The Actress: A Novel (32 page)

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.

M
addy 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?”

W
hen 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.”

She slid down the edge of the bed so she was sitting on the floor, clasping her knees to her chest. “And after Wilmington?” she asked hollowly.

“On and off. There was a period where he was angry, we didn’t speak.”

“Where did you do it?”

“Always the boat. It was the only place he felt safe. Even after the thing with Christian.” Maddy’s throat began to close, and she opened her mouth to get more air.

“The thing with Christian.”

“You didn’t think it was a lie, did you? He made the mistake of getting involved with someone outside of the industry. I told him he was crazy to keep the boat after that, but he said he could trust the guys at the new club. He had them taking even more money than the ones before. He loved that I wanted discretion, too. He would say to me, ‘We’re the same. That’s why this works. We both need privacy. I don’t have to explain it to you.’ ”

He adjusted the towel around his waist. This half-clothed male body in their guesthouse, using their water, their shower, drinking their coffee.
He wouldn’t put on a shirt for her even as he was assassinating her marriage. “Does he want to be with you?” she asked hollowly.

“He doesn’t know what he wants. Sometimes he liked to fantasize that things could be different. He said he wanted to divorce you and be out in the open with me.” She didn’t believe that he would speak that way about her, that he would denigrate her to Ryan. She wondered if he was making it up. “But then he would get worried about the Tommy movies. He’ll never come out, but he likes to play with the idea that he could. He won’t change. Only someone really afraid would go to the lengths he does.”

“What do you mean,
the lengths he does
?”

“To get married, to throw the scent off.”

“Is that how he speaks of our marriage? Throwing the scent off? Is that something he said?”

Ryan turned his back and ran his finger down the edge of the countertop. “I don’t think we should talk anymore.”

“I can handle it. Keep going.”

His back still turned, he said, “Sometimes he said he loved you, but sex with you . . . disgusted him.”

He had to be lying. Steven wouldn’t say that about her, no matter how confused he was, no matter how angry.

“You’re a liar,” she said.

“Whatever,” Ryan said.

He went to the Roman shades and rolled them up. It had taken Maddy a long time to figure out how to raise Roman shades, but he already knew. She had no interest in window treatments and decor. She had wanted to put her stamp on this house, but in the end, it wasn’t about aesthetics. It was about wanting Steven to hear her. She had never cared about couture or designer furniture or modern art. But Steven did, he loved decorating the home, it was part of his identity. She imagined the two men snuggling on the bed in the main cabin and fingering the collars of each other’s shirt.

“Why were you two fighting last night?” she asked.

“He asked if there was someone else. I said yes, because I started seeing someone. I never lied to him about other guys before, but last night he just went crazy. I said it was ludicrous to expect me to be faithful when
he was married to you. He said, ‘What if I left Maddy? Would that change anything?’ I said no. And he lost it and drove off.”

She stood up. Her legs were weak, like after the C-section, after the spinal wore off. She pushed open the door. “I’m going for a drive,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour, and when I come in, I don’t want any trace of you.”

She got in the Prius and took the streets to the 101 headed northwest, not sure where she was going. Just wanting to drive fast. She had loved Steven. She didn’t want to believe it was all a lie. There was a chance that Ryan was making up the story. Maybe he was in love with Steven, and the things he said about Steven wanting a divorce—lies, revenge.

But when he spoke, it felt like the truth. And more upsetting than this affair, even, which seemed an affair of the heart, was that Ryan had probably been only one of many. Maddy and Steven had been separated physically almost half of the four years they had been married. Opportunity abounded. So easy. There could be dozens of lovers. Hundreds. Paid and not. And Ryan had said the Christian Bernard story was true. Her appearances, her testimonials, all a farce. Of course he had paid off Bernard to retract, maybe paid others over the years, others she didn’t know about because Steven had told her never to search their names.