In the living room, where Maddy finally found Dan, he was talking to Todd Lewitt about a tracking shot in The Widower and nodding at the answers the way Cady Pearce had nodded when Weller spoke. Maddy stood there silently, waiting for Dan to pause so she could tell him she had to talk to him, but there was never a pause. She noticed Zack enter the room, alone. She turned quickly to Dan and said, “We should be getting back,” but he shook his head.
The girl Zack had been with, now wearing a tube skirt and a sweatshirt with a print of a cat, came down a minute later, as if Zack had instructed her to delay. Zack went to the bar for more liqueur. Maddy caught herself staring at him, blushed, and turned away.
“I’m leaving,” she told Dan.
He nodded and said to Todd Lewitt, “I love Antonioni.”
She took the car back to the condo, and the driver said he would return to the party to get Dan. She went to the bathroom and rinsed her face.
And I’d like that. That look. Steven Weller seemed to have been flirting, but maybe he was playing elder statesman. Though the two weren’t mutually exclusive.
She lay on the bed and closed her eyes, but the room was spinning. She didn’t want to throw up. She paced in the living room and called Irina to tell her about Bridget, if not about Weller. It was two A.M. in New York, but Irina was a night owl. When the phone went to voice mail, Maddy hung up.
Sharoz would have advice about Bridget Ostrow. Sharoz took the Hollywood stuff in stride. She would be able to say whether Bridget Ostrow was legit or just a vanity manager for a famous man. Maddy glanced out the window at Sharoz and Kira’s condo. A light was on.
Kira opened the door in a cutoff Bad Brains T-shirt, a whiskey glass in her hand. She seemed to be weaving a little. “Hey, is Sharoz around?” Maddy asked.
“She’s at some party,” Kira said.
“Oh. Can you have her knock on my door if she comes back in the next half hour?”
“Yeah, sure.” Maddy turned unsteadily toward the door. “So how were the beautiful people?” Kira called behind her.
Dan had told Kira about the dinner invitation, and if she had been jealous, she had hidden it well. Now she seemed too tipsy to be cool. “It was a good party,” Maddy answered.
“And was the son there, the midget boy?”
“He’s not that short.”
“Oh my God, he is. I saw him in the theater for that first screening, and I was thinking how inappropriate it was that someone brought a child to our movie.”
Maddy didn’t know why she was knocking him. She was irritated with Kira for being haughty, for always undermining her. “The midget boy wants to work for me.”
“Of course he does. Did you say yes?”
“No. I don’t know what I’m going to do. You know, since you brought up the screenings, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’ve been so obnoxious at the Q and A’s.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kira said, her hand on her hip.
“Those comments about me being Dan’s girlfriend. You always find a way to work it in. Like I only got cast because we’re sleeping together.”
“I never said that. Is that why you think you got cast?”
“You imply it. And you’re so dismissive of my MFA. You were obnoxious during the shoot, but I never said anything because it was good for the movie. Now we’ve been lucky enough to make it here, and it’s like you have it in for me.”
“I don’t have it in for you, Maddy.”
Maddy wanted to scream. “Sure you do,” Maddy said. “You think I’m a snob.”
“God, I’ve never seen your cheeks this red except when you were doing that fucking in the movie.”
When Maddy reconstructed the moment later, it was like she was watching from a corner of the room. She shoved Kira hard, and Kira stumbled back a few steps and then strode toward her fast, like she was going to hit her. Instead, she put her face right up against Maddy’s and glared.
Without thinking about it or knowing why she was doing it, Maddy kissed her. Then she stepped back, shocked at herself and what she had done. Kira moved toward her, slowly, and touched her face. She kissed Maddy gently and with affection that seemed completely incompatible with the rudeness. Maddy’s tongue began to move in Kira’s mouth, and Kira’s hands were on Maddy’s back, pulling her closer. She could feel Kira’s breasts against her own, so much bigger than hers, these strange soft boobs in a place where until now she had encountered only hardness.
Kira was kissing her neck and her chin, and then she was unclasping Maddy’s bra and her hands were on her. Maddy cupped Kira’s breasts over the T-shirt, imagining the size and shape of her nipples. Kira lifted Maddy’s sweater and shirt over her head and went for the bra strap, and that was when Maddy realized this was happening. Dan would be home soon, wondering where she was. He might see the light on. She pulled away.
“I should go,” Maddy said. She picked up her sweater and began to put it on.
“Yeah, it’s really late.” She said it like Maddy had overstayed her welcome when only seconds ago, she had been kissing her.
Maddy felt both guilty and embarrassed. Now she had done it and she couldn’t undo it and it was her own fault, she had kissed first.
Dan didn’t get back to their condo for another hour, which gave Maddy time to shower and get into bed. It had been an otherworldly night. The dueling pitches from Bridget and Zack; then Zack with the girl; then Weller on the patio; then Kira. Maddy had never made out with a woman, not even kissed one. In the theater scene at Dartmouth, a lot of the women students got drunk and slept together, but at parties, when Maddy observed them drinking heavily and groping each other, aware that the boys were watching, it had seemed like an act. She didn’t want to do something like that just to turn on guys. Despite the occasional erotic dream about women, she believed she was ninety-five percent straight.
Tonight she was less sure. With Kira being such a good kisser, she had been turned on. Maybe it was actually Steven Weller who had turned her on, and Kira was just a substitute, a nearby body. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Weller at all.
When Dan slid into bed next to her, she asked if he’d had fun. “Best party of my life,” he said. His eyes were starting to close.
“Bridget wants to sign me,” she told him.
“I knew she would,” he murmured. “You should go with her. She knows everyone.”
“She wants me to move out there.”
“Maybe we should. We could rethink it.” Soon Dan was sleeping and she was lying awake, feeling Kira’s hands on her body. What if Kira told Dan what happened, just to spite her, to cause trouble in the relationship? The post-screening panels would go from bad to worse, Kira feeling she had something on Maddy. Maddy wished she had never knocked on the condo door. It was all Steven Weller’s fault. He had made her crazy, turned her into someone else.
An hour into the third I Used to Know Her screening, on Tuesday night, distributors began to leave the room. In the theater, when people walked out, it meant they hated it. But Maddy learned later that the executives had been rushing to put in offers on the film. Four different companies made bids, and after a whirlwind night of negotiations involving Dan, Sharoz, and Ed Handy, Apollo Classics bought world rights for $4 million and first look at Dan’s next screenplay.
When Dan came home in the middle of the night and gave Maddy the news, she was half-asleep and could make out only bits and pieces: He would be able to pay the actors their prenegotiated back salary; Maddy’s was $25,000. On top of that she would get $15,000 for her shared story credit. Each fee was more money than she had ever made for anything creative. Sharoz and Dan would get a quarter of a million each, plus more if the film made any money. It wasn’t a mammoth deal, but it was mammoth in relation to her life with Dan, their dumpy apartment, their service-industry jobs.