by Amy Sohn
“Kira, go with the baby,” she said. “Don’t take your eyes off him. I don’t want him to get switched.”
“Your baby is not going to get switched.”
“Just go. Make sure he’s okay.”
Maddy could hear Dr. Baker talking to the surgical assistant as she stitched her up. Something about plans for Memorial Day weekend. She couldn’t move her arms. She had given birth, and the baby was on another floor, probably, where was he? She felt a flood of grief for her mother, who had gone so early, was not here now, when she needed a mother. She missed her father, too, but it was her mother she yearned for, wanted in this room with her.
She remembered her wearing glasses in the morning, she wore glasses when she first woke up and a dark purple robe with two white stripes, and she was squatting beside her in Maddy’s bedroom in Potter so their faces were level, and she said, “Is that so?” It was all Maddy remembered, “Is that so?” and the warmth in her mother’s eyes.
All these years when people asked about her, she said she didn’t remember much, she diminished it, but this was the hole in her life, always had been. To have to learn about tampons from her father. Later, when she lost her virginity to that asshole at Dartmouth, she’d stood in the shower and cried, feeling the burning, regretting that she had done it. She had wanted a mother then, wanted her mother to explain why it had been so awful.
And she wanted her now to tell her it would all be all right, she would get better. Just like her baby needed his mommy, she wanted hers. There was no one here to hold her. She was an orphan and she was alone and her husband had let her give birth without him.
A recovery room. The compression boots made loud, mechanical noises as they rhythmically squeezed her calves. A nurse sat by her, watching TV. They were waiting for a complete blood count, she said; Maddy couldn’t be moved until they got it. Kira came in. She said the baby was in the NICU but looked fine. “You should go back and touch him,” Maddy said. “Don’t leave him all alone in there.”
“I feel like I should stay with you,” Kira said.
Zack came in, and Maddy shooed Kira away to the NICU. “Congratulations,” Zack said.
“Have you seen him? He’s so beautiful.”
“I came straight to you. They’re trying to get Steven on the radio. No one’s picking up.”
“What about the Coast Guard?”
“My mother tried, but they won’t send out boats because they say it’s not an emergency.”
“Your mother couldn’t convince them?”
“She’s working on it.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s born.”
Zack looked out the hospital window, feeling numb. His mother had been his first call. Five minutes passed and ten, and he called back and she said the guys at the yacht club were trying to get Steven on the radio. As soon as she told Zack, he knew. The radio was off.
“How can they not reach him?” Maddy asked. “He told me he always has it on.”
“I just don’t know,” Zack said, and felt worse than he had after telling her Kira was going to do Walter’s movie.
Maddy was pale and sad, so frail in her gown and the weird boots that kept pumping. She looked off to the side, and then seemed to muster all her strength and said, “I had to have a C-section.”
“Look on the bright side. You get to keep your vagina nice and tight.” The nurse visibly pretended not to hear this.
“Please don’t make me laugh. My stitches will come out.” Then she started to cry.
As he put his hand on hers, he felt disgusted with Steven. Steven was a selfish prick and had been as long as Zack had known him. Zack had tried to warn Maddy in Friedenau, but it hadn’t worked, and looking at her now, he felt it was his own fault. She had been invited to that dinner party in Mile’s End only because he’d called Bridget. Maddy never would have met Steven if it weren’t for him.
This was why, when they’d walked in the cemetery, he had tried to convince her to stay away. But at that time they hadn’t been friends. He hadn’t wanted to come across as a meddler. And he had worried she would relay their conversation to his mother, who had already signed her. He had tried to warn Maddy without warning her.
So many signs over the years. From before he was old enough to know what they meant, until later, when he was.
The funny expression on his mother’s face when she would read the gossip items hinting at affairs with men. “I can promise you, Steven is not your father,” Bridget had said.
The bad first marriage and the way Steven never talked about his wife, the parade of pretty young things afterward. The women always just right. Hyper-feminine. With their fake boobs and their blowouts and their Kewpie eyes.
Zack had never known for sure, but he had ideas. One night, it must have been senior year of high school, Steven had come over late. Steven and Bridget talked for a long time; he was upset about something. After he had left, Zack went down to the kitchen to get food. His mother was alone at the table and looked sad. “Is he okay?” Zack had asked.
“He’s going through a hard time right now. Personal stuff.”
And then Zack had blurted it out: “How come he’s not married?”
“I’m not married.”
“I mean, how come he never stays with one girl?”
“Steven isn’t like other men,” she had said, and her eyes lingered on his just a beat too long.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he doesn’t think about marriage the way other men do.”
In Berlin, Zack had hoped Maddy would be smart enough to get it, even if she didn’t get all of it. Later, after the wedding, he concluded that she was more complicated than he had thought. If not a contract, then an agreement.
And when it became difficult to reconcile his instincts about Maddy with the idea of an arrangement, he worked out other explanations in his head: He had misunderstood all these years and Steven didn’t like men, or he liked both, or Maddy had changed him.
