The Actress: A Novel (7 page)

Maddy heard Steven saying, “This is Maddy Freed. M-A-D-D-Y F-R-E-E-D. She just won a Special Jury Prize at the Mile’s End Film Festival. Keep your eye on this one, she’ll be a lot more famous than I am soon. And she takes a much better picture.”

She began to feel less intimidated, to relax. As her confidence grew, she turned her face this way and that. “Ms. Freed, Ms. Freed! Here, Ms. Freed!” She was high. It was different from her feeling when she’d won
the Jury Prize. That had been about her work. This was about her.

F
rom the foot of the carpet, Zack stared at the V that Maddy and Steven’s hands formed. He didn’t like that V.

Zack was familiar with a certain cynical type of girl. He met them at premiere parties or nightclubs, the models/actresses—anoractresses, he called them. At first glance, they would blow him off, but when they found out he was an agent, everything changed. His diminutiveness was no object. Suddenly, they were touching his arm, moving their lips near his. Shameless.

In his first year as an agent, he had enjoyed the attention—it was a trip to walk into a Michelin restaurant with a knockout on his arm—but at the end of the night, it was just him and the girl in his loft. Because none of the girls was interested in talking, it felt a lot like bringing home dolls. Coke helped, but eventually that bored him, too.

He didn’t know Maddy well, but he never would have put her in that category of girl. Now he wasn’t sure. She was vamping, hamming it up in that ridiculous dress, a dress you wore only if you had a movie in the festival, not if you were someone’s date. Berlin wasn’t the Academy Awards; there were different rules. He couldn’t reconcile the girl on the carpet with the girl he had seen in
I Used to Know Her
, the serious dramatic actress. Who could not only act but write. Maddy was smart. What was she thinking?

“It seems like a lot of trouble to bring her to Berlin for one audition,” he murmured to his mother.

“Not when your director refuses to leave the continent.”

“That’s a very fancy dress.”

“This is a very important premiere.”

“What’s your plan for her?”

“To break her in. Zachary, please. I don’t need to educate you on the value of advance publicity. You’re an
agent,
for God’s sake.”

He shook his head and watched the V grow tighter.

M
addy could hear a woman calling her name in a thick accent. The
woman was in a parka, standing next to a guy with a videocamera. “Ms. Freed, I am Gisela Moor. I’m from a German television show?”

“Hey there,” Maddy said. Steven had released her hand and was talking to another reporter a few steps away.

“What is your film in the festival?” the woman in the parka was asking Maddy.

“Oh, I don’t have one. But I’m in a movie that just premiered at Mile’s End, in the U.S. It should be out by Christmas in the States, and we’re hoping for a release in Europe. It’s called
I Used to Know Her
. By a great new director named—”

“How long have you and Mr. Weller been involved?”

“Oh, we’re not—he isn’t—we just met. My boyfriend is the director of my movie, and he’s actually named Dan—”

Bridget was there, standing next to her. “That’s all for now,” she said. She ushered Maddy inside the theater. Maddy was flushed from the adrenaline of the past ten minutes and embarrassed that the press had misunderstood Steven’s gesture. She wished she had gotten more time to talk about Dan and the movie. “You did very well,” Bridget said, smiling warmly. “You’re a natural.”

When the rest of the cast finished their interviews and came inside, they all climbed the stairs to the theater. With Steven beside her, her hand still tingling, Maddy wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you for doing that,” she tried. He said nothing but smiled at her briefly, paternally, before moving a few steps ahead.

A
t the after-party, held at a hot nightclub, she and the
Widower
crew sat a banquette in a roped-off private area. Zack had come to dinner with them during the screening but decided to skip the party.

Maddy’s cell phone rang. It was a number she didn’t recognize, with a strange area code, and not knowing any better, she answered. A man from the
Daily Mail
said he was calling for confirmation that Maddy was dating Steven Weller. “No, that’s not true,” she said. “I don’t know where you got that. I have a boyfriend.”

