I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (2 page)

But at the time, understand that I’d never
had so much as a pet goldfish belly up and die on me. So Mom’s
passing sank me down into a well of depression, where one moment I
blamed myself for not being there, the next I would be thanking God
that she didn’t suffer much, and then the next I’d be bawling my
eyes out and stuffing my face with chocolate éclairs to dull the
pain.

But like any good artist, when life gives you
lemons, you go out and make a boatload of lemon-drop martinis. I
did just that, and when I woke up at a friend’s house, naked and in
bed with a producer I sorta-kinda-knew on one side – and
his
girlfriend on the other – I knew it was time to do something more
productive.

So I flat out dumped every single
conventional idea I’d had, chucked out everything in the old film
can of the mind, and headed out to Guatemala with four
shoulder-mounted Cinegraf cameras, a trio of cameramen, two sound
guys, and a partridge in a friggin’ pear tree.

I had gritty thoughts on the brainpan. I’d
been filming stuff that had been controlled. Fake, in the sense
that it was all so very sanitized and safe. If I’d been making
Mexican chalupas, they’d have tasted like someone had made a run to
the local Taco Bell down the block. Mom’s death shook that out of
me, I think.

The little corner of Latin America I’d
plunked myself down in was reaping a bumper crop of unpleasantness
called
Machupo
. For those of you who don’t know what Machupo
is, it’s the local, Latino variant of a nasty virus you can find in
Africa called
Ebola
. Different name, same fun way for
everyone who got the bug to check out: vomiting until your stomach
burst, or leaking blood from every orifice until you ran out of
enough human-juice to carry oxygen to your brain.

We filmed an outbreak of our little
vomit-and-bloody death pal in Chiapas City. Chiapas sits in a
valley, a steamy, tropical hellhole that makes the rest of
Guatemala say,
‘Amigo, I hear you saw Chiapas. Ayyo! Maybe next
time, you visit someplace on the nice side of the tracks, por
favor?

The paint peeling off the stucco and laterite
walls throughout the city looked a million years old. The effect
through the camera lens was awe-inspiringly awful.
Post-apocalypto-tropico
, I dubbed it. When you combined the
peeling paint with the scum-tinted sunshine and the crumbling,
mildewed edges of the buildings, the city itself looked like it had
contracted a fatal case of leprosy.

We took some horrible risks doing the film.
Things I can’t say I’m all that proud of.

Like bringing the entire film crew out to a
field hospital that’d been hacked out of the trackless green
jungle. Abandoned by the local doctors and nurses out of fear of
El Machupo
. Filming people who’d died not more than an hour
before. The smell of gangrenous meat hanging in the air like a
curtain. Eyes sightless, fly-covered and staring at the ceiling
like gluey marbles.

But enough about that.

Suffice it to say that I got the macabre
footage in the can. I brought it back to a studio in Burbank,
locked myself in a basement room with an editor who smoked like a
chimney with a jammed flue, and chopped it into a film that I
titled, in a momentary flash of artistic genius,
Machupo
.

And the work really
was
friggin’
brilliant. I can say that without sounding like an uppity bitch,
because we took it to the Sundance Film Festival out east of Salt
Lake City, Utah.

It
rocked
Sundance.

Hell, it rocked
Robert Redford
.

He gave me that warm smile that had always
made my Mom’s knees buckle, shook my hand, and said, “If it didn’t
make me feel like losing my lunch, I’d be asking for a role in your
follow-up.”

I think that meant that the Sundance Kid
liked it.

Three days later, after all the film crews
and their hangers-on had upped stakes, I was still staying at the
Gower Gulch, one of the town’s better ranch-style hotels. People
from Los Angeles love to bag on places named things like ‘Gower
Gulch’ – calling it kitschy, overdone. But I liked it.

Well, maybe putting the gold-foil wrapped
chunk of jerky on the room pillow instead of a mint was a little
much.

I’d come out on the second-story balcony,
which was made of wide, straight lengths of polished redwood
planking. I took a deep sip of coffee (two sugars, two dashes of
real cream, because I’d decided that calories weren’t going to
count today) and rested my palm on the moist, dewy railing. The
glorious, snow-capped Wasatch Range made up the backdrop. The
mountains were tinged blue by the distance, which added to their
almost unearthly charm. Sunlight slanted in from the east, which
lit up the mountains with an expectant sense of drama.

And right then, that’s when I first saw
Mitchel. When I first met him.

Oh, God.

Give me a moment, okay? It just sounds so
corny, but the way he looked, the way he stepped into the
mise
en scène
of my life, he really looked like he was the answer to
a woman’s dreams.

Like a knight of old, Mitchel rode up towards
me on a white horse. I’m not making that up. Literally, a big white
stallion with an ivory-colored mane, silver-tinted bridle, and a
set of muscles that bulged under the horse’s skin like bunches of
that hemp rope they use to keep ocean liners tied to the dock.

What’s more, Mitchel wore a white ribbed
sweater with a cream-colored shield on his lapel. Printed on the
shield was a golden crown and longbow. It made him look both like a
medieval herald, and a present-day Ivy-league guy gone west. A
Connecticut yuppie in King Arthur’s court, that sort of thing.

