“Put him through,” Zack called.
“Zack,” Steven said. “First of all, I wanted to thank you again for being so good to Maddy at the hospital.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Zack asked tightly.
“I know, but it was a difficult situation, and you were there for her. She’s so grateful to you.”
“Someone had to be there.”
Steven paused dramatically and then said, “So I read Velvet. And I wanted to congratulate you. It’s a perfect hybrid. A smart heist movie. Reminds me of the best suspense features of the ’seventies. Like The Day of the Jackal and Three Days of the Condor. I just—you’re a player now. When I met you, you were just a boy.”
Zack knew Steven Weller would never call anyone just to say congratulations. He said nothing, only waited. Like a good journalist.
“I was calling because—I’d like to throw my name into the ring,” Steven said.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“For Frank. McKnight.” Zack tapped his fingers together and pivoted to regard the painting of Kid Berg. Every time he examined it, he saw something new. Sometimes the fighter seemed aggressive, tough, invincible. Other times he looked like a scrappy young kid. “I think I would get a lot of bodies into the theater,” Steven was saying. “And you and I would work well together as producer and actor. You remind me of your mother when she was starting out.”
Zack stood up and went to the window of his office. A woman in a jog bra was walking a Pomeranian. “Thank you for saying all of that, Steven.”
“It’s true.”
“But I can tell you right now that I would never cast you as Frank McKnight. You’re completely wrong for him.”
“Really? I feel like I could bring out a lot of the humor, and you know audiences already buy me as an action—”
“I don’t mean to upset you, but you’re just too old. Frank McKnight is in his thirties. I need an actor with vitality. Someone more warm-blooded.”
Zack thought of Berg, who had fought ten rounds against then-unbeaten Cuban Kid Chocolate at the Harlem Polo Grounds in 1930. Berg was persistent and steady and kept it up, and by the end Kid Chocolate couldn’t lift his hands.
“We could have a long conversation about whether audiences find my blood warm,” Steven said, “but regardless of that, I could bring you attention on a level that . . .”
“That what?”
“That will be hard for you to get from anyone else, given your unknown screenwriter.”
“You know, Steven, it’s funny you say that. Because I founded this company with the mission of telling good stories and a belief that good stories can also make money. I believe that American audiences are hungry for material that challenges them, makes them think, and provokes them. I’ve been developing this script for two years, and I have faith that this is a story that needs telling. I will get attention for this movie, wherever we land, and the man who plays McKnight is going to be the one who’s most right for him. Because that’s part of telling a good story. I have no doubts that this film will find its audience, even without Steven Weller. All right? No hard feelings.” And he clicked off before Steven could get in another word.
In the fall, when Jake was a few months old, Maddy and Steven did a family photo spread for People. They donated the $1 million fee to World Children’s Welfare. The photos showed them cooing over Jake, and they were taken in a studio so no one would have any indication what the nursery looked like. In the interviews, they talked about what a joy it was to be parents, despite the sleeplessness and the crying. They talked about how the experience had changed them. Steven said Maddy was an amazing and selfless mother, but during the sit-down, as she watched his mouth move, it sounded phony and depressing.
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.