The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

LET’S PICK UP HERE TOMORROW,” Evelyn says. The sun set long ago. As I look around, I notice the remains of breakfast, lunch, and dinner scattered across the room.

“OK,” I say.

“By the way,” she adds as I start to pack up. “My publicist got an e-mail today from your editor. Inquiring about a photo shoot for the June cover.”

“Oh,” I say. Frankie has checked in on me a few times now. I know I need to call her back, update her on this situation. I’m just . . . not sure of my next move.

“I take it you haven’t told them the plan,” Evelyn says.

I place my computer in my bag. “Not yet.” I hate the slight tint of sheepishness that comes out when I say it.

“That’s fine,” Evelyn says. “I’m not judging you, if that’s what you’re worried about. God knows I’m no defender of the truth.”

I laugh.

“You’ll do what you need to do,” she says.

“I will,” I say.

I just don’t know what, exactly, that is yet.

* * *

WHEN I GET home, the package from my mother is sitting just inside my building’s door. I pick it up, only to realize that it’s incredibly heavy. I end up pushing it across the tile floor with my foot. I pull it, one step at a time, up the stairs. And then I drag it into my apartment.

When I open the box, it’s filled with some of my father’s photo albums.

The front of each is embossed with “James Grant” in the bottom right-hand corner.

Nothing can stop me from sitting down, right on the floor where I am, and looking through the photos one by one.

On-set still photos of directors, famous actors, bored extras, ADs—you name it, they are all in here. My dad loved his job. He loved taking pictures of people who weren’t paying attention to him.

I remember once, about a year before he died, he took a two-month job in Vancouver. My mom and I went to visit him twice while he was up there, but it was so much colder than L.A., and he was gone for what felt like so long. I asked him why. Why couldn’t he just work at home? Why did he have to take this job?

He told me he wanted to do work that invigorated him. He said, “You have to do that, too, Monique. When you’re older. You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small. OK? You promise me that?” He put out his hand, and I shook it, like we were making a business deal. I was six. By the time I was eight, we’d lost him.

I always kept what he said in my heart. I spent my teenage years with a burning pressure to find a passion, one that would expand my soul in some way. It was no small task. In high school, long after we had said good-bye to my father, I tried theater and orchestra. I tried joining the chorus. I tried soccer and debate. In a moment of what felt like an epiphany, I tried photography, hoping that the thing that expanded my father’s heart might expand my own.

But it wasn’t until I was assigned to write a profile piece on one of my classmates in my composition class freshman year at USC that I felt anything close to a swelling in my chest. I liked writing about real people. I liked finding evocative ways of interpreting the real world. I liked the idea of connecting people by sharing their stories.

Following that part of my heart led me to J school at NYU. Which led to my internship at WNYC. I followed that passion to a life of freelancing for embarrassing blogs, living check to check and hand to mouth, and then, eventually, to the Discourse, where I met David when he was working on the site’s redesign, and then to Vivant and now to Evelyn.

One small thing my dad said to me on a cold day in Vancouver has essentially been the basis of my entire life’s trajectory.

For a brief moment, I wonder if I would have listened to him if he hadn’t died. Would I have clung to his every word so tightly if his advice had felt unlimited?

At the end of the last photo album, I come across candids that don’t appear to be from a movie set. They were taken at a barbecue. I recognize my mom in the background of some of them. And then, at the very end, is one of me with my parents.

I can’t be more than four years old. I am eating a piece of cake with my hand, looking directly into the camera, as my mother holds me and my father has his arm around us. Most people still called me by my first name, Elizabeth, back then. Elizabeth Monique Grant.

My mom assumed I’d grow up to be a Liz or a Lizzy. But my father had always loved the name Monique and couldn’t help but call me by it. I would often remind him that my name was Elizabeth and he would tell me that my name was whatever I wanted it to be. When he passed away, it became clear to both my mother and me that I should be Monique. It eased our pain ever so slightly to honor every last thing about him. So my pet name became my real name. And my mother often reminds me that my name was a gift from my father.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood.

I was in school before I met another person who looked like me. Her name was Yael. Her father was Dominican, and her mother was from Israel. She liked to play soccer. I liked to play dress-up. We could rarely agree on anything. But I liked that when someone asked her if she was Jewish, she said, “I’m half Jewish.” No one else I knew was half something.

For so long, I felt like two halves.

And then my father died, and I felt like I was one-half my mother and one-half lost. A half that I feel so torn from, so incomplete without.

But looking at this picture now, the three of us together in 1986, me in overalls, my father in a polo, my mother in a denim jacket, we look like we belong together. I don’t look like I am half of one thing and half of another but rather one whole thing, theirs. Loved.

I miss my dad. I miss him all the time. But it’s moments like this, when I’m on the precipice of finally doing work that might just expand my heart, that I wish I could at least send him a letter, telling him what I’m doing. And I wish that he could send me one back.

I already know what he would write. Something like “I’m proud of you. I love you.” But still, I’d like to get one anyway.

* * *

“ALL RIGHT,” I say. My spot at Evelyn’s desk has become my second home. I’ve come to rely on Grace’s morning coffee. It has replaced my usual Starbucks habit. “Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. You’re about to start Little Women. Go.”

Evelyn laughs. “You’ve become an old hand at this,” she says.

“I learn quickly.”