by Nora Roberts
I’m connected to her too.”
Julia couldn’t help but smile. “You’d like her.”
“Possibly.” She shrugged it off. “Rory also brought me Delrickio, and Delrickio, Damien. You see how each character in a life story alters it, subtly or overtly? Without even one of the players, the plot might take a different turn.”
“Would you say that Charlie Gray changed yours?”
“Charlie.” Eve smiled wistfully into the night. “Charlie speeded up the inevitable. If I could go back, change one thing, it would be my relationship with Charlie. Perhaps if I’d been kinder, less self-driven, things would have been different for him. But you can’t go back.” Her eyes changed, darkened as they fixed on Julia’s. “That’s part of what I want to say tonight. Of all the people I’ve known, I’ve touched in my lifetime, there are two who have influenced it the most. Victor and Gloria.”
“Gloria DuBarry?”
“Yes. She’s outraged with me. Feels betrayed because I’m about to reveal what she considers her private hell. I don’t do it for revenge, or vindictiveness. I don’t do it lightly. Of all the things I’ve told you, this is the most difficult, and the most necessary.”
“I told you from the beginning I wouldn’t judge. I’m not going to start now.”
“But you will,” Eve said softly. “In the early part of Gloria’s career, when she was playing young, innocent girls, giggling angels, she met a man. He was breathtaking to the eye, successful, seductive, and married. She confided in me, not only because we were friends, but because I’d once fallen under the same spell. The man was Michael Torrent.”
“DuBarry and Torrent?” There were no two names that Eve could have linked together that would have surprised Julia more. “I’ve read everything I could find on both of them. There was never even a rumor.”
“They were careful. I helped them be careful. Understand that Gloria was desperately in love. And she wasn’t completely locked into her public image then. This would have been perhaps two years before she met and married Marcus. There was a wildness in her. A passion for life. One I’m sorry she’s smothered so completely.”
Julia could only shake her head. She could no more imagine Gloria DuBarry wild or passionate then she could imagine Eve leaping onto the table to do a quick tap dance.
Less.
“At that time Torrent would have been married to …” Julia did quick calculations. “Amelia Gray.”
“Charlie’s first wife, yes. Their marriage was rapidly sinking. It had a poor foundation. Michael’s guilt. He had used all of his power and influence to keep Charlie out of lead roles and never learned to live with it.”
Julia let out a long breath. If Gloria’s illicit affair had been the left jab, this was the roundhouse. “You’re telling me that Torrent sabotaged Charlie’s career? Christ, Eve, they were friends. Their partnership is a legend. And Torrent’s become one of the most revered names in the industry.”
“Become,” Eve repeated. “He might have ended at the same place if he’d been patient and loyal. But he betrayed a friend out of his own fears. He was terrified that Charlie would overshadow him. He pressured the studio, as some stars could at that time, into boxing Charlie into the buddy characters.”
“Did Charlie know?”
“He might have had suspicions, but he’d never have believed it. Michael also pleasured himself with Charlie’s wives. He confessed it all to me not long after Charlie’s suicide. That, plus excruciating boredom, is why I divorced him. He married Amelia, and somehow his guilt carried him through several years. Then he met Gloria.”
“And you helped them? After what he’d done, with the way you must have felt about him?”
“I helped Gloria. Charlie was dead and she was alive. I was coming out of the disaster with Tony, and the intrigue of it all distracted me. They would meet at the Bel Air, but then, everyone with an illicit liaison did.” She smiled a little. “Including me.”
Intrigued, Julia cupped her chin on her open hand. “Wasn’t it difficult, keeping the players straight? And think of how many bellhops were tipped into being millionaires.”
Eve felt a layer of tension dissolve with her laugh. “It was a delicious time.” There was appreciation in Julia’s eyes. Interest, and no condemnation. Not yet. “Exciting.”
“Sin usually is.” The image was vivid. The glamorous, the famous, the passionate, playing hide-and-seek with gossip columnists and suspicious spouses. Temporary lovers having an afternoon romp—as much for the excitement of sin as the satisfaction of sex. “Oh, to have been a chambermaid,” she murmured.
“Discretion was the byword of the Bel Air,” Eve told her. “But, of course, everyone knew that was the place to go if you wanted a few hours of privacy with someone else’s husband, or wife. And Amelia Gray Torrent wasn’t a fool. Fear of discovery had Gloria and Michael holding their mating ritual at nasty little motels. My guest house wasn’t completed yet, or I might have lent that to them. Still, they managed to do the deed well enough. Ironic that while they were tearing up the motel sheets, they were also filming a movie together.”
“The Blushing Bride,” Julia remembered. “Jesus, he was playing her father.”
“Ah, what Hedda and Louella might have done with that angle.”
She couldn’t help it, the idea had laughter bubbling out. “I’m sorry, I’m sure it was intense and romantic at the time, but it’s just sleazy enough to be funny. All that fatherly frustration and those daughterly pranks onscreen, then the two of them are rushing off to rent a room by the hour. Imagine if they’d gotten their lines mixed?”
