By the time I got to my own bedroom door, it was locked.

  I pounded on it. “Honey, please.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Please,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t do this, Celia. Let’s talk this out.” I leaned against the door, pushing my face into the slim gap of the doorframe, hoping it would make my voice travel farther, make Celia understand faster.

  “This is not a life, Evelyn,” she said.

  She opened the door and walked past me. I almost fell, so much of my weight had been resting on the very door she had just flung open. But I caught myself and followed her down the stairs.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “This is our life. And we’ve sacrificed so much for it, and you can’t give up on it now.”

  “Yes, I can,” she said. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to live this way. I don’t want to drive an awful brown car to your home so no one knows I’m here. I don’t want to pretend I live by myself in Hollywood when I truly live here with you in this house. And I certainly don’t want to love a woman who would screw some singer just so the world doesn’t suspect she loves me.”

  “You are twisting the truth.”

  “You are a coward, and I can’t believe I ever thought any differently.”

  “I did this for you!” I yelled.

  We were at the foot of the stairs now. Celia had one hand on the door, the other on her suitcase. She was still in her bathing suit. Her hair was dripping.

  “You didn’t do a goddamn thing for me,” she said, her chest turning red in splotches, her cheeks burning. “You did it for you. You did it because you can’t stand the idea of not being the most famous woman on the planet. You did it to protect yourself and your precious fans, who go to the theater over and over just to see if this time they’ll catch a half frame of your tits. That’s who you did it for.”

  “It was for you, Celia. Do you think your family is going to stick by you if they find out the truth?”

  She bristled when I said it, and I saw her turn the doorknob.

  “You will lose everything you have if people find out what you are,” I said.

  “What we are,” she said, turning toward me. “Don’t go around trying to pretend you’re different from me.”

  “I am,” I said. “And you know that I am.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I can love a man, Celia. I can go marry any man I want and have children and be happy. And we both know that wouldn’t come easily for you.”

  Celia looked at me, her eyes narrow, her lips pursed. “You think you’re better than me? Is that what’s going on? You think I’m sick, and you think you’re just playing some kind of game?”

  I grabbed her, immediately wanting to take back what I’d said. That wasn’t what I meant at all.

  But she flung her arm away from me and said, “Don’t you ever touch me again.”

  I let go of her. “If they find out about us, Celia, they’ll forgive me. I’ll marry another guy like Don, and they’ll forget I even knew you. I can survive this. But I’m not sure that you can. Because you’d have to either fall in love with a man or marry one you didn’t love. And I don’t think you’re capable of either option. I’m worried for you, Celia. More than I’m worried for me. I’m not sure your career would ever recover—if your life would recover—if I didn’t do something. So I did the only thing I knew. And it worked.”

  “It didn’t work, Evelyn. You’re pregnant.”

  “I will take care of it.”

  Celia looked down at the floor and laughed at me. “You certainly know how to handle almost any situation, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, unsure why I was supposed to be insulted by that. “I do.”

  “And yet when it comes to being a human, you seem to have absolutely no idea where to start.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “You are a whore, Evelyn. You let men screw you for fame. And that is why I’m leaving you.”

  She opened the door to leave, not even looking back at me. I watched her walk out to my front stoop, down the stairs, and over to her car. I followed her out and stood, frozen, in the driveway.

  She threw her bag into the passenger’s side of her car. And then she opened the door on the driver’s side and stood there.

  “I loved you so much that I thought you were the meaning of my life,” Celia said, crying. “I thought that people were put on earth to find other people, and I was put here to find you. To find you and touch your skin and smell your breath and hear all your thoughts. But I don’t think that’s true anymore.” She wiped her eyes. “Because I don’t want to be meant for someone like you.”

  The searing pain in my chest felt like water boiling. “You know what? You’re right. You aren’t meant for someone like me,” I said finally. “Because I’m willing to do what it takes to make a world for us, and you’re too chickenshit. You won’t make the hard decisions; you aren’t willing to do the ugly stuff. And I’ve always known that. But I thought you’d at least have the decency to admit you need someone like me. You need someone who will get her hands dirty to protect you. You want to play like you’re all high and mighty all the time. Well, try doing that without someone in the trenches protecting you.”

  Celia’s face was stoic, frozen. I wasn’t sure she’d heard a single word I’d said. “I guess we aren’t as right for each other as we thought,” she said, and then she got into her car.

  It wasn’t until that moment, with her hand on the steering wheel, that I realized this was really happening, that this wasn’t just a fight we were having. That this was the fight that would end us. It had all been going so well and had turned so quickly in the other direction, like a hairpin turn off the freeway.

  “I guess not” was all I could say. It came out like a croak, the vowels cracking.

  Celia started the car and put it in reverse. “Good-bye, Evelyn,” she said at the very last minute. Then she backed out of my driveway and disappeared down the road.

  I walked into my house and started cleaning up the puddles of water she’d left. I called a service to come and drain the pool and clean the shards of glass from her iced tea.