I mean, if I’d filmed it for a commercial or
something, even the studio suits – a bunch of people who don’t know
decent art product from their left nut – would have rolled their
eyes and said ‘Don’t you think that’s a wee bit clichéd?’

As for the rest of him, he had clean, sharp
features and stubble-free cheeks. He looked like the man they cast
for the Old Spice after-shave commercials in the 70’s, only with a
neat wave of ebony-colored hair. Mom’s knees wouldn’t just have
buckled, they’d have crumbled to dust.

Eat your heart out, Robert Redford.

I remember sighing a sigh that should have
been followed by a line like ‘Romeo, sweet Romeo, where art thou?
For I’ve been freezing my butt off on this balcony for more than an
hour, you slacker.’

But what actually went through my mind was:
Wow. I’d sure like to meet a man like that. If only he’d ride up
to me and call me by my name.

And right then, right as the thoughts had
done no more than pop into my brain, he did just that.
Abso-friggin’ amazing. He galloped straightaway up the emerald
swath of field, reined in his horse, and looked up at me.

His eyes were the exact shade of blue that
practically leapt off the spring vests hanging in the shops on
Rodeo Drive. Something inside me went
zing!
and melted.

“You must be Mrs. Van Deene,” he said, with a
smile. His voice was deep, full, and perfectly pitched, like a
properly tuned bass bassoon. If we’d been chatting within an hour
of Los Angeles, I’d have sent him over to a voiceover studio to
earn some extra money touting Lexus luxury sedans or Tennessee
whiskey, stat.

“Actually, I’m not Mrs. Van Deene,” I
replied. “You’re thinking of my mom. I’m just Cassie.”

He nodded, as if to store the knowledge in
some kind of inner storage bank, which made me smile. I couldn’t
help myself, for he was such a beautiful man. It sounds kind of
odd, I guess, to describe a man as ‘beautiful’, but his looks
really did fit the word. And I guess I was a little giddy, having
done so well at Sundance, processing the horrors I’d seen in
Central America, short on sleep, long on coffee, all those
things.

Of course, it could have just been that I
hadn’t really had a man between my legs in a while to ride and be
ridden. Could’ve been that part of my anatomy that spoke up loud
and clear. But let’s just put that aside on the shelf next to the
preserves and the sugar-free sweeteners for the moment.

“My apologies, Miss…Cassie. I saw you
standing on the balcony as I came in from the trail, and I wanted
to meet you.”

“That’s flattering. You’ve got good eyes if
you could see me from out there.”

“It’s not as far as it looks. But I
recognized you from the awards ceremony last night. My brothers and
I don’t watch much live entertainment, normally. But we do like to
go to the Sundance Festival, since it’s down the road from our
family’s ranch.”

Brothers? You mean there’s more like you
where you came from? Cassie, maybe you just stumbled into the
mother lode of hot guys.

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed the
festival.”

“I could take it or leave it,” he said with a
dismissive shrug. “What really caught my eye was your film.
Machupo
. You have a talent, an eye, for capturing the
essence of human suffering. I was curious as to what brought it
out.”

I grimaced. “A lot of things. I think you’d
find it boring.”

“I sort of doubt that. Of course, it’s not an
easy thing to discuss at a distance, the way we are right now.”

I nodded. He appeared to be leading up to
something, so I kept quiet. In my experience, it’s never a good
idea to show too much interest in a guy, particularly a looker like
he was. Men love to play hunter, chaser, seeker, while women enjoy
the opposite side of the chase equation. I sometimes wonder if that
wasn’t the reason that high-heeled shoes were invented. So that
women could appear more chase-able while making it more difficult
to actually run away.

“Tell you what, Cassie,” he suggested, “would
you like to join me for brunch at the hotel lounge?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, feigning a
delicate constitution. “It’s early yet, and I never dine with
strange men.”

Another smile crossed his face. Goodness, he
had long, white teeth.

“My name is Mitchel. Mitchel Thantos. So, now
that we’ve been introduced, you won’t be dining with a strange
man.”

“What can I say to that but yes?” I raised my
coffee to him. “See you in, say, half an hour?”

“See you then, Cassie,” He made a clicking
sound with his tongue, a kind of
pop
. The horse turned and
they galloped off.

I still wasn’t sure what to do, what to make
of this Prince Charming character who’d just galloped up to me on
his makeshift Lipizzaner stallion. His outside appearance certainly
looked the part. There was something else about him, though.

Something that struck me as odd, like a
couple frames of porn spliced into a Disney flick. Too short a time
for you to see it consciously. But long enough that you’d leave the
theatre with an unsettled feeling.

A feeling down in the reptile piece of the
brain that told you when to eat, when to flee, when to splurge on
getting your hair styled, and when to say
hell
with it all
and go on the gosh-darned lunch date.

I kept seeing Mitchel Thantos’ toothpaste-ad
worthy smile in a haze of diffused-filter shots. But two lines ran
through my head in counterpoint, like a pair of annoying, recurring
commercial jingles.

Goodness, he had long, white teeth.

The better to EAT you with, my dear.

What I did next is something that you’ll also
find silly, stupid.

So girly.

But when my Scales O’ Decision (term
patent-pending, suitable for royalty use) are so equally balanced,
I always turn to one source. The ultimate Cassie Van Deene decision
tiebreaker.