“What was Will like as a baby?” I asked Gloria the next afternoon as soon as she walked into the library at 1 p.m. and sat down across from me on the couch. I had three days left here, three more chances to figure her out in our one-hour conversations. Today I was thinking I would shift focus away from George, away from my thoughts about the photograph I’d found and would try instead to figure out what Gloria had been like as a young mother, which was also an important part of the role.
And besides, my line of questioning about George had so far gotten me nowhere. I’d woken up this morning and finished Love in the Library. It wasn’t my favorite book of hers—it was more sex than character development or plot, like in the beginning of her career someone had told Gloria to throw together some steamy scenes and call it a day. But the one interesting thing I’d noticed was that Gloria’s dedication read as almost exactly what she had said to me yesterday: For the one I love, always, and that someone—my mother, I guessed—had once taken a pen and drawn a small heart around these words. I imagined that she, like the rest of the world, had been taken with Gloria’s real-life tragic love story when the book had first come out. Which only reenergized me to dig deeper, understand Gloria more. Somehow pull off my own transformation in the next seventy-two hours.
Gloria frowned now at the mention of Will’s name and rested her cane against the bottom cushions. She crossed her ankles and leaned forward, like she was setting herself up for another TV interview with Oprah, not an informal get-to-know-you session with me. Except unlike when she was on Oprah, now she was dressed in casual clothes, no wig, just the slightest hint of red lipstick. The only sign of anything remotely glamorous were the massive diamond studs in her ears that felt out of place with the rest of her. Were they two carats or three? “Will?” she repeated slowly, like she was taking a moment to remember. “Well...exactly what I wrote in the book. Will was the perfect baby. Never cried,” she said.
I didn’t know much about babies, but I did still remember the summer my half sister, Melody, was born. She cried all night. That was the longest two weeks I’d ever spent with my dad as a kid. And was what made me think, as a teenager, that I might never want to have kids of my own.
“But you were very young when you had him. That must’ve been challenging?” Will was born when she was twenty-one. I could barely figure out how to light the gas stove in my mother’s kitchen to make canned soup when I was twenty-one. Much less have imagined having a baby to take care of day and night.
“It was a different time then,” Gloria mused. “Women had babies younger back in the ’80s.” I nodded. That felt somewhat true. My mother had me when she was barely twenty-five. “But yes,” Gloria added softly. “The truth is, it was hard. I didn’t have a mother growing up. I didn’t know how to be a mother myself. At first.”
I was shocked at what seemed like the first honest piece of information from her. I knew from my research that her mother had died when she was very young and that she became estranged from her father as a teenager, but hearing her speak about the absence of her own mother now hit me right in that hollow, grieving center of my chest. At twenty-one, Gloria had basically been a motherless child trying to figure out how to become a mother herself. I felt an inkling of something real for her, sadness. Longing. And that felt like something I could actually use.
“But I loved Will from the moment I first met him,” Gloria continued. “Men leave you, Amelia,” she added, and I nodded, feeling a wash of betrayal over Jase again. “But a son’s love is for always.”
I thought about the dedication again. “‘For the one I love, always,’” I said. “Your dedication in Love in the Library. It wasn’t for George? It was for Will?”
Gloria grimaced a little, leaned forward and reached for her bell, ringing it only once before Tate magically appeared as if out of thin air. “Tate, I’m feeling chilled.”
Tate nodded and then reappeared again only a minute later with a giant brown fur coat three times the size of Gloria’s tiny body. I looked away as she wrapped Gloria in it and tried not to worry about how many animals might have been killed for such a monstrosity.
“Anyway,” Gloria said, after she waved Tate away. The coat practically consumed her now, and she had it pulled up to her chin so I could barely read her expression. “You were saying, Amelia?”
“The dedication in your first book. Was it for Will?”
“I’m done talking about that book. Ask me something else.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, wondering what I could possibly ask her that would get me anywhere. “Do you have any pictures of yourself in the 1980s?” I finally asked her. “It would be really helpful to see you at that time.” It would be great to see how she did her hair, how she dressed. What expression she wore on her face as a new mother and a new wife.
After Will and I got back from dinner last night, I’d stayed up late, watching more YouTube videos of Gloria. I’d found a conference she was keynote speaker for in 2005, but that was as far back as I could find on the internet. Will must’ve already been in college by then; George was long dead. That platinum blonde, diamond-clad Gloria was not at all the same Gloria that I would be portraying in the movie. At least I didn’t think she was.
“Pictures...” Gloria shook her head. “Aside from what’s in the book, no. Almost everything I had from that time got destroyed the night George died,” she added softly.
That made sense. Almost. I thought about the picture on her diamond-studded desk. The picture Will said she ran back into the gas-filled house for. The man in that picture who decidedly wasn’t George, and the lightness that was captured on her face in that particular moment when the photograph was taken. But of course, that photo wasn’t in the book, and I couldn’t just ask her about it without giving away that I’d been snooping.
