The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

EVELYN GETS UP OFF THE sofa and picks up the phone, asking Grace to order us dinner from the Mediterranean place on the corner.

“Monique? What would you like? Beef or chicken?”

“Chicken, I guess.” I watch her, waiting for her to sit back down and resume her story. But when she does sit, she merely looks at me. She neither acknowledges what she has just told me nor admits what I’ve been suspecting for some time now. I have no choice but to be direct. “Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“That Celia St. James was gay?”

“I’m telling you the story as it unfolded.”

“Well, yes,” I say. “But . . .”

“But what?” Evelyn is calm, perfectly composed. And I can’t tell if it’s because she knows what I suspect and she’s finally ready to tell the truth or because I’m dead wrong and so she has no idea what I’m thinking.

I’m not sure I want to ask the question before I know the answer.

Evelyn’s lips are together in a straight line. Her eyes are focused directly on me. But I notice, as she’s waiting for me to speak, that her chest is rising and falling at a rapid pace. She’s nervous. She’s not as confident as she’s letting on. She’s an actress, after all. I should know well enough by now that what you see isn’t always what you get with Evelyn.

So I ask her the question in a way that lets her tell me as much, or as little, as she’s ready to say. “Who was the love of your life?”

Evelyn looks me in the eye, and I know she needs one more tiny push.

“It’s OK, Evelyn. Really.”

It’s a big deal. But it is OK. Things are different now from how they were then. Although still not entirely safe, either, I have to admit.

But still.

She can say it.

She can say it to me.

She can admit it, freely. Now. Here.

“Evelyn, who was your great love? You can tell me.”

Evelyn looks out the window, breathes in deeply, and then says, “Celia St. James.”

The room is quiet as Evelyn lets herself hear her own words. And then she smiles, a bright, wide, deeply sincere smile. She starts laughing to herself and then refocuses on me. “I feel like I spent my entire life loving her.”

“So this book, your biography . . . you’re ready to come out as a gay woman?”

Evelyn closes her eyes for a moment, and at first I think she is processing the weight of what I’ve said, but once she opens her eyes again, I realize she is trying to process my stupidity.

“Haven’t you been listening to a single thing I’ve told you? I loved Celia, but I also, before her, loved Don. In fact, I’m positive that if Don hadn’t turned out to be a spectacular asshole, I probably never would have been capable of falling in love with someone else at all. I’m bisexual. Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box, Monique. Don’t do that.”

This stings. Hard. I know how it feels for people to assume things about you, to prescribe a label for you based on how you appear to them. I have spent my life trying to explain to people that while I look black, I am biracial. I have spent my life knowing the importance of allowing people to tell you who they are instead of reducing them to labels.

And here I’ve gone and done to Evelyn what so many people have done to me.

Her love affair with a woman signaled to me that she was gay, and I did not wait for her to tell me she was bisexual.

This is her whole point, isn’t it? This is why she wants to be so acutely understood, with such perfect word choices. Because she wants to be seen exactly as she truly is, with all the nuance and shades of gray. The same way I have wanted to be seen.

So this is my fuckup. I just fucked up. And despite my desire to blow past it or to reduce it to nothing, I know the stronger move here is to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should have asked you how you identify instead of assuming I knew. So let me try again. Are you prepared to come out, in the pages of this book, as a bisexual woman?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes, I am.” Evelyn seems pleased with my apology, if not still slightly indignant. But we are back in business.

“And how exactly did you figure it out?” I ask. “That you loved her? After all, you could have found out she was interested in women and just as easily not realized you were interested in her.”

“Well, it helped that my husband was upstairs cheating on me. Because I was sickeningly jealous on both accounts. I was jealous when I found out Celia was gay, because it meant that she was with other women, or had been with other women, that her life wasn’t just me. And I was jealous that my husband was with a woman upstairs at the very party I was at, because it was embarrassing and threatened my way of life. I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else. It was this odd bubble that just up and burst.”

“I would imagine, back then, it wasn’t a conclusion you’d come to easily—being in love with someone of the same sex.”

“Of course not! Maybe if I’d spent my whole life fighting off feelings for women, then I might have had a template for it. But I didn’t. I was taught to like men, and I had found—albeit temporarily—love and lust with a man. The fact that I wanted to be around Celia all the time, the fact that I cared about her enough that I valued her happiness over my own, the fact that I liked to think about that moment when she stood in front of me without her shirt on—now, you put those pieces together, and you say, one plus one equals I’m in love with a woman. But back then, at least for me, I didn’t have that equation. And if you don’t even realize that there’s a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?”

She goes on. “I thought I finally had a friendship with a woman. And I thought my marriage was down the tubes because my husband was an asshole. And by the way, both those things were true. They just weren’t the whole truth.”

“So what did you do?”

“At the party?”

“Yeah, who did you go to first?”

“Well,” Evelyn says, “one of them came to me.”