Her tension fled long enough for Eve to chuckle into her wine. “Oh, Christ, it never even occurred to me.”
“It would have been wonderful. The camera rolls in when he says: ‘Young lady, I should put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.’”
“And her eyes glaze, her lips tremble. ‘Yes, oh, yes, Daddy, please.’”
“Cut and print.” Julia leaned back. “It would have been a classic.”
“A pity neither of them ever had much of a sense of humor. They wouldn’t be so crazed about it all still today.”
Feeling good, Julia added wine to their glasses. “They can’t really believe an affair all those years ago would shock people today. It might have been a scandal thirty years ago, but really, Eve, who’d give a damn now?”
“Gloria would—and her husband. He’s a rigid sort. The kind who would have cheerfully cast the first stone.”
“They’ve been married more than twenty-five years. I can’t see him hauling her into divorce court for a past indiscretion.”
“No, and neither can I. Gloria sees things differently. There’s more, Julia, and while the rest might be hard for Marcus to shoulder, I think he will. But this will test him.” She was silent a moment, knowing that her words would be like a snowball tossed down a long, steep hill. Before long, they would be too heavy to stop. “Just as the movie premiered, Gloria discovered herself pregnant, with Michael Torrent’s child.”
Julia’s laughter stilled. This was a pain she understood too well. “I’m sorry. Finding yourself pregnant with a married man’s child—”
“Gives you limited choices,” Eve finished. “She was terrified, devastated. Her affair with Michael was already burning out. She’d gone to him first, of course, undoubtedly raging and hysterical. His marriage was ending, and, pregnancy or not, he wasn’t about to tie himself into another.”
“I’m sorry,” Julia said again because it brought her own memories flashing by too clearly. “She must have been terrified.”
“They were both afraid of the scandal, the responsibility, and of being stuck with each other for any appreciable length of time. She came to me. She had no one else.”
“And you helped her, again.”
“I stood by her, as a friend, as a woman. She’d already decided on an abortion. They were illegal in those days, and often dangerous.”
Julia c
losed her eyes. The shudder came quickly, and from deep within. “It must have been horrible for her.”
“It was. I found out about a clinic in France, and we went there. It was painful for her, Julia, not just physically. That choice is never easy for a woman.”
“She was lucky to have you. If she’d been alone …” She opened her eyes again, and they were damp. Like wet gray velvet. “Whatever choice a woman makes, it’s so hard to make it alone.”
“It was a very sterile, very quiet place. I sat in a little waiting room with white walls and glossy magazines, and all I could see was the way Gloria had thrown her arms over her eyes, weeping, as they wheeled her away. It was very quick, and after they let me sit with her in her room. She didn’t speak for a long time, hours really. Then she turned her head and looked at me.
“‘Eve,’ she said, ‘I know it was the right thing, the only thing, just as I know that nothing I ever do will hurt as much as this.’”
Julia brushed a tear from her cheek. “Are you sure it’s necessary to publish this?”
“I believe it is, but I’m going to leave that decision in your hands, your heart, after you hear the rest.”
Julia rose. She wasn’t sure where the nerves had sprung from, but they were rippling just under her skin, like an itch she couldn’t reach. “The decision shouldn’t be mine, Eve. The judgment belongs to someone who was affected by the story, not an observer.”
“You’ve never been just an observer, Julia, not from the moment you came here. I know you tried to be, that you would have preferred it that way, but it’s impossible.”
“Maybe I’ve lost my objectivity, and maybe I hope I’ll write a better book that way. But it isn’t my place to decide to include or delete something this intimate.”
“Who better?” Eve murmured, then gestured to the chair. “Please, sit, let me tell you the rest.”
She hesitated, but she wasn’t sure why. Night had fallen quickly, leaving only the scatter of tiny lights and candleglow. Eve was haloed by the light, and an owl hooted from the shadows. Julia took her seat, and waited. “Go on.”
“Gloria went home. She picked up her life. Within a year she met Marcus and began a new one. That same year I met Victor. We didn’t have our affair at discreet hotels or dingy motels. It wasn’t a flash of passion, but a slow, steady flame that held us together. On other points, I suppose our relationship had many similarities with Michael and Gloria. He was married, and though his marriage was unhappy, we didn’t make what we had public. I knew, though it’s taken me years to accept, that we would never be a couple outside our own walls.”
She looked around her now, while Julia remained silent. The backsplash of light from the kitchen window sprinkled over the geraniums. Moonlight slashed over the fuming water of the fountain and turned it to liquid silver. Around it all was a wall, closing her in, and others out.
“We loved here, in this house, and only a handful of people we both knew and trusted were ever included in our secret. I won’t pretend I don’t resent it, that I don’t resent his wife, and at times resent Victor, for all that’s been stolen from me. All the lies I’ve lived with. And one lie, one thing stolen most of all.”
It was she who rose now, to walk toward the flowers, drinking in their fragrance deeply, as if she could find sustenance there that she hadn’t found in the food on the table. This was the point, she knew. The point of it all, the point, once passed, she could never retreat from. Slowly, she walked back, but didn’t sit.