Bridget indicated that Maddy should give her the phone. Bridget took
it, listened for a moment, and said Maddy was not going to comment on the rumors. Then she clicked off.

“But that makes it sound like it’s true,” Maddy said.

“No, it’s always better not to comment,” Bridget said, “or else it sounds like a false denial.”

“Maybe I should issue some kind of statement. Flora could help me. I want the press to know that Dan and I are together. I want to get his name out there, too.”

“Don’t take any of this seriously,” Bridget said with a wave of her hand. “The legitimate outlets won’t report anything without attribution. As for the illegitimate ones, I try to give them as little attention as possible.” A moment later, the phone rang again. Bridget silenced it, returned it to Maddy, and said, “We’re going to have to change your number.”

Maddy hoped no one else bothered her. She’d had too much wine at dinner and didn’t want to answer by accident and say the wrong thing. That it had been exciting to hold Steven’s hand. That she loved feeling his blood next to hers.

Maddy heard Chrissie Hynde singing “I’ll Stand By You,” and began to sway in response to the music. She was sixteen again, at the Potter High School prom. Steven saw her swaying and asked if she wanted to dance. “Yes, Mr. Weller, I will dance with you,” she said, realizing she was verging on drunk. At the banquette, someone had ordered cranberry and vodka and she’d already had a glass.

He held her closely as they rocked back and forth. It was intoxicating to be close to him. He smelled like cedar or musk.

His wrists were heavy on her shoulders. In her velvet heels, she was three inches taller than he. “Your real last name is Woyceck, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Polish. Way too hard to spell, so I changed it early. Why do you ask?”

“I was just thinking about how I used to know everything about you. When I was a teenager, I clipped articles about you from teeny-bopper magazines. Isn’t that stupid?”

“Not at all. Even at a young age, you had good taste.” It was classic Steven, pretending to be full of himself as a way of pretending not to be
full of himself.

He was cocking his head and closing one eye, and then he ran his hands down Maddy’s hair. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Imagining you with a shag. I think it would be a good look. I used to do women’s hair, you know.”

“You mean like Warren Beatty in
Shampoo
? The one based on Jon Peters?”

“Yes, but Jon Peters is sixty.” His eyes were bloodshot. She wondered if he was drunk, too. The way he acted all the time was a little bit drunk, the hoarse voice, the ever-present whimsy.

“Can I ask you something? What exactly happened with you and Cady Pearce? Dan told me you guys broke up, but—he didn’t say why.”

“We didn’t want the same things.”

“Then why was she at that party at Mile’s End?”

“Because she’s a good friend. I try to maintain good relationships with all my exes.”

“Does that include Julia Hanson?”

His face went dark. “Are you really asking me about this?”

“Sure I am. I appear to be slow-dancing with Steven Weller. I might never have this opportunity again.” She put on a British-journalist voice and set her fist below his mouth like a microphone. “Tell me, Mr. Weller. Why did you and Ms. Hanson get divorced?”

He smiled at her, but the smile had lost some of its warmth. “When we married, I was very frustrated professionally. This was before
Briefs
. She was doing well, she had a film career. I was competitive. It was just a bad time to get into a marriage, especially so young.”

He wasn’t giving her anything. Maddy didn’t blame him. It was inappropriate for her to ask about a near-stranger’s divorce. Especially a celebrity.

“It also ended because she was insane,” he continued, surprising her. “We had a bad fight one night, and I knew if I stayed, she would pull me into the abyss. Never sleep with someone who has more problems than you.”

She smiled at him drunkenly. “Nelson Algren.”

“What?”

“Nelson Algren.
A Walk on the Wild Side
.” Dan had turned her on to Algren soon after they started dating. “ ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s,’ ” she went on, speaking more loudly as the music rose. “Weren’t you quoting him?” The music was blaring, and she couldn’t quite make out his response, but it sounded like “Of course I was!”

