“But you can learn. That’s the wonderful thing about faith. It can only grow, and along with that growth comes experience.”
He was holding her hand in one of his own.
“Some are willing and will learn nothing,” he told her. “Those who are eager to learn will be given much.”
“Kyle?” she asked.
“Yes, my love?” he replied with such warmth that she wanted to hold him so tightly that their hearts would be practically touching one another, making it difficult for Carla to control her emotions.
“I have one criticism,” she said, gulping a couple of times.
Kyle was frowning as he asked, “Criticism of—?”
Carla had not meant to make him nervous in any way but that was how he seemed to be reacting.
“You, Kyle.”
“Me?”
He looked so good, his bright blond hair glistening as a ray of sunlight framed the top of his head.
“A halo,” she muttered, trying to get out of the corner into which she had backed herself. “You’ve actually got a halo around your—”
“You’re changing the subject, Carla.”
“I guess I am.”
He was teasing her a bit but with an edge of seriousness as well and said, “You were about to tell me what that one criticism is.”
“I guess I was.”
“What is it? No more evasion, okay?”
“Okay,” she told him.
“Well?”
Carla hesitated, not sure when or if she should say anything after all.
“Go ahead…” Kyle kept prodding. “There is not one word or a thousand in the English language that you would use that could ever offend me or make me want to reconsider our relationship, okay, Carla?”
She was grateful for that reassurance.
“You are beginning to sound like some ultrasophisticated whoever from New York City or someplace. It’s almost like you are putting on a facade that you hope people will think is real. You weren’t like that when we first met. You sounded much more—”
“—normal?” he finished the sentence for her.
“Well, yes, that’s right.”
“You’re not the only one to point that out to me. My father said something just a few days ago.”
Kyle pulled the car over to the side of the road.
“Carla,” he said earnestly, “I’ve dated lots of women, you know. I think each one was special in her own way. But you’re different. You are very special. I find that I am always stretching myself emotionally to keep up with you.”
“But I don’t understand why you would feel that way. We’re on the same level. I’ve never felt that I was above you.”
He seemed unconvinced.
“I want to be a proper husband, a man you can respect. Rely on. I don’t know all that much about you yet I know enough to say that I am looking forward to us spending the rest of our lives together. And I don’t want you to be ashamed of me when we meet those big-time executives you know. It would be terrible for your career to have people saying that you settled for me out of wild passion, that there was no real love involved. What if important folks started whispering, ‘He might be a good lover but he doesn’t have a brain in his head.”‘
Kyle cupped her head in his hands.
“And I want to think that I can be a proper father to any children the Lord blesses us with, Carla, that they can be proud of me, too.”
Listening to Kyle talk about their future, about marriage and the children they would raise together someday, Carla felt so moved with love she couldn’t speak. She took his hand, threading her fingers through his. Staring down at their hands clasped together, she spoke in a quiet voice, one straight from her heart.
“I respect you more than any man I have ever known. More than anyone rich, or powerful or famous. I am proud to be with you and the proudest day of my life will be the day I become your wife.” She smiled tenderly at him. “I hope we’ll be blessed with children. And I pray I’ll be a good mother. I thought I’d done it all and knew it all when I met you. But now I know there’s still a lot I have to learn about life and about relationships, too.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “We have a lifetime ahead of us, my love. To discover it all together.”
An Oscar!
It was coveted by virtually everyone in the moviemaking business.
Carla Gearhart had placed the statuette on the mantel over her fireplace at her home in Brentwood, Tennessee almost as a talisman to ward off failure.
For a while it seemed to be working. Winning an Academy Award for Best Actress had opened up a new career for her and revived the one she had started with when she was in her late teens: country music.
What a night that Monday was, with an in-person attendance of thirty-five hundred producers, directors, studio executives and many others, as well as a television viewing audience numbering into the millions.
Betting handicappers in Las Vegas and elsewhere were loading the odds against her, in part because no country music singer had ever gone from the Grand Ole Opry to any kind of real movie stardom, but also due to the kind of role that she had played: an obsessive, control freak mother who drove her daughter to a successful suicide attempt and her husband to booze. The film was dark, sad, largely downbeat. And her competition included more than one previous Academy Award winner.
Yet she won.
Columnists, media reviewers and others speculated after the ceremony had ended that Carla had been absolutely convincing in playing a character who was utterly opposite her own personality. None of the others did anything that the Academy Award voter had not seen them do before, however well they did it.
Carla was a breath of fresh air!
The morning after the annual ceremony in Hollywood, and the winners’ parties afterward, was precisely when her agent received a dozen phone calls from the various studios as well as major independent producers, most of whom would have little to do with her before she was able to hold the Oscar in her hand, and smile.
“You’ve got no worries, Carla!” Irving Chicolte had told her over lunch that next day, less than two hours after she had managed to drag herself out of bed, the two of them now sitting at a favored table in the most coveted section of a restaurant only minutes from the auditorium. But then Irving was a master of feel-good sensibilities, and would have told her the same thing if she had just been signed to do a role in a grade C quickie.
He was a genuinely sweet man, this bald-headed, bushy eye-browed, dimpled little character, a leftover from another era, surviving, and doing it well, in an industry of cookie-cutter young Turks, some of the other agents laughing at flashy old Irving behind his back but, at the same time, jealous of the deals he was able to secure for his clients, some of whom had been with him for decades.
More honest than he was willing to admit for fear of blowing his image, Irving Chicolte turned down deals that were suspect, telling people that he could not face his cigar in the morning if he ever threw his integrity out the window. Producers and studio executives, while