The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Juhasz,” she said.

  “What did you think of my script?” He had a mild Hungarian accent and a higher voice than she had imagined.

  “Extremely gripping. Thank you for writing such a rich female character.”

  “I am sorry I couldn’t get it in shape before Berlin, but I hate Berlin anyway. Venice is a much more scenic place to meet.”

  “Well, I’m honored to have a chance to read for you.”

  “I have a terrible track record with women in real life, but not in my films. Perhaps it is because in my scripts, the women cannot talk back to me.” She wasn’t sure she liked this and said nothing. He slapped his thighs and said, “I can see that you are ready to work. Let us begin.”

  There was a digital camera set up on a tripod in the center of the gigantic room. Juhasz and Steven sat in two chairs behind the camera, and Maddy sat in the straight-backed wooden chair facing it. Steven had a copy of the script in his lap. “You two will do the Louis-Ellie scene in the car,” Juhasz said, fiddling with the camera. “Steven, you can begin with ‘You look tired.’ ” Maddy had the pages on one knee for safekeeping, just in case she drew a blank. “Whenever you’re ready,” Juhasz said.

  A red light was glaring at her. She breathed in a few times, then nodded slightly at Steven to let him know she was ready. In the scene, Louis tells Ellie he’s disappointed in her because she has stopped putting effort into her appearance, and she tells him she no longer respects him.

  Steven read in a flat tone—maybe he was trying to be neutral—that made it hard for Maddy to know how to play her response. The scene culminated in a short monologue from Ellie: “I was a possession. You wanted to show me off. To add me to your collection. You’re angry because you can’t do that anymore.” She looked up at Juhasz. The red light went off.

  “Excellent,” Juhasz said. “Let’s move on to the scene after Ellie and Paul make love for the first time. Just the monologue. Since Billy Peck is not here with us.”

  “You don’t want us to do the scene again? You don’t want to see it any other way?” She had come all this way for one take. Maybe he had hated her and didn’t see the point in wasting more time.

  “I liked your choices in the scene. I wanted to get a sense of the chemistry between you and Mr. Weller. Now, for this monologue, we need to feel that Ellie is constantly afraid of the feelings. I want you to show me the vulnerability. She is almost like a child. Like Laura in The Glass Menagerie. Start with ‘The sky is so dark.’ Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Good,” said Juhasz, when she finished. “Now I want you to take it again from the top, and this time play the grief and not the euphoria. I see that you can play the high of the new feelings. Now I want to see that you can play the pain.”

  She was relieved to get some direction. She loved the way you could transform the meaning of a scene with how you played it. She tried the monologue again. By the end, she was crying. She had learned to do it in school, with relaxation and breath work. She hoped the tears would make him think she was a professional, but then feared it had been too show-offy.

  Juhasz came toward her. She thought he might hug her or hit her. He opened and closed his fists by the sides of his face like a Bob Fosse dancer. Was he rendering his verdict? Had she been cast or not? In New York they just said “Thanks so much,” but he seemed to be communicating something of great importance without words. She tried to see Steven’s face, but it was blocked by the camera.

  “Shall we eat?” Juhasz finally asked.

  She had no idea if this meant she had booked it or if she would find out in a few days that she hadn’t. Maybe he would call Bridget, and Bridget would call her. She was supposed to fly back to New York in the morning and couldn’t face the possibility that she might go home not knowing if Ellie was hers.

  “Absolutely,” Maddy said, pretending everything that had happened so far was ordinary, that she went on auditions this strange all the time. “I’m famished.”

  The boat trip was cold and quiet. Steven had said their destination was a surprise. They rode about forty minutes before Giorgio docked the boat. “Welcome to Torcello,” Steven said. “This was the original Venice. It was wiped out by malaria. Now almost no one lives here year-round.” He pointed out a small cathedral. “Santa Fosca.”

  They walked underneath a green awning into a yellow building. Inside was a warm-toned room with low ceilings and a fireplace. At their table, the waiter brought menus that said LOCANDA CIPRIANI. “Steven knows it’s one of my favorite restaurants in all of Italy,” Juhasz said. “Many luminaries have dined here, Kim Novak and Charlie Chaplin. Most famous was Ernest Hemingway. This was his inspiration for Across the River and Into the Trees. Widely considered his biggest failure.” Maddy giggled. “Even so,” he went on, “I would rather have a Hemingwayesque failure than a Juhaszian success.”

  Soon there was food on the table: the famous carpaccio; risotto alla Torcellana; and lagoon shrimps. Steven had ordered Prosecco for all three of them, and though she was wary of getting tipsy, she liked it as much as she had at Steven’s party.

  “Do you mind if I ask what inspired the screenplay?” she asked Juhasz, hoping he would give some indication as to whether he had cast her.

  “As I age, I keep returning to the subject of women. And jealousy. It is the most destructive of human emotions because it has no utility.” He had to be talking about his first wife, who had made him so jealous that he’d left the country.

  “I disagree that it has no utility,” Maddy said. “It crystallizes feeling.”

  “For whom?” Steven asked across the table.

