The Actress: A Novel (13 page)

“You saw it in
college
? Oh, God, you’re making me feel old.”

“Writers have so much more creative freedom than actors,” Maddy said. “You must be happy you made the transition.”

“I don’t know, most of the time the studios destroy anything good that I put on the page. It’s like when Mervyn LeRoy optioned a novel and said to Spencer Tracy, ‘This book has everything. Great characters, an element of surprise, a sophisticated theme, beautiful writing. But I think I can lick it.’ ”

She laughed. She could see why he was Steven’s best friend. Terry seemed wholly genuine and funny. He was more politically active than Steven was, lobbying frequently on behalf of Rwandans and working as a World Children’s Welfare ambassador.

“It’s a relief to finally meet you,” she said. “I was worried. Steven told me about the time you met a girlfriend of his and pretended to have a limp.”

Terry chuckled. “Yeah, he told her I was faking, and she was looking
at him in horror because she believed me. That was a long time ago. But you shouldn’t have been nervous to meet me. I’ve never seen him so happy.”

“Really?” she asked coyly.

“Dating Steven isn’t like dating other men,” he said. “It’s hard, I think. There will be people who think they can tell you who he is. What he’s about. They’ll pretend to know him, but they don’t. A successful relationship has walls and windows. You need to let the world in a little, but not too much. For Steven’s sake and your own, make sure there aren’t too many windows.”

His eyes were close and very serious. She wasn’t sure what he meant but nodded intently. She was relieved when he resumed his nail-prying and added, “And don’t forget to give him shit. He’s got too many people kissing his ass already.”

E
arly the next morning Maddy woke up from a bad dream. It was about her father. In this one they were on a canoe on Yarrow Lake, and the canoe toppled and she was a very little girl screaming for him, but he was gone.

The clock by the bed said two. She wandered down to see if Steven was in the kitchen. He wasn’t.

She moved through the living room, past the eighteenth-century
faux marbre
columns. A soft voice was coming from Steven’s study. He always kept the door closed; he had said he didn’t want her going in there without him. It was the only room of the mansion that she’d never been in alone.

One of the double doors was ajar, and through the crack she saw him. The desk was in the center of the room, facing the arched windows that overlooked the patio, garden, and pool. He was leaning back in his chair, talking on the phone, and one of the desk drawers was open. While he talked, laughing so quietly it was almost inaudible, he pushed in the low drawer, inserted a key, and locked it. Then, very casually, he took a framed photo on the desk, removed the backing, and inserted the key behind the photo. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he was saying on the phone. His voice was husky and affectionate.

She pushed the door open. He jumped a little, but when he turned to her, he did it slowly.

“Who are you talking to in the middle of the night?” she asked, coming in. She had joked, a few weeks after she arrived, that his study was like part of the west wing in Manderley. He’d said, “Men need space to be alone. Howard Hughes had an entire wing barred to his family, where he would sit for hours, reading aviation books.” She had laughed and said he shouldn’t point to Howard Hughes as a paragon of male virtue.

“Someone in Italy,” Steven said, angling the mouthpiece away from his mouth. The photo on the desk was black and white. It was his mother, standing in front of a house, hand on hip, smiling.

“Who?” Maddy asked, trying not to sound worried. Her voice quavered on the “who.”

Steven sighed, said something inaudible into the phone, and hung up. He went to her, near the door. “What’s going on?”

“Was it Albertina, that woman from your party?” she asked. “The princess?”

He expelled a rush of air through his mouth. “It was Vito, from the palazzo.” His head butler. “There was a problem with a fireplace.”

“He couldn’t handle it himself?”

“I tell him, when it comes to Palazzo Mastrototaro, to call me day or night.”

“But I heard you say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ”

“So? He’s my friend. He dialed me on my cell but I didn’t want to disturb you, so I came down and called him from the landline.”

