When she arrived on her set, the cast and crew were abuzz about the Tommy deal, congratulating her, asking her to send him their good wishes. She nodded faintly, the only saving grace that she had heard it on the radio so she didn’t look like a complete idiot.

That night she was to meet Steven at the Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. When she arrived five minutes early, he was already waiting in the garden. She could sense diners watching her as she paraded to the rear. As he stood, she felt her face crumple. She sat quickly so no one could see her, lowered her head, and said, “How could you not tell me?”

“The studio was going to announce it Thursday,” he said, “but it leaked, so they had to move forward with it. I was going to tell you Wednesday.”

“But why not before? You used to talk to me about your jobs. I tell you everything.” She often felt she put too much weight on his opinion, delaying responses to scripts until Steven had a chance to read them.

“This wasn’t an audition,” Steven said. “Everything came together so quickly. Bridget kept it secret from me for weeks.” He explained that Jerome Roundhouse had gotten director and actor approval and wanted only Steven for the role. He felt no one else could play Tommy.

“I thought you were into artistic films,” she said. “This is a total one-eighty for you, and you didn’t even want to share it with me.”

“It was because of the confidentiality, Mad.”

She wondered if it had something to do with their talk about Alex a few months ago. He must have felt violated to learn she had been in his study. She had snooped, and he was betrayed, so now he didn’t trust her with his decisions. She had built a wall between them.

The waiter came, and Steven ordered them a bottle of her favorite Tocai. “Aren’t you even a little bit happy for me?” he asked.

“I just didn’t think this was the direction you wanted to go in. I thought you wanted to do projects like The Widower and Husbandry.”

“I’m not sure those films were serving me. We’ll see what happens when Husbandry is released, but you know The Widower wasn’t what I had hoped. Anyway, I don’t see The Hall Fixation as selling out on any level. High art can be low art and vice versa. The script is going to be incredible. We’re trying to get Bryan Monakhov.”

She winced. Dan would be insanely jealous. “I just didn’t know you were interested in—a franchise.”

He stiffened at the word “franchise,” as if it were a slur. “This is a deeply personal project for me. I told you I read The Hall Fixation when things were bad with my dad.”

“You never told me that.”

“Yes, I did, you’re forgetting. I told you in London that night we went to see the Pinter. I’m not even interested in the thriller elements. It’s the father-son relationship between Tommy Hall and the boss, Richard Breyer. That’s the crux of the films.”

She was almost certain he’d never said anything about the books. She would have remembered. When he referenced books, they were usually by James or Wharton. It was as though he were spinning her, as he would spin the public. With a made-up story that Tommy was personal.

Lowering his voice, he proceeded to tell her the deal points: $12 million for the first film with a pay-or-play, and options on the next two Tommy Halls, with escalations.

“So you just want to be richer than you already are?” she asked. “It’s about money?”

“It’s about what the money means. This will give me longevity as a performer, and allow me more choice as I get older, which I’m going to need. It could lead to more producing. It’s not just for me, Mad. It’s for us. I want to have children with you. This will ensure that they’re taken care of.”

A family. He was trying to seduce her with talk of a family. But he already had money, which she knew from the net-worth statement he had had to prepare before the postnup. Their children would already be taken care of. He was speaking like a minimum-wage janitor who had just won the lottery instead of a man already worth tens of millions.

Later that night, as he was making love to her from behind, she told herself to forgive him. If he wanted to build a family with her, then he saw her as a partner. But if he saw her as a partner, then he would have told her about it. She had lost him in some way, and as he came in her and cried out, his face invisible behind her, she felt like she wasn’t even there.


In mid-October, a few days after Steven’s Tommy role had been announced, Maddy came home from a long day of complicated driving shots in Line Drive, wanting to eat a plate of Annette’s roast organic chicken and go right to bed. Steven was at the dinner table—Annette was out—and though he’d already eaten, he had warmed a plate for her and poured her a glass of red. She was moved by how kind he was being, and they talked about their workdays. After a few minutes she could see that he was troubled by something. “What is it?” she asked, blotting her mouth with her napkin. “You seem upset.”

He waved his hand. “It’s— No, I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”

“Well, now you have to tell me.”

He let out a little sigh. “There’s a story coming out, some guy came forward and said something ridiculous, but it’s in a low-class publication and we’re already on top of it.”

She put down her fork. “Go on.”

“Some lowlife took a payout from The Weekly Report to say he and I had an affair. They’re running the story in a couple days. Edward’s already on it, he’s drafting up one of his famous Edward letters. Actual malice, reckless disregard for the truth. We’ll get a retraction from the guy, but I wanted you to know because the paps are going to be worse than usual. Do you like the chicken?”

“Who is this person? Who said this about you?”

“He works at the yacht club. I’ve known his father forever, and we’ve met, but only dealing with the boat. He’s a dockworker. Last name Bernard. I can’t even remember the first, Chad or Charlie or something. Anyway, Edward’s going to squash him. Kid must be desperate for cash, because the supermarket tabs don’t pay as much as they used to. I think he has drug problems.”

It couldn’t be true. It was too perfect, too easy. A dockworker, the yacht club. It was only because Steven was famous that this was happening. And because he had signed on to do The Hall Fixation.

“You’re supposed to do the press thing for Tommy next week, right?” she asked, no longer hungry.