All I remembered seeing in the book was her wedding photo with George and also one of Will as a baby, sitting by a Christmas tree. “So where did you get the ones for the book?” I asked her.
“My sister had a few,” she said.
Her sister. Aunt Marge. I smiled and made certain my face didn’t show any recognition or give away that I spoke with Marge yesterday. Gloria had no idea. At least, I didn’t think she did. “Your sister doesn’t have any other photos of you from that time?” I asked her.
Gloria burrowed her chin even deeper into the fur coat and I remembered what Will said, that they weren’t close. Still, somehow Marge had the wedding photo and the photo of Will. “Every single photograph from that time in my life made it into the book,” Gloria finally said into the collar of her coat, so that her words came out almost muffled.
And even if I hadn’t already known for a fact she was lying, I would’ve felt certain she was now from her tone.
At two o’clock, after Gloria dismissed me, I wandered into the kitchen in search of a late lunch and found Tate in there already prepping dinner in a slow cooker.
“Brisket,” Tate clarified, as I peered over her shoulder. “I’m doing a kale salad on the side for you,” she added. “Oh, and I picked up some yogurt and fruit for you this morning. They’re in the fridge if you want them for lunch.”
I smiled a thank-you and opened the fridge to pull out the yogurt and bowl of strawberries. I took a seat on a barstool at the counter, and as I popped a strawberry in my mouth, I thought about how Will said Tate was Gloria’s fifth or sixth assistant this year. I suspected that was part of the reason she seemed to be trying so hard. She was worried about getting fired.
“How did you come to work for Gloria?” I asked her now, as she pulled a spoon out of the drawer near her and handed it to me for my yogurt.
“I just graduated in December, and I was struggling to find a job. English major.” She shrugged. As a theater and dance major myself, I got it, and I nodded. “My creative writing professor knows Gloria, and she recommended me when Gloria was in a bind and needed an assistant two months ago. Anyway, Gloria agreed to do a trial run with me and I’m still here.” Tate let out a little nervous laugh and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. I realized how young she truly must be, if she’d graduated college a few months ago. Even younger than I’d initially thought. And, also, weirdly about the same age Gloria had been when she’d had Will.
I pointed that out to Tate now in between a few spoonfuls of the yogurt. Then I asked her if she had anything to say about Gloria that she wanted to share with me in confidence.
Tate grimaced, but then she leaned across the bar and lowered her voice. “I had to sign an NDA to take this job.” Of course she did. “But my professor who knows Gloria—they’ve been friends for years. At least, I think they have been.” Friends. There it was again. Gloria had actual friends. I thought about what Aunt Marge said, that there was a woman she remembered Gloria being close with. Could this be the same woman, Tate’s professor?
“Do you think she would mind if I reached out to her?” I asked Tate.
She hesitated for a second, and glanced around the empty, quiet kitchen, as if she was afraid Gloria was about to pop out of the pantry and fire her on the spot. More likely, she would tinkle her little demeaning bell, say a few unkind words and usher Tate away with a flick of her diamond-clad wrist. But the only sound to be heard now was the gradual bubble of the broth in the slow cooker. “Just don’t say you got her name from me, okay?” Tate said softly.
Back up in my room, I fired off a quick email to Emily St. James, associate professor of English at the University of Washington, asking if she’d be willing to talk to me for a little bit about Gloria in preparation for the role. I didn’t mention Tate, but told her instead I was interviewing all of Gloria’s Seattle-based friends in the few days leading up to when filming would start.
Few days. The short timeline sank in my chest after I hit Send on the email. I had learned all my lines before I’d left Pasadena but it wouldn’t hurt to keep them fresh, and I rummaged in my bag for the script. I noticed the sun had finally come out, and I decided I would take the script outside, get some fresh air and some sunshine.
I found Will out on Gloria’s back deck, his khakis rolled up midcalf and his shoes off, his bare feet resting up on a chair, his laptop on the table in front of him.
“There you are,” he said when I walked outside, like he’d been looking for me. Though his relaxed pose didn’t make me think he’d been looking very hard.
I held up my script. “It seemed nice out. Figured I’d review my lines out here, but I can go somewhere else if I’ll be bothering you.”
“No, please, have a seat.” He gestured to a chair across the patio table from him, and I sat down. “I came to look for you earlier, but Tate said you were meeting with my mother.” He paused, lowered the lid of his laptop and leaned across it so he was closer to me. “The um...person we spoke with yesterday texted me this morning. She found a box in her attic with some things she thought might interest you. She’s overnighting them to me.”
Gloria had said that the pictures in her memoir had come from her sister’s house, and I guessed that much was the truth. Maybe there was more there she hadn’t wanted to tell me about, or didn’t even know about herself. “A box?” I questioned him. He shrugged and I supposed she hadn’t told him much more than that.
“It should be here tomorrow,” he said.
My phone suddenly dinged with a new email, and I glanced down. Emily St. James had responded quickly: I would love to talk to you! Do you have time for a drink later? I’m a huge fan of Margaret Moon!!