The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  She nodded slowly, trying to read Zack’s eyes. Doesn’t like any for more than a year. Maybe he was warning her that Steven was gay because he guessed she had a crush, and he didn’t want her to develop feelings. He was being protective. Or maybe he was just calling him a womanizer.

  “Can I ask you something?” Maddy said.

  “Sure.”

  “Promise not to tell your mother?”

  “I have no problem keeping secrets from my mother. I do it all the time.”

  “Dan has a theory that Bridget and Steven invited me here so he’d have someone to see movies with. Because he’s gay.”

  Zack had lit another cigarette and was examining the tip. “And?” he said.

  “Well, there must have been parties at your house, I figure you saw people. Friends of his. I mean, it’s not like I care one way or the other, I’m just curious.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “Did he ever, like, come to your stuff at school?”

  “You mean when I was in Peter Pan at eleven, playing the dog, did he bring some muscular guy with a Tom of Finland tattoo and a handkerchief hanging out of his jeans pocket?”

  “So he brought girls, then?” She felt like an idiot as she was asking it, classless, overeager.

  “The times he came to see me in plays, he was with my mother.”

  Zack began walking more quickly, and she had to run to catch up despite his stubby legs. Not only had she failed to get anything out of him, but it seemed she had offended him with her questions. Whether he was being dense or merely protective of his mother’s star client, she could not tell. They walked in silence for a while, and when they neared the cemetery’s exit, he said, “If you’re so sure you’re not interested in him, why do you care if he’s gay or straight?”

  “I don’t,” she said. Her cheeks reddened and she was ashamed. He knew her interest in his sexuality had more to do with her than with Steven. Whether Steven slept with men or women made no difference, because nothing was going to happen between them, except an audition. She would read with him and do everything she could to get the role. That was what she needed to focus on. In one day’s time she would be in Venice, preparing to meet Walter Juhasz.

  7

  Venice was like a fairy tale, with the thick February fog hovering over the Grand Canal. They flew from Berlin to Marco Polo Airport on Steven’s plane, and to Palazzo Mastrototaro by private motorboat. Steven greeted the grizzled captain with enthusiasm and introduced him as Giorgio.

  They sat inside the boat because it was so cold and windy. As they made their way through the lagoon, Steven pointed out the island of Murano and the legendary Harry’s Bar. The palazzi were pink and decayed. Maddy was excited to see the city, which she knew only from movies. In film, Venice always represented love, death, or both. She could see why: It was a city of decay.

  “Venice is ‘the most beautiful of tombs,’ ” Steven said, as though reading her mind. “Henry James wrote that. He was more astute on this city than anyone else.” It was a little pretentious, but his passion seemed genuine.

  “Henry James is Steven’s favorite writer,” Bridget said. “Bores the fuck out of me. Some of it’s okay, but mostly, I’m like, skip, skip, skip.”

  “How’d you get into Henry James?” Maddy asked Steven.

  “I was in my twenties. A friend gave me a copy of The Ambassadors, and I went crazy for it. That’s my favorite of all of his novels. Since then I’ve read everything he wrote.”

  “All I’ve read is The Heiress, for grad school, plus Washington Square. What should I read next?”

  “Definitely The Portrait of a Lady. You in particular would like that book.”

  They coasted to a stop in front of a grand yellow-white building, its windows shaped like suns. Young, handsome butlers collected their luggage as Steven greeted them in Italian. Everyone seemed happy to see him, as in a scene from a Victorian costume drama where all the servants loved the masters. They went up the stone stairs to the door.

  “Would you like a tour?” Steven asked Maddy inside, after Bridget disappeared to make some phone calls. Maddy was overcome by the majesty of the palazzo but also found it spooky. She nodded.

  “This is the pianterréno,” Steven said, “but it’s really the cellar.” They climbed a flight of wide marble stairs to a spacious main room. “This is the mezzanine, where the kitchen is, and the servants’ apartments. I’ve converted some of them to guest rooms, because most of my staff doesn’t live here.”

  They climbed another flight. In the wide hallways, colorful chandeliers hung from beamed ceilings. It was glittery and otherworldly. The walls were done in marigold. “The piano nobile,” he said, “where the noblemen lived.” He led her down a wide hall to an enormous ballroom with marble columns.

  “Do you have parties here?” she asked.

  “I’m having one tonight.”

  “Who’s coming?” she asked, getting excited despite herself. As anxious as she was about the audition, there was something magical about a party at a private Venetian palazzo.

  “A cross section. Some writers, some painters, some actors. You’ll enjoy it.”

  They left the ballroom, and he showed her a library with bookcases containing a mix of bound first editions of English classics, including several volumes of Henry James, and hardcovers of 1960s and 1970s American novels. He offered her a black copy of Portrait whose pages were so thin she had no idea how she’d be able to hold them between her fingers. The walls were covered with monochromatic modern paintings and photographs, a lot of squares and lines, no people. She approached one of them. “You like that?” he asked from behind her.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s by Ed Ruscha.” He pronounced it “RooSHAY.” When she had seen the name in print, she had always read it as “ROOSH-a.” She was embarrassed by her mistake.

