“I talked to Ryan,” she said, “and I know.” He said nothing, merely staring sadly ahead. “You were making love with him when I was having Jake, and you turned the radio off so you could. I needed you, and you sailed away.”
“I was afraid of the future.”
“You’re a phony. You always loved men. You cast me. You and Bridget. You never loved me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Are you just going to keep lying and lying? There’s no point anymore.”
“I did love you. At first . . . at the beginning, it was Bridget’s idea. She was worried about those rumors. Felt I needed to do something. She thought marriage would be a good idea, to the right woman. And then when I got to know you, I believed we could— You were so beautiful and smart. I saw you as an equal. You were my partner. In life and art. I watched you work and I—learned things. You made me a better actor. I fell in love with you after we married. That was the great surprise.”
She stared at the grid on the Ruscha. Did he have these pieces because he liked them or because they were the kind of pieces he thought he should have? Did he know what he liked or like what he thought he should? Did he have Ruscha so he could pronounce “Ruscha”?
Steven Weller was interesting, not interested.
Everything in this house was a sham. He was like those faux marbre columns she had hated so much in the mansion. He was a gay boy from Kenosha who had transformed himself into Hollywood’s sexiest leading man, from Steven Woyceck to Steven Weller. She didn’t know Steven Woyceck. Maybe Ryan did.
Maybe Steven Woyceck didn’t care for Henry James and pretended to only because Alex had. Alex Pattison had seemed comfortable with himself; whatever taste he had was his own. Maybe Steven Woyceck didn’t even like to read. Maybe he had faked his interest in art and literature all his life to make himself seem smarter and more cultured than he was.
“Don’t say you loved me,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t have betrayed me.”
“But I do love you. I wanted it to be enough. I kept thinking, hoping, that I had changed. It happens. For thirty years you think one thing about yourself, and then you meet someone and you become someone else. But no matter how much I loved you, there was this longing for something different. So I tried to be two people at once. I had my . . . other world, and I had you. I told myself that with men, it was transactional. Physical. Scratching an itch. Sometimes I could believe it. But it became harder. To keep lying and lying. Each time I took out Jo, I would say it was the last time, but it never was. You don’t know what it’s like to have to hide all the time.”
“You ruined my life. At our wedding, you vowed you would be true to me and loyal.”
“I kept thinking I could get control over it. When I met Ryan, it was confusing. It was different from the other times.”
“Ryan said you told him sex with me disgusts you.”
“I never said that. I never spoke that way about you, Maddy!”
She didn’t know what to believe. She trusted Steven even less than she trusted Ryan Costello. “What about Terry? Was he your lover, too?”
“Never.”
“You were with him on that trip to Cabo after your bad reviews.”
He shook his head. “That was someone else.”
“Who? Actually, don’t tell me. What if I had called Terry or Ananda to check on you?”
“They always had instructions.”
“So they know.”
“They love me. And they understand that this part of me doesn’t have to do with what I feel for you.”
“They were at our wedding. They were in on this, and she pretended she was so happy for me.”
“I told them it’s an addiction. It is an addiction. I keep trying to fix it, but—”
“That guy, Christian Bernard from the old yacht club. You did have an affair with him, and you did coke and poppers and all the stuff the story said you did. Even though you say you hate drugs.” His shoulders slumped. “I did those appearances to defend you, and it was true all along. I asked you to tell me the truth, and you looked right into my eyes and lied to me.”
He said nothing. She remembered the blue dress she had worn to Harry, the roaring elation of the crowd when she’d said he was the best lover she’d had. She had been an actress for her husband, and she had been good at it. Bridget had plucked her for that very reason. “You made a fool of me!”
“I didn’t want any of it to be true. No one knows, Maddy. You did such a good job. You changed the tide.” He sat next to her on the couch and put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.
“Who are you?” she said. “Do you know?”
“Sometimes I think I do.”
“Do you even like Biedermeier? Did you ever read Nelson Algren, or do you just quote him?”
“Of course I’ve read Algren.”
“Why do you keep a photo of Alex in a box in your drawer?”
He looked as though he was about to protest, to attack her for snooping, but he must have seen something in her face. He couldn’t manipulate her anymore. And then he seemed to give up. “I have my things. I had a life before you.”
“You think that if you keep a part of yourself in a box, then it’s not really who you are, but that’s not true. Who took the picture of you on that boat?”
“Bridget. We were all on it together.”
“So she knew.”
“She thought Alex and I were friends.”
“It’s not possible. She must have seen the way you . . . She knew. It’s why she wanted you to have a wife. So she went and found a director she could manipulate. She knew Walter needed her, wanted his work to reach a larger audience. You used me. You had me sign the postnup because you knew one day you would be done with me, and you wanted to protect your money. I had an expiration date from the very beginning.”
“Maddy,” Steven said. “When I married you, I wanted it to be forever. It was Bridget who suggested the postnup. I didn’t care about the money. I was prepared to give you whatever you wanted if it didn’t work out, because I wanted it to work out. I love you. And I love Jake. The sex with you . . . It wasn’t fake. We could have more children. We can make this work.”
“You’re just saying that because Ryan broke up with you. You’re crawling back to me, but only because he’s through with you. If he wanted to keep it going, it would go on and on like this. You would play with Jake in the house, be the all-star father, and then go to the guesthouse at night to be with Ryan. Where am I in that picture? Am I just Jake’s mother? Where were you the last couple of days?”
“On the boat.”
“With who?”
“No one. I was alone.”
“I don’t believe you’ve been alone on that boat once since we met.”
“This time I was. I was trying to figure out what matters. It’s you. You’re all that matters. We can stay together.”
“No, we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have no respect for you anymore.”
Steven nodded at Maddy and went to the bookshelf, running his hands down the first editions. These were the books that Alex had read aloud to him in bed so long ago, and he had wanted to read them to Ryan, but now Ryan was gone, and he would never get the chance.
The night in the pool, when they fought, he could feel him slipping away and wanted to stop it but was angry with Ryan. For not loving him. And he yelled. Ryan had asked to crash but it turned out that he was dating someone, an architect; the guy was working on his house. Of course it was an architect. Ryan was always talking about Julius Shulman and the Stahl House and Richard Neutra, and when he read books in bed, he would put on a pair of reading glasses, though Steven tried them on once and couldn’t detect a prescription.