“Yeah.”

“That’s by Ed Ruscha.” He pronounced it “RooSHAY.” When she had seen the name in print, she had always read it as “ROOSH-a.” She was embarrassed by her mistake.

“Are you a serious art collector?” she asked, pivoting around.

“I would never call myself a collector,” he said. “I just know what I like. Why don’t you unpack, and then we can go to L’Accademia? I always visit La Tempesta on my first day.”

Her bedroom had an adjoining living room. A fire roared in the fireplace. She had brought the Marchesa from Berlin and hung it in the closet. Bridget had not asked for it back. It might be the most beautiful piece that Maddy ever owned, and she felt it was her duty to keep it, for if she and Dan ever had a daughter.

Out the window was a private garden that she imagined was resplendent in summer. Her father and mother had honeymooned in Venice. She had seen pictures in their album. They had probably passed this very palazzo, maybe posed in front of it for a photo. And now she was inside it. She imagined her father watching her from up above. (She always imagined him looking down on her, even though he had been a secular humanist who didn’t believe in God or heaven.) He would want her to soak up everything, the fog on the canal, the cold air, the Academy. She would soak it up, for him. She had to appreciate everything wonderful that happened to her.

Her theatrical adventures had been thrilling to him, the quirky film actor who came backstage to compliment her after a production of the dreamer examines his pillow or the famous guest lecturers at The New School. He salivated for all the details, and she relished sharing them. He had been practical so she could be impractical, and because she was impractical, she was here.


Giorgio, the captain, was waiting in front with the motorboat. Bridget was busy, Steven said, so he and Maddy took off on their own. The Academy was only a short ride. No doubt they could have walked, but she guessed that Steven wanted her to experience the water.

As they entered the Academy, she noticed a few American tourists. They recognized Steven and whispered to each other. He walked past them casually. She waited to see if they would swarm him for autographs, but they watched from afar, pointing and gesturing. He acted like he wasn’t aware of it, but he had to be aware, he had to be used to this, it was his life.

La Tempesta by Giorgione was a startling, confusing image. A naked woman breast-fed her baby. The baby looked one way; the woman looked at the viewer. To the woman’s right, at a distance, a dandyish man stared at her, leaning on a staff. Behind them were a white city and a bolt of lightning in the midst of clouds. “What do you make of it?” Steven asked.

She was struck by the expressive sexuality in the work. The Peeping Tom. The dark woods. “There’s a lot going on,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Nothing is as it seems. A Madonna who is not a Madonna. A voyeur whom she may or may not know is spying. It’s quintessentially Venetian.”

“Why is that?”

“Because everything about Venice is a trick.” As Maddy stared at the painting, Steven glanced at her to observe her reaction. She felt self-conscious being watched, and then he was saying something: “In Berlin . . . in my suite . . .”

“Yes?” She stared at the painting, unable to face him.

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.” She turned. So he was admitting there had been something for a moment. It was a relief to know she hadn’t imagined it.

“It’s okay.” She didn’t want to talk too much about it. If she did, it would be more awkward, and she didn’t want to sully her chances of booking Husbandry. “I was just—confused.” He nodded and turned, moving swiftly toward the next gallery.


Back at Palazzo Mastrototaro, she sat in her living room and reread the Husbandry script, trying to unlock Ellie. Maddy wanted to make the character bolder and braver than she seemed on the page. She remembered a mantra from school: “Be interested, not interesting.” It was about the importance of listening, not doing. With Ellie, Maddy felt the key was to play not the lack of sex or the boredom, but the interest in Paul. Ellie had to come alive when she was with him.

She was so engrossed in the script that when her phone rang, she jumped. “I miss you so much,” Dan said.

“Oh God, I miss you, too. I can’t believe I’m in Venice without you.”

“So you made it.”

“Yeah, we got here a couple hours ago.” She didn’t want to tell him she had gone to the Academy with Steven alone. It didn’t sound right. “I wish you were here with me.” She wanted him nearby, so she could remember everything she loved about him.

There was a knock on her door. “Hold on a second,” she said, “there’s someone at the d—”

When she pulled it open, she was face-to-face with Dan, his skin smudged and sweaty, a duffel bag slung over his chest. “What’s going on?” she cried out, kissing him. “How did you get here?”

“I flew. Just like you did. Probably not as nice a plane, though.”

“But how did you find the palazzo?”

“I went online to find the address, and when I got here, I said I was your boyfriend, and one of the guys got Steven. He was really cool about it.”

She kissed him again. The handholding in Berlin and Steven’s strange looks were meaningless now. Dan would stay for her audition, help her prepare. They were “partners on screen and in life,” read the headline of a blog piece about them that had come out during Mile’s End.

He wanted to take a bath. She went into the bathroom with him. Matching marble columns connected the ceiling to the tub and on one wall was a framed etching of an egg.

“What made you decide to come here all of a sudden?” she asked from the tub ledge, stroking his hair.

“I missed you, and I just didn’t see the point in staying in Brooklyn. We can write here. I quit the bar. I don’t need it anymore. I’m a director now.”

She climbed into the bath with him. Held his cock in her hand. It was like the finger of a musical man. Pale and long. It stiffened in the water.

