“I’ll be working with her, too. And she is right for it. You’ve been doing such a good job. Let me do mine.”
“What can you do about this situation?”
“Well, I was thinking.” She had a vein that ran down the center of her forehead that throbbed when she was excited. With age, it had gotten bluer. “Dan is such a skilled director, particularly with female-friendly material. That was an unusual film he made.”
“And?”
“He’s responsible. Obviously professional. Well trained. He wouldn’t need to learn on the job.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Valentine. My film in Bulgaria. They’ve been having so many problems. Patrick Fitzsimmons is a disaster. It’s a serious love story, and I’m getting reports that this guy has no facility with actors. The cast is miserable. And Dan wants to work. I want to go out on a limb for him, the way I always do for people I care about.”
There was a kind of love you could feel for your manager that surpassed even the love of a child for his parents. “He does want to work,” Steven said, smoothing the jacket of one of the art books and examining his palm for dust. None.
“I want to help the boy. I like matching talented people with important projects.”
“Of course you do,” he said, patting her on the knee. “It’s what you do for a living.”
“It’s more than a living. It’s who I am.”
For the party Maddy chose a black wool boatneck dress. Dressy but not too much. She wanted to be herself. Dan had noticed the Marchesa in the closet and fingered it, wolf-whistling. “This must have cost ten thousand dollars,” he said. “More.”
“You know rich people get everything for nothing,” she said. “I’m sure they gave it to Bridget for free.”
When the couple arrived in the ballroom, they found a dozen or so dinner guests, all in expensive sweaters, speaking accented English. A handsome Spanish actor was there, and a man she recognized as a Soho art dealer. A British memoirist with prematurely gray hair was talking to a 1970s-era comedian whom Maddy’s father had loved.
“Oh my God,” Dan murmured as they came in together.
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s like every subset of the creative world.”
She took in the details of the room, the incredible sparkling chandeliers (ca’rezzonico, Steven had told her they were called), the live chamber quartet—all the things she would have mentioned to her father if she could have called him.
A server offered Maddy and Dan colorful drinks. They took glasses, clinked. The drink was sweet and refreshing. “What is this?” Maddy asked.
“Venetian spreetz,” the server said. “Prosecco, Aperol, and sparkling water.”
Bridget swooped over, accompanied by a thirtysomething woman with dark eyebrows. “I wanted to introduce you to Rachel Huber,” Bridget said. “Rachel is the head of production for Worldwide Films. We’re working together on The Valentine.”
“I just saw I Used to Know Her,” Rachel said to Dan. “I loved it.”
“Thank you so much,” Dan said.
“You know, even though I work for the devil now, I actually started in indie film myself.” Rachel dropped the names of a couple of now-defunct New York–based companies.
A server was calling them inside for dinner. There was a long handcrafted table, with place cards that indicated Maddy was next to Dan. Rachel was on his other side. Steven was bracketed by a tall, glamorous Italian woman and the old comedian. Steven was in his element, his skin luminous in the candlelight.
Throughout dinner, Rachel asked Dan a lot of questions about I Used to Know Her, and several times Maddy noticed that she tapped him on the arm for emphasis. He mentioned some names of NYU classmates, and then they began gossiping about indie-film people. Dan drank Prosecco, and the Pinocchio circles began to appear. He would say something funny, and Rachel’s gray eyes would glint. Maddy felt something greater than irritation and less than jealousy.
Throughout the meal, Steven told show-business anecdotes. One was a famous story that he attributed to Gore Vidal, which required him to imitate Vidal imitating the characters. Jack Kennedy and Tennessee Williams had met at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach in 1957. JFK was shooting a target and offered the gun to Williams. Williams took the gun with great confidence and got three bull’s-eyes in a row. “ ‘Very good,’ ” said Steven, as a Boston-accented Kennedy. “ ‘Yes,’ ” said Steven, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, as Williams. “ ‘Considering I was using my blind eye.’ ”
For after-dinner drinks, they moved to the sitting room, and Bridget, Rachel, and Dan got into a detailed discussion of how a seminal 1992 Mile’s End film had come to be acquired and distributed. Maddy was not quite bored but ignored. Steven came in and beckoned to her. With a glance at Dan, she went to him. “He seems happy here,” Steven said, eyeing Dan as he laughed at something Rachel said.
“Oh God, he’s going to be on cloud nine for weeks. Thank you for having him. I know it was unexpected.”
“Please, it’s nothing. He’s welcome in my home. As are you. I take my hosting duties very seriously.”
She saw the tall Italian woman light a cigarette, her fingers long and elegant. “Who is that?” she asked.
“A friend. Albertina. She’s a princess.”
“If you didn’t like her, why did you invite her?”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “She an actual Venetian princess.”
Maddy spotted Bridget, Rachel, and Dan stepping outside to one of the terraces. Bridget had her arm around Dan. “Come with me for a second,” Steven said. Maddy hesitated and then followed.
He led her downstairs and down a long hallway to a kitchen, where men in white aprons did dishes. Through the kitchen was another, smaller room. More men in white ate and drank. They rose as Steven entered. He said something in Italian. They were pulling out seats for them and smiling, laughing. Pointing at her, Steven said, “Permettete che vi presenti la Signorina Freed?” He said each word with a perfect Italian accent except Freed, which sounded hard and Wisconsin. “Un giorno sarà più famosa di me.” She recognized the word “famosa,” but when she asked him what the rest of it meant, he wouldn’t tell her.
One of the men, who had thick eyebrows and a handsome stubbled face, had a bottle of something dark and shimmering. Two extra glasses were produced, and Steven poured for Maddy and himself. It was some kind of wine, strong and sweet. She took another sip and her body grew pliable. She didn’t want to go upstairs and try to hold her own around all those important people. She wanted to stay down here and learn dirty jokes in Italian, smoke unfiltered cigarettes with men. “What am I drinking?” she asked.
“An old recipe. It’s Vito’s grandmother’s. He could give it to you, but then he’d have to kill you.” The men laughed again, and one of them said something in Italian she didn’t understand.
In the bedroom later that night, she was flipping pages of a coffee-table book of photography and essays called Venice Observed, by Mary McCarthy, when Dan came in. He tossed her a screenplay. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Rachel Huber asked me to read it, and I already did. But I want to know what you think.”
The title page said The Valentine. “What is this?”
“The movie Bridget’s producing in Bulgaria.”
“Why does she want you to read it if it’s already in production?”
“Can you just read it? And then I’ll tell you.”