The Actress: A Novel (15 page)

They were quiet, looking down into their bottomless coffees. Finally, she said, “I guess we’ve both gone totally Hollywood, huh?”

“Why is that?”

“We get together for the first time since we broke up, and you ask me to relinquish my rights.”

3

It was two weeks into the
Husbandry
shoot, and Maddy was removing her costume in her dressing room. It had been a long day. She had shot a difficult sex scene with Steven. She had been nervous at first, but because the sex was meant to be bad, she was able to focus on her character, so it went relatively smoothly. It turned out it was easy to play bad sex.

Which was why she was nervous about the next day’s call sheet: good sex. She would be doing her first bedroom scene with Billy Peck, the English actor playing Paul. Bridget would be there, with the skeleton crew: Walter; Jimmy, the director of photography; and Stu, the boom operator. Wardrobe would be supplying Maddy with a nude-colored G-string, a nude bandeau, and her merkin, which had been dyed to match her own pubic hair.

There was a knock. “Just a minute!” She hung up her dress and put on a robe.

Walter. He came to her dressing room from time to time to talk about Ellie, and he had a playful Platonic style. He was a sharp observer, which gave her confidence that in his hands, she would give her best performance. There were times he could be difficult, though. He would stand on her mark and pantomime: “Do not scratch your nose like this. Do it like this!” But she respected his desire to have things be just so; in film, the director had to be a dictator.

He was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned farther than usual. “May I come in?” he asked, though he was already in the room. She had decorated it with photographs of her parents and postcards of Jim Jarmusch, Liz Phair, John Garfield, and Eleonora Duse, the great Italian
stage actress known for blushing on cue. Even with the attempts to personalize it, the room still felt too fancy and too generic.

Walter sat on one of the couches. “You were excellent today,” he said. She sat on the opposite couch, pulling her robe more tightly around her body. She should have dressed before she answered the door but had been expecting a wardrobe girl. “I am proud of the work you have been doing,” Walter went on. “It has great integrity. I could tell when you wept that you weren’t afraid to be ugly.”

From anyone else, she would have taken it as an insult. From Walter, she didn’t. She was ugly when she cried; most people were. It was the chaos taking over the face. He spread his knees and leaned forward. “What’s amazing to me is that you carry yourself with no awareness. Most beautiful women know it from an early age, and it ruins them. You carry yourself like someone who doesn’t turn heads.”

This was the longest conversation they’d had alone. “Steven has excellent taste,” Walter continued, gazing distantly toward Maddy’s picture window, the one that overlooked Woodmere’s Victorian gardens, which were often used for period films. Woodmere was the famous postwar soundstage where they were shooting the film, half an hour from London. “What a refined man. He has great appreciation for attractive things. And yet I wonder whether he appreciates you the way he should.”

Not sure where he was going with this line of talk, she stood and walked to the window. She looked out at the gardens. “Walter, is this about the scene tomorrow?” she asked, keeping her back turned.

“You are a young woman,” he said from the couch. “You have a promising road ahead of you professionally and personally. If you’ll forgive my playing for a moment the role of sage old man, you’ll let me give you a piece of advice. A woman’s job is to be where she’s most appreciated.”

Be where she’s most appreciated?
He was trying to get inside her skull by maligning her boyfriend. Didn’t he see how counterproductive it was? “Steven appreciates me,” she said, spinning around to face him, “if that’s what you’re trying to—”

“Not in the way you think he does.” He stood and moved to the other side of the window so he was facing her. “You may love him,” he said, enunciating carefully, “but I can say with confidence that he does not
love you.”

He took a few steps toward her, his hands extended, and she jumped back. “Walter!”

His face seemed to soften, and after a moment he retreated. “I am so sorry, my dear. I do not know what came over me. I feel protective of you, but sometimes I am not the best communicator.” He moved swiftly to the door, and it closed behind him without a sound.

A
s she went to the town house in the chauffeured car, she kept hearing Walter’s words. The most logical explanation was that he was trying to make her vulnerable for her lovemaking scene with Billy. Nicholas Ray had famously manipulated James Dean and Sal Mineo by whispering “He hates you” to each of them on the set of
Rebel
.

