“I just need to know that you’re loyal,” Maddy said in the study, hating the needy pitch of her voice.
“I am loyal,” he said in an exhausted tone. “But I’m older than you, and we do things a different way. We don’t vomit everything up like your generation.”
His tone was hostile and defensive. It reminded her of the arguments she used to have with Dan when he was in a funk about his career and took it out on her.
All this time Steven had seemed too confident to be hypersensitive, but perhaps men were all alike. It was as though Venice had been a hundred years ago. “I’m not asking you to vomit everything up,” she said.
He walked over to the couch and sat. The moonlight was flickering on the pool out the window.
She sat in an armchair adjacent to the couch. The study had built-in bookshelves holding dark, monochromatic volumes. On one of the walls was a de Kooning painting of an angry, naked woman. Maddy didn’t know if it was original. She wasn’t sure how wealthy Steven was and didn’t want to be sure. She didn’t like the things about him that made him different from her, like his modernist Catalan portraits and antique urns. She liked the things they had in common: his devotion to acting, his attention to scripts, his belief in the power of art.
“I think I’m lonely,” she said. “I feel like we’re not alone enough.”
“We’re busy people.”
“I’m not busy yet. It seems like every night you’re free, we’re at an appearance. It makes me worry that I’m not . . . special to you.”
He came over to the armchair, got beneath her, and lifted her so she was on his lap. He stroked her hair. “Is that what this is about? How long have you been feeling this way?”
“A while. Don’t you want to be with just me sometimes?”
“These commitments are for causes I believe in. But you’re right. It’s not fair. I haven’t made enough room for you.”
“I left my whole life for you.”
He began to kiss her. You couldn’t know, in a relationship, whether you were being lied to, she thought. She had a study, a converted guest room, and she was trying to make it her own, but it wasn’t yet. A desk, a chair, some paperbacks, and her books and plays from The New School. She wanted independence, but she didn’t escape into it in the middle of the night to take private phone calls or lock things away in drawers. She didn’t have drawers with locks. She had a shoe box of mementos given to her by different boyfriends over the years, cigarette-filter flowers; wallet-sized photos of boys, taken in grade school; Valentine’s cards. But the box was in storage in Steven’s garage, and she hadn’t looked at it in years, not until she’d found it in the back of the closet in Fort Greene.
Steven carried her to the desk, so strong, as if she were nothing in his arms, even though she was sturdy and tall. When he touched her like this, there was no frustration, no discord. When he held her, she believed him.
After they finished, he left the room first. Like a dare. She picked up the phone on the desk and placed her finger above the redial button, and then she felt a chill and put the receiver in its cradle.
2
The next morning she woke up alone. Steven had left for his set. The clock said ten-fifteen. Annette was out shopping. The housekeepers didn’t come until eleven.
Maddy made herself a cup of coffee, and homemade Greek yogurt with fresh berries and granola, and took it to the patio with that morning’s New York Times. She flipped through the Arts section, reading play reviews. There was a rave for a new Off-Broadway play about a deaf bricklayer, and Maddy was surprised to see that Irina was in the cast. They had exchanged a few emails after Maddy’s move, and then they’d slowed down, and eventually, Irina hadn’t written back.
She wasn’t in touch with anyone from New York, not in a sustained way. She had heard through Sharoz that Dan had wrapped The Valentine and moved to Venice Beach. Sharoz said he was dating Rachel Huber, the executive on The Valentine. Maddy wondered if the affair had begun during the shoot but Sharoz said she didn’t know.
She had not yet run into him in L.A. and wondered when she would. Though she wasn’t sorry their relationship was over, she was nostalgic for the nights they had stayed up late hammering out the story beats. Maybe someday she would collaborate with him again. Ananda McCarthy said Hollywood was like a big summer camp in which exes were constantly forced to work together, making the best of it.
The sun was bright. She could hear a house sparrow. She read the paper and did twenty laps in the pool. She never swam in New York, but now that she lived in a home with a pool, she felt an obligation to take advantage. After one of Maddy’s film auditions, Bridget had reported that the casting director had commented she was “healthy.” Maddy had been shocked and wounded; in the theater world, they weren’t as picky about weight. She was aware that in Los Angeles, the trend was super-slim with fake breasts, but she’d hoped that in the eyes of the casting directors, if not the tabloids, her Special Jury Prize would set its own expectations.
“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.