  “Well, both people. I was thinking of the Bardot character in Contempt. To me, it’s about a relationship that ends because the man wasn’t possessive enough. A woman needs to know she is wanted.”

  “And what about your boyfriend?” Juhasz asked. “Is he a jealous man?”

  “How do you know I have a boyfriend?”

  “He directed that Vermont movie, no? If he were a jealous man, he would not have abandoned his girlfriend in a palazzo of a major motion picture star, and taken her matronly chaperone along with him.” Maddy was surprised that Juhasz knew so much about the situation.

  “Dan wants me to succeed,” she said. “He believes in me.”

  “I feel the film is less about jealousy than triangles,” Steven interrupted cheerfully. “Louis loves Ellie even though he doesn’t know how to make her happy. Ellie loves Paul. And Paul, in a certain way, loves his brother. He wants the approval of his brother but can’t figure out how to live in the world. The triangle is a really interesting place of human interaction.”

  “I love triangles,” Juhasz said. “The three of us are a triangle right now.”

  “How so?” Maddy asked.

  “Mr. Weller needs me to legitimize him, I need you to challenge him, and you need him to make love to you.”

  Maddy blushed. She was struck silent, momentarily, by the accusation, and could not summon the words to protest. How had Juhasz gotten this in his head? Had Steven said something? Was her attraction so obvious?

  She realized she had focused so much on the “make love” part of the sentence that she hadn’t paid attention to the rest: I need you to challenge him.

  “Mr. Juhasz,” she said, “what did you mean about challenging Steven?”

  “I want your Ellie to really draw out the best in him.”

  “I have a callback?”

  Juhasz looked at Steven, his mouth wide and delighted, and back at Maddy. “You have the part. You did not know?”

  “How would I know? You never said it.” She was so relieved, she wanted to cry.

  “I am sorry, my darling,” Juhasz said, patting her hand. “I thought it was clear this was a celebratory meal. We’ve read many major actresses for Ellie, but none of them was right
.” Maddy got a strange feeling when he said it, as though her Prosecco had been drugged. “The role is yours. Congratulations.”

  She could feel herself floating to the ceiling of Locanda Cipriani and over the island of Torcello, above the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, who was cheering as if at a boxing match.

  She had gotten it. A real, legitimate feature role, shooting with one of the greatest living directors opposite a Hollywood icon. And she was the lead. It was Ellie’s movie more than Louis’s or Paul’s. If her Jury Prize had been the equivalent of putting her foot on the pedal, now she had pressed it down.

  The men held up their glasses by the stems. “To the birth of new talent,” said Juhasz.

  “To collaboration,” said Steven, looking at Maddy.

  8

  Maddy was on the stairs of the palazzo. Juhasz had retired to his room, and she had started up to her bedroom to call Dan when Steven, tending to the fire, said, “Stay with me a little.”

  “I was going to make a phone call.”

  “Not even a few minutes?”

  She came down a few steps. Sat next to him on the couch. She kept flashing back to the moment when Juhasz had said, And you need him to make love to you. It was embarrassing that he had said it, out in the open.

  Steven rang a bell, and Vito brought two glasses of a dark brown liquid. “Cynar,” Steven said, moving toward her. “It’s made from artichoke.”

  She sipped. “I like it.” They sat in silence, watching the flames. “This has been the oddest evening,” she said. “I feel like Walter’s going to come down those stairs any minute, and I’ll find out I was on a candid-camera show.”

  “I told you he would love you.”

  “I never thought this would happen. Any of this, not Mile’s End or this. Until now, the biggest job I’d gotten was a Foxborough revival of Barefoot in the Park.”

  “Pay attention to what you’re feeling right now. You’re so open. Try to remember this moment.”

  He was close, his face inches from hers. She could smell the Cynar on his breath. His eyes were gleaming. The light on the irises, the way they always seemed alive, no matter what emotion he was playing. Steven had an abundance of personhood. This was why he was successful. He lived too fully not to do so on screen.

  “I wanted to be alone with you tonight,” he said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t possible.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she said carefully.

  “I wanted to take you around the island. Show you the Basilica. I love being alone with you. You make me selfish. When I saw you at that party at Mile’s End, it was clear.”

  She saw her hand trembling before her face. “What party?”

  “Opening night. I knew I would fall in love with you.” So he had been looking at her. She hadn’t imagined it. She had been strapped into a roller coaster and the car had started to move. She could hear the irreversible clacking on the tracks. “The past couple of years, I’ve had a feeling something was about to happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was, but I was waiting. When I saw you, I understood that you were what I’d been waiting for.”

  His breath was hot as he leaned in and kissed her. She had never been kissed like this. His lips were soft but deft. And then he was on his knees, his body between her legs, his strong arms moving up and down her back. She touched the hair on the back of his head, so much softer than it looked from far away. The kiss went on through entire decades of cinema: She was every actress who had ever kissed Steven Weller in a movie, and she was Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth, and the kiss was nothing like the ho-hum kisses Dan had given her lately; it had personality and confidence, and she offered her whole mouth, her self, to him.

  When she finally opened her eyes, he was scooping her up without a grunt. He carried her up the grand marble stairs.