D
an was at the kitchen table on his laptop. It was Friday night in New York and he had dinner plans with Sharoz and their lawyer. If he didn’t leave soon, he would be late. But he was surfing. He browsed through his usual liberal news sites, pretending he wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and then he typed “Maddy Freed.”

Dozens of items popped up from entertainment and gossip sites describing her as Steven Weller’s new girlfriend. He clicked on “Images.” Rows and rows of photos appeared. Maddy in a glamorous dress, standing close to Weller. There was one where she was looking at him, not the cameras, and her eyes were so adoring Dan closed his laptop. His mother in Silver Spring would see these. And all his friends. People would think they’d split up. He would have to explain that it was a misunderstanding, that she was there on business.

Maybe he should have told her not to go. But she never would have listened. She wanted to meet Walter Juhasz. And maybe she would.

Weller was gay. Not a sexual threat. He was a master of this. Clearly, he’d been doing it all his working life.

Dan dialed Maddy’s cell, even though it was two
A.M.
in Berlin. “There are pictures of you on the Internet,” he said. “A lot of them.”

“Oh God,” she said. She had come home from the party and was hanging the Marchesa in her hotel-room closet. “I haven’t gone online yet, but I should have expected it. These journalists have been calling me, and you wouldn’t believe how many photographers there were. Did they print anything about
I Used to Know Her
?”

“No. They just call you an actress. These articles say you’re Steven’s girlfriend.”

“Seriously?” She kicked off the heels, lay on the bed, and massaged
her aching feet. “But I never said that. I specifically said—I mean—I told the reporters I had just met him. I told them about you, but then I got interrupted and—I didn’t have time to explain.”

“It’s fine, Mad,” he said. “You don’t have to tell
me
he’s not your boyfriend.”

Dan squinted at one of the photos on his screen, blew it up as big as it would go. His girlfriend was not falling for Steven Weller. What Dan had with her was deep and important, the intimacy they had built. The look in her eye wasn’t love. It was intoxication: the cameras, the attention.

He had to think like a director. These photos were golden for
I Used to Know Her
. The shots would run in the American tabloids, and the tabloids were more influential to the entertainment industry than every film festival combined. No matter how much that fact bothered him. What piqued audiences was backstory. And a romance, even a fake one, was just that.

Since Dan had signed with the OTA agent Jon Starr, he’d been reading scripts for directing jobs. He wanted to keep working, maintain momentum from the acquisition. Maddy was momentum. “This is exactly the kind of publicity we need going into our release,” he said on the phone. “We couldn’t have planned it better if we’d tried.”

“But we didn’t plan anything. I told you, I’m here to meet Juhasz. It was
Bridget’s
idea for me to go on the red carpet, like an introduction to the media. The handholding thing just happened. He pulled me onto the line, and they—they drew their own conclusions. It’s a sexist world. People expect any woman who’s in public with a movie star to be sleeping with him.”

“Where’d you get the dress?”

“Bridget sent it. It’s her job to advance my career. You’re reading this all wrong. You don’t know anything about it.”

“Are you saying he tried something?”

Her mind flashed back to the slow-dancing at the club. But Steven hadn’t tried anything; she’d been the drunk one. She’d asked him a tactless question. “Of course not. He’s been a total gentleman.”

“I
told
you that he’s gay.”

Maddy stood with the phone and went to the window. There was a
couple fighting below, in front of one of the luxury shops on the Kurfürstendamm.

“I don’t care if he’s gay, and you shouldn’t, either,” she said. “It isn’t relevant. Grow up.”

“It
is
relevant, because if I thought the guy was going to make a move, I wouldn’t have wanted you to go. I’m not worried. Just have fun. Play it out a little. Look at Steven like you’re into him. It’ll be easy. Think about it as a role. You’re an actress.”

6

The next day Maddy slept till one in the afternoon. After ordering room service, she finished watching
Body Blow
, taking notes. All of Juhasz’s work dealt with outsiders who could not figure out how to fit into society.
Ruth’s Kiss
, about a young waitress in Los Angeles who slowly becomes unhinged, was a great example; at first Ruth just seems a little lonely, and soon it becomes clear she’s insane. In Juhasz’s films, madness could afflict anyone, given the right set of circumstances.

