The Actress: A Novel (21 page)

T
heir routine the next few days was like nothing she had encountered in the marriage. A bodyguard had to get her to a private car, where a driver took her to the studio lot and straight home at the end of the day. There were no public appearances, no dinners out. Bridget, Flora, Edward, or all three were in the house almost every night, strategizing. She didn’t want to know the nitty-gritty, though she understood that Steven’s
Eddie Coyle
director was upset with him: There had been a
Vanity Fair
writer on the
Coyle
set doing a profile on Steven, but Flora had Steven pull out, and now the reporter was planning a nasty write-around.

Neil Finneran, the CEO of Apollo, had been spotted lunching with Billy Peck, and there were rumors that Billy would replace Steven as Tommy Hall. Steven had hundreds of thousands of supporters, too. There
were hashtags on social-media sites like #letStevenWork, and #teamWeller. But Jerome Roundhouse had given a blog interview saying that if the
Weekly Report
story were true, he would boycott the movie because Steven was unsuitable for the role. The anti-Steven hashtags included #WellersDockworker and #tommyhallcruises. Though he had scheduled a handful of lunches and meetings with executives and directors to discuss other roles in the days following the Tommy Hall announcement, Steven was getting cancellations left and right. Suddenly, everyone was away. Meanwhile, Edward’s PI could not find Christian Bernard.

After a strategy session at Flora’s firm, it was decided that in the absence of a retraction letter, Steven and Maddy should do some well-placed counter-press. Flora arranged for them to dine at a sushi restaurant on Robertson Boulevard to look romantic and show the marriage was stable.

The restaurant, where they had never been, was chosen for its outdoor patio, easily accessible to zoom lenses. Flora’s people alerted the paparazzi. When they got out of the car, Steven put his arm around Maddy. They kept their heads down and took a prearranged table on the patio. The entire time, they talked about the miserable past week, but they did so while smiling and tilting their foreheads together, as Flora had instructed.

That night in bed, Maddy listened to the sound of his breathing. It was shallow and came at odd intervals. She took his hand in the dark, thinking about the security guard stationed outside the front door and the other one in the dark car parked around the corner. “This is going to end soon,” she said. “I don’t want you to be so afraid. When Edward tracks down the guy and he says he made it all up, no one’s going to remember this. They won’t fire you.”

“I just hate that it has to be like this,” he said. “I chose my career, but I didn’t choose this part of it.”

She rubbed his arm, but he was still and robotic. Something dawned on her. She had been feeling trapped the past week, pained by watching her husband become so demoralized, so frightened. She sat up in bed in the dark. “I want to help you,” she said.

“What can you do?”

She turned on the light next to the bed and looked down at him. His arm was cast over his eyes. “I can go out there and tell them who you are.”

“It wouldn’t matter. The studio can terminate me even if they have to pay my salary. The franchise is way more important to them than I am.”

“It
would
matter. Flora wouldn’t have asked us to go to dinner tonight if she didn’t think that kind of thing could help. You can’t do press right now, but I can. If I go out there and—”

“Go out where?”

The more she thought about it, the more excited she got. “On a tour, to tell everyone about the man I married. I mean, it’s got to make some difference. Wouldn’t it? It drives me crazy that there are people out there who want to ruin you. I want to help you. I want to tell them about the man I know.” She felt the way she did when she booked a new role and began to mark up the script. She could—what was the phrase?—change the conversation. Neil Finneran would feel better about the deal, and if they tracked down the dockworker after her appearances, maybe Steven could do a belated press tour for
The Hall Fixation
and turn everything around.

“I’m going to call Flora first thing tomorrow,” Maddy said. “She’ll know where I should go.” She clasped his hand. “Edward and Bridget and Flora, they’re your team, but I’m your team, too.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding.

She wanted to believe she was giving him confidence. She wanted him to be strong and happy, to be
Steven
. “Can you sit up?” she asked. He slid up in the bed so their backs were against the gray headboard. “It’s just us here in this room now. No one else. I am going to throw myself behind you. I’ll be everything you need me to be. But this isn’t just your life. It’s ours, and I have to be clear. Did you sleep with this man?”

He was still and didn’t touch her, as though he knew that anything he did would make her wonder. He stared at her, his gaze direct and strong, and said, “No.”

And so she decided to believe him.

