The Actress: A Novel (5 page)

Though it seemed the kind of thing a 1980s Steven Weller would say, Maddy didn’t like that he had been so openly sexist. Maybe he enjoyed the story because it had an arc to it, or maybe he’d never said it. Celebrities told the same stories again and again, in interviews, to mold the image they wanted. At a certain point, they probably couldn’t even remember what was fact and what was fiction.

“Anyway, I hope you go with Bridget,” Weller said, getting out of the chair.

“Because you think she’s the best?” The moon made a halo around his head.

“Because then you and I might work together one day. And I’d like that.” His gaze held hers. It was an expensive gaze to put in a movie and one that looked very good blown up a thousand times.

He went inside. She turned the matchbook over in her hand but couldn’t get the trick.

I
n the living room, where Maddy finally found Dan, he was talking to Todd Lewitt about a tracking shot in
The Widower
and nodding at the answers the way Cady Pearce had nodded when Weller spoke. Maddy stood there silently, waiting for Dan to pause so she could tell him she had to talk to him, but there was never a pause. She noticed Zack enter the
room, alone. She turned quickly to Dan and said, “We should be getting back,” but he shook his head.

The girl Zack had been with, now wearing a tube skirt and a sweatshirt with a print of a cat, came down a minute later, as if Zack had instructed her to delay. Zack went to the bar for more liqueur. Maddy caught herself staring at him, blushed, and turned away.

“I’m leaving,” she told Dan.

He nodded and said to Todd Lewitt, “I love Antonioni.”

She took the car back to the condo, and the driver said he would return to the party to get Dan. She went to the bathroom and rinsed her face.

And I’d like that
. That look. Steven Weller seemed to have been flirting, but maybe he was playing elder statesman. Though the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

She lay on the bed and closed her eyes, but the room was spinning. She didn’t want to throw up. She paced in the living room and called Irina to tell her about Bridget, if not about Weller. It was two
A.M.
in New York, but Irina was a night owl. When the phone went to voice mail, Maddy hung up.

Sharoz would have advice about Bridget Ostrow. Sharoz took the Hollywood stuff in stride. She would be able to say whether Bridget Ostrow was legit or just a vanity manager for a famous man. Maddy glanced out the window at Sharoz and Kira’s condo. A light was on.

Kira opened the door in a cutoff Bad Brains T-shirt, a whiskey glass in her hand. She seemed to be weaving a little. “Hey, is Sharoz around?” Maddy asked.

“She’s at some party,” Kira said.

“Oh. Can you have her knock on my door if she comes back in the next half hour?”

“Yeah, sure.” Maddy turned unsteadily toward the door. “So how were the beautiful people?” Kira called behind her.

Dan had told Kira about the dinner invitation, and if she had been jealous, she had hidden it well. Now she seemed too tipsy to be cool. “It was a good party,” Maddy answered.

“And was the son there, the midget boy?”

“He’s not that short.”

“Oh my God, he is. I saw him in the theater for that first screening, and I was thinking how inappropriate it was that someone brought a child to our movie.”

Maddy didn’t know why she was knocking him. She was irritated with Kira for being haughty, for always undermining her. “The midget boy wants to work for me.”

“Of course he does. Did you say yes?”

“No. I don’t know what I’m going to do. You know, since you brought up the screenings, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’ve been so obnoxious at the Q and A’s.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kira said, her hand on her hip.

“Those comments about me being Dan’s girlfriend. You always find a way to work it in. Like I only got cast because we’re sleeping together.”

“I never said that. Is that why you think you got cast?”

“You imply it. And you’re so dismissive of my MFA. You were obnoxious during the shoot, but I never said anything because it was good for the movie. Now we’ve been lucky enough to make it here, and it’s like you have it in for me.”

“I don’t have it in for you, Maddy.”

Maddy wanted to scream. “Sure you do,” Maddy said. “You think I’m a snob.”

“God, I’ve never seen your cheeks this red except when you were doing that fucking in the movie.”

When Maddy reconstructed the moment later, it was like she was watching from a corner of the room. She shoved Kira hard, and Kira stumbled back a few steps and then strode toward her fast, like she was going to hit her. Instead, she put her face right up against Maddy’s and glared.

