Genuine Lies

except on cue. “He was gentle, unbearably sweet, and quite shaken when he discovered he was my first. A woman never forgets the first time. And that memory is precious when the first time is kind. I kept the necklace on while we made love.” She laughed and picked up her cold coffee. “Then we had more champagne and made love again. I like to think I gave him more than sex that night, and the other nights of those few weeks we were lovers. He was thirty-two. The studio press had shaved four years off that, but he told me. There were no lies in Charlie Gray.”
    With a sigh she set the coffee aside again and looked down at her hands. “He coached me for the screen test himself. He was a fine actor, continually underrated in his day. Within two months I had a part in his next movie.”
    When the silence dragged on, Julia set aside her notebook. She didn’t need it. There was nothing about this morning she would forget.
“Desperate Lives
, with Michael Torrent and Gloria Mitchell. You played Cecily, the sultry villainess who seduced and betrayed Torrent’s idealistic young attorney. One of the most erotic moments onscreen then, or now, was when you walked into his office, sat on his desk, and pulled off his tie.”
    “I had eighteen minutes onscreen, and made the best of them. They told me to sell sex, and I sold buckets of it.” She shrugged. “The movie didn’t set the world on fire. Now it plays on cable at three A.M. Still, I made enough of an impression in it that the studio shoved me right into another tramp part. I was Hollywood’s newest sex symbol—making them a mint because I was on a contract player’s salary. But I don’t resent it, even today. I got quite a bit out of that first movie.”
    “Including a husband.”
    “Ah, yes, my first mistake.” She gave a careless shrug and a thin smile. “Christ, Michael had a beautiful face. But the mind of a sheep. When we were in the sack, things were fine. Try to have a conversation? Shit.” Her fingers began to drum on the rosewood. “Charlie had it all over him as an actor, but Michael had the face, the presence. It still annoys me to think I was stupid enough to believe the jerk had any connection with the men he played onscreen.”
    “And Charlie Gray?” Julia watched Eve’s face carefully. “He committed suicide.”
    “His finances were a mess, and his career had stalled. Still, it was difficult for anyone to believe it was mere coincidence that he shot himself the day I married Michael Torrent.” Her voice remained flat, her eyes calm as they met Julia’s. “Am I sorry for it? Yes. Charlie was one in a million, and I loved him. Never the way he loved me, but I loved him. Do I blame myself? No. We made our choices, Charlie and I. Survivors live with their choices.” She inclined her head. “Don’t they, Julia?”

Yes, they did, Julia thought later. To survive, one lived with choices, but also paid for them. She wondered how Eve had paid.
    From Julia’s seat at an umbrellaed, glass table on the terrace of the guest house, it looked as though Eve Benedict had reaped only rewards. Working on her notes, she was surrounded by shade trees, the fragrance of jasmine. The air hummed—the distant echo of a lawn mower beyond the stand of palms, the drone of bees drunk on nectar, the whirr of a hummingbird’s wings as it fed on a hibiscus nearby.
    Here was luxury and privilege. But, Julia thought, the people who shared all this with Eve were paid to do so. Here was a woman who had reached pinnacle after pinnacle, only to be alone. A stiff payment for success.
    Yet Julia didn’t see Eve as a woman who suffered from regrets, but as one who layered successes over them. Julia had listed people she wanted to interview—ex-husbands, one-time lovers, former employees. Eve had merely shrugged her approval. Thoughtfully, Julia circled Charlie Gray’s name twice. She wanted to talk to people who had known him,people who might talk about his relationship with Eve from another angle.
    She sipped chilled juice, then began to write.
    She is flawed, of course. Where there is generosity, there is also selfishness. Where there is kindness, there is also a careless disregard for feelings. She can be abrupt, cool, callus, rude—human. The flaws make the woman off the screen as fascinating and vital as any woman she has played on it. Her strength is awesome. It is in her eyes, her voice, in every gesture of her disciplined body. Life, it seems, is a