Because if he did like men, and Maddy didn’t know, it meant she had been duped. By Steven. Or his mother. And if Steven could do such a horrible thing, Zack didn’t want to believe that Bridget could. In business she had lied and deceived, but to take another person’s life, to use someone as a tool . . . it meant she was a monster.
Maddy found the NICU frightening, wholly abnormal, and too bright. Tiny babies in incubators lined up, all out of the womb too early, purple and skinny, with tubes in them, these bodies so small and weak, hooked up to the big machines. Kira was at the baby’s incubator, with a slim, middle-aged pediatric nurse named Lillian. Maddy had already spoken with the neonatologist, who told her there were no signs of withdrawal in the baby, but they were monitoring him. Maddy was relieved to hear that but was agonized by the two tubes going into his tiny hand. “What are those?” she asked Lillian.
“One is antibiotics and one is an IV drip. He had some respiratory distress and we want to make sure he’s breathing properly. Do you want to hold your son?”
Lillian lifted the lid of the incubator and took him out. Put him in her lap. She put him to her breast. Lillian demonstrated the football hold. If Maddy held him like a football, to the side, his body wouldn’t put pressure on her sutures.
It was hard to coordinate the nursing with the tubes and the monitor strapped to his body, but Lillian and Kira helped her. The baby flailed but took the breast. She had been cut open, catheterized, and shaved, she had morphine and antibiotics in her blood, but her baby was nursing.
“He’s perfect,” Kira said softly. Maddy stroked his little head.
“Have you picked a name yet?” Zack asked.
“Jake,” Maddy said. “Jake Weller Freed.” She hadn’t been certain until she said it. He was going to have her last name, and her father’s. The baby was hers.
She looked down at the baby�
��s little head. The eyes so black. The mouth working hard on her nipple. She wanted to fatten him up so they would let them both go. “He looks like you,” Kira said.
“No, he doesn’t,” she said. “He looks like him.”
Maddy was in the NICU, nursing Jake, when she looked up to see Steven standing there. It was a day later. She hadn’t even heard him come in.
“You missed it,” she said dully. “I told you not to go and you went.” Lillian looked up and then down. There was a handful of other parents in the room, but they were focusing on their newborns. It was one of the few times Maddy had been around Steven when no one seemed to notice him.
“I’m so sorry, my love.” He leaned down, kissed her head. “They reached us on Catalina and I flew. I got here as fast as I could.”
“Why didn’t you take your phone, like you said?”
“I left it in the car, at the yacht club.”
“And the radio?”
“I thought it was on, but it was off. I feel awful. You had a month before the date. I had no idea he’d come early.” He gazed at him on her breast. “He’s perfect.”
“They want to keep him here longer. I’ve been pumping my milk so I can nurse him when we get out, so my supply doesn’t go down. It’s so complicated.”
“Hey there, buddy,” he cooed softly, running his finger down the baby’s cheek.
“I named him after my father,” she said. She handed him the baby and Steven took him, sat in another chair, gently avoiding the tubes. “Jake Weller Freed.”
He looked a little surprised but then said, “Jake Weller Freed. I like it.” He rocked the baby and touched her arm. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
“I’m on Percocet. I don’t know how long they’ll let me take it. I can’t believe you missed the delivery. What’s wrong with you? Who are you?” Her voice came out demented and shrill. She didn’t care. In every other room of Cedars-Sinai, there were probably bisexual actors in shouting matches with wives recovering from emergency C-section births that the men had missed.
“I shouldn’t have gone.”
“You care more about Ryan than me.” She kept her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear, but she was livid. “You’re in love with him.”
“Nothing you said is true. He’s my friend.”
This tiny helpless thing was counting on the two of them to help him live. How could they do that when they were so far apart? If Steven loved her, he never would have left. Or maybe he had already left her, years ago, on the boat trip to Cabo, and she hadn’t wanted to see it.
“I don’t want to be with you right now,” she said. “I want to get to know my son.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. Should I go home or—”
“I don’t care anymore. Just go.” He gave her an odd look as though about to say something, and then gently handed her the baby and went out.
The morning they left the hospital, Maddy had clothing and heels brought in, and a glam squad for natural-looking hair and makeup. Flora had arranged everything so the media knew when the family would be coming out and no one outlet would have “the first shots.”
Dozens of photographers were gathered outside behind the stanchions. It would be an orderly affair. When the time came, Steven and Maddy posed outside with Jake in her arms and Steven’s arm around her. Flora was there, overseeing everything. As agreed, the photographers refrained from yelling their names so as not to upset the baby. All Maddy could hear were the digital shutters clicking. They posed for several minutes. Maddy smiled wearily, playing the role of exuberant new mother. It was all cream blush, all fake. No one knew Steven had missed the birth.
But he had missed it, and every day since, she had been replaying the delivery, rewinding to the moment when she had the dream and imagining that her water had not broken. She wanted to fix Jake’s birth so he hadn’t come early and she’d delivered him naturally, in the birthing room they had toured, with the tub and the wood paneling. In this vision of the birth, Steven was there, and he caught the baby and cut the cord, and afterward she could smell the vernix on Jake’s face. She was broken and imperfect, her body wouldn’t cooperate, a woman’s body was supposed to push. It had been the dream that had started it all, the nightmare and then the broken amniotic sac. She shouldn’t have napped. If you didn’t sleep, you didn’t dream.
