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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.
Some mornings I would wake up in a pile of her hair and inhale deeply, trying to breathe in as much of her as I could.