Or maybe Walter was just an old man who didn’t get that younger American actors worked differently from older ones, and liked their sets PC, their boundaries clear. He probably didn’t remember half the things that came out of his mouth. The entire moment could have been chalked up to senility.

But it irritated her that Walter had known Steven longer than she had, that he had visited Palazzo Mastrototaro several times. Steven had said that he and Walter were not friends but friendly, and yet she couldn’t shake the fear that Walter knew something about him that she didn’t: There was another woman in his life. Cady. Or Albertina. Maybe the person on the phone that night; she still didn’t completely believe it was Vito. Or someone else, some English model whom he visited in the black of night while she slept. Maybe Walter knew, and like a grandfather, he had been warning her not to trust him. Just because Walter seemed crazy didn’t mean he didn’t speak the truth.

T
he Regent’s Park town house rental was furnished in a sleek, luxurious style, with views of the park’s rowing pond, but because of the paparazzi, Steven and Maddy never opened the drapes. She was even less at home there than she was in Hancock Park, where at least she was beginning to
build up things of her own, clothes and music and books.

At dinner that night, Maddy picked listlessly at her paella; Annette had come with them to London for the duration of the shoot. She wanted to ask Steven what Walter might have meant by his comment, but she was afraid he’d get angry with Walter and disrupt the production. Either logical interpretation of Walter’s words was discomfiting: Walter believed Steven was unfaithful, or Walter had been trying to seduce her.

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” Steven asked, as though reading her mind, swirling his glass of Bordeaux. He liked red wines all year, even in summer.

She was terrified. As a producer, Steven would be in the production office while they were shooting, but she didn’t want him to come to set, and she didn’t know how to tell him. She would be fucking another man all day. “A little. It’ll probably be the longest stretch of time I’ve ever spent naked,” she said, forcing a smile, “except for Venice, with you.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted you in this if it were exploitative,” he said.

That night in bed, long after he had fallen asleep beside her, she tossed and turned.
He does not love you.
There was someone else in Steven’s life. Walter’s eerie pronouncement was keeping her awake, the night before the most important day in the shoot.

It was two in the morning. She went into the bathroom to fetch her anti-anxiety pills and deposited two under her tongue.

Before they had left L.A., Maddy had gotten a bad cough, and Ananda had recommended her general practitioner, who turned out to be a dashing Frenchman named Thierry Chataigne. (Steven didn’t trust doctors and didn’t have a general physician of his own.) Dr. Chataigne had diagnosed Maddy with bronchitis and put her on antibiotics. A few days later, after a bout of insomnia brought on by the missing
Freda Jansons
script, she’d made an appointment and he’d prescribed her lorazepam, the same drug that Dr. Larson Wells in Fort Greene had given her after her father’s death. She had brought the pills to London but hidden them from Steven, who would disapprove. He didn’t even take Advil for a headache. She didn’t like the idea of relying on them, either, but she had to work in the morning, and if she could not sleep, she could not deliver.

The pills under her tongue, she went back to bed. She’d had intermit
tent insomnia as a child. She would become anxious for no reason, then fixate on lying awake. This would go on for two or three hours, and she would go into her father’s room and stare at him sleeping, envying him. Sometimes she’d wake him and he would take her into her room and rub her back until she drifted off. On the soft sheets in Regent’s Park, the lorazepam began to work, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

I
n the cafeteria at Woodmere, Maddy took a bowl of Irish oatmeal and milk. Usually, she ate at home, but today she wanted the extra time to get her thoughts in order. She had driven over with Steven, who had kissed her on the cheek and gone into the office.

Walter sat next to her and asked how she was feeling. “Like I’m at the ob-gyn’s waiting room,” she said, casting her food aside.

“We’ll get through it.”

“Where’s Billy?”

She heard a voice over her shoulder. “I was just having a session with my fluffer,” Billy said.

She liked working with Billy. He was cute, with reddish hair, and friendly, and so far didn’t seem like a diva. She had been attracted to him when Steven first introduced them at a premiere in L.A. She had felt it at rehearsal and in the cafeteria and at the first table read, and she had been telling herself the attraction was good because of the plot. He was wearing a blue oxford shirt with the collar cut off. “Have you done any sex scenes before?” he asked her, plopping down beside her.