3
Who is it?” Zack called out to Natalie from the desk of his new office. They communicated through an open door all day. In September, after two years at the Bentley Howard office in L.A., he had left to launch his own company, Laight Street Entertainment, which he had named after his old block in Tribeca. He had used his trust to capitalize some of it, but the rest came from investors he had met and courted during his time in L.A. Who had been watching him build a better and bigger list, who believed that he could go out on his own at an age when most people would be considered foolish to do so.
When Natalie told him Steven was on the line, he paused before putting on his headset. It had been an insane morning. The script had gone out at five P.M. the day before, and already he had offers from three of the six studios. It was his first submission as independent manager-producer, and he knew the sale price would shape the perception of his company.
Velvet was by a young screenwriter client who had been working on it for a year. It was based on the true story of an Australian jewel thief in the 1980s named Frank McKnight—a tight, edge-of-your seat tale with a coiled, charismatic lead. McKnight was a get for any actor in his mid-thirties. Hyper-intelligent and manic, he had a troubled marriage and a thrill-seeking nature. And he was the greatest fucking jewel thief who ever lived.
The offers that had come in last night and this morning were all in the mid-sixes, which Zack thought boded well. He was hoping for a mil.
He wondered if Steven was putting out a feeler for Zack’s management services. Bridget had folded Ostrow Productions and officially taken over as Apollo Pictures CEO and chairwoman just one week ago. Steven was said to be taking meetings with high-profile agents and managers, but there was no way he would hire Zack. A brand-new company, a twenty-nine-year-old manager, even younger than his wife. Steven wasn’t the kind of person to take a chance, not in work or in life.
“Put him through,” Zack called.
“Zack,” Steven said. “First of all, I wanted to thank you again for being so good to Maddy at the hospital.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Zack asked tightly.
“I know, but it was a difficult situation, and you were there for her. She’s so grateful to you.”
“Someone had to be there.”
Steven paused dramatically and then said, “So I read Velvet. And I wanted to congratulate you. It’s a perfect hybrid. A smart heist movie. Reminds me of the best suspense features of the ’seventies. Like The Day of the Jackal and Three Days of the Condor. I just—you’re a player now. When I met you, you were just a boy.”
Zack knew Steven Weller would never call anyone just to say congratulations. He said nothing, only waited. Like a good journalist.
“I was calling because—I’d like to throw my name into the ring,” Steven said.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“For Frank. McKnight.” Zack tapped his fingers together and pivoted to regard the painting of Kid Berg. Every time he examined it, he saw something new. Sometimes the fighter seemed aggressive, tough, invincible. Other times he looked like a scrappy young kid. “I think I would get a lot of bodies into the theater,” Steven was saying. “And you and I would work well together as producer and actor. You remind me of your mother when she was starting out.”
Zack stood up and went to the window of his office. A woman in a jog bra was walking a Pomeranian. “Thank you for saying all of that, Steven.”
“It’s true.”
“But I can tell you right now that
I would never cast you as Frank McKnight. You’re completely wrong for him.”
“Really? I feel like I could bring out a lot of the humor, and you know audiences already buy me as an action—”
“I don’t mean to upset you, but you’re just too old. Frank McKnight is in his thirties. I need an actor with vitality. Someone more warm-blooded.”
Zack thought of Berg, who had fought ten rounds against then-unbeaten Cuban Kid Chocolate at the Harlem Polo Grounds in 1930. Berg was persistent and steady and kept it up, and by the end Kid Chocolate couldn’t lift his hands.
“We could have a long conversation about whether audiences find my blood warm,” Steven said, “but regardless of that, I could bring you attention on a level that . . .”
“That what?”
“That will be hard for you to get from anyone else, given your unknown screenwriter.”
“You know, Steven, it’s funny you say that. Because I founded this company with the mission of telling good stories and a belief that good stories can also make money. I believe that American audiences are hungry for material that challenges them, makes them think, and provokes them. I’ve been developing this script for two years, and I have faith that this is a story that needs telling. I will get attention for this movie, wherever we land, and the man who plays McKnight is going to be the one who’s most right for him. Because that’s part of telling a good story. I have no doubts that this film will find its audience, even without Steven Weller. All right? No hard feelings.” And he clicked off before Steven could get in another word.
In the fall, when Jake was a few months old, Maddy and Steven did a family photo spread for People. They donated the $1 million fee to World Children’s Welfare. The photos showed them cooing over Jake, and they were taken in a studio so no one would have any indication what the nursery looked like. In the interviews, they talked about what a joy it was to be parents, despite the sleeplessness and the crying. They talked about how the experience had changed them. Steven said Maddy was an amazing and selfless mother, but during the sit-down, as she watched his mouth move, it sounded phony and depressing.