Astonished, stunned really at the significance of his compliment, since my actions had exacted such a toll on him, I just stood there, speechless, as he got into the Bentley. The driver turned the car around and headed south, leaving me in the midst of emotions so tangled I wrestled with them for days as I thought about the past—not what had actually happened to me, but what could have happened to me if I had not had Leon and Julia to love me, if I had not had Max and Simon and Nelson and Jerrold to cheer me through childhood. My life might have been as blighted as my right cheek. And yet I escaped being unloved, and that escape seemed to me suddenly miraculous, and I saw my life strangely, as if I had somehow survived a shipwreck that had cast others into the loveless deep.

Chapter Thirty-nine

In that first month or so at Paragon, I made no new friends. Acquaintances, yes, but people were wary of me. As Terrence might have said, I didn’t take it personally. After all, my scandals, plural, were well known, still fresh, and had been widely, publicly aired. Plus, I was closely associated with rival Empire. Still, everyone knew I was the person who had brought Adios Diablo to Paragon. That picture and its massive budget were the studio’s great hope, and also, as everyone knew, its great gamble. But for the moment, only Carleton and I knew what he had planned for its 1957 release.