Genuine Lies

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 eachother 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 went 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,