The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  She slid down the edge of the bed so she was sitting on the floor, clasping her knees to her chest. “And after Wilmington?” she asked hollowly.

  “On and off. There was a period where he was angry, we didn’t speak.”

  “Where did you do it?”

  “Always the boat. It was the only place he felt safe. Even after the thing with Christian.” Maddy’s throat began to close, and she opened her mouth to get more air.

  “The thing with Christian.”

  “You didn’t think it was a lie, did you? He made the mistake of getting involved with someone outside of the industry. I told him he was crazy to keep the boat after that, but he said he could trust the guys at the new club. He had them taking even more money than the ones before. He loved that I wanted discretion, too. He would say to me, ‘We’re the same. That’s why this works. We both need privacy. I don’t have to explain it to you.’ ”

  He adjusted the towel around his waist. This half-clothed male body in their guesthouse, using their water, their shower, drinking their coffee. He wouldn’t put on a shirt for her even as he was assassinating her marriage. “Does he want to be with you?” she asked hollowly.

  “He doesn’t know what he wants. Sometimes he liked to fantasize that things could be different. He said he wanted to divorce you and be out in the open with me.” She didn’t believe that he would speak that way about her, that he would denigrate her to Ryan. She wondered if he was making it up. “But then he would get worried about the Tommy movies. He’ll never come out, but he likes to play with the idea that he could. He won’t change. Only someone really afraid would go to the lengths he does.”

  “What do you mean, the lengths he does?”

  “To get married, to throw the scent off.”

  “Is that how he speaks of our marriage? Throwing the scent off? Is that something he said?”

  Ryan turned his back and ran his finger down the edge of the countertop. “I don’t think we should talk anymore.”

  “I can handle it. Keep going.”

  His back still turned, he said, “Sometimes he said he loved you, but sex with you . . . disgusted him.”

  He had to be lying. Steven wouldn’t say that about her, no matter how confused he was, no matter how angry.

  “You’re a liar,” she said.

  “Whatever,” Ryan said.

  He went to the Roman shades and rolled them up. It had taken Maddy a long time to figure out how to raise Roman shades, but he already knew. She had no interest in window treatments and decor. She had wanted to put her stamp on this house, but in the end, it wasn’t about aesthetics. It was about wanting Steven to hear her. She had never cared about couture or designer furniture or modern art. But Steven did, he loved decorating the home, it was part of his identity. She imagined the two men snuggling on the bed in the main cabin and fingering the collars of each other’s shirt.

  “Why were you two fighting last night?” she asked.

  “He asked if there was someone else. I said yes, because I started seeing someone. I never lied to him about other guys before, but last night he just went crazy. I said it was ludicrous to expect me to be faithful when he was married to you. He said, ‘What if I left Maddy? Would that change anything?’ I said no. And he lost it and drove off.”

  She stood up. Her legs were weak, like after the C-section, after the spinal wore off. She pushed open the door. “I’m going for a drive,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour, and when I come in, I don’t want any trace of you.”

  She got in the Prius and took the streets to the 101 headed northwest, not sure where she was going. Just wanting to drive fast. She had loved Steven. She didn’t want to believe it was all a lie. There was a chance that Ryan was making up the story. Maybe he was in love with Steven, and the things he said about Steven wanting a divorce—lies, revenge.

  But when he spoke, it felt like the truth. And more upsetting than this affair, even, which seemed an affair of the heart, was that Ryan had probably been only one of many. Maddy and Steven had been separated physically almost half of the four years they had been married. Opportunity abounded. So easy. There could be dozens of lovers. Hundreds. Paid and not. And Ryan had said the Christian Bernard story was true. Her appearances, her testimonials, all a farce. Of course he had paid off Bernard to retract, maybe paid others over the years, others she didn’t know about because Steven had told her never to search their names.

  She had been shocked and offended when Kira brought up a contract, but they did have a contract. It wasn’t written, and there was no salary, but it was a kind of agreement, in that she had let him do what he did.

  She had ignored everyone’s warnings because in loving and being loved by Steven, she had been part of something huge and important. The charisma, the charm, the stories. He was like Tennessee Williams, shooting three bull’s-eyes in a row, all with his blind eye.

  She wanted to believe he loved her once. Maybe he had, at the very beginning. The first year. But even after that, he kept making love to her. How was it possible? Always on, never off. In Venice, the time she conceived . . . the way he had kissed her and held her . . . It hadn’t felt like he was performing. It felt genuine. He had made love to her and put his mouth all over her, caressed her breasts, buried his nose in her, his tongue, until she came. Even if they hadn’t had sex since the baby. Was it so easy to act, to trick her into believing she was desired? There must have been pills, though she had never seen any in his cabinet; maybe he hid them, as she had hid hers. Or maybe he used his mind. Did what gay men had been doing for centuries: closed his eyes and thought of England.

  She had married someone with two selves. And like a political wife, she had looked the other way. When the gay men whispered at parties. When he went on the boat, on the trips with Terry, and alone. That time after the Husbandry reviews, he had asked her to come, and she had been berating herself for years for saying no, but he’d known she was working. Maybe he’d known she would decline, and had only asked so as to mislead her into trusting him.

