, but you have no antidote.”

“Don’t say ‘Lord’ unless you mean it.”

“Oh, but I do mean it. Good Lord, but I mean it.”

“Please flick yourself in the forehead for me.”

“Ouch.”

“Good boy. Now each time you take the Lord’s name in vain, flick yourself again.”

“Why would calling on the Lord’s name ever be in vain if he were really there to listen?”

“Also you should flick yourself each time you’re obnoxious.”

“Now you’ve gone too far. I’d be too bruised to show my face on camera.”

“You’re right. Besides, all the books say we should focus on positive reinforcement. Call me each time you had the opportunity to be obnoxious but stopped yourself, and I’ll put a sticker on your sticker chart. When you fill it up, you get a lollipop!”

“Mmm, lollipop. You’ve got my number, darling, indeed you do.”

It took Felix a year to fill up the chart. Becky sent him a package—a single Dum Dum wrapped in a yard of cellophane with a note that said, “We’re so proud of you!” signed by all six of the Jacks (Becky signing on behalf of eighteen-month-old Sam—she had his permission).

Mike sighed as he signed. “I don’t even want to know what it means. I have a feeling I couldn’t comprehend it.”

It had been a year and a half since the Valentine’s Ball. Felix was busy—in France with Celeste, at home in London, working in Los Angeles, shooting on location in New York or Australia or Toronto. Becky suggested driving the family out to California, but twelve hours with a one-year-old (and five-, eight-, and eleven-year-olds) intimidated Becky so much she consumed half a bag of Oreos just at the thought.

“If we’re going to take a trip,” Mike said, “why don’t we go visit my brother in Vernal? We haven’t gone to Dinosaurland since Fiona was five, and that’s a heck of a lot closer and less expensive than L.A.”

“But Felix isn’t in Vernal.”

“The kids don’t care about seeing Felix.”