The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  From the walk-in, she selected a gray James Perse T-shirt and dark jeans and a baseball cap of Steven’s that said GREEN BAY PACKERS. When she emerged, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on a pair of designer high-tops. He reeled her in and kissed her. “God, I love you,” he said.

  Maddy’s body softened. How was she supposed to be on time for the event when she wanted to take off her clothes and make love? When she was around him, she wanted to be touching him all the time, his forearms, his hair, his ears. When he came home after a long day and she heard the beep of the alarm system, she got woozy. “I love you, too,” she said.

  As Steven pushed her hair behind her ears, he realized that he never got tired of hearing her say “I love you.” With Maddy in his life, he was less pessimistic. He felt that Maddy knew him, and this made him see the world differently, made him less glum about the business and his role in it.

  The most miraculous thing about his new relationship was its completeness. He liked to hear what she had to say about his scripts and was impressed by her close reading. And she was making him a better actor. On the set of Declarations, for a heavy scene with the actress playing his wife, he had been struggling. In the fight, he said she didn’t understand him, and he was coming off very heavy-handed. After six difficult takes, he took a break, and while he sat in a director’s chair, he remembered that Maddy had played a similar scene in her Mile’s End film. For the next take, he tried laughing maniacally in the middle. The director loved it and complimented him. It was a special thing to carry with you the person who made you complete, to take what she gave you and bring it into your work. That was the essence of love.

  So far Maddy was holding her own in her new lifestyle, with everyone from rising directors to studio execs to Beverly Hills doyennes. She had a way of bringing out genuineness in the least genuine of people. Sometimes the two of them would be out at a fund-raiser, mingling separately, and he would sense that she missed him. He would cross the room and place his hand on her back and she would sigh happily. He loved that she needed him.

  Downstairs, Alan was waiting to drive Maddy and Steven to Oxnard. He was in his mid-sixties, large, and had been a bodybuilder at Gold’s Gym in the 1970s, and Maddy liked his easy, low-key manner. When they arrived at the work site, she instinctively grabbed the door handle, but Steven said, “Alan’ll do it.” Of course she had to wait. Everything had to be timed just right.

  Alan opened it and she stepped out. The cameras went off, but this was all authorized press, so it wasn’t as jarring as the paparazzi. The paparazzi had been one of the scariest things about her new life in L.A. One evening she and Steven were coming out of a northern Italian place they liked on Beverly Boulevard, and she saw dozens of them outside, flashing madly. “Don’t say a word,” Steven whispered, ushering her swiftly to the car door. Later, he explained that if she said anything, even “Leave me alone” or “I don’t want to talk,” they could put it on an evil television show and make it seem like she was drunk or unstable. “Think of it as the fourth wall,” he said.

  In Oxnard, Flora and a Housing Project USA publicist led Steven to a podium where folding chairs had been arranged. While Maddy sat in the front row, Steven said a few words about homelessness in Ventura County. He wasn’t reading from notes, yet he was completely eloquent. Then the organizers led them to the construction area, where they were given hard hats and aprons.

  Her job was to pry nails from two-by-fours with a hammer, which disappointed her because she’d thought she would be doing real construction. Her father had taught her woodworking, and she knew her way around an electric saw. She knelt and began the work, depositing the nails in a plastic can. They were working next to teenagers from the community, mostly Mexican, and Steven joked around with them.

  While they worked, camera crews roved and interviewed the celebs. When Maddy saw a young female journalist approaching with a videographer, she got nervous. “Can you tell us a little bit about why you’re here?” the woman asked.

  “Um, homelessness is a serious social ill, and I grew up in a community where there was a fair amount, in rural Vermont, and I guess the way I feel is that if you can give people houses, you can empower them in a lot of other ways. That can help them get control of their lives. Because without a home, there are so many things that you just don’t have access to. It can be hard to get a job and also—”

  The journalist was striding away, her videographer trailing behind. A network-television star had arrived, and the woman was going after him to get a shot.

  In horror, Maddy watched them leave. “Oh my God, I feel like such a loser,” she said.

  “They never want more than a sound bite,” Steven said. “But I liked what you said. It was very heartfelt.”

  “Did I just make a total fool of myself?”

  “No. It takes time to learn this stuff.” But she felt humiliated. She had wanted to make him proud. “The important thing,” he added, wrenching out a nail, “is that you’re here. Making your presence known.”

  After they’d been working about an hour, Maddy saw a figure coming toward them in the distance. He was burly, and when he got behind Steven, he put his hands over his eyes. Steven flipped him over and they rolled around like wrestlers, chuckling deeply and swearing.

  “Maddy Freed, Terry McCarthy,” Steven said as they rose to their feet.

  “The famous Terry, at last!” Maddy laughed and shook his hand. Steven’s best friend. Terry was a bearish Irish-American guy with blue eyes who had befriended Steven in the mid-’80s on the audition circuit. They had done walk-ons for the same sitcom and had been close ever since. For a brief period they had shared an apartment on Sunset Boulevard. Terry had long ago given up acting and become a top screenwriter.

  Though Maddy had never met Terry, she had gone to lunch with his wife, Ananda, a few times. Maddy liked her. Ananda was a half–African American, half-Korean former actress with high cheekbones who spent most of her time caring for their three kids. At one point Ananda had confessed that when she first started dating Terry, she was jealous of Steven, because of the rumors that their friendship was more than a friendship. “These men were so close,” Ananda said. “They lived together in this tiny place.”

  “So you wondered?”

  “Of course I wondered! It took me a long time to accept that straight men could have friendships as rich and rewarding as those between women.”

  As Maddy worked next to Terry, she asked him about his early days as an actor and his shift to screenwriting. He told her about all the embarrassing sitcom walk-ons he had had in the 1980s, the pizza delivery boys and jocks. The men started to talk over each other, laughing and mocking.

  After Steven left to do more press, Maddy said to Terry, “I have to tell you, I am such a fan of Marginal. I saw it when I was at Dartmouth. A whole group of us. That scene in the garage gave me nightmares.”

  “You saw it in college? Oh, God, you’re making me feel old.”

  “Writers have so much more creative freedom than actors,” Maddy said. “You must be happy you made the transition.”

  “I don’t know, most of the time the studios destroy anything good that I put on the page. It’s like when Mervyn LeRoy optioned a novel and said to Spencer Tracy, ‘This book has everything. Great characters, an element of surprise, a sophisticated theme, beautiful writing. But I think I can lick it.’ ”

  She laughed. She could see why he was Steven’s best friend. Terry seemed wholly genuine and funny. He was more politically active than Steven was, lobbying frequently on behalf of Rwandans and working as a World Children’s Welfare ambassador.

  “It’s a relief to finally meet you,” she said. “I was worried. Steven told me about the time you met a girlfriend of his and pretended to have a limp.”

  Terry chuckled. “Yeah, he told her I was faking, and she was looking at him in horror because she believed
me. That was a long time ago. But you shouldn’t have been nervous to meet me. I’ve never seen him so happy.”

  “Really?” she asked coyly.

  “Dating Steven isn’t like dating other men,” he said. “It’s hard, I think. There will be people who think they can tell you who he is. What he’s about. They’ll pretend to know him, but they don’t. A successful relationship has walls and windows. You need to let the world in a little, but not too much. For Steven’s sake and your own, make sure there aren’t too many windows.”

  His eyes were close and very serious. She wasn’t sure what he meant but nodded intently. She was relieved when he resumed his nail-prying and added, “And don’t forget to give him shit. He’s got too many people kissing his ass already.”

  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.

  2

  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.