She smelled floral, like lilac powder, and her lips felt humid. Her breath was sweet, spiked with the taste of cigarettes and crème de menthe.

  When she pushed herself against me, when our chests touched and her pelvis grazed mine, all I could think was that it wasn’t so different and yet it was different entirely. She swelled in all the places Don went flat. She was flat in the places Don swelled.

  And yet that sense that you can feel your heart in your chest, that your body tells you it wants more, that you lose yourself in the scent, taste, and feel of another person—it was all the same.

  Celia broke away first. “We can’t stay in here,” she said. She wiped her lips on the back of her hand. She took her thumb and rubbed it against the bottom of mine.

  “Wait, Celia,” I said, trying to stop her.

  But she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  I closed my eyes, unsure how to get a handle on myself, how to quiet my brain.

  I breathed in. I opened the door and walked right up the steps, taking them two at a time.

  I opened every single door on the second floor until I found who I was looking for.

  Don was getting dressed, shoving the tail of his shirt into his suit pants, as a woman in a beaded gold dress put her shoes on.

  I ran out. And Don followed me.

  “Let’s talk about this at home,” he said, grabbing my elbow.

  I yanked it away, searching for Celia. There was no sign of her.

  Harry came in through the front door, fresh-faced and looking sober. I ran up to him, leaving Don on the staircase, cornered by a tipsy producer wanting to talk to him about a melodrama.

  “Where have you been all night?” I asked Harry.

  He smiled. “I’m going to keep that to myself.”

  “Can you take me home?”

  Harry looked at me and then at Don still on the stairs. “You’re not going home with your husband?”

  I shook my head.

  “Does he know that?”

  “If he doesn’t, he’s a moron.”

  “OK,” Harry said, nodding with confidence and submission. Whatever I wanted was what he would do.

  I got into the front seat of Harry’s Chevy, and he started backing out just as Don came out of the house. He ran to my side of the car. I did not roll down the window.

  “Evelyn!” he yelled.

  I liked how the glass between us took the edge off his voice, how it muffled it enough to make him sound far away. I liked the control of being able to decide whether I listened to him at full volume.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It isn’t what you think.”

  I stared straight ahead. “Let’s go.”

  I was putting Harry in a tough spot, making him take sides. But to Harry’s credit, he didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “Cameron, don’t you dare take my wife away from me!”

  “Don, let’s discuss it in the morning,” Harry called through the window, and then he plowed out, into the roads of the canyon.

  When we got to Sunset Boulevard and my pulse had slowed, I turned to Harry and started talking. When I told him that Don had been upstairs with a woman, he nodded as if he’d expected no less.

  “Why don’t you seem surprised?” I asked as we sped through the intersection of Doheny and Sunset, the very spot where the beauty of Beverly Hills started to show. The streets widened and became lined with trees, and the lawns were immaculately manicured, the sidewalks clean.

  “Don has always had a penchant for women he’s just met,” Harry says. “I wasn’t sure if you knew. Or if you cared.”

  “I didn’t know. And I do care.”

  “Well, then, I’m sorry,” he said, looking at me briefly before putting his eyes back on the road. “In that case, I should have told you.”

  “I suppose there are lots of things we don’t tell each other,” I said, looking out the window. There was a man walking his dog down the street.

  I needed someone.

  Right then, I needed a friend. Someone to tell my truths to, someone to accept me, someone to say that I was going to be OK.

  “What if we really did it?” I said.

  “Told each other the truth?”

  “Told each other everything.”

  Harry looked at me. “I’d say that’s a burden I don’t want to put on you.”

  “It might be a burden for you, too,” I said. “I have skeletons.”

  “You’re Cuban, and you’re a power-hungry, calculating bitch,” Harry said, smiling at me. “Those secrets aren’t so bad.”

  I threw my head back and laughed.

  “And you know what I am,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “But right now, you have plausible deniability. You don’t have to hear about it or see it.”

  Harry turned left, into the flats instead of the hills. He was taking me to his house instead of my own. He was scared of what Don would do to me. I sort of was, too.

  “Maybe I’m ready for that. To be a real friend. True blue,” I said.

  “I’m not sure that’s a secret I want you to have to keep, love. It’s a sticky one.”

  “I think that secret’s much more common than either of us is pretending,” I said. “I think maybe all of us have at least a little bit of that secret within us. I think I just might have that secret in me, too.”

  Harry took a right and pulled into his driveway. He put the car in park and turned to me. “You’re not like me, Evelyn.”

  “I might be a little,” I said. “I might be, and Celia might be, too.”

  Harry turned back to the wheel, thinking. “Yes,” he said finally. “Celia might be, too.”

  “You knew?”

  “I suspected,” he said. “And I suspected she might have . . . feelings for you.”

