The Actress: A Novel

by Amy Sohn

  She knew she could not stay with Steven, but every time she pictured leaving, she would think about Jake and feel trapped. Only a selfish mother kicked out the father when the child was this young. This tiny baby needed not only Maddy but Steven, too. How could she disrupt her young son’s life?

  It didn’t help her decision-making that Steven had turned out to be a doting dad. During the day, the three of them would go out together. Steven would carry Jake in the BabyBjörn, and they would go hiking or to a playground or the zoo. There would be photographers and people would smile and sometimes she could convince herself that they were happy. But they connected only over Jake.

  At home one night, she came in to find Steven making funny noises with his mouth as he read a board book to Jake in the nursery. The baby in his lap, Steven looked like a man who had never been quite so happy. As she stood there in the doorway, she worried not only that Jake preferred Steven, which was painful enough, but also the opposite. Jake was his miniature, his boy. Steven could feel love for him that he could never feel for Maddy, or maybe never had.

  That November, in the midst of awards season, The Moon and the Stars came out. Maddy watched a screener from bed while nursing Jake. It was excruciating to watch Kira, who put her own stamp on the role of Betty, and Maddy kept imagining the things she would have done differently.

  As Jake grew bigger, learned to walk, smile, laugh, and eat, Maddy’s mood begin to lift. She decided to go off the Zoloft. At first she was anxious about it, but she went down slowly and found she could sleep at night, and even fall back asleep, after she nursed him. They had let go of the baby nurse and hired a live-in Polish nanny named Lucia.

  She started to see a therapist named Dina Friedberg, who had been recommended to her by Dr. Baker. In her visits with Dina, Maddy talked a lot about the night Jake was born. She said she was certain that Steven and Ryan were lovers. She told her about Alex Pattison and the Christian Bernard story and her press blitz.

  “Maybe I deserve a husband who cheats on me,” Maddy said after confessing about the night she spent with Dan.

  “What do you mean?” Dina, who had bony cheeks and hair to her waist, asked from her boxy gray armchair.

  “Because I cheated on him.”

  “But didn’t you think he was betraying you before that night with Dan?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know if that makes it right, though.”

  In their sessions, Dina would try to pry out of Maddy what fidelity represented to her. And Maddy realized it mattered, it wasn’t nothing. She understood that some couples didn’t care, but when she had married Steven, she had believed in and expected his faithfulness. Even if she had been stupid to do so. And he knew she felt it was important. To her, fidelity was part and parcel of love. She had felt adrift because she was uncertain of his loyalty, and because of that she had gone to Dan, and it had been wrong, but she couldn’t undo it. Now she had to figure out whether to stay married.

  Slowly, she began to see the possibility of a future without Steven, though it would be impossible to do anything until Jake was more independent and she was physically back on her feet. She was still nursing him three to four times a day.

  Thinking about Pinhole and the prospect of someday playing Lane Cromwell, she hired a personal trainer and nutritionist. The pounds fell off. She began to get strong.

  Zack had sent out the screenplay, and a New York–based production company, Reckless Entertainment, fell in love with it. The head of the company, Christine Nabors, had been in indie film since the ’80s; she flew in to L.A. to discuss her ideas. Maddy, Zack, and Christine had a three-hour lunch meeting at a new Asian restaurant in a condo building in Century City, and Maddy was so taken by Christine’s enthusiasm and track record that she decided to go with her without sending it anywhere else. Christine began sending Maddy director reels to watch, and though she took two meetings, she didn’t quite click with either director.

  One Saturday in December, when Lucia had the day off, Maddy went out for a walk with Jake, who was about seven months old. They returned to find a strange car in the driveway. The light in the guesthouse was on, and suddenly Ryan Costello came out, swept up the baby, and spun him around. “What are you doing here?” Maddy spat.

  “Steven didn’t tell you? My house in Malibu is being renovated, and he said I could crash here.”

  “No, he didn’t tell me.” Jake was crying out with glee. “That’s not good for babies,” she said, and whisked him away.

