Amy Sohn - The Actress

Early 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.

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.

“It’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.