  She got off the freeway at Mulholland and headed west toward the Santa Monica Mountains. A little past Laurel Canyon, she passed an overlook. She parked the car and got out, staring down at the San Fernando Valley and the trees. She remembered the flash of the cameras in her eyes that night in Berlin, the beautiful blinding light that left spots. The feeling of being on the arm of Steven Weller . . . It wasn’t undignified. It was thrilling. As he had risen, she had risen, too. She had seen her marriage transactionally, whether or not she had known it. When Steven took her hand on that press line, she told herself it was an act of generosity, and to some extent it was. But he had been claiming her, announcing that they were together, before she got a chance to decide. And she had let him. She had wanted to be claimed.

  She remembered glancing at Bridget and seeing the look she’d shared with Steven. It was some kind of signal. The ever so slight nod of approval. Maddy had read it as a nod about her career, her future stardom. But perhaps it had been something else.

  Bridget had managed the marriage. She had been with the two of them all along, she had been at the first party at Mile’s End. She’d seen the movie and made sure Steven did.

  Every major actress in Hollywood has read for her, but none was right. As though major actresses, far more accomplished and with better résumés, had been unsuitable for Ellie. Or maybe they were right for Ellie but not for Steven. Lael had said she had flown all the way to London and never read her scenes.

  They were casting for something more than a movie. The marriage was a script. A script that Walter, Bridget, and Steven had written together. They delivered it flawlessly, they were all off-book.

  When Walter had told her she was cast during the dinner at Locanda Cipriani, he’d said it as though it were a foregone conclusion. Bridget and Steven had chosen her for a far more important role than she had though
t. Her marriage had been made. Everyone had known it but the bride.

  4

  When Steven finally came in after three days and three nights, tan, his hair a tousled mess, Maddy was on the living room couch, her knees folded beneath her. Jake was upstairs napping. Lucia was out running errands.

  Steven looked like he had been running a marathon. He sat in the armchair across from her, an Ed Ruscha behind his head. An eerie grid of L.A. lights. It had been in the study in the mansion, and now it was in their living room.

  “I talked to Ryan,” she said, “and I know.” He said nothing, merely staring sadly ahead. “You were making love with him when I was having Jake, and you turned the radio off so you could. I needed you, and you sailed away.”

  “I was afraid of the future.”

  “You’re a phony. You always loved men. You cast me. You and Bridget. You never loved me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Are you just going to keep lying and lying? There’s no point anymore.”

  “I did love you. At first . . . at the beginning, it was Bridget’s idea. She was worried about those rumors. Felt I needed to do something. She thought marriage would be a good idea, to the right woman. And then when I got to know you, I believed we could— You were so beautiful and smart. I saw you as an equal. You were my partner. In life and art. I watched you work and I—learned things. You made me a better actor. I fell in love with you after we married. That was the great surprise.”

  She stared at the grid on the Ruscha. Did he have these pieces because he liked them or because they were the kind of pieces he thought he should have? Did he know what he liked or like what he thought he should? Did he have Ruscha so he could pronounce “Ruscha”?

  Steven Weller was interesting, not interested.

  Everything in this house was a sham. He was like those faux marbre columns she had hated so much in the mansion. He was a gay boy from Kenosha who had transformed himself into Hollywood’s sexiest leading man, from Steven Woyceck to Steven Weller. She didn’t know Steven Woyceck. Maybe Ryan did.

  Maybe Steven Woyceck didn’t care for Henry James and pretended to only because Alex had. Alex Pattison had seemed comfortable with himself; whatever taste he had was his own. Maybe Steven Woyceck didn’t even like to read. Maybe he had faked his interest in art and literature all his life to make himself seem smarter and more cultured than he was.

  “Don’t say you loved me,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have betrayed me.”

  “But I do love you. I wanted it to be enough. I kept thinking, hoping, that I had changed. It happens. For thirty years you think one thing about yourself, and then you meet someone and you become someone else. But no matter how much I loved you, there was this longing for something different. So I tried to be two people at once. I had my . . . other world, and I had you. I told myself that with men, it was transactional. Physical. Scratching an itch. Sometimes I could believe it. But it became harder. To keep lying and lying. Each time I took out Jo, I would say it was the last time, but it never was. You don’t know what it’s like to have to hide all the time.”

  “You ruined my life. At our wedding, you vowed you would be true to me and loyal.”

  “I kept thinking I could get control over it. When I met Ryan, it was confusing. It was different from the other times.”

  “Ryan said you told him sex with me disgusts you.”

  “I never said that. I never spoke that way about you, Maddy!”

  She didn’t know what to believe. She trusted Steven even less than she trusted Ryan Costello. “What about Terry? Was he your lover, too?”

  “Never.”

  “You were with him on that trip to Cabo after your bad reviews.”

  He shook his head. “That was someone else.”

  “Who? Actually, don’t tell me. What if I had called Terry or Ananda to check on you?”

  “They always had instructions.”