  Inside the house, she dialed Steven. The call went to voice mail. When he came in a few hours later, she said, “How could you let him stay here without asking me?”

  “I’m sorry. I meant to tell you. It’s just for a couple weeks. He needs a crash pad and—”

  “Ryan can afford to stay in a hotel.”

  “You’ve never liked him.”

  “No, I don’t like him. I thought I had already made it clear. I don’t want this man in our life.”

  “It’s not up to you who’s in my life,” he said, then went upstairs into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  That night Steven left and didn’t come home for dinner, and Ryan’s car was gone. Maddy ate early with Jake. She fell asleep for a few hours and was awakened by loud laughter. Out the window, she saw Ryan and Steven in the pool, hanging off the edge. They had whiskey glasses resting on the deck and Steven was saying, “And Brando was so broke, he had to hitchhike!”

  Ryan laughed and said, “You’re making that up.”

  “Read it in the memoir,” Steven said.

  Maddy went back to bed and put a pillow over her head. But she was too restless to stay still.

  When she went to the window again, the men had moved away from the edge. They were both in the water, and though they weren’t physically close, maybe five feet apart, she caught a glimpse of her husband’s face in the moonlight. She drew in her breath. His eyes were dancing. He was besotted. It was the way he looked at Alex in the photo.

  Steven had looked at her when he made love to her the first time. It was so obvious now, as it had been obvious in Wilmington. These men were lovers. They had been lovers on Jo when Jake was born, and they had been lovers in North Carolina before that. And maybe in between, even when Steven said they were no longer in touch. It could have been going on for two years.

  He had installed his lover in their guesthouse and was swimming with him in their pool. As though he no longer cared if she knew. As though they had an “understanding.” He wanted her to leave him or he believed she had known all along—or both.

  She let the curtain go and went into her walk-in. She moved her hand across the dresses that she had worn to the charity balls and premieres and openings and parties since she moved to L.A. Her fingers stopped at the red strapless Marchesa. She held it up against her body in the mirror. She had been so innocent in Berlin. She had believed she was Cinderella.

  To Steven it had all been a grand show. Maddy had never enchanted Steven. Only a man could. A Ryan Costello. An Alex Pattison. A Christian Bernard, who wasn’t some grifter but a young man Steven had trusted, who likely had turned on him because Steven had ended the affair. Edward must have known, and Flora, and Bridget, he probably told them the truth while he had lied to her. Why wouldn’t he? They were the team, and you had to be honest with your team.

  She wanted to be angry with Steven, but she was disgusted with herself for shutting her own eyes. She had loved him so much that she had made herself believe the lies. That had been her fault, not his. In school she had played Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible, and every night, when she had to convince John to sign the confession, she believed that he would, and thus would not hang. Every performance it came as a surprise to her that he had torn up the confession and would die. Her belief was so strong that each night the surprise felt real.

  It was the same with Steven: She had acted herself into denial.
It was because of her need for him. She wanted to be his more than she wanted him to be faithful. He had been selfish, but there was selfishness, too, in looking the other way. Her desire for him had been so great that she had been willing to accept a kind of lumpy half-love, flawed, temporal, and incomplete.

  She stared at her reflection in the mirror, the Marchesa against her neck, remembering her hand in his on the press line in front of the Berlinale Palast. There was no one like Steven, just as Julia had put it.

  She heard shouting and went back to the window. Ryan and Steven were having a fight. Moments before, that look of adoration, and now a lovers’ spat. She could hear “You’re a liar!” from Steven, pained and angry. She heard the words “narcissist” and “dilettante.” Ryan ran out of the pool area to the guesthouse with Steven chasing him. They disappeared inside and the door shut and she couldn’t hear anything anymore.

  Five minutes later, Steven came rushing out and got into the Mustang. There was a squeal as it left, and then she heard the hum of the gate opening.

  Jake cried from the nursery on the baby monitor. She went to his room. Lucia was already comforting him when she arrived, but she told her to go back to bed.

