The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  The ceremony took place at the Beverly Hills courthouse. Evelyn wore a cream-colored suit. Robert looked dapper in pinstripes. Evelyn’s daughter with the late Harry Cameron, Connor Cameron, was the maid of honor.

  Shortly after, the three left on a trip to Spain. We can only assume they are off to visit Celia, who just recently bought property off the southern coast.

  CONNOR CAME BACK TO LIFE on the rocky beaches of Aldiz. It was slow but steady, like a seed sprouting.

  She liked playing Scrabble with Celia. As she’d promised, she ate dinner with me every night, sometimes even coming down to the kitchen early to help me make tortillas from scratch or my mother’s caldo gallego.

  But it was Robert she gravitated toward.

  Tall and broad, with a gentle beer belly and silver hair, Robert had no idea what to do with a teenage girl at first. I think he was intimidated by her. He was unsure what to say. So he gave her space, maybe even more of a wide berth.

  It was Connor who reached out, who asked him to teach her how to play poker, asked him to tell her about finance, asked him if he wanted to go fishing.

  He never replaced Harry. No one could. But he did ease the pain, a little bit. She asked his opinion about boys. She took the time to find him the perfect sweater on his birthday.

  He painted her bedroom for her. He made her favorite barbecue ribs on the weekends.

  And slowly, Connor began to trust that the world was a reasonably safe place to open your heart to. I knew the wounds of losing her father would never truly heal, that scar tissue was forming all through her high school years. But I saw her stop partying. I saw her start getting As and Bs. And then, when she got into Stanford, I looked at her and realized I had a daughter with two feet placed firmly on the ground and her head squarely on her shoulders.

  Celia, Robert, and I took Connor out for dinner the night before she and I left to take her to school. We were at a tiny restaurant on the water. Robert had bought her a present and wrapped it. It was a poker set. He said, “Take everybody’s money, like you’ve been taking mine with all those flushes.”

  “And then you can help me invest it,” she said with devilish glee.

  “Atta girl,” he said.

  Robert always claimed that he married me because he would do anything for Celia. But I think he did it, in at least some small part, because it gave him a chance to have a family. He was never going to settle down with one woman. And Spanish women proved to be just as enchanted by him as American ones had been. But this system, this family, was one he could be a part of, and I think he knew that when he signed up.

  Or maybe Robert merely stumbled into something that worked for him, unsure what he wanted until he had it. Some people are lucky like that. Me, I’ve always gone after what I wanted with everything in me. Others fall into happiness. Sometimes I wish I was like them. I’m sure sometimes they wish they were like me.

  With Connor back in the United States, coming home only during school breaks, Celia and I had more time with each other than we ever had before. We did not have film shoots or gossip columns to worry about. We were almost never recognized—and if people did recognize one of us, they mostly steered clear and kept it to themselves.

  There in Spain, I had the life I truly wanted. I felt at peace, again waking up every day seeing Celia’s hair fanned on my pillow. I cherished every moment we had to ourselves, every second I spent with my arms around her.

  Our bedroom had an oversized balcony that looked out onto the ocean. Often the breeze from the water would rush into our room at night. We would sit out there on lazy mornings, reading the newspaper together, our fingers gray from the ink.

  I even started speaking Spanish again. At first, I did it because it was necessary. There were so many people we needed to converse with, and I was the only one truly prepared to do it. But I think the necessity of it was good for me. Because I couldn’t worry too much about feeling insecure; I simply had to get through the transaction. And then, over time, I found myself proud of how easily it came to me. The dialect was different—the Cuban Spanish of my youth was not a perfect match for the Castilian of Spain—but years without the words had not erased many of them from my mind.

  I would often speak Spanish even at home, making Celia and Robert piece together what I was saying from their own limited knowledge. I loved sharing it with them. I loved being able to show a part of myself that I had long buried. I was happy to find that when I dug it up, that part was still there, waiting for me.

  But of course, no matter how perfect the days seemed, there was one ache looming over us night after night.

  Celia was not well. Her health was deteriorating. She did not have much time.

  “I know I shouldn’t,” Celia said to me one night as we lay together in the dark, neither of us yet sleeping. “But sometimes I get so mad at us for all the years we lost. For all the time we wasted.”

  I grabbed her hand. “I know,” I said. “Me too.”

  “If you love someone enough, you should be able to overcome anything,” she said. “And we have always loved each other so much, more than I ever thought I could be loved, more than I ever thought I could love. So why . . . why couldn’t we overcome it?”

  “We did,” I said, turning toward her. “We’re here.”

  She shook her head. “But the years,” she said.

  “We’re stubborn,” I said. “And we weren’t exactly given the tools to succeed. We’re both used to being the one who calls the shots. We both have a tendency to think the world revolves around us . . .”

  “And we’ve had to hide that we’re gay,” she said. “Or, rather, I’m gay. You’re bisexual.”

  I smiled in the dark and squeezed her hand.

  “The world hasn’t made that easy,” she said.

  “I think both of us wanted more than was realistic. I’m sure we could have made it work, the two of us, in a small town. You could have been a teacher. I could have been a nurse. We could have made it easier on ourselves that way.”