  “Are you a serious art collector?” she asked, pivoting around.

  “I would never call myself a collector,” he said. “I just know what I like. Why don’t you unpack, and then we can go to L’Accademia? I always visit La Tempesta on my first day.”

  Her bedroom had an adjoining living room. A fire roared in the fireplace. She had brought the Marchesa from Berlin and hung it in the closet. Bridget had not asked for it back. It might be the most beautiful piece that Maddy ever owned, and she felt it was her duty to keep it, for if she and Dan ever had a daughter.

  Out the window was a private garden that she imagined was resplendent in summer. Her father and mother had honeymooned in Venice. She had seen pictures in their album. They had probably passed this very palazzo, maybe posed in front of it for a photo. And now she was inside it. She imagined her father watching her from up above. (She always imagined him looking down on her, even though he had been a secular humanist who didn’t believe in God or heaven.) He would want her to soak up everything, the fog on the canal, the cold air, the Academy. She would soak it up, for him. She had to appreciate everything wonderful that happened to her.

  Her theatrical adventures had been thrilling to him, the quirky film actor who came backstage to compliment her after a production of the dreamer examines his pillow or the famous guest lecturers at The New School. He salivated for all the details, and she relished sharing them. He had been practical so she could be impractical, and because she was impractical, she was here.

  Giorgio, the captain, was waiting in front with the motorboat. Bridget was busy, Steven said, so he and Maddy took off on their own. The Academy was only a short ride. No doubt they could have walked, but she guessed that Steven wanted her to experience the water.

  As they entered the Academy, she noticed a few American tourists. They recognized Steven and whispered to each other. He walked past them casually. She waited to see if they would swarm him for autographs, but they watched from afar, pointing and gesturing. He acted like he wasn�
��t aware of it, but he had to be aware, he had to be used to this, it was his life.

  La Tempesta by Giorgione was a startling, confusing image. A naked woman breast-fed her baby. The baby looked one way; the woman looked at the viewer. To the woman’s right, at a distance, a dandyish man stared at her, leaning on a staff. Behind them were a white city and a bolt of lightning in the midst of clouds. “What do you make of it?” Steven asked.

  She was struck by the expressive sexuality in the work. The Peeping Tom. The dark woods. “There’s a lot going on,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Nothing is as it seems. A Madonna who is not a Madonna. A voyeur whom she may or may not know is spying. It’s quintessentially Venetian.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because everything about Venice is a trick.” As Maddy stared at the painting, Steven glanced at her to observe her reaction. She felt self-conscious being watched, and then he was saying something: “In Berlin . . . in my suite . . .”

  “Yes?” She stared at the painting, unable to face him.

  “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.” She turned. So he was admitting there had been something for a moment. It was a relief to know she hadn’t imagined it.

  “It’s okay.” She didn’t want to talk too much about it. If she did, it would be more awkward, and she didn’t want to sully her chances of booking Husbandry. “I was just—confused.” He nodded and turned, moving swiftly toward the next gallery.

  Back at Palazzo Mastrototaro, she sat in her living room and reread the Husbandry script, trying to unlock Ellie. Maddy wanted to make the character bolder and braver than she seemed on the page. She remembered a mantra from school: “Be interested, not interesting.” It was about the importance of listening, not doing. With Ellie, Maddy felt the key was to play not the lack of sex or the boredom, but the interest in Paul. Ellie had to come alive when she was with him.

  She was so engrossed in the script that when her phone rang, she jumped. “I miss you so much,” Dan said.

  “Oh God, I miss you, too. I can’t believe I’m in Venice without you.”

  “So you made it.”

  “Yeah, we got here a couple hours ago.” She didn’t want to tell him she had gone to the Academy with Steven alone. It didn’t sound right. “I wish you were here with me.” She wanted him nearby, so she could remember everything she loved about him.

  There was a knock on her door. “Hold on a second,” she said, “there’s someone at the d—”

  When she pulled it open, she was face-to-face with Dan, his skin smudged and sweaty, a duffel bag slung over his chest. “What’s going on?” she cried out, kissing him. “How did you get here?”

  “I flew. Just like you did. Probably not as nice a plane, though.”

  “But how did you find the palazzo?”

  “I went online to find the address, and when I got here, I said I was your boyfriend, and one of the guys got Steven. He was really cool about it.”

  She kissed him again. The handholding in Berlin and Steven’s strange looks were meaningless now. Dan would stay for her audition, help her prepare. They were “partners on screen and in life,” read the headline of a blog piece about them that had come out during Mile’s End.

  He wanted to take a bath. She went into the bathroom with him. Matching marble columns connected the ceiling to the tub and on one wall was a framed etching of an egg.

  “What made you decide to come here all of a sudden?” she asked from the tub ledge, stroking his hair.

  “I missed you, and I just didn’t see the point in staying in Brooklyn. We can write here. I quit the bar. I don’t need it anymore. I’m a director now.”

  She climbed into the bath with him. Held his cock in her hand. It was like the finger of a musical man. Pale and long. It stiffened in the water.