B
y the time Maddy went on
Harry
, she had already done a morning show, a prime-time, and a cover interview with
People
. Flora’s strategy was “limited and well placed,” targeting women. On the prime-time sit-down, Maddy showed photos from her wedding album and recounted
the story of how she and Steven had met. The
People
spread (four pages, photo-heavy, including candids from her life with Steven) had broken records for Internet traffic and newsstand sales.

The PI had tracked down Christian Bernard, who had been in hiding in Miami Beach and was already scared about the repercussions of the story. His retraction letter, which was being written by his lawyer, was expected any day. It was just down to the wording.

It had been Maddy’s idea to go on
Harry
. At first Flora said a comedy show would make a mockery of the story. It was the wrong forum for Maddy’s audience. Maddy argued that it was the right forum for Tommy Hall fans, those coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old men, and so after half a dozen extended conference calls with one of the producers and Flora and Bridget on the line with her, the appearance was scheduled.

Maddy had gone on
Harry
twice already, the week before
Jen
aired, and when
I Used to Know Her
came out. She didn’t particularly like going on the late-night shows because she didn’t feel funny enough, but Harry Matheson, a charming, laconic redhead, was the most likable of all the guys.

When he eased into the question, Maddy was crossing one leg over the other and thinking that her dress was too short. It was electric blue and very slinky. Patti Young, a stylist she’d been working with the past year, had selected it. Though Maddy had practiced sitting in it, it seemed to be riding up more now. Her hair was loose around her face. Her English hair stylist, Gemma, who had come to the house to help her get ready, had used the word “postcoital” to describe it.

The first minute or so of the interview had been easy. Softballs about her current projects, jokes about New York versus L.A. But everyone knew why she was there. She didn’t have a movie to promote. As she was tugging her hem down, Harry Matheson said, “We’ve all been reading a lot about your husband in the tabloids.” The crowd got hushed. “As everyone here knows, you’re married to Steven Weller.” Faint cheers, a few titters. “Who’s going to play Tommy Hall. Which is very exciting, by the way. I’m a huge fan of the novels.”

“They’re really great novels.”

“Apparently, some guy, I guess”—Harry looked down at a card—“a dockworker down the coast a little, said he and Steven had a thing.” As
he spoke, she was careful not to nod—if she nodded, it would seem like she was agreeing—but she couldn’t get angry, either. She smiled faintly, attentively,
Be interested, not interesting.
She knew the high-def video was getting the slightest nuance of her expression. “And he provided a lot of details. I mean, this would shock the pants off a lot of people here. I wondered if you wanted to comment on the story.”

There were a few lone giggles, and then they died out. She could feel Harry feeling the silence; you weren’t supposed to be quiet on TV. But Harry was tolerating it, letting it go on longer than he would with another guest. Because he knew, as they all did, that this was why she had wanted to do the tour. He knew this was television gold.

As she opened her mouth, she felt the stage fright that she had experienced when she did theater, which had abated now that she was doing films, where she didn’t have to worry about dropping lines. The light obscured the faces in the audience but not completely: She was aware of the eyes and the mouths. On her movie sets, there was no audience, and now she was performing in front of an audience again, even if it was in Burbank and not on Theatre Row.

“I heard about that story,” she said. The audience laughed at the understatement. Good, they were on her side, at least a little bit. “And you know, for legal reasons, I can’t get into the specifics of what the guy is saying. But I can say a little bit.” She was reminded of how nervous she had been at the Mile’s End panel. The problem then was that she hadn’t seen the panel as a performance of its own. This appearance was, too. “And I’m sorry if it’s more information than you wanted to know, Harry, but I have to tell you, Steven Weller is the best lover I have ever had.” Which was true. She and Steven did it a few times a week, when they were in the same city. However, the last ten days they hadn’t touched each other, both of them too terrorized to make love. He had been remote, someone beaten and afraid.

The audience was guffawing. A few people clapped, they were eating it up, she felt that she might have them.

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” she continued. “I wouldn’t want you to get the misperception that I’ve had a lot of lovers. Because I haven’t. I’m from Vermont.” Scattered giggles. “Based on my small but quality list, I can tell you that if Steven doesn’t like women, that would come as a news flash to my clitoris.”

She had memorized that line, which was all about the syllables in “clitoris.” Flora hadn’t liked the sentence at first, but Maddy had swayed her: She said the way to fight the ugliness of the Bernard story was to be blithe and confident. She said Harry’s viewers would get this.