  His bedroom was dim and huge. On the bed, she could feel his hardness against her and it thrilled her, his desire for her. She had done this to him.

  He kissed her for a long time, moving above her. She craved life and Steven was life and she would be doing this even if Dan had not left for Bulgaria, even if he were sleeping in her bedroom in the palazzo right now.

  She felt powerless. She was Steven’s. She had been avoiding this truth since he looked at her at the Entertainer, but now it was unavoidable. He had enraptured her with his mind and his notorious grin and she was as unable to resist him as the millions of American women who had tuned in on Thursday nights to see him arch his eyebrow in close-ups or who had cheered in cineplexes when he appeared shirtless from the heat in his Louisiana law office.

  He moved his mouth down her body, sighing loudly when he unclasped her bra and her breasts came free. It defied rationality that a man with the undoubted sexual experience of Steven Weller could caress her body with an expression of such wonder. He moved his hand on her belly and hip bones. His mouth was on her, what was he doing, fingers inside and wetness, and she was coming. His pants were off and his nakedness rubbed against hers. There was a question in the air and she said, “I’m on the pill,” and with that she took him in. Things were as they were supposed to be, there was nothing between them. She was not making love to a movie star, there was no world but this, it was only Maddy and Steven, not Steven Weller but Steven. As he rocked, he hit a place deep within her, and they were like this for how long she couldn’t guess because there was no time, there was nothing, there was no room and no place, just them.

  She was coming again and he kept moving and his warmth was inside her and he kissed her as she cried out, and made a strange noise, touching her tongue. He would never soften, she was made to have him inside her. Then his expression changed, it didn’t cool, exactly, but he became separate again, and she felt the tragedy of the moment being over and he was out, examining her features, moving his finger along her mole.

  It was too much for her that it was over, and she cried and was embarrassed by this, and he took her nipple in his mouth and she had to have him and they were turned this way and that. This was something she had never liked, she found it confusing, too much at once to be wanted and wanter, receiver and giver, but this seemed natural and soon he was very hard. This time his orgasm in her mouth brought on hers, his taste in her so thrilling and illicit that it set off an eruption. She stroked it and it shrank. He moved so his face was near hers, and this time she didn’t cry, because he would be in her again many other days and nights. There was no need to rush.

  And when he said, “Be with me,” she knew he wasn’t asking her to make love again. He was asking her to be his, and there was no question in her mind that she would.

  She was with him now, and she would be with him, here in Venice or Los Angeles, wherever he wanted, he could take her anywhere and she would go, because the sex was the punctuation for the feelings she’d had since he first looked at her from across the room at the festival. She was his.

  In the morning, when a text came from Dan, three words, “How was it?,” she did not hesitate before using her thumbs to type out three of her own: “I’m leaving you.”

  Act Two

  1

  Maddy and Steven stayed in Venice another week, making love, eating in his bedroom, and occasionally seeing the town. Dan called her several times a day to beg her to change her mind. They had brief, tortured conversations in which he alternated between screaming and crying. He said Steven was using her because he was gay, that he didn’t love her and never would. Steven told her not to answer the calls, but she couldn’t just turn her back on the man she had been with for three years, a man she still loved, even if she could no longer envision a life with anyone but Steven. She told Dan that Steven wasn’t gay, but she knew it would hurt him too much to learn how she knew it: Steven made love to her in a way no man ever had.

  Soon Dan changed tactics, sending long emails about her opportunism and duplicity. He ca
lled her “a shallow whore.” He said all she had ever cared about was fame. She wanted to scream back that no one who cared about fame would pursue theater, but he wasn’t being rational; there was no point. The emails grew so abusive that she had to block him, email and phone, which made her feel worse.

  When Steven had to return to L.A. to shoot a film, they first flew to New York and checked in to the Lowell so she could have a day to gather her things. When Steven came to the apartment on South Portland with her, a few guys on a stoop recognized him and made him pose for pictures. As professional packers separated her things from Dan’s and boxed them up, she took her last glimpse at the posters of Dan’s student films and her Samuel French plays, their stained Mr. Coffee, the IKEA spice rack, wondering if she would ever see them again.

  She was reminded of those fevered weeks when Dan wrote I Used to Know Her and she had felt proud. Even after they’d gotten into Mile’s End, he hadn’t been that person. Brooding, selfish, and phony—and then he had gone off to do The Valentine. Maybe someday he would remember who he was.

  Before she took off on Steven’s plane, she went with Irina to an Indian place in the East Village that they used to frequent. Irina sat with an expression of disbelief mixed with dubiousness as Maddy spilled every detail, from the slow attraction to the audition and the first night together at the palazzo.

  “I know I sound like the dumbest girl in the universe,” Maddy said, looking down at her food, “because he’s famous and old and he’s dated a lot. But I don’t care. I want to be with him no matter what.”

  “I thought you liked ’em poor and skinny.”

  “So did I.”

  “Are you guys going to have a live-in maid?”

  Maddy laughed and shook her head. “He has housekeepers but no live-ins. Except the cook.” He had told her he employed a private half-German chef named Annette Kohl, who had gone to Le Cordon Bleu.