  “So they know.”

  “They love me. And they understand that this part of me doesn’t have to do with what I feel for you.”

  “They were at our wedding. They were in on this, and she pretended she was so happy for me.”

  “I told them it’s an addiction. It is an addiction. I keep trying to fix it, but—”

  “That guy, Christian Bernard from the old yacht club. You did have an affair with him, and you did coke and poppers and all the stuff the story said you did. Even though you say you hate drugs.” His shoulders slumped. “I did those appearances to defend you, and it was true all along. I asked you to tell me the truth, and you looked right into my eyes and lied to me.”

  He said nothing. She remembered the blue dress she had worn to Harry, the roaring elation of the crowd when she’d said he was the best lover she’d had. She had been an actress for her husband, and she had been good at it. Bridget had plucked her for that very reason. “You made a fool of me!”

  “I didn’t want any of it to be true. No one knows, Maddy. You did such a good job. You changed the tide.” He sat next to her on the couch and put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.

  “Who are you?” she said. “Do you know?”

  “Sometimes I think I do.”

  “Do you even like Biedermeier? Did you ever read Nelson Algren, or do you just quote him?”

  “Of course I’ve read Algren.”

  “Why do you keep a photo of Alex in a box in your drawer?”

  He looked as though he was about to protest, to attack her for snooping, but he must have seen something in her face. He couldn’t manipulate her anymore. And then he seemed to give up. “I have my things. I had a life before you.”

  “You think that if you keep a part of yourself in a box, then it’s not really who you are, but that’s not true. Who took the picture of you on that boat?”

  “Bridget. We were all on it together.”

  “So she knew.”

  “She thought Alex and I were friends.”

  “It’s not possible. She must have seen the way you . . . She knew. It’s why she wanted you to have a wife. So she went and found a director she could manipulate. She knew Walter needed her, wanted his work to reach a larger audience. You used me. You had me sign the postnup because you knew one day you would be done with me, and you wanted to protect your money. I had an expiration date from the very beginning.”

  “Maddy,” Steven said. “When I married you, I wanted it to be forever. It was Bridget who suggested the postnup. I didn’t care about the money. I was prepared to give you whatever you wanted if it didn’t work out, because I wanted it to work out. I love you. And I love Jake. The sex with you . . . It wasn’t fake. We could have more children. We can make this work.”

  “You’re just saying that because Ryan broke up with you. You’re crawling back to me, but only because he’s through with you. If he wanted to keep it going, it would go on and on like this. You would play with Jake in the house, be the all-star father, and then go to the guesthouse at night to be with Ryan. Where am I in that picture? Am I just Jake’s mother? Where were you the last couple of days?”

  “On the boat.”

  “With who?”

  “No one. I was alone.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve been alone on that boat once since we met.”

  “This time I was. I was trying to figure out what matters. It’s you. You’re all that matters. We can stay together.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have no respect for you anymore.”

  Steven nodded at Maddy and went to the bookshelf, running his hands down the first editions. These were the books that Alex had read aloud to him in bed so long ago, and he had wanted to read them to Ryan, but now Ryan was gone, and he would never get the chance.

  The night in the pool, when they
fought, he could feel him slipping away and wanted to stop it but was angry with Ryan. For not loving him. And he yelled. Ryan had asked to crash but it turned out that he was dating someone, an architect; the guy was working on his house. Of course it was an architect. Ryan was always talking about Julius Shulman and the Stahl House and Richard Neutra, and when he read books in bed, he would put on a pair of reading glasses, though Steven tried them on once and couldn’t detect a prescription.

  Steven had sneaked on the boat to see him as often as he could after Office Mate, but then Ryan broke it off. When he called again and wanted to see Steven just before Jake’s birth, he had been excited. Ryan loved him again. That was why he had taken Ryan on Jo. They had talked about their future. He said Steven’s “choice” was the problem. Steven had said that Ryan was making a choice, too, coy in interviews about his romantic life, escorting pretty young women to premieres. When Ryan said that he was just waiting for the right time to come out, Steven didn’t believe it.

  Ryan said that if Steven lost the franchise, it wouldn’t matter, because he’d already made two Tommy Halls and it was dangerous to get typecast. As for Maddy, he said, “You gave her a perfect life.” Steven didn’t like discussing Maddy with Ryan. When he was with Ryan, he wanted it to be the two of them. And on the water it was. He could picture Ryan’s back as he stood out looking at the blue, so healthy and tan, two dimples on either side of the spine, above his board shorts. Now it was over and he had lost Ryan, and from the look on Maddy’s face he was about to lose her, too.

  “I loved you,” Steven said in the study, turning to her.

  “Did you use condoms? Have you made me sick?”

  He had been waiting for this. “I’m clean, I’m careful. I never wanted to hurt you. When you got pregnant . . . I thought I could stop all of this. And I will stop. Ryan was the last. I’ll be a good husband to you. Not like before. Let’s work on this. It will be different. Better.” He went to her and embraced her, ran his hands through her hair, began to sob. She looked at him as if he frightened her. He could see the hate in her eyes.