She started crying. She put her head in her hands. “I feel like I’m failing you,” she said. “But I can’t do it. I can’t. I know myself, and I know this is too much for me. I’ll be too sick over it. I’ll make myself ill thinking of you with him.” She shook her head, resolved. “I’m sorry. I don’t have it in me. I can’t handle it. I want to be stronger for you, I do. I know that if the tables were turned, you could handle it. I feel like I’m disappointing you. And I’m so sorry, Evelyn. I will work forever to make it up to you. I’ll help you get any part you want. For the rest of our lives. And I’ll work on getting there so that the next time this happens, I can be stronger. But . . . please, Evelyn, I can’t live through you sleeping with another man. Even if this time it only looks real. I can’t do it. Please,” she said. “Please don’t do this.”
My heart sank. I nearly vomited.
I looked down at the floor. I studied the way two planks of wood met just under my feet, how the nailheads were just the littlest bit sunken in.
And then I looked up at her and said, “I already did it.”
I sobbed.
And I pleaded.
And I groveled, desperately, on my knees, having long ago learned the lesson that you have to throw yourself at the mercy of the things you truly want.
But before I was done, Celia said, “All I’ve ever wanted was for you to be truly mine. But you’ve never been mine. Not really. I’ve always had to settle for one piece of you. While the world gets the other half. I don’t blame you. It doesn’t make me stop loving you. But I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Evelyn. I can’t live with my heart half-broken all the time.”
And she walked out the door and left me.
Within a week, Celia had packed up all her things, at my apartment and hers, and moved back to L.A.
She would not answer the phone when I called. I couldn’t get hold of her.
Then, weeks after she left, she filed for divorce from John. When he got the papers, I swear, it was as if she had served them to me directly. It was clear, in no uncertain terms, that by divorcing him, she was divorcing me.
I got John to make some calls to her agent, her manager. He tracked her down at the Beverly Wilshire. I flew to Los Angeles, and I pounded on her door.
I was wearing my favorite Diane von Furstenberg, because Celia had once said I was irresistible in it. There were a man and a woman coming out of their hotel room, and as they walked down the hall, they couldn’t stop looking at me. They knew who I was. But I refused to hide. I just kept knocking on the door.
When Celia finally opened it, I looked her in the eye and didn’t say a word. She stared back at me, silent. And then, with tears in my eyes, I said, simply, “Please.”
She turned away from me.
“I made a mistake,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”
The last time we had fought like this, I had refused to apologize. And I really thought that this time, if I just admitted how wrong I was, if I gave in, sincerely and with all my heart, she would forgive me.
But she didn’t. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said as she shook her head. She was wearing high-waisted jeans and a Coca-Cola T-shirt. Her hair was long, past her shoulders. She was thirty-seven but still looked like she was in her twenties. She always had a youthfulness to her that I never really had. I was thirty-eight then, and I was starting to look it.
When she said that, I got down on my knees, in the hallway of the hotel, and bawled my eyes out.
She pulled me inside.
“Take me back, Celia,” I begged her. “Take me back, and I’ll give the rest of it up. I’ll give up everything but Connor. I won’t ever act again. I’ll let the world know about us. I’m ready to give you all of me. Please.”
Celia listened. But then she very calmly sat down in the chair by the bed and said, “Evelyn, you are not capable of giving it up. And you never will be. And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine. That you cannot be loved enough to be anyone’s.”
I stood there for a moment longer, waiting for her to say something else. But she didn’t. She had nothing else to say. And there was nothing I could say that would change her mind.
Facing reality, I got hold of myself, held in my tears, kissed her on her temple, and walked away.
I got back on the plane to New York, hiding my pain. And it wasn’t until I was back in my apartment that I lost it. Sobbing as if she’d died.
That’s how final it felt.
I had pushed her too far. And it was over.
THAT WAS TRULY IT?” I say.
“She was done with me,” Evelyn says.