She had to try to remain calm, but it was difficult. To date Steven Weller was to date Warren Beatty. She was in a constant state of nervous tension. When he left, she often worried he would never come back. He would just pick up a woman more beautiful and cultured, and tell Maddy it was over. He had gone off to D.C. for meetings about Darfur, and when she’d asked to come, he’d said she would be bored. A few times he had taken out
Jo
alone or with Terry, to Catalina or San Diego, but he hadn’t invited her. She hadn’t pressed him, but it bothered her that she had never been on the boat.

She often obsessed over the girls who had come before her, like Cady. They were bustier or better in bed. She wanted to be a better lover than every woman he had been with before, and she thought about it during sex, which made her worry more, and that made it hard to relax.

Sometimes she imagined his life with Julia Hanson. Wondered whether what he had said about her was really true, that she would have pulled him into the abyss. Julia’s TV show was advertised on billboards all over L.A. Maddy would stare up at Julia in her crisp white pantsuit and wonder what secrets this woman knew about Steven.

“I just need to know that you’re loyal,” Maddy said in the study, hating the needy pitch of her voice.

“I am loyal,” he said in an exhausted tone. “But I’m older than you, and we do things a different way. We don’t vomit everything up like your generation.”

His tone was hostile and defensive. It reminded her of the arguments she used to have with Dan when he was in a funk about his career and took it out on her.

All this time Steven had seemed too confident to be hypersensitive, but perhaps men were all alike. It was as though Venice had been a hundred years ago. “I’m not asking you to vomit everything up,” she said.

He walked over to the couch and sat. The moonlight was flickering on the pool out the window.

She sat in an armchair adjacent to the couch. The study had built-in bookshelves holding dark, monochromatic volumes. On one of the walls was a de Kooning painting of an angry, naked woman. Maddy didn’t know if it was original. She wasn’t sure how wealthy Steven was and didn’t want to be sure. She didn’t like the things about him that made him different from her, like his modernist Catalan portraits and antique urns. She liked the things they had in common: his devotion to acting, his attention to scripts, his belief in the power of art.

“I think I’m lonely,” she said. “I feel like we’re not alone enough.”

“We’re busy people.”

“I’m not busy yet. It seems like every night you’re free, we’re at an appearance. It makes me worry that I’m not . . . special to you.”

He came over to the armchair, got beneath her, and lifted her so she
was on his lap. He stroked her hair. “Is that what this is about? How long have you been feeling this way?”

“A while. Don’t you want to be with just me sometimes?”

“These commitments are for causes I believe in. But you’re right. It’s not fair. I haven’t made enough room for you.”

“I left my whole life for you.”

He began to kiss her. You couldn’t know, in a relationship, whether you were being lied to, she thought. She had a study, a converted guest room, and she was trying to make it her own, but it wasn’t yet. A desk, a chair, some paperbacks, and her books and plays from The New School. She wanted independence, but she didn’t escape into it in the middle of the night to take private phone calls or lock things away in drawers. She didn’t have drawers with locks. She had a shoe box of mementos given to her by different boyfriends over the years, cigarette-filter flowers; wallet-sized photos of boys, taken in grade school; Valentine’s cards. But the box was in storage in Steven’s garage, and she hadn’t looked at it in years, not until she’d found it in the back of the closet in Fort Greene.

Steven carried her to the desk, so strong, as if she were nothing in his arms, even though she was sturdy and tall. When he touched her like this, there was no frustration, no discord. When he held her, she believed him.

After they finished, he left the room first. Like a dare. She picked up the phone on the desk and placed her finger above the redial button, and then she felt a chill and put the receiver in its cradle.

2

The next morning she woke up alone. Steven had left for his set. The clock said ten-fifteen. Annette was out shopping. The housekeepers didn’t come until eleven.

