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.


An 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.


In 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.


“The 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.

Bryan was high-fiving people, shouting jubilantly. He made a big show of getting Munro Heming and the other stars up to the stage with him and said in an exaggerated hoodlum accent, “I don’t know what to say, man. This movie is about doing anything you have to do to make it, and it’s a message I believe in. Peace out.”

“I can’t believe they gave it to him twice,” Dan muttered.

“People are going to see our movie no matter what,” said Maddy. “Remember, we have distribution. And we could still win Audience.”

But the Audience Award, given out a few minutes later, went to a coming-of-age in a Lower East Side housing project. The director was so impassioned, it was hard to hate him. Maddy wanted to trade her award for Dan’s. This was the injustice of her win: It helped their film, but only marginally. An award for Dan or the film would have helped them all.


The closing-night party was at the Entertainer. Maddy wanted to enjoy her prize, but Dan was cranky, and she felt too sorry for him to enjoy the many compliments and the fans who made her pose for photos. Around midnight, as they trudged to the festival bus stop, she asked, “Are you mad at me for winning?”

“Stop this,” he said.

“ ’Cause you seem sad.”

“This is everything I wanted for you. It’s going to get you real auditions. Bigger parts. You’re a real actress now.” But his tone was hollow.

The bus was full of drunk, exhausted filmmakers. Maddy and Dan stood near the front. After a moment a Japanese film crew approached, asking for her autograph. She handed Dan her award to hold while she signed, which gave her a little thrill. To them, she was a star, even if no one would recognize her the moment she returned to New York and to La Cloche.

At their stop, they walked silently in the snow toward the condo. She realized he was still holding her award and wasn’t sure whether to ask for it back. But then he cast it away from his body and said, “Here,” and the shape of his mouth was odd and ugly. She walked a few steps ahead of him so as not to see his face.

4

The sushi restaurant where Maddy went to meet Bridget in Hollywood turned out to be at a strip mall, two doors down from a Domino’s Pizza. When Maddy pulled up, she was certain she had the wrong address—it was so grungy-looking, she couldn’t imagine Bridget would eat there. But then she saw her waving from a back table. Sitting next to her was Steven Weller. Bridget hadn’t mentioned that he was coming.

Maddy had already gone to Bridget’s office in Beverly Hills and been impressed by the small staff, just one assistant and a constantly ringing phone. Though she was planning to meet Zack in New York as a courtesy, she was leaning toward signing with Bridget as her manager and with Nancy Watson-Eckstein at OTA as her agent. She had not expected to see Bridget again before she flew home to Brooklyn and had been surprised by the lunch invitation.

Maddy and Dan had been crashing at the Laurel Canyon home of a film-school buddy of his, driving to meetings with executives and prospective reps. (Kira had opted not to come to L.A. just yet, which was a relief to Maddy, who needed a break from the awkwardness.)

Standing over the restaurant table, she shook Bridget and Weller’s hands, immediately feeling overformal. Weller looked her up and down, making her self-conscious. He was at a point in his career where he could leer openly and women didn’t get offended. It was the license of having been voted the Sexiest Man Alive. Twice.

“This place looks like nothing on the outside,” Bridget said as they sat, “but it’s the best sushi in L.A. I came here years before it got written up. Yuki takes very good care of me.” She gestured to a man behind the sushi bar who was wearing a folded bandana around his head and working intently.

Maddy suspected the sushi would be phenomenal, but the place was such a dump that she wondered if Bridget brought people here to show them she didn’t need to impress them. Only someone at her level could lunch in a place like this.

“Congratulations on your Jury Prize,” Weller said, tossing back a shot of sake.

“I was totally taken aback,” Maddy said.

“Were you really?”

“Of course. Our acquisition was ultimately pretty small potatoes, even though it’s still completely amazing, and there were so many buzzy performances at the festival. I just—I didn’t think anyone would notice my work.”

“They always notice what’s exceptional,” Weller said.

There were no menus. Bridget told the waitress to bring whatever Yuki wanted, and soon there was a spread of sashimi, sushi, and grilled octopus tentacles, which sounded disgusting but turned out to be delicious. It was the best sushi Maddy had ever tasted. Midway through the lunch, Bridget took a sip of sparkling water and said, “The reason I wanted to see you again is this. In a few weeks, Steven and I will be going to the Berlin Film Festival with The Widower. Walter Juhasz is going to be there. Steven is doing his next film and coproducing with me. Walter is interested in you for the female lead, and we’d like you to come with us, so you can meet him.”