The Actress: A Novel Read online

  “Do you think I need to lose weight?” Maddy had asked Bridget on the phone.

  “It might not be a bad thing for Husbandry,” she said. “Especially with what Ellie goes through in the movie.” In response, Maddy began swimming every day, telling herself it was for wellness, not appearance.

  After her swim, she headed inside with the vague plan of taking a yoga class in Santa Monica. No auditions today. She preferred the days when she had them. The days when she didn’t feel like a bored housewife, like Ellie in the movie. Alone in the house when Steven was working, she tended to worry, pacing the rooms, leaving him voice mails that said “I love you,” that she was embarrassed to have left, taking walks in the neighborhood, then racing home when a paparazzo caught her. She had discovered the Wilshire branch of the public library, one of the few places where no one seemed to know or care who she was. She had been reading for pleasure, a mix of modern fiction and the classics that she felt Steven would want her to read. After finishing The Portrait of a Lady (a great hook, a slow middle, and a conclusion too ambiguous for her taste), she had decided to check out The Wings of the Dove from the library. But she was making her way through it painstakingly, afraid that Steven’s adoration of James might be something she could never completely share.

  In the house she started toward the stairs, but when she passed the door to Steven’s study, she stopped.

  She turned the knob, pushed the door open. She flipped the lights, not wanting to open the drapes in case the housekeepers came early. Though he had a burglar alarm, she had once asked him whether there were hidden video cameras and he’d said only outside the house, not in.

  The furniture was all 1930s, shiny blond wood tables with silk skirts. There was a crystal bowl filled with yellow apples and an iron vase with fresh pink azaleas.

  She ran her hand across one of the shelves. Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev, Sand, Proust, Wharton, and James. She examined a copy of Middlemarch that appeared unread. She wondered if he kept the books here for show. Clearly, he had read James, whom he quoted often, but she had seldom heard him talk about the others.

  She went to the desk and lifted the photo of his mother. She pulled out the key and inserted it in the bottom drawer. Steven would be furious if he found out she was here. She glanced up at the ceiling but saw no camera domes.

  The drawer was deep, and when she pulled it open, she found hanging files. Inside them were folders containing receipts, articles on Darfur, Christmas cards from studio executives. Nothing interesting, nothing juicy.

  Why would he lock a drawer that had nothing important in it? Maybe he knew she’d seen the open drawer and had moved whatever had been in there. But if that was true, why hadn’t he moved the key? Was he taunting her because he suspected she would snoop?

  She closed and relocked the drawer, put the key back behind his mother. Shut the lights. She checked the bookshelf one more time to be sure all the books were even, then darted out.

  “It’s time to tack,” Steven was calling. They were aboard Jo, on their way to Catalina for a long weekend. He had proposed the trip spontaneously a couple of days after his two A.M. phone call. He was taking time off from Declarations just to be with her.

  She helped him pull the sail and they ducked as the boom moved. Jo was a beauty. White sail. Regal, with two gorgeous cabins and its own showers. Maddy squinted up at the mast, which seemed enormous against the bright sky.

  She was sitting across from Steven, her feet propped up next to him. “Okay, your turn,” he said.

  She took the tiller. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Steven pointed to a distant mound of brown. “Aim for that,” he said.

  “I’ve sailed before,” she said. She had been on friends’ boats on Yarrow Lake in summer, and she’d always enjoyed the thrill of moving fast, as well as the constant work that went with having a boat, the tying and moving and switching sides.

  “You haven’t told me enough about where you’re from. Tell me all about your father.”

  “People always said we were similar. Whenever he was thinking hard about something, he would run his hands through his hair. Both hands over his head, crossed. I do it, too. It’s eerie. He loved the crossword puzzle. He could do it in, like, five minutes. But he also had a really bad temper. He was a complicated guy. Hair-trigger temper, but he wept at Hallmark commercials. He taught me to play chess. He read me All-of-a-Kind Family.”

  “I wish I had met him.”

  “He would have loved you. He was an English teacher. But he loved mysteries. Total Anglophile. He watched those BBC shows, which was probably why he wanted me to be an actress.”

  Steven was wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, and his hair billowed in the wind, his sunglasses shielding his eyes. This was how she wanted it, away from everyone else. It was what she had missed these months in L.A.

  He came to her side, put his arm around her, and raised his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Has any woman loved a man as much as I love you?” she asked.

  “Many have asked themselves that very question.”

  “Shut up,” she said, swatting his arm. She closed her eyes and felt the wind on her face. “I wish we could be like this all the time. I feel selfish about you. It can be hard to be your girlfriend, you know. Intelligent, respectable women make eyes at you like teenagers.”

  “It’s the fame. They don’t know me. Don’t read too much into it.”

  “Men, too. At these parties, gay men, they look at you and whisper.”

  “I’m not the only one they whisper about.”

  “I’m sorry I got so upset the other night,” she said.

  “I’ve already forgotten it.”

  “I shouldn’t be so jealous. I’m just getting used to being with you.”

