The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

THE NIGHT AFTER THE NEW article came out, Don was not convinced that it had been the right move, and Harry was busy but wouldn’t say with what, which I knew meant he was seeing someone.

And I wanted to celebrate.

So Celia came over to the house, and we split a bottle of wine.

“You’ve got no maid,” Celia said as she was searching around the kitchen for a corkscrew.

“No,” I said, sighing. “Not until the studio is done vetting all the applicants.”

Celia found the corkscrew, and I handed her a bottle of cabernet.

I never spent much time in the kitchen, and it was sort of surreal to be there without someone looking over my shoulder, offering to make me a sandwich or find whatever I was looking for. When you are rich, parts of your house don’t really feel like they are yours. The kitchen was one of them for me.

I looked through my own cabinets, trying to remember where the wineglasses were. “Ah,” I said when I found them. “Here.”

Celia looked at what I was handing her. “Those are champagne flutes.”

“Oh, right,” I said, putting them back where I’d found them. We had two other sizes. I showed one of each to Celia. “Which?”

“The rounder. Do you not know glassware?”

“Glassware, serving ware, I don’t know any of it. Remember, honey, I’m new money.”

Celia laughed as she poured our drinks.

“I’ve either not been able to afford it or have been so rich someone would do it for me. Never anywhere in between.”

“I love that about you,” Celia said as she took a full glass and handed it to me. She took the other for herself. “I’ve had money my whole life. My parents act as if there is a recognized nobility in Georgia. And all of my brothers and sisters, with the exception of my older brother, Robert, are just like my parents. My sister Rebecca thinks my being in movies is an embarrassment to the family. Not so much because of the Hollywood aspect but because I’m ‘working.’ She says it’s undignified. I love them, and I hate them. But that’s family, I guess.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I . . . don’t have much family. Any, really.” My father and the rest of the relatives I had back in Hell’s Kitchen had not succeeded in contacting me, if they had even tried at all. And I hadn’t lost one night of sleep thinking about them.

Celia looked at me. She appeared to neither pity me nor feel uncomfortable for all that she’d had growing up that I didn’t have. “All the more reason for me to admire you the way I do,” she said. “Everything you have you went out and got for yourself.” Celia leaned her glass into mine and clinked. “To you,” she said. “For being absolutely unstoppable.”

I laughed and then drank with her. “Come,” I said, leading her out of the kitchen and into the living room. I put my drink down on the hairpin-leg coffee table and walked over to the record player. I pulled out Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin from the bottom of the stack. Don hated Billie Holiday. But Don wasn’t there.

“Do you know her real name is Eleanora Fagan?” I said to Celia. “Billie Holiday is just so much prettier.”

I sat down on one of our blue tufted sofas. Celia sat on the one opposite me. She folded her legs underneath her, her spare hand on her feet.

“What’s yours?” she asked. “Is it really Evelyn Hugo?”

I grabbed my wineglass and confessed the truth. “Herrera. Evelyn Herrera.”

Celia didn’t react really. She didn’t say, “So you are Latin.” Or “I knew you were faking it,” as I feared she might be thinking. She didn’t say that it explained why my skin was darker than hers or Don’s. In fact, she said nothing at all until she said, “That’s beautiful.”

“And yours?” I asked. I stood up and moved over to the couch where she was sitting, to close the gap between us. “Celia St. James . . .”

“Jamison.”

“What?”

“Cecelia Jamison. That’s my real name.”

“That’s a great name. Why did they change it?”

“I changed it.”

“Why?”

“Because it sounds like a girl who might live next door to you. And I’ve always wanted to be the kind of girl you feel lucky just to lay your eyes on.” She tilted her head back and finished her wine. “Like you.”

“Oh, stop.”

“You stop. You know damn well what you are. How you affect the people around you. I’d kill for a chest like that and full lips like yours. You make people think of undressing you just by showing up in a room fully clothed.”

I felt flushed hearing her talk about me like that. Having her talk about the way men saw me. I’d never heard a woman talk about me that way before.

Celia took my glass out of my hand. She threw the wine back into her own throat. “We need more,” she said, waving the glass in the air.

I smiled and took both glasses into the kitchen. Celia followed me. She leaned against my Formica counter as I poured.

“The first time I saw Father and Daughter, do you know what I thought?” she said. Billie Holiday was now faintly playing in the background.

“What?” I said, handing her her glass. She took it and put it down for a moment, then hopped up onto the counter and picked it up. She was wearing dark blue capri pants and a white sleeveless turtleneck.

“I thought you were the most gorgeous woman who had ever been created and we should all stop trying.” She inhaled half the contents of her glass.

“No, you did not,” I said.

“Yes, I did.”

I took a sip of my wine. “It makes no sense,” I told her. “You admiring me like you’re any different. You’re a knockout, plain and simple. With your big blue eyes and your hourglass figure . . . I think together we really give the guys a wild sight.”

Celia smiled. “Thank you.”

I finished my glass and put it down on the counter. Celia took it as a challenge to do the same with hers. She wiped her mouth with her fingertips when she was done. I poured us more.

“How did you learn all the underhanded, sneaky stuff you know?” Celia asked.

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” I said coyly.

“You’re smarter than you let on to just about anybody.”

“Me?” I said.

Celia was starting to get goose bumps, so I suggested we go back into the living room, where it was warmer. The desert winds had swooped in and turned this June night into a chilly one. When I started to get cold, too, I asked her if she knew how to make a fire.

