I looked at him and sold him the line I’d come up with the night before, as if I’d just thought of it. “What about Evelyn Hugo?”
Harry smiled. “Sounds French,” he said. “I like it.”
I stood up and shook his hand, my blond hair, which I was still getting used to, framing my sight.
I turned the knob to his door, but Harry stopped me.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
“OK.”
“I read your answers to the interview questions.” He looked at me directly. “Ari is very happy with the changes you’ve made. He thinks you have a lot of potential. The studio thinks it would be a good idea if you went on a few dates, if you were seen around town with some guys like Pete Greer and Brick Thomas. Maybe even Don Adler.”
Don Adler was the hottest actor at Sunset. His parents, Mary and Roger Adler, were two of the biggest stars of the 1930s. He was Hollywood royalty.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Harry asked.
He wasn’t going to mention Ernie directly, because he knew he didn’t have to.
“Not a problem,” I said. “Not at all.”
Harry nodded. He handed me a business card.
“Call Benny Morris. He’s a lawyer over in the bungalows. Handled Ruby Reilly’s annulment from Mac Riggs. He’ll help you straighten it out.”
I went home and told Ernie I was leaving him.
He cried for six hours straight, and then
, in the wee hours of the night, as I lay beside him in our bed, he said, “Bien. If that’s what you want.”
The studio gave him a payout, and I left him a heartfelt letter telling him how much it hurt me to leave him. It wasn’t true, but I felt I owed it to him to finish out the marriage as I’d started it, pretending to love him.
I’m not proud of what I did to him; it didn’t feel casual to me, the way I hurt him. It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now.
But I also know how badly I’d needed to leave Hell’s Kitchen. I know what it feels like to not want your father to look at you too closely, lest he decides he hates you and hits you or decides he loves you a little too much. And I know what it feels like to see your future ahead of you—the husband who’s really just a new version of your father, surrendering to him in bed when it’s the last thing you want to do, making only biscuits and canned corn for dinner because you don’t have money for meat.
So how can I condemn the fourteen-year-old girl who did whatever she could to get herself out of town? And how can I judge the eighteen-year-old who got herself out of that marriage once it was safe to do so?
Ernie ended up remarried to a woman named Betty who gave him eight children. I believe he died in the early ’90s, a grandfather many times over. He used the payout from the studio to put a down payment on a house in Mar Vista, not far from the Fox lot. I never heard from him again.
So if we are going by the metric that all’s well that ends well, then I guess it’s safe to say that I’m not sorry.
EVELYN,” GRACE SAYS AS SHE comes into the room. “You have a dinner with Ronnie Beelman in an hour. I just wanted to remind you.”
“Oh, right,” Evelyn says. “Thank you.” She turns to me once Grace has left. “How about we pick this up tomorrow? Same time?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I say, starting to gather my things. My left leg has fallen asleep, and I tap it against the hardwood to try to wake it up.
“How do you think it’s going so far?” Evelyn asks as she gets up and walks me out. “You can make a story out of it?”
“I can do anything,” I say.
Evelyn laughs and says, “Good girl.”
* * *
“HOW ARE THINGS?” my mom asks the moment I pick up the phone. She says “things,” but I know she means How is your life without David?
