by Amy Sohn
“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.
She walked slowly back to the table so her breathing would return to normal by the time she arrived, but when she reached for her wineglass, she saw that her hand was shaking. “Everything okay?” Steven whispered, squeezing her tightly.
“Fine,” she said, and took a large swig.
When they got back to Hancock Park, Steven went to bed, and Maddy went into her study and closed the door. On her laptop, she began to type: “Alex Duse Repertory Company Steven Woyceck.” Without pressing enter, she moved the mouse over to the images tab. Then she stopped herself.
Even if Alex from the theater was a man, what did it matter? Steven had been in the company in the mid-’80s. Even if there was some man back then, it didn’t mean they were in touch now. Steven had married her. He was capable of getting hard, fucking her, and ejaculating in her night after night. Why make herself paranoid? Julia had probably wanted her to do just this, had wanted to sully Maddy’s marriage because she was jealous.
He was sleeping when Maddy went back in the bedroom. He often got bone-tired after these balls and charity events, where he was always drinking whiskey, and fell asleep as soon as they returned. Sometimes they would make love in the morning, afte
r he had showered. He said he was more of a morning person.
She reached for him, wanting to feel close, to feel his body near hers. His skin grew warmer. She kissed his chest, his belly. Moved down below his navel and took him in her mouth. She felt it get big inside her, big because of what she was doing. She waited for him to stop her and pull her on top of him, but instead he held her hair and moaned and she let him, and as she bobbed above him, his eyes closed. She rose up and down and realized she was sore on her upper arm. She couldn’t figure out what it was from until she remembered that it was the spot Julia had grabbed.
In the morning, Steven left before she awoke. She had a late call time that day, ten A.M., a blessing because she wanted to be alone. She went down to the kitchen, drank a smoothie standing up, then went to his study. She had not gone in since before England, before the wedding, but she felt there was a connection between her talk with Julia and that open drawer. She darted in and shut the door swiftly behind her. The room was flooded with light; he had left the drapes open.
The key was still wedged in behind the photo of his mother, and Maddy’s fingers trembled as she used it to open the bottom desk drawer. Inside were the folders, but behind them, this time, was a wooden box. So there had been something that night he was talking on the phone. She shoved the folders forward with her hand and lifted the box. It had a treble clef painted on it. It was ugly and looked like the kind of thing he would laugh at if he saw it at a store.
She lifted the lid. Inside was a sterling silver man’s ring in the shape of a greyhound dog; a note on a napkin that said “Went to watch the sun rise”; and a weathered, glossy, three-by-five photo. It showed Steven and a handsome, tan, blond man, both in their twenties. They were carefree, the wind in their hair, and they were on Jo, she recognized immediately. The man was looking at the camera and Steven was looking at him, an arm draped casually around him. The date on the back said August 1986. She flipped it over. Steven’s eyes hypnotized her. Dancing and full. What kind of man named his boat after Jo Van Fleet?
She wondered if Steven thought of that hairless youthful body when he was in bed with her, that strong jaw, those noble cheeks. Maybe they were just friends, it was too hard to tell from a photo. Maybe she was connecting dots she wasn’t supposed to.
She put back the items, replaced the box in the drawer, closed and locked it, and stashed the key behind the photo. She went to one of the windows. She could see a hint of her reflection, the pool and the azalea bushes beyond. She stared at her face and said, “Don’t be homophobic.”
Of course the blond boy had been his lover. He had to be.
So long ago. It didn’t mean Steven was gay. Dan had done a circle jerk at Jewish summer camp where they raced to see who could come first; that was about as homo as you could get.
It would be unusual if Steven hadn’t had same-sex experiences. He was an actor, after all, and half the men in her grad school had been gay. But in bed in London, during that awful time, he had said, “It’s not my thing.”
She stepped away from the window to the middle of the room, imagining what it was like to work in here, read in here, think in here. To be Steven Weller. The Steven Weller who talked on the phone late at night to his staff, or maybe not his staff but exes and friends she had never met. The Steven Weller who read classic literature, or pretended to, who displayed books like trophies, none of them dog-eared or stained by use.
She stared at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The Henry James books were arranged alphabetically. She stopped at The Ambassadors, remembering the first boat ride in Venice when he had said it was his favorite book. She flipped open the cover, and the book opened to the title page. “Steve—Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. Love always, Alex.”
The room felt chilly, like a morgue. The phrase had sounded strange when he’d said it in their bed in Regent’s Park, but she had never asked him. If only she had started her James education with The Ambassadors and not The Portrait of a Lady. She would have recognized those words when he spoke them. And then she would have known.