Without thinking about it or knowing why she was doing it, Maddy kissed her. Then she stepped back, shocked at herself and what she had done. Kira moved toward her, slowly, and touched her face. She kissed Maddy gently and with affection that seemed completely incompatible with the rudeness. Maddy’s tongue began to move in Kira’s mouth, and
Kira’s hands were on Maddy’s back, pulling her closer. She could feel Kira’s breasts against her own, so much bigger than hers, these strange soft boobs in a place where until now she had encountered only hardness.

Kira was kissing her neck and her chin, and then she was unclasping Maddy’s bra and her hands were on her. Maddy cupped Kira’s breasts over the T-shirt, imagining the size and shape of her nipples. Kira lifted Maddy’s sweater and shirt over her head and went for the bra strap, and that was when Maddy realized this was happening. Dan would be home soon, wondering where she was. He might see the light on. She pulled away.

“I should go,” Maddy said. She picked up her sweater and began to put it on.

“Yeah, it’s really late.” She said it like Maddy had overstayed her welcome when only seconds ago, she had been kissing her.

Maddy felt both guilty and embarrassed. Now she had done it and she couldn’t undo it and it was her own fault, she had kissed first.

Dan didn’t get back to their condo for another hour, which gave Maddy time to shower and get into bed. It had been an otherworldly night. The dueling pitches from Bridget and Zack; then Zack with the girl; then Weller on the patio; then Kira. Maddy had never made out with a woman, not even kissed one. In the theater scene at Dartmouth, a lot of the women students got drunk and slept together, but at parties, when Maddy observed them drinking heavily and groping each other, aware that the boys were watching, it had seemed like an act. She didn’t want to do something like that just to turn on guys. Despite the occasional erotic dream about women, she believed she was ninety-five percent straight.

Tonight she was less sure. With Kira being such a good kisser, she had been turned on. Maybe it was actually Steven Weller who had turned her on, and Kira was just a substitute, a nearby body. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Weller at all.

When Dan slid into bed next to her, she asked if he’d had fun. “Best party of my life,” he said. His eyes were starting to close.

“Bridget wants to sign me,” she told him.

“I knew she would,” he murmured. “You should go with her. She knows everyone.”

“She wants me to move out there.”

“Maybe we should. We could rethink it.” Soon Dan was sleeping and she was lying awake, feeling Kira’s hands on her body. What if Kira told Dan what happened, just to spite her, to cause trouble in the relationship? The post-screening panels would go from bad to worse, Kira feeling she had something on Maddy. Maddy wished she had never knocked on the condo door. It was all Steven Weller’s fault. He had made her crazy, turned her into someone else.

A
n hour into the third
I Used to Know Her
screening, on Tuesday night, distributors began to leave the room. In the theater, when people walked out, it meant they hated it. But Maddy learned later that the executives had been rushing to put in offers on the film. Four different companies made bids, and after a whirlwind night of negotiations involving Dan, Sharoz, and Ed Handy, Apollo Classics bought world rights for $4 million and first look at Dan’s next screenplay.

When Dan came home in the middle of the night and gave Maddy the news, she was half-asleep and could make out only bits and pieces: He would be able to pay the actors their prenegotiated back salary; Maddy’s was $25,000. On top of that she would get $15,000 for her shared story credit. Each fee was more money than she had ever made for anything creative. Sharoz and Dan would get a quarter of a million each, plus more if the film made any money. It wasn’t a mammoth deal, but it was mammoth in relation to her life with Dan, their dumpy apartment, their service-industry jobs.

He got on top of her. “I have flop sweat,” he said. “I smell disgusting.” But he didn’t make a move to stop.

So now he wanted to make love, after becoming a big man. He wanted validation. That was all right with her. Sex could serve many purposes. She had been trying to forget what had happened with Kira, even if it was only a makeout, even if Kira was a girl. In the three days since then, Kira had been distant with Maddy, terse and breezy. At the Q and A’s she stopped lobbing her half-insults, as though she had lost interest in raising Maddy’s ire. Maddy was ashamed of the lonely part of her that had
kissed Kira. Her conversation with Weller had excited her, and then Dan wouldn’t leave the party. If you were lonely, there were other things you could do, like buy cigarettes or listen to Tom Waits.

