Genuine Lies

by Nora Roberts

  Eve was already to the terrace doors before Nina rushed into the room. “To the guest house?”

  “Yes, and right away. I’m starving.”

  Brandon was in the middle of building a very intricate space port. The television flickered in front of him, but he’d lost interest in the sitcom. The idea of building a floating walkway between the docking area and the lab had just come to him.

  He sat on the living room rug, Indian-style, dressed in his faded and much-loved Batman pajamas. Scattered around him were a variety of action figures.

  At the knock, he looked up and peered at Eve through the terrace doors. His mother had given him repeated instructions not to open the door to anyone, but he certainly knew that didn’t include their hostess.

  He scrambled up to throw the latch. “Hi. Do you want to see my mom?”

  “Yes, eventually.” She’d forgotten how appealing a freshly scrubbed, pajamaed child could be. Beneath the scent of soap lurked that wild forest smell that was boy. Her fingers itched with a surprising urge to ruffle his hair. “And how are you, Master Summers?”

  He giggled and grinned. She often called him that if they happened to pass on the estate. Over the last weeks, he’d come to like her in a distant way. She had the cook send over frosted cakes and pastries which Julia meted out. And she often waved or called out to him when his mother or CeeCee watched him at the pool.

  “I’m okay. You can come in.”

  “Why, thank you.” She swept inside, silk robe swirling. “My mom’s on the phone in her office. Should I get her?” “We can wait until she’s done.”

  Not quite sure what to do with her, Brandon stood and shrugged. “Should I get you something—like to eat or drink? We’ve got brownies.”

  “That sounds delightful, but I haven’t had my dinner yet. It’s on its way.” She dropped onto the sofa and took out a cigarette. It occurred to her that this was the first time she’d had an opportunity to talk to the boy alone in what could be considered his home. “I suppose I should ask you the usual questions about school and sports, but I’m afraid I have little interest in either.” She glanced down. “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m building a space port.”

  “A space port.” Intrigued, she set the cigarette aside, unlit, and leaned forward. “How does one go about building a space port?”

  “It’s not so hard if you’ve got a plan.” Willing to share, he sat on the rug again. “See, these things hook together, and you’ve got all kinds of pieces so you can make layers and curves and towers. I’m going to put this bridge between the docking bay and the lab.”

  “Very wise, I’m sure. Show me.”

  When Nina arrived five minutes later with a tray, Eve was sitting on the floor with Brandon, struggling to link plastic pieces together. “You should have had one of the servants bring it.” Eve gestured to the coffee table. “Just set it down there.”

  “I wanted to remind you that you had a six-thirty call.”

  “Don’t worry, dear.” Eve let out a little crow of triumph as the pieces clicked. “I’ll get my beauty sleep.”

  Nina hovered, hesitated. “You won’t let your dinner get cold?”

  Eve made a few agreeable noises and continued to build. Brandon waited until the terrace doors closed, then whispered, “She sounded like a mother.”

  Eve glanced up, brows lifted high, then let out an uproarious laugh. “My God, child, you’re absolutely right. One day you’ll have to tell me about yours.”

  “She hardly ever yells.” Brandon’s mouth pursed as he worked out the engineering of the bridge. “But she worries all the time. Like I might run out in the street and get hit by a car, or eat too much candy or forget my homework. And I hardly ever.”

  “Get hit by a car?”

  His chuckle was quick and appreciative. “Forget my homework.”

  “A mother’s meant to worry, I’d guess, if she’s a good one.” She lifted her head, smiled. “Hello, Julia.”

  Julia only continued to stare, wondering what to make of the fact that Eve Benedict was sitting on the floor playing with her son and discussing motherhood.

  “Miss B. came to see you,” Brandon supplied. “But she said she could wait until you were off the phone.”

  In an absent and automatic gesture, Julia switched off the television. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “No need.” This time Eve gave in to the urge and stroked Brandon’s head. “I’ve been beautifully entertained.” She rose, suffering only minor aches in her joints from squatting on the floor. “I hope you don’t mind if I eat while we talk.” She gestured to the covered tray. “I haven’t had time for dinner since returning from the studio, and I have a story to tell you.”

  “No, please, go right ahead. Brandon, tomorrow’s a school day.”

  It was the signal for bedtime, and he sighed. “I was going to build this bridge.”

  “You can build it tomorrow.” After he’d gotten reluctantly to his feet, she cupped his face. “It’s a first class space port, pal. Just leave everything here.” She kissed his forehead, then his nose. “And don’t forget—”

  “To brush your teeth,” he finished, and rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mom.”

  “Come on, Brandon.” Laughing, she gave him a quick squeeze. “Lights out in ten.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Good night, Miss B.”

  “Good night, Brandon.” She watched the boy climb the stairs before turning back to Julia. “Is he always so obedient?”

  “Brandon? I suppose he is.” She smiled as she rubbed a day’s worth of tension away from the base of her neck. “Then again, he knows there are only a handful of rules I’m unlikely to bend.”