  And then I called Harry.

  Three days later, he drove with me to Tijuana, where no one would ask any questions. It was a set of moments that I tried not to be mentally present for so that I would never have to work to forget them. I was relieved, walking back to the car after the procedure, that I had become so good at compartmentalization and disassociation. May it make its way to the record books that I never regretted, not for one minute, ending that pregnancy. It was the right decision. On that I never wavered.

  But still I cried the whole way home, while Harry drove us through San Diego and along the California coastline. I cried because of everything I had lost and all the decisions I had made. I cried because I was supposed to start Anna Karenina on Monday and I didn’t care about acting or accolades. I wished I’d never needed a reason to be in Mexico in the first place. And I desperately wanted Celia to call me, crying, telling me how wrong she’d been. I wanted her to show up on my doorstep and beg to come home. I wanted . . . her. I just wanted her back.

  As we were coming off the San Diego Freeway, I asked Harry the question that had been running through my mind for days.

  “Do you think I’m a whore?”

  Harry pulled over to the side of the road and turned to me. “I think you’re brilliant. I think you’re tough. And I think the word whore is something ignorant people throw around when they have nothing else.”

  I listened to him and then turned my head to look out my window.

  “Isn’t it awfully convenient,” Harry added, “that when men make the rules, the one thing that’s looked down on the most is the one thing that would bear them the greatest threat? Imagine if every single woman on the planet wanted something in exchange when she gave up her body. You’d all be ruling the place. An armed populace. Only men like me would stand a chance against you. And that’s the last thing those assholes want, a world run by people like you and me.”

  I laughed, my eyes still puffy and tired from crying. “So am I a whore or not?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “We’re all whores, really, in some way or another. At least in Hollywood. Look, there’s a reason she’s Celia Saint James. She’s been playing that good-girl routine for years. The rest of us aren’t so pure. But I like you this way. I like you impure and scrappy and formidable. I like the Evelyn Hugo who sees the world for what it is and then goes out there and wrestles what she wants out of it. So, you know, put whatever label you want on it, just don’t change. That would be the real tragedy.”

  When we got to my house, Harry tucked me into bed and then went downstairs and made me dinner.

  That night, he slept in the bed next to me, and when I woke up, he was opening the blinds.

  “Rise and shine, little bird,” he said.

  I did not speak to Celia for five years after that. She did not call. She did not write. And I could not bring myself to reach out to her.

  I knew how she was doing only from what people said in the papers and what sort of gossip was running around town. But that first morning, as the sunlight shone on my face and I still felt exhausted from the trip to Mexico, I was actually OK.

  Because I had Harry. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I had family.

  You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”

  So I fell down.

  And Harry caught me.

  30

  * * *

  YOU AND CELIA DIDN’T HAVE any contact at all?” I ask.

  Evelyn shakes her head. She stands up and walks over to the window and opens it a crack. The breeze that streams in is welcome. When she sits back down, she looks at me, ready to move on to something else. But I’m too baffled.

  “How long were the two of you together by that point?”

  “Three years?” Evelyn says. “Just about.”

  “And she just left? Without another word?”

  Evelyn nods.

  “Did you try to call her?”

  She shakes her head. “I was . . . I didn’t yet know that it is OK to grovel for something you really want. I thought that if she didn’t want me, if she didn’t understand why I did what I did, then I didn’t need her.”

  “And you were OK?”

  “No, I was miserable. I was hung up on her for years. I mean, sure, I spent my time having fun. Don’t get me wrong. But Celia was nowhere in sight. In fact, I would read copies of Sub Rosa because Celia’s picture was in them, analyzing the other people with her in the photos, wondering who they were to her, how she knew them. I know now that she was just as heartbroken as I was. That somewhere in her head, she was waiting for me to call her and apologize. But at the time, I just ached all alone.”

  “Do you regret that you didn’t call her?” I ask her. “That you lost that time?”

  Evelyn looks at me as if I am stupid. “She’s gone now,” Evelyn says. “The love of my life is gone, and I can’t just call her and say I’m sorry and have her come back. She’s gone forever. So yes, Monique, that is something I do regret. I regret every second I didn’t spend with her. I regret every stupid thing I did that caused her an ounce of pain. I should have chased her down the street the day she left me. I should have begged her to stay. I should have apologized and sent roses and stood on top of the Hollywood sign and shouted, ‘I’m in love with Celia St. James!’ and let them crucify me for it. That’s what I should have done. And now that I don’t have her, and I have more money than I could ever use in this lifetime, and my name is cemented in Hollywood history, and I know how hollow it is, I am kicking myself for every single second I chose it over loving her proudly. But that’s a luxury. You can do that when you’re rich and famous. You can decide that wealth and renown are worthless when you have them. Back then, I still thought I had all the time I needed to do everything I wanted. That if I just played my cards right, I could have it all.”

  “You thought she’d come back to you,” I say.

  “I knew she’d come back to me,” Evelyn says. “And she knew it, too. We both knew our time wasn’t over.”