Maddy made herself a cup of coffee, and homemade Greek yogurt with fresh berries and granola, and took it to the patio with that morning’s
New York Times
. She flipped through the Arts section, reading play reviews. There was a rave for a new Off-Broadway play about a deaf bricklayer, and Maddy was surprised to see that Irina was in the cast. They had exchanged a few emails after Maddy’s move, and then they’d slowed down, and eventually, Irina hadn’t written back.

She wasn’t in touch with anyone from New York, not in a sustained way. She had heard through Sharoz that Dan had wrapped
The Valentine
and moved to Venice Beach. Sharoz said he was dating Rachel Huber, the executive on
The Valentine
. Maddy wondered if the affair had begun during the shoot but Sharoz said she didn’t know.

She had not yet run into him in L.A. and wondered when she would. Though she wasn’t sorry their relationship was over, she was nostalgic for the nights they had stayed up late hammering out the story beats. Maybe someday she would collaborate with him again. Ananda McCarthy said Hollywood was like a big summer camp in which exes were constantly forced to work together, making the best of it.

The sun was bright. She could hear a house sparrow. She read the paper and did twenty laps in the pool. She never swam in New York, but now that she lived in a home with a pool, she felt an obligation to take advantage. After one of Maddy’s film auditions, Bridget had reported that
the casting director had commented she was “healthy.” Maddy had been shocked and wounded; in the theater world, they weren’t as picky about weight. She was aware that in Los Angeles, the trend was super-slim with fake breasts, but she’d hoped that in the eyes of the casting directors, if not the tabloids, her Special Jury Prize would set its own expectations.

“Do you think I need to lose weight?” Maddy had asked Bridget on the phone.

“It might not be a bad thing for
Husbandry,
” she said. “Especially with what Ellie goes through in the movie.” In response, Maddy began swimming every day, telling herself it was for wellness, not appearance.

After her swim, she headed inside with the vague plan of taking a yoga class in Santa Monica. No auditions today. She preferred the days when she had them. The days when she didn’t feel like a bored housewife, like Ellie in the movie. Alone in the house when Steven was working, she tended to worry, pacing the rooms, leaving him voice mails that said “I love you,” that she was embarrassed to have left, taking walks in the neighborhood, then racing home when a paparazzo caught her. She had discovered the Wilshire branch of the public library, one of the few places where no one seemed to know or care who she was. She had been reading for pleasure, a mix of modern fiction and the classics that she felt Steven would want her to read. After finishing
The Portrait of a Lady
(a great hook, a slow middle, and a conclusion too ambiguous for her taste), she had decided to check out
The Wings of the Dove
from the library. But she was making her way through it painstakingly, afraid that Steven’s adoration of James might be something she could never completely share.

In the house she started toward the stairs, but when she passed the door to Steven’s study, she stopped.

She turned the knob, pushed the door open. She flipped the lights, not wanting to open the drapes in case the housekeepers came early. Though he had a burglar alarm, she had once asked him whether there were hidden video cameras and he’d said only outside the house, not in.

The furniture was all 1930s, shiny blond wood tables with silk skirts. There was a crystal bowl filled with yellow apples and an iron vase with fresh pink azaleas.

She ran her hand across one of the shelves. Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev, Sand, Proust, Wharton, and James. She examined a copy of
Middlemarch
that appeared unread. She wondered if he kept the books here for show. Clearly, he had read James, whom he quoted often, but she had seldom heard him talk about the others.

She went to the desk and lifted the photo of his mother. She pulled out the key and inserted it in the bottom drawer. Steven would be furious if he found out she was here. She glanced up at the ceiling but saw no camera domes.

The drawer was deep, and when she pulled it open, she found hanging files. Inside them were folders containing receipts, articles on Darfur, Christmas cards from studio executives. Nothing interesting, nothing juicy.

Why would he lock a drawer that had nothing important in it? Maybe he knew she’d seen the open drawer and had moved whatever had been in there. But if that was true, why hadn’t he moved the key? Was he taunting her because he suspected she would snoop?