  “Lucky you.” Eve lifted the top off the tray and examined her steak Diane. “I remember when many of my friends and associates were raising young children. As a guest, you were often subjected to the whining, the crabbing, the tantrums and tears. It quite put me off children.”

  “Is that why you never had any of your own?”

  Eve took the napkin out of its porcelain ring, spread the square of rose-colored linen over her lap. “You could say it is why I spent a great deal of time wondering why anyone would. But I didn’t come here tonight to speak of the mysteries of parenting.” She chose a delicate spear of asparagus. “I hope it’s convenient for you to talk now. And here.”

  “Yes, of course. If you’ll give me time to see to Brandon and get my recorder.”

  “Go ahead.” Eve poured some herb tea from the pot on the tray and waited.

  Though she appreciated the tastes and textures, she ate mechanically. She required fuel to give her best on the set in the morning. She never gave less than her best. By the time Julia settled in the chair opposite her, she was halfway through the meal.

  “I should tell you that I had a visit from Victor tonight, which is why I decided to talk now, while it’s so much on my mind. His wife attempted suicide this morning.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Eve lifted her shoulders and sliced at the meat. “It isn’t the first time. Nor, if medical science pulls Muriel through, is it likely to be the last. God seems to protect fools and neurotics.” She slipped the slice between her lips. “You find me unfeeling.”

  “Unmoved,” Julia said after a moment. “There’s a difference.”

  “Indeed there is. I feel, Julia. Indeed I feel.” She went back to the tea, wondering how much it would take to ease the ache in her throat. “What other reason could there be for me to give so many years of my life to a man I could never really have?”

  “Victor Flannigan.”

  “Victor Flannigan.” With a sigh, Eve covered the tray and sat back with a goblet of chilled water. “I have loved him, and have been his lover, for thirty years. He is the only man I have ever made a sacrifice for. The only man to give me lonely nights, the kind of nights a woman spends in tears, in despair, in hope.”

  “Yet you’ve married twice in the past thirty years.�
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  “Yes. And taken and enjoyed lovers. Being in love with Victor didn’t mean I had to stop trying to live. That was, is, Muriel’s way. Not mine.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to justify, Eve.”

  “No?” She skimmed her fingers through her hair, then drummed them on the arm of the couch. Julia might not ask, Eve realized, but Julia’s eyes did. “I would not try to hold him by martyring myself. And, I’ll admit, I tried to forget him by filling myself with other men.”

  “And he loves you.”

  “Oh, yes. Our feelings for each other are very closely matched. That’s part of the tragedy, and the glory of it.”

  “If that’s true, Eve, why is he married to someone else?”

  “An excellent question.” After lighting a cigarette, she sank back into the pillows on the couch. “One I’ve asked myself countless times over the years. Even when I knew the answer, I still asked. His marriage to Muriel was already on shaky ground when we met. I don’t say that to gloss over adultery. I say it because it’s true.” She expelled smoke in a hurried puff. “I wouldn’t give a damn if I had been the reason Victor had fallen out of love with his wife. But that had already happened before I came along. He stayed with her because he felt responsible, because her faith made it impossible for her to condone divorce. And because they lost a child, a daughter, at birth. That loss was something Muriel never adjusted to—or never allowed herself to adjust to.

  “Muriel was always delicate physically. Epilepsy. No,” Eve said, smiling, “there’s never been any whisper or hint that Victor’s wife is an epileptic. Of course there’s no stigma attached to the illness now.”

  “But there was a stigma a generation ago,” Julia put in.

  “And Muriel Flannigan is the kind of woman who clasps such things to her bosom and revels.”

  Julia frowned. “You’re saying she uses her illness to provoke sympathy.”

  “My dear, she uses it as cleverly, as calculatingly and as cold-bloodedly as a general uses his troops. It’s her shield against reality, and she’s spent a lifetime dragging Victor behind that shield with her.”

  “It’s hard to drag a man anywhere he doesn’t want to go.”

  Eve’s lips tightened for a moment, then she smiled brittlely. “Touché, darling.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m making judgments. It’s only …” Because I care about you. She blew out an impatient breath. If anyone could muddle through on her own, it was Eve. “I shouldn’t be,” she finished. “You know the players better than I.”

  “Well put,” Eve murmured. “The three of us have indeed been players in an endless script. The other woman, the long-suffering wife, and the man torn between his heart and conscience.” She whipped up a cigarette, then stared into space without lighting it. “I offer sex, and she responsibility, and she plays so astutely. How often she conveniently neglects to take the medication that would control the illness—usually when there is some crisis to be faced, some decision to be made.”

  Julia held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Eve, but why would he tolerate it? Why would anyone allow themselves to be used year after year?”

  “What’s the stronger motivator, Julia? Tell me using your practical brain. Is it love, or is it guilt?”

  It took her only a moment to see the clearest answer. “A combination of both would outweigh any other emotion.”

  “And such a desperate woman knows just how to wield that combination.” She let out an impatient huff of breath to clear the bitterness from her voice. “Victor has seen to it that Muriel’s illness has been kept secret. She insists on it— fanatically. Since the miscarriage, her mental health has been unstable at best. We both knew, we both accepted, that while Muriel lived, he could never be mine.”