  Maddy took him out of the crib, sat in the glider, and nursed. “Shhh, shhh,” she said as she watched his head bobbing, his mouth taking her so hungrily. His cheeks moving as he suckled. Someone in the house was happy she was there.

  Maddy lay in bed a long time, waiting for Steven to come in, but by two in the morning he hadn’t returned. She got up and went into the study. “Professor Alex Pattison, Theater Arts, Los Angeles College.” She typed the address into her phone.

  In the morning, she arose to find that Steven’s Mustang was still gone. There was a light on in the guesthouse. In the living room, Lucia was playing blocks with Jake. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Maddy said, and got in her Prius.

  Professor Pattison worked in a low brick building. As she followed the corridor to his office, she felt an instinct to turn around and not come back.

  Outside the door, she could hear a man’s voice. It was deep and melodious: “And Bérenger is the only one who doesn’t think everyone should become a rhinoceros just because they can. He says, ‘I will not capitulate,’ and we get Ionesco’s ideas about the war.”

  A few minutes later, the door opened and a girl came out. She wore a scoop-necked black shirt and dark jeans with boots, the kind of thing Maddy used to wear to New School classes every day. She did a double take when she saw Maddy. Maddy smiled faintly and waited to knock till the girl was down the hall.

  “Come in.”

  He had a wooden desk and a gray leather chair facing it. Seeing her, he registered surprise and a hint of amusement.

  “Professor Pattison,” she said. “Could I speak with you? I’m Maddy Freed.”

  “I know who you are.” He gestured to the seat. She closed the door behind her. He wore a dark gray blazer with a gray collared shirt in a slightly lighter hue than the jacket. He eyed her evenly. He would have made a good poker player. She wondered if she was the first. Maybe there had been other visits like this, from other women, over the years. Or maybe Cady and all the rest knew, like Julia most likely had, and Maddy had been the only one delusional or narcissistic enough to convince herself that Steven Weller could ever love a woman.

  “I—I wanted to talk to you about Steven,” she said.

  “Amazing how easy it was to find me, right? Every once in a while an entertainment journalist comes knocking. I’ve gotten good at turning them away. Probably would have been harder to find me if I’d left L.A., but this happens to a lot of us midwestern boys who have a love of acting. We move out and never go home.”

  She took a deep breath and held his gaze. “Did I marry a fraud?”

  He clasped his hands together on his desk. “How can I answer that question?”

  “Is my husband gay?”

  “You know,” he said, gently rotating a paper-clip holder on his desk, “if you had asked me that two decades ago, I would have said yes. But who knows? I teach these kids, and they talk to me about their personal lives. I guess because I’ve always been open about my own. And it’s so fluid for them. They aren’t interested in labels. ‘Labels are for cans,’ they say. If they do try a name on for size, ‘queer’ or ‘dyke’ or ‘fag,’ they rip it off the next day. We were the opposite. We wore labels as a sign of pride. Because there was so much hate.”

  “Steven told me about the two of you. He said you were friends. And it got blurry. He said you slept together one night and went back to being friends,” Maddy said. Professor Pattison laughed. “It wasn’t once, was it?” she asked.

  “A lot more than that,” he said. “On and off for four years. It went on after his marriage to Julia.”

  So he had lied to Maddy even after she confronted him with Alex’s name. Of course it had been an affair. He had used Alex’s book, Alex’s quotation, to propose to her, and then lied about how serious it was. If he had told her, after the marriage, that he had been with a man on and off for four years, she would have . . .

  “He was so confused,” the professor continued. “He fell hard for her and wanted to believe that it meant, that he could . . . She found out. They had a fight and he told her. They split up. We got back together, but he was torn up by the divorce. It made him feel like a failure. Broken. Instead of asking himself why it didn’t work, he just wanted to be ‘normal’ all the more.”

  “I married a man who loves men,” she said. Her face was hot. It was crazy to have tracked down this man on the Internet, like an amateur private detective. But now she was here with him, with a stranger, Steven the glue between them.

