One Saturday in December, when Lucia had the day off, Maddy went out for a walk with Jake, who was about seven months old. They returned to find a strange car in the driveway. The light in the guesthouse was on, and suddenly Ryan Costello came out, swept up the baby, and spun him around. “What are you doing here?” Maddy spat.
“Steven didn’t tell you? My house in Malibu is being renovated, and he said I could crash here.”
“No, he didn’t tell me.” Jake was crying out with glee. “That’s not good for babies,” she said, and whisked him away.
Inside the house, she dialed Steven. The call went to voice mail. When he came in a few hours later, she said, “How could you let him stay here without asking me?”
“I’m sorry. I meant to tell you. It’s just for a couple weeks. He needs a crash pad and—”
“Ryan can afford to stay in a hotel.”
“You’ve never liked him.”
“No, I don’t like him. I thought I had already made it clear. I don’t want this man in our life.”
“It’s not up to you who’s in my life,” he said, then went upstairs into the bedroom and slammed the door.
That night Steven left and didn’t come home for dinner, and Ryan’s car was gone. Maddy ate early with Jake. She fell asleep for a few hours and was awakened by loud laughter. Out the window, she saw Ryan and Steven in the pool, hanging off the edge. They had whiskey glasses resting on the deck and Steven was saying, “And Brando was so broke, he had to hitchhike!”
Ryan laughed and said, “You’re making that up.”
“Read it in the memoir,” Steven said.
Maddy went back to bed and put a pillow over her head. But she was too restless to stay still.
When she went to the window again, the men had moved away from the edge. They were both in the water, and though they weren’t physically close, maybe five feet apart, she caught a glimpse of her husband’s face in the moonlight. She drew in her breath. His eyes were dancing. He was besotted. It was the way he looked at Alex in the photo.
Steven had looked at her when he made love to her the first time. It was so obvious now, as it had been obvious in Wilmington. These men were lovers. They had been lovers on Jo when Jake was born, and they had been lovers in North Carolina before that. And maybe in between, even when Steven said they were no longer in touch. It could have been going on for two years.
He had installed his lover in their guesthouse and was swimming with him in their pool. As though he no longer cared if she knew. As though they had an “understanding.” He wanted her to leave him or he believed she had known all along—or both.
She let the curtain go and went into her walk-in. She moved her hand across the dresses that she had worn to the charity balls and premieres and openings and parties since she moved to L.A. Her fingers stopped at the red strapless Marchesa. She held it up against her body in the mirror. She had been so innocent in Berlin. She had believed she was Cinderella.
To Steven it had all been a grand show. Maddy had never enchanted Steven. Only a man could. A Ryan Costello. An Alex Pattison. A Christian Bernard, who wasn’t some grifter but a young man Steven had trusted, who likely had turned on him because Steven had ended the affair. Edward must have known, and Flora, and Bridget, he probably told them the truth while he had lied to her. Why wouldn’t he? They were the team, and you had to be honest with your team.
She wanted to be angry with Steven, but she was disgusted with herself for shutting her own eyes. She had loved him so much that she had made herself believe the lies. That had been her fault, not his. In school she had played Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible, and every night, when she had to convince John to sign the confession, she believed that he would, and thus would not hang. Every performance it came as a surprise to her that he had torn up the confession and would die. Her belief was so strong that each night the surprise felt real.
It was the same with Steven: She had acted herself into denial. It was because of her need for him. She wanted to be his more than she wanted him to be faithful. He had been selfish, but there was selfishness, too, in looking the other way. Her desire for him had been so great that she had been willing to accept a kind of lumpy half-love, flawed, temporal, and incomplete.
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.
Maddy 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.