“Yes, just one. It was a really low-budget shoot, and we didn’t have any merkins.”

“You’ll be fine. It’s the first that’s the most painful. Just like life.” He was staying in his American accent around the clock, and when he spoke, the R’s were harder than they should have been.

On the bedroom set, Jimmy was behind the camera. The set had a New England feel, with wainscoting and Shaker furniture. Out the windows were flats of green mountains. It was deliberately fake, Juhasz’s stylized idea of small-town American life.

“Have a seat, my pets,” Walter said.

“When he said ‘pets,’ he was talking about my balls,” Billy said. Maddy elbowed him hard.

“This is the most important scene in the film,” Walter said. “We must believe that Paul and Ellie are meant for each other. The sexual chemistry must be otherworldly.”

“All my sex is otherworldly,” Billy said.

In the scene, Ellie and Paul stumble up to the bedroom. From there, Walter’s stage directions read:

They kiss as they move into the bedroom. Paul kneels by the bed and puts his hand on Ellie’s breast. She unbuttons her blouse and removes her bra. He puts his mouth on her nipple. She unbuckles his pants, holds him. He pulls her skirt off. Eats her. She cums. He mounts her. She raises her legs to her ears and then moves to ride him. He lifts her in the air. She maintains her mount. She cums again. He explodes.

Maddy had been uncomfortable with Walter’s spelling of “cum” when she first read the screenplay but had figured Walter was trying to show that the sex needed to feel real, and hot, and urgent. “So here’s how we’re going to work,” Walter said. “We’ll rehearse it once. I’ll tell you how to move. You’ll both be dressed. This is just for the blocking, for camera. I want you to kiss. Everything else, you can suggest.”

Suggest
. The death knell to the actor. Often “suggesting” was more uncomfortable than doing it. Bridget had come to the set and was standing near Walter. “The two of you will enter the room here,” Walter went on, indicating the door. “You’ll be kissing while you enter. Maddy, you’ll come in first, your back to the camera. So—just go for it.”

Billy and Maddy stood on the other side of the door and closed it. “Action on rehearsal,” Walter called. Billy leaned in and kissed her. It felt illicit because no one could see them doing it.

She hadn’t expected him to use tongue. His kiss was different from Steven’s, so much more welcoming. It was strange to be kissing Billy when Steven was in the building, a few hundred feet away. What if he had
sneaked onto the closed set? The PAs wouldn’t stop him. But there was no time to worry, because Billy was pivoting her so her back was to the door, and then he pushed it open, moving with her into the room.

They shot the scene over several hours, in portions and out of sequence. Shortly before the lunch break, Walter began to get frustrated with her. She wasn’t sure what she was doing wrong, but he kept saying the sex felt “stagy.” He sat on the bed and said to Maddy, “I want you to play more. Not so serious. We need this to feel spontaneous, the first good sex she’s ever had. This time keep going until I say ‘Cut.’ We’ll get out before your first orgasm.”

“That’s always a good idea,” Billy piped up.

They got into position. Walter called action. Billy’s hands were rough on her nipples. She didn’t want to be responding, but she was, her nipples perking up. For this angle she was wearing the merkin, and he had on a nude jock cup, and as she rode the cup, she realized she was wet.

She rocked above Billy and saw something new on his face: surprise. Did he know? She had always heard that sex scenes weren’t sexy, but this
was
sexy, and maybe all sex scenes were, and she was conscious of the muscles on Billy’s body. Remembering Walter’s direction to keep going, she tilted her head, leaned down, and kissed Billy. Her tongue entwined with his. She was not herself, she was Ellie with Paul, and she had been unhappy in her marriage, and now this frightening man was making her feel things she hadn’t felt. They kept going, simulating the sex, and she wasn’t sure whether to continue, but it was a no-no to cut before the director did, so she kept riding Billy and she pretended to come, her back arching, her nipples exposed and alert, her mouth widening as Ellie cried out.

Finally, she heard “Cut.” She pulled up the covers. A wardrobe girl handed her the robe, and she slipped into it and sat on the bed.

Walter approached the two of them, a strange smile on his face. “Did you not hear me?” he asked Maddy.