by Amy Sohn
“That’s not true. I just didn’t want to break from production!”
“You see how angry you’re getting? This is exactly what I mean. It’s not good to be this angry. I’ve noticed a change in you. In Prague, when you came to visit, you were rude to Corinna.” His love interest in the film was played by Corinna Mestre, a beautiful Spanish actress with a Jessica Rabbit figure and a thick accent. Maddy didn’t like the way she looked at Steven during breaks. “I’m not rude to your costars, am I?”
“You don’t come to my sets. You used to, but not now.”
“Poor girl hardly speaks English, and you were glaring at her. And now, after everything we’ve been through together, this nonsense that I wasn’t with Terry. What’s going on? I’m concerned about you. You’re needy.”
“Needy” was a word filled with blame. If a person needed assurance, that didn’t make her crazy. It wasn’t a personality flaw to want your husband to be faithful.
She was in a terrible conundrum. If she continued to be herself, she might lose him. She pretended to trust him and she was loved, or she was herself and she was despised.
He guided her to the mirror where he had inspected his neck. There was a stone bust of a woman on the table beneath the mirror, and she had to squeeze next to it to see her face. Her eyes were white and her pupils were like tiny pins. “Look at yourself,” he said. “You must get some help. I cannot do it for you. I’m sorry it’s complicated—that we’re apart so often—but you have to find a way to trust me. Otherwise this marriage will fail.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I am trying to paint a picture for you of what you are doing to us. If our marriage ends, you will have only yourself to blame. A marriage is very delicate. You have to treat it with care.”
She wondered if he was threatening her. She thought about how she’d felt when he’d brought up the postnup. She hadn’t wanted to think about the end, and now he was talking about the end.
“I’m not being careless about our marriage,” she said.
“You need to get better. If you want to see a therapist, I’ll give you a few names.”
“Why can’t we see someone together?”
“Because I am not the one with a problem. If therapy doesn’t appeal, there are other modalities. You could benefit from more exercise. Those laps in the pool aren’t doing much for you. You need an hour a day minimum. More yoga might help you get out of your head. Pick something, I don’t care what it is. But commit to it.” He guided her firmly to the door of the study. “Now let me be. I have work to do.”
He closed and locked the door. It wasn’t until she was up in the master, her head buried in three enormous pillows, that she allowed herself to cry. She had to make sure he didn’t hear a sound. If he did, he would only be more certain that he was right.
2
Maddy called Dan from the car on her way home from The Pharmacist’s Daughter. It was a few days after Steven’s return from Cabo, and they had been avoiding each other. It seemed like he was watching her too closely. She was afraid and angry, a bad combination.
Tonight Steven had business dinners and drinks and wouldn’t be home till eleven, he’d said. She had wrapped at eight and was on the 101, but she didn’t want to go home. When Dan picked up, she was so relieved that she panted. “Are you in L.A.?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
She started to say “Nothing,” but then she began to cry and had to cross three lanes and take an exit so she wouldn’t get in an accident. She took him off speaker, held the phone to her cheek.
“What is it?” he asked. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I think I made a mess of my life. And I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Is this about your work, or . . .”
“My work is fine. It’s the only thing keeping me sane right now. Can you . . . do you think you could meet me? I need to talk to someone. You have friends, but I don’t. Just Steven’s friends.”
“Yeah, sure, sure. Why don’t you meet me in forty-five at London House?” It was a private club with branches in New York, Dubai, London, and now in L.A. Maddy had no idea he was a member.
“Could we go someplace less sceney?” she asked. “I don’t want anyone to see me. I’m kind of a mess.”
“I’m sure you’re not a mess.”
“Please?” The makeup woman had commented that she seemed tired, and when Maddy had leaned in to her reflection, she had looked frightened, her skin pale, her hair thin.
“Meet me at my house, then,” he said.
She thought about it a moment and then asked the address.
Dan’s house in Venice Beach was small, on a quiet street about a ten-minute walk from the ocean. His movie posters were artfully arranged, along with vintage surfboards from the 1960s. It was neat and airy, wholly unlike their apartment in Fort Greene.
“Hey,” she said at the door, hugging him hard.
“Hey,” he said.
He had a brown couch with no arms and a brushed-metal base, and a kidney bean–shaped coffee table. There were coasters that looked like tiny record albums, and on one of them was a glass of whiskey. “Can I have one of those?” she asked, sitting in a cow-hair chair.
“You’re not a whiskey person.”
“Everyone is, under the right circumstances,” she said.
He disappeared into the kitchen and set down a tumbler that said SO-CAL SPEED SHOP. He was wearing a crew-neck shirt with an artfully weathered collar. She realized he was starting to spend money on clothes. “This place is really nice. I didn’t know you were so into decorating.”
“I had a little help,” he said. “I decided that thirty’s too old to have shitty things.”
