“How come you were sucking up to Bridget when you didn’t like her movie?” Maddy asked Dan.
“We’re here to network,” he said testily. “Her client is one of a dozen actors who can get a project made by attaching himself. If she remembers me a couple years down the line, I could wind up directing Steven Weller.”
“But you hated his performance.”
“I could get better work out of him.”
In New York, Maddy was used to being the social one, going out with fellow New School alums to plays and movies, while Dan preferred staying inside or seeing foreign films with Maddy and no one else. She always tried to get him to come with her—he might meet actors for his films, producers—but he said he didn’t believe in networking. He’d trot out some line he attributed to Hunter S. Thompson: “An artist must have a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.” Now all his high-art soliloquies seemed a handy way of casting an unwilling lack of success as a willing one.
Steven Weller was holding court in the center of the room. Bridget’s eyes were on him, but her body was turned slightly away. She looked like a Secret Service agent scanning the room for danger.
It occurred to Maddy that Bridget Ostrow probably knew things about Steven Weller that no one else did, even Cady Pearce. Over the years she must have seen his insecurity, fear, anger, everything a celebrity had to hide from the rest of the world. A manager couldn’t yell at her star client or act jealous when he got all the attention. She couldn’t cross him (or let him find out if she did), and when she disagreed, she had to do so gently, respectfully. Maddy wasn’t sure which one had the real power—Weller, with his fame, or Bridget, who had made the fame possible.
Dan said he wanted another drink, and Maddy followed him to the bar. As he tried to get the bartender’s attention, she leaned back to face the room. She closed her eyes and tilted her head, the din thrumming in her ears, phrases like “entire ecosystem” and “digging deep.”
There was a skylight, and through it she could see the moon. She wanted to call her father on her cell and tell him she was at an elite party, a stone’s throw from a movie star, and then she remembered that she couldn’t. She sighed and lowered her chin. Her gaze fell on the group huddled around Steven Weller. Everyone was zeroed in on him, but he was staring, unblinkingly, at her.
2
On the bed, Dan was typing furiously into his phone as Maddy unpacked. To save money, they had rented a condo twenty minutes from town; Kira and Sharoz were in the one next door. The apartment looked like it hadn’t been altered since the 1970s, complete with old board games, linoleum floors, and a cream-colored fridge.
Maddy removed the jeans and slouchy sweaters she had brought along—Dan and Sharoz had told her that in Mile’s End, it was gauche to be anything but casual—and lay down beside him. He was emailing their hired publicist, Reid Rasmussen, about the first screening, trying to make sure they got bodies. She took one of his hands. He had long pale fingers, and she loved to lace them through hers. “I think we’re going to win Dramatic,” she said.
“Ahh! Don’t say that. I don’t want to jinx it.”
“What’s the point of being here if we can’t fantasize?” Maddy loved doing theater, but since graduation she had done mostly Off-Off-Broadway, and Actors’ Equity showcases and staged readings, and regional theater productions in depressing small towns. She was hoping the festival would expand her horizons. Even if I Used to Know Her failed to get distribution, she wanted to use her time in Utah to make connections and meet talented people with whom she could collaborate on other indie films like the one they had made, films that didn’t speak down to their audiences.
“We’re not going to win,” he said, taking his hand away so he could type. “Dramatic will go to the one about the suburban New Jersey boy whose stepmother comes on to him. Or Rap Sheet. Anyway, distribution is way more important than awards.”
“Well, whatever happens with I Used to Know Her,” she said, rubbing his belly, “I’ll still think you’re the most talented man in the universe.”
She had met him three years ago, during her final year of grad school, at an Irish dive bar after a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. He’d come up to her while she was waiting for her drink and said, “Best Gwendolen I’ve ever seen.” She’d thought the bump in his nose was cute; she had always been drawn to Jewish guys, maybe because they reminded her of her father.
Her dreadlocked classmate Sal, who had played Algernon, said, “You’re the only Gwendolen he’s ever seen. He’s a movie snob. He’s complimenting you because he thinks you’re pretty.” Dan had directed Sal, who’d invited him to the play, in a short.
“That is not true,” Dan said. “I love Wilde. I’m wild about Wilde.”
“Oh my God, he’s lying,” Sal said. “Maddy, stay away from this guy. He has a thing for actresses.”
“Is that true?” she asked, aware that she was flirting.
Dan said, “I’m trying to rehabilitate myself. I had a bad breakup with one a couple years ago and swore I’d only date civilians. Then I dated a ballet dancer, and now actresses seem like a pillar of sanity.”
The three of them sat in a corner by the window. After an hour Sal cut out, giving them an accusatory look before he left. As they watched people’s feet pass above the window, they talked about movies. Dan was a movie buff the way Peter Bogdanovich was, his knowledge obsessive, exhaustive. He told her about Ernst Lubitsch’s musicals, Godard, Fellini, and Truffaut. He told her about his favorite Fassbinder film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. He said theater would be irrelevant one day. She made a great show of being offended to mask the fact that she was offended.
Still, there was something in his ambition that appealed to her, and when he said he would ride the L with her to East Williamsburg, where she lived in a graduate-housing loft, she said yes. In front of the steel door, he kissed her, murmuring, “I’m afraid of what I might do if I come up.” When he headed off, she had to shout to him that the subway stop was the other way. He called the next morning to say he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She moved into his Fort Greene apartment a few months later.
In the condo now she delicately removed the phone from his hand and placed it on the bedside table. She planted her knees on either side of his hips and kissed him languorously. “I think I’m too distracted,” he said, putting his palms against her shoulders. Maddy’s sex drive had gone down the first months after her father died, and then something strange had happened: She wanted it all the time. It confused her, because she worried it meant she wasn’t properly grieving.
“That’s a great reason to do it,” she said, grinding herself against him. “It’ll focus you.” She was an inch taller than he was, five-ten to his five-nine, and she had broad shoulders and ash-blond hair that she wore to her chin. As a teenager, she had been self-conscious about her height, but in acting it was an advantage; it allowed her to measure up to men during dramatic scenes.
Dan pushed her away gently. “I feel like I shouldn’t let any go before we screen.”
“My boyfriend is Muhammad Ali,” she said, rolling off.
“It worked out pretty well for him,” he said, and reached for his phone.
The opening shot of I Used to Know Her was a bus coming down a highway with MONTREAL on the top. When Maddy saw it on the enormous screen, she felt a mix of pride and dread. Pride because they had worked so hard to make the film, and she was seeing it for the first time in a theater. And dread because the theater was only a quarter full. Ed Handy and Reid had tried valiantly to chat up the critics (The New York Times, L.A. Times, Variety) before the screening, but they had looked morose nonetheless, hungover and reluctant.