Steven was coming toward her. Later, she would remember the look on his face, a kind of gratitude that could be interpreted as love. He hugged her while the trio went on and on about how it couldn’t have gone any better, how she was a natural. She put her face in his chest so as to drown out their voices. She didn’t want to be around anyone else, she wanted to be alone with Steven, the man she loved, the man she knew.
In bed later that night, he kissed her cheek, her shoulders, and she was relaxing, feeling not precisely open, the way she had in Venice on her first trip, but getting there, getting there, and he pushed her back onto the bed and she softened.
He was making love to everything about her that made her female. There was no way he could have been with that man. He was going down, down, and he put his tongue in her, and her eyes rolled back. Her hips fell open, and then, on the verge of orgasm, she brought her pelvis down to meet his and he was moving against her until they came at the same time. The story would be retracted and everyone would know, but that wasn’t the important part. They had won. They had triumphed over the press, and now his fans knew it and the studio knew it, too, and soon everything would go back to normal.
Act Three
1
About a year after her Harry appearance, Maddy was eating breakfast by the pool when Steven came out and threw a pile of printouts on the table with a scowl. They were the reviews of Husbandry. The couple had attended the premiere the night before, a charmed night, and they’d had a happy reunion with Walter and Billy. The audience had loved the film, and Maddy had been proud of her work and her husband’s.
She had been planning to read the reviews later. Though she told interviewers she didn’t read her own press, that was a lie. She scanned them quickly, knowing from Steven’s face that the news wasn’t going to be good. The critics had loved Maddy and Billy, but Steven’s reviews were almost universal pans. He was “out of his league in such a dramatic role.” “Wooden” and “remote.” “His perpetually downcast eyes make it seem as though he is trying to find his mark.”
She thought the reviews were too cruel. Steven’s performance had been a bit stilted, but it was because Louis was tightly wound. Watching the film in their screening room for the first time, she’d felt the three of them had created something magical, each character compelling if not wholly sympathetic. Her scenes with Billy were both arousing and arresting, and during the final confrontation she gripped the armrests, almost unsure which character was going to die.
“They’re wrong about you,” she said now.
“Walter sabotaged me in the editing room,” he said, looming over the patio table. “He humiliated me. We never should have given him final cut. He deliberately chose my weakest takes.”
“I don’t think he did that.”
“He was attracted to you and jealous of me for having you. He’s a pig. And after I hit him, he never forgave me. He just pretended to. This film was his punishment.”
She remembered consoling Dan about his pan at Mile’s End, but back then there had been other positive reviews to focus on. The most innocuous of Steven’s Husbandry reviews called him “not a detriment to the production.”
Her reviews were as warm as Steven’s were cold: “quietly brave,” “operatic,” “proof of the awesome power of female sexuality.” It had been a triumphant year for her. After winning raves for I Used to Know Her, she’d begun fielding big offers—mostly dramatic roles, many of them period films or adapted from successful modern novels—and her quote was now $1 million.
The Husbandry pans were the third set in a row for him, following The Widower and Declarations. But he hadn’t seemed upset about the other two. After Declarations was released in February, buried, and then savaged, he’d said the indie phase of his career was over—he was focused on playing Tommy Hall—so Maddy thought it was odd that he was worked up about the Juhasz. She didn’t want to believe his anger stemmed from jealousy over her good reviews. He was too sophisticated for that, and too powerful.
Everyone was anticipating the release of The Hall Fixation the following March. After the Christian Bernard retraction, the studio decided to keep Steven on, and he did a belated press blitz. The production had wrapped in the spring. Everything Steven and Maddy had been afraid of hadn’t happened. In her own way, she had gotten him to the place he was now. She felt she had changed the way the studio saw him. She had helped his fans, his employers, and the media regain confidence in him.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, standing up and going to him. “You can’t dwell on this. You’re Tommy Hall. That’s all anyone’s thinking about. And you said the footage is great.”
“The release is still five months away,” he said. “Bridget and I had reservations about how Walter was assembling the film, but he kept reassuring us. Never again will I work with a director who wears Depends. Juhasz has set my career back decades.” He started inside.
“Well, I don’t regret doing Husbandry for a second,” she called after him.
“Of course you don’t!” he said, spinning around. “Because you got raves!”
“No. Because Husbandry was what brought us together.” He nodded, but his face was white and cold.
A few days later, when she went to take her birth control pill in the kitchen, she noticed the pack wasn’t there. Unlike her lorazepam, which she hid in the back of her nightstand drawer, her birth control was kept in one of the kitchen cabinets by the vitamins they both took.
Steven was doing laps in the pool. When he approached the side, she leaned over and grabbed his hand. He picked up his head. “Where are my pills?” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t want you to take them anymore.” His goggles were on and made him look like a bug.
“But you can’t just steal them. They’re mine.”
“Why don’t you want to get started on having a family?” They discussed it every couple of months. She knew he knew her reservations. Lately, he hadn’t brought it up, which she had taken to mean he was okay with postponing it.
“We’ve talked about this. I’m only twenty-eight. We have time. I want to be an involved mother, and I’m not ready to stop working now. My career just started.”
She thought he understood. He had seemed happy for her, happy that she was becoming a star in her own right.
“Women work through their pregnancies,” Steven said, gripping the edge of the pool. “We’ll get you trainers to help you lose the weight. You can bring the baby to set. You’ll be able to do it your own way. Let’s get it going. Get those toxins out of your blood.”
“Toxins?”
“The hormones. They’re poison. I don’t want to be fifty when we start. I want to know my children. Don’t you get that? I bought a new house for you. You said you wanted something better for a family.”
After her repeated entreaties to move someplace homier, they had closed on a new house a short walk away, an Italianate Mediterranean with a small guesthouse, warm-colored tiles, stenciled beams, and a family-friendly feel. But Steven was renovating it, consulting with contractors and architects, and he said it could be a year before they moved.
“I do want a family, but not yet. You can’t just take my pills. It’s a violation.”
“If you don’t want to have children with me now, you never will!”