“Oh, boy,” she said. “Are these flowers just to butter me up?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “The flowers are because I love you. Because I want you to know how often I think of you, how important you are to me. I don’t tell you that enough. I wanted to tell you this way. With those.”
Guilt is a feeling I’ve never made much peace with. I find that when it rears its head, it brings an army. When I feel guilty for one thing, I start to see all the other things I should feel guilty for.
I sat on the foot of our bed. “I just . . . I wanted to let you know that Max and I have discussed it, and I think the love scene in the movie will be more graphic than you and I were thinking.”
“How graphic?”
“Something a bit more intense. Something that conveys Patricia’s desperate need to be pleasured.”
I was lying outright to hide a lie of omission. I was crafting a new narrative, in which Celia would believe that I had asked for her blessing before doing what I had already done.
“Her need to be pleasured?”
“We need to see what Patricia gets out of her relationship with Mark. It’s not just love. It has to be more than that.”
“That makes sense,” Celia said. “You’re saying it answers the question Why does she stay with him?”
“Yeah,” I said, excited that maybe she would understand, maybe I could fix this retroactively. “Exactly. So we are going to shoot an explicit scene between Don and me. I’ll be mostly nude. For the heart of the movie to really sink in, we need to see the two main characters truly vulnerable together, connecting . . . sexually.”
Celia listened as I spoke, letting the words sink in. I could see her grappling with what I was saying, trying to make it fit for her. “I want you to do the movie as you want to do it,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I just . . .” She looked down and started shaking her head. “I’m feeling very . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure I can do this. Knowing you’re with Don all day, with these long nights, and I never see you, and . . . sex. Sex is sacred between us. I’m not sure I can stand to watch that.”
“You won’t need to watch it.”
“But I’ll know it happened. I’ll know it’s out there. And everyone will see it. I want to be OK with this. I really do.”
“So be OK with it.”
“I’m going to try.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m really going to try.”
“Great.”
“But Evelyn, I don’t think I can. Just knowing that you were . . . when you slept with Mick, I was sick for years afterward, thinking about the two of you together.”
“I know.”
“And you slept with Harry, God knows how many times,” she said.
&n
bsp; “I know, honey. I know. But I’m not sleeping with Don.”
“But you have slept with him. You have. When people watch the two of you on-screen, they will be watching something the two of you have already done.”
“It’s not real,” I said.
“I know, but what you’re saying to me is that you are prepared to make it look real. You’re saying you’re going to make it look more real than anything else any of us have done so far.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I am saying that.”