  “I know I loved him,” Alex said slowly. “Did he love me? He wasn’t sure. We were so young. I can’t tell you who he is. Why would I presume to know? I’m not Gay Yoda.”

  “But you knew him. You knew Steven Woyceck. You have to help me. We have a son, he’s still an infant, and I have to—Steven says he’s not gay. But there’s a man in his life now and . . . I think he’s been deceiving me. Do you think I made a mistake?”

  “Are you happy in bed with him?”

  “Mostly. Yes.”

  Alex drummed his fingers on the desk and looked out the window. “It seems your problem is the same one we all have. You don’t know if you are truly loved. But does anyone? Do I know the secret thoughts and dreams of my partner, whom he sees in his mind when he closes his eyes in bed? Does he know how much it disgusts me to find the cap of the toothpaste off yet again, even though I have told him hundreds of times? To hear the clanging of his fork against his teeth as he eats his fusilli? We are all a little bit despised. Aren’t we? Alongside the need to be coupled is an equally compelling need to be left utterly alone.”

  “Did I make a mistake?”

  “Love is filled with mistakes, just varying degrees.” He rose to his feet. “I hope you find some answers. Whether that’s the same as being happy, I don’t know. Is that Gay Yoda enough for you?”

  When she returned, Steven’s Mustang still wasn’t there. She could hear the Rolling Stones blasting from the guesthouse. She opened the door and heard the shower running. She waited on the edge of the bed, imagining that they had made love in it, while she was sleeping, before they got in the pool and had their spat.

  The room was a mess; Ryan had books, clothes, and scripts strewn everywhere. She glanced at the titles: up-and-coming action films, all in the Steven Weller/Tommy Hall oeuvre. One day Ryan would be as successful as Steven.

  The bathroom door opened. Ryan was naked and rubbing his head with a towel. His penis was long and white, and it looked like he trimmed the hair around his balls.

  When he saw her, he jumped and covered himself. “What the fuck?” His torso had the familiar overdeveloped pectorals of many Hollywood stars. Had Steven touched this torso, had Steven kissed
Ryan’s neck the way he had kissed hers? Did Ryan turn him on in a way she didn’t? Had Steven been repulsed by her breasts, her softness, everything about her that made her a woman?

  Ryan went to the galley kitchen and started making a pot of coffee. “Does he love you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said dully.

  She hadn’t realized until now how exhausted she was. The deceiver wasn’t the only one who had to split in two. The deceived did, too.

  “Were you guys having sex the night Jake was born?” He stared at the coffeemaker. “Ryan. Steven’s not here. It’s you and me now. Please. Just tell me.”

  “Why should I?” he said, pivoting around. “What do I owe you?” With his lip curled out, he reminded her of Steven. The sneer. He had no interest in another person, in imagining what it might be like to be on the other side.

  “I know he was with a man when he was younger. And I think there have been others. A lot of them. Please just tell me to my face what’s going on between you.”

  The coffee made bubbling noises, and he poured the brown brew into a modernist mug by Eva Zeisel. Steven had picked all the stoneware for the guesthouse. Steven picked everything.

  Ryan held the mug between his hands, blew into the cup, and leaned against the cabinets, sipping. He looked like an ad in an interiors magazine. “Of course we were. It was why he wanted the radio off.”

  “And that’s why he left his phone. So no one could bother him.”

  “He’s crazy when it comes to the phones. Always has to check the bag, the pockets. Like I would take a photo and sell it to a magazine. Like I would do that to myself.”

  “When did it start? In Wilmington?”

  He hesitated and looked down into his mug. “It was weird at first. He thought I was straight. He was cautious. Then one night at the house, we got drunk. It was so easy. My house, his house. Two men. Practical jokers. He felt safe with me because we were doing a movie together and because of my reputation. Sometimes I crashed with him. The paparazzi don’t go to Wilmington to stake out homes. Not with all the cutbacks to the tabloid-magazine industry.”