It must have shocked the live audience to hear the word “clitoris” spoken clearly, because they were screaming with pleasure. It took a solid five seconds for Harry to shut them up. When they finally did, he mugged and said, “I’d like to be the anchorman delivering the news flash to your clitoris,” and the audience went crazy all over again.

Steven was waiting for her in the greenroom. Flora was there, Edward and Bridget, Terry. It was like a war room, with all his supporters. When Maddy came in, they all stood up. Terry said, “You were perfect,” though his brow was knotted, as if it had been hard for him to watch Steven go through the past week and a half.

Steven was coming toward her. Later, she would remember the look on his face, a kind of gratitude that could be interpreted as love. He hugged her while the trio went on and on about how it couldn’t have gone any better, how she was a natural. She put her face in his chest so as to drown out their voices. She didn’t want to be around anyone else, she wanted to be alone with Steven, the man she loved, the man she knew.

In bed later that night, he kissed her cheek, her shoulders, and she was relaxing, feeling not precisely open, the way she had in Venice on her first trip, but getting there, getting there, and he pushed her back onto the bed and she softened.

He was making love to everything about her that made her female. There was no way he could have been with that man. He was going down, down, and he put his tongue in her, and her eyes rolled back. Her hips fell open, and then, on the verge of orgasm, she brought her pelvis down to meet his and he was moving against her until they came at the same time. The story would be retracted and everyone would know, but that wasn’t the important part. They had won. They had triumphed over the press, and now his fans knew it and the studio knew it, too, and soon everything would go back to normal.

Act Three

1

About a year after her
Harry
appearance, Maddy was eating breakfast by the pool when Steven came out and threw a pile of printouts on the table with a scowl. They were the reviews of
Husbandry
. The couple had attended the premiere the night before, a charmed night, and they’d had a happy reunion with Walter and Billy. The audience had loved the film, and Maddy had been proud of her work and her husband’s.

She had been planning to read the reviews later. Though she told interviewers she didn’t read her own press, that was a lie. She scanned them quickly, knowing from Steven’s face that the news wasn’t going to be good. The critics had loved Maddy and Billy, but Steven’s reviews were almost universal pans. He was “out of his league in such a dramatic role.” “Wooden” and “remote.” “His perpetually downcast eyes make it seem as though he is trying to find his mark.”

She thought the reviews were too cruel. Steven’s performance had been a bit stilted, but it was because Louis was tightly wound. Watching the film in their screening room for the first time, she’d felt the three of them had created something magical, each character compelling if not wholly sympathetic. Her scenes with Billy were both arousing and arresting, and during the final confrontation she gripped the armrests, almost unsure which character was going to die.

“They’re wrong about you,” she said now.

“Walter sabotaged me in the editing room,” he said, looming over the patio table. “He humiliated me. We never should have given him final cut. He deliberately chose my weakest takes.”

“I don’t think he did that.”

“He was attracted to you and jealous of me for having you. He’s a pig. And after I hit him, he never forgave me. He just pretended to. This film was his punishment.”

She remembered consoling Dan about his pan at Mile’s End, but back then there had been other positive reviews to focus on. The most innocuous of Steven’s
Husbandry
reviews called him “not a detriment to the production.”

Her reviews were as warm as Steven’s were cold: “quietly brave,” “operatic,” “proof of the awesome power of female sexuality.” It had been a triumphant year for her. After winning raves for
I Used to Know Her
, she’d begun fielding big offers—mostly dramatic roles, many of them period films or adapted from successful modern novels—and her quote was now $1 million.

The
Husbandry
pans were the third set in a row for him, following
The Widower
and
Declarations
. But he hadn’t seemed upset about the other two. After
Declarations
was released in February, buried, and then savaged, he’d said the indie phase of his career was over—he was focused on playing Tommy Hall—so Maddy thought it was odd that he was worked up about the Juhasz. She didn’t want to believe his anger stemmed from jealousy over her good reviews. He was too sophisticated for that, and too powerful.

Everyone was anticipating the release of
The Hall Fixation
the following March. After the Christian Bernard retraction, the studio decided to keep Steven on, and he did a belated press blitz. The production had wrapped in the spring. Everything Steven and Maddy had been afraid of hadn’t happened. In her own way, she had gotten him to the place he was now. She felt she had changed the way the studio saw him. She had helped his fans, his employers, and the media regain confidence in him.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, standing up and going to him. “You can’t dwell on this. You’re Tommy Hall. That’s all anyone’s thinking about. And you said the footage is great.”