  This wasn’t the time for censor or criticism, Julia realized. Like the hour they had spent by the pool, it was a time for understanding. “I’m so sorry. I can see I only believed myself in love with a man who could never belong to me. But still there was terrible pain. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to love someone so long, and so hopelessly.”

  “Never hopelessly,” Eve corrected Julia. She had to strike the match three times before it flared. “Always hopefully.” She expelled a slow stream of smoke. “I was older than you when I met him, but still young. Young enough to believe that miracles happened. That love conquered all. Now I’m not young, and though I know better, I wouldn’t change my life. I can look back at those first giddy months with Victor and be grateful. So very grateful.”

  “Tell me,” Julia said.

  “I suppose I was still smarting from my disillusionment with Tony—or myself,” Eve began. “It was a couple of years after the divorce, but I was still raw. I’d moved out of the house Tony and I had shared—the house I’d forced him to sign over to me. But I’d hung on to it. I enjoy dabbling in real estate,” she said with a casualness that skimmed over more than twenty million in prime properties. “Why don’t you have some tea?” she suggested. “It’s still warm and Nina brought two cups.” “Thanks.”

  “I’d just bought this estate,” she went on as Julia helped herself. “I was having some remodeling and redecorating done, so it’s safe to say my life was in a state of flux.”

  “Not your professional one.”

  “No.” Eve smiled through the mist of smoke. “But things had changed. It was the early sixties, and the faces had changed, become younger. Garbo was retired and in seclusion, James Dean was dead. Monroe would be in a matter of months. But more than those two wasted youths, that one defiant and suppressed talent, was the changing of the guard. Fairbanks, Flynn, Power, Gable, Crawford, Hay worth, Garson, Turner. All those beautiful faces and magnificent talents were being replaced, or certainly challenged by other faces, other talents. The classy Paul Newman, the young, dashing Peter O’Toole, the ethereal Claire Bloom, the gamine Audrey Hepburn.” She sighed again, knowing the guard had changed yet again. “Hollywood is a woman, Julia, forever charging after youth.”

  “Yet it celebrates endurance.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, it does indeed. When I met Victor on the set of our first movie together, I was not yet forty. Neither fish nor fowl—no longer quite young, not yet eligible for the label of endurance. Hell, I hadn’t even had my eyes done yet.”

  Julia had to grin. Where else but Hollywood would people measure their lives by their cosmetic surgery? “The movie was Dead Heat. It brought you your second Academy Award.”

  “And it brought me Victor.” Lazily, Eve curled her legs up on the couch. “As I was saying before I started to ramble, I was still sore from my last marriage. Distrustful of men, though I certainly knew they had their uses and was never shy about utilizing them. I was pleased to be making this movie— particularly since Charlotte Miller had wanted the part desperately, and I’d beaten her to it. And because I’d be working with Victor, who had a tremendous reputation as an actor—stage and screen.”

  “You must have met him before.”

  “No, actually I hadn’t. I imagine we’d attended some of the same functions, but our paths hadn’t crossed. He was often in the East doing theater, and when here in California, he didn’t socialize often, unless one counts the habitual drunken forays with a group of his male companions. We met on set. It happened so fast. Comet fast.”

  Lost in her thoughts, Eve ran a finger up and down the lapel of her robe. Her eyes were narrowed, concentrated, as if against some nagging pain. “People speak of love at first sight casually, humorously, wistfully. I don’t believe it happens often, but when it does it’s irresistible and dangerous. We said all the polite things strangers in the same profession say to each other at the start of an important project. But beneath all that was fire. How clichéd, but how true.”

  She rubbed absently at her temple. “Do you have a headache?” Julia asked. “Can I get you something?”

  “No. It’s nothing.” Eve dragged deep on the cigarette and willed her mind beyond the pain, back into memory. “It all wen
t very well initially. The plot of the movie was basic—I was a tough broad who’d inadvertently gotten herself mixed up with the mob. Victor was the cop assigned to protect me. What made the movie better than that was the sum of its parts. Gritty dialogue, moody sets and lighting, solid directing, a treasure chest of a supporting cast and yes, the chemistry between the stars.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that film.” Julia smiled, hoping to ease some of the pain she saw in Eve’s eyes. “Each time I do, I find something new, something different.”

  “A small, shiny gem in my crown,” Eve said, gesturing with the cigarette. “Do you recall the scene where Richard and Susan are hiding out in a grubby hotel room—he waiting for orders, she looking for a way out? They’re arguing, insulting each other, fighting the attraction they’ve felt from the beginning. He the good, solid Irish cop believing in only right and wrong; she the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who lived in all the shades between black and white.”

  “I remember it very well. I caught it on television one night when I was baby-sitting. I would have been oh, fifteen, maybe sixteen, and I had a monster crush on Robert Redford. After the movie I tossed him aside like an old shoe and fell desperately in love with Victor Flannigan.”

  “How flattered he would be.” To clear some of the emotion from her voice, Eve sipped at the water. “And how disappointing for Mr. Redford.”

  “I think he got over it.” She gestured with her cup. “Go on, please. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”