The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

FOR TWO MONTHS, I WAS living in near bliss. Celia and I never talked about Mick, because we didn’t have to. Instead, we could go wherever we wanted, do whatever we wanted.

Celia bought a second car, a boring brown sedan, and left it parked in my driveway every night without anyone asking questions. We would sleep cradling each other, turning off the light an hour before we wanted to fall asleep so that we could talk in the darkness. I would trace the lines of her palm with my fingertips in the mornings to wake her up. On my birthday, she took me out to the Polo Lounge. We were hiding in plain sight.

Fortunately, painting me as some woman who couldn’t keep a husband sold more papers—for a longer period of time—than outing me. I’m not saying the gossip columnists printed what they knew to be a lie. I’m simply saying they were all too happy to believe the lie I was selling them. And of course, that’s the easiest lie to tell, one you know the other person desperately wants to be true.

All I had to do was make sure that my romantic scandals felt like a story that would keep making headlines. And as long as I did that, I knew the gossip rags would never look too closely at Celia.

And it was all working so goddamn beautifully.

Until I found out I was pregnant.

* * *

“YOU ARE NOT,” Celia said to me. She was standing in my pool in a lavender polka-dot bikini and sunglasses.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

I had just brought her out a glass of iced tea from the kitchen. I was standing right in front of her, looming over her, in a blue cover-up and sandals. I’d suspected I was pregnant for two weeks. I’d known for sure since the day before, when I went to Burbank and saw a discreet doctor Harry had recommended.

I told her then, when she was in the pool and I was holding a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon in it, because I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

I am and have always been a great liar. But Celia was sacred to me. And I never wanted to lie to her.

I was under no illusions about how much it had cost Celia and me to be together and that it was going to continue to cost us more. It was like a tax on being happy. The world was going to take fifty percent of my happiness. But I could keep the other fifty percent.

And that was her. And this life we had.

But keeping something like this from her felt wrong. And I couldn’t do it.

I put my feet into the pool next to her and tried to touch her, tried to comfort her. I expected that the news would upset her, but I did not expect her to hurl the iced tea to the other side of the pool, breaking the glass on the edge, scattering shards in the water.

I also did not expect her to plunge herself under the surface and scream. Actresses are very dramatic.

When she popped back up, she was wet and disheveled, her hair in her face, her mascara running. And she did not want to talk to me.

I grabbed her arm, and she pulled away. When I caught a glimpse of her face and saw the hurt in her eyes, I realized that Celia and I had never really been on the same page about what I was going to do with Mick Riva.

“You slept with him?” she said.

“I thought that was implied,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t.”

Celia raised herself up out of the pool and didn’t even bother to dry off. I watched as her wet footprints changed the color of the cement around the pool, as they created puddles on the hardwood and then started dampening the carpet on the stairs.

When I looked up at the back bedroom window, I saw that she was walking back and forth. It looked like she was packing.

“Celia! Stop it,” I said, running up the stairs. “This doesn’t change anything.”

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.