But she didn’t. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said as she shook her head. She was wearing high-waisted jeans and a Coca-Cola T-shirt. Her hair was long, past her shoulders. She was thirty-seven but still looked like she was in her twenties. She always had a youthfulness to her that I never really had. I was thirty-eight then, and I was starting to look it.
When she said that, I got down on my knees, in the hallway of the hotel, and bawled my eyes out.
She pulled me inside.
“Take me back, Celia,” I begged her. “Take me back, and I’ll give the rest of it up. I’ll give up everything but Connor. I won’t ever act again. I’ll let the world know about us. I’m ready to give you all of me. Please.”
Celia listened. But then she very calmly sat down in the chair by the bed and said, “Evelyn, you are not capable of giving it up. And you never will be. And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine. That you cannot be loved enough to be anyone’s.”
I stood there for a moment longer, waiting for her to say something else. But she didn’t. She had nothing else to say. And there was nothing I could say that would change her mind.
Facing reality, I got hold of myself, held in my tears, kissed her on her temple, and walked away.
I got back on the plane to New York, hiding my pain. And it wasn’t until I was back in my apartment that I lost it. Sobbing as if she’d died.
That’s how final it felt.
I had pushed her too far. And it was over.
THAT WAS TRULY IT?” I say.
“She was done with me,” Evelyn says.
“What about the movie?”
“Are you asking if it was worth it?”
“I guess so.”
“The movie was a huge hit. Didn’t make it worth it.”
“Don Adler won an Oscar for it, didn’t he?”
Evelyn rolls her eyes. “That bastard won an Oscar, and I wasn’t even nominated.”
“Why not? I’ve seen it,” I say. “Parts of it, at least. You’re great. Really exceptional.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Well, then, why weren’t you nominated?”
“Because!” Evelyn says, frustrated. “Because I wasn’t allowed to be applauded for it. It had an X rating. It was responsible for letters to the editor at nearly every paper in the country. It was too scandalous, too explicit. It got people excited, and when they felt that way, they had to blame someone, and they blamed me. What else were they going to do? Blame the French director? The French are like that. And they weren’t going to blame the newly redeemed Don Adler. They blamed the sexpot they’d created whom they could now call a tramp. They weren’t going to give me an Oscar for that. They were going to watch it alone in a dark theater and then chastise me in public.”
“But it didn’t hurt your career,” I say. “You did two more movies the next year.”
“I made people money. No one turns away money. They were all too happy to get me in their movies and then talk about me behind my back.”
“Within a few years, you delivered what is considered one of the most noble performances of the decade.”
“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have had to turn it around. I did nothing wrong.”
“Well, we know that now. People were praising you, and the film, as early as the mid-’80s.”
“It’s all fine in hindsight,” Evelyn says. “Except that I spent years with a scarlet A on my chest, while women and men across the country screwed each other’s brains out thinking about what the movie meant. People were shocked by the representation of a woman wanting to get fucked. And while I’m aware of the crassness of my language, it’s really the only way to describe it. Patricia was not a woman who wanted to make love. She wanted to get fucked. And we showed that. And people hated how much they loved it.”
She’s still angry. I can see it in the way her jaw tightens.
“You won an Oscar shortly after that.”
“I lost Celia for that movie,” she says. “My life, which I loved so much, was turned upside down over that movie. Of course, I understand it was my own fault. I’m the one who filmed an explicit sex scene with my ex-husband without talking to her about it first. I’m not trying to blame other people for the mistakes I made in my own relationship. But still.” Evelyn is quiet, lost in her thoughts for a moment.
“I want to ask you something, because I think it’s important for you to speak directly about it,” I say.
“OK . . .”
“Did being bisexual put a strain on your relationship?” I want to make sure to portray her sexuality with all of its nuance, in all its complexity.