“Back here?” Evelyn says. “Monday morning? What do you say we start around ten?”
“OK,” I say, putting my thick coat around my shoulders. “If that’s what you’d like.”
Evelyn nods. She looks past me for a moment, over my shoulder, but appearing not to actually be looking at anything in particular. Then she opens her mouth. “I’ve spent a very long time learning how to . . . spin the truth,” she says. “It’s hard to undo that wiring. I’ve gotten too good at it, I think. Just now, I wasn’t exactly sure how to tell the truth. I don’t have very much practice in it. It feels antithetical to my very survival. But I’ll get there.”
I nod, unsure how to respond. “So . . . Monday?”
“Monday,” Evelyn says with a long blink and a nod. “I’ll be ready then.”
I walk back to the subway in the chilly air. I cram myself into a car packed with people, holding on to the handrail above my head. I walk to my apartment and open my front door.
I sit on my couch, open my laptop, and answer some e-mails. I start to order something for dinner. And it is only when I go to put my feet up that I remember there is no coffee table. For the first time since he left, I have not come into this apartment immediately thinking of David.
Instead, what plays in the back of my mind all weekend—from my Friday night in to my Saturday night out and my Sunday morning at the park—isn’t How did my marriage fail? but rather Who the hell was Evelyn Hugo in love with?
I AM ONCE AGAIN IN Evelyn’s study. The sun is shining directly into the windows, lighting Evelyn’s face with so much warmth that it obscures her right side from view.
We’re really doing this. Evelyn and me. Subject and biographer. It begins now.
She is wearing black leggings and a man’s navy-blue button-down shirt with a belt. I’m wearing my usual jeans, T-shirt, and blazer. I dressed with the intention of staying here all day and all night, if need be. If she keeps talking, I will be here, listening.
“So,” I say.
“So,” Evelyn says, her voice daring me to go for it.
Sitting at her desk while she is on the couch feels adversarial somehow. I want her to feel as if we are on the same team. Because we are, aren’t we? Although I get the impression you never know with Evelyn.
Can she really tell the truth? Is she capable of it?
I take a seat in the chair next to the sofa. I lean forward, with my notepad in my lap and a pen in my hand. I take out my phone, open the voice memo app, and hit record.
“You sure you’re ready?” I ask her.
Evelyn nods. “Everyone I loved is dead now. There’s no one left to protect. No one left to lie for but me. People have so closely followed the most intricate details of the fake story of my life. But it’s not . . . I don’t . . . I want them to know the real story. The real me.”
“All right,” I say. “Show me the real you, then. And I’ll make sure the world understands.”
Evelyn looks at me and briefly smiles. I can tell I have said what she wants to hear. Fortunately, I mean it.
“Let’s go chronologically,” I say. “Tell me more about Ernie Diaz, your first husband, the one who got you out of Hell’s Kitchen.”
“OK,” Evelyn says, nodding. “It’s as good a place to start as any.”
Poor Ernie Diaz
MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A chorus girl off Broadway. She’d emigrated from Cuba with my father when she was seventeen. When I got older, I found out that chorus girl was also a euphemism for a prostitute. I don’t know if she was or not. I’d like to think she wasn’t—not because there’s any shame in it but because I know a little bit about what it is to give your body to someone when you don’t want to, and I hope she didn’t have to do that.
I was eleven when she died of pneumonia. Obviously, I don’t have a lot of memories of her, but I do remember that she smelled like cheap vanilla, and she made the most amazing caldo gallego. She never called me Evelyn, only mija, which made me feel really special, like I was hers and she was mine. Above all else, my mother wanted to be a movie star. She really thought she could get us out of there and away from my father by getting into the movies.
I wanted to be just like her.
I’ve often wished that on her deathbed she’d said something moving, something I could take with me always. But we didn’t know how sick she was until it was over. The last thing she said to me was Dile a tu padre que estaré en la cama. “Tell your father I’ll be in bed.”
After she died, I would cry only in the shower, where no one could see me or hear me, where I couldn’t tell what were my tears and what was the water. I don’t know why I did that. I just know that after a few months, I was able to take a shower without crying.
And then, the summer after she died, I began to develop.
My chest started growing, and it wouldn’t stop. I had to rifle through my mom’s old things when I was twelve years old, looking to see if there was a bra that would fit. The only one I found was too small, but I put it on anyway.
By the time I was thirteen, I was five foot eight, with dark, shiny brown hair, long legs, light bronze skin, and a chest that pulled at the buttons of my dresses. Grown men were watching me walk down the street, and some of the girls in my building didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. It was a lonely business. Motherless, with an abusive father, no friends, and a sexuality in my body that my mind wasn’t ready for.
The cashier at the five-and-dime on the corner was this boy named Billy. He was the sixteen-year-old brother of the girl who sat next to me in school. One October day, I went down to the five-and-dime to buy a piece of candy, and he kissed me.
I didn’t want him to kiss me. I pushed him away. But he held on to my arm.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
The store was empty. His arms were strong. He grasped me tighter. And in that moment, I knew he was going to get what he wanted from me whether I let him or not.
So I had two choices. I could do it for free. Or I could do it for free candy.
For the next three months, I took anything I wanted from that five-and-dime. And in exchange, I saw him every Saturday night and let him take my shirt off. I never felt I had much choice in the matter. Being wanted meant having to satisfy. At least, that was my view of it back then.
I remember him saying, in the dark, cramped stockroom with my back against a wooden crate, “You have this power over me.”
He’d convinced himself that his wanting me was my fault.
And I believed him.
Look what I do to these poor boys, I thought. And yet also, Here is my value, my power.
So when he dumped me—because he was bored with me, because he’d found someone else more exciting—I felt both a deep relief and a very real sense of failure.