  I felt like I was the last person on earth to know what was right in front of me.

  “I’m leaving Don,” I said.

  Harry nodded, unsurprised. “I’m happy to hear it,” he said. “But I hope you know the full extent of what it means.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Harry.” I was wrong. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  “Don’s not going to take it sitting down,” Harry said. “That’s all I mean.”

  “So I should continue this charade? Allow him to sleep around and hit me when he feels like it?”

  “Absolutely not. You know I would never say that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I want you to be prepared for what you’re going to do.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” Harry said. He opened his car door and got out. He came around to my side and opened my door.

  “Come, Ev,” he said kindly. He put his hand out. “It’s been a long night. You need some rest.”

  I suddenly felt very tired, as if once he pointed it out, I realized it had been there all along. I followed Harry to his front door.

  His living room was sparse but handsome, furnished with wood and leather. The alcoves and doorways were all arched, the walls stark white. Only a single piece of art hung on the wall, a red and blue Rothko above the sofa. It occurred to me then that Harry wasn’t a Hollywood producer for the paycheck. Sure, his house was nice. But there wasn’t anything ostentatious about it, nothing performative. It was merely a place to sleep for him.

  Harry was like me. Harry was in it for the glory. He was in it because it kept him busy, kept him important, kept him sharp.

  Harry, like me, had gotten into it for the ego.

  And we were both fortunate that we’d found our humanity in it, even though it appeared to be somewhat by accident.

  The two of us walked up the curved stairs, and Harry set me up in his guest room. The bed had a thin mattress with a heavy wool blanket. I used a bar of soap to wash my makeup off, and Harry gently unzipped the back of my dress for me and gave me a pair of his pajamas to wear.

  “I’ll be just next door if you need anything,” he said.

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  Harry nodded. He turned away and then turned back to me as I was folding down the blanket. “Our interests aren’t aligned, Evelyn,” he said. “Yours and mine. You see that, right?”

  I looked at him, trying to determine if I did see it.

  “My job is to make the studio money. And if you are doing what the studio wants, then my job is to make you happy. But more than anything, Ari wants to—”

  “Make Don happy.”

  Harry looked me in the eye. I got the point.

  “OK,” I said. “I see it.”

  Harry smiled shyly and closed the door behind him.

  You’d think I’d have tossed and turned all night, worried about the future, worried about what it meant that I had kissed a woman, worried about whether I should really leave Don.

  But that’s what denial is for.

  The next morning, Harry drove me back to my house. I was bracing myself for a fight. But when I got there, Don was nowhere to be seen.

  I knew that very moment that our marriage was over and that the decision—the one I thought was mine to make—had been made for me.

  Don hadn’t been waiting for me, hadn’t been planning to fight for me. Don was off somewhere else, leaving me before I could leave him.

  Instead, right on my doorstep, was Celia St. James.

  Harry waited in the driveway until I made my way up to her. I turned and waved for him to go.

  When he was gone, and my beautiful treelined street was as quiet as you’d expect in Beverly Hills at just past seven in the morning, I took Celia’s hand and led her inside.

  “I’m not a . . .” Celia said when I shut the door behind us. “I just . . . there was a girl in high school, my best friend. And she and I—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “I’m just . . . I’m not . . . there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I know there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  She looked at me, looking to understand exactly what I wanted from her, exactly what she should confess.

  “Here is what I know,” I said. “I know that I used to love Don.”

  “I know that!” she said defensively. “I know you love Don. I’ve always known that.”

  “I said I used to love Don. But I don’t think I’ve loved him for some time now.”

  “OK.”

  “Now the only person I think about is you.”

  And with that, I went upstairs and packed my bags.

  21

  * * *

  I HID OUT IN CELIA’S apartment for a week and a half, in purgatory. Celia and I slept, chastely, side by side in her bed every night.

  During the day, I stayed in her apartment and read books while she went to work on her new movie for Warner Brothers.

  We did not kiss. We occasionally lingered a little too long when our arms brushed, when our hands touched, never locking eyes. But in the middle of the night, after we both had appeared to fall asleep, I would feel her body against my back and I would push myself into her, feeling the warmth of her stomach against me, her chin in the crook of my neck.

  Some mornings I would wake up in a pile of her hair and inhale deeply, trying to breathe in as much of her as I could.

  I knew that I wanted to kiss her again. I knew that I wanted to touch her. But I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to do or how it was supposed to work. It was easy to think of that one kiss in a dark laundry room as a fluke. It wasn’t even that hard to tell myself that the feelings I had for her were simply platonic.

  As long as I only indulged my thoughts about Celia sometimes, then I could tell myself it wasn’t real. Homosexuals were misfits. And while I didn’t think that made them bad people—after all, I loved Harry like a brother—I wasn’t ready to be one of them.

