“No, it’s not. It would be good for you. Don’t you trust me? I would never try to take you to the bank. Never. Even if you got tired of me one day.”
“I’ll never be tired of you,” he said, placing his palm on her neck. “But what you just said isn’t true. These agreements actually protect both people. Someday you’re going to be making more than I am. I really believe that. I’ll be old and poor and unemployed. You don’t want to protect the money you’ll make when you get really famous? You want me to come after it?”
“Yes, if you were unemployed,” she said. “I’d let you have it.” She shook her head at the ridiculousness of the conversation. How could they be thinking about the end of a marriage when it had just begun? “I don’t want to think about any of that stuff. I’m in love with you. I’ll never leave you.”
“If you don’t want to do it, we don’t have to,” he said. “That’s what I told Edward. In the end, it’s up to us.”
But later that night, awake in bed, she found herself worrying. Though she wasn’t some chippie after his money, she liked the idea of protecting herself as a creator, an earner, an artist in her own right. A few days later, she made some phone calls and spoke with a family lawyer, a pretty, middle-aged woman who had photos of her kids and husband. Lisa Burns Miller. She said, “You have just married someone who has a lot more money than you do. If you had called me earlier, I would have recommended a prenup, but at least this way you’ll have something. You need to protect yourself.”
“From what?”
“From a marriage that leaves you with nothing.”
“But I don’t want his money. And it’s not going to end.”
“What if you have children and you stop working to care for them, so he can make movies, and your earnings go down and then it’s hard to work? Wouldn’t you want to be compensated for that? You know how brutal your industry is on women. A postnup doesn’t mean you’re planning to divorce. It means you two are being mature adults who have a plan for if things change between you. No one can be certain of anything in life.”
With a large dose of ambivalence, Maddy retained her, and over the course of a week, Lisa and a matrimonial lawyer hired by Steven went back and forth, negotiating language. The basics were: In the first year, only ten percent of Steven’s wealth was community property, but each year it bumped up, until after ten years, it was a hundred percent community. Maddy’s income would never be considered community even if she became wealthy, and it didn’t get factored in to compute support. If they divorced, she would get $1 million a year of spousal support for each year they were married, and $50,000 a month of support per child, which would be adjusted according to the visitation schedule.
The day they went in to sign the documents, there were video cameras set up in the attorney’s office. Her lawyer said they were for documentation, to show that there was no duress, but they made Maddy feel like the whole thing was a grand performance. After they finished, she cried in the elevator.
“Don’t feel badly about this,” he said. “We decided this together. It makes us stronger.”
“I know, but I don’t ever want to look at those papers again,” she said.
“We don’t have to. Not once. I love you so much more that you did this.”
“Why?”
“Because it means you believe in yourself as much as I believe in you,” he said, and they walked in the bright sunlight from the building to the car.
One of the biggest social events of the L.A. fall season was the World Children’s Welfare ball. The guests were a combination of star-studded Hollywood and charity circuit: Steven always insisted that the key to progressivism was to make it sexy. He was devoted to doing his part to eradicate poverty, both domestic and international, and through his fame, he had gotten a number of young actresses and actors involved with WCW.
The ball was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The newlyweds shared a table with Terry and Ananda, Bridget, and others in Steven’s circle. Steven was shooting a remake of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Maddy had begun production on Line Drive, about the relationship between an Iowan sportswriter father and his daughter. It was strange to make all these movies that no one would see for close to a year, which was why she was looking forward to the release of I Used to Know Her in October. Dan would be there, and Kira, though Maddy was more nervous about seeing Kira. She and Dan emailed from time to time and she considered him a friend.
The live auction was interminable, the auctioneer making entertainment-industry jokes, testosterone-jawed men in tuxes drunkenly raising paddles as their wives hooted. Forty-five minutes in, Maddy excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.
She passed women doing their lipstick at the mirror and adjusting the implants in their redundant bras. “I was just talking about it with my shrink,” a platinum blonde was saying to a friend, “and I finally get that my father’s money issues come from his Jainism and his age.”
Maddy went into one of the stalls, and when she emerged to wash her hands, she noticed that someone was next to her. A woman. Staring at her in the mirror.
Julia Hanson. From the billboards. She was striking, with shiny dark hair, and she wore a high-necked burgundy gown and long diamond earrings. She was more beautiful than Maddy had thought, and there was something overly and frighteningly intense about her.
“You’re the new wife,” Julia said.
“I . . .”
“Are you lonely yet?”
Maddy looked at Julia’s reflection and said, “I don’t think I—”
“When I look back, I remember the loneliness. During his sailing trips on Jo. The guys’ nights. Whenever he was off with Alex.”
“Who’s Alex?” Maddy asked, unable to stop herself.
“From the theater. The repertory company.”
Maddy had never heard Steven mention an Alex from the Duse. She didn’t want to know about this person, didn’t want to know the details of Steven’s time with Julia and why it had gone wrong. She thought about the postnup and felt she had been wrong to sign it. Julia seemed cynical about marriage and Maddy had signed a document outlining what she would get if it ended.
“I have to go,” Maddy said. Why were they the only two in the ladies’ room? There had been half a dozen women a few moments ago.
“He needs you more than he needed me,” Julia said. “Because he’s older. It was time. The entertainment community is so narrow-minded. He must have felt pressure. He’ll say you’re his one true love. But you can’t be. Alex was the only person he ever really loved.”
Alex. Why, oh why, did it have to be a name like that and not Janine or Melissa?
“What do you mean by that?” Maddy asked hoarsely.
“The one he still dreams of years later. The one he can’t get out of his head no matter how hard he tries. We all have someone like that.”
Maddy went to the door and Julia followed quickly, gripping her arm. Maddy could feel her nails digging into the flesh. “I hear you’re very good,” Julia said. “Keep working. Even when he tells you that you should be home. He calls himself a feminist, but it’s a lie. I’ve never met a man who hated women more. And I’ve lived in Los Angeles twenty-five years.”
Instead of returning to her table, Maddy made a long circuit around the room. She scanned the crowd for Julia, but didn’t see her. She had disappeared among the throng or left. Feeling faint, Maddy stopped at one of the bars and drank a glass of water slowly, as the auctioneer sold a kiss from a premium-cable star.