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 touching 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.