  She soaped his body, massaged him. They kissed and then rose, wet, moving to the bed. Their sex at Mile’s End had been strange, not connected. Now he was present and she was, too. He got on top of her. She had a fantasy of Steven taking her on the window seat of his suite in the Hotel Concorde and pushing her legs up into the air. She imagined the cleft in his chin and the feel of his stubble as it rubbed against her mouth, turning it raw.

  When she came, she cried out loudly. Dan came soon after. “That was intense,” he said.

  He dozed for a few minutes and then woke up and said he was wired. “I want you to read this,” she said, handing him the Husbandry script.

  She moved around the room anxiously, unpacking his things, while he read it on the couch. When he finished, he breathed in deeply through his nose and closed the script. She darted over and sat next to him. “So?”

  “It’s really good,” he said.

  “Do you really think so? I know the language is poetic, and it’s not a real American city. You don’t think it’s too . . . Euro? Pretentious?”

  “It’s sexy, it’s dark, it’s Juhasz’s European take on an American marriage. He’s going to turn this small town into a horror show.”

  “So you think I should read?”

  “Of course you should. You’re going to nail this. You have that combination of sadness and raw sexuality.” He bit her earlobe playfully.

  “I feel like I get this character. But Juhasz might hate me.”

  “He already loved I Used to Know Her. Just do what you always do. Prepare, be confident, and show him who you are.” He kissed her. There was an ornate mirror across the room, and in it she could see them nuzzling.

  “How do you think I would look with a shag?” she asked, angling her head so she could better see her reflection.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  In the library Steven was lying on a couch, his head facing away from Bridget as though she were his shrink. She was in a dark blue armchair. The light from the canal made patterns on the ceiling.

  She had to keep Steven on task. Focused on the future and not the present.

  The boyfriend had been an unexpected hitch in the plan. It took balls to crash at Steven Weller’s palazzo. Maddy and Dan had come down for a late lunch, both with wet hair. Steven had been gracious with Dan, asking about his flight, the room. Now the couple had gone on a walk, “exploring the town.”

  “Maybe she’s too complicated,” Steven said. In Berlin, in his suite, he had been beguiled by Maddy, certain she was the one they’d been looking for. The frisson between them would enliven the project. But now the boyfriend was here, and he felt as though he were running a youth hostel.

  “It’s good that she’s complicated,” Bridget said. “We already know that not just any pretty face will do. You need a costar who can be an equal.”

  “He’s probably read the script. All the sex scenes. It could be a problem for him.”

  “He went to NYU! He’s not a Mormon! You’re forgetting the sex scene in his movie.”

  “Even if he encourages her to do this, I’m not sure I feel the requisite . . . passion for her. I need to feel that the girl is the only one who could possibly play the part.” He sat up and adjusted a stack of architectural and art books on the table so they were lined up perfectly. One was a study of eighteenth-century German coins.

  Bridget crossed her left leg over her right so her body was facing him, and bounced her foot up and down slowly. “I know I don’t usually talk to you this way,” she said, “but we’ve been in each other’s lives a very long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I have to—I’m frustrated with the way you’re handling all this. I watched you fight so hard to do The Widower, and I don’t know what happened to that spirit. Don’t you want this to happen?”

  “I’m not sure. My enthusiasm has waned.”

  “Why give up now?”

  “This has been a long process, and I’m tired.”

  “And now it’s going to
pay off, all the work we’ve done to get here. You’ve been persuasive. She wants to do this. I saw the way you two connected on the patio.” He glanced at her sharply. “You know I see everything. Now stop. You cannot be so fear-based.”

  “You’re forgetting that I’m the one who has to work with her.”

  “I’ll be working with her, too. And she is right for it. You’ve been doing such a good job. Let me do mine.”

  “What can you do about this situation?”

  “Well, I was thinking.” She had a vein that ran down the center of her forehead that throbbed when she was excited. With age, it had gotten bluer. “Dan is such a skilled director, particularly with female-friendly material. That was an unusual film he made.”

  “And?”

  “He’s responsible. Obviously professional. Well trained. He wouldn’t need to learn on the job.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Valentine. My film in Bulgaria. They’ve been having so many problems. Patrick Fitzsimmons is a disaster. It’s a serious love story, and I’m getting reports that this guy has no facility with actors. The cast is miserable. And Dan wants to work. I want to go out on a limb for him, the way I always do for people I care about.”

  There was a kind of love you could feel for your manager that surpassed even the love of a child for his parents. “He does want to work,” Steven said, smoothing the jacket of one of the art books and examining his palm for dust. None.

  “I want to help the boy. I like matching talented people with important projects.”

  “Of course you do,” he said, patting her on the knee. “It’s what you do for a living.”

  “It’s more than a living. It’s who I am.”

  For the party Maddy chose a black wool boatneck dress. Dressy but not too much. She wanted to be herself. Dan had noticed the Marchesa in the closet and fingered it, wolf-whistling. “This must have cost ten thousand dollars,” he said. “More.”

  “You know rich people get everything for nothing,” she said. “I’m sure they gave it to Bridget for free.”