“People.”
“What people?”
“They think you wear the pants.”
My head fell into my hands. “Don, you’re being silly.”
Another car came up around us, and I watched as they recognized Don and me. We were seconds away from a full page in Sub Rosa magazine about how Hollywood’s favorite couple were at each other’s throat. They’d probably say something like “The Adlers Gone Madlers?”
I suspected Don saw the headlines writing themselves at the same time I did, because he started the car and drove us to set. When we pulled onto the lot, I said, “I can’t believe we’re almost forty-five minutes late.”
And Don said, “Yeah, well, we’re Adlers. We can be.”
I found it absolutely repugnant. I waited until the two of us were in his trailer, and I said, “When you talk like that, you sound like a horse’s ass. You shouldn’t say things like that where people can hear you.”
He was taking off his jacket. Wardrobe was due in any moment. I should have just left and gone to my own trailer. I should have let him be.
“I think you have gotten the wrong impression here, Evelyn,” Don said.
“And how is that?”
He came right up into my face. “We are not equals, love. And I’m sorry if I’ve been so kind that you’ve forgotten that.”
I was speechless.
“I think this should be the last movie you do,” he said. “I think it’s time for us to have children.”
His career wasn’t turning out the way he wanted. And if he wasn’t going to be the most famous person in his family, he surely wasn’t going to allow that person to be me.
I looked right at him and said, “Absolutely. Positively. Not.”
And he smacked me across the face. Sharp, fast, strong.
It was over before I even knew what happened, the skin on my face stinging from the blow I could barely believe had come my way.
If you’ve never been smacked across the face, let me tell you something, it is humiliating. Mostly because your eyes start to tear up, whether you mean to be crying or not. The shock of it and the sheer force of it stimulate your tear ducts.
There is no way to take a smack across the face and look stoic. All you can do is remain still and stare straight ahead, allowing your face to turn red and your eyes to bloom.
So that’s what I did.
The way I’d done it when my father hit me.
I put my hand to my jaw, and I could feel the skin heating up under my hand.
The assistant director knocked on the door. “Mr. Adler, is Miss Hugo with you?”
Don was unable to speak.
“One minute, Bobby,” I said. I was impressed by how unstrained my voice was, how confident it seemed. It sounded like the voice of a woman who had never been hit a day in her life.
There were no mirrors I could get to easily. Don had his back to them, blocking them. I pushed my jaw forward.
“Is it red?” I said.
Don could barely look at me. But he glanced and then nodded his head. He was boyish and ashamed, as if I were asking him if he’d been the one to break the neighbor’s window.
“Go out there and tell Bobby I’m having lady troubles. He’ll be too embarrassed to ask anything else. Then tell your wardrobe person to meet you in my dressing room. Have Bobby tell mine to meet me in here in a half hour.”