So I ask her the question in a way that lets her tell me as much, or as little, as she’s ready to say. “Who was the love of your life?”
Evelyn looks me in the eye, and I know she needs one more tiny push.
“It’s OK, Evelyn. Really.”
It’s a big deal. But it is OK. Things are different now from how they were then. Although still not entirely safe, either, I have to admit.
But still.
She can say it.
She can say it to me.
She can admit it, freely. Now. Here.
“Evelyn, who was your great love? You can tell me.”
Evelyn looks out the window, breathes in deeply, and then says, “Celia St. James.”
The room is quiet as Evelyn lets herself hear her own words. And then she smiles, a bright, wide, deeply sincere smile. She starts laughing to herself and then refocuses on me. “I feel like I spent my entire life loving her.”
“So this book, your biography . . . you’re ready to come out as a gay woman?”
Evelyn closes her eyes for a moment, and at first I think she is processing the weight of what I’ve said, but once she opens her eyes again, I realize she is trying to process my stupidity.
“Haven’t you been listening to a single thing I’ve told you? I loved Celia, but I also, before her, loved Don. In fact, I’m positive that if Don hadn’t turned out to be a spectacular asshole, I probably never would have been capable of falling in love with someone else at all. I’m bisexual. Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box, Monique. Don’t do that.”
This stings. Hard. I know how it feels for people to assume things about you, to prescribe a label for you based on how you appear to them. I have spent my life trying to explain to people that while I look black, I am biracial. I have spent my life knowing the importance of allowing people to tell you who they are instead of reducing them to labels.
And here I’ve gone and done to Evelyn what so many people have done to me.
Her love affair with a woman signaled to me that she was gay, and I did not wait for her to tell me she was bisexual.
This is her whole point, isn’t it? This is why she wants to be so acutely understood, with such perfect word choices. Because she wants to be seen exactly as she truly is, with all the nuance and shades of gray. The same way I have wanted to be seen.
So this is my fuckup. I just fucked up. And despite my desire to blow past it or to reduce it to nothing, I know the stronger move here is to apologize.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should have asked you how you identify instead of assuming I knew. So let me try again. Are you prepared to come out, in the pages of this book, as a bisexual woman?”
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes, I am.” Evelyn seems pleased with my apology, if not still slightly indignant. But we are back in business.
“And how exactly did you figure it out?” I ask. “That you loved her? After all, you could have found out she was interested in women and just as easily not realized you were interested in her.”
“Well, it helped that my husband was upstairs cheating on me. Because I was sickeningly jealous on both accounts. I was jealous when I found out Celia was gay, because it meant that she was with other women, or had been with other women, that her life wasn’t just me. And I was jealous that my husband was with a woman upstairs at the very party I was at, because it was embarrassing and threatened my way of life. I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else. It was this odd bubble that just up and burst.”
“I would imagine, back then, it wasn’t a conclusion you’d come to easily—being in love with someone of the same sex.”
“Of course not! Maybe if I’d spent my whole life fighting off feelings for women, then I might have had a template for it. But I didn’t. I was taught to like men, and I had found—albeit temporarily—love and lust with a man. The fact that I wanted to be around Celia all the time, the fact that I cared about her enough that I valued her happiness over my own, the fact that I liked to think about that moment when she stood in front of me without her shirt on—now, you put those pieces together, and you say, one plus one equals I’m in love with a woman. But back then, at least for me, I didn’t have that equation. And if you don’t even realize that there’s a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?”
She goes on. “I thought I finally had a friendship with a woman. And I thought my marriage was down the tubes because my husband was an asshole. And by the way, both those things were true. They just weren’t the whole truth.”
“So what did you do?”
“At the party?”
“Yeah, who did you go to first?”
“Well,” Evelyn says, “one of them came to me.”
RUBY LEFT ME THERE, NEXT to the dryer, with an empty cocktail glass in my hand.
I needed to go back to the party. But I stood there, frozen, thinking, Get out of here. I just couldn’t turn the doorknob. And then the door opened on its own. Celia. The raucous, bright-lit party behind her.