She closed and relocked the drawer, put the key back behind his mother. Shut the lights. She checked the bookshelf one more time to be sure all the books were even, then darted out.

“I
t’s time to tack,” Steven was calling. They were aboard
Jo
, on their way to Catalina for a long weekend. He had proposed the trip spontaneously a couple of days after his two
A.M.
phone call. He was taking time off from
Declarations
just to be with her.

She helped him pull the sail and they ducked as the boom moved.
Jo
was a beauty. White sail. Regal, with two gorgeous cabins and its own showers. Maddy squinted up at the mast, which seemed enormous against the bright sky.

She was sitting across from Steven, her feet propped up next to him. “Okay, your turn,” he said.

She took the tiller. “Where are we going?” she asked.

Steven pointed to a distant mound of brown. “Aim for that,” he said.

“I’ve sailed before,” she said. She had been on friends’ boats on Yar
row Lake in summer, and she’d always enjoyed the thrill of moving fast, as well as the constant work that went with having a boat, the tying and moving and switching sides.

“You haven’t told me enough about where you’re from. Tell me all about your father.”

“People always said we were similar. Whenever he was thinking hard about something, he would run his hands through his hair. Both hands over his head, crossed. I do it, too. It’s eerie. He loved the crossword puzzle. He could do it in, like, five minutes. But he also had a really bad temper. He was a complicated guy. Hair-trigger temper, but he wept at Hallmark commercials. He taught me to play chess. He read me
All-of-a-Kind Family
.”

“I wish I had met him.”

“He would have loved you. He was an English teacher. But he loved mysteries. Total Anglophile. He watched those BBC shows, which was probably why he wanted me to be an actress.”

Steven was wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, and his hair billowed in the wind, his sunglasses shielding his eyes. This was how she wanted it, away from everyone else. It was what she had missed these months in L.A.

He came to her side, put his arm around her, and raised his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Has any woman loved a man as much as I love you?” she asked.

“Many have asked themselves that very question.”

“Shut up,” she said, swatting his arm. She closed her eyes and felt the wind on her face. “I wish we could be like this all the time. I feel selfish about you. It can be hard to be your girlfriend, you know. Intelligent, respectable women make eyes at you like teenagers.”

“It’s the fame. They don’t know me. Don’t read too much into it.”

“Men, too. At these parties, gay men, they look at you and whisper.”

“I’m not the only one they whisper about.”

“I’m sorry I got so upset the other night,” she said.

“I’ve already forgotten it.”

“I shouldn’t be so jealous. I’m just getting used to being with you.”

“I know you are,” he said. “And I don’t envy you. There are times I wish I could go back to being Steven Woyceck.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just be alone, like this, on the water. With someone I love. Not have to worry about long-lens cameras or tabloids or blogs.”

She felt a surge of love for him and guilt that she had mistrusted him. She had been brazen the other night. Not believing him. A sophisticated girlfriend wouldn’t have harped on him. She wanted to be one of those cool, confident girls who didn’t need to pry. She feared that she had soured things between them that night.

“You can be Steven Woyceck with me,” she said.

“I want to be.”

It had been disingenuous to act like she needed to know everything. He didn’t know everything about her. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“And what’s that?” he asked, positioning his hand over hers on the tiller, adjusting the angle slightly, his eyes on the distant island.

“I was with a woman once.”

“Oh yes?” he asked with a smile.

She told him what had happened in Kira’s condo at Mile’s End. “I feel really weird about it.”

“Because it was good?”

“Yeah, and because—I never told Dan. He still doesn’t know.”

“If I had a cell phone on this boat, you could call him up right now.” Steven didn’t allow phones on
Jo
; he liked to be at one with the elements. He said there was a radio for emergencies. “I think it’s good you experimented,” he said. “Sometimes I worry I’m not enough fun for you.”

“But you are!”

“I’m not too old?”

“Stop saying that.”

He kissed her. She felt safe and invincible against the world.