“Success suits you,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. I feel like it’s just made me more neurotic now that people are actually watching my movies. Anyway, let’s not talk about me. What’s going on with you? You don’t look so good.”
She took a sip of her whiskey and winced, it was so bitter, and then she took another one. Dan was quiet, watching her. The way he used to be when she came home from a bad audition and he sensed it hadn’t gone well. He could be high-maintenance and melancholic, but he knew how to be silent.
“I feel like I married a stranger,” she said.
“Anyone in a relationship feels that way sometimes.”
She shook her head slowly. “I thought he would be my home, you know? And now I think maybe I was wrong and he was only using me. Maybe you were right. Maybe he just needed a girl and it didn’t matter so much who she was.”
“You really think that?”
“I don’t know anything for sure.”
He sipped his drink contemplatively. Behind his head was a poster of Cassavetes’s Husbands: “A comedy about life, death, and freedom.”
“Does this have to do with—that story about the dockworker?” he asked.
“Yeah, and other stuff, too. Stuff I can’t talk about. I try to talk to him, but he makes me feel like I’m crazy. I can’t tell if he’s right. If I’m right, and I’m not crazy, then I have to . . .” She wanted to cry, but she was numb, cried out. The miserable last day when he was gone, with the hours ticking by. And the hickey. That badge, that stamp, that looked like it had been put there by a troublemaker. “I used to think that if I knew someone was betraying me, then I would have to end it, but it’s not so simple. You can be in love and pain at the same time. I just feel . . . stuck. And I don’t know how to get unstuck.”
“You don’t have to stay, you know. What’s stopping you from . . . breaking up? You don’t have any children.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want it to end. I want it to be different. I want him to love me, just me. The way . . . he used to.”
“I loved you.”
>
“I know.” She looked down into her whiskey. “I cheated on you. With Kira. At Mile’s End. I think you’re the only member of the production team who doesn’t know.”
“But you hate Kira.”
“The night of Bridget’s dinner party, I came home before you did. I kissed her and then we—made out a little.” He looked more confused than angry, so she continued. “I was tipsy and it was a crazy night. Bridget wanting to sign me. And Steven and I had talked on the patio and I didn’t want to tell you. And you didn’t come back to the condo with me. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“It was almost two years ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I know, but I was a bad person, and I don’t want to be a bad person.” She drank some more.
“You’re not,” he said.
“Thank you for being there for me when my father died,” she said.
“Mad, it’s nothing. You would have done the same for me.”
“You helped me take care of myself. Those nights of insomnia, I thought I was losing my mind. Like how I feel now.”
“I was worried about you. I’d never seen you like that. I just wanted you to get well.”
Get well. It could be a kind thing or a terrible thing to say to someone. When Dan said it now, it seemed kind, but when Steven had said it in the study . . .
“I think about your dad sometimes,” Dan said. “I miss him, too.”
“You were the Jewish son he never had. I used to imagine us getting married in Vermont under a chuppah. He would have been bawling so hard.”
“Did you have a Jewish wedding to Steven?”
“Just the glass. We broke the glass. Supposedly, it’s a symbol of the hymen breaking, but that’s gross. To me, it’s about pain. In every happy moment, there’s sadness, too.”
He was looking at her intently, and she was uncomfortable, so she suggested he give her a tour of his house. He took her to the back, where he had a porch and a yard with a trampoline and a hammock and a grill with some chairs. They brought out the tumblers and the bottle of whiskey.
When she put her third glass of whiskey down on the table between them, her hand brushed his and he looked at her. Instead of moving it away, she closed her eyes from exhaustion and drink, and just . . . felt. The warmth of his skin touching hers. To be with someone who cared about her. Who had been there during the most traumatic event of her life. Dan knew her, he had known her then, and he knew her now.
And when she looked at him, she could see the question in his eyes. He said, “I did love you. I had no idea you would leave me. I thought I would spend my life with you.”
“I thought so, too, until I met him. It never seemed complicated to me then. It only got complicated later.”
She stared at him over the table. Their hands were still touching, and he leaned in. His lips on her lips, the whiskey bitter, and the kiss different from the ones at the end. They kept kissing, and she stood and straddled his chair, and soon they were upstairs, his bedroom had blue walls and his bed was clean and made up, which he never used to do, and then they were under the comforter and he was on her, over her, she touched his long slender fingers. His body was different now, he had muscles that were never there before. It was as though he were a stranger, except this stranger knew how to touch her.
He was slower and less morose, and he seemed to appreciate her body, her smell, or maybe he had been appreciative when they were together and she hadn’t wanted to see it because if she didn’t see it, then she could leave. She let him take her, wanting to obliterate the feel of Steven on her body. She wanted Dan to stamp out any memory of her husband, the word “husband,” she didn’t want to think of that, didn’t want to be Steven Weller’s wife, just Maddy . . .
