She waited for him to say something else, but he was quiet and she was confused. “Are you asking me for money?” she said. Of course he wasn’t; he was just telling her about his plans.
He looked surprised by her confusion. “Well, yeah. I respect you. And your opinion of my work. You have money now, and I need your help.”
She got the same feeling she had when Steven told her about the Christian Bernard article. It was worse than dread, it was slow, heavy doom, and it started at her chest and moved down into the pit of her stomach.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. “You asked me to give you my rights and now you want my money. You don’t care about me. Just what I can do for you.”
“Of course I care about you.”
She was backing away from him. She grabbed the sheet off the bed and held it to her front. “You just wanted to get me into bed to butter me up so I’d invest in your movie.”
“Get you into bed? I had no idea this was going to happen. You think I planned this? You called me.”
“But you invited me to your house.”
“You didn’t want to go to London House. I had no idea we’d wind up in this room. I was so worried about you when you came in. You looked like a ghost. I wanted to help you. I still do. You’re going back to this jerk, and I’m sitting here knowing that moment’s going to come, and we’re naked and eating and I feel good and you feel good and I just . . . didn’t see the point in waiting a week to send you an email.”
“Are you asking me to pay you twenty-five grand for having sex with me? Because the sex was not that special.”
“I thought it was.”
She started dressing, quickly, turning her back so he couldn’t see her breasts. He stood, still buck-naked, looking befuddled. “Maddy . . . what happened between us . . . I wanted it to. I’m sorry about the timing of my ask, but—”
“Your ask? Is that what I am to you? You see me as a backer?”
“You’re confusing things. I loved what we just did. I’m post-orgasmically retarded right now, you can’t hold my timing against me. It’s because I feel so safe around you that I thought we could just . . . switch gears.”
“I gotta get out of here,” she muttered, crawling on the floor in search of a flat. When she had gathered all her things, he reached for her and she recoiled as if he were hot. “Leave me alone!” she shouted. “You’re just like him. I thought you were different, but you’re exactly the same.”
In the car, her mind was racing. When she loved a man, made herself vulnerable to him, he betrayed her, and her father had betrayed her by leaving her so soon, leaving her when she still needed him, when she was barely an adult. She couldn’t believe she had been stupid enough to go to bed with Dan. Steven and Dan were wheeler-dealers.
When she got home, it was around midnight. She found Steven in the bathroom, the door wide open. He was standing in front of the vanity mirror, using an electric clipper on his nose hair. His mouth was open slightly, his eyes intent and focused.
She waited for him to ask where she had been, but he said nothing. At first it looked like he was grinning, but he was only tightening his lips to get the best angle into his nose.
3
Over the next few days, Dan texted her ill-written apologies. After she did not respond, the texts stopped. She told herself this was a good thing, she could forget about it and pretend it hadn’t happened.
But to forget was not so easy. Her body would come alive as she remembered the way Dan had touched her, and then the guilt would follow the arousal and she would resolve to tell Steven. A few times she opened her mouth to blurt it out, before shutting it for fear he would leave her if she did. Hoping that he would force her into a confession, she waited for him to ask about that night, but he never did. His lack of suspicion had the effect of making her feel less trusting than she already did. Any man who was faithful to his wife would expect fidelity in return. She became certain that he’d had sex on Jo, though with whom she did not know. Every time he went on the boat, she decided, dozens of times since they had met, he was fucking. Terry, another man, a woman, Corinna Mestre, many men, many women, the possibilities multiplied in her head until he was betraying her with half the industry. His directors, his trainers, his accountant, even Edward Rosenman of Rosenman Kogan LLP.
After his lecture about modalities, though, she was afraid to express her doubts, so her fear was accompanied by the pain of trying to hide it. Whenever he was gone for a long stretch but not on set—with his trainer or at meetings or dinners—she was careful to make it seem that she was not suspicious. Even so, he seemed to be waiting for her to attack him. Awaiting signs of neediness. As if he had decided she was a madwoman and nothing she did could change his opinion.
But her work was a distraction, a good one. After The Pharmacist’s Daughter wrapped in October, her next film would be Barry Hiller’s Loins, the new Elkan Hocky, in New York. Hocky was a famed Brooklynite director in his seventies, known for his witty dialogue, and Loins was an ensemble comedy about a young woman, played by Maddy, who decides to find her biological father only to learn that he’s a mute homeless man. Maddy would be renting a furnished luxury apartment in Tribeca. She had thought about renting in Brooklyn but decided the commute to the Upper East Side locations would be too long.
A few weeks after she was cast she learned that Kira had been cast as her best friend—because of her work in Rondelay, which had had a healthy run in independent theaters and turned Kira into a hipster acting phenom. Maddy had watched a DVD of Rondelay with Steven in the screening room, and both agreed that Kira was magnetic. She seemed to be digging deeper than she had in I Used to Know Her.
Kira had been the subject of adulatory profiles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, New York, and Out in which she talked openly about her lesbianism. The op-ed page of the Times published a think piece on her called “The Non–Coming Out.” The author, a gay-and-lesbian-studies professor at Harvard, said that many of today’s twentysomethings had had same-sex experiences, or had friends who were gay, and weren’t filled with the self-hate that had plagued earlier generations. “In today’s entertainment landscape,” the professor wrote, “homosexuality is no longer a liability to a career, something that must be hidden, as it was by Rock Hudson and Rudolph Valentino.”
Maddy had been nervous when she’d learned that she would be working with Kira again, given their confrontation at the I Used to Know Her premiere, but Kira called a few days before shooting began. “I was drunk that night,” she said, “and I was stupid. Your marriage is none of my business.”
“Thank you,” Maddy had said.
Barry Hiller’s Loins turned out to be easy, fast-paced, and fun. Elkan was gracious and witty, and many days they shot on the streets, which Maddy loved—it was as alive as shooting on a studio lot was dead.
She went to dinner with Zack one night, and he told her he still wanted to work for her. Maddy said Bridget was helping her and she saw no reason to leave. Though he grimaced, he didn’t call her again in New York. Maddy wasn’t sure whether he hadn’t truly wanted to sign her or was being tactical by not pushing too hard.