Steven had sneaked on the boat to see him as often as he could after Office Mate, but then Ryan broke it off. When he called again and wanted to see Steven just before Jake’s birth, he had been excited. Ryan loved him again. That was why he had taken Ryan on Jo. They had talked about their future. He said Steven’s “choice” was the problem. Steven had said that Ryan was making a choice, too, coy in interviews about his romantic life, escorting pretty young women to premieres. When Ryan said that he was just waiting for the right time to come out, Steven didn’t believe it.
Ryan said that if Steven lost the franchise, it wouldn’t matter, because he’d already made two Tommy Halls and it was dangerous to get typecast. As for Maddy, he said, “You gave her a perfect life.” Steven didn’t like discussing Maddy with Ryan. When he was with Ryan, he wanted it to be the two of them. And on the water it was. He could picture Ryan’s back as he stood out looking at the blue, so healthy and tan, two dimples on either side of the spine, above his board shorts. Now it was over and he had lost Ryan, and from the look on Maddy’s face he was about to lose her, too.
“I loved you,” Steven said in the study, turning to her.
“Did you use condoms? Have you made me sick?”
He had been waiting for this. “I’m clean, I’m careful. I never wanted to hurt you. When you got pregnant . . . I thought I could stop all of this. And I will stop. Ryan was the last. I’ll be a good husband to you. Not like before. Let’s work on this. It will be different. Better.” He went to her and embraced her, ran his hands through her hair, began to sob. She looked at him as if he frightened her. He could see the hate in her eyes.
She told him to get his things and go. He headed up the stairs to the bedroom. As he was climbing, he heard her talking and he stopped. “All these years I thought I was the better actor between us,” she said. “But I was wrong. You are.”
She looks like a crazy woman, Bridget thought as Maddy stood over her desk at Apollo Pictures. Her hair was a mess and her face was blotchy. It was impossible to believe this was Faye Fontinell.
“You knew he could never love me,” Maddy was saying. “And you didn’t care. You chose me. Like I was some kind of toy. To do with as you pleased.”
Bridget was unsure how precarious the situation was. Steven had said only that they’d had a fight and he had left the house.
She had worried that this day would come. Over the years she had imagined what might happen if his boat trips caught up with him. But as the years passed and he was safe, she came to believe that he was changing. Really changing. That was before Christian Bernard, and even then it seemed that Steven had dodged a bullet once again.
She had to be calm and figure out what Maddy wanted. Many women thought their marriages were on the brink, but that didn’t mean they were. “I didn’t choose you,” Bridget said. “You fell in love. The two of you did that on your own.”
“You made me think you believed in me, but all you wanted was a wife. And you’re a woman. You did this to another woman!”
“I did believe in you. I wouldn’t have had you read for Walter if I didn’t.”
“Walter was going to cast whoever you told him to. He was under your thumb. You were casting me for a life.”
“Maddy, that’s not true. Dozens of actresses read for it.”
“Lael didn’t even get to read. You left her alone in a room with Steven. That was her audition. And Taylor Yaccarino—same thing.”
“Walter did it differently with every girl. You know he has an atypical process.”
“I worked so hard on those scenes. Did you ever even think I was good? When you saw my screener? Or did I just fit the specifications? Did I match some character breakdown in your mind? The Perfect Wife?”
Of course it had been more complicated than that. When it came to Steven, nothing had been explicit. As long as Bridget had known him, as close as they were. To some extent he had always been unknowable, which was what made their relationship work so well. She saw the brand and only occasionally the man. In that way, she was like his audience. It helped her imagine the character they wanted on the screen.
She had wondered, suspected, from the very beginning. But she had looked the other way and seen what she needed to see. In the mid-’80s, after she signed him, when he was still at the repertory company, he would bring around “friends.” There were glances, touches, but how could she know? Actors and their games. Young men working for no money to live out their dreams, rooming in close quarters. Later she had wondered about Terry McCarthy, but Terry got married and had children and she put that theory to rest.
There had been one boy, the night she met Steven at the sports bar after Bus Stop. He’d stayed later than the rest, and she thought she picked up on something, glances, mostly from him to Steven. Alex, his name was. After Steven started making a little money and bought the boat, the three of them had gone out on it a couple of times. The men gave her the main cabin. They slept in bunk beds in the other cabin. She didn’t question it, not then. Though the Alex fellow seemed effeminate, she guessed it was unrequited.
She had been rising as an agent, she knew it would be complicated for Steven if . . . And then he married Julia, and after they divorced, he wouldn’t talk about it. From then on it was always beautiful women, maybe too beautiful, but Steven was good-looking and people sought out their own kind. She thought the brief affairs were good for him publicity-wise, but the rumors continued, as though the serial monogamy was proof of something. And then the Internet came along and there was no way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate news, and the bloggers, and the young generation with their constant theorizing, it was a mess. With the search fields and other people’s searches visible when you typed in your own questions, it fed on itself, became self-perpetuating. People were fascinated by the idea of someone pulling the wool over their eyes. As though every entertainer didn’t do the same thing.
The chatter only got louder after Julia’s comeback, when the media became curious about the marriage once again, with the blog items and innuendo. Bridget didn’t like the new “standards.” The actors with wives and big broods succeeded while the single men, who drank more than was “appropriate,” and grew paunches, and stayed out an hour or two too late, weren’t taken seriously. They were seen as alcoholics, fuckups.
So she’d thought it would be good to quiet the noise. Which was becoming a distraction. They needed a project, and then the Juhasz script landed on her desk and it seemed . . . synergistic.
Bridget came around the desk and tried to take Maddy’s hands in hers, but the girl jerked them away. “I always thought you had talent,” Bridget said. “I never would have wanted Steven to marry a bad actress. Now, tell me what’s going on between the two of you.”
“It’s over. I know about Ryan.”
“You should forgive him,” Bridget said quietly.
It was the boat that had done him in. She had hoped that it would stop when he got married, that he wouldn’t need it the way he had in the past. But he kept sailing away, and he was sailing when the baby was born, a colossal mistake. A mistake she would have told him not to make if he had consulted her. Leaving the radio off with a wife so far along? No man did that.
“I won’t forgive him,” Maddy said. “He’s gone. This is the end.”
“You’re crazy to end it. You have everything you could want.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Maddy said. She went around Bridget’s desk and sat in her big swivel chair. “I just wanted to be loved.”