Maddy decided to go for a walk and get a coffee. On Kurfürstendamm, she passed the designer shops and department stores, the theaters and cinemas. At a newsstand piled high with magazines she was startled to spot a photo of herself and Steven. The magazine was called
Bundt
. His arm was around her waist and she was staring at him. The caption read,
“Steven Weller: Er ist seit Jahren in Maddy Freed verliebt!”
The only piece of it she could translate was
verliebt;
she knew
liebe
was love.

She lowered her head so the newsman wouldn’t see her and hurried along to a café. She drank her coffee quickly, feeling exposed. She kept seeing her gaze in the photo. It was as though it had been Photoshopped; she looked like a woman in love.

If Steven was gay and using her as arm candy, then he was either a master seducer or a deeply gifted actor. When he’d touched her on the red carpet, he had made her feel that he liked her. And then he’d danced with her at the club, his body hot and near.

That evening at five, a quirky heist film by an Austin, Texas, director would be premiering. Steven and Bridget had said they were planning to go, and Maddy had been looking forward to it. Now, after seeing the tabloid, she felt it might be better to stay home.

That morning, her cell phone had rung several dozen times, all reporters, so she turned it off until Bridget could change it for her. At the premiere, they would be there again, flocking around her. If she mentioned Dan, who knew if they would print it?

She went to the VIP restaurant in the penthouse, which Bridget had told her about, and ordered a late lunch. It was a totally private area with wraparound windows. After lunch, she started watching another Juhasz film, and then four o’clock came, and four-thirty, and there was no call from Bridget. Wanting to make dinner plans and not sure what was expected of her, she dialed Bridget’s cell. “Are we seeing that movie?” she asked.

“Oh my goodness, I forgot to call you,” Bridget said. “I’ve been running around like a chicken without a head. We’re not going. Steven’s in London.”

“What? When did he go?”

“This morning. He went to meet Walter about the script.”

“But you said Walter was coming here.”

“He is. They’ll come back together. Either Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Well, did
you
want to see the movie with me?”

“I have a phoner I can’t get out of. I’m producing a film in Sofia, and our director is going over budget, it’s a disaster. But you should go. That’s why you’re in Berlin. There’s a ticket for you at will call. Why don’t you take Zack?”

Maddy found the news of will call slightly disappointing and then was shocked at herself for being so shallow. Steven’s trip to London was good, not bad. It proved that Dan had been wrong about him. If they had truly invited her to Berlin to act like she was dating Steven Weller, he wouldn’t very well take off when the festival had just begun.

She dialed Zack but didn’t get him and decided to see the heist movie alone. She wore her sheath dress and a dingy gray coat and walked to the theater. As she was approaching, a short bearded man darted in out of nowhere, snapped her photo, and disappeared. She was shocked. She had never felt watched before, used in this way. It was violating.

She took the civilian entrance to the Palast, a long walkway under a temporary roof that ran parallel to the red carpet. From the glassed doors inside the theater, she could see the director and two of his actresses pos
ing on the red carpet, just as Maddy had the night before. It was as though she had hallucinated the
Widower
premiere, even the cover of
Bundt
. Except for that one strange photographer, it was as though the night before had never happened at all.

T
he next afternoon Bridget took Maddy to the European Film Market to meet international distributors and talk up the film. The distributors were exceedingly polite and couldn’t wait to see
I Used to Know Her
. A few of them wanted to know how long she had been dating Steven, and she kept having to correct them, tell them about Dan.

In the car back to the hotel, Bridget took a call. When she clicked off, she said, “There’s been a change in plans. Walter can’t make it here after all. Steven is bringing back the script with him tomorrow. We’ll all fly to Venice on Tuesday, and you’ll read for Walter there.”

“Where would I stay?”

