The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  “I never said that. Is that why you think you got cast?”

  “You imply it. And you’re so dismissive of my MFA. You were obnoxious during the shoot, but I never said anything because it was good for the movie. Now we’ve been lucky enough to make it here, and it’s like you have it in for me.”

  “I don’t have it in for you, Maddy.”

  Maddy wanted to scream. “Sure you do,” Maddy said. “You think I’m a snob.”

  “God, I’ve never seen your cheeks this red except when you were doing that fucking in the movie.”

  When Maddy reconstructed the moment later, it was like she was watching from a corner of the room. She shoved Kira hard, and Kira stumbled back a few steps and then strode toward her fast, like she was going to hit her. Instead, she put her face right up against Maddy’s and glared.

  Without thinking about it or knowing why she was doing it, Maddy kissed her. Then she stepped back, shocked at herself and what she had done. Kira moved toward her, slowly, and touched her face. She kissed Maddy gently and with affection that seemed completely incompatible with the rudeness. Maddy’s tongue began to move in Kira’s mouth, and Kira’s hands were on Maddy’s back, pulling her closer. She could feel Kira’s breasts against her own, so much bigger than hers, these strange soft boobs in a place where until now she had encountered only hardness.

  Kira was kissing her neck and her chin, and then she was unclasping Maddy’s bra and her hands were on her. Maddy cupped Kira’s breasts over the T-shirt, imagining the size and shape of her nipples. Kira lifted Maddy’s sweater and shirt over her head and went for the bra strap, and that was when Maddy realized this was happening. Dan would be home soon, wondering where she was. He might see the light on. She pulled away.

  “I should go,” Maddy said. She picked up her sweater and began to put it on.

  “Yeah, it’s really late.” She said it like Maddy had overstayed her welcome when only seconds ago, she had been kissing her.

  Maddy felt both guilty and embarrassed. Now she had done it and she couldn’t undo it and it was her own fault, she had kissed first.

  Dan didn’t get back to their condo for another hour, which gave Maddy time to shower and get into bed. It had been an otherworldly night. The dueling pitches from Bridget and Zack; then Zack with the girl; then Weller on the patio; then Kira. Maddy had never made out with a woman, not even kissed one. In the theater scene at Dartmouth, a lot of the women students got drunk and slept together, but at parties, when Maddy observed them drinking heavily and groping each other, aware that the boys were watching, it had seemed like an act. She didn’t want to do something like that just to turn on guys. Despite the occasional erotic dream about women, she believed she was ninety-five percent straight.

  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.”

  Maddy couldn’t believe it. Juhasz was a famous Hungarian director who had been big in the 1970s in the States but now shot entirely in Europe. He was said to be reclusive and agoraphobic. He lived in London, and all of his films had a strange, dislocated feeling, theoretically set in America but totally un-American. His actress wife had left him in the late 1970s for a famous music producer, and Juhasz had a crack-up and flew to London, never to return to the States.

  “How does Walter Juhasz even know who I am?”

  “We sent him a DVD of I Used to Know Her,” Weller said. “He was bowled over by your performance.”

  “The film is called Husbandry,” Bridget said.

  So this was the movie that Lael and Taylor had talked about at Bridget’s dinner. She remembered Lael say
ing that they’d been casting for a year. Was it possible? How could Bridget, Weller, and Juhasz think she was at the same professional level as Lael?

  “It’s about a woman, her husband, and his troubled younger brother,” Bridget went on. “Steven will be playing the husband. The brother will be played by Billy Peck.” Peck was a notorious English bad boy who often got into bar brawls. “The lead role, Ellie, is unlike anything I’ve seen for a woman. She’s complicated and alive. Every major actress in Hollywood has read for her, but none was right.”

  “I’d love to read the script,” Maddy said. “Absolutely.” She could be face-to-face with Walter Juhasz in less than a month. Every time she felt her life could not grow stranger, something happened to make her think she had been wrong.

  “I’ll try to get it to you before Berlin,” Bridget said, “but he’s doing a polish, so you may have to wait to read it until the festival.”

  “It will be a useful trip,” Weller chimed in. “All the European companies will be there, and you can talk up I Used to Know Her. It’s an unusual city. The art scene is fantastic, and the youth culture. We really hope you’ll consider it.”

  “Of course I’ll consider it,” Maddy said. “It’s Walter Freaking Juhasz.”

  Dan and Maddy were in his rented Prius on their way to see a friend’s indie feature at the ArcLight. “I definitely think you should go,” he was saying.

  “Obviously, you don’t,” Maddy responded. “What’s going on?”

  Dan kept his eyes on the road, unsure whether to tell her what he really thought: that there might be something more to the offer. The girlfriend, Cady, was kaput, and a guy like Weller couldn’t stay single for long. He needed new arm candy, an attractive female for all the Berlin premieres. Maddy fit the bill: pretty, independent, young, and most important, buzz-worthy. Dan’s theory was that Weller wanted her to act like they were together but was smart enough to realize Maddy would say no if he asked her outright. So he and Bridget had come up with an “audition.” Walter Juhasz went five years between movies these days; he was not known for being prolific.