“Gloria married Marcus one year after our trip to France. Within two months she was pregnant again, and deliriously happy. Weeks after that, I, too, was pregnant, and miserably unhappy.”
“You?” Julia absorbed the jolt, then got to her feet to take Eve’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Eve tightened the grip. “Sit down with me. Let me finish.”
Hands still linked, they sat together. The flame of the candle was between them, tossing light and shadow over Eve’s face. Julia couldn’t be sure what she was seeing. Grief, pain, hope.
“I was almost forty, and had long since given up on the notion of having children. The pregnancy frightened me, not only because of my age, but the circumstances. I wasn’t afraid of public opinion, Julia, at least not for myself.”
“It was Victor’s,” Julia murmured, understanding throbbing like a wound in her side.
“Yes, it was Victor’s, and he was bound by law and church to another woman.”
“But he loved you.” Julia brought Eve’s hand to her cheek a moment, in comfort. “How did he react when you told him?”
“I didn’t tell him. I’ve never told him.”
“Oh, Eve, how could you have kept it from him? It was his child as much as yours, and his right to know.”
“Do you know how desperately he wanted children?” Eyes dark and bright, Eve leaned closer. “He had never, never forgiven himself for the loss of one. Yes, things might have changed if I’d told him. And I would have trapped him with me with that child as surely as she had trapped him with guilt, God, and grief. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do it.”
Julia waited while Eve shakily poured more wine. “I understand. I think I do,” she corrected herself. “I never told my parents the name of Brandon’s father for much the same reason. I couldn’t stand the idea that the only reason he would be with me was because of a child conceived by accident.”
Eve took one sip, then another. “The child was inside me, and I felt, always will feel, the choice was mine. I ached to tell him, to share it with him even for one day. But it would have been worse than a lie. I decided to go back to France. Travers was to go with me. I couldn’t ask Gloria, couldn’t even tell her when she was so cozily picking out names and knitting booties.”
“Eve, you don’t have to explain to me. I know.” “Yes, you would. Only a woman who had had to face that same choice would. Travers …” Eve fumbled with a match, then sat back gratefully when Julia lit it for her. “Travers understood as well.” She blew out a stream of smoke. “She had a child, yet, at the same time, could never really have him. So, with Travers, I went back to France.”
Nothing had ever seemed so cold, so without hope as the plain white walls of that examining room. The doctor had a gentle voice, gentle hands, gentle eyes. None of it mattered. Eve suffered through the required physical, dully answered all the necessary questions. She never took her eyes from that plain white wall.
That was what her life was like. Blank and empty. No one would believe that, of course. Not of Eve Benedict, star, movie goddess, the woman men craved and women envied. How could anyone understand that she would have given anything, at this single moment of her life, to be ordinary? The ordinary wife of an ordinary man having an ordinary child?
Because she was Eve Benedict, because the father was Victor Flannigan, the child could not be ordinary. The child could not even be.
She didn’t want to wonder if it would have been a boy or girl. Yet she did. She couldn’t afford to imagine what it would look like if she allowed those cells to grow, expand, become. Yet all too often she did imagine. And the child would have Victor’s eyes. She would nearly collapse with love and longing.
There could be no love here, and certainly no longing.
She sat, listening as the doctor explained the simplicity of the procedure, as he promised little pain in his soft, soothing voice. She tasted her own tears as one slipped down her cheek and through her lips.
It was foolish, unproductive, this emotion. Other women had faced this same crossroads, and traveled it. If there was regret, she could live with it. As long as she knew the choice was the right one.
She didn’t speak when the nurse came in to prep her. More gentle, competent hands, more quiet words of reassurance. Eve shuddered to think of the women without her funds and resources. Her sisters whose only solution to an impossible pregnancy was some shadowy back room.
She lay quietly on the gurney, felt only the quick sting of
the needle. To relax her, she was told.
They wheeled her out. She watched the ceiling. In moments she would be in surgery. Then, in less time than it takes to talk about it, she would be out again, recuperating in one of the charming private rooms looking out on the distant mountains.
And she remembered the way Gloria had looked when she’d thrown her arm over her eyes.
Eve shook her head. The drug was making her sleepy, floaty, fanciful. She thought she could hear a baby crying. But that couldn’t be. Her baby wasn’t really a baby yet at all. And never would be.
She saw the doctor’s eyes, those soft, sympathetic eyes over his surgical mask. She reached out for his hand, but couldn’t feel it.
“Please … I can’t … I want this baby.”
When she awakened, she was in bed, in one of those pretty rooms with the sun shooting slants of light through the blinds. She saw Travers sitting in the chair beside her. Though Eve made no sound, she was able to reach out.
“It’s all right,” Travers said, taking her hand. “You stopped them in time.”
“You had the baby,” Julia whispered.
“It was Victor’s child, conceived in love. Rare and precious. And, as they wheeled me down that corridor, I realized what had been right for Gloria wasn’t right for me. I’m not sure, if I hadn’t gone through that with her, I’d have been able to make the right choice for myself.”
“How did you have the child and keep it secret all these years?”
“Once I made the decision to bring the pregnancy to term, I