“I’ve seen people do it,” she said, shrugging.

“Me too. I’ve seen Don do it. But I’ve never done it.”

“We can do it,” she said. “We can do anything.”

“All right!” I said. “You go open another bottle of wine, and I’ll start trying to guess how to get it started.”

“Great idea!” Celia flung the blanket off her shoulders and ran into the kitchen.

I knelt down in front of the fireplace and started poking the ashes. And then I took two logs and laid them perpendicular to each other.

“We need newspaper,” she said when she came back. “And I’ve decided there’s no point in glasses anymore.”

I looked up to see her swigging the wine out of the bottle.

I laughed, grabbed the newspaper off the table, and threw it in. “Even better!” I said, and I ran upstairs and grabbed the copy of Sub Rosa that had called me a cold bitch. I raced back down to show her. “We’ll burn this!”

I threw the magazine into the fireplace and lit a match.

“Do it!” she said. “Burn those jerks.”

The flame curled the pages, held steady for a moment, and then sputtered out. I lit another match and threw it in.

I somehow managed a few embers and then a very small flame as some of the newspaper caught.

“All right,” I said. “I feel confident that this is slowly coming along.”

Celia came over and handed me the bottle of wine. I took it and sipped from it. “You have a little catching up to do,” she said as I tried to give it back to her.

I laughed and put the bottle back up to my lips.

It was expensive wine. I liked drinking it as if it was water, as if it meant nothing to me. Poor girls from Hell’s Kitchen can’t drink this kind of wine and treat it like it’s nothing.

“All right, all right, give it back,” Celia said.

I teasingly held on to it, not letting it out of my grasp.

Her hand was on mine. She pulled with the same force I did. And then I said, “OK, it’s all yours.” But I said it too late, and I let go too soon.

Wine went all over her white shirt.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I took the bottle, put it down on the table, took her hand, and pulled her up the stairs. “You can borrow a shirt. I have just the perfect one for you.”

I led her into my bedroom and straight into my closet. I watched as Celia looked around, taking in the surroundings of the bedroom I shared with Don.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. Her voice had an airiness to it, a wistfulness. I thought she might ask me if I believed in ghosts or love at first sight.

“Sure,” I said.

“And you’ll promise to tell the truth?” she asked as she took a seat on the corner of the bed.

“Not particularly,” I said.

Celia laughed.

“But go ahead and ask the question,” I said. “And we’ll see.”

“Do you love him?” she asked.

“Don?”

“Who else?”

I thought about it. I had loved him once. I’d loved him very much. But did I love him anymore? “I don’t know,” I said.

“Is it all for publicity? Are you just in it to be an Adler?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“What, then?”

I walked over and sat down on the bed. “It’s hard to say I do or don’t love him or to say that I’m with him for one reason over another. I love him, and a lot of the time I hate him. And I’m with him because of his name but also because we have fun. We used to have fun a lot, and now we still do sometimes. It’s hard to explain.”

“Does he do it for you?” she said.

“Yes, very much. Sometimes I find myself aching to be with him so much it embarrasses me. I don’t know if a woman is supposed to want a man as much as I find myself wanting Don.”

Don may have taught me that I was capable of loving someone and desiring him. But he also taught me that you could desire someone even when you don’t like him, that you can desire someone especially when you don’t like him. I believe today they call it hate-fucking. But it’s a crude name for something that is a very human, sensual experience.

“Forget I asked,” Celia said, standing up from the bed. I could tell she was bothered.

“Let me get the shirt,” I said, walking toward the dresser.

It was one of my favorite shirts, a lilac button-down blouse with a silvery sheen to it. But it didn’t fit me well. I could barely fasten it around my chest.

Celia was smaller than me, more delicate.

“Here,” I said, handing it to her.

She took it from me and looked at it. “The color is gorgeous.”

“I know,” I said. “I stole it from the set of Father and Daughter. But don’t tell anyone.”

“I hope you know by now that all of your secrets are safe with me,” Celia said as she started unbuttoning it to put it on.

I think for her it was a throwaway line. But it meant a lot to me. Not because she said it, I suppose. But because when she said it, I realized I believed her.

“I do,” I said. “I do know that.”

People think that intimacy is about sex.

But intimacy is about truth.

When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “You’re safe with me”—that’s intimacy.

And by those standards, that moment with Celia was the most intimate one I’d ever had with anyone.

It made me so appreciative, so grateful, that I wanted to wrap my arms around her and never let go.

“I’m not sure it will fit me,” Celia said.

“Try it on. I bet it will, and if it does, it’s yours.”

I wanted to give her a lot of things. I wanted what I had to be hers. I wondered if this was what it felt like to love someone. I already knew what it meant to be in love with someone. I’d felt it, and I’d acted it. But to love someone. To care for them. To throw your lot in with theirs and think, Whatever happens, it’s you and me.

“All right,” Celia said. She threw the shirt on the bed. As she pulled off her own shirt, I found myself looking at the paleness of the skin stretched across her ribs. I gazed at the bright whiteness of her bra. I noticed the way her breasts, instead of being lifted by the bra like mine, appeared as if the bra were there merely for decoration.

I followed the tiny trail of dark brown freckles that ran along the side of her right hip.

“Well, hello,” Don said.

I jumped. Celia gasped and scrambled to put her shirt back on.

Don started laughing. “What on earth is going on in here?” he teased.

I walked over to him and said, “Absolutely nothing.”