She soaped his body, massaged him. They kissed and then rose, wet, moving to the bed. Their sex at Mile’s End had been strange, not connected. Now he was present and she was, too. He got on top of her. She had a fantasy of Steven taking her on the window seat of his suite in the Hotel Concorde and pushing her legs up into the air. She imagined the cleft in his chin and the feel of his stubble as it rubbed against her mouth, turning it raw.

When she came, she cried out loudly. Dan came soon after. “That was intense,” he said.

He dozed for a few minutes and then woke up and said he was wired. “I want you to read this,” she said, handing him the Husbandry script.

She moved around the room anxiously, unpacking his things, while he read it on the couch. When he finished, he breathed in deeply through his nose and closed the script. She darted over and sat next to him. “So?”

“It’s really good,” he said.

“Do you really think so? I know the language is poetic, and it’s not a real American city. You don’t think it’s too . . . Euro? Pretentious?”

“It’s sexy, it’s dark, it’s Juhasz’s European take on an American marriage. He’s going to turn this small town into a horror show.”

“So you think I should read?”

“Of course you should. You’re going to nail this. You have that combination of sadness and raw sexuality.” He bit her earlobe playfully.

“I feel like I get this character. But Juhasz might hate me.”

“He already loved I Used to Know Her. Just do what you always do. Prepare, be confident, and show him who you are.” He kissed her. There was an ornate mirror across the room, and in it she could see them nuzzling.

“How do you think I would look with a shag?” she asked, angling her head so she could better see her reflection.

“What?”

“Nothing.”


In the library Steven was lying on a couch, his head facing away from Bridget as though she were his shrink. She was in a dark blue armchair. The light from the canal made patterns on the ceiling.

She had to keep Steven on task. Focused on the future and not the present.

The boyfriend had been an unexpected hitch in the plan. It took balls to crash at Steven Weller’s palazzo. Maddy and Dan had come down for a late lunch, both with wet hair. Steven had been gracious with Dan, asking about his flight, the room. Now the couple had gone on a walk, “exploring the town.”

“Maybe she’s too complicated,” Steven said. In Berlin, in his suite, he had been beguiled by Maddy, certain she was the one they’d been looking for. The frisson between them would enliven the project. But now the boyfriend was here, and he felt as though he were running a youth hostel.

“It’s good that she’s complicated,” Bridget said. “We already know that not just any pretty face will do. You need a costar who can be an equal.”

“He’s probably read the script. All the sex scenes. It could be a problem for him.”

“He went to NYU! He’s not a Mormon! You’re forgetting the sex scene in his movie.”

“Even if he encourages her to do this, I’m not sure I feel the requisite . . . passion for her. I need to feel that the girl is the only one who could possibly play the part.” He sat up and adjusted a stack of architectural and art books on the table so they were lined up perfectly. One was a study of eighteenth-century German coins.

Bridget crossed her left leg over her right so her body was facing him, and bounced her foot up and down slowly. “I know I don’t usually talk to you this way,” she said, “but we’ve been in each other’s lives a very long time.”

“Yes.”

“And I have to—I’m frustrated with the way you’re handling all this. I watched you fight so hard to do The Widower, and I don’t know what happened to that spirit. Don’t you want this to happen?”

“I’m not sure. My enthusiasm has waned.”

“Why give up now?”

“This has been a long process, and I’m tired.”

“And now it’s going to pay off, all the work we’ve done to get here. You’ve been persuasive. She wants to do this. I saw the way you two connected on the patio.” He glanced at her sharply. “You know I see everything. Now stop. You cannot be so fear-based.”

“You’re forgetting that I’m the one who has to work with her.”

“I’ll be working with her, too. And she is right for it. You’ve been doing such a good job. Let me do mine.”

“What can you do about this situation?”

“Well, I was thinking.” She had a vein that ran down the center of her forehead that throbbed when she was excited. With age, it had gotten bluer. “Dan is such a skilled director, particularly with female-friendly material. That was an unusual film he made.”

“And?”

“He’s responsible. Obviously professional. Well trained. He wouldn’t need to learn on the job.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Valentine. My film in Bulgaria. They’ve been having so many problems. Patrick Fitzsimmons is a disaster. It’s a serious love story, and I’m getting reports that this guy has no facility with actors. The cast is miserable. And Dan wants to work. I want to go out on a limb for him, the way I always do for people I care about.”

There was a kind of love you could feel for your manager that surpassed even the love of a child for his parents. “He does want to work,” Steven said, smoothing the jacket of one of the art books and examining his palm for dust. None.

“I want to help the boy. I like matching talented people with important projects.”

“Of course you do,” he said, patting her on the knee. “It’s what you do for a living.”

“It’s more than a living. It’s who I am.”


For the party Maddy chose a black wool boatneck dress. Dressy but not too much. She wanted to be herself. Dan had noticed the Marchesa in the closet and fingered it, wolf-whistling. “This must have cost ten thousand dollars,” he said. “More.”

“You know rich people get everything for nothing,” she said. “I’m sure they gave it to Bridget for free.”

When the couple arrived in the ballroom, they found a dozen or so dinner guests, all in expensive sweaters, speaking accented English. A handsome Spanish actor was there, and a man she recognized as a Soho art dealer. A British memoirist with prematurely gray hair was talking to a 1970s-era comedian whom Maddy’s father had loved.