She laughed coldly. “Exactly the same Evelyn I’ve been dealing with for years. Nothing’s changed. You’re afraid of who you are, and you still don’t have an Oscar. You are what you have always been: a nice pair of tits.”
I let the silence hang in the air for a moment. The buzz of the phone was the only sound either of us could hear.
And then Celia started crying. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should never have said that. I don’t even mean it. I’m so sorry. I’ve had too much to drink, and I miss you, and I’m sorry that I said something so terrible.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I should be going. It’s late here, you understand. Congratulations again, sweetheart.”
I hung up before she could reply.
That was how it was with Celia. When you denied her what she wanted, when you hurt her, she made sure you hurt, too.
DID YOU EVER CALL HER on it?” I ask Evelyn.
I hear the muffled sound of my phone ringing in my bag, and I know from the ringtone that it’s David. I did not return his text over the weekend because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. And then, once I got here again this morning, I put it out of my mind.
I reach over and turn the ringer off.
“There was no point in fighting with Celia once she got mean,” Evelyn says. “If things got too tense, I tended to back off before they came to a head. I would tell her I loved her and I couldn’t live without her, and then I’d take my top off, and that usually ended the conversation. For all her posturing, Celia had one thing in common with almost every straight man in America: she wanted nothing more than to get her hands on my chest.”
“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.”