  So I told myself that the spark between Celia and me was just a quirk we had. Which was convincing as long as it remained quirky.

  Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

  And that is what happened to me one Saturday morning when Celia was in the shower and I was making eggs.

  There was a knock at the door, and when I opened it, I saw the only face I was happy to see on that side of the threshold.

  “Hi, Harry,” I said, leaning in to hug him. I was careful not to get my runny spatula on his nice oxford shirt.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Cooking!”

  “I know,” I said as I moved out of the way and invited him in. “Hell has frozen over, I guess. Would you like some eggs?”

  I led him toward the kitchen. He peeked into the pan. “How well have you mastered breakfast?” he asked.

  “If you’re asking if your eggs will be burned, the answer is probably.”

  Harry smiled and put a large, heavy envelope on the dining room table. The thwap it made as it hit the wood was all the clue I needed to what it contained.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “It would appear you are.”

  “On what grounds? I assume his lawyers didn’t check the boxes for adultery or cruelty.”

  “Abandonment.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Clever.”

  “The grounds don’t matter. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  “You should read through it, have a lawyer read through it. But there’s essentially one big highlight.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You get the house and your money and half of his.”

  I looked at Harry as if he was trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because you are forbidden to talk to anyone at any time about anything that happened during your marriage.”

  “Is he also forbidden?”

  Harry shook his head. “Not in writing, no.”

  “So I can’t talk, and he can blab all over town? What makes him think I’ll go for that?”

  Harry looked down at the table for a moment and then back up at me, sheepish.

  “Sunset’s dropping me, aren’t they?”

  “Don wants you out of the studio. Ari’s planning to loan you out to MGM and Columbia.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you’re on your own.”

  “Well, that’s fine. I can do that. Celia’s freelance. I’ll get an agent, like her.”

  “You can,” Harry said. “And I think you should try, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Don wants Ari to blackball you from getting an Oscar nod, and Ari’s agreeing to it. I think he’s gonna loan you out and purposefully put you in flops.”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “He can. And he will, because Don’s the goose that laid the golden egg. The studios are all hurting. People aren’t going to the movies as much; they are waiting for the next episode of Gunsmoke. Sunset’s been in decline from the minute we were forced to sell off our theaters. We’re staying afloat because of stars like Don.”

  “And stars like me.”

  Harry nodded. “But—and I’m sorry to say it, but I think it’s important that you see the big picture—Don’s worth a lot more asses in the seats than you are.”

  I felt about two inches tall. “That hurts.”

  “I know,” Harry said. “And I’m sorry.”

  The water in the bathroom turned off, and I heard Celia step out of the shower. There was a breeze coming in from the window. I wanted to shut it, but I didn’t move. “So that’s it. If Don doesn’t want me, no one does.”

  “If Don doesn’t want you, he doesn’t want anyone else to have you. I realize it’s a subtle difference, but . . .”

  “But it is vaguely reassuring.”

  “Good.”

  “So that’s his play? Don ruins my life and buys my silence with a house and less than a million dollars?”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Harry said, as if it mattered, as if it helped.

  “You know I don’t care about money,” I said. “At least, not primarily.”

  “I know.”

  Celia came out of the bathroom in a robe, her hair wet and straight. “Oh, hi, Harry,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “No need to hurry on my account,” he said. “I was just leaving.”

  Celia smiled and walked into the bedroom.

  “Thank you for bringing it,” I said.

  Harry nodded.

  “I did it once, I can do it again,” I said to him as we walked to the door. “I can build the whole thing back up from scratch.”

  “I have never doubted that you could do a single thing you put your mind to.” Harry put his hand on the doorknob, ready to go. “I’d like it if . . . I hope that we can still be friends, Evelyn. That we can still—”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said. “We’re best friends. Who may or may not tell each other everything. That doesn’t change. You still love me, right? Even though I’m about to be on the outs?”

  “I do.”

  “And I still love you. So that’s the end of it.”

  Harry smiled, relieved. “OK,” he said. “It’s me and you.”

  “Me and you, true blue.”

  Harry walked out of the apartment, and I watched him go down the street and get into his car. Then I turned around and rested my back against the door.

  I was going to lose everything I had built my life on.

  Everything except the money.

  I still had the money.

  And that was something.

  And then I realized there was something else waiting for me, something I wanted that I was free to have.

  It was there, with my back against the door of her apartment, on the brink of my divorce from the most popular man in Hollywood, that I realized that lying to myself about what I wanted took far more energy than I had.

  So instead of wondering what it meant and what it made me, I stood up and walked into Celia’s room.

  She was in her robe still, drying her hair in front of her vanity.

  I walked up to her and looked into her gorgeous blue eyes, and I said, “I think that I love you.”