Genuine Lies

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