“The release is still five months away,” he said. “Bridget and I had reservations about how Walter was assembling the film, but he kept reassuring us. Never again will I work with a director who wears Depends. Juhasz has set my career back decades.” He started inside.

“Well, I don’t regret doing
Husbandry
for a second,” she called after
him.

“Of course you don’t!” he said, spinning around. “Because you got raves!”

“No. Because
Husbandry
was what brought us together.” He nodded, but his face was white and cold.

A
few days later, when she went to take her birth control pill in the kitchen, she noticed the pack wasn’t there. Unlike her lorazepam, which she hid in the back of her nightstand drawer, her birth control was kept in one of the kitchen cabinets by the vitamins they both took.

Steven was doing laps in the pool. When he approached the side, she leaned over and grabbed his hand. He picked up his head. “Where are my pills?” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t want you to take them anymore.” His goggles were on and made him look like a bug.

“But you can’t just steal them. They’re mine.”

“Why don’t you want to get started on having a family?” They discussed it every couple of months. She knew he knew her reservations. Lately, he hadn’t brought it up, which she had taken to mean he was okay with postponing it.

“We’ve talked about this. I’m only twenty-eight. We have time. I want to be an involved mother, and I’m not ready to stop working now. My career just started.”

She thought he understood. He had seemed happy for her, happy that she was becoming a star in her own right.

“Women work through their pregnancies,” Steven said, gripping the edge of the pool. “We’ll get you trainers to help you lose the weight. You can bring the baby to set. You’ll be able to do it your own way. Let’s get it going. Get those toxins out of your blood.”

“Toxins?”

“The hormones. They’re poison. I don’t want to be fifty when we start. I want to know my children. Don’t you get that? I bought a new house for you. You said you wanted something better for a family.”

After her repeated entreaties to move someplace homier, they had
closed on a new house a short walk away, an Italianate Mediterranean with a small guesthouse, warm-colored tiles, stenciled beams, and a family-friendly feel. But Steven was renovating it, consulting with contractors and architects, and he said it could be a year before they moved.

“I do want a family, but not yet. You can’t just take my pills. It’s a violation.”

“If you don’t want to have children with me now, you never will!”

“That’s not true,” she said. “Don’t you want me to work?” Bridget’s phone had been ringing off the hook since the
Husbandry
reviews; she said the film would take Maddy to a new level. There was already Oscar buzz on
Husbandry
, and Bridget said Maddy might get nominated for the many awards that came before the Oscars.

“Back of the spice drawer, underneath the cumin,” Steven said, and took off, splashing angrily as he swam.

Out the window of the kitchen she watched him slice through the water, and hated him. He was guilting her for wanting to work. It had to have something to do with her raves and his pans. If he was jealous, she wanted him to rise above it. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t wait a few more years when he had waited half his life already. In the scheme of a lifetime, a few years meant nothing at all.

L
ater that week, Steven said he wanted Maddy to come away on
Jo
with him. To Cabo San Lucas and back. After the Christian Bernard story came out, he had moved the boat down the coast to Orange County. He had gotten a one-week break from the action thriller he was working on and wanted her to take a break from her own film, a cancer drama called
The Pharmacist’s Daughter
that was being directed by Tim Heller, who had done
Freda Jansons
.

“I can’t ask for that,” she said. They were in the garden of the Italian restaurant on Beverly. “We’re doing all the deathbed scenes next week.”

“You can do whatever you want. You’re Maddy Freed.”

She thought she detected a sneer but said nothing about it because she didn’t want to have a fight. “Even if they let me, I can’t do it to the rest of the cast,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

“I need you,” he said. She remembered the way he’d needed her to do
the press the year before, and how she had helped him. Bernard’s letter had retracted every detail except that they had met at the yacht club.

“I just want to get away from the bad press,” Steven said. “Clear my head. And I feel clearer when I’m with you.” She wanted him to act this solicitous toward her all the time. “Please come with me.”

Though she could have asked Bridget to speak to Tim on her behalf, Maddy felt obligated to do it herself. When she did, Tim said, “It’s going to be hell to reschedule, but I’ll make it work if it’s what you want.”

Maddy didn’t want to abandon Steven when he needed her, but the truth was, she was enjoying the film; she liked her costars and didn’t want to take a break. So she told Steven no, and the next day he said Terry would come along instead.

The night before he was to leave, Maddy was anxious. “Why don’t you just postpone this till we’re both free?” she said.

“Because I want to go now. And Terry knows me. Knows how to be there for me.”

“I wish you weren’t going.”