She came twice, the second time with him, and his eyes gleamed in the dim light. Afterward they lay there naked and said nothing. He went to the bathroom and got water for both of them. She drank gratefully. Her head hurt. They got under the covers, though she knew she would not stay. She could hear a party going on down the block, shouting and laughter.
If she told Steven what happened and he divorced her, she would not care. Right at this moment she would not care.
Dan seemed happy, too, and she curled up next to him, her nose against his. “Do you want me to make some food?” he asked. “I’m starving.”
Ten minutes later, he came up with a tray filled with big turkey sandwiches, celery soda, and potato chips and put it on the bed between them. They sat and faced each other, eating naked and smiling.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you, but I didn’t want to ad-miss it,” she said. She wanted to stay here forever, but soon she would have to leave this room and leave this feeling of being open and free, and go back to the house with the iron gate.
“You always loved wordplay,” he said. “You’re a writer even if you don’t think so.”
“I’m more of an assistant.”
“No, you helped me write that movie, and that’s what started everything. I wouldn’t own this house without what you did for me.” He sounded nostalgic.
“You think you’ll ever write anything like that again?”
“What do you mean?
“Respectful of women that comes from the heart?”
“Yeah, I do, actually. The Valentine was embarrassing, so fake and manufactured. All the crying and kissing. And then Hirshman’s Mistake, even when we were testing it and the audiences were going wild, I was disconnected from it all.” Hirshman’s Mistake had become a huge hit over the summer, making a few hundred million dollars. Maddy had seen it in the screening room with Steven and been so embarrassed by it that she’d chosen not to attend the premiere.
“You didn’t know that when you went out with the script?”
“I didn’t realize it till I got on set. I mean, I tried to humanize the characters as much as I could, but in the testing, we cut all that stuff out because it was slowing down the film. Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about what it means. To have my name on something. I want to get back to directing my own work. You know, ‘a film by.’ The whole auteur concept. I haven’t been feeling like much of an auteur. I want to make something character-driven. Something small.”
“I think that’s good,” she said.
“Over the summer, I started writing again, just getting back into it. I haven’t done anything myself since I Used to Know Her, and you and I hammered out the story beats together, so I don’t even know if that counts. So it’s really been three and a half years. I wound up writing this coming-of-age story about a kid growing up in Maryland. I mean, kind of obvious or whatever, but it’s about me being a teenager, and my friends, and my mother. I wrote it in, like, nine days. I’ve never had an experience like that before. I wrote it really small, you know? I sent it to Sharoz, and she wants to produce it. It wouldn’t cost much. I’d do it with a really bare-bones crew. If I can find the right kid.” He seemed to lift up as he spoke, and his face became more beautiful.
“I’ve never heard you like this,” she said.
“I sat down with a line producer, and I think I can do the whole thing for a half-million dollars. I really want to shoot it on film because it’s period, and I want to capture that flat suburban landscape.”
“With the money you’ve made the last couple years, you could fund it yourself, couldn’t you?”
“I’m going to put money in. People say never to invest your own money in your film, but that’s bullshit. I mean, if you care about something, you have to. I’m going to put in a hundred grand.” They sat in silence, and she’d opened her mouth to ask him something about the script when he jumped in. “To get the rest, I’ve been going to people, just a few people, who I feel know me and know what I’m about, and I’m asking each of them for twenty-five thousand . . . What do you think?”
She waited
for him to say something else, but he was quiet and she was confused. “Are you asking me for money?” she said. Of course he wasn’t; he was just telling her about his plans.
He looked surprised by her confusion. “Well, yeah. I respect you. And your opinion of my work. You have money now, and I need your help.”
She got the same feeling she had when Steven told her about the Christian Bernard article. It was worse than dread, it was slow, heavy doom, and it started at her chest and moved down into the pit of her stomach.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. “You asked me to give you my rights and now you want my money. You don’t care about me. Just what I can do for you.”
“Of course I care about you.”
She was backing away from him. She grabbed the sheet off the bed and held it to her front. “You just wanted to get me into bed to butter me up so I’d invest in your movie.”
“Get you into bed? I had no idea this was going to happen. You think I planned this? You called me.”
“But you invited me to your house.”
“You didn’t want to go to London House. I had no idea we’d wind up in this room. I was so worried about you when you came in. You looked like a ghost. I wanted to help you. I still do. You’re going back to this jerk, and I’m sitting here knowing that moment’s going to come, and we’re naked and eating and I feel good and you feel good and I just . . . didn’t see the point in waiting a week to send you an email.”
“Are you asking me to pay you twenty-five grand for having sex with me? Because the sex was not that special.”
“I thought it was.”
She started dressing, quickly, turning her back so he couldn’t see her breasts. He stood, still buck-naked, looking befuddled. “Maddy . . . what happened between us . . . I wanted it to. I’m sorry about the timing of my ask, but—”