  “I know you are,” he said. “And I don’t envy you. There are times I wish I could go back to being Steven Woyceck.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just be alone, like this, on the water. With someone I love. Not have to worry about long-lens cameras or tabloids or blogs.”

  She felt a surge of love for him and guilt that she had mistrusted him. She had been brazen the other night. Not believing him. A sophisticated girlfriend wouldn’t have harped on him. She wanted to be one of those cool, confident girls who didn’t need to pry. She feared that she had soured things between them that night.

  “You can be Steven Woyceck with me,” she said.

  “I want to be.”

  It had been disingenuous to act like she needed to know everything. He didn’t know everything about her. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked, positioning his hand over hers on the tiller, adjusting the angle slightly, his eyes on the distant island.

  “I was with a woman once.”

  “Oh yes?” he asked with a smile.

  She told him what had happened in Kira’s condo at Mile’s End. “I feel really weird about it.”

  “Because it was good?”

  “Yeah, and because—I never told Dan. He still doesn’t know.”

  “If I had a cell phone on this boat, you could call him up right now.” Steven didn’t allow phones on Jo; he liked to be at one with the elements. He said there was a radio for emergencies. “I think it’s good you experimented,” he said. “Sometimes I worry I’m not enough fun for you.”

  “But you are!”

  “I’m not too old?”

  “Stop saying that.”

  He kissed her. She felt safe and invincible against the world.

  As they approached Catalina, she started to sing “26 Miles,” which she had learned at summer camp. Steven joined in, but their voices were off-key.

  That night after hiking, and dining on the island, they made love in the cabin twice. He was so good at touchin
g her; the way he made her come was unlike the way Dan had. He was focused on her, picking up on the tiniest gradations of pleasure. She loved his hands on her, wherever he wanted to put them. Afterward, the boat moved gently in the current. He ran his finger around her nipple and said, “You’d look good nursing.”

  “How do you know I plan to nurse?”

  “You have arms that were made for it. You could hold twins in those guns.”

  “What about my boobs? You didn’t say I had boobs made for nursing.”

  “I like that they’re small. Big ones scare me.” He kissed her and pushed her hair from her face. “Do you want kids?” Her body tingled, less at the prospect of being a mother than at the prospect of him loving her enough to make children with her. Which he had never done, not with any woman. “How do you feel about it?”

  “Oh, Steven,” she said, and began to cry.

  He put his thumbs on her cheeks to blot the tears. “If you want to wait, that’s okay. If you don’t, it’s okay. Don’t you understand, Maddy? I want to make you happy.”

  “Do I not seem happy to you?”

  “I want you to have whatever you want. Feel taken care of. I want to take care of you, whatever that means to you.”

  “You do,” she said. “You already do.”

  “So has L.A. gotten the better of you?” Zack asked Maddy on the phone. She had said she was in her car, on the way home from spinning class. He had never imagined her as the type of girl to spin. It was for gerbils.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “Weekly mani-pedis?”

  She laughed. “Only twice a month.”

  Zack swiveled in his chair and looked up at the painting on the wall behind his desk. He had recently moved into a bigger office, and though it was only slightly larger, it was a symbolic victory. After attending an art opening on Hudson Street with a colleague, he’d sprung for a small painting of a Jewish English boxer from the 1930s, Jack “Kid” Berg. Berg had Hebrew letters on his shorts and was posed formally, fists up, small but tough.

  Zack’s actors were working consistently, some getting second and third leads in big-budget movies, the kind that garnered entire-paragraph digressions in reviews. Kira had already shot a pretty decent indie drama. For the first time, he was feeling like an agent and not a servicer. But he had called Maddy because an agent had to think constantly of all the clients he was going to sign, not just the ones he already had. If his fervor for her was greater because she was his mother’s client, he tried not to think about that.

  “You’ll go weekly soon,” Zack said. “Most men in L.A. get their nails done. One of the reasons I can’t stand it there. Seriously, how has the transition been?”

  “The hardest part is the driving,” she said. “The GPS makes it simple, but I have no conceptual sense of the layout. I read Steven’s old Thomas Guide at night, and he calls me a Luddite. I tell him I want to have a sense of east and west.”

  Zack had not been surprised when he’d learned about Maddy and Steven. His mother said the two of them were “blissful,” but Bridget massaged the truth for a living. He wondered what Maddy’s day-to-day life was like in that creepy mansion, which seemed like the kind of place where you would be murdered in your sleep with a pillow.

  “So do you know what second position is?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  “The second-position agent is the one who’s waiting in the wings. The one who didn’t get the client. I’m yours. Which means you can call me and talk about anything you want, your roles, your jobs, your representation, and I’ll listen. You don’t have to worry that I’ll blab, and I’ll always tell you the truth because I don’t work for you.”

  “You mean that the people who do work for me lie to me?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, running his hand over the surface of his desk. He liked to keep almost nothing on it. He had always been neat, even as a child. When his mother gave him presents, he would fold the opened wrapping paper into squares before giving it to her to throw out.

