“Well.” He coughed again. “It sounds like you’re focusing more on acting these days, and there’s no use having those pages just sit there. I didn’t think you’d care about the money since, you know . . . Steven . . . This way Oded and I can take the grain of the story, the concept, and develop something new from it, without having to worry if you’ll—”
“Sue you?” So this was what their friendly breakfast was all about. It was sneaky to do it here, one-on-one, instead of through her manager or lawyer. Dan had been trying to appeal to her nostalgia, her affection for him, all to get her to give up her intellectual property.
She had a copy of The Nest on her laptop but never looked at it. If he had rewritten it without consulting her and the movie had come out, she wouldn’t have sued; at least she didn’t think so. But he had played his hand. Dan had always been a terrible businessman.
“I have to show this to my attorney,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” he said, swallowing some water. “No problem.”
“And I’m sure he’s going to say no way.”
Dan nodded and chewed his lip, which he always did when he was chagrined. She’d been feeling generous toward him, like maybe he still understood her, but he’d just wanted something for nothing. For a buck.
They were quiet, looking down into their bottomless coffees. Finally, she said, “I guess we’ve both gone totally Hollywood, huh?”
“Why is that?”
“We get together for the first time since we broke up, and you ask me to relinquish my rights.”
3
It was two weeks into the Husbandry shoot, and Maddy was removing her costume in her dressing room. It had been a long day. She had shot a difficult sex scene with Steven. She had been nervous at first, but because the sex was meant to be bad, she was able to focus on her character, so it went relatively smoothly. It turned out it was easy to play bad sex.
Which was why she was nervous about the next day’s call sheet: good sex. She would be doing her first bedroom scene with Billy Peck, the English actor playing Paul. Bridget would be there, with the skeleton crew: Walter; Jimmy, the director of photography; and Stu, the boom operator. Wardrobe would be supplying Maddy with a nude-colored G-string, a nude bandeau, and her merkin, which had been dyed to match her own pubic hair.
There was a knock. “Just a minute!” She hung up her dress and put on a robe.
Walter. He came to her dressing room from time to time to talk about Ellie, and he had a playful Platonic style. He was a sharp observer, which gave her confidence that in his hands, she would give her best performance. There were times he could be difficult, though. He would stand on her mark and pantomime: “Do not scratch your nose like this. Do it like this!” But she respected his desire to have things be just so; in film, the director had to be a dictator.
He was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned farther than usual. “May I come in?” he asked, though he was already in the room. She had decorated it with photographs of her parents and postcards of Jim Jarmusch, Liz Phair, John Garfield, and Eleonora Duse, the great Italian stage actress known for blushing on cue. Even with the attempts to personalize it, the room still felt too fancy and too generic.
Walter sat on one of the couches. “You were excellent today,” he said. She sat on the opposite couch, pulling her robe more tightly around her body. She should have dressed before she answered the door but had been expecting a wardrobe girl. “I am proud of the work you have been doing,” Walter went on. “It has great integrity. I could tell when you wept that you weren’t afraid to be ugly.”
From anyone else, she would have taken it as an insult. From Walter, she didn’t. She was ugly when she cried; most people were. It was the chaos taking over the face. He spread his knees and leaned forward. “What’s amazing to me is that you carry yourself with no awareness. Most beautiful women know it from an early age, and it ruins them. You carry yourself like someone who doesn’t turn heads.”
This was the longest conversation they’d had alone. “Steven has excellent taste,” Walter continued, gazing distantly toward Maddy’s picture window, the one that overlooked Woodmere’s Victorian gardens, which were often used for period films. Woodmere was the famous postwar soundstage where they were shooting the film, half an hour from London. “What a refined man. He has great appreciation for attractive things. And yet I wonder whether he appreciates you the way he should.”
Not sure where he was going with this line of talk, she stood and walked to the window. She looked out at the gardens. “Walter, is this about the scene tomorrow?” she asked, keeping her back turned.
“You are a young woman,” he said from the couch. “You have a promising road ahead of you professionally and personally. If you’ll forgive my playing for a moment the role of sage old man, you’ll let me give you a piece of advice. A woman’s job is to be where she’s most appreciated.”
Be where she’s most appreciated? He was trying to get inside her skull by maligning her boyfriend. Didn’t he see how counterproductive it was? “Steven appreciates me,” she said, spinning around to face him, “if that’s what you’re trying to—”
“Not in the way you think he does.” He stood and moved to the other side of the window so he was facing her. “You may love him,” he said, enunciating carefully, “but I can say with confidence that he does not love you.”
He took a few steps toward her, his hands extended, and she jumped back. “Walter!”
His face seemed to soften, and after a moment he retreated. “I am so sorry, my dear. I do not know what came over me. I feel protective of you, but sometimes I am not the best communicator.” He moved swiftly to the door, and it closed behind him without a sound.
As she went to the town house in the chauffeured car, she kept hearing Walter’s words. The most logical explanation was that he was trying to make her vulnerable for her lovemaking scene with Billy. Nicholas Ray had famously manipulated James Dean and Sal Mineo by whispering “He hates you” to each of them on the set of Rebel.
Or maybe Walter was just an old man who didn’t get that younger American actors worked differently from older ones, and liked their sets PC, their boundaries clear. He probably didn’t remember half the things that came out of his mouth. The entire moment could have been chalked up to senility.
But it irritated her that Walter had known Steven longer than she had, that he had visited Palazzo Mastrototaro several times. Steven had said that he and Walter were not friends but friendly, and yet she couldn’t shake the fear that Walter knew something about him that she didn’t: There was another woman in his life. Cady. Or Albertina. Maybe the person on the phone that night; she still didn’t completely believe it was Vito. Or someone else, some English model whom he visited in the black of night while she slept. Maybe Walter knew, and like a grandfather, he had been warning her not to trust him. Just because Walter seemed crazy didn’t mean he didn’t speak the truth.
The Regent’s Park town house rental was furnished in a sleek, luxurious style, with views of the park’s rowing pond, but because of the paparazzi, Steven and Maddy never opened the drapes. She was even less at home there than she was in Hancock Park, where at least she was beginning to build up things of her own, clothes and music and books.