Eve's Men Read Online Free Page B

cared, since her stone-washed jeans amply displayed the excellence of her legs. More to the point, he was embarrassed that such a stupid speculation would even cross his mind, on this particular evening, in the company of his brother’s girlfriend while the brother himself was in jail. But then Charley was never greatly surprised at his capacity for sexual woolgathering. He often thought that on his deathbed, all wired up and gurgling, he would still somehow find the strength to observe and compare the nurses’ buttocks. In this instance, however, he judged he wasn’t entirely at fault, since Eve was in no way just another good-looking woman. He ran across good-looking women all the time. In fact, Charley’s own Donna was one of them. But Eve was different. She was one of those rare perfect physical creatures, like a leopard or eagle, with everything just the way it should have been, from any angle. He imagined that wherever she went, she turned heads and stopped conversations, set men fantasizing about sex and women about murder.
    Even now, as she finished telling him about the bulldozing and went on to other things, Charley caught himself paying as much attention to her eyes and mouth as to her words. Still, he learned that Eve was indeed an actress, a failed one. Jewish on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s, she had been raised in comfort in Santa Barbara, where her father was a prosperous tax attorney. After studying theater arts at UCLA for a couple of years, she married a lawyer colleague of her father’s, divorced him a year later, and seriously set about becoming an actress. Getting nowhere in New York and London, she returned to Los Angeles, got a new agent, and landed a few parts in various cable TV movies.
    “And other real dreck,” she said. “Bikini and beach stuff. Even a cavewoman epic. My fanny’s been on screen more than my face.”
    “That’s a shame,” Charley said, adding, “I think.”
    Eve gave him a wry look. “Well, it was. At least for my so-called career, it was.”
    “Well, I suppose you have to do movies like that in the beginning.”
    “Maybe so. But I just couldn’t hack it—the cattle calls and the humiliation. In the end, I wound up pretty much like Brian. Maybe the business didn’t want me, but the stars did.”
    Charley made no response to that, waiting for Eve to elaborate. But she apparently preferred to leave the matter as it was, which made him wonder why she had brought it up in the first place. There were many things Charley wanted to ask about Brian, particularly his long-standing problem with drugs, as well as the state of his finances, considering that his bail was likely to be substantial. But Charley didn’t want Eve to feel that he was pumping her, so he sat back and let her continue to take the conversation where she would. As he expected, she never strayed far from Brian. Regarding his use of drugs, Eve claimed that he no longer used them at all except for alcohol and tobacco. And even with these, she said he tried to minimize their harmful effects by strenuously working out. In Venice he ran the beach and swam in the ocean; here he swam in the motel pool for thirty and forty minutes at a time.
    He was in great physical shape, she said. Unfortunately she could not say the same about his attitude, his outlook on life.
    “More and more, he just seems to do things with no thought to their consequences. And I guess the making of Miss Colorado was simply the last straw. I mean, here’s his onetime lover, this has-been star and longtime drug addict, and they’re going to portray her as a helpless victim in the clutches of a cruel, drug pushing boyfriend.”
    “Which was not the case,” Charley said, unsure what the truth was.
    “Definitely not. My God, when Brian first met the lady, she was doing heroin as well as coke and just about everything else. She’d been a hype for years, and everyone knew it. At least Brian got her off heroin for a while.