“Did it stick with you, though?” I ask. “Those words?”
“Of course it did. Look, I’d be the first person to say back when I was young that all I was was a nice pair of tits. The only currency I had was my sexuality, and I used it like money. I wasn’t well educated when I got to Hollywood, I wasn’t book-smart, I wasn’t powerful, I wasn’t a trained actress. What did I have to be good at other than being beautiful? And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.”
She goes on. “When Celia said that to me, I had crossed into my thirties. I wasn’t sure I had many more good years left, to be honest. I thought, you know, sure, Celia would keep getting work because people were hiring her for her talent. I wasn’t so sure they would continue hiring me once the wrinkles set in, once my metabolism slowed down. So yeah, it hurt, a lot.”
“But you had to know you were talented,” I tell her. “You had been nominated for an Academy Award three times by that point.”
“You’re using reason,” Evelyn says, smiling at me. “It doesn’t always work.”
IN 1974, ON MY THIRTY-SIXTH birthday, Harry, Celia, John, and I all went out to the Palace. It was supposedly the most expensive restaurant in the world during that time. And I was the sort of person who liked being extravagant and absurd.
I look back on it now, and I wonder where I got off, throwing money around so casually, as if the fact that it came easily to me meant I had no responsibility to value it. I find it mildly mortifying now. The caviar, the private planes, the staff big enough to populate a baseball team.
But the Palace it was.
We posed for pictures, knowing they would end up in some tabloid or another. Celia bought us a bottle of Dom Perignon. Harry put back four manhattans himself. And when the dessert came with a lit candle in the middle, the three of them sang for me as people looked on.
Harry was the only one who had a piece of the cake. Celia and I were watching our figures, and John was on a strict regimen that had him mostly eating protein.
“At least have a bite, Ev,” John said good-naturedly as he took the plate away from Harry and pushed it toward me. “It’s your birthday, for crying out loud.”
I raised an eyebrow and grabbed a fork, using it to scrape a forkful of the chocolate fudge icing. “When you’re right, you’re right,” I said to him.
“He just doesn’t think I should have it,” Harry said.
John laughed. “Two birds with one stone.”
Celia lightly tapped her fork against her glass. “OK, OK,” she said. “Small speech time.”
She was due to shoot a film in Montana the following week. She’d postponed the start date so she could be with me that night.
“To Evelyn,” she said, lifting her glass in the air. “Who has lit up every goddamn room she ever walked into. And who, day after day, makes us feel like we’re living in a dream.”
*
LATER THAT NIGHT, as Celia and John went out to hail a cab, Harry gently helped me put my jacket on. “Do you realize that I’m the longest marriage you’ve had?” he asked.
By that point, Harry and I had been married for almost seven years. “And also the best,” I said. “Bar none.”
“I was thinking . . .”
I already knew what he was thinking. Or at least, I suspected what he was thinking. Because I’d been thinking it, too.
I was thirty-six. If we were going to have a baby, I’d put it off for as long as I could.
Sure, there were women having babies later than that, but it wasn’t very common, and I had spent the last few years staring at babies in strollers, unable to focus my eyes on anything else when they were around.
I would pick up friends’ babies and hold them tightly until the very moment their mothers demanded them back. I thought of what my own child might be like. I thought of how it would feel to bring a life into the world, to give the four of us another being to focus on.
But if I was going to do it, I had to get moving.
And our decision to have a baby wasn’t really just a two-person conversation. It was a four-person conversation.
“Go on,” I said as we made our way to the front of the restaurant. “Say it.”
“A baby,” Harry said. “You and me.”
“Have you discussed it with John?” I asked.
“Not specifically,” he said. “Have you discussed it with Celia?”
“No.”
“But are you ready?” he said.
My career was going to take a hit. There was no avoiding it. I’d go from being a woman to being a mother—and somehow those things appeared mutually exclusive in Hollywood. My body would change. I’d have months where I couldn’t work. It made absolutely no sense to say yes. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Harry nodded. “Me too.”
“OK,” I said, considering the next steps. “So we’ll talk to John and Celia.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I suppose we will.”
“And if everyone is on board?” I asked, stopping before we got out to the sidewalk.
“We’ll get started,” Harry said, stopping with me.
“I know the most obvious solution is adoption,” I said. “But . . .”
“You think we should have a biological child.”
“I do,” I said. “I don’t want anyone trying to claim we adopted because we had something to hide.”
Harry nodded. “I get it,” he said. “I want a biological child, too. Someone half you, half me. I’m with you on this.”
I raised my eyebrow. “You do realize how babies are made?” I asked him.
He smiled and then leaned in and whispered, “There is a very small part of me that has wanted to bed you since I met you, Evelyn Hugo.”
I laughed and hit him on the arm. “No, there is not.”
“A small part,” Harry said, defending himself. “It goes against all my greater instincts. But it is there nonetheless.”
I smiled. “Well,” I said, “we will keep that part to ourselves.”
Harry laughed and put out his hand. I shook it. “Once again, Evelyn, you’ve got yourself a deal.”
WOULD THE BABY BE RAISED by the both of you?” Celia asked. We were lying in bed, naked. My back was lined with sweat, my hairline damp. I rolled over onto my stomach and put my hand on Celia’s chest.
The movie she was doing next was making her a brunette. I found myself transfixed by the golden red of her hair, desperate to know that they would dye it back properly, that she would return to me looking exactly like herself.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. It would be ours. We’d raise it together.”
“And where would I fit into all of this? Where would John?”
“Wherever you want to.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that we would figure it out as we go.”
Celia considered my words and stared at the ceiling. “This is something you want?” Celia asked finally.
“Yes,” I told her. “Very badly.”
“Is it a problem for you that I have never . . . wanted that?” she asked.
“That you don’t want children?”
“Yes.”