  I hear the distinct sound of my phone. But it isn’t the familiar tone of a regular text message. It is the beep I set just for David, last year when I got the phone, just after we were married, when it never occurred to me that he’d ever stop texting.

  I look down briefly to see his name. And beneath it: I think we should talk. This is too huge, M. It’s happening too fast. We have to talk about it. I put it out of my mind instantly.

  “So you knew she was coming back to you, but you married Rex North anyway?” I ask, refocused.

  Evelyn lowers her head for a moment, preparing to explain herself. “Anna Karenina was way over budget. We were weeks behind schedule. Rex was Count Vronsky. By the time the director’s cut came in, we knew the entire thing had to be reedited, and we needed to bring someone else in to save it.”

  “And you had a stake in the box office.”

  “Both Harry and I did. It was his first movie after leaving Sunset Studios. If it flopped, he would have a hard time getting another meeting in town.”

  “And you? What would have happened to you if it flopped?”

  “If my first project after Boute-en-Train didn’t do well, I was worried I’d be a flash in the pan. I’d risen from ashes more than once by that point. But I didn’t want to have to do it again. So I did the one thing I knew would get people desperate to see the movie. I married Count Vronsky.”

  CLEVER

  REX NORTH

  31

  * * *

  THERE IS A CERTAIN FREEDOM in marrying a man when you aren’t hiding anything.

  Celia was gone. I wasn’t really at a place in my life where I could fall in love with anyone, and Rex wasn’t the type of man who seemed capable of falling in love at all. Maybe, if we’d met at different times in our lives, we might have hit it off. But with things as they were, Rex and I had a relationship built entirely on box office.

  It was tacky and fake and manipulative.

  But it was the beginning of my millions.

  It was also how I got Celia to come back to me.

  And it was one of the most honest deals I’ve ever made with anybody.

  I think I will always love Rex North a little bit because of all that.

  * * *

  “SO YOU’RE NEVER going to sleep with me?” Rex said.

  He was sitting in my living room with one leg casually crossed over the other, drinking a manhattan. He was wearing a black suit with a thin tie. His blond hair was slicked back. It made his blue eyes look even brighter, with nothing in their way.

  Rex was the kind of guy who was so beautiful it was nearly boring. And then he smiled, and you watched every girl in the room faint. Perfect teeth, two shallow dimples, a slight arch of the eyebrow, and everybody was done for.

  Like me, he’d been made by the studios. Born Karl Olvirsson in Iceland, he hightailed it to Hollywood, changed his name, perfected his accent, and slept with everybody he needed to sleep with to get what he wanted. He was a matinee idol with a chip on his shoulder about proving he could act. But he actually could act. He felt underestimated because he was underestimated. Anna Karenina was his chance to be taken seriously. He needed it to be a big hit just as much as I did. Which was why he was willing to do exactly what I was willing to do. A marriage stunt.

  Rex was pragmatic and never precious. He saw ten steps ahead but never let on what he was thinking. We were kindred spirits in that regard.

  I sat down next to him on my living room sofa, my arm resting behind him. “I can’t say for sure I’d never sleep with you,” I said. It was the truth. “You’re handsome. I could see myself falling for your shtick once or twice.”

  Rex laughed. He always had a detached sense about him, like you could do whatever you wanted and you wouldn’t get under his skin. He was untouchable in that way.

  “I mean, can you say for certain that you’d never fall in love with me?” I asked. “What if you end up wanting to make this a real marriage? That would be uncomfortable for everyone.”

  “You know, if any woman could do it, it would make sense that it was Evelyn Hugo. I suppose there’s always a chance.”

  “That’s how I feel about sleeping with you,” I said. “There’s always a chance.” I grabbed my gibson off the coffee table and drank a sip.

  Rex laughed. “Tell me, then, where will we live?”

  “Good question.”

  “My house is in the Bird Streets, with floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s a pain in the ass to get out of the driveway. But you can see the whole canyon from my pool.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t mind moving to your place for a little while. I’m shooting another movie in a month or so over at Columbia, so your place will be closer anyway. The only thing I insist on is that I can bring Luisa.”

  After Celia left, I could hire help again. After all, there was no longer anyone hiding in my bedroom. Luisa was from El Salvador, just a few years younger than I was. The first day she came to work for me, she was talking to her mother on the phone during her lunch break. She was speaking in Spanish, right in front of me. “La señora es tan bonita, pero loca.” (“This lady is beautiful but crazy.”)

  I turned and looked at her, and I said, “Disculpe? Yo te puedo entender.” (“Excuse me? I can understand you.”)

  Luisa’s eyes went wide, and she hung up the phone on her mother and said to me, “Lo siento. No sabía que usted hablaba Español.” (“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”)

  I switched to English, not wanting to speak Spanish anymore, not liking how strange it sounded coming out of my own mouth. “I’m Cuban,” I said to her. “I’ve spoken Spanish my entire life.” That wasn’t true, though. I hadn’t spoken it in years.