She leans back against the wall, her breath coming in short gasps as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her. To the other women harmed by this man. She thinks of the lies the industry must have told to protect the director. How it betrayed her. Betrayed the others.
She thinks of Daphne’s story about Adelaide, the lies and betrayal.
She’d asked Daphne if she could forgive Adelaide. How could she have thought that was possible?
She won’t forgive. She won’t forget.
‘Darling?’ her mother enquires gently as she re-enters the room.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Christina says and she heads into the adjacent laundry to grab her running shoes.
She’s not dressed for a run but she doesn’t care. She has to get out. Go down to the park. To the water. She needs to touch trees and breathe in salt air and see birds and remind herself that she is here, not there; that nothing can touch her here, in her home, in her city. The lies and betrayal belong over there. They won’t reach her again. She won’t let them.
‘I love you,’ she says to Joni, kissing her on the cheek as she opens the back door. ‘I won’t be too long.’
As she sets off down the hill, she thinks about how the phone call from Lindsay might have seemed like a vindicationto someone else, but Christina knows he probably never cared in the first place whether she had or hadn’t been involved with the director; he only cared about whether his ability to earn commission was affected. That’s why he called her now: suddenly she’s commissionable again. And the speed at which he called after the news about the director came out suggests he sees her as a valuable commodity.
If Christina were more ambitious, she wouldn’t care. She’d leap at the chance for a lead role, no matter how she came by it. She would thinkThat’s showbiz!and get on the first plane to Los Angeles.
Maybe she used to be like that. She must have been, to have gone as far as she did. A little dash of both ruthlessness and single-mindedness is a necessity for anyone who wants to claim a sliver of spotlight. You have to be willing to decide that you are by far the best person for any given role and pursue it accordingly.
Something has happened to Christina since then – and not only the attack by the director. That was the catalyst, but not the cause of her resistance to furthering her career now that there’s no impediment.
Nearing the harbour, she feels bright sunlight on her cheeks and the breeze in her hair.
I am free, she thinks.I am free, I am free, I am free.
THE
HOT-PINK BALLGOWN
The hot-pink ballgown was on the rack at a little boutique in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood when it was spied by a young woman who needed to buy a dress for an important event. Her husband worked for a law firm in the city; the firm had bought a table at a black-tie fundraising dinner and the young lawyer and his wife were invited to be on the table. It was an unexpected opportunity – he had only been at the firm for a year and didn’t think he’d proven himself enough to be invited to an event like this, but one of the partners had taken a shine to him and thus extended the invitation.
The young woman hadn’t planned to buy anything in a bright colour – she knew her role was to complement her husband, not stand out – but she loved the dress. The colour made her happy, and the shape – short sleeves with a slight puff, sweetheart neckline and full skirt – flattered her. She had navy shoes she could wear with it, and a navy evening bag.
‘Pink?’ her husband said when she showed him her purchase. ‘That’s a bit … much.’ His mouth twisted as he frowned.
She felt crestfallen. The last thing she wanted was to disappoint or upset him. But she also didn’t want to return the dress, refusing to believe that anything that made her so happy could be in any way wrong.
On the night of the dinner she put on the dress and shoes, chose some understated pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, put her hair up and chose her lipstick shade to match the dress.
When her husband saw her his eyes lit up and she knew that he no longer thought the dress was a bit much.
As they arrived at their table, the partner’s wife came to greet them. ‘What a lovely dress,’ she said, and the young woman felt even more vindicated.
The evening was splendid, and she received many a compliment.
There were other black-tie events as the years went on, but it was difficult to wear the dress again, she found, because its colour was so memorable. Worse than wearing a dress that might be a bit much was wearing one that people remembered seeing before, because a re-worn dress implied that you weren’t successful enough to buy new clothes. And she very much wanted people to think her husband was successful – not because it was important to her, but it was to him.
What was important to her was that her husband was kind and strong, and he was both those things. Which was why his sudden death, seven years after the first black-tie dinner, shocked her so deeply that she couldn’t function well for many months. It was both a small comfort to her and a devastation that they hadn’t had children – there had been two miscarriages in that time, and they weren’t sure if they wanted to try again.
It took her a long time to remove his clothes from their small house in Willoughby. She knew she had to; she couldn’t keep them like trophies of the life he had lived well if not long enough. She also knew she had to remove the clothes of hers that were tied to his professional life. They wouldn’t be needed again. Out went the hot-pink ballgown, along with other evening dresses she had bought for other events.
Everything went into the charity bin at her local shopping centre. She didn’t feel better afterward. In fact, she regretted bitterly that she hadn’t kept the hot-pink ballgown that made her so happyjust by looking at it. Because she needed to access happiness again. There were glimpses of it from time to time, but not enough.
By the time she emerged from her grief enough to feel like she could begin to see the light, two years had passed and the hot-pink ballgown was on to its next life.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE