Maddy started to answer, but Kira jumped in. “You know, the script was really tight, so Dan discouraged any improv. It was hard for me, because I have a more fluid way of working than Maddy does. She comes from the thee-ah-tuh, where the script is God. I’m more moment-to-moment.” The audience murmured appreciatively, and Maddy felt that Kira had scored yet another point.
On the street after the screening, as Dan and Maddy headed up Mountain Way, a voice came from behind them. “Maddy, you were sensational.” Zack Ostrow.
“Thanks for coming, man,” Dan said. “We needed every audience member we could get. Was your mom there, too?”
“No, I’m sure she’ll come to another one,” Zack said, clearly accustomed to people using him to get to his mother. “Dan, I don’t represent directors,” he said, “but if you’ll let me, I’ll put you in touch with one of my colleagues. And Maddy, I would love to get a coffee with you and discuss career possibilities. BHA has incredible reach.”
Maddy was flattered that he was thinking on those terms—she hadn’t come in search of a new agent, but Dan had said there would be hundreds at the festival, seeking new discoveries. “Absolutely,” she said.
“Come to think of it,” said Zack, “my mom is having this dinner at her lodge tomorrow. You guys should come. I’ll help you drum up audience for the other screenings.”
“We’ll be there,” Dan said, so quickly that Maddy was almost embarrassed.
“Do you have a car here?”
“No,” Maddy said. “We ride El Cheapo. The festival bus.” Dan glared at her, as though not wanting Zack to know they were losers, but she didn’t understand the accusation; it had been his decision not to ask the backers to cover a car rental.
“Then we’ll send one to get you,” Zack said. After he headed away, their condo address in his phone, she wondered who “we” was. Zack, his mother, or his agency?
It didn’t make a difference. They were going.
Having been to many films and bad Off-Broadway theater in his time at Bentley Howard, and countless premieres with his mother as a teenager, Zack was not easily impressed by actresses. But Maddy was different. Her performance had been luminous, thoroughly unself-conscious, and he was intrigued by her figure, which was un-Hollywood, with its small, natural breasts and enormous shoulders.
Zack had been at Bentley Howard since right after graduating from Skidmore. His primary responsibility was to serve the needs of his boss’s clients. George Zeger was a sloppy, corduroy-wearing man who had been at the agency nearly forty years. As an assistant, Zack had listened in on George’s calls and heard him negotiate, manipulate, and rage when dealing with employers, but speak softly and gently to his clients.
In addition to George’s clients, Zack had a handful of his own, most referred to him by Bridget, but he had come to the festival in search of more. George had said Zack could go if he paid for his own lodging. Reluctantly, he had asked his mother if he could crash. He made $49,000 a year at Bentley Howard, which meant that his mother paid the rent on his loft in Tribeca and thus kept him under her thumb, inasmuch as she could from Brentwood. He would not have access to his trust fund until he turned twenty-eight, four long years away. For his entire childhood, the contingency age had been twenty-one, but at Skidmore he’d run into problems with coke, and when he wound up at Silver Hill, she changed it.
Zack was dizzy as he headed up the street, dialing his phone. He had stayed till five A.M. at the Rap Sheet party, playing foosball and doing tequila shots, and then a young, dorky network-comedy star offered him a few bumps, and because of the bumps, he couldn’t sleep. By the time nine A.M. rolled around, he’d decided to get a coffee in town and see the movie.
When his mother answered, he told her about the extra invitations. “I’ll have to redo the seating arrangement,” she said with a sigh. “Who are they again?”
“The girl from that Vermont movie. Maddy Freed. You met her at the Entertainer. And her boyfriend. He’s the director.”
“Was she the blonde?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you trying to sleep with her?” she said.
“I am not trying to sleep with her, Mom,” he said. “I want to sign her.” It was scary, what she picked up on. Zack had always had an intense relationship with his mother. As his many shrinks had reminded him, it was a by-product of his father being out of the picture. There were lots of nannies, and he had resented her absences. Lately, he was working on resenting her less. He had been in therapy on and off since he was ten, for being antisocial and later for doing drugs, and he was enjoying not being in therapy for the first time in many years.
“Just let me have them over, Mom,” he said. “You won’t have to do anything. I’ll make sure they have a good time.”
“Not too good a time,” she said. “This is a classy party.”
“You need to watch this right now,” Bridget told Steven in his suite at the Niels Lundtofte Lodge. “I Used to Know Her, it’s called.” They were standing in his kitchen, and she was holding the DVD in its clear case.
She had called Ed Handy, immediately after hanging up with Zack, to request the screener. When Ed said Maddy had been at the opening-night party, she remembered Steven watching her with an odd, intent gaze. That look, then Zack’s call. Bridget had been so transfixed, she didn’t stand up until the film was over.
“Never heard of it,” Steven said from the kitchen island, sipping a green smoothie. “What’s her name?”
“Maddy Freed.”
“What makes you think she’s right?”
“She can handle the material.”
“The material is very sexual,” he said, “and it needs extreme commitment. A lot of the girls have had trouble with it.”
“It will make her career. Come on, now. How could any bright, talented actress turn down the role of a lifetime?”
“I’ll watch it tomorrow,” he said, noticing a ring of water that the smoothie had left on the countertop, and wiping it with his fingers.
“She’s coming to my dinner party. With her boyfriend. He directed it. I want you to see it before they come.” Bridget knew not to push him too hard. A manager’s job was to walk in the client’s shoes and guide him to the decisions that were best for him, like a therapist teasing out insight from a patient. If he watched this movie and didn’t like the girl, they would be back to the drawing board. But it was his decision to make.
She looked at Steven evenly for a few seconds. Finally, he sighed. She smiled as she walked past him to the DVD player.
As I Used to Know Her began to roll, Steven prepared to be disappointed. He had been to many film festivals and seen a lot of atmospheric shots of toothless men, tetherball courts, and snow—and more than enough protagonist-toting vehicles. But as soon as he saw the girl, he remembered. He had noticed her at the Entertainer. She had a type of beauty that you took in slowly. Striking without being striking. Her eyes were open and widely set, her mouth turned down slightly. She had baby fat around her chin, untrimmed eyebrows, and a mole on one temple that he found fetching.
The girl greeted her mother. You could sense the ambivalence she felt about coming home for a visit. The mother was talking, the girl frustrated. She moved naturally, a little tomboyish, hunching her shoulders in an adaptation to being tall, and unlike many actresses of her age range, she didn’t fry her voice when she spoke.
Around the sixty-minute mark, she wasn’t speaking to the best friend, and after an ugly fight with her mother, she stormed out the door and peeled off in her mother’s truck. She met up with a chubby former high school classmate, and they got drunk on bourbon and made love in his car in the parking lot. As she came, there was a hint of sadness behind her eyes, as though the orgasm brought her into contact with her disappointment. She was melancholy. Steven didn’t know how much was the actress and how much the character. He wondered if the girl had the same depth in real life.