  I could feel Celia shaking her head next to me. “But that’s not who we are, that’s not who we have ever been or could ever be.”

  I nodded. “I think being yourself—your true, entire self—is always going to feel like you’re swimming upstream.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But if the last few years with you have been any indication, I think it also feels like taking your bra off at the end of the day.”

  I laughed. “I love you,” I said. “Don’t ever leave me.”

  But when she said, “I love you, too. I never will,” we both knew she was making a promise she couldn’t keep.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her again, losing her in a deeper way than I’d ever lost her before. I couldn’t bear the idea that I would be forever without her, with no tie to her.

  “Will you marry me?” I said.

  She laughed, and I stopped her.

  “I’m not kidding! I want to marry you. For once and for all. Don’t I deserve that? Seven marriages in, shouldn’t I finally get to marry the love of my life?”

  “I don’t think it works that way, sweetheart,” she said. “And need I remind you, I’d be stealing my brother’s wife.”

  “I’m serious, Celia.”

  “So am I, Evelyn. There’s no way for us to marry.”

  “All a marriage is is a promise.”

  “If you say so,” she said. “You’re the expert.”

  “Let’s get married right here and now. Me and you. In this bed. You don’t even have to put on a white nightgown.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about a spiritual promise, between the two of us, for the rest of our lives.”

  When Celia didn’t say anything, I knew that she was thinking about it. She was thinking about whether it could mean anything, the two of us there in that bed.

  “Here’s what we will do,” I said, trying to convince her. “We will look each other in the eye, and w
e will hold hands, and we will say what’s in our hearts, and we will promise to be there for each other. We don’t need any government documents or witnesses or religious approval. It doesn’t matter that I’m already legally married, because we both know that when I was marrying Robert, I was doing it to be with you. We don’t need anybody else’s rules. We just need each other.”

  She was quiet. She sighed. And then she said, “OK. I’m in.”

  “Really?” I was surprised at just how meaningful this moment was becoming.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I want to marry you. I’ve always wanted to marry you. I just . . . it never occurred to me that we could. That we didn’t need anyone’s approval.”

  “We don’t,” I said.

  “Then I do.”

  I laughed and sat up in our bed. I turned on the light on my nightstand. Celia sat up, too. We faced each other and held hands.

  “I think you should probably perform the ceremony,” she said.

  “I suppose I have been in more weddings,” I joked.

  She laughed, and I laughed with her. We were in our midfifties, giddy at the idea of finally doing what we should have done years ago.

  “OK,” I said. “No more laughing. We’re gonna do it.”

  “OK,” she said, smiling. “I’m ready.”

  I breathed in. I looked at her. She had crow’s-feet around her eyes. She had laugh lines around her mouth. Her hair was mussed from the pillow. She was wearing an old New York Giants T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. Convention be damned, she never looked more beautiful.

  “Dearly beloved,” I said. “I suppose that’s just us.”

  “OK,” Celia said. “I follow.”

  “We are gathered here today to celebrate the union of . . . us.”

  “Great.”

  “Two people who come together to spend the rest of their lives with each other.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do you, Celia, take me, Evelyn, to be your wedded wife? In sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, till death do us part, as long as we both shall live?”

  She smiled at me. “I do.”

  “And do I, Evelyn, take you, Celia, to be my wedded wife? In sickness and in health and all the other stuff? I do.” I realized there was a slight hiccup. “Wait, we don’t have rings.”

  Celia looked around for something that might suffice. Without taking my hands from her, I checked the nightstand.

  “Here,” Celia said, taking the hair tie from her head.

  I laughed and took mine out of my ponytail.

  “OK,” I said. “Celia, repeat after me. Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”

  “Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”

  Celia took the hair tie and wrapped it around my ring finger three times.

  “Say, With this ring, I thee wed.”

  “With this ring, I thee wed.”

  “OK. Now I do it. Celia, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love. With this ring, I thee wed.” I put my hair tie on her finger. “Oh, I forgot vows. Should we do vows?”

  “We can,” she said. “If you want to.”

  “OK,” I said. “You think of what you want to say. I’ll think, too.”

  “I don’t need to think,” she said. “I’m ready. I know.”

  “OK,” I said, surprised to find that my heart was beating quickly, eager to hear her words. “Go.”

  “Evelyn, I have been in love with you since 1959. I may not have always shown it, I may have let other things get in the way, but know that I have loved you that long. That I have never stopped. And that I never will.”

  I closed my eyes briefly, letting her words sink in.

  And then I gave her mine. “I have been married seven times, and never once has it felt half as right as this. I think that loving you has been the truest thing about me.”

  She smiled so hard I thought she might cry. But she didn’t.

  I said, “By the power vested in me by . . . us, I now declare us married.”

  Celia laughed.

  “I may now kiss the bride,” I said, and I let go of her hands, grabbed her face, and kissed her. My wife.