“Palazzo Mastrototaro, of course. Oh, honey, did you think we would just drop you at a
pensione
?”

They were inviting her to his palazzo. This was turning into a European tour. She had already taken a week off La Cloche.

She had a bad feeling about
Husbandry
. So many delays, so many “issues,” and now, a new city. She wanted to talk to Dan but was worried he would say, “I told you so.” He would say Juhasz was Godot and wouldn’t come to Venice. And if Juhasz was Godot, she would have to fire Bridget, because no actress in her right mind would employ a manager who had no intention of getting her cast.

D
an was having trouble reaching Maddy, and he was nervous. She had texted him her new number, and he had tried her a couple times, but it went to voice mail. Once, when she called him back, he had been on the subway and missed it. He had a vision of her holed up in a suite with Steven Weller, fucking him around the clock. He had been certain Weller was gay, but maybe he had it all wrong.

On Sunday he finally caught her. He was on his way to his attorney’s
office above Barneys on Madison Avenue. “What have you been doing the last couple days?” he asked.

“I went to the Film Market with Bridget. Visited a couple museums, walked around. And I’ve seen a couple screenings.”

“With Steven?”

“No. Alone. Steven’s in London.”

“Gone?”

“London. To meet with Walter Juhasz. He’s coming back today, and on Tuesday we’re going to go to Venice. I’ll audition for Juhasz there.”

As soon as he heard her say Venice, he felt a chill. She would be staying in Weller’s palazzo. In the most romantic city in the world. Dan had a premonition, however irrational, that if she made it to Italy, he would never see her again. “So it’s happening,” he said.

“I wish I had more time with the script. Not just to prepare, but what if I hate it? If I hate it, I’m not going to read.”

“It’s Walter Juhasz. It’s all in the execution, anyway.” He was quiet a second and then added, “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. I wish you were here. I went to the Brecht House. You would have liked it.” As she started to tell him about the rooms, he had an idea. There was no reason he had to stay in Brooklyn just to go back and forth on deal points with Apollo Classics. Though he hadn’t yet told Maddy, he had quit his bartending job, in anticipation of the on-signing money he had coming to him.

What if he surprised Maddy in Venice? If they were together, he could stop worrying about Weller. They would work on
The Nest
in the palazzo. She knew how to motivate him. She was the lead in
The Nest
. She was his muse. He imagined the words popping up on his laptop as if he were a stenographer, which was what had happened when he started
I Used to Know Her
. The atmosphere would help him, the atmosphere and the sex, and being in the company of Maddy. All Americans wrote better in Europe. They crossed the ocean, and every word they wrote was brilliant.

“There’s someone at my door,” Maddy was saying. “I have to go.”

When she opened the door, she found a bellboy holding a brown envelope. Inside was
Husbandry
with a Post-it note: “At long last. Call when
you’ve read.—SW.” She wanted to dig right in, but she walked to a café a few blocks away. Old ladies with violet hair sat and ate cakes. She ordered a hot cocoa and opened the script, which was in blue-and-white binding that said
OSTROW PRODUCTIONS
on the front.

E
llie is a young housewife in an unnamed American suburb. Her husband, Louis, is an estate lawyer who makes love to her regularly and without passion. One day Louis’s younger brother, Paul, who has just gotten out of jail, comes to visit. Paul and Ellie, who have never met, are instantly and wildly attracted. That night on the porch, after Louis goes to bed, Ellie tells Paul about her loneliness. They kiss.

Paul moves in temporarily. During the day, when Louis is at work, Paul and Ellie make love in her bed. Something is awakened in her, but Paul has problems. He owes money to bad guys. One night he gets in a bar brawl and is hauled off to jail. After bailing him out, Louis demands that Paul move out. Paul finds a motel in town. Louis goes away on business. The affair continues, in the bed, in the motel. When Louis returns, the lovers can’t tell if he suspects.