Dan was inside her now, though it felt clinical, like he was a surgeon doing a procedure. He came on her stomach and looked down at it with the hint of a smile. She was on the pill, so he usually finished inside her, but sometimes he didn’t. He got a towel from the bathroom and handed it to her, and she dabbed at herself.

He was asleep a few minutes later, his body turned away from her. She stared at the ceiling. They would have to get cracking on
The Nest
now that he had a first-look deal. After he had finished
I Used to Know Her,
but before they shot it, they had started a new screenplay together.
The Nest
was a comedy about a Brooklyn girl who can’t move out of her parents’ apartment even though she’s engaged. They wrote about sixty pages, but then Jake died and Maddy had stopped sleeping and hadn’t been able to work on it. Maybe now they would finally finish.

Maybe she would start getting writing jobs of her own, since she had a story credit on
I Used to Know Her
. Her career would advance right alongside Dan’s, the two of them in step like in that Atalanta story on
Free to Be . . . You and Me
. She was still holding the sticky towel in her hand. She set it down on the wall-to-wall carpet before turning to Dan and pressing her front against his back.

I
n the morning Maddy called Irina to share the good news. “Oh my God, I am shitting,” Irina said. She had grown up in Bay Ridge and hadn’t completely lost her accent. “I knew this would happen. How is Dan?”

“He’s happy, but he almost seems like he knew it. It’s weird. He was so squirrelly the first couple days, and now he’s Mr. Cool.”

“I knew you were going to get a deal,” Irina said. “Can I throw you guys a party when you come home?” She and her sound-designer boyfriend lived in a loft in East Williamsburg.

After the festival, Maddy explained, they were going to L.A. to take meetings with agents and managers; they had decided that morning, before Dan went off to meet the head of Apollo Classics. “But definitely after we get back.”

Maddy told her about Bridget Ostrow, and Irina said, “She’s huge.”

“I know. She might be too huge.” Maddy told her that Steven Weller had been at the party, and had urged her to sign with Bridget. “We talked for, like, twenty minutes. Alone. It was so bizarre. I feel like I hallucinated it.”

“The fact that he’s her main client is not the biggest endorsement of Bridget Ostrow.”

“You don’t get it,” Maddy said. “This new role is a tour de force for him.
The Widower
. He’s getting better, Irina, I’m telling you.”

Irina cleared her throat and said, “How many clients does Bridget have?”

“She said seven. She says she doesn’t do volume. Like that Robert Klein routine.”

“Who’s Robert Klein?” asked Irina.

“T
he idea of a jury giving an award for acting is ridiculous,” Lael Gordinier was saying from the podium of the Mountain Way Theater. “There is no objective way of judging actors in comparison to each other.”

It was the closing ceremony for the festival. After the acquisition, every screening of
I Used to Know Her
had been sold out, with a line snaking around the block. Maddy and Kira were stopped for autographs wherever they went, and Victor was in talks to be a cinematographer on a cable comedy series about Staten Island secretaries.

Every seat in the Mountain Way was packed, and IFC was airing it live. “But sometimes there is a performance so unique,” Lael continued, “that it deserves to be recognized. This year the Grand Jury has awarded a prize for such a performance. The Special Jury Prize for Acting goes to Maddy Freed for
I Used to Know Her
.”

“You bitch,” Kira said, but she was smiling. She leaned over to Maddy, and their eyes locked. For a moment Maddy feared Kira would French-kiss her, but she planted a wet one on her cheek.

Maddy registered very little of the next five minutes—the award, the way it was shaped like a mountain and made of something that looked like steel. Thanking Kira, Sharoz, Dan, and a dozen cast and crew members. Stammering something hokey about her father, then beginning to weep. Backstage, she did a press line before weaving back to her seat.

Dan hugged her. “I sounded like an ass,” she said.

“A little bit,” he said. She took out a tissue and dabbed her face, still unable to think past the moment when Lael read out her name.

Best Director went to the director of
Rap Sheet,
a portly white British guy, and Bryan Monakhov’s
Triggers
won Best Dramatic Feature. When Bryan’s name was announced, Maddy was afraid to glance over at Dan, who was sitting very still in his seat.