  SIX YEARS LATER, AFTER CELIA and I had spent more than a decade together on the beaches of Spain, after Connor had graduated from college and taken a job on Wall Street, after the world had all but forgotten about Little Women and Boute-en-Train and Celia’s three Oscars, Cecelia Jamison died of respiratory failure.

  She was in my arms. In our bed.

  It was summer. The windows were open to let in the breeze. The room smelled of sickness, but if you focused hard enough, you could still smell the salt from the ocean. Her eyes went still. I called out for the nurse, who had been downstairs in the kitchen. I think I stopped making memories again, in those moments when Celia was being taken from me.

  I only remember clinging to her, holding her as best I could. I only remember saying, “We didn’t have enough time.”

  It felt as if by taking her body, the paramedics were ripping out my soul. And then, when the door shut, when everyone had left, when Celia was nowhere to be seen, I looked over at Robert. I fell to the floor.

  The tiles felt cold on my flushed skin. The hardness of the stone ached in my bones. Underneath me, puddles of tears were forming, and yet I could not lift my head off the ground.

  Robert did not help me up.

  He got down on the floor next to me. And wept.

  I had lost her. My love. My Celia. My soul mate. The woman whose love I’d spent my life earning.

  Simply gone.

  Irrevocably and forever.

  And the devastating luxury of panic overtook me again.

  Now This

  July 5, 2000

  SCREEN QUEEN CELIA ST. JAMES HAS DIED

  Three-time Oscar-winning actress Celia St. James died last week of complications related to emphysema. She was 61 years old.

  From a well-to-do family in a small town in Georgia, the red-haired St. James was often referred to as the Georgia Peach early in her career. But it was her role as Beth in the 1959 adaptation of Little Women that brought her her first Academy Award and turned her into a bona fide star.

  St. James would go on to be nominated four other times and take home the trophy twice more over the next 30 years, for Best Actress in 1970 for Our Men and for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lady Macbeth in the 1988 adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy.

  In addition to her remarkable talent, St. James was known for her girl-next-door allure and her fifteen-year marriage to football hero John Braverman. The two divorced in the late 1970s but remained friendly until Braverman’s passing in 1980. She never remarried.

  St. James’s estate is to be managed by her brother, Robert Jamison, husband of actress—and St. James’s former costar—Evelyn Hugo.

  CELIA, LIKE HARRY, WAS BURIED in Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. Robert and I held her funeral on a Thursday morning. It was kept private. But people knew we were there. They knew she was being laid to rest.

  When she was lowered to the ground, I stared at the hole in the earth. I stared at the glossy sheen of the wood of her casket. I could not keep it in. I could not keep my true self from coming out.

  “I need a minute,” I said to Robert and Connor and then I turned away.

  I walked. Farther and farther up the winding hillside roads of the cemetery, until I found what I was looking for.

  Harry Cameron.

  I sat down at his tombstone, and I cried out everything within me. I cried until I felt depleted. I did not say a single thing. I did not feel any need. I had talked to Harry in my head and my heart for so long, for so many years, that it felt as if we transcended words.

  He had been the one to help me, to support me, through everything in my life. And now I needed him more than ever. So I went to him the only way I knew how. I let him heal me as only he could. And then I stood up, dusted off my skirt, and turned around.
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  There, in the trees, were two paparazzi taking my photo. I was neither angry nor flattered. I simply didn’t care. It cost so much, caring. I didn’t have any currency to spend on it.

  Instead, I walked away.

  Two weeks later, after Robert and I had gone home to Aldiz, Connor sent me a magazine with the image of me at Harry’s grave on the cover. She had attached a note to the front. It said, simply, “I love you.”

  I pulled off the note and read the headline: “Legend Evelyn Hugo Weeps at Harry Cameron’s Grave Years Later.”

  Even long past my prime, people were still easily distracted from seeing how I felt about Celia St. James. But this time was different. Because I wasn’t hiding anything.

  The truth had been there for them to grab if they’d paid attention. I had been my truest self, searching for the help of my best friend to ease the pain of the loss of my lover.

  But of course, they got it wrong. They never did care about getting it right. The media are going to tell whatever story they want to tell. They always have. They always will.

  It was then that I knew that the only time anyone would know anything true about my life was when I told them directly.

  In a book.

  I saved Connor’s note and threw the magazine in the trash.

  WITH CELIA’S PASSING AND HARRY gone and myself finally in a marriage that, while chaste, was stable, my life officially became entirely void of scandal.

  Me. Evelyn Hugo. A boring old lady.

  Robert and I lived a friendly marriage for the next eleven years. We moved back to Manhattan in the mid-2000s to be closer to Connor. We refinished this apartment. We donated some of Celia’s money to LGBTQ+ organizations and lung disease research.

  Every Christmas, we threw a benefit for homeless youth organizations in New York City. After years on a quiet beach, it was nice to be members of society again in some ways.

  But all I really cared about was Connor.

  She had worked her way up the ladder at Merrill Lynch, and then, shortly after Robert and I moved back to New York, she admitted to him that she hated the culture of finance. She told him she had to leave. He was disappointed that she hadn’t been happy with what had made him happy; that was obvious. But he was never disappointed in her.