As she keeps her affair secret, her paranoia grows. She gets confused and fearful. She tries to break it off, but Paul stalks her, unable to admit that it’s over. Confused, she confesses everything to Louis. He calls her a whore and puts his fist through a wall. Convinced that she must end the affair, she goes to the cops and gets a restraining order against Paul. She cries as she fills out the paperwork. The couple returns to their sad life, Paul now living in a trailer on the other side of the tracks.

Louis guilts her every day about the affair. She becomes numb. He speaks to her coldly, like a robot. She discovers she is pregnant. She knows it is Paul’s. She sneaks out to see Paul and tells him. He begs her to leave Louis. She resumes the affair. One day Louis follows her to Paul’s trailer and comes through the door with a gun. A struggle ensues and the gun falls. Ellie grabs the gun and Louis jumps her. Trying to shoot Louis, she kills Paul.

After she has the baby, Louis and Ellie throw a party. The night of the party, they make love, Ellie unable to look at Louis. The baby wails
in the night. When she goes to hold the baby, a boy, she realizes he cannot be consoled.

M
addy closed the script, deeply moved. Everyone around her was speaking German, which allowed her to think without distraction. The film reminded her of great French films from the 1960s in the way it dealt with female sexuality, and it contained the best of what Juhasz brought to the cinema: the dread and alienation of being human.

Maddy was intrigued by Ellie’s dread. And she thought it was good that Ellie got to stay alive. Too often in movies, strong or adulterous women ended up dead.

She wished Dan were here with her. It was the kind of screenplay that made you want to talk about it: what it meant to be a woman, to be in a relationship but feel lonely. It was about someone who woke up one morning and realized the life she’d built for herself was a prison.

She had to get this role. The reason she had gone to grad school, the reason she greeted Eurotrash at a hostess station for $21 an hour, was so someday she might play a role like this: strong, complex, layered, and undeniably the center of the film.

From the café, she tried Dan. Voice mail. She walked down Kurfürstendamm, past the glittery designer shops with their blank-looking mannequins. At the hotel, she went straight to the VIP restaurant, ordered venison and pinot blanc, and read the script again, liking it even more the second time.

Back in her room, she called the front desk. She asked for Steven by name, and the clerk said he wasn’t staying there. She remembered Steven had told her on the plane that his pseudonym was Gerber Stan, an inversion of his
Briefs
name. She called back. “Gerber Stan’s room, please.”

“Just one moment, miss.”

His voice was husky when he said hello. “I read it,” she said.

“And?”

“I love it.”

“I knew you would.” She started to say something, but she was so excited, it came out sounding like a Swedish vowel. She tried again. This
one was more like a French vowel. “Do you want to come up for a minute to talk about it?” he asked.

H
is suite was twice the size of hers. The windows met at an angle, and she realized that they were in the penthouse, in the wedge-shaped apex of the building.

He poured two glasses of red wine, and they sat on a white couch. “So you liked it,” he said.

“I liked it and it terrified me. I wish it could have had a happier ending, but Juhasz doesn’t do them.”

“No. He’s interested in the way we create our own hell. Louis thinks he’s getting Ellie back by cutting Paul out of their life, but instead he has the baby to live with forever, the ghost of his brother.”

“Exactly,” Maddy said. “In constructing a jail for her, he winds up constructing one for himself.”

“Are you okay with all the sex scenes?”

“I don’t know if I would say I’m okay with them, but I mean, the way they would be shot, the nudity, that could all be negotiated, right?”

“Yes, and Bridget will be there as producer. So you would have a wonderful advocate in her.” He swirled his tan fingers around the rim of the wineglass.

“How is it possible you haven’t cast Ellie yet?” she asked.

“Different reasons. The younger, edgier actresses had trouble with Walter’s language. We read some girls who were great with the material but didn’t have the right look. He wants Ellie to look real. He wants someone without plastic surgery.”

The wine must have been going to Maddy’s head because she said, “Are you trying to say I’m right for it because my breasts are small?”

“I didn’t say anything about that. You’re the one bringing your breasts into the conversation.”