“Maddy, you’re not making sense. Do you want to come or don’t you?”

“It’s too late now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be confusing you. Have fun. I’ll miss you.”

He turned over and shut off his light. As she lay there in the dark, she told herself not to be anxious. It was a male-bonding trip. The couple had dined with Terry and Ananda over a dozen times since getting married. Clearly, Terry was straight, and a loyal husband and father. On the boat, the men would do nothing more than talk trash, play poker, and cook.

But maybe he wasn’t really taking Terry. There could be women, younger than Maddy, hookers. Or men. Alex. Maybe Steven had lied to her and he was still in touch with Alex.

The first three days he was gone, she was busy with the film, but then she began to think about him nonstop, and she became unfocused on set. By the time it was Steven’s last day, she had a day off, and didn’t know what to do with herself. When Steven was around, she often wished there were no housekeepers, no Annette, but now she wanted company. Annette was on vacation, visiting friends in Portland. Steven had told her to go, saying she needed a break.

In the morning Maddy sat on a chaise by the pool and tried to read
Act One
by Moss Hart, which she had checked out of the library, but she couldn’t focus on the words and realized she had read five pages without absorbing anything. She decided to get a facial at the Four Seasons spa, where they always accommodated her and gave her full privacy.

Earlier that year she had been invited to the fashion shows in Paris. She had become interested in style, and she was enjoying working with Patti, the stylist. She had made other important hires, too: a nice Italian business manager named Craig; and the hairdresser, Gemma. She had built up a nest egg of her own from her movie roles, residuals, and a handbag campaign. She never paid for things with Steven’s credit card anymore.

In the facial room, with her eyes covered, she got an itch and scratched her nose, and her knuckles got burned under the steam. “Ow!” she cried out. The aesthetician gave her a cold compress, but for the rest of the hour, her hand smarted and she found herself counting the minutes until it was over.

She stopped at a newsstand on her way home and bought a pack of natural cigarettes and smoked one out the window of the car before she started to feel sick. At home she swam her laps, and when she got out, she didn’t feel tired. It was only three o’clock. If she could just talk to him, she would feel better, but he never took phones on the boat.

She sat by the pool and dialed Ananda’s cell.

Ananda was someplace loud, and when she answered, she was laughing at something. “How’s it going?” Ananda asked.

“All right, I guess.” Maddy strained to hear if Terry was in the background. He had a deep, easily recognizable chuckle. “I was just calling to say hi. It’s been a long day.”

“Did you want to get together? Today, tomorrow? Is everything okay?”

Ask her. Just ask her.

But if she asked and Ananda said the men were on the boat, then Ananda would tell Terry and Terry would tell Steven. Steven would know she hadn’t trusted him. He wouldn’t like that. It would embarrass him, especially given how painful the Christian Bernard mess had been.

If there was some way she could ask Ananda without asking . . . “Yeah, everything’s fine,” Maddy said.

There was a loud giggle in the background, but it was a woman’s gig
gle. “What?” Ananda shouted. “I’m sorry, my sister’s in town, and we’re having drinks and—”

“Oh, have fun with her. I have a really early call time tomorrow anyway. We’ll talk soon.” Maddy clicked off, listening to the awful birds, the birds that reminded her that it would be hours before it was dark.

She smoked five more cigarettes and felt nauseated and wondered why she had done it. In the kitchen, she ran the butts under the faucet and threw them in the kitchen garbage where he wouldn’t see them; he hated cigarettes almost as much as he hated pills. On her way to the stairs, she stopped at his study door, but it was locked. He was pushing her out of his life and if she told him she had noticed it was locked, it would only prove to him that he had been right not to trust her.

Upstairs, she went into her study and shut the door, even though she was alone. Her fingers typed swiftly in the search field, “Alex Duse Repertory Company Steven Woyceck.” She paused a long moment before hitting enter.

The first few hits were duds. A guy named Alex Duse who blogged about a theater in Kentucky. A mommy blog by a woman in Duse, Idaho, named Alexandra Woyceck.

She tried “Duse Repertory Company,” and an amateurish-looking Web page popped up. The title was “Duse Repertory Company, 1965–1991.” It had a gallery of photos organized by year, with all the different repertory companies. Production photos and candids.
Awake and Sing
! Othello. Little Murders. Bus Stop
.

Steven was in a lot of the photos, looking young and confident, with longer hair and softer eyes. The last one, at the bottom, was marked, “1984–1985.”