  Work was the most important thing in his life. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t enjoy other things, like the yoga he took regularly at a studio in Tribeca or the occasional lecture at the Open Center on being present. He wanted to be a good businessman but not a bad person. To that end, he hadn’t done coke since he’d been at Mile’s End.

  Sometimes his mother could be a bad person; as a kid, he’d hear her screaming on the phone, and afterward she would say something innocuous about what she was making for dinner. She was like two different people.

  “As second position, I have a question for you,” he said to Maddy on the phone. “I was talking to the casting director on Freda Jansons, and he said you hadn’t come in to read. I was surprised because it seemed right up your alley. They’ve been searching all over the country. Kira auditioned here. What happened? Did you not like the script?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never heard of it.” Her voice was tinny and afraid.

  “It’s directed by Tim Heller, who did Grande Dame. The screenwriter, Erin Hedges, is going to be one of the top”—he started to say “woman” but stopped himself—“screenwriters in Hollywood in another year or so. It’s about an autistic scientist and her relationship with a little boy. Kind of a Miracle Worker set in the ’fifties. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t seen.”

  “Maybe Bridget’s going to send it to me,” she offered.

  “It’s already been cast. Lael Gordinier is Freda.”

  “What? Well, maybe the problem was Nancy. Maybe she never got the script.”

  “Nancy had to have gotten it. Everyone saw this.” It was exactly as he’d suspected. Bridget was withholding information from her own client. Representatives did it all the time, but not the ones who really cared.

  “I’ll call Bridget,” Maddy said.

  “Don’t tell her we spoke, okay?”

  “Why? You don’t want her to know you’re trying to get me as a client?”

  “No, I don’t want her to tell George. You see, I’m helping you, and the number one rule of agenting is ‘Don’t work for anyone who isn’t paying you.’ ”

  It was a lie, of course. Bosses loved employees who wooed clients from rivals. But he wanted to make Maddy feel that he was putting himself out in order to call her. If she did, she might become loyal, and loyalty would get him halfway to his goal.

  After Maddy hung up, she couldn’t shake the jumpy feeling in her chest. She couldn’t fathom why Bridget hadn’t told her about such an important role. Wasn’t Bridget’s whole job to be her client’s eyes and ears?

  She tried Nancy first. “What can I do for you, Maddy?” she asked. They had seen each other only a few times since Mile’s End; most of their interaction was by phone. Nancy had a well-modulated voice, like the ones you heard on yogurt commercials.

  “What do you mean you never read it?” Nancy asked after Maddy told her.

  “I just heard about it now, from a friend. Steven doesn’t like me reading the trades.”

  “I sent it to Bridget, God, it must have been last month. I can look it up. She said you loved it, but it conflicted with Husbandry. I’m sorry for any miscommunication.” This was a classic Hollywood coping mechanism, Maddy had learned. CYA. Cover your ass. She couldn’t tell whether Nancy was being honest and it occurred to her that she might need a new agent. But before she could make a decision like switching agencies she needed to know what Bridget had to say.

  “Honey, I didn’t send it because the shooting dates conflicted with your commitment to Walter’s film,” Bridget said.

  “But maybe we could have figured it out. I mean, at least if I’d seen it.”

  “Not really. You had signed the contract by the time I got the script.”

  “Can’t contracts be broken?”

  “No, it’
s more difficult that you would think. Look, the last thing in the world I want is for you to dwell on this. There will always be projects you lose because you’re too busy. Hollywood history is made on the basis of who’s available when. Frank Sinatra almost played Dirty Harry. And Steve McQueen was going to be Butch Cassidy.”

  “That makes me feel worse. Lael Gordinier might make history doing that role, and I didn’t get a chance to go in.”

  “You’ll make history doing Husbandry.”

  “Why did you lie to Nancy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why did you tell Nancy I loved the script when you knew I hadn’t read it?”

  Bridget had handled these situations before. The key was to be calm and never admit you’d done something wrong. “Honey, I just didn’t want to get into it with her. I’m sorry. I was only trying to protect you from being disappointed. One thing you should understand is that you can’t be two places at once.”

  “Don’t lie to my agent, Bridget. And don’t hide scripts from me. Are we clear?”

  “Of course.”

  Maddy hung up feeling uneasy. She wanted to trust Bridget, she had to, but this was not the kind of thing a manager was supposed to do. Especially not in the beginning. Bridget had encouraged her to do the psychological thriller and then Jen, and both had worked out well. Now she wasn’t sure she had an ally. She thought she heard a call coming in on the dashboard phone, but it was only a horn beeping from far away.

  As she and Steven were lying in bed reading, she told him she’d heard “from a girl I see at auditions” that Tim Heller was casting a movie called Freda Jansons, and Bridget hadn’t sent her the script because her Husbandry contract was signed. “I thought a manager was supposed to relay all the phone calls,” Maddy said.

  “Bridget knew you were booked,” he said. “I was with her when she got the call. She had the executed contracts in front of her.”

  “Why couldn’t I delay?”

  “We don’t want to hold up Walter. He’s taking a gamble on you. Delays can be more dangerous to the actor than the director.”