Alex loved these words and Steven had recycled them to propose to her. It was Alex whom he loved, Alex whom he loved still, Alex to whom he had wanted to propose. Whether a man or a woman, the man in the photo or another, there was someone in Steven’s past whose love coursed through him and governed everything he did. Someone she could never replace, a Rebecca de Winter. She replaced the book on the shelf and fled from the room as though from a fire.
When Steven came home from the lot that night, she was by the pool. She wore a long beige cashmere sweater and held a du Maurier collection in her hand. She had bought it in an English-language bookshop in Paris on their honeymoon and had been reading it in small doses. She had started a story called “Split Second,” about a middle-aged widow who gets a feeling of foreboding as she’s eating her lunch. The woman goes out for a walk and almost gets run over by a van, and when she returns to her house there are other people living there.
The French doors opened, and she could hear his steps on the patio. She buried her nose in the book. He sat on the chaise next to her. Kissed her on the cheek.
“How was your day?” he asked, lacing his fingers through hers.
“Tell me about Alex,” she said, pulling her hand away. She would have to bluff a little.
“Alex who?” he said, his face betraying nothing.
“From the theater.”
“Where did you get this?” he asked. He seemed to be working hard to see just what she knew.
“Julia was at the ball. She said you used to go off with Alex.”
“The ball? I didn’t see her. What did she say to you? She was in an institution. You can’t trust a word out of her mouth.”
“She told me about Alex. So I know. He was at the Duse Rep, and there was something between you.”
She waited for him to correct her, say Alex from the theater was a woman, but he said nothing, only sighed, stood, and paced by the edge of the pool. Then his shoulders slumped and he straddled the chaise, facing the water.
“When I was in my mid-twenties . . .” He drew in a breath and started again. “When I was starting out in my career . . . there were a lot of gay men at the Duse. There was no line between work and fun. We were all passionate about what we did and about each other. Alex was in the company with me. I knew he was gay, and he knew I wasn’t. We were friends. I went to gay bars with him as a lark, and sometimes he came to straight bars with me, trying to guess which women I would hit on. He’d had a difficult childhood, too, and we talked about it. We were very close. And then one night we had been out late, drinking, and we were back at his apartment and . . . we slept together.”
She was almost relieved that he had finally told her; she was getting to it at last. All day she had heard the inscription in her head. The words he had taken from another lover and used on her. To seduce her. This was what shook her more than Alex’s gender: the idea that the proposal hadn’t been genuine, that she was a stand-in for someone else.
“Was he the one on the phone in your study?” she asked.
“I told you, it was Vito.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, you should. I don’t even know where Alex is these days.”
“How long did it go on?”
“It didn’t. It was just that one night. It was confusing. He understood that I was straight. That it could never be. It messed with our friendship. We didn’t speak for a while, but then we made up. After I married Julia, sometimes he and I would hang out. She thought I was still seeing him. I wasn’t. He was my friend.”
“In London I asked if you had been with men. And you said no.”
“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t get it. You’d— Most women think if a man has been with one man, he’s gay.”
“Are you?”
“No, Maddy.” He said it like sh
e was stupid. “Are you?”
“No!”
“You slept with a woman.”
“We made out a little! It was mostly kissing.”
“And you enjoyed it. And I didn’t judge you. You’re a hypocrite.”
“You lied to me, and now you’re calling me names?”
She raced up the lawn toward the house. He followed and pivoted her toward him roughly. “Maddy. It was only Alex. One night and one man. I’m not gay. The line between friendship and attraction—it’s—it can be complicated. You know that.”
She wondered where Alex was now, even if he wasn’t the one in the photo. Maybe he was dead of AIDS and Steven missed him. Or maybe she was being stupid to think any gay man in the ’80s must have died of AIDS.
He put his hands on her shoulders. “It was a youthful indiscretion. I was going to tell you about him. I was just afraid of how you would react. And now . . . I feel like I was right to be.”
“I went into your study,” she said. She waited for a lecture on the importance of privacy, the terrible invasive thing she had done, but he was listening, as though he understood that Julia had shaken her. “I was so upset last night. I felt like I didn’t know you. I went to your bookshelves, and I was thinking about how you love Henry James, and I took out The Ambassadors and there was an inscription . . . from Alex.”
“Yes, yes. A quote from the novel.”
“But you used that quote when you proposed to me!”
“Because I believe it. Alex did, too. I want to be someone who embraces life. For so many years I’ve been about work, and that’s something I’ve wanted to change. To soak up the world, to appreciate my good fortune. Even though he gave me the book, we had discussed those lines before that, the words Strether speaks. You should read it, you would like it. When Alex wrote that, he knew the quote had meaning to me, and it still does. It’s not about him, it’s about Henry James.”