“Evelyn, what are you doing?”
“How did you find me?”
“I ran into Ruby, and she said I could find you drinking in the laundry room. I thought it was a euphemism.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I can see that.”
“Do you sleep with women?” I asked.
Celia, shocked, shut the door behind her. “What are you talking about?”
“Ruby says you’re a lesbian.”
Celia looked over my shoulder. “Who cares what Ruby says?”
“Are you?”
“Are you going to stop being friends with me now? Is that what this is about?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Of course not. I would . . . never do that. I would never.”
“What, then?”
“I just want to know is all.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you think I have the right to know?”
“Depends.”
“So you are?” I asked.
Celia put her hand on the doorknob and prepared to leave. Instinctively, I leaned forward and grabbed her wrist.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I liked the feel of her wrist in my hand. I liked the way her perfume permeated the whole tiny room. I leaned forward and kissed her.
I did not know what I was doing. And by that I mean that I was not fully in control of my movement and that I was physically unaware of how to kiss her. Should it be the way I kissed men, or should it be different somehow? I also did not understand the emotional scope of my actions. I did not truly understand their significance or risk.
I was a famous woman kissing a famous woman in the house of the biggest studio head in Hollywood, surrounded by producers and stars and probably a good dozen people who ratted to Sub Rosa magazine.
But all I cared about in that moment was that her lips were soft. Her skin was without any roughness whatsoever. All I cared about was that she kissed me back, that she took her hand off the doorknob and, instead, put it on my waist.
She smelled floral, like lilac powder, and her lips felt humid. Her breath was sweet, spiked with the taste of cigarettes and crème de menthe.
When she pushed herself against me, when our chests touched and her pelvis grazed mine, all I could think was that it wasn’t so different and yet it was different entirely. She swelled in all the places Don went flat. She was flat in the places Don swelled.
And yet that sense that you can feel your heart in your chest, that your body tells you it wants more, that you lose yourself in the scent, taste, and feel of another person—it was all the same.
Celia broke away first. “We can’t stay in here,” she said. She wiped her lips on the back of her hand. She took her thumb and rubbed it against the bottom of mine.
“Wait, Celia,” I said, trying to stop her.
But she left the room, shutting the door behind her.
I closed my eyes, unsure how to get a handle on myself, how to quiet my brain.
I breathed in. I opened the door and walked right up the steps, taking them two at a time.
I opened every single door on the second floor until I found who I was looking for.
Don was getting dressed, shoving the tail of his shirt into his suit pants, as a woman in a beaded gold dress put her shoes on.
I ran out. And Don followed me.
“Let’s talk about this at home,” he said, grabbing my elbow.
I yanked it away, searching for Celia. There was no sign of her.
Harry came in through the front door, fresh-faced and looking sober. I ran up to him, leaving Don on the staircase, cornered by a tipsy producer wanting to talk to him about a melodrama.
“Where have you been all night?” I asked Harry.
He smiled. “I’m going to keep that to myself.”
“Can you take me home?”
Harry looked at me and then at Don still on the stairs. “You’re not going home with your husband?”
I shook my head.
“Does he know that?”
“If he doesn’t, he’s a moron.”
“OK,” Harry said, nodding with confidence and submission. Whatever I wanted was what he would do.
I got into the front seat of Harry’s Chevy, and he started backing out just as Don came out of the house. He ran to my side of the car. I did not roll down the window.
“Evelyn!” he yelled.
I liked how the glass between us took the edge off his voice, how it muffled it enough to make him sound far away. I liked the control of being able to decide whether I listened to him at full volume.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It isn’t what you think.”
I stared straight ahead. “Let’s go.”
I was putting Harry in a tough spot, making him take sides. But to Harry’s credit, he didn’t bat an eyelash.
“Cameron, don’t you dare take my wife away from me!”
“Don, let’s discuss it in the morning,” Harry called through the window, and then he plowed out, into the roads of the canyon.