“Yeah.” He would be doing all the morning shows, the late-night comedies, choice entertainment-blog interviews, phoners with the international press, and a few trades. “But we know about the story early, which is good, and we’re going to get him. The guy will retract it before anyone can blink, and the magazine, they never retract, but that doesn’t matter. We’ll get a letter from him, and Edward will leak the letter. Everyone will know it’s meritless.”

His cell phone rang, and he went into the study to take the call. From his tone, it sounded like Bridget, but she wasn’t sure.


The first sign the situation had worsened was when Maddy pulled out of the studio lot, at the end of a long shooting day, and saw fifty paparazzi standing there. She wondered whom they were there for, and then one of the guys ran up to the window, the rest trailing behind, and said, “What do you think about the Weekly Report story about Steven? Is Steven gay?” She had to close her window, afraid that one of them would stick his hand or his face in the car. She drove so fast to get away that she ran a light.

At home, what looked like a hundred photographers were on the sidewalk corner. Maddy drove up the driveway and opened the gate, terrified that they would follow her in, and when she got out of the car, she ran in. Bridget was there. “Oh, my darling,” she said, and hugged her.

Bridget led her into the study. Flora, their publicist, was there; and Edward, a wide-faced sixtyish man who resembled a young Ernest Borgnine; and Steven, each typing frantically on a device. Classical music was playing in the background. Their faces were alert but not happy.

Maddy took a high-backed wooden chair. Bridget went to the chair behind Steven’s desk. She wore a big silver-and-opal vertical ring on the pointer of her right hand and stroked it periodically.

Steven cleared his throat. “I wish you didn’t have to deal with any of this, Maddy, but unfortunately, it affects both of us. We were just discussing that we’ll be hiring a temporary security team to deal with the situation outside the door. We’ll also be getting bodyguards, and if need be, we’ll relocate temporarily.”

“Relocate? What are you talking about?”

“You may not have to move,” Flora said, “but there are safe houses. Places you can go to get away from them. If they’re following you around all the time, it’s dangerous for you to drive. What you’ve experienced in your marriage is only a taste of how bad it can be.”

“How can this be happening?” Maddy said, conscious of the chamber music playing in the background. “I thought you were threatening a lawsuit, Edward.”

“I released my cease-and-desist today,” Edward said. “We’re saying it’s defamatory and recklessly untrue and seeking a full retraction from this, this”—he looked down at a sheet of paper—“Christian Bernard.”

“The problem,” Bridget said, “is the Tommy Hall press tour. Steven was supposed to be on that plane to New York tomorrow. The studio doesn’t feel it’s advisable at this point. To expose him in this way.”

“But it’s not true. Shouldn’t he be going on with business as usual, to show everyone it’s baseless?”

“They want the focus to be on the role,” Bridget said. “The franchise. This is a massive distraction. It’s not responsible to put him out there in front of the press when he’s so vulnerable. Any appearance he makes, he’ll have to address this. Even the soft outlets. They still have a marginal obligation to what they consider newsworthiness. The studio is putting a lot of money on the line for him, and it’s up to them, not us. Flora agrees.”

Flora nodded. “I can’t feed him to the wolves. The studio’s doing the right thing. You type in Steven’s name on the Internet right now, and this is all you get.”

“When do you expect the retraction to come in?” Maddy asked Edward.

“We’re having trouble locating the guy,” Bridget said.

Edward said, “We’ll get him. I’m working with a PI, and it’s going to happen. This is no rocket scientist. If he were, he wouldn’t have done this. But it may take a couple of days.”

The meeting went on, with more and more news. Flora and Edward were running a campaign to discredit Bernard; they had done their homework and found out he had a criminal record (attempted assault in a bar fight, marijuana possession, reckless driving). The stories would come out, and he would be known as an unreliable, unstable money-grubber. Steven looked miserable even as they rattled off the details of how they were “countering.”

A half hour later, Edward left and an enormous, muscled security guy came. He, Flora, Bridget, and Steven got into a detailed talk about cars, and schedules, and avoiding paparazzi. Maddy got so tired that she went upstairs and lay on top of the bed.

She could hear them strategizing downstairs. She wanted to be in control, wanted to do the right thing, but her curiosity overcame her. It was a masochistic curiosity in which the horror and the rush that the horror gave her were synonymous. She went into her study and opened her computer. Her first search was for the Weekly Report story. The headline was: “STEVEN WELLER CAUGHT IN GAY SEX SCANDAL.” Alongside was a photo of Christian Bernard, and the first thing that struck her was how devilishly handsome he was, in his mid-twenties, brawny, in a gray T-shirt, with thick, defined arched eyebrows and lips that pouted. She started to read the story but got only a paragraph in before the words on the page jumped out at her: “cocaine,” “poppers,” “wrestling,” “wanted to make a sex tape.” These words had nothing to do with the Steven she knew, who didn’t even like ibuprofen. What was the point of reading all this, why do it to herself? She was helping the enemies by giving them one more hit, driving traffic to their website. She could read it no longer, she had to stop. Only a woman who hated herself would keep reading.

When Steven finally came into the bedroom a few hours later, he looked twenty pounds lighter. “Come here,” she said. She pulled him toward her. His gaze was so open that she knew he was scared. “We’re going to get through this,” she said. She hugged him tightly. She had to be the grounded one, the low-key one. If they both lost it, there was no way they could make it. As she held him in her arms, she could feel his heart beating desperately against her own.