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.
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.