As they approached Catalina, she started to sing “26 Miles,” which she had learned at summer camp. Steven joined in, but their voices were off-key.

That night after hiking, and dining on the island, they made love in the cabin twice. He was so good at touching her; the way he made her come was unlike the way Dan had. He was focused on her, picking up on the tiniest gradations of pleasure. She loved his hands on her, wherever
he wanted to put them. Afterward, the boat moved gently in the current. He ran his finger around her nipple and said, “You’d look good nursing.”

“How do you know I plan to nurse?”

“You have arms that were made for it. You could hold twins in those guns.”

“What about my boobs? You didn’t say I had boobs made for nursing.”

“I like that they’re small. Big ones scare me.” He kissed her and pushed her hair from her face. “Do you want kids?” Her body tingled, less at the prospect of being a mother than at the prospect of him loving her enough to make children with her. Which he had never done, not with any woman. “How do you feel about it?”

“Oh, Steven,” she said, and began to cry.

He put his thumbs on her cheeks to blot the tears. “If you want to wait, that’s okay. If you don’t, it’s okay. Don’t you understand, Maddy? I want to make you happy.”

“Do I not seem happy to you?”

“I want you to have whatever you want. Feel taken care of. I want to take care of you, whatever that means to you.”

“You do,” she said. “You already do.”

“S
o has L.A. gotten the better of you?” Zack asked Maddy on the phone. She had said she was in her car, on the way home from spinning class. He had never imagined her as the type of girl to spin. It was for gerbils.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“Weekly mani-pedis?”

She laughed. “Only twice a month.”

Zack swiveled in his chair and looked up at the painting on the wall behind his desk. He had recently moved into a bigger office, and though it was only slightly larger, it was a symbolic victory. After attending an art opening on Hudson Street with a colleague, he’d sprung for a small painting of a Jewish English boxer from the 1930s, Jack “Kid” Berg. Berg had Hebrew letters on his shorts and was posed formally, fists up, small but tough.

Zack’s actors were working consistently, some getting second and third leads in big-budget movies, the kind that garnered entire-paragraph di
gressions in reviews. Kira had already shot a pretty decent indie drama. For the first time, he was feeling like an agent and not a servicer. But he had called Maddy because an agent had to think constantly of all the clients he was going to sign, not just the ones he already had. If his fervor for her was greater because she was his mother’s client, he tried not to think about that.

“You’ll go weekly soon,” Zack said. “Most
men
in L.A. get their nails done. One of the reasons I can’t stand it there. Seriously, how has the transition been?”

“The hardest part is the driving,” she said. “The GPS makes it simple, but I have no conceptual sense of the layout. I read Steven’s old Thomas Guide at night, and he calls me a Luddite. I tell him I want to have a sense of east and west.”

Zack had not been surprised when he’d learned about Maddy and Steven. His mother said the two of them were “blissful,” but Bridget massaged the truth for a living. He wondered what Maddy’s day-to-day life was like in that creepy mansion, which seemed like the kind of place where you would be murdered in your sleep with a pillow.

“So do you know what second position is?” he asked her.

“No.”

“The second-position agent is the one who’s waiting in the wings. The one who didn’t get the client. I’m yours. Which means you can call me and talk about anything you want, your roles, your jobs, your representation, and I’ll listen. You don’t have to worry that I’ll blab, and I’ll always tell you the truth because I don’t work for you.”

“You mean that the people who do work for me lie to me?”

“Absolutely,” he said, running his hand over the surface of his desk. He liked to keep almost nothing on it. He had always been neat, even as a child. When his mother gave him presents, he would fold the opened wrapping paper into squares before giving it to her to throw out.

Work was the most important thing in his life. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t enjoy other things, like the yoga he took regularly at a studio in Tribeca or the occasional lecture at the Open Center on being present. He wanted to be a good businessman but not a bad person. To that end, he hadn’t done coke since he’d been at Mile’s End.